Rosanne Cash, The Wheel (Columbia Records, 1993)

Ever since I heard Rosanne Cash in concert for the first time last month in the Berkshires, I’ve been returning to my favorite of her albums, 1993’s The Wheel. It’s obvious to me why I like this album the most out of all the superb records from Cash’s thirty-year catalog: The Wheel is the closest she’s ever come to recording a pure pop album. With a career that began deeply steeped in country music — partly through association with her legendary father, the late Johnny Cash — Rosanne first made her name in that particular genre, though the majority of her songs lean more in the direction of folk. One listen through the selections included on The Essential Rosanne Cash, her excellent two-disc career retrospective released back in May, makes that distinction fairly clear.

The Wheel arrived at an important turning point not just in Rosanne Cash’s career, but in her personal and romantic life as well. As she chronicles in her recently published memoir Composed, she met her future husband and musical collaborator John Leventhal just as she’d begun recording the album, and the two ended up co-producing its eleven songs together. The sonic result is appropriately buoyant, filled with the bliss and adrenaline of newly falling in love, both with a person and with a place. Cash had relocated with her daughters from Nashville to Manhattan just prior to writing the first songs on The Wheel, having divorced her husband of a decade, country musician Rodney Crowell. The album is imbued with the vibrant atmosphere of New York, while the City of Light makes a shimmering appearance on the song “Sleeping in Paris” as well (“I thought I knew which way the wind blows / But now it’s blowing me back to you / And the wind speaks French too”).

Cash’s previous release — 1990’s moody, self-produced, and Grammy-nominated Interiors — had closely explored her divorce, and it also marked her commercial crossover from country singer to mainstream artist. The Wheel was clearly intended, from an industry standpoint, to cement that status. It’s a transition that a number of other female folk/country songwriters and performers had successfully made at right around that time: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tracy Chapman, Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega. Chapman’s runaway 1988 hit “Fast Car” is especially useful to consider in this context; in addition to the song’s brilliant, enduring appeal both lyrically and musically, “Fast Car” found an audience largely because of how unusual a fit it was for standard Top 40 pop fare. The very unexpectedness of such a song at the top of the pop charts helped to make it, like Vega’s “Luka” not too long before, an authentic novelty record.

Although the three singles from Cash’s The Wheel — “Seventh Avenue,” “You Won’t Let Me In,” and the album’s title track — didn’t experience similar chart runs, they were all equally worthy of doing so. In fact, The Wheel is one of those rare albums that doesn’t include a single mediocre song. Cash infuses it with a thematic and sonic integrity from beginning to end, endowing the album with the unassuming sweep of an internalized musical, one that’s meant to play on a solitary Broadway in the mind of each individual listener. In Composed, she describes the overarching concept of the album as elemental, featuring “recurring themes . . . of fire and water, wind and moon.” Along with its distinctive pop veneer, this thematic continuity is largely why the album appealed to me so much from my very first listen.

The elemental, earthly through-line of The Wheel, ironically, carries an almost cosmic scope. Love, heartbreak, and rejuvenation are all set against the vast machinery of the universe itself. The central image of the title song is equal parts zodiac, prayer wheel, and celestial pocket-watch. This is best expressed by how Cash chooses to open the album with a series of questions that feel down-to-earth and mythical at once, counterpointing Sleeping Beauty with Persephone:

“How long was I asleep?

When did we plan to meet?

Have you been waiting long for me?

When did the sky turn black?

Do you still want me back?

I’ll pick it all up piece by piece.”

It’s no coincidence that the highlight of Cash’s concert last month for me was her encore of “The Wheel,” performed solo and acoustic. Even without the driving, jubilant rhythms of John Leventhal’s electric guitar from the album version, she managed to give the song its widescreen, propulsive thrust: “And the wheel goes round and round / And the flame in our souls / It will never burn out.”

“Seventh Avenue,” the album’s second track, is my very favorite of Rosanne Cash’s songs, full-stop. I admire how quiet and introspective it feels, an open declaration and a private musing, just like all the best works of art. Anybody who’s spent a night in New York City, or even just a night alone anywhere, can relate to the intimate, emotional scene that she paints:

“The world keeps getting smaller

’Til it closes ’round my room

And everything I feel now

Is hard and fast and true

My window is a spotlight

On the madness down below

It takes a silent figure

To make this place a home.”

Most art that’s created, ideally, comes from within this same space, the silent, darkened room above a street, and certainly, that’s where most songs begin and take shape. This particular song is also born out of pain to some extent, as its gorgeous and plainspoken chorus makes clear: “Now the candles burn all night / Without you / And the moon hangs out of sight / So blue / On Seventh Avenue.” To telescope from a small room out into the heavens seems like exactly the right move to me, the way that gazing up at a star-filled sky feels like looking at everything and nothing at the same time. The great Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a wonderful prose-poem about Shakespeare titled “Everything and Nothing.” Likewise, saying that “Seventh Avenue” captures everything and nothing is one of the best compliments that I can give it.

The album continues to balance intensity and ease on “Change Partners,” a soaring mediation on shifting gears to the “new dance” of a different and better relationship (“I’m purified by fire / Renewed by my desire”), via the uplift of a swooning piano refrain. “From the Ashes” takes the rising phoenix metaphor, as well as the sense of euphoria and reawakening, a few steps further, as does a later track, “Fire of the Newly Alive.”

But even love’s new dance has its moments of struggle, as on the melancholy, percussive “You Won’t Let Me In,” which Cash sings “like a girl / On the threshold of her life / In love with the whole world / But staring down each night,” sentiments that are again contemplated on “The Truth About You” and “Tears Falling Down” (“In the cradle of our fears / We sleep without tears”). These darker shades of feeling culminate on “Roses in the Fire,” Cash’s affecting look back at her former relationship, especially potent during an impassioned, point-blank lyrical bridge that’s the emotional vortex of the album: “Oh I’ll kill you if we can’t be friends / I’ll bleed like diamonds running through your hands / I’ll be a bitter taste you can’t forget / And I won’t leave this world until you relent.”

Redemption, however, is the main focus of the album. As Cash famously sings on “Sleeping in Paris,” “A lonely road is a bodyguard / If we really want it to be,” a lyric that she had originally jotted down in a notebook back when she was 17 and revived at just the right moment many years later. A bent for solitude can prevent us from connecting with others, yet it can also protect us until we’re truly ready to do so. The album’s spiritually inclined, ethereal closing number, “If There’s a God on My Side,” returns to a litany of questions that’s similar in tone to the ones that opened the record:

“If there’s a God on my side

Why don’t she show me her face?

If there’s a God on my side

Could she live in this place?

If there’s a God on my side

Is she inside these walls?

If there’s a God on my side

Could she not hear me call?”

The final impression is one of hope and earnest inquiry, but Cash’s obvious mood of uncertainty throughout these lyrics is equally significant and profound. In the context of her life as a whole, I find that element to be quite inspiring. As the daughter of one of the most celebrated figures in the history of American popular music, she was clearly in a privileged position both materially and in terms of preparation for a future career in music herself. But throughout that career, her search through the realm of art and expression has remained resolutely inconclusive, calmly unsure of what exactly she’ll find and how she might grow and change over time. Her willingness to accept the mysterious and the unknown as vital to the act of creating has made her a singer and songwriter of the highest caliber.

Perhaps the finest quality on The Wheel is the sense of immediacy and distillation it conveys from song to song. Cash’s lyrical approach is direct in style and in spirit, maybe because the album is about attempting to shed complexity in the midst of potentially overwhelming emotional complications. The idea that the universe is constantly moving, as a way of keeping our everyday selves unstuck in time, is somehow reassuring and also unsettling. That delicate tension, and the magical energy that’s produced by it, has kept me listening to the sounds of The Wheel nearly twenty years on.

13th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival (June 15th - 19th, 2011)

Having attended the annual film festival in Provincetown since 2005, I found the roster of films at the latest festival — in its thirteenth year — to be as solid as previous years. In the spirit of this blog, I’ll focus my comments on the handful of films that I enjoyed the most at last week’s festival, all of which I very highly recommend seeing when they arrive at your local cinemas over the coming months.

The documentaries are almost always a bit more satisfying for me than the narrative features. This could be due to the whole “truth is stranger than fiction” phenomenon, or more likely, it’s because telling a fictional narrative in an engaging way is a more difficult task these days. Most stories have already been repeatedly rehashed from many possible angles, but even more problematically, a narrative feature film needs to present itself with a distinctive storytelling style that also doesn’t seem false to the viewer. Finding an individual style or voice is perhaps the hardest element for any artist to achieve, film directors included.

My favorite movie in the festival was We Were Here, a powerful documentary about the early AIDS years in San Francisco. The film had played at the gay film festival here in Boston last month, and since I missed it then, I was glad to have a chance to see it in Provincetown. The movie delicately intersplices memories and anecdotes of five finely selected interviewees: four gay men and one female nurse. The four gay men, some HIV-positive and some negative, have all done important work as activists and otherwise in San Francisco over time: a visual artist, a street-corner flower vendor, an AIDS hospice volunteer, and the executive director of the GLBT Historical Society. They all speak with candor and quiet wisdom about witnessing first-hand, and from the epicenter, one of the most devastating (and ironically uniting) medical crises in American history, during which nearly 20,000 men in San Francisco lost their lives, the population size of many small cities.

I was most struck by the film’s seamless tone; the carefully interwoven interviews all felt contemplative, direct, and untampered with. The hospice volunteer movingly recounts how he never fit into the landscape of anonymous gay sex in San Francisco at the time, and once he began doing work as a caretaker, he realized that was how he could become close with other gay men. The visual artist tells a heartbreaking story of rushing his partner who was living with AIDS to the hospital, only to have him die before they arrived there. And the flower vendor recalls watching one man progress from riding around on his bike, to becoming ill and walking with a cane, to being very ill in a wheelchair; then, as new drug treatments were introduced, the man went back to walking with a cane, to walking past without the cane, and he finally returned to riding by on his bike again, older than before but back to his previously healthy self. That image is both instructive and life-affirming, just one of many moving examples from this profound and humane documentary.

Equally moving and profound is Buck, a documentary about Buck Brannaman, the real-life “horse whisperer,” who trained the actor Robert Redford for his role in the film of that title. While the documentary does explore Brannaman’s unique methods for taming and training difficult and unwieldy horses, it’s also concerned with the people who own those horses, and the people are often more in need of assistance than the animals to whom Brannaman so caringly attends.

Mainly, however, the film focuses on Brannaman’s own personal history and the reasons why he ended up in this unusual line of work. The scenes of Brannaman painfully remembering his early childhood — he and his older brother were violently abused by their alcoholic father — are deeply sad but ultimately redemptive. His memories of the foster parents who showed him the meaning of family and unconditional love after his mother’s death provide ample explanation of how he learned to have such insight into the horses’ behavior and his own. A frightening segment near the end of the film, when a wild horse that Buck is training brutally attacks its owners, culminates in a lesson which could describe both the vicious horse and Buck himself: “You can’t hold it against him for how his life has been.”

Errol Morris’s latest documentary Tabloid is also worth mentioning here. Far more offbeat than the other two documentaries that I enjoyed in the festival, it’s also original, bizarre, and hilarious enough that I was in tears laughing at several points during the film. It’s the story of former teenage Wyoming beauty queen Joyce McKinney and her alleged late-’70s “kidnapping” of the young Mormon boyfriend with whom she eloped to London. Morris pieces together the tale and so skillfully arranges its manic details that the effect becomes nearly hallucinatory. I’ve never been on a drug trip, but about halfway through the film, I was sure that it must be similar to what one would feel like.

From a cultural standpoint, Morris is invested in examining how any story becomes “the truth,” since Joyce McKinney’s "manacled Mormon" jaunt-gone-awry was sliced up, devoured, and dramatically reconstructed by the British tabloid press. Her own retelling of the situation is enthusiastically counterpointed with memories of the dueling tabloid editors who greedily bought and sold her story to a public hungry for vicarious thrills and sordid revelations, a predilection which our culture has obviously never outgrown. And neither has Joyce McKinney. She returned to the United States with thirteen suitcases filled with tabloid clippings of her own story, and today she’s still obsessed over the man she fell madly in love with so many years ago.

Keeping with the theme of crazy love, the narrative feature that I enjoyed most in the festival was Weekend, a downbeat gay romantic film from the UK. Two young guys in Nottingham, Russell (Tom Cullen) and Glen (Chris New), meet at a club and get to know each other over the course of a couple of lazy weekend days. Drinks, drugs, intense dialogue, and frequent sex are all involved, and it doesn’t hurt that both men are gorgeous in an unassuming hipster way. The film is at its most authentic when it delves into issues that resonate with many young gay men today: questions of dating, relationships, monogamy, marriage, loneliness, and self-fulfillment.

Glen is the more “out” guy in the pair, and also the one who’s more willing to interrogate social norms, while Russell is comfortably open but enjoys hanging out with his straight friends more. Who are we in relation to those around us, and how does intimacy with another person affect all of that? Wisely, Weekend avoids providing any clear-cut answers, but instead presents a genuinely intriguing and open-ended double-portrait. The cinéma vérité style of the film brings us in closer proximity to the characters and their situation, making the entire experiment feel naturalistic and true. The movie also demonstrates how gay couples all have to deal with problems that are both similar to those faced by heterosexual couples and different from them in key ways at the same time. Growing up with a sense of ourselves as “outsiders” gives gay men a greater need to connect, and it also often prevents us from being fully able to do so.

A straight and even younger outsider, Oliver Tate, has an equally tricky time connecting with those around him in Submarine, another UK romantic flick that’s set in Wales. The debut feature by director Richard Ayoade, Submarine puts a fresh and vibrant spin on the misfit’s coming-of-age tale. Craig Roberts is pitch-perfect in his performance as Oliver; he sustains the audience’s interest as thoroughly and intently as Holden Caulfield did in Catcher in the Rye. The lovelorn Oliver pursues his sullen classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) throughout the film, catching her but then losing her to a less frenetic sort of guy.

Visually and structurally innovative, the film goes a little over the top with a revenge subplot involving an affair between Oliver’s mother (Sally Hawkins) and a quirky New Age motivational guru (Paddy Considine). Yet we never really lose sight of Oliver’s hilarious and tortured journey into early manhood, which manages to be both wrenching and endearing. There’s more than a dash of Bud Cort’s title misfit from Harold and Maude laced throughout Roberts’ portrayal of Oliver, and the cinematic appeal of his character shows the potential for having a similar endurance. At one point late in the movie, Oliver muses that every person has a “sub-aquatic” mental and emotional life that makes it impossible for us ever truly to know what somebody else is thinking. The stunning fantasy sequence that follows Oliver’s break-up with Jordana, during which he curls up on his bed and literally floats away on the ocean, is alone worth the price of admission.

Perhaps the most exciting moment of the festival for me came when director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) gave a brilliant answer to a question of mine at the festival awards ceremony. Aronofsky was the recipient of this year’s Filmmaker on the Edge award, so during his Q&A session with the audience, I asked him about an interesting comment that Natalie Portman had made when accepting her Golden Globe for Best Actress in Black Swan earlier this year. Portman remarked that she appreciated how, after pushing her through many exhausting takes for a scene, Aronofsky would tell her, “Now do this next take for yourself.” I asked Aronofsky how he knows, as a film director, when it’s the right moment to offer that to an actor. He responded that it’s like deciding whether or not to go for the fourth blue ghost when playing the Pac-Man arcade game! I’ll plan to see any future movie that’s directed by someone who can offer such a flawless ’80s video-game metaphor right off the top of his head.

Junebug (dir. Phil Morrison, 2005)

As I do each year in mid-June, I’m looking forward to attending the annual Provincetown Film Festival next week. One of the early reviews that I posted on this blog last June was my critique of Loggerheads, which I saw at the festival back in 2005. That same year, I also saw the movie Junebug at the festival, and now that we’re back in the month of June again, my thoughts have been returning to that film a lot recently.

The word “original” gets tossed around often when discussing films or any art form, but I find that it rarely truly applies whenever it’s used. Phil Morrison’s Junebug is an original American film that deserves the description. It’s easy to forget the somewhat startling series of images that open the movie, since they don’t seem to connect immediately to the rest of its narrative. We first see some vintage footage of individual, middle-aged men singing, or doing something in between yelling and yodeling (the end-credits acknowledge a national “hollerin’” competition). It’s almost like the southern version of trumpeters who introduced the start of a stage-play in the Elizabethan era. Then the movie’s title is suddenly superimposed over a haunting shot of a thicket of trees at night, an image that will recur at a very strategic point much later in the film.

It's just as easy to forget how happy the earliest scenes of the story are, given the amount of tension and tragedy that follow in the course of the film. We meet George (Alessandro Nivola) as he falls believably in love-at-first-sight with Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz). He attends a benefit auction at the gallery in Chicago where she curates “outsider” art by self-taught painters. The close-up, blissful, headlong rush into their relationship — we’ll soon discover that they married each other only one week later — is necessary for the rest of the film to work. The couple heads south to George’s hometown in North Carolina for two reasons: so that George’s new wife can meet his family (and hopefully be embraced by them), and so that Madeleine can try to recruit the reclusive artist David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) to the roster of painters whom she represents.

Once the film and its central characters arrive at George’s childhood home, we gradually realize that every member of the family wants something in particular. Madeleine wants to sign her painter before a New York art dealer signs him first. George, the silent, smiling golden boy, wants his family to get along comfortably, without disturbing the usual proceedings. His mother, Peg (Celia Weston), despite her occasionally up-front demeanor, wants her children to be happy, a wish that may not include the worldly, elegant Madeleine. George’s frustrated, jealous younger brother, Johnny (Ben McKenzie), seems to want to be left alone, though through his angry outbursts, we also glimpse flashes of his desire to connect with the other members of his family, if he can manage to do so on his own sullen terms. He’s equally disconnected from and disdainful of his overly cheerful and very pregnant wife, Ashley (Amy Adams), who wants Johnny to be as in love with her as he was back when they were in high school.

The family’s quietly supportive father, Eugene (Scott Wilson), holds the whole clan together, as unlikely as it seems for such a reticent, soft-spoken character. He intuits both the genuine love and the various levels of pain in those who surround him, and his gentle quietude is his way of both respecting and enduring that knowledge. He, too, works toward a single goal throughout the duration of the movie; just prior to Madeleine’s arrival, we overhear him whisper to himself, “I’m gonna make her a bird.” The product of his careful woodworking during the film, nevertheless, isn’t presented to her in the end. He pockets the tiny bird instead, knowing that the act of creating something out of love for someone is more important than the gratification of offering the gift itself, and knowing that he will see her in the future and it can wait until later.

Much of Junebug, in fact, is spent waiting: waiting for an air mattress to inflate itself on the floor of the guest bedroom, waiting for George and Madeleine to arrive, waiting for Johnny’s ride to his warehouse job to show up, waiting for David Wark to make his decision about Madeleine’s proposed contract, waiting for characters to show what they feel, waiting for them not to show what they feel. Some of the film’s key scenes unfold in complete silence, simple jump-cut still shots of the empty rooms in the family’s two-story, suburban house, which becomes just as much of a character as those who reside inside of it, shaping their personalities and the way we perceive them. We also see numerous shots of the family’s three couples nestled separately in their beds, suggesting that the film is to some degree a study in the mechanisms and nuances of intimacy.

Several film reviewers have criticized the movie’s male characters for coming off as too underdeveloped, but I find them to be just as complex as the movie’s spunkier female characters. The men simply express their emotions in ways other than language, with their eyes and gestures of consent or dismissal, just as many of the men did during my own childhood in rural Ohio, and more recently throughout my adult life in metropolitan areas along the East Coast. This quality makes one of the film’s most pivotal moments all the more profound, when George sings a hymn about coming home, a cappella, at a church potluck, and gives Madeleine a new and richer understanding of the place where he was raised.

Of course, we also wait for the imminent arrival of Ashley’s baby, whose pre-birth nickname we learn is shared with the film’s title. It’s better if I don’t explain anything more about that here, except to mention that Amy Adams’ inspired, career-making performance is entirely worthy of the Academy Award nomination that she received for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. I recall watching a few lone men sitting in the theater at the festival screening of the film that I attended, and they responded with openly visible feeling to the scene that surely secured Adams her Oscar nod.

Phil Morrison’s direction is nothing short of extraordinary, and I anxiously await another feature film from him in the future. A native of Winston-Salem, he shows his roots faithfully and abundantly in the movie’s details, from the characters’ recognizable, no-nonsense attitudes to his affinity for the area’s vibrantly green landscape. There’s a deliberate quirkiness to the film’s style (accompanied by Yo La Tengo’s offbeat musical score) that’s analogous to David Wark’s bizarrely visionary paintings, partly comical and partly disturbing. It’s in this liminal zone and mixture of conflicting tones — thanks largely to Angus MacLachlan’s textured screenplay and regionally precise dialogue — where the characters’ truthfulness manifests most clearly, making us both laugh and flinch at the emotional situations in which they find themselves. I’m reminded of what I like to call the “deep caricatures” portrayed in Mike Leigh’s finest films. We feel as if we know these characters because their idiosyncrasies make them so accurately honest, yet that same cartoonishness distances us from them and reminds us that what we’re viewing is not actual life, but a work of art.

Milk (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2008)

Earlier this week, I delivered a brief address at one of the schools where I teach, Emerson College. The resident assistants in the college’s dorms screened Gus Van Sant’s Academy Award-winning film Milk, and they invited me to share some comments about the movie in relation to gay representations in cinema and popular culture. Thanks to all of the students who attended and stayed for our engaging discussion afterwards. Here are the remarks that I prepared for the occasion:

Gus Van Sant’s Milk is an ideal launching pad for considering gay representations in cinema, partly due to its style and subject, and partly due to the point in history at which it arrived. I first saw the movie at an advance screening at Boston Common cinema with my Evolution of Queer Identity class, before the film was officially released three years ago. Cleve Jones, the character played by Emile Hirsch, attended that screening to host a Q&A afterwards, and he noted how coincidental the film’s timing was, in relation to the debate over Proposition 8 in California, which was unfolding at the same time. Younger people, especially, began to participate in a huge and highly visible wave of social activism in support of same-sex marriage rights, the kind of widespread political activism that we also witness in the movie Milk and had not seen very much of here in the United States since the days of Supervisor Harvey Milk himself.

While I do think the movie takes a few small missteps, slightly over-dramatizing or over-sentimentalizing just a handful of times, I find Milk to be a beautiful and important film overall. The movie culminates in a climax that’s all-too-typical of queer-themed cinema, sadly, in that our gay hero dies, but Milk is special in that its hero lives on and looms large in gay cultural history, indeed in our country’s history, even if he didn’t actually survive. His legacy is foreshadowed by the final image he sees from an office window during the tragic assassination scene: the banners for the opera Tosca that’s playing across the street. Harvey Milk, a lifelong devotee of opera, knows at the moment of his death that the narrative of his own life has been irreversibly transformed and altered, and that his life story will now carry the emotional and dramatic potency of an opera itself.

Despite the political urgency of the film, I find the most radical aspect of the movie to be its candid depiction of physical and romantic intimacy between its two central male characters, Milk (Sean Penn) and his partner Scott Smith (James Franco). With the exception of films like Brokeback Mountain and Philadelphia, rarely do we see gay male romance portrayed in mainstream cinematic fare, unless it’s presented to the audience as a joke or for comic relief. As the gay writer Allen Barnett perceptively observed in his wonderful short story titled “Snapshot,” “There’s nothing more serious than the desire of one man for another.” In her book Epistemology of the Closet, the late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick referred to this particular kind of seriousness as “the swirls of totalizing knowledge-power that circulate so violently around any but the most openly acknowledged gay male identity.”

Physical and romantic tenderness depicted between men on screen has always been risky, and it continues to be somewhat risky today. While so-called mainstream audiences have become a little more comfortable watching open affection between men, fairly strict limits still remain firmly in place regarding just how much physicality between two men a straight audience is willing to accept or tolerate. The fact that Milk does not back down from this overt physicality — from the early scene of Sean Penn and James Franco flirtatiously chatting in the stairwell of a New York City subway station — is vital to the film and the integrity of its inherent message. If cultural acceptance of gay people is to continue to progress, and if same-sex marriage is eventually to become a federally legalized reality for everyone in our country, then open and honest images of men in love with men, and women in love with women, and everything else in between, must persist in such natural and forthright artistic representations.

The most moving moment in the film, for me, is the moment just after Harvey Milk is fatally shot, when he flashes back in his mind to the scene of himself talking quietly in bed with Scott, James Franco’s character. Harvey Milk’s lasting presence in queer history, and in American history-at-large, is due to his key role as a progressive public figure; however, what he stood for politically — full equality and honorable treatment of queer people and individuals from all underrepresented groups — would have far less meaning without this brief glimpse into his private, intimate life. Our public lives have value as direct extensions of who we are in our daily private lives, so our private lives and our public lives must both be dignified in the eyes of our society, in order for our time on this earth to be truly fulfilled.

Three from the Vault

Since I have just a bit of spare time remaining before I begin a new semester of teaching at my colleges, I figured this would be a good chance to post another blog entry, to help tide my blog over until the arrival of summer break, when I’ll have more opportunities to attend to such things. This is also an ideal way to share my enthusiasm about three pop music rarities that I’ve been obsessing over for the past two months now: Lovelife by The Painted Word, Shoebox Full of Secrets by Andy Pawlak, and 24 Years of Hunger by Eg and Alice.

In each instance this was the only studio album officially released by each musical act. Therefore, the above title of this blog post, “Three from the Vault,” doesn’t really describe the albums accurately. Despite maintaining a small but vocal underground cult following for over twenty years since their arrival, these three albums have all been retrieved from the deep, deep vault of British pop music, and together they’re about as pristine, emotive, and rapturous a trio of pop albums as one could hope to find just about anywhere, from any era.

Before delving into these records from the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d like to say a few words first about the idea of nostalgia, especially as it’s applied to pop music. One reason why these three quirky, far left-of-center albums sound so perfect to me is, no doubt, because I came of age in exactly the time period during which they were recorded and released. (I graduated from high school in 1991.) My ears gravitate naturally to these sounds, half-electronic, half-acoustic, untainted by the cynicism that would come to dominate mainstream pop by the mid-’90s. I think these albums still sound fairly timeless, regardless of my personal associations with the music of my youth.

The problem is that what’s typically referred to, and quite often unfairly condescended to, as nostalgic — allowing ourselves to over-sentimentalize our earlier years, while whitewashing their perhaps harsher realities — doesn’t truly apply in this case. Music is created both inside of time and outside of time; it necessarily reflects the trappings and technology of its era, and in the very best instances, it also transcends them. A recording of the pure sound of a voice and an instrument can tap into something much “older” within us, and it can simultaneously project itself well into the future, as a kind of aesthetic preservation. That’s what permits us to pluck from complete obscurity a fine album composed two decades ago and realize that it sounds just as good now as it did back then. As the great Southern novelist William Faulkner famously put it in one of his later books, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Maybe the most obscure of the three records that I’ll be critiquing here, The Painted Word’s Lovelife (BMG/RCA Records, 1989) brims and sometimes nearly overflows with melodic ’80s pop of the very highest order. In the tradition of Aztec Camera’s Love (1987) and The Blue Nile’s Hats (1989), there’s something almost emblematic about this album. And like those other two albums, it was created with one young British man primarily at its center. In the case of The Painted Word, that young singer/songwriter was Alan McCusker-Thompson. Pictured hazily out of focus on the album’s cover, but nonetheless dapperly dressed, his image often seems to glow when the CD is sitting under the lamplight on my desk, beckoning to me from across the room in his crisp white shirt-sleeves and snug red vest, floating up from an otherworldly little sea of aquamarine.

The Painted Word surfaced in 1986, when U2’s Mother Records label released the band’s moody yet uplifting first single, “Independence Day.” Three years later, in the waning afterglow of the New Romantic movement, the band’s full-length debut, Lovelife, quietly appeared on the British music scene. The album is sophisticated enough not to draw attention to itself, partly because it’s top-notch musical craftsmanship masquerading as mainstream pop. (Even “I Found Love Today,” a B-side for the album’s single “Worldwide,” easily trumps most other songs of the era.) The lyrics on Lovelife don’t intend to astound anybody. As the band’s name suggests, the words in the songs aren’t innately extraordinary; rather, they’re painted, stylized, customary but more colorful than the words that we use in daily life. True to the album’s title, Lovelife is entirely, jubilantly love-centric (“Yes it’s true / That the reason I’m alive / Is to be here by your side”). Or better yet, it’s surrounded by a buoyant cloud of what love might feel like to someone who’s young and overtaken by infatuation, with hardly even a tinge of romantic uncertainty about it all.

Ironically, these love-filled songs somehow avoid clichés through total immersion in them. On the aptly named “Joie de Vivre,” McCusker-Thompson’s delivery strikes a balance between innocence and seduction as he croons (swoons, really) in a resonant voice that bears a distinct resemblance to Sting’s, “We’ll go out tonight / Forget the danger signs / Tonight this world is mine.” Indeed, the song succeeds by creating and spinning itself out into its own little world, beginning with soft piano chords and synth-based rhythms. Midway through the track, the singer’s joined by a joyful chorus of background vocalists, then a full-tilt horns section, along with galloping strings orchestrated by the famed pop arranger Anne Dudley. The man at the song’s helm excels at impassioned refrains and chants, and the one that he riffs on here — “When they take you down, they take you down for good” — propels the song and its singer toward an ecstatic sense of liberation.

The slightly more down-tempo “Wilderness,” with strings that echo classic Burt Bacharach hits, accomplishes a similar openness (“Take your love into the world”), while pensive numbers like “24 Hours” and the nostalgia-limned “boy I once was” of “’77” penetrate through the more somber layers of ’60s-influenced orchestral pop. “Worldwide” readily demonstrates through its catchiness why it was one of Lovelife’s singles, even if the album version’s lingering, soul-inflected outro is what most makes the song worth hearing. And the lazily tender but no less passionate “I Want It Here and I Want It Now” might just be the record’s finest cut, with its smitten young couple strolling through sun-struck Paris, holding hands “beneath the blue armistice sky.”

Although The Painted Word did record another album, Universal, in 1995, the disc was never officially released, and only a handful of promotional copies found their way into the world. Like many other musicians who recorded just one or two albums at some point in the distant past, Alan McCusker-Thompson works in academia today. He lectures on commercial music at the University of the West of Scotland, where he leads the Master’s Program in Music Innovation and Entrepreneurship, among the first academic programs of its kind. He also currently manages musicians with independent and major labels.

Andy Pawlak, another British musician whose first and only album debuted in the same year as The Painted Word’s, has apparently disappeared from the music business far more thoroughly since the release of Shoebox Full of Secrets (Phonogram/Fontana Records, 1989). Some random comments online mention that Pawlak now works as a driving instructor in the far north of England, though like McCusker-Thompson, Pawlak also recorded a second unreleased album, Low Beat Folk, in 2003 under the moniker Monkey.

As it were, Shoebox Full of Secrets is itself exactly that, a musical shoebox full of tiny secret gems, and a shimmering and vastly overlooked pop masterpiece. I was mesmerized by the cover photo and purchased the album, sound unheard, when I stumbled upon the CD at a used record shop in London’s Notting Hill district. It was a wise investment; today, the disc is worth twentyfold what I paid for it. And for only three quid back then, what a sterling album it turned out to be, flawless from beginning to end: thirteen dreamy, hard-to-categorize songs that proved just as beguiling as the album’s cover.

From the playful opening title track, “Secrets,” these songs are largely for and about “lovers keeping lovers warm.” Just as unashamedly romantic as the songs by The Painted Word, Andy Pawlak’s tunes feel like they’ve been partially beamed in from an earlier decade, reviving soulful ’60s and ’70s American pop values more authentically than most ’80s American pop musicians ever did. Rhythmic guitar hooks, chiming piano interludes, and especially the doo-wop harmonies of background vocalists Dee and Shirley Lewis all contribute to the album’s genuine throwback aura.

“Mermaids” may be the best example of this, with lyrics that are whimsical enough to match the boundless energy of the music: “We should be swimming with mermaids / Not praying for rain / In puddles of lace / Watching tumbleweeds tumbling / Feeding ice cream to rattlesnakes.” Sometimes darkness creeps in beneath the cheerful, polished surface of the songs. “Best Regards” tells an abstract wartime tale with tragic swerves throughout its verses:

“And all the children swam

Among the floating bombs

A gift from Uncle Sam

Sent with his best regards

Another boy was took last night

He had his hands and ankles tied

He tasted gun oil in his mouth

And never heard another sound.”

Yet Pawlak’s toughly exuberant vocals help to keep even his darker poetic narratives hopeful. The central figure of “Mother’s Day,” as Pawlak sings of her, rises above the surrounding squalor (“When it all came down around her feet / In the soggy paper maché streets / She kept a hold of love”). “All That’s Left of Me” and “Eskimo Kissing” are punctuated with similar bursts of fresh, surprising imagery, while “Love Letters” and “For Better or for Worse” rely more on lovelorn character sketches to drive the songs gently forward.

Finally, Eg and Alice’s 24 Years of Hunger (Warner Music/WEA Records, 1991) may be the best known of these three rare albums, mainly because of Francis “Eg” White’s still-thriving career as a songwriter for a wide array of major pop stars. White got his start as a bassist for the ’80s British boyband Brother Beyond, and he’s gone on to compose massively successful hits for everyone from Kylie Minogue to James Morrison to Joss Stone to Will Young. In addition to producing tracks for artists like Pink and Sam Sparro, Eg also penned Grammy Award winner Adele’s song “Chasing Pavements,” as well as Duffy’s “Warwick Avenue,” the most unforgettable cut on her debut album, Rockferry.

In between his boyband days and his current status as one of the world’s most successful pop songsmiths, Eg White wrote and recorded one ultra-sublime album with his friend Alice Temple, who was formerly a model in London and a BMX bike-racing champion. (Though first glances may prove deceptive, that’s Temple posing in the striking photo for Eg and Alice’s cover artwork at the beginning of this post.) 24 Years of Hunger has stood the test of time just as well as the albums by The Painted Word and Andy Pawlak, and perhaps even a little bit better, since Eg and Alice’s album doesn’t bear the somewhat outdated stamp of trademark ’80s production and instrumentation quite as much.

The songs on Eg and Alice’s debut rank among the moodiest of pop music, and their greatest appeal is that the lyrics never feel the need to spell everything out. Poetic abstraction is a very difficult feat to pull off well in the setting of a pop song. The disc’s opening number, “Rockets,” achieves this on a variety of levels, gradually but surely working its way into the listener’s consciousness, as Eg and Alice sing about how a bittersweet relationship can make a person want to take off right into space: “And when I touch my baby / So blue, she’s sad too . . . / Send us a rocket or two.” Against a backdrop of light electronics, percussion, and delicate crescendos, Eg’s straightforward vocals intertwine with Alice’s raspy, shy delivery, and the effect is almost indescribably gorgeous.

Elsewhere, “In a Cold Way” courts a distinctively jazzy sensibility in a pleading wake-up call to a depressed friend, while “And I Have Seen Myself” sounds indebted equally to Southern gospel and Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” One of the album’s two singles, “Doesn’t Mean That Much to Me,” faithfully recreates early Prince-variety funk and R&B (“The same key that will let you into heaven / Will open every door in hell”).

But it’s the album’s other single, “Indian,” that provides 24 Years of Hunger with its most alluring, remarkable track. On the surface, the lyrics of the chorus suggest a typical “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” sort of moral (“If you tell me I’m an Indian / You’re an Indian too”). Repeated listening reveals a deeper theme of outsiderdom and feeling like a misfit amongst one’s peers, the word “Indian” perhaps being a kind of lyrical substitute for lesbianism, since Temple sings the majority of the song:

“For several years I have been

On the edge of every scene

A stranger in my town

And even though they say hello

They would not be seen with me

I guess they’ve never known . . .

I wonder how come they can turn me away

I think it’s so sad, we may never be the same again.”

As sonically beautiful, radio-friendly, and unassumingly moving as “Indian” is, it’s unlikely that such a song could ever have been a mainstream hit. That’s a sad fact indeed, considering that pop music listeners would certainly benefit from the clever indirection and thematic seriousness that the song offers. Its message is a potent and universal one: discriminating against people or treating them like outcasts for being perceived as different also places the prejudiced individual firmly in the realm of “difference,” separate from the majority of human beings who attempt to treat each other with dignity.

Although they collaborated as a duo on only one full-length album, both Eg White and Alice Temple recorded subsequent solo projects. Eg’s two solo albums, Turn Me On, I’m a Rocket Man (WEA Records, 1996) and Adventure Man (Spilt Milk Records, 2009), were both quietly well-received by fans and critics. White worked with Temple on her harder-edged debut, Hang Over (V2 Records, 1999), and in 2008 Temple recorded an independently-released album titled Be With You in a Minute. She also contributed lead vocals to “Pull Me Through,” a track on Eg’s Adventure Man.

So why are these three lost albums from decades past significant enough for me to write about now? When we suddenly hear a snippet of a nearly forgotten song from long ago, the feeling that we get of being carried back to our younger days isn’t merely nostalgic. The greatest songs and albums emphasize how memory actually functions. During the different phases of our lives, we move through time in ways that are both continuous and discontinuous at once, experiencing “a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability,” as the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space. Pop songs are like indelible gemstones that don’t ever change, but we do. And so they open a bright path back to those unchanged versions of our younger selves that remain trapped in time, the people we were before we became who we are today.