I’m a few weeks behind, but I’m finding some gems to put in this week’s New Music. I’m also playing with a very cool new Amazon widget, where you can preview a song or CD, and download the MP3s. I think everyone will enjoy previewing the US debut CD by the British soul sensation Duffy. Let me know how you like the widget!
Rockferry Duffy
You may have already heard “Mercy”, the first great summer song of 2008, with its irresistible 60s British soul beat. Duffy is not a soul belter, but there is some substance and edge to her light voice -– After downloading the hit single (and you must), check out “Warwick Avenue” with a sultry melody that Dusty Springfield might have enjoyed (Margaux)
Preview and download MP3s….
From the Reach Sonny Landreth
Slide guitar wizard Sonny Landreth joins a cast of superstars including Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton and Vince Gill for a tasty offering of Louisiana swamp rock, blues and soul. The standout from the previews was “Howlin’ Moon” with Dr. John and Jimmy Buffet, a steamy boil of gumbo. (Margaux)
Jim Jamie Lidell
For Amy, who is a fan of Jamie Lidell and his huge hit of a couple years ago — “Multiply” which was one of those infectious Target ad songs (or should have been if it wasn’t actually). His newest CD evokes Marvin Gaye and Sam Cooke, full of funk and groove. Is Lidell jumping on the blue eyed soul bandwagon, is this a novelty disc, or a new direction? In any case, it’s absolute fun. (Margaux)
Lay It Down Al Green
Al Green still has it, 11 new songs by the soul icon and sexiest reverend in music, backed by old-school Stax-style horns, strings and organ, including collaborations with the hottest names in neo-soul, Anthony Hamilton, Corinne Bailey Rae, John Legend, and the Dap Kings. (Margaux)
Ah, the novelty song. A distinctly American song form, the novelty song has been around since the 1920s and the golden age of Tin Pan Alley. Wikipedia has an excellent short history of the novelty song (it really doesn’t need to be long) and also a huge list of novelty songs and comedic musicians. Flip through it; I’m sure you’ll recognize at least 20 if you have ears and a radio. Remember the song “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window”? Yup, that was a novelty song, and it became so popular there was actually a backlash against it in the early 50s! Maybe that’s why it’s a children’s song now…
Within my lifetime, the novelty songs to hit the charts have either been by “Weird Al” Yankovic or were dance songs. In fact, most songs that have dances that go with them (”The Macarena”) are novelty songs, although some (”The Twist”) have gone on to become just-plain-hits. Prior to “Weird Al”, comedic musicians like Ray Stevens and Dave Seville & the Chipmunks topped the charts. One of my dad’s favorite albums is Ray Stevens’ The Streak, so I know that pretty well! But for my money, the best novelty song ever (and Wikipedia agrees) is “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” In fact, the only thing better than that song is the B-side to the single — the same song, played backward. (If you don’t believe me, c’mon over to my parents’ basement. They own it. In fact, I think my parents own a lot of novelty songs. Hmm.)
So what makes a hit novelty song? Cuddle up with your “Ding-A-Ling” (Chuck Berry) and get ready to learn! (Continue Reading …)
It’s that time of year again, when the auditions, the hype, the scandals, and a few shock eliminations have come down to three people with a chance to win America’s favorite singing contest, American Idol. Or as my all-time favorite guest mentor, and original teen idol Peter Noone said so aptly “it’s a voting contest!”. While I can shake my head and lament about the artists that I might have preferred, there is one remaining contestant that has caught my interest and will get my votes, the young Midwestern rocker and crossword-puzzle-solver David Cook.
In the first audition out of Omaha, I did take notice of the kid with a geeky argyle sweater and odd spiky streaked hair who sang Bon Jovi and confessed to being a Daughtry wannabe — thinking at least his voice was less annoying than Daughtry’s, which I find merely abrasive when loud. In the early rounds, I smiled at a video package where Cook revealed he was a “word nerd” who did crosswords to relax, and Simon Cowell glowered at how “uncool” a pastime this was. Simon, Simon, what you don’t understand is that all the rock-loving librarians and bookstore girls just fell in love.
Then Cook kicked the door down with change-ups of Lionel Richie’s “Hello” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”, and we all took notice. Who cares whether the arrangements were original, who is this guy? Apparently just about the only one who got the memo that the “challenge” of American Idol 7 was to take the hoary songlist of 70s and 80s that had long passed their sell-by dates and make them sound like something on a current ITunes playlist. Several very good singers who were expected to do well, particularly Michael Johns and Carly Smithson, got panned by the judges when their 80s covers sounded like 80s covers, and so got voted off the island.
Meanwhile, the hair and wardrobe people did their thing with Mr. Cook, and he evolved from “kinda cute in a dorky way, with impossible hair” to rather presentable. No one has yet been able to determine if this has involved the use of the Official American Idol Hair Extensions that volumized the luscious dos of Kat McPhee and Haley Scarnato, or just a skillful hand with scissors and gel. As a performer, Cook displayed a quiet and grounded confidence, sometimes mistaken for smugness.
As an American Idol rocker, Cook has far more versatility than Chris Daughtry. While both have the rocker’s rasp and power, Cook’s voice has a luscious warm, sandy tone that will serve him well when he starts making records for mass consumption. His interpretations are intelligent and compelling. His take on “Always Be My Baby”, which should be released to radio NOW, is a rich dark chocolate-caramel-cappucino confection (not to be confused with saccharine, none of that at all.. ) of quiet urgency, a thinking girl’s guilty pleasure pop masterpiece.
David Cook – “Always Be My Baby”
The boy now had my attention, clearly the smartest and most interesting guy in the competition. As Andrew Lloyd Webber week approached, it was apparent to me that in order to break out the pack and make American Idol history, Cook had to expose his inner theater geek, bring his best Michael Crawford and show us that he really can sing anything. Fortunately, he listened to me, and performed “Music of the Night” with sensitive phrasing and impeccable vocal control, and proved that he is a very very good singer.
My ITunes collection of the studio versions of the American Idol songs has become sorted in alphabetical order, so I hear “Little Sparrow” from Dolly Parton night immediately before “Music of the Night”. For the first song, Cook knows exactly how to use the rasp in his voice to create a perfect “Oh Brother Where Art Thou” sound. The final verse is gorgeous, searing, raw a capella. ITunes segues right into the strings and piano of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and I melt into the deep cushion created by this lush voice. Oh yes, this is the reason you watch this ridiculous show, to hear the voice that makes you melt.
But what happens if David Cook wins American Idol? Or even if he doesn’t win, and gets signed by the 19E Music Machine? Will the money changers label him Daughtry 2, and load him up with yet another album of Nickelback clone songs?
Looking at Cook’s pre-Idol music does not alleviate the fear I have. Like previous Idol contenders, including Taylor Hicks, Cook has independently-produced music available, with prior bands, and a fairly recent solo album titled Analog Heart. I don’t know if Taylor was the first to use this strategy, but it’s a brilliant one. Anyone who found Taylor’s original songs and concert performances discovered he was a creative, dynamic performer, and a sensitive songwriter. Any serious musician who contemplates the Idol experience should make sure to have music and performances available through Youtube and streaming sites, so that potential fans can check out original product and get some idea what sort of music the future Idol would produce.
For a while “Analog Heart” could be downloaded from Amazon, but that must have been too brazen to suit “The Powers That Be” in the American Idol machine. The CD can still be pre-ordered from the Amazon site:
“Analog Heart” consists of ten radio-friendly rockers, mostly following the formula of Verse, Chorus, Verse Chorus, and repeat chorus till you fill 3 minutes. The songs seem to be about the personal angst and heartbreak common to male songwriters in their early twenties. It’s all so earnest. I don’t usually listen to this type of rock music. I want my music to have style, groove and the promise of redemption. Give me a growling saxophone or a bluesy harmonica, something I can sing, clap or dance to. Do you believe in rock n roll, can music save your mortal soul, and can you teach me how to dance real slow, that’s my motto.
Mr. Cook doesn’t answer that question in “Analog Heart”. The noisy guitar rock arrangements don’t do justice to his marvelous vocal instrument. Maybe he’s only just now learned how to use it. If I was cruising the radio dial, I don’t know that I’d switch the station when these songs came on, but I don’t think anything would grab me. A couple of songs stay with me after frequent listening, notably the closing number “Silver” with its Coldplay-style piano intro, and prescient chorus that makes you wonder if Cook had been planning his current project for some time:
So take this small confession as my price to pay
I’ve never been the kind to let go
But before you up and walk away
I’m miserable without you, you know
This silver leaves me longing for gold
Second place has never carried me home
Second place has never carried me home
You think the boy wants to win? I’m quite okay with that. I hope that one thing he’s learned in the past few months is that he has the talent and savvy to stretch the boundaries of genre and make some damn fine music.
David Ford strikes me as a man with better things to do.
Perhaps not at the moment I was talking to him. He was on the road in Idaho, en route to a show in Salt Lake City, when we battled our way through cell phone connectivity issues and spent a few moments discussing music and all the things that seem to come part and parcel with today’s music industry. But like I said, he’s got better things to do. Like, say, writing and performing music.
Ford’s been a working musician in Great Britain for more than a decade, and has even seen some measure of success as part of the band Easyworld. Since 2004, he’s been a solo artist, and has been steadily gaining fans in the United States, among them Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen. He has toured with Ray LaMontagne, Suzanne Vega, Sara Bareilles (in April 2008) and Augustana (this month), and in June will be touring with Aimee Mann. (All of his summer tour dates are available in the OFTV events calendar.) His latest album, Songs For The Road, was released last year and is available for download on iTunes.
I first heard of Ford thanks to Kired over at Cursed Monkey Paw, and I was immediately struck by the honesty and sheer musicality of his songs. No pop songs, these, although they could easily do well in a better musical atmosphere than the current music industry. Therefore, I thought he’d be a perfect fit for our readership here — we’re all tired of the current music industry, yes?
Here is the utterly enjoyable and admittedly most “pop” song from Ford’s Songs For The Road, “Decimate”. As Ford says, “It’s a positive song about inviting someone to lay all their problems on you, to take their hardships and lighten their load, wanting everything to be OK. It’s kind of like a love song.” The video, I think, is also the most “pop” of the videos I’ve seen.
More representative of both Ford’s music and his videos is “State of the Union”. The video was shot live, in one take, with one camera. “It’s a challenging thing to keep it interesting without relying on clever editing and cuts,” he says. “There’s a sense of realness as well, you’re actually watching a moment in time that happens as you see it.” (Continue Reading …)
I’m one of those people that looks for patterns in everything. I may have mild obsessive-compulsive disorder (or whatever they’re calling it these days). Let’s not discuss why; I’m here to discuss a pattern I’ve been noticing for years.
People seem to be intimidated by the serious discussion of art. By art I mean the concrete arts (painting, sculpture), music, other performance arts (dance, wrapping buildings in plastic wrap), and writing. I even see the symptoms of this in myself sometimes, and I consider myself pretty well educated and also both engaged with and skeptical of the arts communities. (Full disclosure, in case I haven’t mentioned it before: I have a bachelor’s degree in music theory and history.)
I’m going to focus on music for the purposes of this post, since that’s what this blog is about. Here are the symptoms that I have seen: Vague complaints like “that song is not like his other songs” or “that song sounds like all his other songs”. A focus on the physical appearance of the artist. A focus on the personal life/emotional state/mental state of the artist (I mean other than Britney Spears, since obviously that’s wayyyyy more fascinating than her music). Vast amounts of excitement surrounding a new release, then comments like “Yeah, that’s pretty good” after the first listen. Outright refusal to discuss the music, while dissecting the meaning of the lyrics to death. Fear of instrumentals and jams.
Now, what would a serious discussion look like, in opposition to the above “symptoms”? Well, how about a discussion of keys and chords, and the way they set a mood and manipulate your emotions? Instead of “This song makes me sad because the lyrics are so sad,” you could say “This song makes me burst out in tears in the third verse because I think the chords are different from the first two verses, they’re sadder.” You don’t even have to know the difference between major and minor! And in the discussion of lyrics, I would love to hear less “Those lyrics are funny!” and more “The internal rhymes in that verse make it sound almost like a rap, but with more melody.”
So why are people afraid to engage in this sort of behavior? I think it’s because so many artists have made it a “thing” to say, “I am an artiste,” like that somehow makes them superior. Also, a lot of critics are total snobs. Of course regular, everyday, non-music-major people are going to be intimidated!
Well, here I am, music major, critic, snob extraordinaire, to tell you that you do not need to be intimidated by my kind! At heart, I really am just a regular ol’ music listener; I have some terrible taste and some great taste, and I think everyone else does, too. So let’s all just have a little chat about music, why don’t we?
Over the next few months, I am going to make it my personal mission to bring our readers out of their shells and convince you all to join in the conversation. Let me know what I can do to make this a safe place for you to learn to talk about music without feeling like a dork. Hey, I can’t tell a diminished chord from a monkey hitting a keyboard after years and years of ear-training. So we can use words like “crunchy” and “groovy”, but I’ll also try to teach you the vocabulary of music. If this works, I’ll go start an art blog. Kidding… kinda. To this end, I’ll be picking a song every week or so, then picking it apart. Everyone is invited to jump in and tell me I’m wrong (actually, you’re always invited to do that). How does that sound?
If you said “like church music”, we’re on our way already!
This week’s releases include new records by one of American Idol’s biggest stars, and two iconic singer/songwriters.
Which raises the question — hit records these days go to the same trendy songwriters, over and over, and ignore the living geniuses. Neil Diamond got his start writing for the Monkees, certainly he doesn’t need the money, but he must have songs in the vault that would work for young pop and country stars, and join his catalog of enduring classics. Elvis Costello is a brilliant melody maker, who can be starkly beautiful or just as angry as ever, still the boundary breaking post-punk genius.
When a young singer like Clay Aiken sings classics of the 70s or 80s, it’s dismissed as “just a cover”, and the new music is forgettable. Maybe the answer is to get the “old guys” who still have the stuff to write new classics for guys like Clay.
Home Before Dark Neil Diamond
There are a few musicians with iconic voices, they cannot be mistaken for anyone else, they cannot be imitated, they transcend genre and generation, the voices convey character and conviction. Think Sinatra, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson. The gravelly baritone of Neil Diamond is surely on that list.
“Home Before Dark” is the second Diamond/Rubin collaboration. Three years ago, Neil released “12 Songs” produced by the legendary Rick Rubin, who did the masterpiece recordings of Johnny Cash in his late years. Some fans of Neil’s adult contemporary classics were taken aback by the sparse unornamented arrangements. To my mind, when you have quality songs and Neil’s enduring voice, 1001 strings or synthesizers don’t add a thing. Neil’s voice shows its age, but has lost none of its richness. If you thought that somewhere in the 80s, Neil wandered too far down the path of saccharine lyrics and “easy listening”, these back to basic arrangements are welcome. Check out “Pretty Amazing Grace” and “Power of Two” and the bluesy ambling “Slow It Down”. I could skip the duet with Natalie Maines, her voice is too flat to harmonize with Neil. (Margaux)
Momofuku Elvis Costello and the Imposters
Don’t worry, the title isn’t obscene. According to Elvis, “Well, obviously the title is a tribute to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of the Cup Noodle. Like so many things in this world of wonders, all we had to do to make this record was add water.” The album was recorded in about a week.
“I’d been telling people that I was done with recording and believed it myself. This record date reminded me that it wasn’t making music in the studio that made me miserable but the nonsense that predictably follows in what we laughingly call the “music business”. So I decided to change it and my mind. That’s what I do.”
The result is unpolished, unadulterated rock n roll as only Elvis can do. (Margaux)
On My Way Here Clay Aiken
Fresh from his successful run on Broadway in “Spamalot”, the Season two runner-up Clay Aiken releases an album that is “finally” the one he has always wanted to make. So what is it? Middle-of-the-road pop that rocks just a little. The title track, written by One Republic (who did the recent hit “Apologize”) frontman Ryan Tedder called, “On My Way Here”, has enough of the contemporary sheen to make it on adult contemporary radio, but could get old after about five listens. “Something About Her” is a pleasant piano ballad, suitable for a romantic dinner. Attempts to be edgy like the rocker “Fallen” with its vocal distortions are less successful (Margaux)
Snack Time Barenaked Ladies
The new Barenaked Ladies’ kids’ album, Snack Time, was released today. The video for “7,8,9″ is awesome:
It’s like old-school, Schoolhouse Rock kind of animation. The song is hilarious. I am actually contemplating buying the album even though I don’t have any kids. (Mari)
Kidding… kinda. To this end, I’ll be picking a song every week or so, then picking it apart. Everyone is invited to jump in and tell me I’m wrong (actually, you’re always invited to do that). How does that sound?