Fearless Romantics

Lost

2009-03-28T16:46:00.006Z

Here's another song. I wrote and recorded it this week. I'd like to develop it a bit more - maybe with some piano. Use the link below to download.

lost

The Lily

2009-03-15T19:37:00.004Z

I had a lot of fun writing and recording this! It came about after I thought of some silly lyrics about guilding and a lily.

the lily

In My Dream

2009-02-01T14:27:00.002Z

I wrote this song last week. I had just spoken to a man who was telling me how his wife had Alzheimer's, and there was something about the care in his voice that I found really moving. This got me thinking about some lyrics for a song about how illnesses might get in the way of what could have been a great love affair.

InMyDream.mp3

Shallow Day

2009-01-23T19:14:00.004Z

This song is more recent. Last summer I picked up my viola for the first time in years, and after some messing around I found that I really liked the sound that it made when combined with a harmonica. Kind of rustic (if not Waltons-esque). Having said that, if the conductor of the orchestra I play in hears this, he'll probably have words to say about my tuning.

I wrote the lyrics while standing on a picket line in the rain! The other singer is me as well.

Click here: Shallowday.mp3

All I Need

2009-01-23T19:12:00.002Z

Here's another song I wrote years ago, called All I Need.

Click here: AllINeed.mp3

Times

2009-01-18T21:41:00.003Z

Here's another - this is called Times, and it's one of the first songs I ever wrote.

Times

Devil at my Deathbed

2009-01-18T21:28:00.007Z

I've decided that it's about time I started posting some of my own songs online, and rather than set up a myspace site, it makes sense to have all of my music stuff on the one site.

So for starters, here's a song I wrote and recorded this weekend - it's a bit rough and ready, but it is supposed to be the dying confession of some dodgy old New Orleans criminal, so with any luck the style fits.

Devil at my Deathbed

Neil Diamond - If I Don't See You Again

2008-08-30T21:44:00.002Z

Neil Diamond’s 2008 album, Home Before Dark, opens with its best song. He didn’t choose the single with the catchy but annoying name, Pretty Amazing Grace (it’s good isn’t it – you don’t like it, but it’s good) as its first track; nor did he choose the title track as song number one. Instead, he went for the nearest song the record has to an ‘epic’ – the seven minute If I Don’t See You Again, a work of simplicity and elegance which evokes all of the best work from Diamond’s career.

It is said that having produced Johnny Cash’s last few albums, helping create that trademark powerful American acoustic sound, Rick Rubin actively wooed Neil Diamond, to persuade him to let Rubin produce him too. The initial result was the album 12 Songs, and Home Before Dark is their follow-up album. Some people will undoubtedly have sniffed at the idea of Rubin, for many the epitome of cool, approaching that walking Brooklyn-LA cliché, Neil Diamond. But listening to If I Don’t See You Again, perhaps they can begin to see what the attraction was.

Starting with what seems at first to be a hesitant guitar pattern, Diamond swiftly transforms that sense of uncertainty into what it really was all along: a stately and respectful initiation into the world of lost love. He eschews angst and rejects the temptation to engage in hand-wringing; instead he lets the song do the talking. Similarly, and it seems a strange point to make, his diction is near-perfect. Every word is given its due space, without ever being swallowed or deprived of half of its sound, because Diamond’s story is a precise one. Lose half of it, and you lose the essence of it. There are no spare sentiments here, and there are no superfluous words – no yeahs, no oohs, none of the posturing that can give pop performance its edge, but which can give pop and rock songwriters an easy way out when they can’t think of what to say, when they don’t know what they mean to say.

There are very few songwriters alive who wouldn’t benefit from a small dose of this sort of discipline, which was probably instilled in Diamond in his days as a jobbing songwriter on Tin Pan Alley – where only the finest, most rounded songs found their way out of the Brill Building into the charts, in the hands of the public’s latest flavour of the month. All the way through If I Don’t See You Again, Diamond’s phrasing and lyrical sense bring to mind his earliest songs, full of a concise eloquence which told you all that you wanted to know about the song’s characters. Songs like Solitary Man:

I’ve had it to here being where love’s a small word
Part-time thing, papering
I know it’s been done having one girl who loves you
Right or wrong, weak or strong

Don’t know that I will, but until I can find me
A girl that will stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am
Solitary man

In a similar way, in If I Don’t See You Again, Diamond tells it like it is, but more than that, he tells it as if he is telling like it is. In other words, listening to this song is like sitting down and being told personally by Diamond how he feels. Even the odd line which doesn’t ring quite so naturally, in actual fact adds to the sense of genuine occurrence and feeling, as when you think about it, when they’re telling such a sad and emotional story, who gets it out in word-perfect fashion? We probably want to say “This is the perfect time to go”, but sometimes we won’t get it right – there’s no second chance, and before we know it, we have said “The time is perfect to go”. That’s what he sings, and we believe him all the more for it.

An element of this song that will be immediately recognisable to long-time Neil Diamond fans is his sense of drama. As the song moves on from that graceful beginning, his voice builds in urgency and regret at the same time, as if the ever-increasing band are egging him on, forcing him to get it all out before they all implode, unable quite to release themselves from the restrained, powerful shackles Rubin has placed on them. So the singer dispenses with the gaps between the lines that the first verse features (retaining them only at the end of subsequent verses), piling on line after line of words which with a combination of literal truth and simple metaphor keep the listener firmly rooted in the land of the real.

If I don’t see you again
We ran a whole other race
Two strangers meet on the road
And find their time and their place
We never once had to lie
We’d passed the age of consent
If I don’t see you again

But still you get the sense that his own songwriting won’t let him dawdle, and so without moving beyond the simple three chords that form the basis of his (and so many others’) art, he introduces a new melody, which switches between the chords every bar, rather than every two bars. At the same time the melody goes higher and higher, before realising that “hardly anyone cared”, and settling back to that repeated line, the title of the song. Indeed, what follows now is the introduction of the third and final musical motif, a gentler and questioning melody – providing space for an ambling organ to enter the fray, but also for Diamond’s voice to take us up, faster, louder, as his feeling of expected loss becomes ever more urgent.

Neil Diamond’s voice has always been sonorous and deep, a baritone of real beauty, but now, with years on the clock, he doesn’t over-use it as he did in the eighties, as the pop songwriting deserted him and he crafted songs based only on the emotion (which itself was often hammed up). No, this song is no Heartlight, which was inspired by another piece of mawkish emotion (the film ET). Now, there’s a real fire in his voice, which takes you right back to his earlier days, back even before the fire in his music came from his experimentation with interesting existential songs, like I Am…I Said, and African rhythms, right back to when he wrote songs about his childhood. The song Shilo was a masterpiece of late sixties pop, using a contained, thoughtful musical accompaniment alongside ambitious and striking lyrics, so that the music gave the thoughts time to breathe. This was the young man Diamond, singing about the boy Neil and his imaginary friend, and as the self-imposed limits on rock and roll aggression reflect the material limits on life of a poor boy growing up in post-war Brooklyn, the singer virtually cries his every word:

I wanted to fly
She made me feel like I could
Held my hand now I let her take me
Blind as a child
All I saw was the way that she made me smile
She made me smile

Forty years later, the technique is the same – just as the song’s lyrics recall Diamond’s earliest work, skipping straight back over his often embarrassing attempts at rootless nostalgia (September Morn) and spiritual self-examination, so Rubin’s major musical achievement has been to listen to Diamond’s sixties work, and strip back the sound of his later excesses so as to arrive back in those younger days. The result is equally powerful.

It’s time for saying goodbye
Cos if I stay for too long
You’d get to know me too well
And find that something was wrong
The time is perfect to go
Before the curtain descends
Right now when both of us know
That everything’s got to end
If I don’t see you again

Only once in this key set of lyrics does the drama of the piece show itself in the written word, as he sings of the curtain descending, giving the strong impression of the two of them playing out some of movie or play, rather than a normal life or love story, as would have been suggested by there being two curtains which simply close. But this is a fleeting image, because after all, they’re not there yet – he’s saying, I’ll go now, before all of this happens. Let’s keep it simple, as just like before, it all has to end. But just let me see you again. And that, importantly, is where the tensely-coiled fervour of his voice has been leading: the realisation, both strong and uncomplicated, that just to see his love is to change everything in some profound way. He doesn’t say it quite like that, but only because he doesn’t need to. The words create the gaps between them, and his voice gives them their weight.

In his early days as a live performer, Diamond was given the advice that he should always leave his audience wanting more. It was advice he took only sometimes when making records. Moving on from writing and recording short, sharp, intelligent poppy numbers, Diamond began to make longer songs, with more mature sentiments than the likes of Shilo. But even some of his best songs from that period in the early seventies leave nothing unsaid, no verse left unsung, no metaphor left unexplored – for example the charming Canta Libre, from his excellent album Moods:

I got music running my head
Makes me feel like a young bird flying
Cross my mind and laying on my bed
Keeps me away from the thought of dying

Several decades later, Diamond seems more able to take that advice and leave things unplayed for as long as possible, so that when the moments of inspiration are finally put on display, they seem less manufactured and more revelatory for that. Four minutes into If I Don’t See You Again, he is still building the song, and it’s now that you realise he’s building something of real substance. The words don’t change that much, the story is as you would expect, but somehow you don’t get bored, and you just want to hear more of that ringing acoustic guitar riff, the increasingly majestic piano, and the frills provided by the organ and bass. And the singer feels your need, in fact he embraces it, and in the closest he gets to anger and conceit in the whole song, he finally lets go about his lost audience, his lost love.

And will you be the one to save me
Doesn’t look like the future is clearing
Need you to hear me playing a tune
When nobody hears me
I end up playing to the moon

So as singer and song demand your full attention while he plays out the end of the affair, Diamond repeats the verse about perfect times to depart and descending curtains, over the most urgent, rapidly-changing melody that the song employs, before settling back, for what seems to be for ever, into a happier, contented place, there to sing the song’s beginning again, complete with those longer gaps between lines, as if we had never been on the emotional ride he’s just taken us through. But instead, he gives us one last passionate flourish, he makes a subtle and sudden change to the by-now familiar melody, and begins to cry at us, just like he did all those years ago when he nearly broke down at the thought of his best friend, his imaginary friend:

You went and turned me around
Could be was something you said
I couldn’t make out the sound

And finally, having accepted that it was his love, not his own self, that made things better, made the difference, he uses that restrained but forceful shout one last time, to tell us how little it would all have meant, in the absence of that last sighting of the object of his song:

I didn’t care what it meant
If I don’t see you again
If I don’t see you again
If I don’t see you again

With no lingering instrumental coda, no chance for the band to round it all up in what would probably be a watering down of Diamond’s flames, the last word and the last chord are allowed to ring out and off in unison, leaving us with a last couple of lines which contain, musically and emotionally, all of the essence of the previous seven minutes. Concise and yet prolonged, restrained and yet passionate, this song is one of a kind – written and performed by a musical giant.

Bruce Springsteen - Stolen Car

2008-08-30T21:40:00.002Z

The most startling thing about the song Stolen Car is the sheer bleakness of the place Bruce Springsteen is coming from. Springsteen is a story-teller, capable of drawing on his own experiences and emotional depths to create compelling fictional characters and events. But the power of Stolen Car is so great that you’re forced to ask, if Springsteen never lived through the desperation and loss described in this song, how did he make it seem so real? Where in his mind did it all come from?

The way Springsteen described his songwriting developing in the second half of the seventies is half legend and half history. It’s history because, as he often tells us, he did move away from the romantic triumphalism of his earlier work. Perhaps realising that the convoluted street stories and their idealised characters were fun for a while but not sustainable, and seeing that when the young dreamer hops in his car with his girl and gets out of that one-horse town, what follows isn’t always that much better, Springsteen started to write about real people, leading normal lives, engaging in everyday struggles. The song often given as early and important evidence of this shift is Factory, from the depressing Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), in which he combined concise, powerful lyrics with a stately, respectful accompaniment that was ideally suited to the metronomic nature of his character’s life’s routine:

Early in the morning factory whistle blows
Man rises from bed and puts on his clothes
Man takes his lunch, walks out in the morning light
The work, the working, just the working life

But this is far from being the whole story. For all its blue collar regularity and poor person’s economics, the Darkness album contains plenty of the hopeful, daring self-improver exemplified by Born to Run, Thunder Road and the rest. Following a wonderfully clear (if simplified) exposition of a normal person’s priorities, when faced with the double-whammy of poverty and oppression, the narrator of Darkness’s opening fanfare, Badlands, makes clear the hope that remains in his heart, and his desire to make it real:

Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And the king ain’t satisfied ‘til he rules everything
I wanna go out tonight
I wanna find out what I got

So Springsteen shouldn’t kid us that the struggles of his characters from the late seventies onwards were the struggles of that idealised everyman. The point about the man in Factory, the central certainty which lends him both his tragedy and his dignity, is that he doesn’t want to go out tonight to find out what he’s got – or at any rate, he doesn’t want to do it enough actually to make him do it. To do so would be to sacrifice whatever it is that he has built up, gradually, day by day – some measure of security, maybe a family, some sense of local stability, where any fragility comes from events beyond his control. In short, this man can’t afford to take risks.

That sounds pretty depressing, and so it is little surprise that Springsteen’s songs from that point on didn’t simply follow that pattern. From Darkness up to the present time, most of his songs contain a rich blend of reality, hope, action and both pent-up and released emotion. But not all of them. A world away from the ambition of Badlands, and a hundred times more depressing than any thought Factory can evoke, lies the grim world of Stolen Car.

The song Stolen Car is to be found buried in the second half of the album The River (1980). This album is Springsteen’s White Album in one (and only one) sense: it is sometimes asked, why didn’t he make it a really good single album, rather than a pretty good double? Conventional wisdom has it that either he couldn’t decide which songs to leave off (despite having left off several songs of substantially better quality than some that made the cut), or that the concept of the album required a particular length and order. The truth of either of these justifications suggests to me that he needed better advice at the time, but I like to think that there was another reason. The songs recorded for that album generally seem either to set the scene, or to describe the better life or world that the narrator or characters strove for. Very few of the songs do both.

Right from the outset, you know that Stolen Car is really moving around in the deepest wells of despair and hopelessness. Set significantly quieter than the songs around it, the song starts with a persistent (though lacking the urgency to be described as “insistent”) guitar which oscillates between two chords for the entirety of the song. On first listen, the tension created by this tightly coiled rhythm part threatens that at any moment it could unwind into that third chord of rock and roll convention – but it never does. To do so would bow not just to normality, a sense of the average, but to accede to the lightening of the mood which the fifth chord brings, after a few bars of the first and fourth. That isn’t Springsteen’s intention, and the two chords provide a sullen backing all the way.

Colour, such as it is, comes from Roy Bittan’s tinkling piano – used to great effect across the album, in a way that he never quite managed subsequently. The hesitating, descending nuances of Bittan’s playing on Stolen Car bring together the love inherent in the tale to come with the lack of any real hope of salvation: in short, they provide Springsteen with instrumental poignancy.

Next up comes the E Street Band’s ultimate instrument: Springsteen’s voice, this time drenched in echo and not letting the band slow him down as he tells his story. He starts by touching on hope – but hope as described as a thing of a past, making it clear that the hope has gone. In fact by the terminal angst in his voice, you get the sense that in his view, hope had existed where none had the right to:

I met a little girl and I settled down
In a little house on the edge of town
We got married and swore we’d never part
And little by little we drifted from each other’s hearts

This seems to be a verse, but there’s no chorus or refrain, just yet. Springsteen’s voice picks up the tempo fractionally, as if he is afraid to pause in the telling and not have the strength to continue. He gets a bit louder too. But the genius of this song’s structure is that the narrator skips a bit of his own history. He doesn’t tell us what happened, at least for the moment. He skips straight to his own bleak assessment of why it went wrong. More accurately, he tells us what his initial assessment was, then dismisses it in favour of something bigger, more portentous, and left undefined:

At first I thought it was just restlessness
That would fade as time went by as our love grew deep
In the end it was something more I guess
That tore us apart and made us weep

What happened, and why it happened, are so far left unexplained. One thing, and one thing only, is for sure: whatever happened was terrible.

What this doom-laden story lacks is a context, a sense of physical surroundings, and that is exactly what the chorus now provides. Springsteen switches to the present tense, and sings:

I’m driving a stolen car
Down on Eldrich Avenue

The literal intention seems to be that this is a description of what his narrator is doing now, as he looks back at the past. But the overwhelming feeling is that this is no mere drive down memory lane - driving stolen cars is also his past, and possibly what brought him and his lover/wife to their sad end. This suggestion is enhanced by the accompaniment to the chorus, as the lone voice of the verses is joined by church-like background vocals, singing simple “aahs”, moving gradually downwards, giving the motoring lyrics a funereal quality. Against the wave of finality they create, the narrator’s subsequent attempt at defiance comes across more as admission of the futility of his vague rebelliousness:

Each night I wait to get caught
But I never do

Whether he waits out of a desire to get caught, or simply the expectation that that is what must happen, is not clear. What is certainly clear is the message of muted thunder of the drums which enter around this point, sending a character to their musical death of ever an instrument could do so.

Accepting those drums as the inevitable partner to the rest of his story, and even adding a plucked bass to add weight to it, Springsteen gets on with telling the tale. He doesn’t bother to go back and fill in the gaps – instead, he remains in the present, in retrospective mode, but switches perspective – or shares it:

I asked if she remembered the letters I wrote
When our love was young and bold
She said last night she read those letters
And they made her feel one hundred years old

Whatever happened to the love between the two of them, it doesn’t seem like either of them died. Actually, Springsteen makes seem natural what is in reality an unusual narrative device: rather than using a sole voice to describe what happened between two people in the past, he uses both people’s voices to describe what happened to something – a feeling, an emotion – which seems too huge to personalise. In particular, the last two lines of that verse seem to say everything and nothing. Everything, because the despair with which he sings them, and the respect commanded by the use of the ancient age suggested at, suggest something so immense as to be transcend adequate description (what did she mean?). Nothing, because what she actually says is to commonplace as to be verging on funny – we all look back at the evidence (or just memories) of our young, bold love, and say they make us feel old. But then, the genius of Springsteen is to convince us that what has happened to these two tragic characters is more, much more, than that commonplace process of ageing, and gathering wisdom as we go, that the rest of us are forced to endure. Helped by Bittan’s piano, which reflects the growing elegance of the tale by spreading his chords out, adding depth to the music, he sews that seed of doubt in our minds – is he singing about me, or is he creating a back-story between the lines that surpasses anything I have ever experienced, in terms of its tragedy and implications?

There’s more, of course. Defying expectation (especially set against the standard structure of the album’s more prosaic songs), Springsteen introduces not one, but two new choruses – retaining the musical shape of the first one, keeping the ethereal choral backing, but using every line of music to add flesh to the story (although not at the expense of the song’s mystery):

I’m driving a stolen car
On a pitch-black night
And I’m telling myself
Gonna be alright

Again, there’s that uncertainty regarding whether this is a memory, or a description of what the narrator is doing as he plunges the darkest depths of memory. He seems temporarily optimistic, although he presents no reason for this momentary hope, but he immediately dismisses it with his very next word, and reinforces his hopelessness with the last lyrics of the song:

But I ride by night
And I travel in fear
That into this darkness
I will disappear

Finally, you feel able to make a judgement about the tense of the choruses: as the vocals vanish suddenly from whence they have come, echoing the sentiment they last expressed, you feel sure that the stolen cars, night riding and fear of the choruses are a part of the narrator’s sense of now, not part of the story he is telling in the verses. This knowledge takes away that growing sense of context and physical space that the choruses had gradually given the verses, leaving them ever more elusive and unexplained. More importantly, it tells you that whatever happened in the past, in those verses, never went away, never eased, and has led Springsteen to consider, even predict, his own demise, even as he remembers.

So it is inevitable that after these final words, the persistent hollow drums (different from the persistent guitars only in that one wanted to make sure a story was told, while the other wants to ensure the story ends, in our heads, with the one irrevocable conclusion we all know) are joined by an organ solo, as beautiful in its conception as it is devastating in its delivery. Emerging at first through what sounds like a dense thicket of guitar, bass, piano and drums, Danny Federici’s solo, as church-like as those earlier vocals, meanders thoughtfully around Springsteen’s earlier melody, before emerging to take centre-stage by rejecting the rhythm set by the other instruments, and commanding them to follow in its wake, as the music fades to a quiet sense of nothing.

If you have never heard Stolen Car before, or if you have heard it without ever really listening to it, put it on, and after it has finished, press stop. Whatever follows this exquisite song of yearning hopelessness and unspoken tragedy is bound to be mundane, and it is bound to ruin what came before. Sit in silence for a few minutes, and let all that has been sung, and all that has been left to your own imagination, sink in. Like I said before, this is no ordinary story of every day life. This song is one of a kind.

One bad gig, several good ones, and the passing of a musical magician

2008-06-07T10:31:00.005Z

A couple of months back I went to a really rubbish gig. I’m not blaming the band entirely – it was a Monday night, I’d had one of those days at work, and I was standing at the Borderline on my own on an unseasonably hot day. I don’t suppose I was up for it. But nonetheless, the music wasn’t that good either.

Sirens of the Ditch, the first solo album by Jason Isbell since he left the Drive By Truckers, is a very good piece of work. He has that southern rock feel off-pat, but he combines it with some top quality singing and a songwriting style which demonstrates how leaving a multi-talented band to branch out on your own, to find a more individual sense of your art, can be a worthwhile risk. And at the Borderline, some of those elements were there – he sang well and his songs were for the most part good (although his tribute to the Band’s deceased legends, Danko/Manuel, seemed hideously inappropriate; delivering personal tributes is all very well, but there has to be some link to the object, otherwise the gesture is an empty one – like opening a copy of the Dandy and reading that it’s a tribute to Franz Kafka). But he really needs to get a new band – or at least a new guitar player. While Isbell himself played some very good solos, including some brave slide work, the other guitarist played the most hackneyed, un-nuanced, screamy guitar parts…it was as if he had just left home and was making the most of finally being allowed to turn his amp up and rock out, man. He was out of place.

The other problem was that it was far too much like being in a poor pastiche of a Southern-style hoe-down. I don’t mean to stereotype the Deep South in any way. But Isbell and his entourage seemed intent on doing just that, as he swigged from a bottle of Jack Daniels before passing it round to band members, some of whom visibly didn’t want it but felt obliged to take a manly swig. Guys, it costs a tenner in Asda, it’s not that cool. Worse, every time Isbell took a swig, various members of the audience indulged in really fake woops and hollers – I don’t know if these were genuine Southerners, impressed by Isbell showing the foreigners what life in Alabama is really like, or if they were Londoners engaging in a bit of escapism and make-belief after a day stuck in an office. Either way, it pissed me off.

Maybe I had just become a grumpy old man, and the fact that I didn’t enjoy myself was absolutely nothing to do with this gig? Not to be put off, I embarked upon a series of shows which I had higher hopes for – and they didn’t let me down. This spring I have witnessed some of the best live performances I have ever seen.

A couple of weeks after the Borderline pantomime, a friend and I entered a very strange venue, the Soho Revue Bar, to witness what was a lot like a coming out party for Lizz Wright. With poles running from floor to ceiling giving a hint as to the venue’s less savoury former use, and a dark red and blue burlesque feeling running around the cushioned seats and eerily lit bar, there was an odd anticipatory atmosphere before Wright hit the stage, earlier than scheduled. I have referred in passing to her latest album, The Orchard, elsewhere on this website, and for the most part the gig was a run-through of that album – though with the shuffle option selected.

Wright is a humble and unassuming performer – what first seemed to be her clasping herself in a classic pose of self-pity and internal angst was actually her indicating to her back-stage guy that she was cold and wanted more clothes. Perhaps inevitably, what he gave her was a loose, flowing wrap which your mum wouldn’t deem adequate to warm up a mouse, but it was in keeping with her musical style. Standing still in the middle of the stage, Wright used her deep, soulful vocals from her toes upwards, swaying only a bit as her music brought song after song to a culmination, a sense of life few performers can match based only on sheer tone.

She did dip back into her previous records, most notably with her cover of Neil Young’s Old Man. Singing it as if she had written it, indeed as if the old man in question was someone she had known her whole life (and in the subjective world of interpreting a song to suit your own needs and predilections, who is to say she hadn’t?), she brought the talented band and the eager audience up a level, closer to where she had been since the start, and after that things really got going. Elegant, stately, passionate – I would have gone to see her night after night if I could have done.

Another singer-songwriter I have been obsessively listening to this year, and another who adds jazzy inflections to a style of music that is otherwise quite different, is Jill Barber. In an underground cellar of a place, I witnessed a simple but striking performance: just Barber and her guitar, combining new songs and a few from For All Time, interspersed with endearing stories which put the songs in a nice context. My thoughts on Jill Barber have been recorded elsewhere, but the main point from a persona perspective is that I had just got off a long, delayed train journey, I was very hot and bothered, but Jill Barber did what Jason Isbell couldn’t – her songs blew my troubles away. That evening I was also reminded how well your friends tend to know you. When Barber asked for requests and I immediately shouted out a song name (I thought other people would too, but they didn’t…), she not only played the song, but asked my name and thanked me after playing it. When afterwards I commented on how embarrassing it had been, the friend I was with just said “You loved it”.

Well, love it I may have done, but not half as much as I loved Alison Krauss, Robert Plant and what they created between them at Wembley Arena a few weeks later. Taking their under-stated masterpiece, Raising Sand, on tour, their live set offers so much more – menacing but acoustic-based Led Zeppelin covers, soft country/bluegrass laments, spicy Cajun blues-rock, and simply gorgeous harmonies.

Robert Plant really showed his subtle side at Wembley, blending well with Alison Krauss and not dominating proceedings. In fact, for all of Plants world-weary and experienced touches, it was Krauss who really shone. She is a revelation - such a beautiful voice. The best moment for me was her version of Down to the River and Pray, famous now for its appearance on the Oh Brother, Where Art thou? Soundtrack. The song was performed a cappella, with Krauss in the spotlight singing the first section on her own, with Plant, Buddy Miller and the Stuart Duncan giving it three part harmony backing vocals, around a second mic. Incredible stuff. And who could fail to be entranced by Alison Krauss? There was an odd incongruousness, seeing this ‘country chick’ with green dress (billowing in the air conditioning like a warped version of Mary in Thunder Road) and cowboy boots in the middle of a massive dingy London garage, otherwise known as Wembley Arena. But when she sang, it all made sense.

There were solid versions of most of the songs from the album, with Killing the Blues being a personal highlight for me (actually it wasn’t one of the better songs on the night, and my main feeling when they started it was less elation and more a strange sense of relief that I wasn’t going to miss out). As for the Zeppelin covers – such as When the Levee Breaks, and the Battle of Evermore, the blend between reinvention and respect for rock classics was just right. Evermore featured faithful mandolin playing and lively, edge-of-seat harmonies. The long intro to When the Levee Breaks was an aggressive duet between the violins of Krauss and Duncan, followed by long, drawn-out vocals from Plant and Krauss.

It is also worth mentioning the strange cult of T-Bone Burnett. The man is clearly a great producer – the sound he created on Raising Sand is captivatingly unique (actually, until this album, my favourite example of his work was the Wallflowers’ second album, Bringing Down the Horse, rather than the Rolling Thunder guitar and the Oh Brother soundtrack for which he is more famous). The man obviously has a lot of style, and knows his music history. But the camera operators, for the big screens, kept focusing on him as he strummed his rhythm guitar, while ignoring Buddy Miller's endless stream of licks, solos and fills. Also Burnett’s’ two-song set was in your face, kind of cool, but a bit out of place. Buddy Miller and Stuart Duncan were definitely the unsung heroes of this show.

Musically speaking, Plant/Krauss show hasn’t been topped this year, for me anyway. But when you bring together the music, the performance, the atmosphere and the sheer exhilaration that only live music can provide, Bruce Springsteen is the best live performer by, oh I would say about a hundred thousand miles.

My ninth Springsteen show was definitely more of a party than a concert. People I know who sat in the stands (for this took place at a football ground, the strange huge squat stadium that Arsenal’s Emirates) tell me that it was a very good show. Certainly the setlist was pretty interesting, for a Springsteen show, with rarities like Point Blank getting an airing. For my old friend, my new friend and me, it was more an excuse to sing, shout, dance, drink some beer, and relish the general wonder of a Bruce Springsteen show. Right from the outset, he was off the stage and into the crowd, and we lapped it up – one of Springsteen’s talents is that however indifferent you are to one of his songs, in a concert he will make you love it and appreciate it in new ways; for those few minutes at least. So it was with 10th Avenue Freeze-out for me, which normally I dismiss as being a nice slice of horn and pop, but forgettable amidst the rockers, lefty ballads and epic tales of life turned every which way.

Amidst the reveling, it wasn’t until the very end of the show that the tragic and poignant background to this tour hit home. As organist Charles Giordano took his applause, we were reminded that he was only present because of the illness and recent death of Danny Federici, an original member of the E Street Band. Since the early 1970s, Danny had been adding his shimmering and swirling organ to Springsteen’s songs – lending them the notes between the notes, the solos which reminded us exactly which boardwalk Springsteen and his band had come from, and the fills which made sure that the music sounded organic and fresh, never hackneyed and plonky (especially as rhythm piano and straight-beat drums became ever more prominent on Springsteen’s records).

Back in 2003, I had a great time attending Springsteen shows in London, Dublin and New Jersey, but for the most part the enjoyment was in the occasion – getting to the second row in Dublin, seeing him in his home state in the US. Musically, the better shows I have seen have been the indoor ones – Wembley Arena with the E Street Band, solo at the Albert Hall, and the Seeger Sessions Band hootenannies in 2006. But Danny Federici’s solos always shone through the most musically mundane of shows – while Springsteen, van Zandt and co focused on entertainment. Federici sat back and let his fingers do the talking. I remember his solo lifting You’re Missing to another level, highlighting the actual subject of the song. I remember his playing on My City of Ruins making me think of everything I have ever known to have gone bad, and instilling me with a sense of hope at the same time.

Danny, maybe others will see your like again; I don’t know. For me, you were a true magician, one of those one-off musicians whose inventiveness and soul made me think and made me dream. Perhaps most of all, I know that as long as I remember that music like yours is possible, I will never abandon going to gigs, however hot and dingy and unpleasant it might sometimes seem, because I know that unexpected pleasures and emotional highs may always be in store. Given this spring’s experiences, for this I can only offer you thanks. Rest in peace.

Jill Barber - For All Time

2008-05-10T14:20:00.004Z

A few weeks ago, I got off the train at the wrong stop. Instead of Clapham Junction, which professes to be Britain’s busiest railway station, I got off at Queenstown Road, which does not. Actually, I think I realised I was getting off at the wrong stop as I did so, but my pride wouldn’t let me look so foolish as to turn away from the open doors and sit down again. So off I got. At this point I had a choice, and instead of waiting in a deserted railway station for another train, I decided the weather was fine and the iPod was ready and waiting. I put the thing on shuffle and selected a playlist I had put together recently.

First up was Justin Rutledge, still sounding as good as he was when I reviewed him for this very website. Next, a cheerful piano intro prefaced a nice, friendly, relaxed voice: “You’re a hard act to follow, heaven knows”. This was quite a coincidence. Justin Rutledge is, of course, a hard act to follow. But I was reminded that after I had reviewed his second album, The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park, I received an email from an associate of his, telling me that if I liked Justin, I’d like Jill Barber too. She sent me a CD – I suspect a review was hoped for in return, in which case I can only apologise for the delay. It was Jill Barber’s song Don’t Go Easy which I heard as I walked along the main road.

Then, last week, in a tiny carpeted living room underneath a London pub, a friend and I watched and listened to Jill Barber as she performed songs new and old, using only her own voice and her own guitar. Between songs, she told us short tales which highlighted the warm and funny personality which gave rise to her songs. The strange coincidence of the train fiasco, and the gorgeous little show, inspired me to revisit the album I had been sent.

For All Time, the record in question, has that rare quality – it employs a huge range of musical genres without compromising either the sound or what the artist is trying to achieve. Don’t Go Easy is actually the second song on the album; the opening number is Just For Now. Part sultry, with a mysterious vocal quality, and part homely, with a comforting feeling, the song reminds you of the moment after you wake up on a sunny Sunday – it’s slow, it’s languorous. Don’t Go Easy is a cup of coffee – it springs you awake and you’re ready to challenge yourself and face the world:

‘Cause before too long
This path I tread
Will be too overgrown for followin'

And will the road ahead
Be much further on
From the one I've been long travellin'

There is also the first hint of Jill Barber’s jazz influences, with an interesting, original guitar solo, and jazz will come and go throughout the rest of the album. Next up is When I’m Making Love to You, where Barber sings with a voice which is at once unadorned and yet rich with suggestion – more than a hint of sensuousness, a velvety feel which doesn’t overwhelm, and a maturity far beyond her years. This is bar-room jazz, with an ambling piano drenched in 7th notes and a jaunty clarinet providing the backdrop. The tempo changes, with pauses and drawn-out notes giving way to a more frantic pace when the narrator remember most vividly, not the act of making love, but the way it made her feel.

The songs on For All Time aren’t all about romantic relationships. Ashes to Ashes is a poignant reflection on, and a tribute to, Barber’s deceased Grandmother. Wistful piano and vocal, with some nice percussive acoustic guitar playing, steer the song away from the song’s bleak title, towards its more thoughtful sentiments: “We let go, because we must”.

But Jill Barber freely accepts that most of her songs are about love affairs, and For All Time revolves around its title track. There’s more of her trademark guitar style, which can verge on a sort of softly-spoken harshness. The beautifully bendy and windy guitar solos provide some counterpoint to that, but it is Barber’s brittle voice which dominates proceedings. It’s that maturity again, suggesting a life lived to the full, with experiences packed in. But there’s a simplicity too, coming out of Barber’s youth; something which isn’t naïveté, but which seems determined to produce music that we can all relate to. The lyric “I thought we’d be lovers for all time” is an example of this, combining an everyday message of lost love with an elegant sense of phraseology that most people can only hope to achieve.

She doesn’t have all of the answers though. Legacy is the song on this record which grabs you most immediately. The narrative device it female to female, as Barber sings to some mysterious Rebecca, with a rising emphasis on the second syllable of the latter’s name, putting all of the feeling she can into that vocal moment. The song has a real yearning quality, a sense of fond tragedy (“burning like an old spotlight”), which seems to suggest that although she is asking questions of Rebecca, does it get lonely, do you ever come out to play, it really seems that the loneliness and uncertainty are switching constantly and fluidly between the two protagonists. This song also represents Barber’s biggest foray away from a jazzy backing and into something resembling a stately and considered Nashville sound, featuring a slide part which is never allowed to dominate. Barber is never so confident as she is in this song, letting the harmonies get so close to her own melody that they almost touch her, daring her to send them away.

Just as Barber never lets her band get out of control, she never seems to let her lyrical expressions run wild, either. This is meant as a compliment. Goodnight Sweetheart is a perfectly formed story of a break-up. Stoical and realistic, she uses that common utterance, “good night”, as a metaphor for the finality of the situation, and this gives the story an air of peace. The music employed reflects this as well, featuring a harmonica break which eases gradually from down-home one-note lament to a broader, chordal farewell. Only the occasional vocal break near the end betrays her genuine sense of anguish, but generally Barber is too considered for that, as life goes on:

I think we both know that you’ve made up your mind
So please say the words, don’t try to be kind

However, the truth might be a bit simpler than this. It could be that the love whose end is told in Goodnight Sweetheart was simply not the real thing. Immediately after that song, The Knot provides a much more emotional response to such matters. The mention of everlasting love appears to act as a trigger for her, and when she compares love to a knot that will never be undone, that last word is released along with all of her pent-up emotions, and a genuinely romantic country sound is unleashed at the same time.

After such an extreme, For All Time ends with a simply plucked and sung final word on love. The verdict is that nothing is certain, and none of us know what’s ahead, least of all those closest to the answers. We can only begin to guess at what’s going on. As Jill Barber puts it, “I can outline my feelings but I can’t fill them in”. When the classical string instruments enter, at first elegant and then broken and emphatic, they reflect what’s being said – matters of love are matters of spiritual beauty, but they can also be extreme, difficult and interrupted. In terms of the music, this song is the perfect end for this album, giving it a complete feel – you don’t want less, but you’re happy with what you’ve had (for now). But the song also makes clear that there is more to come from this story-teller. She’s just finished making a new album, and I can’t wait to hear it.

Killing the Blues

2008-04-13T21:11:00.003Z

Last Wednesday, I travelled a long way for a very short meeting. It’s an occasional and necessary part of my job, so I don’t mind, but it does present me with some interesting choices about how to kill the time during interminable train journeys. On this occasion, I had finished my book on the outward trip, and as soon as I sat down in a seat for the return, I realised my mistake. The carriage was awash with, in fact totally overcome by, the last hurrah of a school trip. To put it more simply, it was full of noisy sixth-formers from a posh girls’ school. Other than one sitting quite close to me, who was arguing about the Middle East with a member of the school’s staff, they were mainly shouting at each other. “Emily, which house are you in?” “Ellis!” “Ugh!”

In time, the guy who was supposed to be supervising them tired of the Middle East peace process and opted to blot out the roar with his iPod. I chose to do the same. First up, an initial listen to Lizz Wright’s The Orchard – as it turns out, a gem of an album which hit me immediately. But more of that another time. All I will say about that album for now is that it contains only 13 songs, rather than the 50-odd that were needed to last me the journey. So as the last chords of a really very good cover of the Band’s It Makes No Difference faded into nothingness, I selected another recent release to help me with my continued cocooning process – Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

This is a lovely album. It has a strange subdued quality, unrelated to the objective dynamics of its songs, which change, as you would expect, in keeping with their moods. But even the loudest, most raucous numbers have a controlled and considered quality. I think this is partly a result of the talent of the musicians – crack performers all – but also a deliberate ploy by the producer, T-Bone Burnett, to emphasise the beauty of the two singers’ voices. On the one hand, we have Robert Plant – the blues-rock screamer of thirty years ago, re-emerging on this record as a force for wise, lived-in blues, the passing of the years dampening the volume but not the inherent power of what he sings. And across the mic from him, we have Alison Krauss, possessor of a lovely country-styled voice – one which is simultaneously a stereotypically ‘good country voice’, and a slightly edgy and versatile instrument.

As with every time I listen to this album, I find it difficult not to become fixated on the second track. This is something of a shame, as there are many fine songs beyond the opening brace. Their take on Gene Clark’s Polly is a faithful and yet fresh interpretation. Please Read the Letter builds and builds but never makes you think that Plant has done all this before. And Townes van Zandt would, I like to think, approve whole-heartedly of the haunting menace of their version of his Nothin’. But by the time I listen to any of those songs, I’ve listened to Killing the Blues at least twice.

Raising Sand generally defies classification, but despite its genre-defying title, Killing the Blues is a blues song. It fits all of the requirements: it is about love; it uses non-human objects and events as metaphors; and it avoids really complicated double-meaning. The chords aren’t too complicated – as in all the best blues. And the instrumentation augments and decorates the emotion delivered through the vocals.

The song opens with gentle strummed guitar and a simple drum rhythm; the first real colour comes from a pedal steel, adding a country touch to proceedings. When Plant and Krauss enter, they enter together, as they do in all of the album’s best songs. Each of them has a chance to shine on their own, with the other singing backup, echo, harmony or whatever. But when they sing together, they harmonise so neatly that you couldn’t say which of them has the melody and which is picking out the counterpointing notes. And because the song was written by one person, Roly Salley, and sung from that perspective, Plant and Krauss meld their voices and sing, together, as that lone narrator. The first line brings in that universal provider of metaphors for love – nature:

Leaves were falling, just like embers
In colors red and gold they set us on fire

So there’s the first less-than-literal lyric – we’re talking about leaves, not embers, it’s just that the leaves are like embers. But nonetheless, their colours are so stark that they set us on fire.

Burning just like a moonbeam in our eyes

Imagery within imagery, then, and you can hardly fail to notice it, because although the band weaves in and out, shifting and stopping and moving, it never rises above a whispered concurrence with the lines of the singers. So you hear every word, and relish the tone which delivers them.

By the time the second verse arrives, it’s confession time:

Now I am guilty of something
I hope you never do

It isn’t entirely clear what the narrator is guilty of, but the point is that there is a story behind the naturalist’s world-view – essential for a decent blues song. The refrain, although phrased as a description of a deed done, isn’t, I wouldn’t have thought, the confession. It’s more a culmination, a release from the guilt, than the initial cause of it:

Somebody said they saw me
Swinging the world by the tail
Bouncing over a white cloud
Killing the blues

His crime isn’t that he killed the blues; his crime was something else, and by killing the blues, he acquitted himself, or at any rate wiped it from his mind. By the last verse all we’re left with is a thoughtful lament, and a comment on some other conversation:

Now you ask me just to leave you
To go out on my own and get what I need to

That last line comes as a surprise, and I had to hear it a few times before I really believed in its existence. Amidst all this pensive, loving, regretful, tenderness, the narrator employs a classic old-school blues device – “get what I need to”. I need to go away from you and get what I need, and it’s okay, because you suggested I go! A bit clichéd, a good deal conflicted, and the clinching moment in viewing this song as a real piece of blues.

So don’t take the economy of the guitar break, the gentle murmur of the acoustic guitar, or the paced beauty of the vocals as signs that this is anything other than a down-home blues song. It’s dressed up in glad-rags, but the history, the tragedy, and the menace of the blues are in there, when you begin to disrobe this song. Enjoy it – but check out the rest of the album too.

Chris and Thomas – Land of Sea

2007-05-07T12:33:00.001Z

The sleeve of Chris and Thomas’ new album Land of Sea folds out to reveal one of those textbook American desert scenes: rocks in the foreground, an arid panoramic stretch of ground littered with dry plants, and round bolderish mountains in the background, not so much looming over the flat land as providing sudden relief from it. The intention is, presumably, to show that the music they’ve made is Americana, acoustic, country-ish – in short the kind of music you would associate with such landscapes. A cursory reading of the sleeve-notes would probably bolster this impression, with credits for pedal steel and banjo joined by photos of dobros, mandolins and acoustic guitars.

They do themselves an injustice. When you hear their music, the places that come into your mind are less specific because they are so varied. Their music creates impressions of Californian sunshine, New York coffee house, northern badlands, deep canyons, and yes, the desert too. But when they sing, it is difficult to get beyond a picture of the two of them sitting opposite each other separated by one microphone, trying their hardest to meld their voices into one musical entity.

The album opens with its title track, and a picked acoustic bass line which isn’t quite sure if it wants to be traipsing across the desert or funking it up in a jazz bar. A precisely played mandolin riff adds a brief hint of menace, before Chris and Thomas’s voices enter the fray – one high-pitched and yearning, the other baritone but wanting to be lower, the two travelling towards the centre of your listening space, there to merge. Their harmonies don’t offer different rhythms – they sing the same thing as each other – it just so happens they have different ranges. When one’s melody soars, both soar. When one ups the emotion after a dramatic pause, the other does too. But it feels good - they’re sleeping under the Milky Way they say, just like yesterday, and despite the mandolin continuing to add its edgy counterpoint, the song itself does more to relax you than make you want to dance.

Matters astronomical seem to be weighing heavy on their minds actually – in Bettin’ on the Moon, the moon seems to be some sort of comfort, a source of support, at a time of changing frontiers and smoking trains. This time the mandolin and bass are more jaunty and apparently determined to make us dance. But again the singers are so laid back you’d rather just listen. They seem equally capable of tight, close harmony, and distant treble-meets-bass union, and both work. In You’re the One I Want, the latter style is used, and this time the story is more straightforward: you’re the one I want, you’re the one I need, proclaims the chorus, and sure we’ve heard it all before, but as the chorus shifts to minor, Chris and Thomas bring their harmonies to a fleeting but deeply affecting jarring cadence, and when they come out of it, you realise that what you really heard was impossibly sweet. And what they’re doing is reassuring you, because their words tell a sad story: “It’s hard to make the morning last, hard to keep the dreams you had, hard to let the love inside your heart”. Their sonorous singing and just-right harmonies say, the words are true, but it’s the same for us all…don’t worry.

The picture of the two singers – who are also billed as being responsible for the guitars, mandolin, banjo, dobro and piano – singing away like Don and Phil is blurred somewhat by my lack of knowledge about them. I know one of them is American and the other is German; I know they have a pretty rubbish name for their duo, if we’re being honest; but I don’t know which is which in the photos, and I don’t know who is the main player of which instrument. The primary feature of another of the album’s stand-out tracks, Isn’t That So, is the rhythmic and wonderfully precise bluesy guitar line, and I cannot picture who’s playing it. In a way this adds to the enjoyment of the music, and makes it even easier to just listen to the thing – without trying to associate it with a particular place or put it in the context of specific musicians – “ooh, isn’t such-and-such a good guitarist? He played session work for [insert famous name here] you know”. This song is over far too quickly – I suspect that when performed live it’s a much longer showcase for whoever plays that guitar line.

The most visually evocative song on Land of Sea is Riversong, and, at the risk of harping on about this, it really doesn’t conjure up images of that barren desert. This song is about a river as representative of what you find, what you discover, what you learn, if you keep moving. “Where the river ends, where it starts, where it goes / How the river bends, what it sees, and what it knows / Singing through the land of a sea…”. We don’t know what the river holds until it has flowed on by, they say, and you know they’re not just talking about the river. Don’t let things, people, opportunities, slip through your grasp – take what they have to offer.

Well, Land of Sea has plenty to offer. The lyrics consist of short little tales and pieces of advice which, while not being earth-shattering in their wisdom, make you feel happy that that’s how the songs’ writers feel. It presents expert acoustic playing on a variety of instruments, measured just right and arranged to lend the tracks both subtlety and drama. The bass playing, in particular, stands out as perhaps the most melodic and central bass playing I have heard since Brendan O’Brien’s on Springsteen’s Devils and Dust. But most of all, Land of Sea offers fantastic singing. Both singers have sonorous, plaintive voices; their melodies are catchy and original; and their harmonies, while interesting and well-designed, have an easy and natural manner, and they don’t suffer from excessive structure. Overall the combination of jaggedness and repose is just right, and this is a fine album.

The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park – and other matters

2007-04-15T15:33:00.001Z

I haven’t posted anything here in quite a while, and while this is partly because I have been busy doing other things, it’s mainly because it has been a few months since I have been really grabbed, truly inspired, by new music.

I get through a lot of music – new albums, and old albums which are new to me – and perhaps the problem is that in the first half of 2006 I was spoiled rotten. Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions album; Alejandro Escovedo’s new album and two stunning live shows; a chance to digest Ryan Adams’s Jacksonville City Nights properly and then see him play several fascinating shows; discovering Guy Clark and Gram Parsons properly; and half a summer re-discovering Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. But more recently, I have found myself listening to music whose quality is clear but which is lacking in one important respect: a decent melody. I appreciate the mellow, country-blues picking genius of Rainer Ptacek, whose 17 Miracles: the Best of I bought not so long ago. As an hour long expression of heartfelt angst, I like Lucinda Williams’ new album, West. But that record seems to be a vehicle for Williams’ feelings and her ever-throatier vocals. And Glitter in the Gutter, the latest album by Jesse Malin, a favourite songwriter of mine, is mostly focused on his drive, his energy, and his love. All of these are good releases, but they’re not the records which make me smile, make me want to sing along, run across a grassy field, while I’m listening on my iPod walking along the Euston Road.

Things have got to the point where I’m ordering all manner of old music in order to find the melodies that make me want to listen again and again, stick on repeat, sing to myself all day. I’m currently awaiting recommended albums by Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland and Linda Ronstadt, following hot on the heels of Kris Kristofferson. But in the middle of all this over-analysis, I finally got round to listening to The Devil on a Bench in Stanley Park (2006), the second album by Canadian singer-songwriter Justin Rutledge.

Rutledge’s first album, No Never Alone (2004), offered glimpses of what was to come. His music offers a wonderful sense of space and time, giving you time to breathe between irresistible melody and catchy hook. The most notable track is The Suffering of Pepe O’Malley (Pt. III). The song starts off normally enough, a rudimentary drum kit, pedal steel and picked banjo ushering in a moderately sad story of a lost love – made interesting by the occasional half-surreal, half-mundane imagery - “My tears rolled by like taxis”. But as the song builds itself up, you realise that the cities its characters come from are important in themselves – for now, Barcelona and Florence. But after two verses and choruses, just when you might expect the song to build into some sort of climax, it drops down several notches, into an extended instrumental jam, with plaintive bar-room violin and pedal steel taking up the banjo’s tentative suggestions, and creating a song within a song. And just as you think that’s it – it’s a two part song and all we have to look forward to is a fade – Rutledge’s faint shout ushers his own lyrics back in, and the promise of those Latin cities is brushed aside by a repeated, chanted epitaph to a doomed individual:

She said
I wanna die in Vienna
Listening to the Moonlight Sonata

There is real power in the rest of the song, as the mantra-like message is backed up by a beautiful band performance behind it, almost making you forget that you don’t really know what on earth he is talking about.

What is most interesting is that with the sheer quality of his melody, and lyrics which give away less than you’d hope, Rutledge’s song has real power – it makes you think that whatever image you have in your head as a result of the song, really is Vienna. In this respect, he is like Lucinda Williams – using good quality roots music to paint a picture of
a place. But while Williams’ pictures make some sort of sense, in that she uses native music - Cajun music to represent New Orleans, country-blues for Mississippi – Rutledge’s images seem to be completely from his own head space. I have never been to Vienna, and now I associate it with mandolins, pedal steel and a lazily brushed 4/4 drum sound. This can’t be right, but I sing this song to myself in my head so much that I’ve made it true.

Yesterday I was idly browsing in YouTube, and while watching Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris and the rest giving In My Hour of Darkness the 13 part harmony it doesn’t really need, I was struck by the fact that Justin Rutledge wouldn’t fit in on that stage. If he were present, it would be as a butterfly drifting dreamily over the stage. Because his voice is of a different quality than those of his more famous counterparts. Put simply, his voice is nicer. Sure, he doesn’t make you feel like you’ve just been romantically spat at, as Steve Earle does, and he doesn’t seem the type to conjure harmonies which tread a fine line between sweetness and jarring pain, in the manner of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. But his voice is just so nice – so beautiful, so sad. The power of his singing comes from its sheer quality. When he wants to emphasise something, to make a powerful point from his intimate surroundings, he uses more subtle techniques. Sometimes he lets the music drift to near silence, and then lets the mandolin pick a brand new hook. Sometimes a tinny electric guitar enters the fray, clean as a whistle but within real menace in its message. And sometimes he just sings louder. All of these methods work, in fact they make perfect sense in the context of the subtlety of what his songs say. Every word, every stress, comes straight from him. Not put off by what the written lyrics look like, Rutledge doesn’t sing “Honey, this is war”. He sings “Honey, this is war”, stressing the first syllable instead of the last. We all know it’s war; the story, the battle, is about his attempt to convince one particular person. Everyone else is an onlooker.

Devil on a Bench brings together Rutledge’s voice, his natural sense of melody, his ability to tell us stories we don’t fully understand, and a bizarre capacity for inappropriate yet convincing place-shaping. If you come to this album having first listened to No Never Alone, you’ll find it hard to resist skipping straight to its sixth song – The Suffering of Pepe O’Malley (Pt. IV). The sequel to the previous instalment (don’t ask me what happened to parts I and II) doesn’t disappoint. It takes as read that we know about the desire to die in Vienna, and sets about telling us why the place is so inevitably tragic in his mind. The opening riff, repeated in what is presumably a conscious nod to the extended middle section of Part III, repeats itself over and over, but as we’ve already been warned about Vienna, this time he goes straight to the grim reality – the riff is electric, minor key and portentous; though still as infectious as you’d hope and expect. And starting with the word “see”, so as to make it clear what follows is an explanation, Rutledge’s first few lines tell us all we need to know:

See they’ve got armchairs in Vienna where a man would want to die
They’ve got Ludwig Van and garbage cans where the poets go to cry
In the boughs of some cathedral you can hear a lazy ghost
Scribble out his memoirs in a dusty petticoat

If you find this all a bit other-worldly, faux-historical, or just downright depressing, don’t worry. Elsewhere on the album, the constant theme of poignancy is presented more appetisingly, with personal stories, pleas and declarations back with tender pedal steel, gorgeous backing vocals (more like mini choirs at times) and thoughtfully and sparsely plucked stringed instruments. In Does it Make You Rain?, you won’t know whether to sing along with the singer or the guitars – that is until the second chorus, which follows a superbly executed verse: lines about stolen requiems are followed, with perfect timing, by that most down to earth of pop lyrics thrown into reverse: “Always on your mind”. But that isn’t quite it, as Rutledge ups the anguish and cries out “Cos honey, you’re on mine”. And this time, the chorus seems to bring it all together – the singer, his subject, the autumn leaves which act as a convenient poetic device in the chorus, and the listener.

That song is matched for stateliness and emotional impact by the very next song, Come Summertime. Starting hesitantly, with a story of a night-time horse ride, the song brings in more instruments, with a piano making a rare foray to the front of the sound, and Rutledge’s excitement grows as he gets to the song’s main declaration

You’ll be mine
Come summertime

It is difficult to explain the impact of these lines, but it is real. It is possibly the identity you want to feel with the narrator – we all have everyday experiences which we inject with our own special touches, whether real or imagined. The specifically named placed (“Marguerita Strand”) elevate the memory to an emotional event in Rutledge’s mind, and his vocal seems to reflect this. As ever, whichever instruments he chooses to employ don’t stand out for any moments of individual virtuosity or surprise. Instead, they use a measured grace and a traditional style to fill in some – though not all – of the gaps left between Rutledge’s perfectly-crafted lines.

So Devil on a Bench wends it way through other such moments, past the painful but necessary Pepe IV, towards its penultimate track – This Is War. The song starts by combining the measured and spare ensemble playing of the album’s earlier songs with the minor key menace of Pepe IV, with a swinging drum kit joined by low-range electric guitar. When Rutledge beings to sing, the end of each line is sung in little more than a sorrowful quaver, as a combination of ambivalence and fatalism drive the story onwards:

I’ve got Alaska on my mind
The mountain range a crooked spine
Frost bitten moon among the pines
Sometimes it snows
The rearview mirror telling lies
Of where we’ve been and how time flies
If you can’t look me in the eyes
Then so it goes
Take your dress from off the floor
I’m not the man I was before
Ain’t this what we’ve been fighting for?

But we’re then left suspended, the inevitable lyrical hook of the song not quite delivered, a soulful harmonica instead playing a brief interlude, and we have another verse of rural and personal apocalypse, punctuated by an increasingly fervent electric guitar and an ever more angry singer, before the killer line and emotional focal point of the album: “Honey, this is war”. For the rest, a fuzz-toned guitar and Rutledge’s repeated shouts of that line compete for emotional space if not real musical room (of which there is plenty). And although there is one more song on the album, which rounds it off with what is by now that fairly familiar mix of cheeriness and impending doom, I’m Gonna Die (One Sunny Day), it is with This Is War that Rutledge rounds off the stories and feelings that represent Devil on a Bench. The transposition of war into a personal tale is not a original idea, but after an execution so perfect, there is little more to be done.

My only remaining problem is that if I want to continue my search for more records combining original melodies and that Americana country sound, I am going to have to drag myself away from Justin Rutledge’s two albums. I don’t think I am have been permanently repelled from music which concentrates more on the energy, the instrumental brilliance, or some other quality unrelated to melody. But by adding his original and irresistible tunes to that modern country small band sound, Justin Rutledge has reminded me why the Beatles were quite so popular, and why the Jayhawks are better everyday listening than Uncle Tupelo. For that, and for improving my walks along the Euston Road, I am grateful.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

2006-08-14T20:06:00.001Z

The South, and its music, held a deep fascination for me long before I visited the place. Whether it was the thought of that mystical confluence of southern soul, country and blues, the sound of Steve Earle singing “agin” when he meant “again”, or the creepy and tragic dreams and memories of Jim White, the Jayhawks and the rest, I knew that one day I had to get there and find out for myself what it was all about. I had to discover and experience the relationship between the compelling and yet ugly side of the area’s politics, the wonderful music of the area, and the American Dream. But if anything really provided a concrete base for my desire to explore, an anchor around which to make the dream a reality, it was none of those things. It was Lucinda Williams’ musical journey through the details and dramas of the South - Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road was released in 1998, right in the middle of the second great stage of alternative country – just as Ryan Adams was tiring of Whiskeytown, Gillian Welch was discovering a peculiarly modern way to make mountain music, and as Alejandro Escovedo was half-way between the extremities of emotions of With These Hands and gearing up for the Americana strains of A Man Under the Influence. But if country music is rooted in the South, then it was the record that Lucinda Williams release in that period which made sure that however ‘alternative’ this group of songwriters were, they were still country singers.

The album starts with a warm guitar sound and unified feel, and if this is the South, then first impressions of the area are of a happy and a reassuring friend. Over the course of this song and a dozen others, this feeling will unravel…not to the extent that the South is unhappy or threatening, but using individual stories and what seem at first to be typical songwriter stories, Williams manages to draw out many of the tensions and complications inherent to taking a positive view of the South. But to begin with, she starts us off with the gut homely pull that she feels.

So that musically influential and virtually mythical region of North America – is it exciting? If this is the South, is it as enthralling as somewhere with so many stories to tell and songs to sing must be? For all of the impact its upbeat tempo can have, Right In Time unwinds slowly. For the first verse and chorus, Williams sits squarely on the fence which divides her famous gritty drawl from a sweeter, more plaintive (although no less genuine) tone more typical of, say Gillian Welch. So we start with uncertainty and with a sense of growing anticipation, especially as the lyrics become more direct – moving from “Not a day goes by…” to “Pierce the skin, and the blood runs through”. Resolution comes at the ed of the second verse, for as she sings the simple word “baby”, either by accident or design her voice breaks up, and the second chorus seems a world away from the first despite its musical similarity: the message is a positive one, you and me, when we move together, it feels good, it feels right; but the tone is angry and bitter, and along with the loss which is obviously implicit, there is a sense of abandonment and fatalism. And all of this comes from that voice and way it metamorphosises so precisely. Williams is virtually shouting, drenched with feeling surely inspired by the breadth of her own experience as well as the history of country blues singers – those men and women who sang about their day to day lives so as to express their woes. As the initial complacency in the listener breaks down as Williams’ experience and blues inspired vocal becomes more menacing and worldly, what of the story? It is of everyday things, but they’re turned off, tuned out of her consciousness, as something more fundamental must have its day.

It is interesting that on the way to creating an album which says so much about the South, Williams uses country and blues in such different ways. The ‘country’ comes from the feel of the music – the big picture that is developed of the landscapes and played-out scenes. Narrowly defined country music, with banjos and harsh harmonies, isn’t really present (if anything, the vocal reverse is true – the lead vocalist sounds harsh and the harmonies, by comparison, are sweet). Car Wheels is no less a country album for those facts, but musically speaking, it owes a much heavier debt to blues. Time and again, you can hear so many of the classic trademarks of the acoustic blues singers from much earlier in the century that Car Wheels closes out. Can’t Let Go serves as the record’s set-piece jam. Williams’ band live it up with infectious riffing and some irresistible slide work underneath her realisation that in this particular relationship she is out of place, everything good has gone, but she just cannot bring herself to leave:

Says he's sorry then he pulls me out
I got a big chain around my neck
And I'm broken down like a train wreck
Well it's over I know it but I can't let go

These lyrics resonate so strongly because they come surrounded by songs of the narrator’s life in the South, and it is difficult to get away from the feeling that she’s not just singing about a man. All around Lucinda Williams and her peers, there are sad people, people who have lost, people who are down on their luck, and these are the subjects for their songs. So does Can’t Let Go represent a feeling about the South – you’re flawed, your history is chequered, but here we are and I cannot quit you. Listen to the jamming and soling in this song, so typical of Southern music, and you begin to see one reason why songwriters might not want to base themselves anywhere else. This place is musical heaven.

The bluesy feel to the album is present even when the songs themselves aren’t what you call blues numbers. Another scene-setter, the album’s title track I in some senses quintessentially alt-country, as it manages to nail that genre’s trademark blend of electric and acoustic guitars and organic harmonies. But it also uses the sparse, gap-filled qualities of acoustic blues to good effect: as the music gives the song space to breathe, the lyrics take the time to fill us in on every detail, whether it is the smell of breakfast cooking or Loretta Lynn gracing the radio. And again, Williams takes her time in letting the song’s point and message reveal themselves, and however much the song rumbles along, the story takes its time, as the characters travel through a typical Southern scene: “Cotton fields stretching miles and miles”, Hank Williams now on the radio. Having driven the length of Mississippi, I can see how this song rings true – it’s a slow place, where people take the time to get know visitors, space out their days so as to enjoy whatever comes their way. And it is a place where for long stretches, the scenery remains unaltered, unbroken and the same. But don’t mistake it for a place where nothing happens. The stories and goings-on of Mississippi aren’t immediately obvious, like in the big cities, but they are there – this song is designed to hint at the stories to come, stories which, as Williams sings, “nobody knows”. They’re hidden in the faces of people living in the broken down shacks, they’re somewhere inside the minds of the people peering over engine parts, and only by experiencing those lives and meeting those people will their stories be known. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is some sort of guide book, pointing you in the right direction – in the case of this song, Jackson, Mississippi – but you have to do the rest.

However, Car Wheels as a guide book does give us some hints and tips – most of which use fantastic music to point you in the direction of places which, on the surface at least, seem less than remarkable. The heartbreaking Greenville is a real Southern track, and not just because of the presence of Emmylou Harris singing harmony vocals. In this song, Williams is more accepting of the fate of whichever relationship she is singing about – a fate which is, of course, an unhappy one. The deliberate placement of the chords gives the story the dignity it so deserves, and Harris matches her voice so well to Williams that it doesn’t seem like there are two women telling the story – it is more like one woman, with the harmonies representing the depth and layers of her sentiments. This song is arguably the emotional focal point of Williams’ entire recording career so far. And what is fascinating for me is that upon visiting Greenville, I found absolutely nothing of any interest. A small town which does not even claim to have a burial ground of a blues great within its borders (even though there are far more such sites than there were blues greats!), this is clearly the town which you have to absorb into your soul in order for the song to resonate completely. If Williams herself had never experienced the town in that way, the she could never make such a musically simple song sound so emotionally complex. And this complexity comes through in some of the lyrics:

Busted down doors and borrowed cash
Borrowed cash oh the borrowed cash
Go back to Greenville just go on back to Greenville
Looking for someone to save you
Looking for someone to rave about you
To rave about you oh to rave about you
Go back to Greenville just go on back to Greenville

Who is the subject here, who is searching for someone to rave about them? In the first instant, sure, it’s the man she is singing to. But with all of its busted down doors, with the shacks and industrial gaps, the South could easily be the subject here. If it wasn’t for music, for country and blues, who would rave about the place? Seen by so many as a slightly backwards region, lacking in a sense of progress and still holding – implicitly if not officially – some very old attitudes, the South relies on music to remind me people of its qualities, whether they be everyday life or deep tales. Such music humanises the South, and as country and blues have filtered into so many types of music, it is alternative country singers like Lucinda Williams who have taken primary responsibility, most recently, for carrying on this work.

Although Car Wheels was only Lucinda Williams’ fifth album she had been a recording artist for 20 years by the time it was released. Her first two albums, Ramblin’ (1978) and Happy Woman Blues (1980), were full-on blues albums. The former was made up of covers of blues classics – like Robert Johnson’s Ramblin’’ on My Mind, Memphis Minnie’s Me and My Chauffeur, and Hayes and Rhodes’ Satisfied Mind. It is clear from one listen that even then she had something special. She didn’t develop that abrasive vocal style deliberately so as to emphasise her feelings about the subjects of her song; this was her style as soon as she was a singer, and the way she fits herself to those old standards confirms this – there is no artifice here. Ramblin’ demonstrates her familiarity with blues and her right to call herself a blues singer – whatever else she was and would become – right from the outset.

By the time of Car Wheels, she was adding other elements to her blues, but it was always blues. So in the song Lake Charles, the theme is similar to that of Greenville. Taking a place in the South as a title and base, Williams explicitly describes the healing power of specific places in Louisiana and the act of travelling between them. As in several other songs, she depicts one place – in this case Lake Charles – as having more power than the others, but Baton Rouge, Lake Pontchartrain and Lafayette all play their part too. Unusually for her, the song is in the third person, and it is someone else’s soul which comes to rest in its spiritual home, Lake Charles. But the message is clear – these places have a healing power, and for their faults, should not be condemned. But the trick to convincing the listener here is to pull them into the physical places as well as the song. So drawing on her blues background, Williams adds a Cajun flavour to that blues base (bearing in mind this song is set in Louisiana and not Mississippi) and, producing a sound not unlike The Band’s Acadian Driftwood, gives the impression that the places she describes and the powers she attributes to them are inseparable.

Happy Woman Blues, the follow-up to Ramblin’, featured Williams’ own songs, though still in that full blues mode. A fascinating comparison can be drawn between that record and Car Wheels, because I Lost It, a stand-out track on both albums, was radically re-created somewhere between the two records. On the earlier record the song is fast and upbeat, so that although she has “lost it”, her plea for more time is hopeful and optimistic. By the time of the Car Wheels interpretation of the song, things have slowed down. The guitar chords ring out, and vaguely grungy picking runs underneath those chords, so that the picking is barely noticeable. This adds to the feeling of loss, and also uncertainty, as it is not clear what has been lost:

Money can't replace it
No memory can erase it
And I know I'm never gonna find
Another one to compare

Although the song goes on to reveal something of what is on the narrator’s mind (“I don’t want no enemies”, “I don’t want nothing if I have to fake it”), the precise nature of the loss is less clear than her realisation that the loss itself is real and permanent.

Just as the listener thinks that no more can be said about the South or about the life of Lucinda Williams herself, or that no more everyday real-life mysteries can be announced and then left unresolved, Car Wheels delivers a twin salute to the music she has in her soul. Joy serves mainly as a taster of Williams’ later work, replete with flamboyant riffing and jamming, overlaid with what is probably, finally, a really full use of her own vocal grit. She is practically rapping as she tells the object of her ire:

I don't want you anymore
Cause you took my joy
I don't want you anymore
You took my joy
You took my joy
I want it back
You took my joy
I want it back

But Williams doesn’t just settle for telling some guy how she feels. She makes it clear what she wants instead – and it is neither another lover or, as in so many other songs, the comfort of solitude (“I don’t need no one…”). No, in order to reclaim her joy, Williams will travel the South, visiting specific places, Slidell and West Memphis. Not the famous places – the real places. Across all this, she laces the search with electric blues, angry and old and new at once. This is country music in the sense of the area it talks of – and surely that is a real, more sustainable definition of country than something which relies on name-checking three musical instruments?

But in any case, having paid that final bluesy tribute to the South, Williams finishes Car Wheels with the country equivalent. Once more, she steers clear of the cliché towns and sings, this time, of Jackson. This is an old-fashioned country song, so over country guitar bends and steel guitar, the vocal style is plaintive and heartfelt, rather than bitter and resentful. But the message is precisely the same as in the previous song. She has lost her love, but once she gets to Jackson, she won’t miss him – well not much, anyway. And as it turns out, it’s not just Jackson – the same is true of Baton Rouge, Lafayette and Vicksburg. The South, finally here, is explicitly described as a magical cure for your ills, capable of taking away your tears, the reality of missing of people, your urges. Everything personal is ultimately submerged by the power of the South, finishing up with Jackson, right in the middle of Mississippi. For the travellers like me, that town, and most of the others Williams names, are mere staging posts between famous studios, big plantations and mighty rivers. But for Lucinda Williams, the South is essential to her well-being, and its central towns are central to her happiness.

Whatever happened to Cotton Mather?

2006-07-18T20:12:00.001Z

Whatever happened to Cotton Mather? They exploded into the middle of my final year at university, shattering the stranglehold the sixties held on my music collection and helping me shout my way through my last few weeks. Then they reintroduced themselves to me a couple of years later, displaying a sound which had progressed into something pretty dramatic. By the time I finally got to see them perform live in London (after a 9/11-induced fear of flying and consequent gig postponement), I thought this would be a long and positive relationship between the band and this listener. But it was not to be! The band have dropped out of sight, and if any readers from their home town of Austen, Texas, can help me out (where all known websites have failed) and provide me with news, then don’t delay. Meanwhile, what else to do but look back fondly?

Most Cotton Mather band biographies almost immediately name check Oasis. Of course this one is no exception, but I have mentioned the Manchester band merely to dismiss the commonly made comparisons. It’s said that Cotton Mather were following in Oasis’ footsteps. Well, in that they tried to make albums full of catchy and original melodies, combining light-touch pop with heavy guitar music, singing about love without being excessively romantic, I guess they can be compared to Oasis. But to be frank they were only ever really put alongside them because Noel Gallagher decided to promote Cotton Mather as his beneficiaries. The reality is that Cotton Mather line up alongside Oasis not as followers, but as fellow would-be inheritors of the Beatles’ legacy. And they out-do them.

Led by singer and songwriter Robert Harrison, Cotton Mather have made two great old-fashioned albums. By old-fashioned I don’t refer to the noise they produce, but to what they represent: forty-odd minutes, a dozen songs, two guitars a bass and drums, some superb songs, and bags of controlled emotion. This is how albums were supposed to be - the band use the Beatles’ musical concept and sensibilities while avoiding sounding like them. Interestingly, this is not a band with a culture, a history, in their sound. They don’t seem to represent a part of the world, a defined group of people, or even some vague woolly socio-political statement. It is all about the music. Some of it is sublime; some of it is barely listenable. But so long as the former dominates the latter – and it does – you’re going to enjoy these two albums.

Kontiki, released as the 1990s closed, typifies the lo-fi production values which many bands adopted in the wake of the ‘Britpop’ era of the 1990s. The less musical noises, like feedback and distortion, sound natural and organic, and at their best they complement the songs they feature in – Vegetable Row, Private Ruth. But the more straightforward sounding songs work better – not least because Harrison’s lyrics are difficult enough to fathom out without being disturbed by intrusive noise. Try this:

She picked me out of the millions
Thumbing an OED
Dressed me down to civilian
Cracked the code on the Rosetta Stone
Said the word for alone is "alone"
My before and after

The lyrics must be personal, because these are not everyday sentiments which anyone could have dreamed up. When you read them back to yourself, they gradually begin to make sense, but when you put the record on for the first time, all you know is that Harrison uses clever words to excellent effect. Attempts to grasp their meaning will prove futile.

Amidst all this nonsense (and one dreadful song title – Aurora Bori Alice), you will find two completely stunning ballads, Spin My Wheels and Lily Dreams On. These are the type of song which use Robert Harrison’s high and slightly hysterical vocals to best effect – he sounds vulnerable, and yet at the same time sure of every word he says:

In my parallel field, what's imagined is real
For you I conceal, all that I feel
And girl you spin my wheels

When you hear this, you get the feeling that he really means it – and while this might be an illusion, the subtext is that he accepts it – he doesn’t mind – and so why would he lie to us? With this technique of expressing his feelings, Harrison draws you into his songs.

In fact, it is this mode of expression which most links Kontiki with The Big Picture, its successor (leaving aside the interim Hotel Baltimore, a short album of live recordings which is unsatisfactorily short and half-developed). This album takes the lyrical excesses to even greater extremes (“Substance suffers style / Stanley lost the Nile” anyone?). And it is, I have to say, one of those albums during which I skip between favourite songs, ignoring the same few irritating tracks each time. But I think the album qualifies as ‘great’ despite this, as alongside the reverberating jingly-jangly guitars are some ballads that aren’t just beautiful, or stunning, like those on Kontiki. No, these slow numbers are brave. There is no other word for it. Just what is Monterey Honey, for example, seeking to say? He starts by telling us (using, naturally, a great tune) that he lost this particular love because he let her down, that sort of thing. But by the second verse, his lover is asking him “Aren’t you done yet?” and lighting a cigarette. Can he really think he just let her down in the standard selfish double-crossing angst-ridden singer-songwriter manner? Sounds to me like he was trying. The narrator humiliates himself in the interests of the song.

Ramon Finds Waterfalls is another brazen number, but this time the courage is shown not by the song’s internal narrator, but by Harrison himself. The sheer effrontery of giving us a deliberately bland lighter-waving anthem, with these lyrics

Inside Ramon finds waterfalls
And water falls
From the Tropic of Cancer to the writing on the chiffon walls
From Victoria Cascades to the…

Well…you get the idea. Harrison takes a risk in making this song the album’s emotional centrepiece, with the triumphant melody, the three-part harmonies only hinted at prior to this point, and the mountain-top strutting guitar solo. But it pays off. Such risk is a rare commodity in modern music, and it is worth hanging on to.

Of course another word for all this lyrical and musical grandstanding is ‘pretentious’, and to an extent, that is a fair comment on The Big Picture. Leaving aside the ballads, Kontiki is dominated by shorter and sharper guitar riffs built around no-frills melodies. The Big Picture, on the other hand, while retaining the Cotton Mather tradition of short songs, definitely has bigger intentions for those same riffs. The mood of Kontiki is that of a small world, with characters who fail to look beyond themselves and their small groups – typified by the subject of Homefront Cameo, who pursues futile activities at the expense of taking a more outward view of the world:

She’s made the bed three times today
Each a masterpiece in its own way

By the time of The Big Picture, lead guitarist Whit Williams’ riffs have to sound grander, because the themes they highlight are much more worldly – the album’s first two title characters are The Last of the Mohicans and Marathon Man, and it continues, for the most part, in this vein.

But is this pretentiousness a cause for criticism? Harrison clearly had ambitious goals when he made The Big Picture, but that is what is so fascinating about the album. He had a successful formula ready to use, but chose not to risk boring us by reiterating the same world view. And the decision to match the lyrics with an equally expansive sound must be the right one.
Of course, you will clearly make your own judgement on which side of the brave/pretentious fence Cotton Mather’s music falls. Either way, these albums are challenging and imaginative. With each clever rhyme, with each frenzied vocal climax, and with each Beatley throwback, Cotton Mather’s music takes me back to the time I first heard it, and forward to whatever dream I fancy. Now, where did they get to?

Steve Earle: From Country Music to Revolution

2006-07-15T14:21:00.001Z

(This piece has been substantially revised since I first posted it.)

What happens when worlds collide? When things you never thought would mix well, meet each other head-on and question each other to the very core, challenging each other to join the party without giving up their own independent essence?

One answer to that question is a Steve Earle album. Any Steve Earle album. Because those are the records, the kinds of musical locations, where you will find poetry, tragedy, politics, philosophy, country music and blues, sitting comfortably together as if the loss of any individual component would mean the descent into irrelevance of the whole. To name all of those parts is to denigrate, in a sense, the overall achievement. Better, perhaps, just to call it the marriage of creativity and emotion. But it is worth noting all of the elements Steve Earle loads into his songs. Because after his unique blend was formulated, the lesser lights (remembering that everything is relative) of alternative country were inevitable – the template had been set. It was Steve Earle, with the assistance of that great American interpreter Emmylou Harris, who brought history with him into the nineties.

The country music character

The characters Steve Earle creates, and the stories he tells, are nothing less than romantic realities. Romantic, because most listeners are forced – compelled – to take them at face value. However far and wide you travel across the North American continent (and I have tried it), you will struggle to find these people and their lives in a concrete and really existing sense. But such is the force of Steve Earle’s music that you know they must be real, because Steve Earle has encountered the tragedies, mysteries and triumphs of which he sings. In some cases he has lived them himself. This boldness, the confidence to tell the stories he knows, is a clear source of inspiration for other modern American songwriters. The model for the frank description of the tragic American figure, more mystical than concrete, more travelling than static, and more full of world-weary experience than most could imagine, is created and re-created in so many Steve Earle songs. This is the country music character from which so many of Earle’s successors drew.

But Earle is no mere chronicler of human suffering. He is also a healer. Some people say that music heals, and in a limited sense, knowing what we know about the emotional power of the music we love, this is true. But this is no pre-ordained, deterministic fact created on the eighth day. If music is to heal, indeed if music is to perform any particular task, it needs exponents of the craft to use the tool that music provides. And so it is with Steve Earle, who has never accepted human suffering as a given. Having told his stories, stated the facts, and explained why things are as they are, through his songs he offers a range of solutions. Rebellion through a life of crime. Money. Love. Music itself. And ultimately, closing a circle and making the vicious virtuous, rebellion through revolution. With this desire to ease the pain of that country music character, to help her or him out, it was Steve Earle who first added that sense of ‘alternative’ to country music.

Steve Earle as an alt country trailblazer

Since I first heard Copperhead Road, Steve Earle has always held a compelling and fascinating presence in my mind, one which cannot be accounted for by any single explanation. It is partly his attitude, the feeling that he will let nothing stand in the way of his quest for meaningful music; partly the songs, which are sometimes catchy, always well written, and frequently facilitate the most unbelievable emotional release; and partly the way he combines all of the musical styles I care for most – rock, blues and country. They are all there, helping to shape the sound which, while not exactly unique as a genre in itself, gives a foundation for the expression of one American’s best singer-songwriters and one of its most thoughtful commentators. Given all this, it is no surprise that Earle was, for me, a key founding influence on the alternative country movement.

This take on Steve Earle is, perhaps by necessity, highly subjective. This is unavoidable – music is an art form and any attempt to define its meaning in an objective sense, unless you remain in very shallow waters, will end in failure. My selection of Earle as the most important formative influence on alt-country is in itself a subjective choice. Sure, he began as a country artist in the same way that many others (Ryan Adams, Jim White) did. And yes, most of the artists in this book have either worked with or at least reference Steve Earle in their own productions. But that is true for many other older country musicians, and many of the artists featured here sound far more like many other country and non-country artists than they sound like Steve Earle. The sound of Ryan Adams, for example, appears to owe much more to both Gram Parsons and the Rolling Stones than it does to Steve Earle. So why him?

Well. However imperfect the comparison between Steve Earle and the alt-country developers of the nineties, and however much more there is to his talent and achievements than such a label can encompass, we will see from the musical evidence that there is a sense in which he has been a sort of godfather to that movement, both musically and emotionally. And his security in that position is strengthened by the fact that however brilliant the records of the likes of Ryan Adams, Uncle Tupelo and Alejandro Escovedo, they will always struggle to reach the heights and breadth of Earle’s own work. The reason for this is simple – Steve Earle has always taken everything he did, and everything he made music about, to the very limit. When Earle wants to growl, he doesn’t add an element of menace to his voice – he really growls. When he wants to sound romantic, he transforms his voice into a tender and vulnerable drawl, liable to break apart at any moment . When he wants to sound like a rebel, he doesn’t just sing about getting drunk and punching some guy – he sings about real, serious crime. And when he wants to get political, he doesn’t fudge it – he says ‘fuck the war’ and ‘the revolution start now’. Steve Earle never holds back. Because of this, Earle’s work is clearly of huge importance, as it tells us a lot about the heart of the country from which he comes, leaving out none of the uncomfortable truths. And when he says what we should do about it, he is equally unequivocal.

Starting out

Steve Earle’s first album, Guitar Town, actually had Earle pigeon-holed as a follower, rather than a founder. Specifically, it caused the description of Earle as a countrified version of Bruce Springsteen - and to a certain extent that label was justified. While Springsteen had made his name lamenting his life in the towns and cities of New Jersey and rock-operatically proclaiming his restlessness, his desire to break free, Steve Earle began by using a more straightforward genre – country-rock – to say similar things about the Southern country from which he emerged:

Nothin' ever happened 'round my hometown
And I ain't the kind to just hang around
But I heard someone callin' my name one day
And I followed that voice down the lost highway
Everybody told me you can't get far
On thirty-seven dollars and a Jap guitar
Now I'm smokin' into Texas with the hammer down
And a rockin’ little combo from the Guitar Town

In Guitar Town, Steve Earle announced himself as a promising songwriter with a real freshness in his sound and his attitude. The songs say intelligent and yet still heartfelt things about love, sadness and restlessness. And there is something quintessentially American about the sound. The broad country-rock sound leaves plenty of room in the music for you to imagine the scenes he describes and the highways by which he is going to escape. And there is an early realisation on his part that, wherever his troubles emanate from, the solution must come primarily from him as an individual. He is on his own out there, and if ever anyone comes with him, they will most likely be followers. So actually, from an early stage, Steve Earle did set trends, which others interested in the business of modernising the country sound would eventually follow.

I first discovered Steve Earle through his 1988 album Copperhead Road. Its attitude is essentially a hangover from the days of the country rebels and outlaws of the seventies, with whom Earle cut his teeth. It was many years after that that he began his recording career, and although it isn’t clear whether Copperhead Road is a tribute to those days or a final hard-rocking attempt to exorcise them, it is clear that the record owes more to a period ten years gone than anything contemporary. What was current, though, was the subject matter – the economic content of his songs. I got hold of this album at a time when everyone around me was only interested in listening to singers who sang in fake voices, unwilling or afraid to look at their audiences while they performed, and this, for me, cast doubt on the authenticity of their words. Not so with Steve Earle. Copperhead Road kicks off with what can perhaps best be described as some shit-kicking attitude: the story of a hereditary bootlegger who, as a result of the hand the economy has dealt him, knows no other way. The words themselves say he is resigned to his fate, but the anger in the voice and the uncompromising and enveloping sound of the electric guitar and organ (which on its own initiates the song with a menacing mixture of drone and swirl, leaving it far from clear what will follow) make you wonder just how happy this man can be with his life:

Well my name's John Lee Pettimore
Same as my daddy and his daddy before
You hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here
He only came to town about twice a year
He'd buy a hundred pounds of yeast and some copper line
Everybody knew that he made moonshine
Now the revenue man wanted Grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road

But there is a subtlety to this song, and it is one which has always attracted me to moments of rock and roll abandonment. The listener has work for that release, as following the organ introduction comes a mandolin rhythm – strident, up in the mix and percussive, but nonetheless just a little mandolin – and plenty of room for you to hear the lyrics. These are things Earle wants you to hear, and understand, before he lets you crank out the air guitar and let it all hang out.

The album’s other key commentary on the state of American society, Johnny Come Lately, is not dissimilar. Less aggressive than the title track, this song is more of an upbeat, Irish bar-room affair – that it was recorded with the Pogues gives a good indication of Steve Earle’s mood. But all the hand-clapping and singing along to that infectious chorus can never disguise the song’s subject matter, not mentioned explicitly until the end of the last verse, but all the more memorable for that, which is the fate of returning Vietnam War veterans. Not an original topic for popular culture, certainly not for those who ever bothered to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, but an important one in Steve Earle’s America.

Up to this point in his career, the main tonics for Steve Earle’s dirty world were crime, portrayed as a negative but inevitable remedy, and music itself, which through good-time singalongs and unbridled rock release offered some respite as well. But as Earle’s work grew in scope, and the problems he addressed began to get bigger, his work became increasingly cinematic in their telling. With this move to a big screen portrayal of American life came, perhaps, the realisation that crime, petty rebellion and rock and roll offered only short-term answers to Earle’s diagnoses. This is where love and politics came in.

Cinematic song

The Hard Way (1990) is one of the few studio albums to be credited to Steve Earle and the Dukes. This nod to his long-time backing band (admittedly a revolving cast of characters based around Earle himself) is appropriate, as this is the album on which Earle sounds most like the lead singer in a band, rather than a bard recording with the hired help. The opening track, The Other Kind, perfectly sums up the heroically individual stance Earle adopts so often, and part of this is down to the way the song’s broad sound envelopes the listener so completely. A piano introduces us to the strident strutting which typifies this record, and as Earle begins to tell what seems to be a quite mundane story (“I woke up this mornin’…”), the rest of the band comes in, once more dominated by a percussively bashed mandolin. And before we can draw much breath, the chorus explodes and leaves us in no doubt who the narrator is: no-one else but Earle himself:

I'm back out on that road again
Turn this beast into the wind
There are those that break and bend
I’m the other kind
I’m the other kind

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course, but it is difficult not to link this implicit promise of an earthly saviour with Earle’s later political work. On the surface, what he is offering is a strong lover and a protective friend. But there is more in this song than that. There is a conceit present in the song which could grate. But somehow it doesn’t, because as in most of Steve Earle’s songs, you are drawn by the power of the story to believing whatever he says. So when he pledges heroism, you know he is up to the task. But there is a human side to this, perhaps represented by the switch from the hard-rocking chorus to the bridge to the next verse, in which the mandolin – hit like a drum, but again nonetheless just a mandolin – leads the way melodically. It always seems like Earle loves mixing his mandos and banjos with heavy electric stuff, but this isn’t just shock value – there is a genuine split in his personality which is demonstrated by the dichotomy in his message (“I’ll love you and save you that way” / “I’ll save you and everyone else too”), and he knows how to reflect this in his music.

This dual message is perhaps the moment where Steve Earle’s country music character, the restless, emotional American, becomes both a part of and a representation of the American Dream, as Earle sees it. Part of Earle seems to want to accept the American Dream at face value – taking as read the ability to do as you like, make something of yourself if only you would put a bit of hard work in, and live a life of independence and prosperity. Up to this point, little if any blame is attached for the imperfections in the American Dream, like the life of bootlegging the character of Copperhead Road lives, or the lack of anything to do in the Guitar Town. But gradually now, Earle seems to realise that there is something more at play here. These are not surface imperfections – they are the results of severe and fundamental social problems. These are problems which cast doubt on the American Dream’s core, and they are problems which need solving.

Unlike so many of his contemporaries in the eighties and early nineties, Earle is not afraid to sing as he speaks. If he sang in any other way, how could we believe such bold statements as those he makes in his songs? There is never a trace of artifice. What you hear is what you get, and his emotions and musical talents are therefore inseparable to the listener. As a result, Earle’s offer of love comes across as a believable solution to some people’s problems, but it is only convincing up to a point. Earle knows he can’t pull the wool over our (or his own) eyes forever, and even in The Other Kind you get the feeling that it isn’t just love he is offering. There must be something more out there. What good is love to someone stuck on death row, about to be killed for killing? That is the story of Billy Austin, one of Steve Earle’s most chilling and moving songs.

Campaigning

It is probably true to say that Earle’s politics and political songs are so credible now partly because he developed his politics organically – beginning from issues in which he had strong beliefs backed up by strong arguments, rather than belatedly jumping on a bandwagon. From an early age, Earle campaigned against the death penalty, and although throughout his career he has written many songs on this issue, none have ever bettered his first. Following the generalisations of his earlier work, implicitly blaming the economics of the time for many of society’s ills without ever quite laying the blame in any particular place (much as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska had done in 1982), with Billy Austin he picked the issue about which he felt most deeply, and said what was on his mind.

Although equally cinematic in its sound as the heavier songs on The Hard Way, Billy Austin’s drama comes from just two things – the production, which makes his acoustic guitar sound like it comes not just from left and right, but also from front, rear and some other more intangible place in the head as well, and Earle’s voice, which is as hard and embittered as an old blues singer at the same as being as fragile as Gram Parsons. The singer fits the song, which isn’t a story of a miscarriage of justice, or the apology of a repentant man. It is the confession of a criminal who knows he has done wrong, can’t say for sure that society is responsible for his own mistakes, but knows certain facts which speak for themselves:

Now my waitin's over
As the final hour drags by
I ain't about to tell you
That I don't deserve to die
But there's twenty-seven men here
Most are black, brown or poor
Most of 'em are guilty
Who are you to say for sure?

The song then finishes as it begins, with Billy pointing out his essential human qualities – his name, his age and the significant fact of his mixed-race background. The listener is left drawing his own conclusions, but Earle’s message is pretty clear. There can be no excuses for what society’s worst criminals have done. But what do we expect? In Steve Earle’s USA, the poverty and racism he sees all around him make such tragedies as Billy’s crimes unavoidable. Not excusable, but the inevitable consequences of a sick society. But Earle always gives the impression that he is here to help us out in some way. His diagnoses always contain the first steps towards finding a cure.

So Steve Earle the rebel, Steve Earle the dissident rock and roller, Steve Earle the songwriter were all firmly established by the mid-nineties; and Steve Earle the political activist was beginning to become a more dominant force in his songs. If the first of those needed any further boosting in the eyes of the listening public, then his spell in prison (for firearms offences) probably sealed the deal. But the record he put out soon after his release from prison, Train a Comin’, is without much doubt his most incredible achievement – and it is the album which, more than any other, offers real spiritual and artistic guidance to the alt-country movement.

The country music character made real

Irrespective of his incarceration, this is a special set of songs. The alt-country boom was already under way when Train a Comin’ was released in 1995, but it was leaning heavily towards the electric – and sometimes punk – stylings of Uncle Tupelo and the Jayhawks. Nothing wrong with that of course, but looking back, the range of influences wasn’t quite in place just yet. If anything was most obviously missing from the music of the country pretenders, it was acoustic country music – and the confidence to go ahead and play it. Uncle Tupelo’s 16-20 March, 1992 had made full use of political folk music, but the uniquely personal and heartfelt sound of acoustic country music needed Train a Comin’ to give it a new set of wings.

In Train a Comin’, Earle combines old western-style bar songs with both the songwriting genius of genuine country songwriters, like Townes Van Zandt, and the Beatles. He combines songs which tell of travels across Mexico and old America with songs which stretch further afield – both spatially and temporally – to Bablyon. He combines mandolins played more delicately than before with harmonies sweeter than ever and a lovely variety of acoustic guitars. And above all, he brings every one of those influences into the songs on the album that he wrote himself. Chief among those songs is Goodbye – so good, so important, a song that it gets a chapter all to itself.

As ever, Earle isn’t afraid to sing in either a chirpy or a downhearted voice about what he considers to be the realities of the country which simultaneously enthrals and disgusts him. Both Mercenary Song and Tom Ames’ Prayer focus on the shady side of the law, and how life at the US-Mexico border will always – given the current economic realities – stay on the wrong side of that straight and narrow path. The solution, of course, is somewhat circular but equally predictable: money. Elsewhere, Earle will offer alternative remedies to life’s ills and ails, but he is never one to shy away from the power, admittedly short-term but no less real for that, of money:

And we're bound for the border
We're soldiers of fortune
And we'll fight for no country but we'll die for good pay
Under the flag of the greenback dollar
Or the peso down Mexico way

Other than Goodbye, the song which stands out most on Train a Comin’ is Tecumseh Valley – performed as a heartfelt tribute to both the song’s writer, Townes Van Zandt, and the song itself. Although Tecumseh Valley was written by Earle’s mentor rather than the man himself, it is in many ways the archetypal Steve Earle song, with one important difference – it is the story of a woman. Women feature heavily in Steve Earle’s repertoire, but not usually as the focal points of songs. Nonetheless he makes the song his own. Earle (and his band) perform a guitar break which is as near to perfect as can be imagined, he laces his vocal with a real sense of tragedy, and even his enunciation of the word ‘Tecumseh’ seems appropriate – as he recites this most difficult and heartbreaking of stories, he gets out the Valley’s name quite hesitatingly – it doesn’t role off his tongue like the Copperheads and Hollywoods of days gone by.

The story itself tells of a young woman named Caroline, free and hopeful, who arrives in the Valley wishing to make something of herself, while making enough money for her mining family back home, who have fallen on hard times. But her dreams of going home are shattered by the realisation that when they come, those hard times spread their wings far and wide. But while van Zandt’s lyrics are suggestive without explicitly telling us the path Caroline takes, Earle uses the words from an alternative version van Zandt once recorded, changing some key lyrics and spelling out the tragedies at the heart of the road, at the heart of the American Dream. While van Zandt’s Caroline walks the streets, filled with hate, enticing men to walk beside her, Earle’s Caroline is more tragic and yet more real: she is forced to sell herself.

She took to whoring out in the streets
With all the lust inside her
And it was many a man
Who returned again
Just to lay himself beside her

Although the song is van Zandt’s, the character is just as much Earle’s – his choice of verse about the whoring, lustful Caroline made sure of that. With that verse, the song is dragged from the internalised, personal world of Townes van Zandt and placed squarely in the middle of Steve Earle’s world view.

Ultimately, as the song unfolds before your ears, as the simply picked guitar rhythm and colourful bent notes build a subtle momentum and sense of loss all of their own, you fear that there is only one way it can end, and Caroline’s death is almost a relief when it comes, as Earle’s vocal has made you feel so sad for her – at last she now rests in peace. But for all of the relief in the world, you cannot help but shed a tear inside for the stoical and accepting way in which Caroline kills herself:

Well they found her down beneath the stairs
That led to Gypsy Sally's
In her hand when she died
Was a note that cried
Fare thee well Tecumseh Valley

Don’t be surprised at the strength of Steve Earle’s poignant rendition of Tecumseh Valley. The character of Caroline is a key one, an emblematic figure for Earle. He didn’t write the song, but he takes possession of it with this performance in an unshakeable manner. His performance is so right, with perfect amounts of emotion, impassively factual storytelling and instrumental skill. Moreover, so many other characters in Earle’s own songs are encapsulated by Caroline. She acts as a summary of so many of Steve Earle’s characters, stories and songs. Just as Billy Austin is his extreme male character, a representation from the half of America’s population of all that is wrong in the country, Caroline is the female equivalent. Between them, Billy and Caroline are Earle’s country music character, and his United States. Everything, from the small town restlessness of Guitar Town to the dysfunctional, dangerous world that gave rise to John Walker’s Blues, is either predicted or described by Steve Earle’s Billy Austin and the hero of Townes Van Zandt’s Tecumseh Valley. Because between them you can see at once both the personal-level tragedy made a million times worse by society’s bad laws, and the social, macro-level tragedy, made worse by individuals’ bigotry and prejudice.

Rebellion

Reference has already been made to Steve Earle’s belief in money as a palliative to suffering and hardship. But he is no fool, and he knows that although money offers some relief, it is only a short-term, surface-level solution, and it could never be more than that. Money and its role in society are a real cause of so many of the problems about which he sings, and so it is no surprise that Steve Earle has, more recently, turned his attentions to more fundamental aspects of society – democracy, equality (or the lack of them) – and done so in the spirit of genuine political activism.

Alternative country music is clearly well steeped in the rebellious side of country music – the affinity of Ryan Adams, Uncle Tupelo and the rest to Hank Williams and Gram Parsons is partly about the music itself, but there is also something there about the attitude. To see a Ryan Adams show is to observe a man who sees a clear link between that outlaw songwriter image and making good music. Only by following your path, and criticising everything around you that you think is wrong, will you be able to write quality music from a position of artistic integrity. But with commercial pressures as they are, these artists have a tendency to hide behind subtle political references which can be left barely noticed and can often be half-denied (a 2005 interview with Jay Farrar in No Depression magazine, in which he denied the existence of any politics in Son Volt’s 2005 album Okemah and the Melody of Riot, is a case in point – have a listen to the album and tell me that album isn’t political).

There’s nothing new there. But while criticising things is all very well, what about some action? There must be room for some leadership from modern country music in this sense, if any credibility is to be retained for this bunch of rebels. Steve Earle had always been one step ahead of most other left-wing musicians, in that he wrote songs about the issues he cared about – chiefly the death penalty. But by 1997, in the album El Corazon, he had made that extra step, and began to make more all-encompassing political gestures. Best among these, to this very day, is Christmas in Washington.

This song has no amazing chord changes, no new or radical solutions to political problems, but the strength of feeling with which he sings his plea to Woody Guthrie (and various other would-be comrades) to come and help us out from this mess of capitalism, corruption and phoneyism gives the song a touching and intangible sense of originality and timelessness. This comes naturally to Steve Earle because he rejects out of hand the often-stated dichotomy between the personal and the political. For him, the two are intrinsically linked – how you treat your family, your friends, cannot be separated from the politics which exist all around you. Of course, that is the essence of the American Dream: the sheer size, resource base and capacity of the country is what, in theory, gives each instance of the country music character the chance to live that free and individual life. Musically, this gives Earle’s political songwriting a natural ease, as he slips between the plight of his individual characters and the political figures and solutions which he feels are of relevance:

I sat home in Tennessee
Staring at the screen
With an uneasy feeling in my chest
And I’m wonderin’ what it means

So come back Woody Guthrie
Come back to us now
Tear your eyes from paradise
And rise again somehow

Despite the soft nature of the recording, with acoustic guitars and Earle’s best attempt at a gentle vocal backed only by his trademark organ drones, there is a marked confidence about it. It sounds like one of Bob Dylan’s better “finger-pointing songs” from the early sixties, but with the genuine emotional depth in the vocal which Dylan only ever put into his later, more personal songs. Some would say that the confidence overspills into conceit, when he sings to Woody that “You and me and Cisco [Houston] know…”, but is such confidence conceit when it is true? By this point in the song, and by this point in Earle’s career, he surely realised, like so many others, that the mantle of America’s foremost popular protest singer had passed to him, and it is a job he takes seriously.

Musical peak

It is said that throughout the recording of Transcendental Blues, Steve Earle kept a copy of the Beatles’ Revolver by his side. This is probably urban myth in terms of its strict accuracy, but it is clear that he had that record, and its experimental lessons, very firmly in mind when making Transcendental Blues, an album that serves as a full and fantastic example of what can be achieved when the very best country musicians cross-fertilise their music with the styles more usually associated with people a world away from them.

Earle’s respect and admiration for the Beatles are well documented, but it is fascinating that he chose Revolver, the Beatles’ most innovative and sonically adventurous album, rather than, the songwriter’s manna that is Rubber Soul. Above all else, Steve Earle is a songwriter, and never lets music get in the way of the song itself. Yet here he was, using as his guiding light a record which wrote the book on loops, backwards guitar tracks, and ethereal, other-worldly sounds. His confidence must have been sky-high, as he would have realised that what made Revolver work was not the experimental sounds themselves, but the fact that the songs the Beatles were writing in the mid-sixties were so strong that the experiments were able to complement the songs without over-shadowing them. If, as seems likely, that was what Steve Earle was aiming for with Transcendental Blues, he pulled it off.

It would be very unlike Steve Earle to start anything off with a half-measure, and so it is with Transcendental Blues’ opening track, the title song. Fuzzy guitars from every corner, a rumbling bass line, echoey pounding drums and mysterious lyrics sung with a confident up-and-down melody are all brought into the fray in a big bang of country-blues, before he eases his foot off the effects pedals and lets the experiments come through at a more reasonable pace for the rest of the album.

Elsewhere on the album, what is notable is the way each song’s story seems to have just the right kind of music attached to it – and with just the right amounts of experimentation and originality. In Another Town he seems to be harking back to his Country-Springsteen days, get out of this one horse town, with just the barest hint of ambivalence:

One of these days when I've had enough
Buddy, you ain't gonna see me around
Just as soon as I get my courage up
Gonna take it to another town

The narrator isn’t quite in that mental place which will allow him to flea the boring bleakness, and the recurrence of Earle’s distorted electric guitars reflect that lack of clarity in the thinking of his character.

The album also has some incredibly delicate, tender and terribly lonely ballads – like Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song) and Lonelier Than This. What becomes obvious listening to these songs in particular is that Steve Earle’s voice had been waiting for the Revolver-esque sound to come along, because the two go really well together. True, country music and rock and roll also sound good when backing his gruff, earthy and rootsy voice, but only because Earle pulls those genres with him, in the directions he knows will work best for his songs. But the Beatles’ inspired fuzz of 1966 is actually Steve Earle’s voice, in instrumental form.

Revolution

As the twentieth century became the twenty-first century, and as most other alt-country artists slowed down their rate of album production, Steve Earle stepped up a gear. He brought the Transcendental Blues sound with him, modifying it just slightly so that the distortion was subtler and the sheer anger and rock and roll aggression were heightened. This is most evident in the opening riff of The Revolution Starts…Now – a frightening guitar-driven combination of intention, menace and volume. But as Earle got his head around a government he hated, and which was doing so many things he opposed so strongly, he stopped bothering with any half-measures for action, like crime, empty rebellion, and even music itself, and focused increasingly on using his songs as vehicles for his activism.

But in terms of the art itself, was it driven purely by Earle’s attitude towards the Bush administration, or was this something of an inevitable next step for him? Both Jerusalem (2002) and The Revolution Starts…Now (2004) are filled with polemical songs – about the war on Iraq, the assault on American people’s liberties, and American society. For the most part, they are up to Earle’s usual standards, combining original melodies and angry (and yet somehow very sensible) lyrics. Take, for instance, Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do):

Look at ya
Yeah, take a look in the mirror now tell me what you see
Another satisfied customer in the front of the line for the American dream
I remember when we was both out on the boulevard
Talkin' revolution and singin' the blues
Nowadays it's letters to the editor and cheatin' on our taxes
Is the best that we can do

Through all of the venom of the message, and amidst the insistent stop-and-start drum-dominated sound, Steve Earle’s old yearning and romanticism peep through, and it is this combination that makes the song work. He is asking, is this mess the best we can manage, with all the knowledge, historical experience and resources we have at our disposal? Let’s try to make things better. But when society’s failures lead to the suicide bomber John Walker (the most modern and yet most believable example of the country music character and the American Dream gone wrong) taking such an extreme path, aren’t things rather more futile than even Steve Earle had expected? What good would Woody Guthrie have done if he had come back as Earle had requested? For all his ‘fellow travelling’ with the Communist Party, it is far from clear that Woody favoured revolution. But maybe that is what is needed – Steve Earle seems to think we’ve already begun to go down that path, less by some voluntaristic route than compelled by an invisible, inevitable force, created by the extremes of reaction from government and so many others:

The revolution starts now
When you rise above your fear
And tear the walls around you down
The revolution starts here
Where you work and where you play
Where you lay your money down
What you do and what you say
The revolution starts now
Yeah the revolution starts now

Of course, this is a verse within a song, and we should not expect a fully-formed political theory to be contained within it. But the sentiment is clear.

But back to the original question – would these albums and these sentiments have happened in any case, in some form, or were they inspired, in some dark way, by President Bush’s extremism and the excesses of his administration? The existence of several weak songs on both albums, less easy to listen to and less perfectly-formed from a songwriting perspective, suggest that Earle just had to release both records, for political reasons more than artistic ones. Certainly, a combination of the two records’ strong songs (mainly the political ones, with the duet with Emmylou Harris I Remember You an obvious addition) would have been a much better album. But one thing both these records have in common with just about every other Steve Earle album is the sense of spontaneity. He had something to say, so he said it.

Indeed, all the way from Guitar Town, through Train a Comin’ to Transcendental Blues, Earle has always sounded fresh, alive and like he has created something new. Jerusalem and The Revolution Starts...Now, for their faults, follow in this tradition, and that is something Steve Earle should be fiercely proud of. In fact, inadequate though it may be, “spontaneous” is as good a word as you will find to sum up Steve Earle’s recording career so far. Genuine, emotional, stoical and hard-nosed. Blues, country and alternative. Crime, love and politics. Everything to the extreme, nothing left in reserve, nothing held back. What else could America’s great songwriters do other than follow in Steve Earle’s footsteps?

The Jayhawks – Imperfections in the American Dream?

2006-05-03T20:21:00.001Z

While Uncle Tupelo were developing a rough, fast and aggressive form of country music, not so far away the Jayhawks were playing their own crucial part in the history of modern country music.

In creating their satisfying, organic blend of country and rock, the Jayhawks contributed to alternative country music the one thing which Uncle Tupelo, in their first couple of albums at least, couldn’t quite master: a fresh and natural sense of melody. The Jayhawks’ music sounds easy – not ‘easy listening’, like those soft-focus releases buried away in a dark corner of your local record store, but songs and ideas which sound like they were easy to conceive and execute. Whether it really was that straightforward doesn’t matter. The point is that the Jayhawks don’t sound strained, forced or desperate – they sound like they were born doing what they do. Without the earthy grit of Uncle Tupelo, the Jayhawks backed up their tunes with a personal and honest sound, rooted in the country. Between them, the Jayhawks and Uncle Tupelo ensured the passage of original, well written, country music into the 1990s and beyond.

It is probably fair to say that the Jayhawks started slowly. After their self-titled debut album in 1986, it was the 1989 release Blue Earth, actually no more than a collection of demos, which attracted the band’s first significant critical attention. Considering the decade of its release, the sound of Blue Earth is incongruous to the point of being unbelievable, because it really is a pure country album, verging at times on rockabilly. And although with its harmonies and laid-back feel it contains suggestions of what was to come, the record sounds like a developmental one – especially when you realise that its best songs, Two Angels and Martin’s Song, were both recycled and improved on their next album. Blue Earth contains little to suggest that the Jayhawks would be a major influence on thoughtful American music over the next decade or so.

But although not the Jayhawks’ first album, Hollywood Town Hall (1992), with its fresh and vital sound, now sounds like a debut album – a true original. And retrospectively, the influence this record had on the band’s later work, not to mention a whole host of other alternative country acts, also gives Hollywood Town Hall the feel of a debut. The lyrics and singing are crucial to this record – considered and flowing sentiments sung in a soulful manner. But the voices never seem separate from the band, fitting easily into its loosely hung country-blues feel – electric and acoustic guitars, piano and harmonica swinging happily on top of the bass and drums, leading and suggesting the songs’ melodies without ever seeking to dominate the singers. And what singers! Marc Olson and Gary Louris sing together constantly, and although most songs are primarily a ‘Marc song’ or a ‘Gary song’, it takes a trained ear to tell them apart. In a sense, the harmoniser, whose song it isn’t, is more noticeable than the singer, because both men have an incredible ability to pick out the best sounding harmony lines – sometimes sung strictly along with the lead vocalist, a third or a sixth above or below the melody, but at other times, veering off in, if not quite a separate direction, then only broadly the same direction, with an independent mind of his own. And actually what could be more appropriate – the theme of this album is in some vague place in the middle of wistful love, wilful individualism, and a self-evident care for others; all set in a windy wilderness. So really, you couldn’t have harmonies any other way than this unattached, free-thinking vocal style.

Hollywood Town Hall consists of ten good songs, but actually its first three songs between them sum up the mood and intention of the whole album. Waiting for the Sun, the opening track, immediately introduces that swinging guitar and piano vibe, and over the top of that Louris begins to reminisce in high-pitched tones:

I was waiting for the sun
Then I walked on home alone
What I didn't know
Was he was waiting for you to fall

There is a sparse quality to the lyrics, as the story of the narrator, the person he sings to, and some mysterious third person is only really half-told. But a knowing sense of confusion comes across, as does a restless drive to move on, away from troubles. This is an interesting song, sounding like it has a quintessentially Americana setting, but not really giving enough away to tell us exactly where. (This coupling of a strong sense of place with a complete absence of clues as to its location is a common feature of Jayhawks songs – but wherever they are, they generally seem to like it – as they sing in Two Angels, “This lifetime's easy / Way back home there's a funeral”.)

The music also adds to this strange feeling, with chord changes emphasised by firm and united syncopated strikes, and melodic instrumental lines which ascend and descend into the song’s refrains. This is one important way in which Waiting for the Sun is representative of much of the Jayhawks’ work. They fill their songs with an intriguing blend of spiky and smooth guitar playing. Gary Louris is no mere gunslinger; he is an inheritor of the songwriter-guitarist tradition of the likes of Robbie Robertson and Neil Young. His playing is thoughtful, full of awareness that less can often be more. But when he wants to break free from such self-imposed shackles, he does so with ease, producing in the listener less of a sense of surprise, of inappropriateness, than is the case with various other alt-country musicians. The results are constant variety and originality.

Next up on Hollywood Town Hall is Crowded in the Wings – a song with a less obvious musical pattern and more of a lyrical tale to tell. It has been said that country is white man’s soul music, but it may be more accurate to say that country, good country music, could and should be soul music. This number is. It is ostensibly a typical story of lost love, with the usual stuff about how life is rough and unreal since you’re gone; but there is a lot more to this song than that. The invocation once more of some mysterious third person, whose role is never explained, provides a natural progression from the album’s first song, and as the story progress, there is more and more real poetry in the telling:

You brought me to, the mother of mountains
You brought me to
And no one reads to you at night
And all your lies came to pass
Just something I said
Made you turn your life in
Been crowded in the wings
Mostly I don’t mind
Been crowded in the wings
Then it’s you I find

The song’s soulfully personal lyrics are backed by a carefree musical style, but the Jayhawks’ sound is definitely not as loose as that of many of their contemporaries. Right from the song’s introductory notes, and actually in many other songs on Hollywood Town Hall, there is a measured, regal quality to their music: although they sound completely organic and natural, they clearly impose some degree of self-restraint, so that they get the best – rather than the most – out of their instruments. Does this result in the lyrical impression of lines left unsaid, feelings left unexpressed? Not really. The point is, the instrumentation of the band has to be used to support appropriately the band’s message – not to swamp it. The song reigns supreme.

Having said this, it would be wrong to deny the existence of ambivalence in the Jayhawks’ music. The person whom the narrator of Crowded in the Wings is singing to seems to have saved him; but not from some terrible fate. For the majority of the time, “mostly”, he doesn’t mind his lot in life – simply, it is okay. You get by on your own, as an individual with your own place within American society, within the American dream – his place is “in the wings”, and from the sounds of things he is not the only one. Sometimes, just sometimes, the American dream’s limitations are unavoidable – you need something more than that individualistic, get by on your own, life philosophy. That’s when people, and relationships, like those in the Jayhawks songs come into their own.

So we begin to see that the Jayhawks, for the most, accept the American dream, but they’re not afraid to expose its flaws. The collectivist, compassionate beliefs epitomised in the next song, Clouds, are the final piece in the jigsaw, as they represent the final thing needed to justify the Jayhawks as a complete American band: the spirit. The individualistic side of their philosophy is self-evident throughout their work, but in order to represent the coming together, the drawing together, of their country through music, the band needed songs like this:

God of the rich man ain't the God for the poor
Autumn ending, the state hospital’s closed
Then wouldn't you know
Winos and office girls in the park
Wanted you alone to walk beside her
Wanted you alone to live beside her
It was mornin’
Better roads with light on them
Can your diamonds talk to you
Can you see them shine
Keep them hiding in your room
Can they guide you in your time

Most of the songs on Hollywood Town Hall imply a rejection of the importance of the material – it is all about the relationship, the journey. But Clouds collectivises that sentiment. This is a song about going beyond the materialistic: it takes the need – occasional and transient though it may be – for comfort and solace, expressed in Crowded in the Wings, to its logical conclusion – collectivism. And by doing so from the perspective of a one-on-one relationship as usual, it ensures that it works as a song.

So the first three tracks on Hollywood Town Hall set the scene for the album – but in fact they do more than that, as they set out the Jayhawks’ stall as a band with something new and original to say about that most hackneyed and clichéd of subjects, the American dream. Between them, those songs lay down a musical marker, setting a standard which would remain as a constant for the rest of the album, and for entire careers of other bands, but which would be abandoned by this band as soon as the album was completed. That loose and yet restrained style, full of swings and swirls, melodies and melancholia, is at once distinctive and perfectly suited to the songs Olson and Louris had written, the messages they wanted to get across.

The rest of the album is used to explore these messages, these themes, and in the process of doing so some really good songs are produced, most of which continue the examination – often indirect and fleeting, but present nonetheless – of the imperfections in the American dream. Sister Cry, for example, features interesting and ambiguous lyrics over a conventional song structure (again, the music must never get in the way of the song). The lyrics pose more questions than they answer – what has happened to the person being sung to, the “sister” of the song’s title? And does the narrator think there is much hope for her? None of this is terribly clear. There are hints of encouraging words for the future: “Sister cry, been mistreated / Doesn't mean someone won't let you in”; and, more significantly, “Could be up ahead you'll be seeing changes”. Well that sounds positive enough, but unfortunately “Somehow the changes made won't belong to you”. It is almost as if he is saying, whatever has happened, and whatever changes for the better in the future, it’ll all be a bit separate from you. So there could be more of the same in store for sister?

In a similar vein, Nevada, California is an even darker song. The protagonist yearns for something from times gone by, but nothing as innocent as childhood. This song deals in fragmented, fleeting images, rather than completed pictures, but what we do hear gives us some clues – kicked around on the bum, your lovesick cousin, and the possibility of jewels behind the lies. In fact, the whole seems to be greater than the sum of its parts, because the resulting image, however imprecise, is strong and powerful. Even the guitar solo goes practically unnoticed, because the song is all about the swinging backing to a guilty memorial of some sort. The key word in the chorus isn’t even clear – what was the last thing he tried to do – hold her, or haunt her? The answer is the former, but even if this blurriness is not deliberate, its effect is unsettling; the image is not a rosy one. Has he done wrong, or does he just feel wrong?

Again, the existence of these questions has broad implications for the Jayhawks’ view of America. As ever in popular music’s meaningful but frustratingly imprecise philosophy, these are difficult to answer, and in any case to attempt to so this soon would be inappropriate. Besides, in music there is often a flip side. Hollywood Town Hall’s flip side is Martin’s Song, the closing track, and it works as a song if not as a convincing riposte to what has come before. This is a re-make of the song that first appeared on Blue Earth, and it is a song of hope. The guitar and organ swirl around as the narrator talks about killers and city developments – in essence he tells us how bad it all is. But, he says, it is going to be okay. Returning to a common Jayhawks device, while the verse gives us the big picture, the societal deficiencies, the chorus personalises both the problem and the solution.

I've been working all night
I go long into the day
Ain't got much money now
Got the time ahead
Got the time ahead to pay

The song works if the listener takes the chorus’ upbeat message and applies it to the problems outlined in the verse. To an extent, they pull it off. The solutions in the “time ahead” can be found both in the middle distance – the collectivism and comfort from a friend sung of in earlier songs on the album – and in the immediate path – that is, in time itself.

In terms of its sound, Tomorrow the Green Grass (1995) could perhaps be described as the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album. The album maintains the swinging quality present on Hollywood Town Hall, but it is certainly less bluesy, leaning away from the electric guitar, and relying increasingly on a really acoustic base from which to build. And in terms of the album’s themes, it seems to address less the philosophical aspects of the American dream, and more the geographical ones. While the settings for the songs are, as ever, imprecise, their descriptions and occurrences become increasingly frequent and vivid, giving listeners the feeling that they are on the verge of a complete and satisfactory picture of the album’s physical location. Unfortunately, the album doesn’t quite deliver.

In fact the similarities between Tomorrow the Green Grass and its predecessor are not simply confined to some vague, barely specified musically expressed social philosophy. Because the inexorable, rolling musical feel of Hollywood Town Hall is still present on Tomorrow the Green Grass. No-one would ever doubt that these were two albums from the same – or at least a similar – model, and the word ‘model’, with the image of a car that it invokes, is the right one, because this album is always on the move, travelling across that same half-told country, led as ever by two guys singing in harmony.

Not surprisingly, the Jayhawks begin their search on Tomorrow the Green Grass from a place of caution, a feeling of safety first. Two Hearts is a gorgeous song, performed with an even heavier dose of measured restraint than usual. Every soft strum of the acoustic guitar is damped, and the guitar solo in the middle is a reluctant acknowledgement of the need for something like that in the middle of the song – it is cut short, clipped, and played on a quiet baritone guitar. Once more the Jayhawks seem determined to fit the music to the song’s point, and in this particular song they sum up easily and succinctly the limitations of their lives and the lives of everyone around them:

Well I know your name
Takes you back from where you came
Your words, they shone
Sometimes it's real to be alone
So real to be alone

It isn’t sad to be alone, or terrible to be alone; it is just real to be alone. This is not a common type of thing for songwriters to say – this is how it is. We are more used to musicians dealing in extremes of emotion and situation – love, death, the earth moving, the town burning. The Jayhawks give their songwriting more thought and come up with something much easier to identify with, and all the more remarkable for that. It isn’t great, but this is how it sometimes is.

But this is not to say that they’re not searching for something better. In fact, Tomorrow the Green Grass isn’t only the Jayhawks’ most alt-country album because of its sound; it is also the album where they seem to be travelling. This is nothing new to music, of course, but in the context of the alt-country boom, the likes of Whiskeytown, Jim White and others didn’t get their physically shifting influences from the industrially rooted anger of Uncle Tupelo; it came from the restless and uneasy searches carried out by the Jayhawks. And searching they were: Tomorrow the Green Grass contains a real sense of purpose. The opening track, Blue, contains a genuine excitement about the emotional heights that the band may be about to arrive at. I’d Run Away, the album’s second song, has a real sense of impatience, with the band running and skipping towards some kind of resolution. And once again, the band’s sound fits the words like a glove, because the point of this song is that, as ever, the narrator’s lot in life is satisfactory, but not quite as spectacular as he once envisaged:

So we had a little baby boy
But we knew it wouldn't last too long
Kind of what I had in mind
But what I had in mind was strong

While the words tell the tale of the realities of the present and the dreams of the past, the band expresses what is only implied by the lyrics: the search for something more. Is this something the fulfilment of the American dream? Or something that the American dream cannot quite deliver? The answer is surely the latter, because the confident individualism, the do-it-yourself and do-it-for-yourself attitude required by the American dream, is shown in the song Miss Williams’ Guitar to be inadequate. It is in this song that Mark Olson achieves that thing in his mind that was “strong” – that romantic collectivism which was what he needed – his missing link. And for once this is not merely implied or suggested, because the story in the song is real and true. Miss Williams’ Guitar unashamedly tells the story of the meeting of minds and lives between Olson and the singer-songwriter Victoria Williams. Olson didn’t need an army of lovers, supporters and associates – he just needed one true companion. As Olson watches Williams, “The whole damn crowd” – all those isolated individuals engaged in their own independent searches for something similar – seem “so far away”. Gary Louris’ contribution to the song is surely to agree with Olson’s assessment of the situation, as his Byrds-style guitar accompaniment gives way to a soaring, euphoric solo, paying tribute to and playing with the song’s melody, serving as a valediction and a confirmation. And, as it turned out, a farewell (if not quite a eulogy). Because with the completion of Tomorrow the Green Grass came the departure of Mark Olson from the Jayhawks. The band’s songwriting duo was split in two, and, in a sense, so was their purpose as alt-country trailblazers. This division wasn’t sudden – many of the later songs on the album sound rather less meaningful – and in fact are just not as good as – the first few tracks, or the collection on Hollywood Town Hall. But while Olson took the band’s purer country side with him and set up the Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers with Williams, Louris began to take the Jayhawks in new sonic directions – more interesting, for sure, and possibly more visionary too. But indisputably, the remaining Jayhawks retained something of that intangible American spirit, and the continuing tension between individual self-reliance and the need for group comfort became ever more prominent.

From the opening chords of Sound of Lies (1997), struck darkly and ominously by an echo-drenched piano, the album’s intentions are clear. The ultimate message of the band’s earlier music, which is unambiguous if somewhat measured, is that hope, and maybe redemption, can usually be found, even if you have to look beyond your normal realm of life in order to find them. In Sound of Lies, only the initial assumption, the underlying premise, remains: things often go bad. Listening to this album, it doesn’t seem so much like there is a way out, a way up.

Sound of Lies is a wonderful record – innovative and fresh, combining genuine and old-fashioned rock and roll songwriting talent, with modern elements like distortion, a fuzz guitar even more prominent that on their earlier albums, and strong keyboard orientation. That opening piano is significant musically, because in the past the piano had been an accompanying instrument for the Jayhawks – contributing to the loose and sometimes bluesy bounce that they created. Now, it is a lead instrument, using its darker side to shape songs. Once it has set the scene for The Man Who Loved Life, with which the album spectacularly opens, there is only one way for Gary Louris to sing. His harmonies with Mark Olson always sounded very natural and easy, but let’s be honest, the very fact of harmonising is a constraint. Now, on his own, his voice becomes more expressive, giving fuller rein to the emotions which caused the song to be written. The band remains a superb harmonising band, but on Sound of Lies most of the harmonies are more structured, and, more importantly, subservient to the lead vocalist. Notwithstanding the fact that a small number of its songs were written (or co-written) by other members of the band, Sound of Lies is very much Louris’ creation, and he is in no mood to talk about the search for something better. If anything, the protagonist in The Man Who Loved Life is on a downward spiral:

Won't you take my hand
Won't you be my friend
Take my advice, go away
When the days get short and the chips are down
Will you be there will you stick around

There is no question mark at the end of that verse, because there really is no question other than a rhetorical one. Louris’ advice is simple: things are bad - go away. And he doesn’t mean to say, leave this place behind, go and find the answer, your answer. It is more “leave me alone”. The song switches confusingly between characters, but the lasting impression of the song is the jarring counterpoint of a shift to a major key, backed by what would normally be cheery repetitions of “oooh….la-la-la”, with the awful half-vision of a man who loved – past tense – life. He is still alive, he is an “is” rather than a “was”, but his love for life is referred to only in the past tense. There is little hope in these bleak lines.

The other key song on Sound of Lies is Haywire. Musically, this song combines that old clipped Jayhawks with their newer desire to innovate – typified by the boxed-up guitar sound, clipped and distorted, but with a classic rhythm; all underpinned by a confident bass from Marc Perlman, one of the band’s two ever-presents. And above that, Louris sings his story with heart-rending emotion. While this album has a broader and more innovative reach of sound than its predecessors, its realm and domain are much smaller and closer. It is strange, then, that while their earlier songs contained strong and vivid references to America’s landscape and heartlands, they never really named particular places; while Haywire, one of their most personal songs, name-checks particular places and, in terms, of the words on paper, gives a clear idea of where the song is set. But while before the unnamed and elliptically referred to places were of crucial importance, now, the locations, although specified, are of no consequence. There is an echo of songs gone by, as Louris suggests a phlegmatic view of the terrible life (that has gone “haywire”) he has suffered:

That's my whole life in a nutshell
Take it as you will
I can hear that old brass band
Playing our song down the hill

But this is a story of lost love, without much hope for the future. The song reaches a glorious zenith, and embarks upon a slow fade, with Louris and the band’s other singers criss-crossing imaginatively as they implore the person at whom he is singing to “smile, smile, smile”; but this doesn’t seem to be any reference to things “getting better”. His chances of a good life appear to have disappeared, and all that is left is to offer some simple advice to someone who – it seems – is in the driving seat in any case.

However, for all of the glum assessments and predictions found on Sound of Lies, Haywire did perhaps suggest something to the band – if not the listener- about the way forward. Smile. Because while their next record (released in 2000) is one of their weakest, leaning far too far towards a synthesiser-based sound, the lyrics of its key songs suggest a band once more beginning to reach upwards. The album’s title? Smile, of course.

Sound of Lies must really be seen as a reaction. The Jayhawks had made a bluesy album and then a nicely organic acoustic/electric album, both of which tried to make some sort of sense of America, through the eyes and ears of individuals and relationships. Gary Louris, having been freed of the folk music orientations of Mark Olson, retreated away from the philosophical big picture, which had perhaps squashed the chances for musical experimentation. With Sound of Lies, he let the music take charge, fitting emotional and personal tales around a dramatic and pleasing soundscape. But by the time the band wrote the songs for Smile, it seems that they wanted to reach up again, to a more positive message and themes. I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, for instance, starts with fairly typical implied suggestions of two troubled lives inside a problematic world. But where there is no love, let us not lament – let us strain for it, let us create it, let us hold onto it:

I'm gonna make you love me
I'm gonna dry your tears
And we're gonna stay together
For a million years

The lyrics themselves are nothing special; but what they are saying is a notable shift in gear from the Jayhawks. And as they began to make that change, back to a more positive mindset, the music changed too. In 2003 they released Rainy Day Music, probably one of their most complete records, and it seems that as they made it, they remembered that the early Jayhawks didn’t just use that natural blend of electric and acoustic, of country music with bluesy sensibilities, of great personal songwriting with a good awareness of the world around; they created it. It was time to use it once more.

Rainy Day Music is not the Jayhawks’ deepest album, nor their most memorable, nor their most original. But it is their most melodic, and possibly their least flawed. Lyrically, it clearly contains mixed messages. There are pretty love songs, with plenty of ‘It’ll be alright’ sentiments; there are some songs which lean towards the darker extreme of the band’s songwriting scope; and there are others which return the band to their capacity to offer a glimmer – and often no more than that – of hope to the benighted. Over and above all else, this is a collection of individually well-crafted songs, and in terms of what it addresses, it doesn’t quite reach the big picture of the Jayhawks’ first few albums. But in a sense, they have come full circle, because that is their point about the American dream – it is intangible at best, and severely flawed at worst. If everyone is as individualistic – and as different – as the American dream assumes, then surely by the same token the answers are different for everyone as well. The big heading, the big solution, the American way, might not suit all.

The Jayhawks brought in Ethan Johns to produce Rainy Day Music, and in doing so, again, they showed a willingness to return to the alt-country scene they had helped create. Johns has produced a wide variety of artists, but most significantly in this context, he produced Ryan Adams’ first two solo albums. In moving from the poster-boy of alt-country to some of the founders of the movement, Johns brought with him his own particular take on the acoustic-electric blend: incredibly clear-sounding acoustic guitars, jingle-jangle electric guitar and slide playing off each other in an explicitly country manner, frequent bursts of harmonica, a bass which leads the song’s rhythm, and, most importantly given the Jayhawks’ history, a harmonic style which is more unplanned, off-the-cuff, and egalitarian.

Similarly, Rainy Day Music’s lyrics are mainly about options and solutions. Sure, there are problems in the world, in the lives of the songs’ protagonists. Rock music would be lost without such difficulties. But however vague the Jayhawks’ remedies and palliatives are, they are there, and this fact lends an air of reassurance and comfort to proceedings. In Save it for a Rainy Day, the guitars shimmer all over the song so that from the outset, you know that the sad life being described is going to collapse into something more positive:

Looking like a train wreck
Wearing too much makeup
The burden that you carry
Is more than one soul could ever bear
Don't look so sad, Marina
There's another part to play
Don't look so sad, Marina
Save it for a rainy day

This kind of sentiment recurs throughout the album, as Louris and Tim O’Reagan – a fine songwriter in his own right – exort the listener to take my love and make it last, and to make your mistakes and go on your way. Don’t look back. Even on the album’s darker moments, in songs like the inexorable Tailspin and the awkward and uncomfortable You Look So Young, this is a romantic album, with love and relationships as both cause and cure. There is a tension there which is never quite resolved, and it adds drama to what are already fine, melodic pieces of work.

Ultimately, however, we’re left in doubt that the over-arching dichotomy in the Jayhawks’ work, between the individualistic, independent American and the need for solace and reliance on others, can be satisfactorily closed. In Angelyne, amidst impeccably gelled harmonies and using a magnificently soaring melody, Louris brings home that old truth – that most of the time, most of the time, people get by on their own, if only because they have to:

Angelyne, forgive me
We threw it all away
I could never fit into your plans
I'm nobody's man

But that is only half the story. In a rare songwriting credit for bassist Marc Perlman, the band use the death of a close friend to give voice to that lingering feeling of regret that people often feel, for feelings not expressed, for dreams not fulfilled, before it is too late. But in the end there is hope, real belief in the value to human nature of that collectivist fall-back:

Will I see you in heaven
Shine your light from above
With your love I am never alone
Won't you carry me, won't you carry me home

And although the Jayhawks may well make more music further down the line, that seems to be as good an end-point as any. Compared directly with the Jayhawks’ first three albums, culminating with the groundbreaking Hollywood Town Hall, Rainy Day Music is substantially different: more ordered, more melodic, less bluesy. But given everything that occurred in between, all the miles of music the band travelled along, their most recent record is in many ways a nostalgic one. Taking the core elements of the genre – great songs, a small ensemble with emphasis placed with thought, and a real – if unspecific – location at America’s heart, the Jayhawks returned to the place they held at the peak of the alt-country scene. And in doing so, they completed their examination of the American dream, in which they relate real and imagined experiences to a world-view which goes far beyond such a bland and inadequate cliché. By really thinking, questioning what the limits and possibilities of that American dream really are, and by making fine music based on the sounds of the American country, the Jayhawks prove that they truly are an American band, in the best sense.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

2006-05-02T20:49:00.001Z

Bruce Springsteen has just released an album of folk covers. Here are my thoughts on it.

It has been a long time since a Bruce Springsteen record has provoked such extremes of reaction from his fans, even before its release. His last album, Devils & Dust, wasn’t universally loved, but it was at least widely anticipated. Prior to that, The Rising’s combination of 9/11 reference and three-guitar rock attack ensured there was something good – though far from brilliant – for everyone. But We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions seems to have been the catalyst for an explosion of anger from a large number of fans who despair at the lack of original songwriting from Springsteen.

At the same time, there are those who, upon reading the press release, could hardly believe their luck. Here, at last, was the album which could prove what they’d been saying for years – that Springsteen was the natural heir to America’s folk tradition, handed down from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and now onto their man. All Springsteen had to do was choose his songs well, sing them as maybe only he could, and through his research and performance, display his knowledge of that folk tradition. Then his place as a true inheritor of the country’s cultural roots would be assured.

I am in the latter camp. I am a huge fan of Springsteen’s songwriting – but I have never thought that was all he had to offer. Randy Newman can write songs. Joni Mitchell can write songs. What Springsteen has always offered on top of the songs is his charisma, his feeling, and his joy. In The Seeger Sessions, those characteristics become uncoupled from his own songs, but they don’t founder without their artistic base - if anything, they are given a happy freedom and a fresh sense of belonging, and they flourish.

Sure – in the wrong hands these songs could be campfire singalongs, fit for nothing more than a jamboree with a bunch of acoustic guitars accompanying assorted campers playing out a rustic version of a scene from Easy Rider. But their original exponents – whether writing or performing – knew what they were doing with the songs, and so does Bruce Springsteen.

The impression given in Springsteen’s own liner notes is of him sitting around inexpertly doodling around a bunch of old songs, backed by a wily crowd of veterans who pat him on the back and let him have his hour of folk authenticity. The reality is probably somewhat less goofy. That he added lyrics to some songs and claims most of the arrangements as his own are testaments to the fact that he shaped the content of this record very carefully. And although he protests that he didn’t have an ideology in mind when making the record, this doesn’t detract from the political message he selects. Rather than poignant, utopian anthems like Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Springsteen chooses Mrs. McGrath – a much more pointed song, about a returning soldier who has had both of his legs blown off by a cannonball. Never mind the flowers – what did they do to my body? This is Springsteen’s political reality, and it still rings true.

Musically, Springsteen sounds equally in control. From the very beginning of the first track, Old Dan Tucker, two things are obvious. The first is that he is having the time of his life – witness the raggedy count-in, try to picture him singing the songs you hear with anything other than a smile on his face (it is difficult), and listen to the way he shouts out instructions for solos and instrumental passages. The other thing is that Springsteen owns these songs. No doubt these are experienced folk musicians, and they create a sound that is both knowledgeable and dense (no surprise – the band is awash with guitars, fiddles, accordions, and everything else you’d hope a hootenanny band would contain). But Springsteen’s voice rises above the band. Now, making him sound louder than the band is easy enough, but actually what we have here is something deeper – his confidence is unquenchable and his charisma drives his voice forward; and the voice, in turn, shapes the sound of the band – not the other way round.

Clearly, for Springsteen, this album is about having fun while making good and meaningful music. Nothing else matters – he displays his knowledge of the folk tradition, but that is the man – it is hard to imagine him going into any project without knowing his brief. But even if by accident, in recording this album he has done a good deal to place himself alongside Bob Dylan as an important American folk artist. The Basement Tapes came first, and they may have contained plenty of original songwriting, but The Seeger Sessions is a different animal. Springsteen’s political folk songwriting came long ago – in Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad, both of which used folk music to make new and damning points about aspects of America. With The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen demonstrates how those earlier records were themselves part of a long tradition of folk culture, and he places himself somewhere between his own personal songwriting on the one hand, and America’s cultural history on the other.

And it sounds great.

Road trip

2006-05-01T20:48:00.000Z

I haven't posted here in a while, and this is partly because last month I was busy visiting a lot of the places which the music I write about is closely associated with - New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, Memphis and Nashville. Click on the 'Road trip' heading to see some photos.

Ryan Adams – Victoria Apollo, 24 February 2006

2006-02-26T10:59:00.001Z

Last Friday I was at the best gig I've been to in a while - a mostly solo show from Ryan Adams. Here's what I thought of it.

The last time I went to this venue, I saw the hit musical Bombay Dreams (I still get ‘Shakalaka Baby’ in my head every once in a while – it won’t go away). It is a grand setting for a solo performer, with only occasional help from his friends, but Ryan Adams rose magnificently to the challenge provided by his surroundings. Even though he took the piss out of the place in a suitable manner – “should I be wearing the same clothes every night?” – he clearly enjoyed it, and provided a performance full of theatricality and a quiet drama.

But if the drama was quiet, the man himself was anything but. From the opening strains of Don’t Get Sentimental At Me, a gorgeous new song, Adams’ voice soared above everything else in my mind, piercing and yet totally natural. His voice was beautiful, containing equal parts soul, surf falsetto and songwriter’s passion. Time and again, as Adams picked out a sensible number of songs from most of his albums, I was impressed by how little accompaniment his vocals needed. His most recent album, 29, is not one that I have warmed to, but it struck me that the new numbers he performed tonight seemed quite similar in style to those on 29. If only that record had been more unadorned, allowing the listener to concentrate on the expression of the voice, rather than filling up every song with clutter, it could have been quite remarkable.

But perhaps it is unfair to blame 29 and its producer, Ethan Johns. Adams is developing a Dylanesque ability to re-invent songs when he plays them live; the difference is, you can still hear what the younger man is singing. The soft, delicate acoustic guitar-driven Please Do Not Let Me Go was a world away from the tinny band version found on Love Is Hell, and it was all the better for that. Sweet Lil Gal, slowed down almost to a stop by Adams’ piano chords, never fails to captivate audiences which might skip the song on record. And so went the show, with every song bringing some sense of surprise, relief or pleasure.

Adams had a special guest in tow – Neal Casal. Entering towards the end of the first half, Casal added his acoustic guitar to Adams’, and the result was stunning – Ryan Adams is a competent guitarist, but Casal brought real originality with his finger-picking and interplay. The duo had clearly rehearsed three songs from the Cold Roses album, as Casal added good quality high harmonies to Let it Ride and Magnolia Mountain – again, producing versions of songs which surpassed those on record. Later on, the show seemed less scripted, and when Adams briefly departed from the song Cold Roses to recall New York, New York, Casal didn’t seem to know which way to turn; he got the chords out, but no harmonies here.

I must confess to shouting loud for my favourite Adams song – the transcendentally depressing Call Me On Your Way Back Home. And following the old-fashioned interlude, and quite a bit of procrastination as Adams strummed his guitar here and there, my wish came true, as he delivered a faithful rendition of the song, with aching bluesy harmonica to cap it off. Throughout the show, Adams switched between his acoustic guitars and the piano, which he played from a menacing sitting position, hunched forward, all crooked back and ghostly fingers.

Next up was Sylvia Plath, played as Sweet Lil Gal was – slow, verging on the cumbersome but never quite falling into that trap. For the patient listener, a real treat. After this, the show became more anarchic – Adams began to ramble happily, telling one (real or imagined?) story about his great-grandmother’s death, freeing himself from the professional shackles he seemed to have imposed on himself in the first half. As singer and audience increased their collective intoxication – his via the booze, ours via the music – the show became less focused, actually not as good musically, but strangely just as entertaining. New songs (such as Two), recent country ones with more soaring vocals (The Hardest Part) and rumbling, rolling classics (The Rescue Blues) mingled naturally and good-naturedly, Adams chatted a bit about the Grateful Dead, and finally, with the help of the harmonies and peculiar hand movements of Carina Round, Adams’ tones softened the blow of the harsh lyrics of Come Pick Me Up, as guitars, harmonica and harmonies combined one more time. Brilliant.

Jim White - fact and myth

2006-01-29T17:10:00.001Z

One thing that is not obvious from Jim White’s music is if he has a particularly vivid imagination, or if he has actually led a fierce and exotic life. Another thing that isn’t clear to me is whether or not this actually matters.

Of course, the answer to that first question is of immense importance if you are attempting to conjure up some sort of objective analysis of Jim White – the person, the life. But in terms of making some sort of subjective judgement of his music, the roots of the lyrics, the origins of his musical soul, could perhaps be dismissed. More than that, in fact: they must be dismissed. Because with every tale of knowing Jesus, with every lost love described with phlegmatic abandon, White deliberately obscures the truth, blurring the distinction between fact and myth with his imaginative and unstructured lyrics, his other-worldly characters, and his subtle, brittle, space-country music.

White’s influences are so numerous that they literally compete for your attention as they make short, sharp pleas for primacy in each song; once more, the South comes across as that melting pot that Levon Helm so usefully described: the place where blues, gospel, folk, Cajun, show tunes, rockabilly and, of course, country music came together to form rock and roll. The South is relevant in White’s albums in a very tangible sense. With some country music, especially that peddled by alt-country performers, the South is conjured up in the listener’s mind by a process that is somewhat circular: we assume country sounds originate from the South, these guys are singing some kind of country, so it must be based on the South. Well, fair enough, but with Jim White you don’t have to make such a convoluted – if subconscious – leap of musical logic. He actually sings about the South. Not by writing a stanza about the deep waters of the Mississippi, or a rhyming couplet likening Alabama to someone’s mama, but in a manner which is at once less obvious and more definitely rooted in that part of America. This is transient music, taking you from place to place, but always with those touches which define the area – the dust, the motor homes, and an inherited faith in Jesus. While it never touches any specific part of the South, White’s music encompasses the whole place.

Take, for example, Heaven of My Heart. One of the more traditional sounding songs on White’s first album, Wrong-Eyed Jesus (1997), it kicks off with a jaunty Cajun-inflected accordion, immediately conjuring up vivid images of the South’s south – the song is from New Orleans. But is it? The steel guitar which enters soon and contributes comfortable licks throughout the song suggests something more akin to the open country, the campfire. The lyrics, for their part, don’t really tell a specific story – like many of White’s songs, they communicate to the listener via a series of snapshots which, though not quite disjointed, are certainly fragmentary. But the overall picture does have an organic feel to it; it must do, as the more peculiar lines within the song don’t feel out of place:

And the shining stars guiding stars pointing away to the heaven of my heart
And guiding stars pointing away to the heaven of my heaven of my heart
Yeah I got a funny bone laugh like a mule I always did pretty good in school
But still I cannot decipher this girl's arithmetic
Still I walk to the moon I'd lick this spittoon I'd wear woolly underwear in the summer
Just to show her how much I want her your loveable lunatic

But this should be little surprise – one of the lessons you learn from many of Jim White’s songs is that, in his world anyway, there is a fine line between the concrete, certain reality and the ethereal, dreamlike visions that can come to you so easily. White’s songs are awash with fine lines, and also a tangible sense of fragility. The quiet banjo-led introduction of Sleepy Town brings home how much he seems to miss the country-ranch-prairie lifestyle, but equally, there is a seedy quality which suggests a wistfulness for the darker side of life: the brothel behind the bland façade of the sleepy town. But these feelings are so closely meshed that he can really only be saying, there is a fine line. However broad that façade is, it can never be more than paper-thin; and the people living on either side of it are all-knowing.

Tales of loss – avoidable loss? - recur throughout Wrong-Eyed Jesus. Sometimes they are comparatively small-time, though no less tragic for that; at other times the stories are downright awful. But either way, White tells them with a delicate and sensitive touch, both lyrically and sonically. Often his voice sounds like it has been recorded via a tin can, and the words he writes are no less interesting:

I pour whiskey in the honeycomb,
It makes the bees all turn to angels
I watch ’em fly off into heaven...
Disappear where I can’t follow
And I would write Jesus a letter
But I hear that he don’t speak English...
So instead I’ll just throw these cobblestones until I ring that old church bell

Meanwhile, the music itself contributes lines both rhythmic and melodic, sweeping in and out, always based on a warped version of down-home country, counterpointing the lyrics but fitting them well.

The songs have their own kind of momentum – they never explode but they do build to a pinnacle, a point of the utmost extreme of whatever emotion White wishes to convey. But there is a feeling of unfulfilled anguish, as if White is still holding something back, and it is this which gives all of his work that sense of fragility. That first album seems to hold everything together – just – very well. By the time of his second album, No Such Place (2001), the results are rather more mixed. The high-points of this record are better than anything found on Wrong-Eyed Jesus. By now he is constantly pushing his own sense of vulnerability to the limit, and on Christmas Day he pulls it off, telling an astonishing story of a loss to which he is already perfectly resigned:

When the words you must utter are hopelessly tangled
In the memories and scars you show no one
So seldom a door…so seldom a key
So seldom a hit like the hurt you put on me
But seldom comes happiness without the pain of the devil in the details
Since I saw the smile on your face as I was crying
In a Greyhound station on Christmas Day…in 1998

This story is at once both uniquely personal and universal. The name of year, 1998, is sung repeatedly, but while for many songwriters this device would be used if there were some broader historical importance to the date, for Jim White this is not necessary. Every person has had years of their lives which were particularly significant, memorable or momentous, years which to most other people seem unimportant; for the narrator in Christmas Day, 1998 was such a year. But what happened on Christmas Day that year? He saw her face in a Greyhound Station – one of the most quintessentially and everyday American settings imaginable. And that is the beauty of Jim White’s songwriting – it makes you believe, or at least imagine, that however mundane the practical details of the life being described, its stories can nonetheless be full of the most extreme emotions and earth-shattering events and relationships.

But therein lies the risk that White is taking. Because while Christmas Day is a fine composition and a perfectly-realised performance, on other songs the marriage of lyrics and music isn’t quite sufficient to deliver a similar narrative and emotional message while still making for enjoyable listening. At some points on the album, the gaps between lyrics and music, and between his inner-most thoughts and more general palatability, become almost too much to take. In The Wrong Kind of Love, these tensions are stretched beyond what is sensible, and the result is a degeneration into some sort of electronic-country incidental music. The centrepiece of the song is White’s gentle description of a girl or woman who wants the sort of love that he says is the wrong kind, and his inability to break free of it:

Come beg, borrow, steal, or fight
'Cause you never felt nothing so real or right as this wrong...wrong kind of love

Unfortunately, the melody White uses is rather too familiar. When White’s songwriting comes together, the result is flawless songs which resist all criticism; at other times, it seems that the melody was the last thing he put his mind to, and the outcome is often a re-hashed tune of limited range. In The Wrong Kind of Love, his standard vocal is supported by a mock tinny radio voice contributing its view on the song’s subject. Meanwhile, the instrumental accompaniment produces a pleasing enough representation of a wild, mystical night on the prairie – but it bears little relation to the words.

Towards the end of No Such Place, White finds safer ground in his more geographical music – his road music. The story of Hey! You Going My Way??? is less meaty and substantial than some of his other efforts: he brings his extremities closer to familiar ground, and the result is more successful (perhaps there is only room for one Christmas Day on an album). His evocation of “the geeks and the freaks and the crooks and the hookers” is reminiscent of the Velvet Underground – this must be deliberate, as White’s vocal at this point seems to be a tribute to Lou Reed – and the song certainly has the Velvets’ sense of subtle urgency. But the song also contains the more natural, less forced, power of, say, Alejandro Escovedo.

The last original song on the album is The Love That Never Fails, and it sees White returning once more to those traditional aspects of the South for his inspiration. Country sounds forms the basis for the song’s music (although, typically, sitars play their part). He sings gently of a an enduring love which is clearly based on some sort of religious tenet – once again, the message is a personal one, but he relates the tale to the “Angels of Death” and, along the way, gives us a massive clue as to his inspiration:

There ain't no room for dreamers in heaven
Silver linings seldom appear-except in horrible storms

Jim White’s advice to us, suggested by his music and made explicit in this song: get your dreams in now. Such clarity is rare in White’s music, and the result is surprising. At the end of The Love That Never Fails, a string ensemble plays out gentle songs, White’s (sometimes over-used) tinny alter-ego vocal recalls lines from God Was Drunk When He Made Me – apparently a message whose importance he feels warrants reiterating – and the album comes together. Finally, fragility is forgotten. After this, the reprise of Corvair comes as a fond memory and nothing more, and in this context its excessively romantic and idealised lyrics are almost palatable.

White’s third album, Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See (2004), follows on directly from the closing section of No Such Place. The stories continue in a similar vein (sometimes too similar – If Jesus Drove a Motor Home is rather too reminiscent of earlier efforts), the music is rooted in country and the South while bringing in fresh and surprising elements, and the vocals alternate between the swamp and the clouds. But White doesn’t push things to the limit quite so much, and the result, if less radical, is certainly easier to listen to.

The ambivalence White – formerly a man of the cloth – holds towards his god is even more blatant on this album. The number of mentions of God and Jesus throughout his records suggests that he is still convinced of their existence – surely he can’t be making some cute point along the lines of Dylan’s With God On Our Side every time? But in The Girl From Brownsville Texas, he makes it clear that although he believes in God, his faith in God’s ability (or desire) to be of much use to him is shaky at best:

I say "God, if you ain't smiling on me, then you ain't no friend of mine." It's late at night and this motel room's drunk, I been listening to the lonesome wind crying. My best friend once said, "Jim, what you cling to, that's the thing that you had best forget

But despite this advice, White cannot quite seem to shake God from his mind. The lyrics are far too personal for White to be making a point to the listener, along the lines of “See, how can he exist?”. White feels the need to refer many of his feelings and actions to a God he doesn’t have much time for any more – almost in the way that a person might privately continue to desire a former lover’s approval for their actions, long after that relationship has broken down. White has shattered any internal myths he held in his mind about God’s power, but he’s not sure what to fill that mental gap with. Ultimately, he suggests to God that the two of them broker a deal: if God will convince the girl from Brownsville that White is a better man than he is, then White in turn will submit to God’s will and become the “religious fool” that God desires – submitting finally to blind faith.

Ultimately, Drill a Hole… suggests only that White’s travels – in both space and time – will just carry on. As an African-sounding percussion section collides pleasingly with a tinkly piano and a country-tinged vocal from the singer, the album’s last song, Land Called Home, is probably White’s most psychedelic song thus far – he certainly sings with more than a hint of that sixties sense of abandon. And what is he singing of?

Even when he is home, White seems himself as being on the move; but that is irrelevant for the moment, as he is not there, he can only sing of it – whether he is hoping for it is unclear. Overall, the simple perspective coming out of Jim White’s music is that life is tough, but you can make it okay. Life is a journey where you encounter whatever happens to be there, and the search for some grander sense of freedom may well be a waste of time. As he sings in Handcuffed to a Fence in Mississippi (from No Such Place):

You know freedom's just a stupid superstition,
'Cause life's a highway that you travel blind.
It's true that having fun's a terminal addiction.
What good is happiness, when it's just a state of mind?
For in the prison of perpetual emotion,
We're all shackled to the millstone of our dreams.
Me, I'm handcuffed to a fence in Mississippi,
Where things is always better than they seem

But don’t be fooled into thinking that White thinks you should just accept your lot in life, or that there is nothing to be done about where you find yourself. For Jim White, freedom is deeply personal, and is achieved in the journey itself. The South, he accepts, is no great bastion of freedom. But broaden your horizons, dream your dreams, and keep moving from harsh reality to imagined fantasy, and you will, at least while you make that journey, be free.

Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle - Goodbye

2006-01-22T13:33:00.001Z

Emmylou Harris' version of Steve Earle's Goodbye is a masterpiece, and for me it sums up a lot of what alt-country is about.

Alternative country music is extraordinarily difficult to define. Musical labels like that can be meaningless and irrelevant at the best of times: after all is said and done, it is about the song. If they are used to pigeon-hole artists, then these generic labels go beyond that – the artists are subjectively imagined in the minds of the listener as wearing straight-jackets.

Certainly, no definitive answer can be given to the question “What is alt-country?” The best that can be done is to use examples of the genre to create some sort of subjective understanding of what it means. As long as no insurmountable barriers, masquerading as objective arbiters of truth, are erected, then the use of alt-country as a loose guide, backed up by pertinent example and suggestion, can open up an enriched study of some of the highlights of modern American music.

I am going to start with one particular recording of a specific song. The subjectivity of this choice of song is highlighted by the year of its release. Emmylou Harris released her album Wrecking Ball in 1995, by which time some of the other landmark alt-country bands had taken shape, made their seminal albums, and in the case of Uncle Tupelo, disbanded. How, then, can one song from this album, Goodbye, be considered an inspiration for a musical movement? Surely temporal realities put paid to any claims of significance the song may have? Well, to an extent this argument is magnetic and unanswerable. But the truth is somewhat deeper. Countless albums throughout the history of popular music could have founded a genre. As it turned out (and hindsight is a wonderful thing), some did and some didn’t. What brings a small number of isolated musical coincidences together and helps bring about some sort of loose coalition is a mysterious process. It may be down to overlapping personnel or social change. But in the case of alt-country, it is possible, just possible, that the song Goodbye at least represented, and even encouraged, the growth and coalescence of alternative country as some kind of organic phenomenon.

Steve Earle’s presence on this recording is no accident, and it is certainly not another celebrity guest spot, adding little but an interesting name on the sleeve: he wrote Goodbye himself. He is there to pass on the soul of the song, the essence of its story, from one of America’s great songwriters to the country’s foremost interpreter and shaper.

The song starts with a gentle, unobtrusive acoustic guitar figure, played by Earle himself. There are then some tentative spoken words in the background, and then Earle’s Southern drawl emerges, sounding far more laid back than when he is assaulting us with his usual barrage of acerbic verbiage: “One…two…one, two, three, four”. On cue, the acoustic introduction is overlaid by a firm but delicate hit of producer Daniel Lanois’ sound, as a rolling, muted, electric band enters the fray. And with that Earle hands over his tragic ballad to Emmylou Harris and Lanois, to do with it as they see fit. Earle has been quoted as saying that to have Harris perform one of your songs is the highest compliment a songwriter can be paid, and his humility comes through in those couple of seconds: Here’s my song. It starts like this. Okay, now it’s yours. The end result is a combination of Earle’s songwriting abilities, and Harris’ genius for interpretation. And what a combination it is.

Steve Earle is one of the great American songwriters. He tells stories with good tunes, good music, and his tales have a genuine relation to the landscapes and personalities of his nation. He has been the perfect American rebel: from drugs and gun busts to jail and back, from single issue campaigning to campaigning politician, Earle’s life has provided some sort of parallel to his art, which progressed from the naive and triumphant escapism of Someday, through the grafting and fighting petty criminals of Copperhead Road, to the dramatic re-definition of patriotism that is Amerika V. 6.0.

Emmylou Harris, for her part, is not so much a songwriter as a country icon and, latterly, a superb interpreter of songs penned by others. Wrecking Ball gave an entirely new sonic dimension to country music, and this was particularly important when set against the backdrop of her history as one of the pioneering traditionalists of the country-rock movement of the early 1970s. From the mid-nineties, she made a series of records which gave a new confidence to country artists: with her albums she instilled in these artists enough self-belief to open the door to a whole range of influences and allow their music to be cross-pollinated.

Both the story of this song and Harris’ voice are simply beautiful. Her tones seem to be at one with the words she is singing, as this terribly sad tale of loss unfolds. The narrator isn’t blaming anyone but herself; and with this self-flagellation comes a naked, almost unbearable honesty:

I remember holdin’ on to you
All them long and lonely nights I put you through

The song has a vague and ethereal quality that is, however, not without its specific events – however ill-described they are – to give substance to its heartbreaking claims.

But I recall all of them nights down in Mexico
One place I may never go in my life again

Harris sings the song with a restrained sort of passion. You know that she feels the song fully and completely; but at the same time, as Earle holds back full details of what happened in those Mexican nights, what he did to destroy such a love, Harris holds back from giving her emotions free rein. She retains some semblance of control, represented by the high-pitched stridency she employs – you feel that if she were to let it all out, the whole story would doubtless emerge, and that is not the song’s intention.

In any case, it becomes gradually clearer that such emotional intensity would destroy her, because however tumultuous it would be if she were to divulge everything that took place, this revelation would be as nothing compared with the full realisation, the full expression, of the ultimate horror: the isolated but colossal gap in her memory.

Most Novembers I break down and cry
Cause I can't remember if we said goodbye

So Harris’ vocal performance is restrained by the semi-transparent, semi-opaque story delivered by Steve Earle; and the musical direction of the recording reflects this tension. Once Earle has counted it in, a soft but insistent drum-beat underpins the song; the acoustic guitar continues but is just about submerged by the more electrified – though equally muted – patterns of the electric guitar and the bass. The whole ensemble maintains its sense of quiet, but at the same time there is urgency. As Harris sings of Mexico, the Caribbean and an evocative soft breeze, the band keeps itself at one with these images by taking the listener right there – across the plains from wherever they started out (and who knows where that is) to each new location. But at the same time, the band keeps its distance from Harris, who remains within a high pitch register; at times it seems as if she wants to drag the band back to a more traditional country sound, with blunter rhythms, higher melodies and older instruments. But the band resists, and the result is a fantastically cross-fertilised sound. A country song, a country singer, an alternative feel.

So this recording of Goodbye is particularly important. Beautifully conceived and executed, it rolls across the listener’s consciousness, enforcing some kind of musical absorption which you don’t realise has taken place until the process is complete. But it is just as significant for what it represents: the fusion of the classic American songwriter and the born-again innovator. As we will see, alternative country music always has one or other of these aspects – and, when it is at its best, alt-country is precisely the combination of the two: great American-style songs recorded in an original and fresh musical style.

Whiskeytown - influencing the movement

2006-01-15T16:51:00.001Z

The music produced by Whiskeytown is the music of a band that knew all but didn’t care. And uniquely for a band that began and ended their career together at such a young age, their story is a rounded one, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Other seminal alt-country bands have left us with unfinished business: Uncle Tupelo had only just discovered their most satisfying sound when they broke up; the Jayhawks moved away from their most countrified sound and then carried on in a variety of other directions. So of the most trailblazing of the groups that added a punky spice and songwriting grit to country music, only Whiskeytown give us the opportunity to assess a complete career – how it developed musically, and how it influenced a movement.

Right from the start, there was a feeling that Whiskeytown could do what none of their predecessors had really achieved – that fusion of country music, punk sensibilities, and superb songs. Their first album, Faithless Street, is not a complete album – and it is certainly not a great album. But it is a suggestive album. Faithless Street contains enough hints of songwriting expertise, enough rural American story-telling, and enough of a sense of unease at the confines of the country world, to indicate that this band could top the lot. In the event, having briefly touched some sort of alt-country summit, they disintegrated, leaving their chief protagonist, Ryan Adams, to attack on his own the challenges of maintaining the high standards he and his band had set so early on.

The fascinating thing about Faithless Street is the story-telling ability on display. In the sleeve-notes to the 1998 re-release of the record, Caitlin Cary, the band’s violinist-vocalist, says that the album exists “as a fond memory of simple times”. That may very well be true, but it also reveals the extent of the band’s carefree, devil-may-care attitude. Because at this point, the band were not writing very many personal songs – the individual emotion, the heartfelt pleas, and the heartbreaking tragedies would come later. On Faithless Street, for the most part they try their hand at telling other people’s stories. And although at times it comes across as facile and inadequate – where could they possibly have acquired sufficient empathy by their early twenties? – at other times, in particular songs, there is at least a real sympathy and understanding of other people’s problems; they manage to create an image of themselves as narrators who are also fellow strugglers. The unspoken implication is that although each person’s problem is her or his own, Whiskeytown are in that same broad category: life’s underdogs, life’s fighters. But how do they pull this off?

Take Drank Like a River, the second song on Faithless Street. It’s a song about a drunk with a story, not dissimilar to those we have all heard before. Like the album’s opening track, Midway Park, the song has an infectious sound which Ryan Adams in particular would perfect with Whiskeytown before using to glorious effect on his solo album Gold – not too heavy, with a really clean and ringing guitar sound which gives an exuberant feel to the saddest of songs. But this exuberance finds its way into the very structure of Drank Like a River, and it lends it an unconvincing air – the chorus explodes in a classic Adams rock and roll style, but the sound is at odds with the sentiment. The resulting effect is that the band don’t seem to have got inside the character’s head, inside his life – and in fact the first few lines suggest the same thing - the song’s narrator isn’t even sure where the root of the drunk’s problems lie:

Well, he was nearly died when he returned to the town he'd come from
He's brown bagging it tonight behind some tavern
Somebody wrecked his life, and I'll bet you it was his darlin'

When the band back away from empathising, perhaps to take their own tentative steps on that faithless street, the record is much more successful. On Tennessee Square, the country music and the more introspective songwriting combine much more effectively, providing tasters of the brilliance to come. Two untold stories are hinted at, and the tension this provides gives a more realistic and yet still more profound feel than in some other songs on the album. The singer watches the old people dancing in a local square festooned with red ribbons, but he has no money – so he just sits and watches. He can’t join them. But a wonderfully wistful musical accompaniment gives the lie to such a simple reason for his inactivity. The people are just dancing - why can’t he join them? The majestically considered acoustic guitar and Cary’s violin combine to suggest that perhaps this narrator has greater – more emotional - troubles than he is letting on, and sure enough, as the song unfolds, he hints at just that: “Vacant parking lots across the street remind me I'm going nowhere”. So this is music as a palliative for – or maybe just a temporary escape from – the depression that is his lot in life. The singing and dancing in the Tennessee Square just brings it all home for him. This use of a more immediate and genuine emotion, using the instrumentation to make the listener think about the words, is a much more mature approach than that of telling other people’s stories.

Ryan Adams would presumably agree, because as the album unfolds, the slower songs become more and more personal, written mostly in the first person singular, and many of the ballads emerge as dry-runs, developmental works, for his later more rounded (basically better-quality) solo ballads. Faithless Street’s title track uses the violin and a very down-home guitar sound to ground the story right in the middle of country music; in fact in the middle of the country itself, and for the first time, a feeling of rural geography comes through in Whiskeytown’s sound. The band’s harmonising – usually between Adams and Cary – is both natural and sweet. But this song is important in another way. The song itself is pure country, and the first of its two verses seem to paint country music as some sort of answer to the narrator’s lack of faith in god – “So I started this damn country band”. But actually this is only half the story. It takes Adams until the end of the song to fill us in fully, suggesting perhaps a reluctance to do so. But that unease at remaining within the confines of country music eventually becomes evident:

So I started this damn country band
'Cause punk rock was too hard to sing

That last line, absent in the first verse, is crucial, and explains a lot of what would come later, from both Whiskeytown and Ryan Adams. Neither act was ever afraid to use real, unadulterated country music to express that yearning sense of loss that it exposes so well. But the adventurous quality of Adams’ songwriting will not be denied, and here, in effect, he says just that – if I could have sung punk rock, I would have done. That would be my means of escape. Another ballad, Black Arrow, Bleeding Heart, contributes to this feeling. The pure country sound of the song sits comfortably with the inevitably being expressed in the lyrics, about the incompleteness and held-back qualities of every love affair. Some other genre, or more realistically the influence of some other genre, was going to be needed if the band were to live the classic American dream through their songs. As a result, they needed, if not a conversion to full-on punk music, some more punk attitude within their country music. With their next record, Strangers Almanac, they achieved just that.

It would be unfair to say that Strangers Almanac washes away everything that was achieved in Faithless Street; though it does render its predecessor, if not irrelevant, then almost redundant. However, it begins with a nod to the slower, more countrified sound of Faithless Street. The song Inn Town appears at first to be an echo of their first album. But actually it is something more than that. Much as television programmes often begin with a recap of last week’s episode, so as to set the scene for what is about to occur, Inn Town reminds of us the sound of Faithless Street, while simultaneously giving a strong impression of a band on the edge, with loose throwaway question and answer vocals hinting at the revised sentiments and fresh sounds that are about to explode in the listener’s direction:

Fifty cents or a dollar three
I don't owe you anything
Spent a life on a heart that woul
Rather not feel anything
I can try
I can see
I can want it to be
I can laugh
I can feel
I can see anything without dreaming

And indeed, the next few songs on Strangers Almanac are delivered with that very carefree attitude: “I don’t owe you anything”. Strangers Almanac isn’t a punk album – it is a country album. But it is so infused with high quality songwriting and that punk approach that “alt-country” is perhaps the only – though imperfect – way to describe this record. Significantly, the next three songs on the album were all recorded by the band around the time they made Faithless Street. But for Strangers Almanac they were re-recorded. While before they were laid-back, with guitar lines that warmed and comforted you, now they are angry and urgent, with guitar lines that bite you. Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight has a country vibe to it, with slide guitar and harmonica prominent, but Ryan Adams’ vocal is virtually shouted, and he pulls every single instrument in the band with him. Throughout this album, Adams as lead singer is also Whiskeytown’s lead musical instrument: the entire band moves, shifts and pauses whenever he does, and generally there is a togetherness born out of a trust in the songs’ main writer to shape the songs as he sees fit. The result is a completely organic sound, with nothing out of place. And so it transpires in Excuse Me…, with even the violin sounding bleakly livid as Adams barks out the song’s theme – it is my heart, my life, and I will destroy it. What else could I possibly do? It is mine to do with as I please.

Yesterday’s News takes the album further down the same path, pausing only to pick up fresh supplies of vitriol:

I can't stand to be under your wing
I can't fly or sink or swim
It's a lot like falling down
Standing up, and I'm falling down

Adams’ message is so explicit – look what you’re doing to me! So much for the slightly idealistic vision of two people’s love which is touched upon – either directly or through a third party – on Faithless Street. This song simmers a bit more than Excuse Me…, but its menacing feel never disappears as the backing rumbles on. The lyrics in the song Faithless Street, about playing country because punk rock was too difficult to master, seem more relevant than ever now, because the passions of Strangers Almanac sound as if they have been stored up for a long, long time, and are finally breaking free – perhaps from the shackles of country music? The instrumentation, of course, is still country-oriented, and who can blame the band for this? Their combination of electric and acoustic, piano and organ, violin and harp, singer and harmonist, is a good one, and enables them to retain much of what is good about country music: genuine heartfelt emotion and a tangible sense of American musical geography. But the songwriting is the key here, because Ryan Adams has found a way to express, lyrically, his restlessness. He then delivers this punked-up message with an appropriate vocal style, and that country band takes on that attitude as it follows him.

Arguably, then, the beauty of Strangers Almanac lies less in any individual songs and more in the overall sound that is created by that combination of writing, band and attitude. But along with Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight, the record does contain two further real masterpieces. Houses on the Hill harks back to the attempts made on Faithless Street to tell the story of another person – someone to whom the narrator has no discernible link. But whether Adams grew significantly as a storyteller between these two albums, or whether he increased his life experiences so much that he could write with real empathy about a broader range of things, this dip into a more conventional country song is perfectly-formed – relaxed, poetic, and above all convincing. In some ways the piano gives the song a slightly contemporary edge, but in this song Caitlin Cary’s violin combines even more effectively with Adams’ voice than her own voice does, and it is this that provides appropriate backing to the story. The songwriting lesson here is “less is more”, as Adams floods the songs with rich images described with a frugal use of words:

There were stars in the sky
There were bunkers on the hill and there were caskets to fill
Where he will lie
Shrouded in the red white and blue with the stripes

An economic use of words – often the sign of a mature and thoughtful songwriter - is even more obvious on this album’s other stand-out track, Losering. The song starts with the premise of an invented word, and to be honest, such a trick at once hints at possible genius and warns of pretentious nonsense. The reality is fortunately closer to the former than the latter. In the context of the song’s few other lyrics, and the mood of the song in general, the word “losering” takes on a massive and portentous meaning. As the song inexorably builds, as the electric guitar becomes ever denser and the harmonica and violin in turn enter the fray, Whiskeytown build a classic piece of alt-country. Again, in some intangible way, the song is rooted in the country – not as directly as, say, Emmylou Harris’s vocal performances or Jim White’s soundscapes, but still there is something in Losering that sums up the vast, sparse nature of much of the country from which this music emanates.

So Losering sums up what Whiskeytown achieved in Strangers Almanac: well-written rock music with a modern country feel to it, a carefree attitude, and a strong sense of Americana culture and geography. It is similar in that respect to Uncle Tupelo’s Andoyne. But while the latter album represented Uncle Tupelo’s swansong, thus ensuring the band went out on a high (and with a legend intact), Whiskeytown went on to make Pneumonia. With Strangers Almanac under their belts, more life experience to fuel both their writing and their performances, and an even better collection of songs, Pneumonia should have been a masterpiece – the album where the band took the Strangers Almanac sound – and hence alt-country – to a whole new level. But the reality was somewhat different. After much production and re-production, Pneumonia was released after the band had broken up; in fact after Ryan Adams’ first solo album, Heartbreaker, had come out. And either by accident or Adams’ design, Pneumonia sounds like the musical link between Heartbreaker and his next solo record, Gold. That is not to say it is a bad album – far from it. But rather than being Whiskeytown’s magnum opus, it comes across as a snapshot of where one man was at certain, very transitional, time.

Pneumonia is a gentler album than Strangers Almanac; it has a gentler sound and its songs carry a gentler message. Ryan Adams’ vocals dominate throughout – indeed, the two elements which make Pneumonia a really good album, possibly rescuing it, are the quality of the songs and Adams’ vocal style. His ability to lead and shape a band was first evident on Strangers Almanac; ever since then he has used this skill to great effect, and Pneumonia is no exception. From the outset, with the opening bars of The Ballad of Carol Lynn, his high and soulful tones act as a very real link between traditional country music and the more individualistic direction he was moving towards. But for the rest, the sound of Pneumonia is more of a mixed bag. The opening song features horns, which re-emerge from time to time; and the piano is much more prominent than on Whiskeytown’s first two albums. A key aspect of good quality alt-country music has been subtle and considered use of the piano: if there is too much piano, it dominates the other instruments to the extent that what could be a genuinely collaboratively band degenerates into a honky-tonk ensemble, or in the case of ballads, a lounge group. Pneumonia threatens to head in this direction at times – and it is difficult to escape the feeling that this is due mainly to Ryan Adams himself, who is after all the main pianist on the album.

However, we shouldn’t judge the album based on a set of premises which the band probably had no thought of when they were making the album. At times, Adams’ piano is used at just the right level, as part of a band. This is never truer than on My Hometown. Several songs on Pneumonia hark back to the narrator’s younger days, even his childhood. However little life experience someone has had, they will have a full childhood of some sort to look back on, and this is perhaps why the further back Adams’ retrospectives go, the better they are as songs:

On back down in my hometown
Everybody's feelin' it bad
No new breaks, whatever it takes
Not to have to sway it on a classified ad

Hey there Ma and Pa here I am
Money's running out all the same
I just close my eyes and bring it on home again

In the wrong hands, these lyrics – and by extension the whole song - could be cloying and sentimental. But with Whiskeytown, something saves the song and makes it sound like well developed – almost poetic – alt-country. What is that something? It is hard to pin down, but contributory factors include the subtle use of the piano, the delicate harmonies (from Caitlin Cary) and steel guitar, and once more, the way the music waxes and wanes just as Adam’s voice does. This a country song, and it is alt-country partly because of the collaborative and yet firmly directed band interplay.

It is worth dwelling on Adams’ seemingly new-found ability to look all the way back to his youngest days, because it is in these songs that he and the band most successfully fuse real country music with genuine songwriting genius. Jacksonville Skyline refers even more explicitly to his hometown, and although fans are well used to this song being performed as a solo acoustic number in concert, its incarnation on Pneumonia flows beautifully, with appropriately spaced out guitar licks and acoustic playing. Adams’ thoughtful songwriting recalls Houses on the Hill, as he creates vivid pictures which only begin to hint at the depths hidden tantalisingly beneath:

Well, Jacksonville's a city with a hopeless streetlight
Seems like you're lucky if it ever change from red to green
I was born in an abundance of inherited sadness
And fifty cent picture frames bought at a five and dime

One thing is clear from Jacksonville Skyline: much of the bitterness and anger evident in Strangers Almanac receded by the time Whiskeytown made Pneumonia. Lyrically, this can be heard most obviously in Reasons to Lie, a gorgeously half-formed feast of interplay between fragile vocalist, sweet guitar and confident violin. There is a hint of the old bitterness, but the sense that the narrator is looking for someone to blame has disappeared; or, if anything, he now blames himself. On Pneumonia, Adams begins to give expression to his own failures and frailties – something which would become a common theme in his later solo work.

The change in mood, from blame to lament, can also be heard in the overall sound. Pneumonia is a smooth album. It still has all those classic country-rock instruments – the steel guitar, the mandolin and the violin all compete for space with the more conventional rock instruments, just as on the two previous Whiskeytown albums. But while on Strangers Almanac the instruments retained a sense of individuality while also coagulating as a band, on Pneumonia there is perhaps too much direct merger between them. On songs like The Ballad of Carol Lynn and Don’t Wanna Know Why, despite some good lyrics and infectious hooks, the message is less outspoken, less outrageous, and the violin and jingle-jangle guitar are muffled. The addition of horns adds to this feeling too. Of course, this is essentially a problem of production, and is no reflection the band members’ playing; but given the music they made before, it is something of a shame. Pneumonia is probably the best collection of songs that Whiskeytown ever produced – other than those already mentioned, What the Devil Wanted, Sit and Listen to the Rain and Crazy About You demonstrate quite clearly the songwriting talent that Adams possessed in his mid-twenties. But at times, and to be fair only at times, the sound behind the songs isn’t quite as incisive as it needs to be.

Following My Hometown, Pneumonia draws slowly and majestically towards a close with the song Easy Hearts. The band provides a wonderfully drawn-out and lazy accompaniment to Ryan Adams as he sings “I’ve had a pretty hard life” – and whether he really had had a hard life at the time he wrote this song no longer matters, because he is now so comfortable with putting himself in someone else’s shoes – a talent he developed on the job. Caitlin Cary harmonises with Adams at length, and her vocal presence makes it easy to imagine that she is the person to whom he sings “Can I be yours tonight?” However the reality is somewhat more prosaic, a fact that Cary herself seems to recognise with her violin lines after the chorus, which reach out to him not for reconciliation but for a final farewell – they see to be replying to his plea with “No, it is time to go our separate ways”. After all, as Adams says before making his request, “If the money isn’t right…” After the emotional push-and-pull of Easy Heart, there is little left for Pneumonia to say. Bar Lights, packed full of jaunty violin, upbeat picked guitar, and a slightly more unhinged vocal, represents one last look back to the carefree days of Strangers Almanac. But that is all it is. For better or for worse, Ryan Adams had taken full control of his music, and would go on to make several albums which would arguably out-do anything his old band ever came up with. But for the defining and perfectly executed alt-country record that is Strangers Almanac, and also the flawed but superbly written Pneumonia, we should be forever grateful to Whiskeytown.

Alejandro Escovedo - American musician

2006-01-08T20:38:00.001Z

Here I look at the music of Alejandro Escovedo, a superb songwriter and one of the most important alt-country artists.

The trajectory of Alejandro Escovedo’s solo career has, so far, taken the appearance of a mountain with no downwards path, or a crescendo which maintains top volume indefinitely. Cut off – temporarily but for no small amount of time – by serious illness, Escovedo’s recording career was halted after he had made two records of seemingly insurmountable power, quality and feeling – the first perhaps more soulful and personal, the second probably a fuller realisation of the sound he had been striving for. With the quality of his songwriting, the maturity of his sound, and the diverse influences he reflects, his music reflects what it is to be a true and perfectly formed American musician.

By the turn of the 21st century, Alejandro Escovedo had become a master of what might best be called the ‘epic ballad’. Conventionally we are used to ‘epic’ songs being long affairs, with majestic lyrics talking of grand ideas complemented by overstated guitar solos and a dense sound. What is this all in the name of? Power. Ultimately, Escovedo has shown us that there are more interesting ways to make powerful music. But in the meantime, he has spent a great deal of time – and vinyl – perfecting this art.

Right from Paradise, the opening song on his 1992 album Gravity, it is clear that Escovedo is searching for that particular combination of the grand and the delicate, the broad and the personal. Often on his early albums, he takes a fairly meaningful set of lyrics – about home, family or history - adds in a folk or country instrumental feel, and then finally plasters on that 70s grandeur: piano, a big (in sound if not in terms of size) band, brazenly portentous chords. He is, after all, a big fan of Ian Hunter and Mott the Hoople, and you can tell. But he isn’t an imitator – his aim is to harness that big sound to his own, more introspective, ends:

Did you hear the bells a ringing
Or was that just in my head
Thought I heard the angels singing
Their wings brush across my face

There is no big idea here – this is Alejandro Escovedo’s life. First of all an acoustic guitar introduces the song’s riff; next, the singer himself begins to tell his tale; and then one by one the piano, basic drum beat and electric band enter the fray. It doesn’t sound bad – there is a natural progression to the song – but the layerered approach is somewhat crude. Time and again, on both Gravity and its successor Thirteen Years (1993), Escovedo takes a similar approach – sometimes obviously, occasionally more cohesively, and often at the expense of bothering with, or maybe finding space for, an original melody. All of this is in the name of trying (too hard?) to create a comfortable vehicle for his message: that the most intimate sentiments, the most personal of songs, can contain within them the biggest ideas of all.

In the meantime, the songs where Escovedo is less ambitious (musically, not lyrically) are much more satisfying and revealing. With its prominent country-tinged pedal steel, and the initial string sounds that would become such a feature of the Escovedo sound later on, Broken Bottle is a poignant ballad. The imagery around the title lyrics are so complete that you can forgive “J’aime mon amour / J’aime mon amour / Fools for love in every language”:

So pour me a drink from a broken bottle
And fill my glass with dirty water
What I’ve lost is gone
What I’ve gained has no name
And I’ll take my leave once more

Equally rounded – and also downright enjoyable – are the full-on rockers on his early albums. Thanks to his earlier career in the True Believers, Escovedo is well experienced with bringing the house down, and his albums are littered with real bar-room stuff – loose, carefree and containing equal measures of roll and rock. There is a secondary joy within Escovedo’s frequent switches to rocker mode: the depth and significance of his lyrics remain intact; they don’t disappear along with their more natural companions, the ballad, the string section and the pedal steel. Any songwriter will tell you, retaining your ’seriousness’ when writing up-tempo songs can be very difficult. Escovedo pulls it off by lightening his lyrics slightly, anticipating and adjusting for the brighter mood which will inevitably come with the faster song. So while early gems like Five Hearts Breaking and Last To Know contain the most transparent and solemn keys to his thoughts, a less wistful side to the narrator is shown in rockers like One More Time and Mountain of Mud.

Whatever kind of song Escovedo is singing, the expression and coherence of the music are emphasised (in the case of his better songs) and saved (in his more imperfect numbers) by his voice. Often within the same song, Escovedo will sound broken and yet healed, firm but still plaintive, and tender while still stoical. In Last to Know, he pulls the listener in two distinct directions – the words of the refrain make you want to cry out for the aching pain the narrator must be feeling; but the finesse with which he sings the lines make you want to break into a smile in recognition of the vocal qualities he displays. When he sings “More miles than money / Look at our lives and it’s so funny” it is as if he has summed up what his music is all about – not accepting his poor lot in life, not making an unconvincing martyred claim that “life is bad, but hey, we should be thankful for whatever we have”, but writing and performing the songs just as a way of sharing – and maybe, on occasion, healing. The lyrics alone do not communicate this message – they need the versatility and magic of Escovedo’s voice to get across the full breadth of his feelings.

Five Hearts Breaking suffers from more than one of the flaws of his earlier work: re-hashed instrumental riffs and the absence of much melodic variety. But again, his voice is wonderfully expansive, telling the story so convincingly that surely, surely, every word is true. The lyrics are indicative of the general direction of much of his work:

Her eyes are taken from the stars above
Her voice is five hearts breaking
Her voice is five hearts breaking

Escovedo demonstrates here his ability to show belief in some sort of destiny. It is doubtful that his sense of fate is based ultimately or solely on any religious faith – in Gravity, for example, he sings “No angels hanging from the ceiling can save you”, and in doing so he echoes a common theme in alt-country and other, recent, music to come out of the South: the use of religion as a crutch, a comfort and an imperfect belief system – one that does not provide all the answers. The usual questions regarding why God allows such a flawed world are never put, not because to do so would be blasphemous, but because the harsh reality lying behind those questions is now taken as read by the likes of Steve Earle, Jim White and Alejandro Escovedo. For them, it is far more interesting to move on from that basic point and write songs in and around the uncertainty that remains. It is clear that Escovedo does not see his sense of destiny as completely pre-determined, but nonetheless there is a sense of some sort of spiritual faith in his work. But this belief is never at the expense of a more personal love, which is at once more materialistic and more human, and whose exposition is just as poetic.

One other musical feature of Escovedo’s earlier albums that marks him out as different from his Americana contemporaries is his use of string sections – not the fact that he uses violins, violas and cellos, but the way he uses them: complete string sections as an independent and leading voice in his ensemble. On Thirteen Years, Escovedo still seems to be trying to reach that perfect marriage of the epic sound with the song in ballad form. The strings are a lot more prominent on Thirteen Years than they had been on his earlier material, and the strings perform as one unit – they are well to the fore of the sound, introducing the riffs and themes on many songs and leading the rest of the band. The result is far removed from strings’ more traditional role in popular music, with a small number of instruments present just to add colour: on this album, the sound is approaching the orchestral. On Try, Try, Try, the strings dominate an ensemble which otherwise consists of just an acoustic guitar and a bit of bass, as Escovedo attempts to find a suitable accompaniment for his bid to break away from faith and solve his problems without appeal to a higher power:

Lock away all your saints
Cos I’m gonna get it right

It is easy to be critical of the imperfections of albums like Gravity and Thirteen Years; for all of the flashes of brilliance that both contain, they do contain flaws – that is inevitable when the project being attempted is so ambitious. But on With These Hands (1996), Alejandro Escovedo finally realised what I have termed the epic ballad – a seamless, coherent and organic marriage of the most intimate and heartfelt stories with an appropriately majestic musical setting. While his earlier work sounds at times like he has plastered various ideas together, on With These Hands, Escovedo is the master of everything he attempts.

A classic case in point is the album’s emotional centre-piece, Pissed Off 2am. Normal song classification would have this number down as a ballad. As with most ballads, it has subject matter which is sad, it is slow-paced, it has sweet but not cloying harmonies, and it is full of the language of loss, drink, and lack of meaning. It touches the listener, and creates a visual image – the two protagonists are there, right in front of you, you feel like you know everything there is to know about their story, you share the singer’s despair…ultimately you begin to identify with him, however silly and inappropriate this is. But this song has something else – it has a subtle but clearly present force, which drives the song in a way which sets it apart from most ballads. It is difficult to pin down exactly how Escovedo achieves this. As with all good epics, there is a piano – but it isn’t the ostentatious plonking he has previously employed, it is more a series of delicate whispers, just in the right place, adding to the melody rather than disguising the lack of one. The lyrics also play their part in creating such a unique song – they are not the simple platitudes of loss, but something far more complex. Escovedo doesn’t just have to fight the reasons given to him for the changes in his life – there are also “barricades”, real obstacles, which he tries to knock down merely by denying their meaning. But the barricades appear again and again in the song, and the story remains unfinished, the suffering unresolved.

Why don’t you sleep?
You look as though you need it
The barricades and reasons
They mean nothing to me
Now they mean nothing to me

That, in fact, is the theme of the album – a yearning for times past, a realisation that times have changed in irreversible ways, and, at times, an uncertain hope that things will be happy in new ways. The initial rumblings and catchy bass riff of the opening song, Put You Down, give way to a description of a love that the singer just cannot relinquish, and then we are away – eleven songs of what might be called ‘Americana’ music if only because that term means so little and encompasses so much. Acoustic folk, rustic country, Latino, rock and roll…actually that last term may be sufficient on its own. The Band’s film The Last Waltz contains a revealing interview with Levon Helm, in which he describes how lots of different musical genres come together in Tennessee, as it is geographically the heart of the United States. The result? “Rock and roll”. Escovedo’s album is a classic exposition of this fusion. The song which sounds most like a rock and roll song is probably Guilty. Unlike most of the songs on the album, it is not in the first or second person – it tells a story of someone else, a man who has lost his way and is wrapped up in shame. But this is not just a token loud, pull-out-all-the-stops, rocker. It has a superb hook – that moment in the chorus where the lyrics are perfectly matched by the melody, and where the band comes together and feels the movement, the change, in the song.

Towards the end of the album, there is another song which successfully combines the epic feel with the ballad form, and this time the power of the song is more easily identifiable. The theme of loss and renewal is poetically exposed at the outset:

Take this old and very tired skin
Wrap up a newborn baby and keep her warm

Judged on paper, the words have the potential to sound trite, but with the warmth and sincerity of the vocals, the song sounds natural and almost unassuming. The ability of music itself to rejuvenate is also recognised:

Take this old and worn out violin and hold it in your arms
And make it sing

By the time we reach the album’s title track, the record is almost complete – this is a song Escovedo wrote for his father, and the life of this brilliant but only moderately successful songwriter is put into tragic context:

They say death’s the only peace the poor understand

The song builds in intensity as it re-acquaints us with the restless growls of the opening number, and we see the light, it moves “faster, howling like the wind blows”…and the singer tells us that the water of the river will heal our wounds – because once again, although the song is not about us, we feel what he is saying. Finally, the album draws to a close and we are reminded that it contains no clear message, just some themes which point the songs in particular directions – because over some more fantastically shimmering piano work, Tugboat ends by reminding us that “Gone gone those days are gone / gone gone gone”. With Escovedo now seriously ill with hepatitis C, these thoughts move beyond being simply poignant and assume the weight of real tragedy.

So With These Hands is an album to be enjoyed by those who like good quality songs and near-perfect performance. The depth of soul on display is practically unsurpassed by any songwriter anywhere, and the articulation given to Escovedo’s emotions by the arrangements and by his own voice is simply brilliant. His challenge, then, was to follow it up with an album of equal quality but different enough to enable more originality of expression. Remarkably, with A Man Under the Influence (2001), he achieved just that – and, if anything, created an even better sound.

A Man Under the Influence is less unified, less realised and less varied than With These Hands, but in its way it is no less outstanding. With These Hands is the album where he takes everything – the stories, the sentiments, the sound – to the limit, and A Man Under the Influence is a record cut from a different mould – it is certainly more accessible. Indeed, it is probably fair to say that A Man Under the Influence is the more commercial of the two albums. In the songs where he reaches for the emotional extremes, the zeniths and nadirs of his feelings, Escovedo’s overall sound is more rounded, and more familiar from track to track. The core band on this album is pretty consistent – an acoustic guitar, a string ensemble (but used in a different, more subtle, manner), and electric guitar solos which are frequent and yet, in the main, unobtrusive. With These Hands is a more diverse record – for instance when it is time for a country song, Escovedo doesn’t do things by halves: he recruits Willie Nelson to sing and play guitar on the gorgeously poignant family history of Nickel and a Spoon. And crucially, the sound varies in keeping with the shifting emotions. In this sense it takes the listener with it: you ache when Escovedo aches, you laugh when he laughs, and you’re optimistic when he is. With A Man Under the Influence, Escovedo obtains a sound – possibly his best sound yet – and he sticks with it.

Inevitably, the result of all this is that the music fits Escovedo’s sentiments more accurately in some songs than in others. The album’s opening tracks are near-perfect in this respect, and they set an example that the rest of the songs find it a bit difficult to follow. First up is Wave, which is best described as a desert song. Unlike most of his writing, the tale here is broad. The title of the song is mysterious, as he uses the verb of his opening phrase, “wave goodbye”, instead of the more obvious farewell. But as the song unfolds, using the best elements of seventies canyon music while retaining that Escovedo mark, you are transported into the world of the narrator, a world which encompasses an emotional landscape as large as the geographical one being conveyed:

Wave goodbye, everybody waves goodbye
Climb aboard the train
Turn and wave goodbye again
Some go north
Some go south
Maybe east, some left out
Some are rich
Some are poor
But everybody’s got to wave

Wave defines a broad canvass in which the rest of the album’s songs, the more local and personal stories, can find a home. The next two songs fit right in. Rosalie and Rhapsody are of a piece, but not much less distinct for that. The former is a simply-worded (by Escovedo’s standards) love song, and it is the first indication that he has really managed to bring together and gel all of the instrumental aspects he has toyed with on previous records. The acoustic guitar provides the typical base for an Escovedo love song, and on A Man Under the Influence they also come forward more, taking little solos, inter-weaving with the pedal steel, and providing a distinct country edge to the album. The strings also play their role, but rather than taking over the band and converting it into a baroque ensemble, the strings are finally used in a more complementary manner – often we hear just a cello on its own, sometimes supplemented with a violin, adding dashes of colour. This works a lot better. Finally, the use of electric guitar solos sits well with the acoustic and strings: there are many solos on the album, but they are only ever employed when the sound of the song demands it. This kind of sound is the essence of alt-country. There is a definite country basis, emanating from both the choice of instruments and, in a more mysterious manner, the mood in which they are used. On top of that, alternative touches are added – again, the choice of instrument is relevant here, but their mode of use is equally important to finding that ‘alternative’ feel – for example the use of the cello as a richly sonorous instrument underneath the vocal, as opposed to the more common use of strings, either as part of a larger ensemble or as a solo, country-style melodic messenger.

Rhapsody is a similar song: the ensemble sounds like its members have been playing together all their lives, and for the moment the music appears to fit the sentiments, too. The presence of a strong melody helps, as Escovedo produces one of his finest expositions of the poignant retrospective love song. Using two musical terms – the everyday “melody” and the exceptional “rhapsody” – as hooks, he goes back to a point well-established in the book of Escovedo: we’re all searching for perfection, and if you can’t find one, no, it’s not okay – but whatever you have for now will have to do. But keep looking. He emphasises that last point with the closing bars of the song. After the slightest of pauses, an acoustic guitar solo, its entry dramatic, its execution delicate, plays the song out.

But however good the band sounds, it is destined not to hit the right mood for every single song, and Don’t Need You is a case in point. This is still a very good song, with an impressive sound and strong lyrics. But the two don’t quite match up. It is one of the album’s most majestic tracks: that solo cello and the acoustic guitar lead the way, interspersed with electric guitar breaks, and the overall effect is dense – there is little room for more. But the words of the song are so bleak. The repeated message is blunt:

I don’t need you
I don’t need you
I don’t need you
Like you don’t need me

This is a big statement. But as he sings it, his voice falters ever so slightly: is it deliberate? Does he mean it or is he just saying, we do need each other, but it has to be mutual, otherwise forget it? Either way, there are hidden and quite tender depths to this song which could be explored if only there were room, and, as a swirling organ joins the band, the listener has little choice but to accept the words at face value and move swiftly on.

This is a shame, because the lyrics on this album are in no way compromised by the increased unity of sound. The danger must have been fairly obvious: once the decision had been made to go with a particular ensemble and its music, it would have been easy enough to write songs to match that sound. But no – the integrity of the songwriter is a constant feature of Escovedo’s records, which are really no more and no less than his attempts to express what he has to say. So despite the occasional – and we shouldn’t over-state it – lack of uniformity between sound and words, this album is in not Escovedo’s middle ground.

Velvet Guitar is ostensibly a song about writing songs and his unquenchable desire to play his guitar and make his music. But he begins to tell us that he doesn’t care exactly what went wrong, and as he repeats the refrain “Not gonna break him down”, you realise that this is not really just about playing music, it’s about his character and his life:

I hear her sing for me
But she won’t cry for me
I’m wasted, inside

As he goes round in circles, repeating himself, the song becomes a mantra – a very personal one. But there is a strain in his voice, and he clearly cannot continue to internalise this struggle. Amidst a driving incessant rhythm, it is finally time to let the band break loose…by this point on album, this point in his career, he has the confidence to let the electric guitar solo go, give it free rein, and it fits. If he had done this too much, too early, it wouldn’t have worked. He makes sure he establishes his credentials first. So by the time it happens, it gives the song, and the refrain in particular, immense power. With this, you can only hope, he finds some sort of release. The solo itself is a good one, intricate and melodic at once, rising, dipping just a bit, rising again, rising still more, then suddenly pulling back. Reflecting what must by now be emotional exhaustion for the narrator, the electric guitar lets the picked acoustic guitar and cello finish the story.

The last two songs on A Man Under the Influence show that however much he idealises the loved ones of whom he sings, however much he fears them dragging him down while does the same to them, there is a harsher reality. In As I Fall, the bottom line is that some sort of collapse is inevitable, he falls all around the subject, “Voices call but what can I do?” It’s going to happen. He’s just telling us. Then, to finish the album, he says a similar thing more tenderly. The first few lines of About This Love say it all:

It’s all about this love
It’s all about this pain
It’s all about the loss
We take to live again
So if you see me ‘round
C’mon let me in
If you see me fall down
Won’t you let me in

Escovedo is telling you, if you see me fall, if you see me in the despair that I sing about so often, let me in. Again, it has to happen. And amidst a romantic cello, the shimmering electric guitar, and a delicate mandolin, Escovedo rounds off the story with a hint of stoicism in his voice: I’ve said my piece now.

So having used With These Hands to master a sound that would fit his imaginings, with A Man Under the Influence Escovedo relaxed and just produced fantastic songs, each with a refined and natural sound. On occasion, this sound doesn’t quite do the quality of his writing justice, but this should not detract from the significance of the record. Alejandro Escovedo has hit a musical peak, and for the moment, remains sitting proudly at its top.

Uncle Tupelo - inventing alt-country

2006-01-05T20:48:00.001Z

Here's my take on Uncle Tupelo, one of the bands credited with starting the alt-country movement.

To say that I had been looking forward to hearing Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression would be putting it mildly. I had been better prepared for this album than perhaps any other – not least because I was coming to it 12 years after its release. As I discovered more and more of the alt-country field, it seemed like I was re-tracing the steps that country-rock had taken to get to where it is now. Among the Ryan Adams and Lucinda Williams records, Jay Farrar’s Sebastopol found its way into my collection and into my consciousness, and its immediacy and originality were quite startling. And then my education in Uncle Tupelo and their various offspring really did go backwards. I listened to some Wilco CDs, saw the film about the making of their classic album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, read all about Uncle Tupelo’s history, got to grips with their final album, Anodyne, and finally laid my hands on a copy of their debut record, No Depression - one of the albums widely acclaimed to have grabbed country music, shaken it free of its schmaltz, introduced it to punk, and reminded it what a few well-written songs could do.

If the term country-rock seems to be a meaningless label, a convenient way of making country music sound cool and accessible, when actually it never needed that kind of assistance, how about country-punk? Imagine Clarence White’s country picking style, combined with power chords which are delivered as a short sharp shock to your ears, literally cutting out before they begin to echo the big rock band excesses of the late sixties and seventies. That is more or less what you get in songs like That Year, Factory Belt and Flatness. These are songs written to reflect a United States that is both rural and yet industrial.

Looks like it's time to lay this burden down
Stop messing around
Don't want to go to the grave without a sound
Give this whole place a rest
Not to ride on the factory belt
Not to ride on the factory belt

The tone of the lyrics is remarkably weary coming from such young songwriters, but weary it is, as their characters (if not their selves) live an industrial life while displaying a rural mentality – there is a yearning quality which conjures up vivid images of small-town America. Whether those images are accurate or not is another issue, but this matters less than the fact that the stories told match the uneasy combination of authentic country and biting rock.

Indeed, the stinging riffs were what I came away remembering after hearing the album for the first time. Not that I was humming them to myself – if you are seeking a collection of catchy melodic hooks or vocal lines, look elsewhere. But the constant random sequencing of quick riff after quick riff, sudden tempo change, rapid country pick, lends No Depression a dynamism which is unique in character but also quite unsettling. This is not background music, and I am glad I came to it after hearing the more approachable side of Americana. The same can be said of the voice of Jay Farrar, who in the early part of Uncle Tupelo’s career was the dominant singer. Feted by such writers as Greg Kot, Wilco’s biographer, as having a golden voice, Farrar can sound very peculiar. His low tones in particular can sound graceless. But this album is pretty short of ballads, and its fast and lively style suits Farrar’s strident vocals more than any other type of song.

So did No Depression live up to the expectations I had formed? Just about. I will listen to it again and again – the way it remains resolutely upbeat in the face of some pretty gloomy subject matter makes it an album I, like many people, will turn to when I need a lift. With No Depression, Uncle Tupelo brought a modern feel, an interesting sound and a good attitude to nineties American folk music, and the influence of this album on a musical generation is undeniable. But to be honest, they left others to think about the tunes.

If nothing else, however, Uncle Tupelo laid down a distinct marker with their first album. Of course looking back, it would be easy to say that with that album they defined a genre. And although at the time even the most discerning listener couldn’t have known this for sure, it is fair to say that their debut effort marked a new departure for country music; and this, coupled with the fact that No Depression is clearly not the finished article, suggested a vast amount of potential. By the terms set by the music they made in their first album, they realised that potential with Still Feel Gone. Their second album starts with a line that would appear half way through most songs: “Falling out the window”. Jeff Tweedy even sings the line like he’s in the middle of a vocal jam. But it is the right opening line, perhaps the only sensible opening line for this album. Because with the opening flurry of easy jagged riff and harsh voice, it is as if the whole eclectic house of country-punk has come tumbling down into your lap before you can get through the front door.

In fact, Gun, the song with which the album kicks off, takes some beating. We can all name countless albums which peter out, some time soon after the promise of the first track or two. Still Feel Gone doesn’t do this, mainly because its best two songs have been placed in the two most memorable positions – first and last. If you buy this album on compact disc, you will get five very good bonus tracks tagged onto the end. Do yourself a favour – the first few times you listen, give them a miss. Because only that way will you feel you have travelled on the journey on which Uncle Tupelo’s album can take you. More than any of their other three albums, Still Feel Gone tells a story like we were taught to write them in primary school – quite simply, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

'Cause my heart it was a gun
But it's unloaded now
So don't bother

With these lines, Jeff Tweedy gives lyrical expression to the musical feel of the album. Just as the probability for confusion arising out of the combination of country and punk (as witnessed on No Depression) is resolved by the sound produced on Still Feel Gone, so these lines bring the band’s thoughts together in words. The violent idea of a narrator’s heart being a gun – not bleeding, not broken, but a deadly weapon – is counterpointed by the impotence of that very weapon. And the singer’s conclusion: oh, forget it. Once this tension is resolved, what do we get? A characteristic musical pause for breath – it does sound like the strings are breathing, you know – and then more, more, more.

That’s right – Still Feel Gone is even more relentless than its predecessor. Not until the fifth track in do we get any sign of a gentle side to the band. And even then, in Still Be Around, the acoustic guitar introduction is a prelude to an evocative song; a song of haunting doubt:

When the bible is a bottle
And the hardwood floor is home
When morning comes twice a day or not at all

As for the rest of the album’s body, the songs trip over each other, clamouring for your notice, for some special attention. None of them quite make it – what we have is a barrage of sound descending over ten songs, with all of the Tupelo trademarks: country picking, sudden stops, crunching electric guitars. But somehow, on this record, they are more together than on the band’s first album. They sound like a band without unfinished business. This sense is partly due to the words employed – the album is less sweeping than No Depression. Rather than creating broad images of blue-collar America, the lyric rely on the music to maintain that vision – which they do – and concentrate themselves on the more personal side of things. Jay Farrar’s curious voice stands out in this respect. He has the ability to sound both sublimely rich and peculiarly grating, and the nearest he gets to entrenching himself in the former quality is in the song Punch Drunk. But with the soaring way he sings the word “is”, Farrar finally combines emotion and technique in what is a seminal vocal moment.

But ultimately, the masterpiece of Still Feel Gone is surely If That’s Alright. It starts as a bleak tribute to a dream which is neither euphoric nor nightmare, but blurred circular daydream. The repetitive nature of the music is deliberate, as Farrar describes his life as a carousel, and there is definitely something vaguely hypnotic about the progression of the song. Backed initially by a lone metallic guitar which sounds like it’s been recorded not in the garage, but in the car inside the garage, Farrar delivers an intense and concentrated vocal performance, and as an organ starts softly and gradually comes to the fore, Uncle Tupelo have somehow invented alt-country, as the punky attitude, introspective lyrics, focused emotional vocals and small-guitar-organ-band all finally come together into some sort of organic whole.

In fact, I would say that it is Still Feel Gone, rather than No Depression, which sits alongside the Jayhawks’ Hollywood Town Hall as a real founding moment of alt-country – a true inspiration for the likes of Whiskeytown. No Depression fuses punk and country within the album and within songs - you can still hear the punk, you can still hear the country. The two styles fight it out for space, and that makes for an unsettling listening experience. Interesting yes, enjoyable mostly, but certainly disconcerting, at least at times. But by the second album, Uncle Tupelo had resolved the dispute. Country? Punk? Can’t find a victor? Well you’ll just have to work together. The fusion works to such an extent that by the time of their next album, the band felt confident enough to move on from the seminal sound they had invented, and make an acoustic throwback album. Because with Still Feel Gone, their first task was complete.

Produced by REM’s Peter Buck and quickly recorded in five days, Uncle Tupelo’s next record, March 16-20, 1992, has some claim to being their Basement Tapes. Like Dylan and The Band’s classic acoustic album, March 1992 contains mainly originals, some arrangements of traditional songs, and the odd cover version; also like the Basement Tapes, the feel of the album across all of these songs is historical and folky. But while the punk sound of their earlier albums has disappeared, the punk posturing remains, and the result is much darker – and vastly more powerful - than The Basement Tapes.

An early indication of what Uncle Tupelo could bring to such traditional material comes on Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down. This is not really country music – it is what most people regard as folk music, and in this case, it sounds very much like the particular strand of folk that was being played in the early sixties by people like Pete Seeger and Judy Collins. The song features a ringing guitar lines which echoes Jeff Tweedy’s vocal, and Jay Farrar’s very ordered harmonies – a world away from the raggedy vocal style of the band’s earlier albums – also root their performance of the song firmly around its origins. However, from the moment Tweedy sings the title lyrics, Uncle Tupelo put their stamp on the song – no quarter is given to sentimentality, as a strange combination of subdued and harsh tones dominates the song from the beginning.

Elsewhere the instrumental playing is often more ornate than the simple call and response feel of Satan. Black Eye is a sad song which uses the subject’s black eye as a device for describing a much deeper pain:

Like his brothers
He emptied himself
And played it safe
Like their father
He wanted to remember
But he almost always
Forgot what he was gonna say

There are no harmonies in this song, and the solo guitar uses the space provided to flick intricately up and down the fingerboard. But Tweedy’s voice sounds detached – from the emotion of the story, but also from the guitar. He sounds like a disembodied story-teller, narrating the tale in a matter-of-fact manner that allows the listener to focus solely on the story itself. In a sense, this concentration on the substance of the song, its message, is what folk music is all about.

The presence of the song Moonshiner on March 1992 suggests that there is value in comparing Uncle Tupelo, at this point in their career, and Bob Dylan. Although Dylan and The Band did not record this traditional southern ballad during the basement sessions, he had recorded a solo version of the song years earlier, in the summer of 1963. Uncle Tupelo cannot have decide to include the song on March 1992 in ignorance of Dylan’s earlier version – however great their knowledge of the original source of such numbers. But the two versions of the song are substantially different. Dylan sings the song with a thin vocal that is nonetheless beautifully knowing, as if he is coming from inside the song’s story, grasping fully what it is saying:

Let me eat when I'm hungry
Let me drink when I'm dry
Two dollars when I'm hard up
Religion when I die
The whole world is a bottle
And life is but a dram
When the bottle gets empty
Lord, it sure ain't worth a damn

Jay Farrar, on the other hand, seems to be using the song to make his own point. In stark contrast with Bob Dylan’s Moonshiner vocal (and also unlike Tweedy’s distant Black Eye vocal), Farrar’s Moonshiner vocal comes across as a temporary phenomenon – but one with much more impact than Dylan’s.

But what is that point that Farrar and Uncle Tupelo are trying to make with this album? What message are they communicating? On first listen, it appears that they are aggressively (there is that punk attitude again) returning folk music to its pre-protest and pre-political roots. This is an oft-repeated point of view: the protest singers of the early sixties were distorting folk music and taking it away from its more traditional, communitarian and personal origins, in order to help convey a broader, political message. This is certainly the view of writers like Greil Marcus, whose book Invisible Republic is based very much on the thesis that it was only in the late sixties, when Dylan and The Band started recording their basement music, that folk music was reclaimed for a more intimate setting.

Well, March 1992 is certainly strong on individual lives and their problems: hunger, family difficulties, and so on. But that is not the full story of the album. March 1992 does cover individuals, but they are constantly set in a broad context, namely the society that surrounds people and without which their stories would be meaningless. For every character on this album who escapes their problems via drunkenness, there is another who is unemployed. The album does not come together as the expression of a political movement, as a lot of the folk music of the early sixties did; but it is a world away from being pre-political or apolitical. Uncle Tupelo have a view which is both subtler and more enlightened: the link between the social and the political within song is a permeable two-way filter. Everything is, or can be, political.

So where is the country music on March 16-20, 1992? It has its moments, and in a manner in some ways reminiscent of Uncle Tupelo’s earlier albums. The album opens with Grindstone, which features some pedal steel that sounds authentic enough, and also the band’s trademark sudden change of tempo. More notable is their cover of the Louvin Brothers’ Atomic Power. Starting out as a fiddle reel, the song develops into a full-blown hoe-down, with more of those structured call-and-response harmonies which mask the song’s serious message:

Will you shout or will you cry
When the fire rains from on high
Are you ready for that great atomic power

In this way, Uncle Tupelo provide a link between older country music and more modern, ‘alternative’, country. Rather than bringing traditional music into the modern era by politicising it, introducing political themes, it sounds more like they bring the anti-traditional back into the country: by taking folk music back into the country, they claim radicalism for country music. This is something that would continue as they made their next album.

In May 1994, years of internal disharmony came to an end when Jay Farrar broke up Uncle Tupelo. What they would have done, what contribution they might have made to country music – or any other kind of music for that matter – is one of those great unknowns. They made only four albums: one in which they experimented with the fusion of country and a sort of garage punk, a second where they perfected that blend, a third in which they stripped it all away to make one of the great contemporary American folk albums, and a fourth, Anodyne, in which they took on a more traditional country-rock sound. With hindsight, it is easy enough to say that this was a very self-conscious swansong, a final nod to the basics from which they emerged, with the songs to match it. But history is never so straightforward and circular: the break-up of the band was a shock to Jeff Tweedy, notwithstanding the fact that it was on Anodyne that he really developed is own independent voice. And in fact, like all of Uncle Tupelo’s albums, Anodyne promises almost as much as it delivers – leaving us to wonder what might have been.

Even the opening notes of the first song, Slate, indicate another shift in emphasis for Uncle Tupelo. While the violin sounds self-assured, strident even though quiet, the strummed guitar for once sounds tentative, as if it is unsure of its place amidst the country instruments which have come along. Up to this point, guitars – whether electric or acoustic – had always dominated the band’s music. What they were playing was partly country, but to a large extent they did without some of country music’s staple instruments – steel guitar, banjo, violin. With Anodyne this ceases to be the case, and the guitars, while still providing the rhythmic base, compete for space with instruments which, while new on the scene, in another sense are a lot older and wiser.

The violin remains to the fore for Tweedy’s first song, Acuff-Rose, his tribute to the legendary country songwriters. The fiddle weaves in and out of the rhythm, which is set by a mandolin, and the result is an infectious-sounding country-rock tune. However, Tweedy’s voice is low in the mix, and the lyrics of the song are similarly insubstantial:

Early in the morning, sometimes late at night
Sometimes I get the feeling that everything's alright

In fact, it is with the return of one of the band’s older styles, the loose and punk-infused rocker The Long Cut, that the album really comes to life. The tempo varies as the song stops and starts, and the simple chords and drum and electric guitar driven rhythm fit nicely with Jay Farrar’s typically direct lyrics:

I've been searching and you've been gone
Out looking for the shortest path to the one that you're on
And I've already seen all I wanna see
Come on, let's take the long cut
I think that's what we need

However, this song is the exception rather than the rule, and as the country band grows slightly, with a banjo joining the fray and the harmonies spreading, the middle section of Anodyne flows unlike on any other Uncle Tupelo record. Give Back the Key to My Heart, Chickamauga, New Madrid, Anodyne and We’ve Been Had all sound fully-formed, something which cannot often be said of Tupelo songs. Their cover of Give Back the Key…, a Doug Sahm classic, is a showcase for Farrar’s soaring vocals, which as ever frequently switch between confident and well-toned on the one hand and downright odd on the other. But this number is most important for being the site, four tracks in, of the final marrying of the riffing violin and the more familiar free-and-easy drums. In a sense, this is what this album needed if it was going to work, because with that blend, we know we have an Uncle Tupelo country album rather than a plain country album.

We’ve Been Had is another important song on Anodyne. With the balanced slightly shifted away from country-punk and towards something a little more subtle and a lot more authentic-sounding (from a country perspective), that representative blue-collar feel of their first two albums largely disappears; also gone are the sometimes explicitly ideological lyrics of March 1992, which would sound incongruous against Anodyne’s musical backdrop. But We’ve Been Had shows that Uncle Tupelo were keen to retain a political element – a protest element – to their work. Their mode of expression, however, has changed, as they eschew both social commentary and ideological polemic in favour of a more pragmatic political approach, reflecting cynically on the inability of the Democrats and Republicans to be straight with them.

Towards the end of Anodyne, the song High Water perhaps provides some sort of explanation for the break up of Uncle Tupelo. Or if this is stretching the laws of cause and effect too much, it is certainly fair to say that, in retrospect, the lyrics and sound of High Water take on a real poignancy, if not a larger significance. Backed only by his own strummed acoustic guitar – such a feature of the band’s later work – and an achingly beautiful pedal steel, Farrar eloquently describes his frustrations, his inability to control his own direction, to overcome obstacles, to do what he wants to do:

I can see the sand and it's running out
It was only circumstances
But it's the difference
It gets in the way
No race is run in this direction
You can't break even
You can't even quit the game

Faced with what he saw as an untenable situation within his band, and his powerlessness to get out altogether, Farrar chose a third option – probably the only other possibility available to him – and broke the band up. Whether knowingly or inadvertently, in so doing, Farrar directed Jeff Tweedy away from country-rooted music and towards the ever-increasingly ambitious experimental and melodic music that Tweedy and his band Wilco would become famous for – far more famous than anything Farrar himself had ever done or would ever do. For his part, Jay Farrar formed Son Volt, a band which would be entirely directed by him. Their music relied heavily on two of Uncle Tupelo’s core styles – the confident and authentic country sound epitomised (somewhat ironically given the song’s absolutist lyrics) by High Water, and the jumpy, unnerving punk/country combination that was perfected on Still Feel Gone.

But other than Wilco and Son Volt, what was Uncle Tupelo’s legacy to popular music in general, and country music in particular? Starting with the most obvious things, they left us with a decent debut album full of promise, and then three truly great albums, each one radically different from the last. Still Feel Gone was the loose and breathless realisation of what No Depression had tried to achieve; March 1992 was a fascinatingly powerful and meaningful acoustic showpiece; and Anodyne was a magnificent fusion of new country and old country.

More generally, it was possibly the order in which they made their albums which has been so crucial to the ‘alt-country’ movement. The band clearly had country leanings, but from the very outset they took a garage band approach and laced their songs with punk attitude. The first two albums give the impression that whenever they were in doubt, they turned up the volume and gave an even greater voice to what they were saying. (This was their approach right up until the end – in their last ever show as a band, they played every song as a fast and furious electric rocker – even the ones which were acoustic and quieter on record, like No Depression and Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down.) It was only later that they brought it back down, making their portentous acoustic album and, ultimately, their country magnum opus, Anodyne. This, for me, is in a way the common thread that runs through much of alternative country music. Its key exponents share a boisterous approach to country music – they are not afraid to play with it, plastering new styles onto it and taking it in fresh directions. But they always bring it back home.

A final word on Uncle Tupelo - that last album was not an end product worthy of book-ending such a short and yet marvellous career. Just as No Depression was followed by a similar but better album, could Anodyne have been followed by an even more worthy epitaph? Sadly, we will never know.

Letter from London

2005-12-21T11:05:00.001Z

One more look back at 2005 - here's a gig review from January, written in the 'Letter from...' style.

Maybe it’s the places I hang out in, but I just don’t get this idea of a ‘London sound’. The phrase gets bandied about but I have lived nearly all my life in London, I work in London, and I just can’t stretch this myth into any sort of reality. The acts that I’ve heard in London over the last few months have given me folk, country, blues, Americana, classic songwriting, rock and roll…but nothing that is specifically London.

I have read my music history. I know all about Swinging London, the King’s Road, Joanna Lumley, whatever. And around that time there were undoubtedly a lot of very British sounding bands – the Small Faces and the Who spring to mind. But of the tales from that period, the one that stands out for me was when Paul McCartney went into a fashionable London club, greeted a bunch of rock glitterati (I forget exactly who – Townshend, Marriott, Richards) and played them the Beatles’ new single, Hey Jude. His peers, so the story goes, were speechless – the Beatles had done it again. True or not, this anecdote sums up all that stuff about a London sound for me – even if there ever was one, it wasn’t that important. London is too big, it has too much to offer, for one type of music to dominate in any significant sense. It’s the same today – only more so. London is massive, cosmopolitan and culturally diverse, and that is reflected in the music on offer. London has history from every age, people from every country, and music from every instrument.

But if we simplify our geographical categorisations and comparisons, we can make things somewhat easier. Is there a British sound – distinct, if nothing else, from an American sound? There is. We have always had a particular way of taking those old blues and folk traditions and making them our own. But rather than wallowing any longer in such spatial definition, let’s get on and look at one band which quite naturally takes the American roots of rock and roll and adds that British flavour.

Amsterdam’s two (internet-only) releases to date feature a lovely blend of vocal and instrumental styles. They embrace the right punk influences – following the lead less of Oasis, who name check the Sex Pistols but sound nothing like them, and more of the newer British guitar bands, like Franz Ferdinand, which have the Clash and Elvis Costello as influences. Amsterdam’s frontman, Ian Prowse, writes the most beautiful melodies and heartfelt, personal lyrics – sometimes so personal that it is painful to listen to – Hatred is Wasted makes me want to cry and shout “Yes! That’s right!” at the same time. Add to this some decent experimental keyboards, and the basis of a good – and original – band is in place. But what really sets Amsterdam apart on the first two albums is Genevieve Mort, then the band’s other singer. Mort takes lead vocals on some songs and adding her gorgeous high tones to Prowse’s on others. For many bands, throw the combination of male and female singers, trippy keyboards, and lots of “Love one another” lyrics into the cocktail mixer and the resulting drink would be late-sixties long-haired hippy music – I am thinking Jefferson Airplane here. But Amsterdam retain their punk sensibilities and the result is unique.

Genevieve Mort is no longer in the band, and their sound is undeniably different as a result. I saw them the other day at the Barfly, one of many bad venues in Camden, and Prowse, a lively and combative musician already, has put two fingers up at the subtleties of the band’s former approach. The songs were familiar but the two-guitar attack – on paper nothing new for the band – was more vigorous, and the harmonies from Johnny Barlow, the bassist turned guitarist, gave the band a real rock drive which previously came solely just from Prowse. But hats off to them – this was another great London gig by Amsterdam. They soared higher than I've seen them before; Prowse himself seemed to be flying, his music taking him far above the dank and dingy upstairs room.

Unusually, they came on in unassuming fashion - an introduction which was a world away from the first time I saw Amsterdam, two and a half years ago, when Prowse came on punching the air like a rock star lost at a football match. This time, the travelling scouse brigade made a lot of noise, but the singer held back the triumphalism for when his music started. It’s a cliché, but he let the music do the talking.

This was a gig to promote Amsterdam’s debut single, The Journey. Many of the songs sound familiar to Amsterdam’s followers, because as Prowse made clear, they have waited a long time for this recognition. But the performance was somehow more emotional than I remember some of the other Amsterdam gigs I've seen - or was it relief that finally they are (nearly) there? I don't know, but certainly naked emotion was what we got from Does This Train Stop on Merseyside? and You're a Phoney. But this is not surprising, since between them, those two songs sum up some important aspects of Prowse’s attitude to the world. Does This Train… is a tribute to his home city, Liverpool, and if anyone thinks emotion can’t be gritty, they should listen to this song. It is immediately obvious that this is a song full of warmth for its subject; but nonetheless its images range from the depressing (“EasyJet flying in the sky”) to the disgraceful (“The blood of Africa on everyone”). You’re a Phoney, meanwhile, is even blunter and has none of the romanticism – it’s a song sung to Tony Blair. He’s let us down. He’s a phoney. Simple as that. These two songs display the honesty that helps make Prowse a really talented songwriter.

Amsterdam are not a one-man band – this is a tight unit, and each member plays a role in creating the band’s distinctive sound. It is heavy enough to be rock, but the tunes are melodic enough (and reach high enough) to sound like classic British pop as well. But what's in a definition? The Journey has that bluesy feel that marks out all authentic rock and roll – whether it is from Britain, the States or wherever. If you haven’t had the chance to catch these guys live, give The Journey a try – I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Did Dylan sell out?

2005-12-19T15:51:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at a meeting held by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, a left-wing group that a friend of mine is involved in. Here's the text of (roughly) what I said - it comes across as quite informal because I wrote it as I envisaged speaking it.

The implication of the initial question is that Bob Dylan was a committed, full-time member of the early 60s movement that we will call ‘folk protest’; and then later on he sold out, abandoning his left-wing principles in the name of making different types of music – more personal songs, a rock and roll style. Well, clearly as the 60s progressed, Dylan moved away from protest songs and made many different types of music. But far too many histories of the era take a very, well, dialectical perspective, based on two types of Dylan: one, the author of Blowin’ in the Wind, Masters of War, and all the rest; and the other, the cool, disengaged rock and roller of the mid sixties, who dismissed his earlier songs as “finger-pointing songs”, a phrase calculated to upset the likes of us, and rejected all that they represented. But this way of looking at things rules out so many important factors – including his pre-Greenwich Village life, and the almost four decades since he played those shows with The Hawks and caused such outrage, and most importantly, the reasons for and the nature of the shift that undeniably took place. I think implicit in the question of whether Dylan sold out is another question – ‘Did Dylan buy in?’ If we can look more honestly and realistically about where Dylan was coming from in the early and mid sixties, we can make a more meaningful assessment of that ‘selling out’ era.

As a general point, I find it best not to be surprised, or too disappointed, when my musical heroes don’t agree with me politically. I have always felt that it was best not to judge my musical heroes, with left-wing tendencies, by the same standards as I would judge say, members of the same political party as me, or colleagues of mine in the trade union I work for, or people who explicitly claim to be something like a socialist, a Marxist, or whatever. Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, none of them have ever claimed to be proper socialists. Bragg comes close; Earle even closer in some ways, claiming he is a borderline Marxist, but although I think he is head and shoulders above those others, politically, I am not sure he fully knows what that means. Anyway it is far better to have low political expectations of your musical heroes. Then when they do good, solid left-wing things, it’s a bonus.

A comment from Mike Davis on the blurb of Mike Marquesee’s book on Bob Dylan caught my attention. He says that Marqusee “rescues” Dylan “from the condescension of his own later cynicism”. Now, apart from being one of those smug, patronising statements that turn people away from your cause, this quote demonstrates what I am talking about. Dylan doesn’t need rescuing! Left-wing readers may need rescuing from Dylan’s later cynicism; his protest songs themselves may even need rescuing from the same thing, so that they can still be enjoyed as what they were – among the greatest left-wing protest songs ever written. But to say that Dylan himself needs rescuing is breathtakingly arrogant, because it suggests that whoever is saying it knows the mind of Dylan better than Dylan himself. Has he listened to Blood on the Tracks? Or Time Out of Mind? Or any number of Dylan’s other great albums? The rest of us struggle to understand the workings of Dylan’s mind, and so we are in no position to second-guess him, although I’m about to try. But Dylan does not need rescuing from himself.

So let’s get down to the question, or rather the two questions as I’ve interpreted it – did Bob buy in, and did he sell out. First, some basic facts, which I think these days are beyond debate.

Bob Dylan started off as a teen rock and roller with no politics or folk music in his work. He played Little Richard numbers on his piano, he rarely played the guitar, and it took a long time before he started writing songs.

Once in New York, he became part of the burgeoning folk protest movement, and in 1962 and 1963 made two albums, Freewheelin’ and The Times They Are A-Changing, which helped begin the definition of a generation. I don’t think I am engaging in hyperbole when I say that. These albums were full of acoustic protest songs which need no introduction – songs which were at once directly political and wonderfully poetic. ‘Blowin in the Wind’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘The Lonsesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’. These songs had some effect, though it’s impossible to say how much, in galvanising and broadening the appeal of the civil rights and peace movements of the early 60s.

In the mid-sixties he left the folk scene behind, wrote songs about a variety of less political and more personal topics, and made more electric rock and blues music. Subsequently, he has made great albums in many genres – older-style folk, country, rock and roll, blues…Dylan is such a great songwriter that he transcends genre. Since the mid 60s, bar the odd political song and a flirtation with born-again Christianity, he has stayed out of politics, and these days seems comfortable performing for the Pope and selling an old live recording through Starbucks.

So far, so uncontroversial.

Now I would just like briefly to cover the argument that Dylan going electric, and all of the hoo-ha that accompanied it, was a political sell-out. Many of you will have seen the footage and read accounts of the set with the Butterfield Blues Band at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and his 66 tour with The Hawks. These moves were of enormous historical significance for music, but not for politics. For an acoustic folk singer, as Dylan was then seen, to go electric was a huge deal, not least because at the time he was subject to a hell of a lot of criticism. But that was because many people felt that electric meant pop. Years later, we know that serious messages can come from electrified music. From a political perspective, we shouldn’t dwell on Dylan going electric. You can sing political and non-political songs both electric or acoustic. ‘Folk’ does not mean ‘left-wing’. Before Pete Seeger ever played a guitar, people were singing folk music about their washing lines. And some great left-wing music has been recorded with electrification. So although at the time many people did equate an abandonment of acoustic music with selling out politically, it’s not a good argument. Whether he sold out is a legitimate question, but using Dylan’s switch to electric music as justification for arguing that he did so doesn’t hold up.

Before Dylan wrote and played his outright folk protest songs, he was already playing what you might call that authentic, older-styled folk music. The quintessentially American music that everyday people would play to each other around the camp-fire, in their homes in the country, in the fields – music which could be about anything; not necessarily even vaguely political. Music chronicled by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, usually based on either blues or country. Dylan went back to this music not long after the Greenwich Village days, when he recorded the Basement Tapes with The Band in Woodstock; and he has returned to that music many times since, on record and in concert. One thing seems clear: Woody Guthrie, who was an exponent of both political and what might be called “pre-political” folk music, was an early hero of Dylan’s. Not just in terms of the politics: Dylan was attracted to Guthrie’s story-song style; his finger-picking techniques; his travelling hobo persona (to the extent that Dylan invented tales of his own travels); and his politics, which were very much for the common person, against oppression, and for a fair deal. But maybe Dylan only paid lip service to each of these aspects of Guthrie’s personality and life. The young Dylan never travelled in the same way that Guthrie did; he wasn’t satisfied with sticking to the story-song spoken blues, let alone acoustic finger-picking; and, in terms of politics, while Guthrie was a sometime member and long-time supporter of the Communist Party, who dedicated the latter half of his life to the struggle, Dylan never went anywhere near that far.

So exactly how political was Dylan?

Richard Farina, with whom Dylan lived in the early 60s, characterises the politics of Dylan at the time as feeling “the intolerability of bigoted opposition to civil rights”. Fairly bland in itself. But Farina goes on to say that Dylan found opposition to such basic rights as an absurdity, and consequently he found it easy to write songs about it. The issue was open-and-shut, and so good material for songs; especially when there were specific, horrific case studies at hand – natural topics for songs like The ‘Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’, and ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’. The nuclear bomb situation seemed similarly obvious and clear-cut to Dylan – hence Masters of War. Even then, Farina points out that it was always the music that mattered to Dylan, not the politics. Not that he didn’t believe in what he was singing about; in that sense he was very much a part of the civil rights movement, and an important one at that. But artistically speaking, the political issues were being used by the songs, not the other way round. And Dylan has always – always – been an artist over and above anything else. And just as Dylan’s songs made use of the issues, in a general sense Dylan himself made use of the folk protest movement. Fame was not an end in itself – but Dylan was wily enough to realise that without it, he would not get the opportunity to practice his art with as much freedom as he wanted.

But as I hope I have made clear, I don’t believe that the exploitation here was all one way. Dylan did believe in the politics he was singing about – as I have said, it was the very fact that he believed them so strongly that made him put them in song. And the exploitation that went on was two-way, as Dylan used the movement to a degree, and the movement used him. But one of the things that impressed me most about Martin Scorcese’s recent documentary about those years was that he wasn’t painted either as an all-out left-wing firebrand or as an unbelieving and cynical user. Cynicism may have come on later, but at the time, Dylan did go far beyond what he needed to do if he was only in it to advance his own career. And Scorcese’s film makes that point with its footage of Dylan, with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica, playing songs for black sharecroppers in a field in the Deep South.

That footage was from Dylan’s trip, along with Theo Bikel and Pete Seeger, to a voter-registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi – the kind of gradualist method for improving civil rights that President Kennedy approved of. The trip in itself proved that Dylan had some sort of belief in, and commitment to, the protest movement of the time, and the footage made quite an impression on me personally. But the trip was to be a significant one in other ways too. He debuted ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’, a superb song telling the story of the murder of Medgar Evers, an NAACP activist. Also at the time, Dylan had long conversations with Jim Forman, the Secretary of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and Dylan was impressed by what Forman had to say – questioning the effectiveness of the slow-moving Kennedy reforms, expressing outrage at Kennedy’s refusal to protect vote-registration workers, and favouring more direct action. Nearly all chroniclers of Dylan’s career at that time accept that Dylan, Joan Baez and the rest were an integral part of that gradual approach – basically taking up the baton from Kennedy’s inaugural address and taking it to the people. Forman and SNCC rejected their approach. And in ‘Only a Pawn’ Dylan seems to lean towards Forman’s views – the murder wasn’t simply the white murderer’s fault – “it ain’t him to blame” – he is only a pawn in their game. There was a real structural problem here which required a more dramatic approach than the non-confrontational methods favoured up to that point.

Around the same time, Dylan wrote an apology to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, for making a speech (which you may remember from the Scorcese documentary) when he accepted the group's Tom Paine award, where he compared himself to Lee Harvey Oswald and attacked bald politicians for being bald, and bourgeois Negroes for wearing suits on the platform at the Great March on Washington, and “generally pissed on liberalism” as Dave Marsh puts it. But what is interesting is that his apology makes it crystal clear that his treatment of the ECLU event was not because he was rejecting left-wing politics; in actual fact, his behaviour represented a radicalisation, offering support to the Black Panther position that direct action led by black people, not white people, was the only solution to civil rights problems. The only thing he rejected was the liberal, white-led folk protest movement.

Dylan did perform at the March on Washington, despite Jim Forman discouraging attendance. But by this point his protest days were numbered. Dylan was increasingly struck by what the folk protest movement had or rather hadn’t achieved, its naivete, and as Marqusee points out, the authoritarian and hence hypocritical way in which it was run. He faced a choice: break off from the musical-political movement that had given him fame, and embrace a more direct form of political action; or, still break off from the musical-political movement that had given him fame, and retreat into himself, artistically. Either way, events, lack of progress and the influence of others had helped persuade him that a new direction was required. And this is where we go back to a point I made earlier: above all else, Bob Dylan was and is an artist. So of those two choices, with hindsight, there can have been little doubt about which he would choose. And there should be no surprise. Such complicated political feelings as he was going through at the time would not make good song material.

I’ve had a look at the discussion on the Workers’ Liberty website, and the point is made that, from 1964 onwards, after the album The Times They Are A-Changing, Dylan still wrote political songs, damning critiques of the political elite, big business, inequality, and so on. His very next album, Another Side Of, contained some of these songs – like ‘Chimes of Freedom’. And not too long afterwards he wrote ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’, one his most lyrically brilliant songs, and a superb indictment of modern society. I think Mike Marqusee’s central thesis is that Dylan’s post-acoustic songs of the mid-sixties – during that run of three magnificent, magnificent, albums – were actually full of social and political comment: ‘Maggie’s Farm’ is a class-based cry of rage against wage labour; ‘It’s Alright Ma’ is a damning indictment of a hypocritical, greedy and corrupt society. And there are more examples. It is certainly true that Dylan didn’t retreat totally into himself, pulling back from any social awareness. But while we don’t have time to pick lots of songs and albums apart here, I’m not sure I’m with Marqusee all the way. It seems to me that by the mid-sixties, Dylan was taking pot-shots against all manner of people and groups. He’d sweep in, condemn someone poetically, brilliantly and concisely, then move off somewhere else. And that would be that. Just like in the past, the ideal, the opinion, served the song; not the other way around. But now he would publicly deny any politics – ok he answered hecklers with “come on man, these are all protest songs”, but they weren’t. They were commentary. As he said to folk singer Phil Ochs at the time, “The stuff you’re writing is bullshit…the only thing that’s real is inside you. Your feelings. Just look at the world you’re writing about and you’ll see you’re wasting your time. The world is, well – it’s just absurd”. You could say that while Dylan still ruled the counter-culture, he provided its apolitical, its personal direction – not its political direction. From a political perspective, the songs became increasingly less specific, less pointed, and with less purpose. He wrote for himself, and never even attempted to use them externally – and nor would he dream of licensing others to do so. One of the most memorable instructions on the 1965 album Bringing it All Back Home was this one: “don’t follow leaders”. He included himself among those leaders. He was moving away from the movement. And in many ways, from the same album, It’s Alright Ma’ sums up most of what Dylan has ever tried to get across in song. The tension between the peaceful, folky style of protest on the one hand, and the more direct and possibly violent solutions on the other hand is made clear with these lyrics:

As some warn victory, some downfall

Private reasons great or small

Can be seen in the eyes of those that call

To make all that should be killed to crawl

While others say don't hate nothing at all

Except hatred

And while presidents, advertising and various other ills of modern liberal democratic capitalistic society are condemned, Dylan constantly refers back to his individualistic outlook, and implicitly his rejection of collective action to solve the problems he’s mentioned:

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged

It's only people's games that you got to dodge

And it's alright, Ma, I can make it

And finally, he admits to the presence in his mind of what would be seen as impure and unworthy thoughts by his former folk protest comrades:

And if my thought-dreams could be seen

They'd probably put my head in a guillotine

But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only

Later on in Dylan’s career, there was the occasional direct protest song. In 1971 he released the single ‘George Jackson’, about the death in prison of the Black Panther; and more importantly, in 1975 he wrote and recorded ‘Hurricane’ – a long and detailed exposition and critique of the miscarriage of justice surrounding the boxer Reuben Carter, wrongly convicted of murder. Dylan sings with urgency, anger and conviction. But even this song reads like a tacit admission of the failure of the folk protest movement: “if you’re black, you might as well not show up on the streets”. So much for voter-registration; inequality runs a lot deeper than that, as we know. In any case, these songs were isolated instances.

So, bringing all of this together so as to answer the original questions. Did Dylan buy in? Dylan bought in to an extent. He was a part-time member of that folk protest movement – he just happened to be by a long way its best songwriter and hence an invaluable asset to it. He did far more than he needed to if his only goal had been to become famous, cynically, on the back of the movement. But as he became more involved in the movement, he came to question it, and as a result he drifted away from it. He continued to write what from most other songwriters would be called dangerously revolutionary songs, and he continued to work and perform with well-known left-wing artists – Allen Ginsberg, Phil Ochs, and Joan Baez again in the 70s – but once the songs were written, that was it. He would play them live, sure, but as songs at Bob Dylan concerts, not as statements.

So did he sell out? Unless you live in the world of pigeon-holes and mass over-simplifications, then the answer has to be no. Just as he had gone into the folk protest movement both for reasons of expediency and belief, he came out of it both because he questioned where it was going and also, and moreover, because it was where his art was going. That last point is one too huge to examine here, but let us not forget that it is the central point: within two years of Another Side Of, Dylan had recorded probably the best three consecutive albums recorded by one person – Bringing it all Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. As Bruce Springsteen said in a recent interview (one which was very revealing, both musically and politically), “Trust the art, not the artist”. So did he sell out? Not really – he just moved on.

The albums of 2005

2005-12-09T22:20:00.001Z

Ok, for my first proper post, here are two album reviews - my thoughts on what I think have been the best two records released in 2005.

Modern Folk

A review of Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

Let’s be honest. The opening minute or so of this album is pretty pretentious. It’s one of those spoken introductions which I guess are supposed to sound off-the-cuff and ad-libbed. We hear Conor Oberst take a scripted sip from a glass of water, and then tell a story about a woman sitting on an aeroplane with a silent man…the plane crashes…the man speaks to the woman…and he sounds like a parent speaking to a small child – “We love you very, very, very, very, very much”. And then the fun begins. Because for all the planned implied nostalgia of the opening, this is a really good album – acoustic, loud and varied. This is a folk record for the modern day.

The first song, At the Bottom of Everything, introduces the listener to several of this album’s trademarks and recurring themes. Bright Eyes have created a remarkably economical use of music. Whether in the ballads or the loud and angry numbers, there are never many instruments on display at one time, and the sound quality has a metallic, verging on tinny, edge to it. There is no fuzz or feedback, and the harmonies have oceans between them – the singers are literally octaves apart, and the fused wall of sound that close harmony bands generate is a world away. Oberst is economical with his sentiments too, as the opening track demonstrates. After all its build-up, with bats, belfries, guns and deep water, it ends with the most throwaway and Zen-like of declamations: I’m happy just because I found out I’m really no one.

At the Bottom of Everything also contains some incredibly rapid mandolin arpeggio picking – avoiding easy-way-out repeated notes, this is Nebraska’s guitar picking speeded up a hundred-fold. Generally the album’s instrumentation is constantly interesting – and if this sounds like faint praise, listen to the way the brass instruments come in at the expense of the conventional band rather than to supplement it. This is an acoustic album with a difference.

And then there is Oberst’s voice. He has been accused of shouting instead of singing during his live performances, and there is an element of this on this album. There is certainly little finesse to the way he gets his words out, and although on some occasions he does show his gentle side, there is just so much emotion that you get the feeling he has to semi-speak some of his lines, because these are merely words which he has to get across to you; the fact that they’re part of a song is secondary. (For those of you who are by now fearing a vocal horror show – don’t panic. Emmylou Harris is a prominent and sublime guest on the album. Her performance on We Are Nowhere and It’s Now is reminiscent less of her recent duets with alt-country pin-up boys and more of her latter-day solo albums, and this record is all the better for it.)

So what is his voice – however imperfect – actually saying? What is the message that is so important that he has to express it in such a raw and unharnessed manner? Again we need to be honest – this album is not about getting across a new message, some revolutionary comment. But that’s okay; because what it does is communicate some classic political and cultural themes in an original manner. The gorgeous, gorgeous ballad (a duet with Emmylou Harris) Landlocked Blues delivers new ways of singing old laments:

A good woman will pick you apart
A box full of suggestions for your possible heart
But you may be offended and you may be afraid
But don’t walk away, don’t walk away

And the album’s starting point, a reflection on the narrator’s younger days, is re-employed to make poetical comment on the degeneracy of society:

And there’s kids playing guns in the street
And ones pointing his tree branch at me
So I put my hands up I say “enough is enough, If you walk away, I’ll walk away”
And he shot me dead

Bright Eyes’ fame was done no harm at all by their status as support act to Bruce Springsteen and REM during last year’s anti-Bush Vote for Change tour. But it would be a brave soul who denied that the tour was a home from home for the band. The album’s closing number, Road to Joy, again displays a refreshing originality in the way it lambasts the current US administration. It may take a couple of listens to reassure you that the song, at the point it really gets going, is an ironic take on what seems to be the attitude of Bush and company:

So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing
It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win
And no one’s sure how all of this got started
But we’re gonna make them goddam certain how its gonna end
Oh ya we will, oh ya we will!

After that, there is little more to say, and Conor Oberst is consistent to the end – a swift moment of self-depreciation as he makes fun of his own voice, another brief and concentrated burst of rage, and then a sudden (not violent, just abrupt) conclusion. That’s all, folks. No time for time-wasting – he got all that out of his system in the first minute of the album. The rest of it is purely and concisely crafted, and the result is the real deal.

Bruce Springsteen – Devils & Dust

Right around the time that most of America’s other major songwriters were making albums with a scaled-down sound, with a proud and organic acoustic sound reflective of the resurgence of folk and country music all the way down the food chain, Bruce Springsteen made The Rising (2002). Produced by Brendan O’Brien, famous for making records with a succession of hard-rocking bands, the album did not disappoint in that respect. The Rising is to be commended for trying to combine anti war sentiments with empathy for the victims of 9/11. But through a combination of the choice of title track, the songs chosen to open concerts on the tie-in tour (The Rising and Lonesome Day), and the fact that this was the first album recorded by the entire E Street Band in almost twenty years, The Rising is best remembered for its tub-thumping songs rather than its more thoughtfully-written and interesting-sounding songs. The sound on the album’s ‘big’ songs comes at you like a wash – nothing quite as well-defined as the wall of sound which Born to Run (1975) used to such great effect; more a big wet wave swooping at you with all the solid determination of a floundering fish.

Springsteen’s latest offering, Devils & Dust, is a different breed of album. Different stylistically, as the artist displays a delayed reaction to the ‘Americana’ boom and makes his own intimate, small-band album; different in terms of quality, because the album is a masterpiece.

Eight years ago, in his mid-fifties, Bob Dylan released Time Out of Mind (1997) – a much-vaunted return to form, in which the songwriter explored personal themes to a garage-band type backing. Springsteen is around the same age now that Dylan was when he made that album, and in a sense Devils & Dust is his Time Out of Mind. The songs are deeply personal – whether fictional or otherwise – and the directly political and economic messages of Springsteen’s 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, are rejected in favour of a more nuanced, personal, socio-political approach.

The title track, which opens the album, is an anti-war song of sorts: “I got my finger on the trigger / But I don’t know who to trust”. But as it winds towards its conclusion, and the band gradually grows, the subject matter surprisingly becomes more introspective, and the chorus asks more questions than it answers:

Well I’ve got God on my side
And I’m just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love

The next few songs follow similar personal lines, in the style of Springsteen’s best songwriting. All the Way Home is a re-hash of a song he wrote many years ago, but O’Brien’s production brings the song in line with the mood of the rest of the album. Springsteen swallows and mumbles his words as only he can, and it is left to O’Brien to command the song’s image with a McCartney-esque melodic bass line. Following this, Reno tells the story of a man who seeks solace from his problems with a prostitute – and doesn’t find anything like what he was after. Long Time Comin’ is an instrumental vehicle for the album’s small core band – Marty Rifkin excels on steel guitar. In actual fact, though, it is Springsteen's own guitar which defines the album’s sound for the most part. His acoustic playing always comes across as more thoughtful and mature than his electric playing (which sounds impressive but is actually not terribly imaginative). And on this album, it is his well-placed (at times sparse) acoustic playing which creates the album’s mood – intimate and reflective without being nostalgic or mawkish.

The middle part of Devils & Dust is what defines it as one Springsteen’s finest albums, artistically speaking. Black Cowboys is a tale of some forgotten heroes of Oklahoma, told through the eyes of a young boy. As you listen to the quiet, acoustic rumblings of the number, you are practically there in that dry place when

Come the fall the rain flooded these homes. Here in Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, it fell hard and dark to the ground.

Some song lyrics are described as poetry, but usually this doesn’t really work – even the greatest song lyrics can sound somewhat silly without musical backing. But what Springsteen has created here is great prose – words which tell a short story in pure narrative form. It is no small achievement to shape such a story into a song. The CD slip-cover recognises this new style of songwriting, as the lyrics to this (and some other) songs are printed in paragraph form rather than line by line. Pretentious? A little. But some of these songs come close to being more story than song.

Springsteen’s tendency to mumble has been referred to, but the reader should not go away with the impression that that is the main vocal style of this album. The variety on display is actually very rich, to the extent that Springsteen complements three of the album’s lighter songs with a falsetto vocal. On Maria’s Bed and All I’m Thinkin’ About in particular, his high-pitched voice sounds surprisingly well-formed, and it seems to drive the band into playing with an impish delight, touching their strings and skins rather than striking and beating them.

Finally, Springsteen does recall the politics of the immigrant that underpinned The Ghost of Tom Joad. Matamoros Banks, with which Devils & Dust draws to a close, is a sister track to Across the Border – a poignant tale of love, loss and the search for a better life in the United States. The irony of such a dream cannot be lost on the artist, opening the album as he does with the line “I got my finger on the trigger”. But the humanity of both songs rings through - along with thanks to some higher being, Matamoros Banks’ narrator sings

Your sweet memory comes on the evenin’ wind
I sleep and dream of holding you in my arms again

The similarity with the picture painted in such all-American Springsteen songs as No Surrender cannot be lost on the listener, and perhaps this is what lies at the heart of the message of Devil & Dust – although there is a lot wrong with the world, and with the United States, the remedies and palliatives which Springsteen offers have remained consistent – love, hope and good dreams. With this album, he has kept that message alive by communicating it in a fresh manner, using a new music, and it really works.

Welcome

2005-12-09T19:05:00.000Z

My name is Mike Short and this is my blog. The main aim of this blog, rather than being a repository for all manner of daily-life-whatever, is to be a place for me to post the stuff I write about music. I'm currently trying to write a book about 'alt-country' music, however poorly defined it is, and so I will post chapters of it here for people to read, comment on, and so on. But I also write one-off reviews of albums and gigs, and I will put them here as well.

I chose the name 'Fearless Romantics' for this site because it's one of those phrases that comes up time and again in the kind of music I like. It says a lot about what music should be about - a journey, pushing emotional and lyrical boundaries but with a good and kind heart.