And so The Loneliest Time is also a return on several levels, including a return to celebrating music together in person around the world, and it’s Jepsen’s best collection of songs since 2015’s fantastic pop masterstroke Emotion. I still have The Loneliest Time on frequent rotation several months after its release, and the songs haven’t yet lost their appeal, probably because the sonic palette is more mature and diverse this time around, the musicianship solid and deeper, although about half of the album is as playful as one would expect. Having witnessed the kids belting along loudly in unison to songs like “Talking to Yourself” at her concert, a trend that’s gotten a bit overwhelming at other pop shows that I’ve attended recently (let’s all just let the singer sing, you guys), I’m sure that’s the upbeat strand of Jepsen’s catalog that most of her audience prefers.
Yet the cute guy dancing next to me and I agreed that the breezily percussive, semi-tropical “Western Wind,” co-written and produced by Rostam Batmanglij, was one of the best songs we heard that night, and it’s equally among the finest cuts on the album, the sort of jam that puts its listeners directly into a trance and doesn’t soon let go. “Joshua Tree,” with its vivid reminiscence of hanging out at night in the California desert with one’s friends decked out in glow-in-the-dark body paint, feels just as transporting. But Jepsen is just as adept at keeping things friendly and accessible in the way only she can, as on the song “So Nice,” which wisely benefits from the R&B-flavored backdrop of her supporting vocalists, who are also a key part of her songs on tour. Carly Rae knows how to make fun of herself in the right ways, too, as she details her history of beyond shifty boyfriends on “Beach House” and kisses off another one on the more contemplative “Go Find Yourself or Whatever.”
Friday, June 12, 2020
Kesha, High Road (RCA/Kemosabe Records, 2020)
On her latest mind-blowing doozy of a pop confection, High Road, Kesha Rose Sebert comes out full-on as a true BFF of the gay community. Not that Kesha hasn’t always been an outspoken supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, because she’s been about as outspoken and supportive as an artistic ally could ever be. But because of the consistent vocal and songwriting presence of Kesha’s close friend, the gay musician Stephen Wrabel — who writes and records his songs simply as Wrabel, and who co-wrote nine of the fifteen tracks on High Road — Kesha’s recent album makes her an official honorary member of our community now. High Road is my favorite album of the year so far, and it’s also the gayest album of the year by a mile, too, in all of the best possible ways.
I’ve long thought that Kesha is pretty much a pop genius, and I’m not at all using that description lightly. Her songs are so fun and so smart sonically and lyrically that they place her on an entirely different level than most of her pop peers. Listeners who write her off probably just don’t have a thorough understanding of the intricacies of popular music, or they just think that pop music isn’t intricate in the first place. Sorry, but they’re all wrong, and Kesha’s High Road is in part about why they’re wrong. It’s also about survival, tenacity, fucking up, having a blast, questioning religion, coming clean, rising above the bullshit, loneliness and friendship, having sex with a stranger, crushing all negativity, endless cycles of forgiveness and resentment, growing up without a father, heartbreak, artistic persistence, being misunderstood, understanding, letting off steam, and most important of all, just getting down.
Just as the album’s themes are that damn all-encompassing, so are the album’s sonic romps through musical genres from unabashed pop to hip-hop to folk to country to gospel to big-band to house to hi-NRG dance to silly novelty songs complete with beeping ’80s video game background flourishes. From the album’s opening throwdown on “Tonight,” Kesha is clearly harkening back to her earliest hits intentionally on every level. Wrabel raps about calling Kesha up on the phone (“Bitch, we goin’ out tonight / Bitch, pick up your phone”). Kesha raps back in a hilarious response, and the punky flow of her lyrical acceleration is irresistible: “OK, we’re goin’ out tonight, don’t wanna stay home / I got my girls to call the Uber ‘cuz I can’t find my phone.” It’s a tiny mishap, a brief missed connection that opens up into a wild night of partying euphoria, “the best night of our lives.” From that point onward, we know what we’re in for, but the album nevertheless remains as unpredictable as all art is.
Then the percussive throb of “My Own Dance,” co-written by the awesome Justin Tranter, launches us off into the album’s most fabulous single, “Raising Hell,” which rapidly transforms itself from a church-basement piano intro into a reggae-spiked barn-burner of a dance-club cut, with Kesha “all fucked up in my Sunday best... / Bitch, I’m blessed” (“Hallelujah / I’m still here, still bringin’ it to ya ... / Mama raised me well / But I don’t wanna go to heaven without raising hell”). In Kesha’s religious universe, the only real place to find salvation is on the dancefloor. “High Road,” the album’s title track, is a double-entendre about having the decency to ignore our culture’s ever-escalating, social media-driven immaturity, and getting a bit high to ignore it when you need to. She also tosses in the finest sharp-pointed put-down of her storied career: “Could a bitch who’s dumb write a Number One? / More than one? More than two? More than you!” “Shadow” follows up that thought with a swift directive to leave Kesha — who’s already had to deal with a whole history of shady characters — to her sunshine and blue skies, in some peaceful land that’s far from darkness. Clearly, we could all use some of that sunny place right about now.
After “Honey” chronicles Kesha’s smackdown of a former female friend who betrayed her trust by dipping into her “sloppy seconds,” “Cowboy Blues” and the slow-burning “Resentment” anchor the album with a country-lite diptych of a centerpiece. Wrabel joins Kesha for a handsomely homespun duet on “Cowboy Blues,” a searching-for-love song that cleverly and delicately deconstructs all other love songs in the pop canon: “They say you know when you know / What do you do when you don’t? / They say in love, it’ll happen if it’s meant to happen / What do you do if it don’t?” Kesha wonders whether a cute Nashville dive-bar cowboy dressed up in shades of blue might’ve been the one she was meant to have kids with (“Did I fuck my whole life up? / Did I miss my one true love?”). Sturgill Simpson and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson both pitch in memorably and hauntingly on “Resentment,” which Kesha endows with as much gorgeous gravity as anything else to be found in her catalog, as she contemplates what emotion could be even worse than hate after being carelessly hurt by someone. So what does Kesha do? She moves past that contemplative midsection of her album to pursue some new lovers on the up-tempo pairing of “Little Bit of Love” and “Birthday Suit.”
The sublimely sexy “Kinky” and super-sweet “BFF” might be my favorite two songs Kesha has ever recorded. “Kinky” traces Ke$ha (as she’s billed on the track-listing for the song) pursuing a hot gender-blending, no-rules threesome where “Boys kiss boys kiss girls kiss girls / That’s how it’s meant to be.” (Yes, the benevolent spirit of Prince himself is absolutely looking out over this song.) And the pretty little chimes of “BFF” find Kesha and Wrabel trading off the most moving set of lyrical glances between a straight woman and her gay male best friend since probably the great “Moon River” scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “The day I met you we got drunk in the backyard / With our friend Drew / I remember we had our first slumber party / We were both feelin’ blue / A few months later, right before I went to rehab / You gave me my first tattoo / It was a hard time, a really fuckin’ dark time / Thank God I found you.” In terms of setting up a scene, I think it’s probably the best opening verse of any pop song from the past five years or so.
The album’s penultimate track, “Father Daughter Dance,” plumbs the depths of a strained father/daughter relationship better than any other song since Kelly Clarkson’s heartbreaking hit “Piece by Piece,” except that in Kesha’s song, the father is completely absent. She ponders in earnest the lifelong effect that it’s had on her and all of her other relationships (“Would he have protected me / From all the bad shit? The bad men? / Would I even be the same person?”). “Chasing Thunder” closes the album on a quietly triumphant note, as Kesha recounts her late grandmother’s story of an ageless girl who’ll be running towards a distant sky forever: “That’s the spirit, that’s the ghost inside of me / Baby, I’m not a rose, I’m a wildflower.” If Billie Holiday were still alive today, she’d be singing Kesha’s songs.
Monday, September 2, 2019
Some Thoughts on Record Stores
I’ve adored record stores for my whole life, or for at least as far back as I can remember, and I miss record stores more and more as they continue to disappear year after year. Ani DiFranco’s song “Fuel,” from her 1998 album Little Plastic Castle, traces the etymology of our word “record” when DiFranco semi-raps, “People used to make records / As in a record of an event / The event of people / Playing music in a room.” Records, therefore — at least in physical formats — are living history re-capturing an original performance, recorded musical documents that allow the documented event (as well as its sonics and lyrics) to be disseminated far and wide, into the rooms and automobiles and earphones of listeners all over the world.
This weekend while I was traveling in New Hampshire and Maine, I stopped in to browse at a couple of record stores that are still around, actually the last real record store chain that exists up in northern New England, which is called Bull Moose. The location in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is a standard downtown storefront, while the one located in Scarborough, Maine is closer to being a superstore, a massive warehouse of CDs and DVDs, situated in a sprawling strip-mall alongside the interstate highway. I fully realize that almost nobody else but me cares at all about physical media like CDs and DVDs anymore, and that’s why I want to say something about all of that right now, while physical media of all forms are clearly in their twilight years, no doubt destined to fade away gradually, or perhaps quite soon.
I’ve collected music for over 30 years, and throughout those decades, I’ve amassed a sizable library of compact discs, neatly shelved and alphabetized. Searching for music in record stores was always (and still is) a kind of deep therapy for me. I can just zone out and work my way straight from A to Z, looking at everything that’s in stock…and I’m not kidding when I say that I browse the entire store because I often scan through every aisle and every genre. Why? Because record stores are carefully curated catalogs of humanity, and I’m someone who prefers to encounter other human beings via the things they create. I listen to music pretty much every moment of each day, and more than anything else that I love in pop culture, music is the one art form that has kept me alive. Even more than I think about what music and songwriters and musicians have done for me, I think about what I can do for music.
Finding and purchasing music at record stores (probably way too much of it, honestly) was my main way of giving back to the people who created it, in addition to buying tickets to attend their concerts, as well as writing reviews of their music now and then. Paying my hard-earned dollars to hold a multiform physical artifact of that music in my hands, along with the album art, liner notes, and lyrics in most cases, has always felt to me like a sort of friendly exchange or handshake, as if something was made just for me, and other people can buy and enjoy it, too, if they want to do so.
Obviously, online streaming and downloading of music files have mostly killed those special qualities of the physical format, swiftly sidelining it to obsolescence, while also changing the profit game for music creators, who now rely mainly on ticket sales from concert tours to make their living, as everybody already knows. I’m not suggesting that digital music formats are totally without advantages. I really love my iPod Touch. It’s also far healthier for our planet and for our environment if we reduce the amount of unnecessary oil-based plastics used in the largely wasteful production of compact discs and the jewel cases that house them. Plus, discs get scratched, jewel cases crack, CD booklets crease and tear, just as physical objects of any kind deteriorate over time, in spite of how well we might try to take care of them.
Even those scratches on a disc and cracks in a jewel case might serve some type of purpose, however, because they personalize and mark as unique what is essentially just one of thousands of identical mass-produced products manufactured for global consumption. In his 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the German Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin argues that reproduction causes the original work of art over time to lose its perceived authority and aura. Benjamin famously proposes that “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself.” Only a limited number of people can watch an actual live musical performance, even one that plays in a huge arena. “Above all,” Benjamin continues, the mechanical reproduction of the work of art “enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record.”
It goes without saying that records as physical artifacts can also get destroyed or lost, whereas digital music files (at least those stored in digital cloud networks) are “lossless.” The real problem is that, when compared to the experience of browsing for actual objects in record stores, streaming or downloading music also feels soulless. Record stores, despite their often jaded, under-compensated employees and blatant capitalist aims, also open up the possibility of community, of potentially meeting like-minded music admirers who share very specific interests and enthusiasms. Though who knows? Maybe one day when music is streamed directly into our brains by some vast governmental/corporate entity, even downloaded digital files might seem more personalized and quaint somehow then.
I’m aware that record stores can be seen as totally soulless, too, just empty commercial spaces that we fill up with wall-to-wall merchandise to sell and then eventually vacate. Yet at least record stores used to make it possible to be in the presence of other people while looking for music, rather that sitting alone in a room staring at a computer screen, the exact opposite of how Ani DiFranco describes musical “records” getting made. I wish that I could trace my way back to the hours upon hours that I’d spend wandering the aisles of Tower Records overlooking Newbury Street in Boston, HMV in Harvard Square, Virgin Megastore in Times Square — right in the pulsing heart of New York City — and all three of those same record stores within a few strides of each other in London’s Piccadilly Circus. But sadly, those days are long gone now.
Sunday, March 24, 2019
Patty Griffin, Patty Griffin (Thirty Tigers, 2019)
The latest self-titled album by celebrated singer/songwriter Patty Griffin, her tenth studio album, is her best in fifteen years. Griffin’s albums are always superb, and each one is filled with songs that add depth and character to the American songbook, but her new effort for me is her consistently strongest record since 2004’s Impossible Dream, which is an album that I still love and listen to frequently today. Over the past few years, Griffin dealt with a cancer scare (in her new album’s liner notes, she thanks “the Docs and their magic”), and given just how solid these songs are from start to finish, I almost wonder if being faced with such a frightening situation had some effect in that regard. Receiving any serious medical diagnosis — one that’s now been successfully treated in Griffin’s case — would probably prompt something of a re-boot for most artists, or a re-examination of their approaches to their own art form. There’s a sense of purity and distillation in these thirteen new original tracks, as well as power and daring, performed with Griffin’s reliable players in styles ranging from folk to blues to near-classical balladry, endowed with Griffin’s distinctively rough-hewn vocals and lyrical dexterity.
I’ve listened to this album continually since its release a couple of weeks ago, and many of the songs feel tied for me to the last time I saw Griffin in concert this past summer on a warm night in early August, at the opera house in the picturesque oceanside town of Boothbay Harbor in midcoast Maine. Patty is a native of the state of Maine; she grew up in Old Town, a small town located mostly on Marsh Island, just about 100 miles inland from the harborside opera house where I heard Griffin perform. She mentioned during the show that she remembered from her childhood passing by those kinds of buildings throughout Maine while driving with her parents in their family car, venues that were often in states of neglect and disrepair back then, and how wonderful it is to see so many of those buildings restored today for community and performing arts purposes.
At that same concert, Griffin also performed one of her new album’s finest songs, “River,” for the very first time before an audience, with her skillful accompanying guitarist David Pulkingham. It happened to be former President Barack Obama’s birthday, so she dedicated the song at that show to him. The song feels especially relevant in the wake of the #MeToo movement: “Isn’t she a river? / She doesn’t need a diamond to shine… / Arms made out of silver / Moving in a crooked line / Carrying some dreamers / Off into the end of time.” This seeming aerial view of the river’s topography creates a kind of cumulative portrait of the unbendable force and endurance of all women over centuries and landscapes (“‘Cause you can’t hold her back for long / A river is just too strong… / You don’t need to save her / Or teach her to behave / Just let her arms unwind / Ever-changing and undefined”).
The image of rivers also plays a central role in another of the album’s strongest songs, “Where I Come From,” a vivid homage to Griffin’s memories of her hometown of Old Town, Maine. “Where I come from / Is a land of many islands,” Griffin sings, “Two rivers run / To the east and to the west.” Looking at the map of Maine, I was surprised to see that it’s true, even 100 miles inland; Old Town is formed by numerous small islands, and you can even clearly see where the land has separated as those islands have gradually been surrounded by waterways over time. Despite how Griffin mentions that “I wanted to run far away as I could / As fast as I could get,” her rural hometown is also a place she finds impossible to forget (“No matter where I’ve been / I can’t escape who I am”). The people and struggles of Old Town stay with Griffin, too: “The veterans of all the past wars / Sit outside on a Sunday afternoon / The mills closed down long ago and so / We’re way past unemployment / Like a bad joke somebody told on our town / For their enjoyment.”
Midway through the album is its emotional centerpiece, the piano ballad “Luminous Places,” already among my top five favorite songs by Patty Griffin. I recall when she told the audience at her show in Boothbay Harbor that she’d asked her booking manager to take her only to the most beautiful places for the concerts on that particular tour; some other stops included Truro on Cape Cod and Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. Her comment made me wonder if this gorgeous, classically inflected song (with cello and guitar accompanying the piano) grew out of that concert tour. The song begins and ends with the delicate lines, “Love flows out of these luminous places / Love lies down in the deep of the sea / Falls out of the sky in millions of pieces on me.” The rest of the lyrics reflect largely on Griffin’s cross-country travels throughout her career as a touring musician, a common subject for folksingers, but she elevates it to another level: “I’ve been over these highways for years in the dark / Criss-crossing the land like a stitch on the wound / Rolling through the night while millions were sleeping / Under every phase of the moon.”
What’s most impressive is the metaphor for how live music can bring people together despite these divided times in the United States, “like a stitch on the wound.” Too often these days, it’s a belabored topic even in the creative realm, but Griffin knows not to belabor that theme, instead making it only a single necessary stitch in the song, albeit a mournful one. She’s also able to connect the years of her music career movingly back to the early days of her youth: “All that I am is a dream that I had / One morning so early and blue / It flew over the river and the freezing bus stops / On a song that I sang to you.” Dreamers are invoked often on this album, so frequently that it becomes a dreamer’s album; its songs are part of a cycle crafted to revivify lost and forgotten dreams.
Elsewhere on the album, Griffin weaves in an allegorical murder ballad from the age of maidens and pirates (“Bluebeard”), a harrowing tale of her ancestors’ immigration from Ireland (“Boys from Tralee”), as well as upbeat meditations on time and change (“Hourglass” and “The Wheel,” which offer stark commentaries on issues from the corruption of the political machine to rampant police brutality). The album is bookended and threaded through with a handful of jazz-inspired numbers (“Mama’s Worried,” “Had a Good Reason,” “What I Remember,” and “Just the Same”), and the great Robert Plant also contributes memorable vocal assists on two of the album’s tracks (“What Now” and “Coins”). Similar to the album’s mystical cover art — which depicts Griffin and her two little dogs surrounded by sunshine, the moon and stars, waterfalls and fields of wheat and sunflowers, symbolic pomegranates at her feet, a phoenix rising from the fire and ashes — the songs on the album create a complex and living tapestry of America.
I remember the very first time that I heard Patty Griffin perform live in concert, opening for Ellis Paul at Somerville Theater here in the Boston area in 1995. She walked out on stage shyly, with big crocheted flowers and daisies stitched to the legs of her blue jeans, and commandingly launched right into one of her best early songs, the hardcore blues belter “I Write the Book.” She sang with such forthright conviction that it was clear to anybody in the audience that Griffin’s art would be her way of claiming her place in the world. Nearly 25 years later, I feel grateful to be still in the audience, receiving and appreciating her art.
Saturday, February 10, 2018
The Music of Tommy Page
I met Tommy Page back in 1990, when I was only 17. As the editor of my high school newspaper in suburban Cincinnati at that time, I possessed a youthful fearlessness and a love for pop music that convinced me it would be totally fine to call up music labels in New York and request to interview their artists on summer concert tours. To my surprise, it always worked. I went to a fairly large high school of about 1,500 students, the perfect audience of middle American teenagers to whom those record labels wanted to sell cassette tapes, concert tickets, and merchandise. I was curious enough about the careers of pop musicians to have scored interviews with acts like New Kids on the Block, Sweet Sensation, and Tiffany, something that might not happen as easily for a Midwestern high school student today.
My meeting with Tommy Page was a little more tense than my other interviews had been. Clearly, we were both gay, which made us slightly nervous I think, sitting alone together in a backstage room of Timberwolf amphitheater at Kings Island amusement park in 1990. After our interview was done, some radio guys from Q102, the big pop music station in Cincinnati, came in to record some on-air spots with Tommy. While the sound engineers were setting up the microphones, Tommy was just having fun with us, gossiping about stuff like Mariah Carey’s then-secret relationship with her boss, the label head of Columbia Records; this was just after Carey’s first single, “Vision of Love,” had been a huge radio hit. It all made such a lasting impression on me that I can vividly recall every detail in that backstage room to this day: the fluorescent lights, the faux-wood paneling, the gentle rasp in Tommy’s voice when he spoke, and the way his jet-black bangs fell to either side of his face.
A little less than a year ago now, on a cold Saturday morning in early March, I was stunned when I heard from a writer at Billboard magazine that Tommy Page had died from an apparent suicide the night before, alone at his country home in Pennsylvania. The former Village Voice gossip columnist Michael Musto, who’d been a close friend of Tommy’s when they were younger, broke the story online right after I found out. Following a string of albums and hit singles back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Tommy had forged a successful career as a music industry executive, and he’d also started a family with his husband Charlie, with whom he was raising three children. By coincidence, I would be in New York that next week on the day of Tommy’s funeral, so I took the hour-long bus ride from Port Authority down to his hometown of Caldwell, New Jersey, to attend the service that Wednesday morning.
It was heavy to carry my young memories from so long ago into the Presbyterian church there. Several women my age who were sitting together in the row in front of me, and who had known Tommy since childhood, cried throughout the entire service. The whole congregation wept when one of Tommy’s young sons spoke about his dad from the pulpit. Then one of Tommy’s brothers played a beautiful version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” which he said had been one of Tommy’s favorite songs. Most of the congregation quietly sang along. I think it came as a relief to us, in a time of grief and confusion, to share in the love of something simple like a pop song together.
When Tommy Page’s eponymous debut album was released in 1988, I was working at Camelot Records in Northgate Mall, across the street from where I grew up in Cincinnati. I remember opening of a box of deliveries from Sire Records, Tommy’s label (and Madonna’s, too), then seeing Tommy’s Elvis-inspired cover photo starting up at me from a cassette near the top of the box. “Who’s that?” I thought. He had quietly arrived on the pop music scene with minimal fanfare, though that album did spawn his first radio hit, the ballad “A Shoulder to Cry On.” I was more drawn to the dance tracks on that album, like “A Zillion Kisses” and the endlessly fun, openly sexual “Turning Me On,” which are among the most club-ready songs that Tommy recorded. There’s also a pulsating number that he wrote and arranged with Grammy-nominated songwriter Shelly Peiken, “Love Takes Over,” as well as a catchy ode to non-conformity called “Hard to Be Normal.”
Tommy’s sophomore effort, Paintings in My Mind from 1990, would be his biggest commercial success, in part because of the involvement of New Kids on the Block, who were riding high on the wave of the boyband craze at the time. They shared credit for two songs on the album with Tommy: the bouncy “Turn on the Radio” and the heartfelt “I’ll Be Your Everything,” Tommy’s Billboard #1 single, the lyrics of which now poignantly sound like they could have been written for Tommy’s young daughter, Ruby. Tommy also sang the album’s duet “Don’t Give Up on Love” with Latin/freestyle artist Safire (aka Wilma Cosme), with whom he later formed a dance music partnership called Cosmic Page.
By the time his third album was released a year later, 1991’s From the Heart found Tommy Page reaching for a more mature sound. The record’s lead single, “Whenever You Close Your Eyes,” written by Michael Bolton and Diane Warren, with its soaring chorus and rousing gospel-choir backdrop, raised the bar for the next chapter of Tommy’s recording career. Songs such as the upbeat “Under the Rainbow” and a moving version of Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” proved that he was capable of sustaining a more refined form of drama on his records, suggesting in a carefully considered way that he (and his audience) had moved past teenage years and into adulthood.
Tommy’s next few albums were released in markets throughout Asia. A Friend to Rely On from 1992 opens with an awesome cover of Nik Kershaw’s mid-‘80s hit “Wouldn’t It Be Good,” while 1994’s Time contains excellent, pensively danceable tracks like “Places in My Heart” and “If I Had a Wish.” Loving You from 1996, titled after a number from Stephen Sondheim’s 1994 musical Passion, includes some of Tommy’s accomplished renditions of songs by other artists, like Cyndi Lauper’s “That’s What I Think” and John Waite’s “Missing You,” as well as another superb track written by Diane Warren, “I Keep Hoping.” A smart handful of cover songs also appears on Tommy’s self-released album Ten til Midnight from 2000: a hardcore house version of Breakfast Club’s 1987 hit “Right on Track,” which sounds like the kind of dance track that Tommy always wanted to record, Ari Gold's wonderful "Dance to the Beat of My Heart," and a sensitive rendering of Nikki’s popular 1990 single “Notice Me.”
The final post and photograph on Tommy Page’s Twitter timeline in January of 2017 indicates that he was working on new songs, something that’s heartbreaking to consider now, of course. I’ve thought of Tommy and his music often throughout the past year, and even so, it took me nearly twelve months to feel enough clarity about his tragic death to be able to write this post. I’m fortunate that I had a chance to meet him years ago, and I can find some comfort in knowing that his music will last.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Aztec Camera, Love (WEA Records, 1987) and Dreamland (Sire/Reprise Records, 1993)
Alongside
Scritti Politti’s Cupid & Psyche ’85
and The Blue Nile’s Hats, Aztec
Camera’s 1987 album Love is one of my
three favorite albums of all time.
That all three acts hail from the United Kingdom, and that two of the
three hail from Scotland in particular, is probably no coincidence. Brits have long adopted soulful
American musical forms, then perfected and polished them to a fine and glowing
sheen. This is still true today,
but it was especially true back in the 1980s. (Next on my list of favorite albums, in fact, would be
1988’s Idlewild by Everything but the
Girl, yet another soulfully sublime ’80s U.K. outfit.) I’m sure these albums stand out the
most to me because I was coming of age during exactly the years when they were
all released, a time when the world of popular music seemed fresh and inspiring
to me, a time when my world itself felt as if it were expanding rapidly and
magically outward.
The
Scottish singer/songwriter Roddy Frame formed Aztec Camera in 1980 when he was
only sixteen. I’ve never bothered
to look up the story behind the band’s enigmatic name, preferring, as Iris
DeMent once wisely sang, to “let the mystery be.” By the time Aztec Camera’s third album Love was released in 1987, Frame was the sole remaining member of
the group. From that stage onward,
he worked with various carefully selected session musicians when recording his
albums. The nine pristine songs on
Love benefit greatly from this
approach, most notably with the powerhouse, R&B-spiked background vocals
provided by such singers as Mtume’s Tawatha Agee and the late Dan Hartman.
A
few of the production credits are a bit surprising, too. For instance, David Frank, famous for
his work with the ’80s pop/dance duo The System, helms two of the album’s
breeziest tracks, “How Men Are” and “Paradise.” “How Men Are” captures the album’s mood especially well (“It’s
called love / And every cruelty will cloud it ... / ‘Cos it’s a lie that we have
ceased to believe / We’ve said goodbye but it won’t take its leave”). The album’s pinnacle, however, is
definitely the more pensive “Working in a Goldmine,” built around a shimmering
slow-drip of a groove, as Frame muses over trying to hold onto love in the
fast-paced touring life of the music business:
“Waiting
on the last train
Flicking
through the highlights
Livin’
in a suitcase
Positively
uptight ...
‘Cos
I believe in your heart of gold
Automatically
sunshine
Glitter,
glitter everywhere
Like
working in a goldmine.”
Frame’s
cascading guitar introduction on “Black Lucia” swerves noticeably in the
direction of Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, whose albums had begun to find
quietly mainstream notoriety by the time Aztec Camera’s Dreamland came into being.
“Spanish Horses,” one of the album’s most instantly recognizable cuts,
dances in another direction altogether, with Frame’s nimble acoustic guitar
work taking on practically Flamenco inflections.
“Where
the streets just sparkle silently
And
leave the lovers to the night
Remembering
how they came together
With
such violence
Felt
so good they did it twice
Too
early for September songs
But
much too late for love to bloom .... ”
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Hem, Departure and Farewell (Waveland Records, 2013)
It’s nice to know in May that I’ve heard what will probably be my favorite album of
this year. The fourth studio album
by the Brooklyn-based band Hem, Departure and Farewell, sounds like a goodbye album that might not actually be one. The album’s title and several of the
songs’ titles (“Last Call,” “So Long,” etc.) seem to suggest that this may be
the band’s farewell. The group’s founder/songwriter Dan Messé has called it
both a breakup album and a reunion album. Certainly, the album’s themes are consistent with that notion; each song
draws on motifs of either leave-taking or homecoming.
Seven
years have passed since Hem’s previous effort, Funnel Cloud, was released in 2006. Hem’s players have been through a lot since then, including
the dissolution of two band members’ marriages, as well as the principal
songwriter’s descent into and recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. Messé provides a glimpse of that
struggle on the song “Tourniquet”: “The prospectors still search for highs in the heights / ‘Til their
first bloody nose which they laugh off despite / How it seems that whatever
gets left in the bar / Just becomes a part of Brooklyn / And here we are.”
Back
in February of 2006, I was fortunate to hear Hem perform an intimate concert at
Berklee College of Music here in Boston. My memory of the entire evening is especially vivid. After dinner with a friend at an Indian
restaurant around the corner from the venue, we walked to the concert through a
slow-motion snowfall that I’ve experienced on only one or two other occasions
in nearly twenty years of living in the city. It was a bitterly cold night, but there was no wind to cause
the snow to blow or drift, so it just fell unhurriedly until it reached the
ground. By the time I was in my
front-row seat, I already felt like I was in a comfortably hypnotic daze.
The
show was as magical as the snowfall. I was grateful to chat a bit with Dan Messé and the band’s vocalist
Sally Ellyson in the lobby afterwards, and I’m so glad that I had a chance to
tell Dan in person that I think his songs are brilliant. They both signed Sally’s copy of the
evening’s set list for me. (I
still have it tucked away inside the booklet of my Funnel Cloud CD.) Back
out into that otherworldly snowfall we all went, a snowfall that felt more
cinematic than realistic, which is an appropriate description of Hem’s music
itself.
A
mixture of folk and chamber pop, Hem’s songs somehow sound orchestral even when
there’s no orchestral accompaniment. In fact, my favorite songs from their early catalog — “Sailor,” “The Fire
Thief,” “Pacific Street” — do feature an orchestra, a trend that’s continued on
their latest disc. This lends
Messé’s songs the touch of classicism that his lyrics deserve. He usually approaches his subjects
through a sunny haze or across a watery distance, preferring a floating
approximation to exactitude, though he does also have exactitude at his
disposal when necessary. I
remember he mentioned being obsessed with Rickie Lee Jones’ 1981 masterpiece Pirates, and it’s a lyrical style that
she, too, has employed for many years now.
Folk
music has long been about traveling: on foot, by train, over water, in cars, along dusty country roads. Departure and Farewell is also largely concerned with travel. The sense of reprieve in the music is
always balanced by a sense of loss. On the opening title track, the travel is both an exterior and an
interior journey: “The summer
folds the afternoon, / And pins a shadow to the lawn, / And sweeps across the
empty room / Where I am gone.” How
do we find again the path inside ourselves when we’ve gotten hopelessly lost? That’s the band’s mission on this album.
Surprising,
then, that the songs are so often rapturous, though also not surprising since
melancholy and bliss are a pairing that Hem has become known for
mastering. Likewise, these songs
brush up equally against rebirth (“Things Are Not Perfect in Our Yard,” “The
Seed”) and death (“Walking Past the Graveyard, Not Breathing”). Hem instrumentalist Steve Curtis’ song
“The Jack Pine” similarly relies on the metaphor of a forest fire to explore
the end of a long romance. About
half of the time, Hem’s songs come across as hymns, while the other half of the
time, they lean in the direction of literate children’s songs (“Seven Angels,”
“Gently Down the Stream”). “Bird
Song” owes an open and faithful debt to Neil Young’s classic track “Birds.”
Beyond
the midway point, the album inhabits a dream, familiar territory for Hem, but
it’s a strategy that reaches full maturity here. This maturity culminates on “Last Call,” a song that
immerses itself in a drowsy, drunken high, underscored by a lilting choir and
Gary Maurer’s precisely drifting guitars. The final effect is for the band to be swept away, out into a dark and
moonless night: “Last call when
the waters came / Rushing in at our feet. / Let’s tear the door from the frame
/ And float off down the street.”
Listening
to an album like this, so rife with the complications of love and human
interaction, always makes me wonder why people put up with the hassles of
relationships at all, unless it’s because they’re trained to expect to put up
with them. Then they pay the
penalty and the price. Hem’s Departure and Farewell is, at its
eloquently wistful heart, a record about loneliness and overcoming it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)