FEATURE: Great Danes of Love: Inspired by Under the Ivy: An Expanded Edition of Hounds of Love

FEATURE:

 

 

Great Danes of Love

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1985/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari 

Inspired by Under the Ivy: An Expanded Edition of Hounds of Love

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I have been inspired by…

a recent anniversary. On 19th March, 1986 Kate Bush performed Under the Ivy live from Abbey Road Studios in London. It was broadcast to mark the 100th episode of The Tube. The  performance is gorgeous. It highlights what a remarkable song it is. Not available on streaming services (not Spotify at least), Under the Ivy is one of Bush’s finest songs. Originally released as a B-side for Running Up That Hill, it never made it onto Hounds of Love. Recorded hurried in one afternoon, it was created after the album was completed. Released as the B-side on 5th August, 1985, it does make me wonder about reissuing Hounds of Love on its own as an expanded edition. Before going further on that, the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia collated interviews where Bush discussed Under the Ivy:

“It's very much a song about someone who is sneaking away from a party to meet someone elusively, secretly, and to possibly make love with them, or just to communicate, but it's secret, and it's something they used to do and that they won't be able to do again. It's about a nostalgic, revisited moment. (...) I think it's sad because it's about someone who is recalling a moment when perhaps they used to do it when they were innocent and when they were children, and it's something that they're having to sneak away to do privately now as adults. (Doug Alan interview, 20 November 1985)

I needed a track to put on the B-Side of the single Running Up That Hill so I wrote this song really quickly. As it was just a simple piano/vocal, it was easy to record. I performed a version of the song that was filmed at Abbey Road Studios for a TV show which was popular at the time, called The Tube. It was hosted by Jools Holland and Paula Yates. I find Paula’s introduction to the song very touching.

It was filmed in Studio One at Abbey Rd. An enormous room used for recording large orchestras, choirs, film scores, etc. It has a vertiginously high ceiling and sometimes when I was working in Studio Two,  a technician, who was a good friend, would take me up above the ceiling of Studio One. We had to climb through a hatch onto the catwalk where we would then crawl across and watch the orchestras working away, completely unaware of the couple of devils hovering in the clouds, way above their heads!  I used to love doing this - the acoustics were heavenly at that scary height.  We used to toy with the idea of bungee jumping from the hatch. (KateBush.com, February 2019)”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Clive Arrowsmith

I have speculated how there could be re-releases of all Kate Bush studio albums. I think that Hounds of Love specially is one that has not really been given much consideration. It has been remastered but, as Bush’s most-acclaimed album, there is definite scope for expansion. Under the Ivy is a song ones suspects could have ended up on Hounds of Love if it was written in the sessions and time around the other songs. So much better than a B-side, I often wonder where it could have fitted on Hounds of Love. Maybe closing the first side, or being nestled on The Ninth Wave (the album’s second side) between the opener, And Dream of Sheep, and Under Ice. Some say it would be sacrilegious to add anything to The Ninth Wave, as complete and flawless as it is. Maybe there would not be enough room to add it to the first side. Having an extra vinyl would allow room for Under the Ivy, My Lagan Love (a traditional Irish song, it was a B-side on Hounds of Love), Burning Bridge (another Hounds of Love (single) B-side), and Not This Time (a B-side for The Big Sky). There are a couple of audio interviews that could also be added to a vinyl. It seems a shame that a song as majestic and important as Under the Ivy has not been included on a reissue. Hounds of Love remains such a wonderful album. Maybe a package that includes a book, special magazine about it and an extra vinyl alongside the original album would be a great idea. Having rewatched the video of Bush performing Under the Ivy in 1986 for The Tube’s 100th show captivated me! A song that not every Kate Bush fan knows about, Under the Ivy is…

A minor masterpiece.

FEATURE: Paul McCartney at Eighty: Forty Years of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory

FEATURE:

 

 

Paul McCartney at Eighty

Forty Years of Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory

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A Paul McCartney song…

that has always had to fight for respect and recognition, Ebony and Ivory was released on 29th March, 1982. The lead single from McCartney’s Tug of War album, it has had its critics through the years. McCartney’s first major duet, it is wonderful hearing him and Stevie Wonder unite on a song about racial harmony. I wanted to look at a few specific songs as I continue a run of forty features ahead of McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June. I will look at a famous Beatles and Wings track in future features. Now, I am keen to explore forty years of one of his most underrated tracks. Seen as too sentimental and lacking necessary anger and depth, some felt that a wealthy Pop musician writing about racial tension and the need for togetherness lacked authenticity and impact. It would be a few years before the golden age of Hip-Hop began – where we saw groups like Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy articulate such topics with more anger and personal experience. I feel it is a classic McCartney track that deserves reinspection. Although it was never intended to change policies and bring about revolution in the same way many Hip-Hop artists of the 1980s and 1990s did, Ebony and Ivory has plenty of heart and is not just intended to get up the charts and cheapen something pure. Reaching number one in the U.S. and U.K. (and many other countries), I have a lot of love for Ebony and Ivory. There are a couple of articles that discuss a song that, whilst it has divided people, remains played and loved by many. The Beatles Bible give us a bit of information about Ebony and Ivory’s release and success:

“Ebony And Ivory’, a duet between Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder, was released as a single on 29 March 1982.

Produced by George Martin, it was the lead single from McCartney’s Tug Of War album.

‘Ebony And Ivory’ topped the Billboard Hot 100 for seven weeks, and became the fourth biggest hit in the USA in 1982.

The single was McCartney’s longest spell at number one in the USA as a solo artist, and the second-longest behind ‘Hey Jude’ including his Beatles work. It was also Stevie Wonder’s longest chart-topper, and enabled him to become the first solo artist to top the US chart in three consecutive decades.

It also topped the singles charts in Canada, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Norway, Spain, the UK, and Zimbabwe. It was a top 10 hit in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland”.

Stereogum run a series where they look at number one singles through the years. Although they were not overly-kind about Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory, they gave us some background about when they song was written and why:

“When I wrote the song, I thought, ‘Maybe we don’t need to keep talking about black and white. Maybe the problem is solved… Maybe I’ve missed the boat. Maybe it should’ve been written in the ’60s, this song.’ But I after I’d written it and recorded it, you look around, and, you know, there’s still tension.” That’s a very astute decades-old observation from Sir Paul McCartney, the man who attempted to heal racial tensions in the most trite, simplistic manner imaginable.

The central metaphor of McCartney’s song “Ebony And Ivory” is so basic that it doesn’t really bear explaining, though McCartney still explains it all over again anytime anyone asks him about the song. McCartney had just been through a few personal upheavals. His band Wings had officially broken up in 1981, when Denny Laine, the only longtime member of the band who did not have the word “McCartney” in his name, quit the group. And of course, McCartney was also mourning the death of his former bandmate John Lennon. He was also, at least in some sense, playing catchup. There’s some possibility that “Ebony And Ivory” is McCartney, long considered the glibbest of the Beatles, doing his best to inject some level of profundity into his solo work.

When McCartney first wrote “Ebony And Ivory,” he’d just gotten into a fight with his wife Linda, and he was thinking that they should be getting along better. Without working particularly hard on it, McCartney stretched his analogy to encompass conflicts between black and white people — a problem that, he thought, had maybe been solved. Maybe that general overall cluelessness is why “Ebony And Ivory” is so blasé and tossed-off, why it’s utterly lacking in anything resembling urgency.

Talking to Bryant Gumble on Today in 1982, McCartney said, “I wanted to sing it with a black guy.” The first black guy who came to mind was Stevie Wonder, the man who’d recorded what many consider to be the best Beatles cover ever recorded. (Wonder’s 1971 version of “We Can Work It Out” peaked at #13.) Wonder was happy to do it. Talking to Dick Clark shortly after the song came out, Wonder said, “I won’t say [the song] demanded of people to reflect upon it, but it politely asks the people to reflect upon life in using the terms of music… this melting pot of many different people.” Right now, all around us, we can see how well that approach works.

McCartney and Wonder recorded the song together on Montserrat, in the West Indies, with both of them playing a bunch of different instruments. McCartney played bass and guitar. Wonder played drums. Both of them played pianos, synths, and percussion. Linda McCartney and Denny Laine sang backup, and so did 10cc’s Eric Stewart, a man who’s previously appeared in this column as a member of Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders. (I’ve seen some reports that Isaac Hayes also sang backup on “Ebony And Ivory,” but I can’t find confirmation of that anywhere reliable, and I sure don’t hear him.) The Chieftains’ Paddy Moloney played pipes. George Martin, McCartney’s old Beatles collaborator, produced the track. While McCartney and Wonder were recording together in Montserrat, they also came up with a much better song that also appeared on McCartney’s Tug Of War album: “What’s That You’re Doing?,” perhaps the nastiest soul/funk track ever released under McCartney’s name”.

On its fortieth anniversary (29th March), I wanted to salute a song that remains underrated and a little maligned. It is a beautiful song of unity and understanding from an artist who had every right to discuss it through music. Ahead of Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, I will dissect one or two of his other songs. I wanted to use this feature to spotlight the lead single from Tug of War. A brilliant single from a terrific album, Ebony and Ivory is something that people should…

EMBRACE and love.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Shenseea

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Shenseea

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EVEN though she has been active…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Phylicia J. L. Munn for Rolling Stone

since 2015 and recording music for a while, her new album, ALPHA, has brought her to the attention of a lot of people. Her anticipated debut has captured a lot of attention and buzz. Shenseea is a remarkable Jamaican-born artist whose Dancehall sound and vibe is sensational and fresh. I am going to come to a review of her amazing new album. Before that, there are a few interviews worth bringing in. I want to take things back to 2017. Wild Cat Sound spent time an artist who, then, was seen as a newcomer. It was fascinating reading about how she started her career and how things got going:

“HI SHENSEEA, HOW DID YOU START YOUR MUSICAL JOURNEY?

I started my musical journey May 2016 when Romeich who was my boss being the fact that i did promotion, later on discovered my talent as I broadcasted videos of me singing my own songs on social medias (Whats App, Instagram etc) we both came up with an agreement for him to be more than just a promotional boss but to the manager of a career I have always wanted to pursue, which ofcourse is to be an artiste. We then recorded my first single "Jiggle Jiggle" and released it in July 2016. We further on shot a video for this single being the fact that we were receiving great feedback off the audio release.

HOW MUCH HARD IS FOR YOU - AS A WOMAN - TO BE A GOOD ARTIST AND WHY?

Its not just for a woman.. I believe to gain success entirely is hard regardless if you are a male or female. We should always work for what we want. To focus on the complications is where you are already doubting yourself. Do what must be done and do it right.

WHICH ARTISTS INSPIRED YOU THE MOST AND WHY?

I wouldn't necessarily say an artiste inspired me. I've always been a lover of music ever since I heard it and discovered that I had been given the talent to sing”.

In 2020, The Guardian chatted with Shenseea. Having put out consistently good music and put in the hard graft, she was representing Jamaican Dancehall like nobody else. Small wonder what she was exciting people! Not that the sound is niche at all. She has definitely put Jamaican Dancehall in the spotlight:

“Four years later, Shenseea is known as Jamaica’s Princess of Dancehall. She has 2.1 million Instagram followers and a slew of hits across the Caribbean. She calls her fans her “Shenyengs”. “I’m as big as I can get in Jamaica,” she says. “But everything that I had to do before, to get to where I am today, I’ll do it all over. I love to feel the hunger.”

Jamaican stars before her serve as proof that hunger alone is not enough to go global – obstacles have ranged from visa issues to a wariness of patois and colourism. But Shenseea is making savvy moves: she has a creative partnership with Interscope labelmate Rvssian, a young Jamaican producer lauded for his Spanish-language reggaeton songs and his modern take on dancehall. Together, they instinctively understand the new genre-hopping, globally focused streaming generation. “We keep the Jamaican roots but we’re trying to branch out,” she says. It’s working: their most recent single, IDKW, has had more than 4m YouTube views since its release in mid January.

Shenseea also knows how to stay on lips beyond the music. In the video for Blessed, she snuggles up to a hot blond woman in bed. It is a bold move for an artist working in a notoriously homophobic genre: it sparked a massive debate in Jamaica, with a leading LGBTQ ambassador calling the move “raw, radical, and disruptive”.

Did she intend to become a gay icon? “Of course!” Wasn’t it pandering to the male gaze? “That too,” she says, with a cheeky smile. “They always wanna see something extra from females. We have to be doing the most! Killing ourselves! Doing some stunt!” More than that: as with her eye on cross-genre pollination, Shenseea knew she was making a timely statement. Buju Banton had just apologised for his old homophobic lyrics, reflecting a change in attitudes in the country. Plus, she had the safety blanket of a US record deal: “LGBT is very big in America.”

But dancehall’s recent modernisation has failed to encompass colourism. Last year, Spice (a close friend of Shenseea’s) said how much harder it had been for her to break the global market as a dark-skinned performer. Shenseea is lighter-skinned, of Korean and African-Jamaican descent, but she says it has been hard for her, too. “Because of my light skin, people say that I didn’t have to work hard enough for it.”

Her work ethic is, evidently, beyond reproach: she is now recording a full album with Rvssian. She has already had shoutouts from A-listers 21 Savage, Cardi B, Drake and her idol Rihanna, who lip-synced to Blessed from the back seat of a cab on Instagram live. “I grew up listening to Rihanna 24/7,” she screams. “And now she’s listening to me.”

You sense that next time Shenseea is in London, she will be staying at the Ritz. But she will still be flying the flag for her country. “It’s still dancehall, it’s just evolving,” she smiles. “Because nothing is ever gonna stay the same for ever”.

In this interview from 2020, Shenseea was asked twenty-one questions about career and influences. I have selected a few that caught my eye:

“1. Shenseea, let’s talk about music and your journey as a performer and recording artist. You are improving rapidly, to what do you credit your improvements?

I travel a lot and I get to experience different audiences. Performing for me now is fun. Years ago anywhere I go I had to have dancers behind me to boost my confidence. I tell them if anything goes wrong they should take the attention (distract them). But now, it’s like majority of the time I don’t feel like I need anybody on the stage with me. Many times I tell everyone to come off the stage because I want to grab their full attention.. you get me? It’s really experience that helped to mold me and I am really proud of myself because I never once backdown. Romeich had people come in teach me to perform but performance comes with your personality and nobody can teach you that. They can teach choreography but the connection has to be natural.

2. So you did go through the A&R process?

I did and sometimes looking back and I cringe but I worked really hard in the last two years. When I first heard your voice I knew it was something special.

3. How did you develop your vocal range?

I was always an outspoken child and was told never to talk under my breath. I was always shouting. Even when I am expressing myself I was always loud so that was training my voice to be strong but the control comes from the beat. When I hear the baseline and kick in the rhythm, I know that’s definitely Dancehall and that chop manish-womanish comes out and that helped me to channel my voice. When I am onstage I say ‘ok for this next song I will tone it down a bit’, and midway I just say Yeah this is me, deal with it. It also grabs the attention of people and keeps them anticipating.

4. Do you write your music?

Yes I do. I write my music. I have over 100 songs and I wrote most of them. Doesn’t mean I won’t take a song from someone. We should be more open to songwriters but only if the song makes sense.

5. Who inspires you?

I wouldn’t say anyone specifically but growing up I listened to a lot of Christopher Martin because i’d watch Rising Stars. And Michael Jackson… I used to play Michael Jackson everyday.

6. So no other female inspire you in the industry?

Well as far as performance I watch Spice a lot and she has the stage locked. She brings the flag for the females onstage. She held her own and I respect her for that. Where lyrics are concerned I listen a lot of Vybz Kartel and challenge myself against him.

7. I take note of your freestyles. That’s not common for Jamaicans?

That’s why I picked it up. I don’t like to do what everyone else is doing.

8. I notice you are diverse…with the Hip Hop lingua as you are with the Dancehall. Which one do you prefer?

Jamaican of course. Jamaican all the way. I can’t do rap 100 percent HipHop lingua I have to add some dancehall in it.

9. You can DJ with the Hip Hop flow. With hip hop having a bigger audience and you being mixed with Black and Asian you think you will do songs for other markets like the Spanish market?

I would do a Spanish song but it has to be the right look.

10. People compare you to Stefflon Don, would you do a collab with her?

We communicate and I would. I am always up for it when it comes on to female collaborators. Not just her but it depends because I work off vibe and energy.

11. Who is your dream collaboration?

Nicki Minaj and Rihanna.

12 Where will Shenseea be in five years?

In five years I will be an international artist and in seven years I want to pursue a career in acting”.

The final interview I want to introduce is from NME. Having appeared on Kanye West's DONDA, and combined with Megan Thee Stallion on Lick, she is now in the midst of making a historical leap:

“She has good reason to be: the 25-year-old – real name Chinsea Lee – has been frontrunner in dancehall music for nearly half a decade. Whether you know her for her dancehall hits like ‘Loodi’, which features the influential producer Vybz Kartel, or perhaps her new song ‘Lick’ with rap heavyweight Megan Thee Stallion, her name continues to expand into new places. Her recently released debut album, ‘Alpha’, will only bolster that: “Most people take the word ‘alpha’ as meaning number one and I think it goes with my personality. I’m a very strong, dominant person… I’m a leader,” she tells NME.

When she featured on Kanye West’s tenth album, 2021’s ‘DONDA’, her ethereal contributions to ‘Pure Souls’ and ‘Ok Ok Part 2’ made her the first female Jamaican dancehall to appear in the Billboard Hot 100 in 17 years. Working on the record was a blessing in disguise, she says. “I did like five or six songs on ‘DONDA’ and two made the cut. I was expecting none or one, to be honest. I really blew my expectations away and Kanye has really been a gem to me. He’s treated us with respect and is a very good mentor and inspiration.”

Bringing what she learnt from all the various mentors throughout her career, ‘Alpha’ is a debut of pure musical exploration. Lee honed in on her unique mix of imaginative salacious lyrics with pop-rap sounds, like on ‘Target’ where she and frequent collaborator Tyga cruise over a subdued, rum-infused version of afroswing sounds. “Tyga is one of those people I just have such good chemistry with,” she says. “Even a mixtape or another album together, that’s the vibe I’m getting from me and Tyga”. When she’s not producing her floaty bashment tunes, you can find her trying out some R&B on ‘Deserve It’ and ‘R U That’.

Shenseea boasts that she “never had to pay for a feature on her album” because of the mutual respect between everyone on it, including 21 Savage, Tyga, and reggae legend Beenie Man and more). But ‘Alpha’ is more so about showcasing herself than making a certified hit: “It’s my first album so I don’t know what to expect, and I’m not going to be perfect at formulating the best album since it’s my first. I really just experimented on all the songs and chose the best of the ones that brought out a different side of me. All of them are my favourites, you can’t pit one against the other.”

Lee recalls wanting to be an “international pop star” from the age of five, with her aunt introducing her to the music that would later influence her to this day. “On a bad day I had no other choice but to listen,” says Shenseea, “and that’s when she’d play all the Xscape music, Usher, Whitney, Michael Jackson.” In particular, Whitney Houston inspired her to embrace her own “vocal range” and to “sing loud” and proud on the album – most noticeably on ‘Sun Comes Up’, the uplighting song of resilience closing ‘Alpha’.

From Rihanna, she takes the thick skin the Barbadian superstar has had to develop after media bashing in a decade-plus career: “She helped with my flavour, with my attitude. Watching her when I grew up, she doesn’t really respond to negativity. She doesn’t waste her time throwing stones at everybody who’s throwing stones at her. I learned that from her and now negativity never affects me because it really doesn’t”.

I will end with a review of the sublime and incredible ALPHA. This is what Dance Hall Mag observed when they reviewed one of this year’s best albums:

“In proving that she had not ditched her Dancehall dexterity, Shenseea starts her 14-track debut album on Target, riding The Stereotypes-produced beat with precision, in her unmistakeable Jamaican accent.  She begins with the song’s catchy hook on the Dancehall-fusion where she calls for her collaborator Tyga, to “aim fi di taagit”, singing and deejaying a song produced for “bubblin” and TikTok dance moves.  Tyga, who’s known to body his many features, embellishes the song with his rap lines, flawlessly.

Can’t Anymore, an R&B/Hip-Hop track about a salacious afterparty in the car, is a slower groove that makes for perfect club music.  Produced by London On Da Track, it is a song that demonstrates that she’s capable of standing on her own and shining without features.

Can’t Anymore is followed by the previously released Deserve It (produced by Rvssian) and R U That featuring 21 Savage (produced by Dr. Luke) and the song regarded as a wasted effort by critics and fans: Lick with Megan Thee Stallion, for which, the less said about that—the better.

In the Hip-Hop/Pop-sounding Bouncy, which featured Offset and was produced by Smash David (Khalid, Tory Lanez, Chris Brown) and Western (Drake, Meek Mill, Camila Cabello), Shenseea wades into uncharted territory but scores big again with her singing voice in a whisper at times and her “gunman voice” — as she described her hardcore deejaying voice — chipping in at intervals.

For the Chimney Records/Banx & Ranx-produced Henkel Glue, which has elements of Steelie and Clevie’s Gi-Gi riddim, some might find it awkward listening to a near-50-year-old Beenie Man telling 25-year-old Shenseea lascivious things such “ p_y good like gold, mi c_ky yuh drape up”, and singing explicitly about her “tight” private parts, which feels like the adhesive, which is popular in Jamaica for gluing wood and paper.  However, the two Jamaicans complement each other on the beat, in exciting Dancehall fashion, while unwittingly giving the distributors of Henkel at Red Hills Road in Kingston, a free endorsement on what might be the biggest hit of the album.

Shenseea takes on Reggae with Sean Paul in Lying If I Call It Love, which was co-produced by Miami duo Cool & Dre and Miami-based Jamaican Supa Dups.  The duet flows smoothly and beautifully and seemed headed for greatness, until the singer begins to use profanity midway, diminishing the potential of the track which would have had massive wherewithal to dominate free-to-air television and radio airwaves.  Hopefully, she will have a radio-friendly version, as this song is, albeit the expletives, magnificent.

In the Rvssian-produced Hangover, Shenseea comes in like a champion, low-keyed at the beginning until she takes charge of the hook, and tells her lover that while she knows her relationship was destined for destruction, she was hell-bent on enjoying the moments. Full of good melodies, inflections and well-written lyrics, the track should get heavy rotation.

In Body Count, she appears to address the well-known lust that Yankees have for her, as a “Yardie”, noting that the man, who saw her as the subject of his affections should not concern himself with her number of past lovers, but ensure that he steps up to the plate when they connect in the bedroom, or wherever.

Known for her stance on cheap, parsimonious, trifling men, Shenseea reminds the world that she is unwavering on that position on Egocentric (co-produced by Slyda Di Wizard and DJ Blackboi) where she disparages “mean men” while expressing her dislike of them, outlining that while she would not beg because “mi a nuh pauper, dat don’t mean yuh nuh fi offer”.

Similarly, on Shen Ex Anthem, produced and co-written by her first manager Romeich Major, Shenseea scolds a low-life ex, which with one of the punch lines being “why yuh dweet drankro?” should chalk up much laugher in Jamaica.  The phrase gained popularity following an online rant by a Seaview Gardens woman, who cursed out the father of her seven children referring to him as Dutty Goola while asking “why yuh dweet drankro”.  Drankro (John Crow) is the Jamaican name for a vulture, but is commonly used to describe those deemed “good-for-nothing”.

Her six-year-old son Rajerio Lee has songwriting credits on the Rvssian-produced Sun Comes Up, an inspirational, upbeat song about perseverance and hope, again, masterfully delivered by the 25-year-old.  In an endearing mother-son moment, an audio clip of him giving her directives as to the manner in which she should deliver her lyrics, for the song, serves as the outro.

“You’re welcome,” a delighted Rajerio responds politely after Shenseea thanks him and tells him that he “is a producer”.

Blessed, her 2019 collab with Tyga, completes the set.

Alpha is a brilliant album.  And it is brilliant not because of the features with older or more established artists.  It is brilliant because Shenseea stamps her authority as a singer and a deejay, with her rich Jamaican accent, which was not ditched as most people feared she would have done based on the content of the pre-released tracks.

She does not sound like “everybody else.”

She is distinctly Shenseea and even with the direction she has taken her sound. Those connoisseurs of Dancehall, with misgivings after Lick, should be well-satisfied with Alpha”.

An artist who keeps growing, and who is bringing Jamaican Dancehall nearer to the mainstream, the remarkable Shenseea is an artist that everyone needs to look out for and keep an eye on. Having been in the business for a while, I think that her best days are still ahead. If you have not discovered her music, then make sure you…

CHECK her out now.

____________

Follow Shenseea

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/shenseea/

Twitter:

https://www.instagram.com/shenseea

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1OFOShsIbhy1l5x73yuVyB?si=nEgSbEnBRqqIZGR52raU_Q

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChSff_mx1n57Hf-k4zFXIjg

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/ShenseeaOfficial/

FEATURE: Revisiting... Tierra Whack - Whack World

FEATURE:

Revisiting...

Tierra Whack - Whack World

___________

HAVING released…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Mary Kang for FADER

three E.P.s last December - Rap?, Pop? and R&B? -, Tierra Whack is announcing herself as a major talent. Each E.P. has its own vibe and sound. The question marks are well-placed and appropriate. Not really committing to genres, they are fascinating works! I want to revisit Tierra Whack’s debut album, Whack World. Maybe not as revered as her recent E.P.s, it is an amazing work. I don’t know if I can call it an album, as it is fifteen minutes in length. The fifteen tracks run in at a minute each. It is more of a mixtape or extended-E.P. However you class it, one should definitely investigate! Before getting to a couple of reviews for Whack World, Whack spoke with FADER. We learn more about the Philadelphia-born rapper’s start and early life. She is a huge talent that is going to go very far:

“Around 9 or 10, she was given a poetry assignment in a reading class and, with that, found the freedom to express herself on her own terms. She committed the poem to memory and presented it to her peers, garnering enough positive feedback in class to go home and ask her mom for a composition book that night. Eventually, the poems that filled the journal would become her first raps after an uncle suggested setting them to beats. "I realized that music was the only thing I really thought about — music and writing. It just all came together,” she says. “For a long time, I couldn't tell somebody how I felt or I couldn't talk about my problems because I felt like I was complaining. Writing would help me or it would be like, I can't tell you how I feel, but I can play you a song."

PHOTO CREDIT: Mary Kang for FADER 

After doing a few years in the Philly cypher scene, she got away for a brief two-year stint in Atlanta. She needed respite from feeling boxed in the place she’d always known, and the Southern rap capital allowed her an opportunity to gain perspective and experience varied audiences. She came away feeling like “someone is bound to like [my music], and that's what I care about — that one person." The time also helped her figure out who she was as an artist outside of the influences that made up her foundation. The transition from Dizzle Dizz to her given name, Tierra Whack, signaled a new artistic chapter that would be built around her own impulses. The first glimmers came through a string of experimental loosies made up of warped melodies and lyrical somersaults that she started uploading to Soundcloud in 2015. The only hint of her hometown was the way in which she could play with words and syllables, how she could bend them to her will even behind the distorted effects. 

Though none of those tracks would end up on Whack World, they were an opportunity to sharpen her edges to an impeccable point. When it was album time, she knew she wanted to present a snapshot of herself with a visual element. The rest was letting herself fall down rabbit holes: more Dr. Seuss, YouTube, Austin Powers, assorted artbooks. And once inspiration struck, she followed the feeling to its end and then started all over again. The result reflects Whack’s varied interests and a kaleidoscopic idea of what constitutes art or even an album. “It was just a feeling. It felt right to put a collection of songs together. I wanted to do videos, but I was trying to find the right person to work with,” she says of the process. “I got everything I wanted: videos and new music.”

The sudden attention coupled with critical acclaim, which Whack admits doesn’t feel real, is particularly exciting when you consider that neither the art nor the person making it fit into any sort of current trend. Popular and mainstream rap hasn’t championed a darker-skinned woman since Missy Elliot (with whom she shares a creative lineage as well), and Whack seems poised to be the one. It is just as rare that women in rap are celebrated when they steer away from the clichés and club bangers and into something that exists on its own terms, free from the expectations of grand statements or the responsibilities of saving the world. “We can't afford to look dumb," Whack says, and it’s true: Art for art’s sake isn’t a privilege that is usually afforded to those in her position, but words like “usually” mean nothing. She’s making her own rules. "I've noticed [those kinds of patterns] in that world, but I'm living in Whack World”.

I think that Whack World got a lot of attention in 2018, though you do not really see people discussing it now. It got some acclaim, yet many may have overlooked the mixtape/album because it is quite short. The fact Tierra Whack doesn’t like her own voice or would get bored with a full-length song means we get these sketches and ideas. I think they all hang together and there are no weak tracks. Hip Hop DX gave their thoughts on the incredible Whack World:

“Tierra Whack recently released her unconventional debut album, Whack World, a strange journey into the eccentric mind of the burgeoning Philadelphia artist. Before getting into what makes the 15-minute audiovisual project brilliant, let’s talk about the glaring negative.

It’s too damn short.

Each song on the 15-track effort is precisely (and purposely) one-minute long to coincide with 15 Instagram videos that go along with the album. Just when “Hookers” gets going with its infectious R&B groove and unabashed bravado, it’s over.

Simply put, the songs feel unfinished, which is a shame because — and here’s the crazy part — they’re all so good. Even without the video clips, Whack is able to express nearly every emotion a woman can experience in a 24-hour period, backed by a myriad of musical styles.

From the doo-wop stylings and heartbreak vibe of “Silly Sam” to the country twang in the brazen “Fuck Off” anthem, Whack exposes her audience to the multiple characters she’s able to summon from her complex and colorful personality.

Coupled with the inventive visuals, the Whack World experience puts all senses on high alert. For “Bugs Life,” Whack removes her hood to unveil a horribly disfigured face as she asserts, “Yeah/Probably would of blew overnight if I was white/Rap with a mic and wore really baggy tights/It’s aight,” seemingly accepting her slow rise to notoriety.

After all, the former Philly battle rapper known as Dizzle Dizz has been at it since 2011, when she was still a wide-eyed 16-year-old. Her unwavering determination is evident on album opener “Black Nails,” as she raps, “Best believe I’m gon’ sell/If I just be myself. ”

Like the American flag on the moon, Whack World is the 22-year-old’s declaration that she has arrived. Not since Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)” has a female rapper/singer captivated her audience with such weird, unbridled innovation.

But instead of a giant, inflatable trash bag-looking ensemble, Whack dons multiple looks for her video collection — she plays a dog groomer in “Flea Market,” boujee badass in “Hungry Hippo,” beret-wearing animal lover mourning her dog’s death in “Pet Cemetery,” balloon-popping maniac in the aforementioned “Fuck Off” and chubby exercise fiend in “Fruit Salad.”

As Whack World begins to come to a close, Whack proves she’s poised for an industry takeover if she plays her cards right, especially on project highlight “Pretty Ugly” when she spits, “It’s about to get ugly, flow so mean I just can’t be polite/Don’t worry ’bout me/I’m doing good, I’m doing great, alright.”

Like many of her peers (Solange, Tyler The Creator, Vince Staples, Mike WiLL Made-It) have already acknowledged, the Whack World of Tierra Whack is one that demands more exploration”.

I am going to finish off with a review from Pitchfork. Gaining acclaim from various sources, Whack World is a stunning debut from a remarkable artist. If you have not heard Whack World, you definitely need to check it out:

“Whack World is a funhouse of minute-long vignettes, teetering between a fantastic dream and an unsettling nightmare. Lyrics share double meanings with the corresponding 15-minute visual Whack released alongside the album, which adds even more dimension and intrigue to the ambitious project; light and dark are forced to coexist. At one point, she snips the strings off of red helium balloons while singing in a comically excessive twang to a potential suitor: “You remind me of my deadbeat dad.” In another bubblegum-backdropped scene, she reveals a half-swollen face and declares: “Probably would’ve blew overnight if I was white.” She’s probably not wrong.

This isn’t Whack’s first foray into the absurd. Last year’s “MUMBO JUMBO” video found her in the midst of a horrifying dentist appointment that could double as a deleted scene from Get Out. On that song, she delivers novocaine-induced, mush-mouthed lyrics over a trap beat that forces you to question whether it even matters what she’s saying. Her point, in part, was that mumbling doesn’t always connote the absence of skill but, on the contrary, can be a valid mode of creative expression. It’s a shrewd suggestion and one that lands well, considering her own lyrical nimbleness, and the way she need not rely on it to make compelling music.

 Little arguments and stories like this land all over Whack World. Despite the brevity of the songs (every single one is exactly a minute long), there are no half-baked ideas here; huge revelations are nestled in the frivolous. “4 Wings” masks the sting of death in a carryout order, while “Pet Cemetery” smudges the line between mourning your dog and mourning your dawg. “My dog had a name/Keepin’ his name alive,” she sings over a disarmingly jovial staccato piano, complete with barking puppies in the background and a video that’s just as literal. Elsewhere, on a lighter note, she encourages self-care—eating fruits and veggies, and drinking water—on “Fruit Salad,” while affirming that she cannot be defined nor denied.

Whack World puts forth a portrait of the good and the bad, the weird and the unremarkable, while plowing through insecurities. She uses vanity mirrors to magnify her features on a song titled “Pretty Ugly” and bursts out of a house several sizes too small on “Dr. Seuss,” as if to reflect that feeling of having outgrown your surroundings or other people’s expectations. With the walls closing in, she throws down a bit of wordplay in a helium-infused voice—“Look but don’t touch/I should just be celibate/You the type to sell out/Me? I’m trying to sell a bit”—before pitching into a warped slo-mo like she’s being smothered.

The triumph of Whack World feels that much more important given the music industry’s stubborn refusal to champion diverse portrayals of women in rap outside of hypersexualized stereotypes. There is freedom in the margins, and Whack has crafted a work that beautifully manifests her own vision on her own terms. The result is brilliant—from the length of the songs down to the exaggerated imagery. Though she springs from a rich stylistic lineage, her 60-second confections have few modern precedents. Short songs, while in vogue, serve a different purpose here: Where others stretch small ideas and repetition, thinning them out for easy absorption, Whack uses the time constraint to make her big ideas seem larger than the space they’re allotted. Like an evolution in real time, she gives just enough to complete the thought before she morphs and catapults you to the next one.

Whack World morphs into a clever exercise in economy and using only what you need. It’s a visual album prepackaged for optimum social media consumption; every tiny piece stands on its own without losing sight of the larger picture. At its core, though, Whack’s sense of humor—her captivating depiction of a black woman’s imagination—is an opportunity to celebrate an aspect of art that often goes uncelebrated, an opportunity for Whack to celebrate herself”.

A tremendous work from 2018, I wanted to revisit the amazing Whack World. I am excited to see what comes next for Whack and where her music heads. A stunning and astonish talent who is one of the best artists in the world, Whack World is a…

SUPERB and memorable debut.

FEATURE: Inside Tom’s Diner… Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing at Thirty-Five

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Inside Tom’s Diner…

Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing at Thirty-Five

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AN album that is thirty-five on 1st April…

Suzanne Vega’s second album, Solitude Standing, is a magnificent release. The most commercially successful and critically acclaimed album of Vega's career, being certified Platinum in the U.S. It reached eleven on the Billboard 200. An album that does not get ranked alongside the best of the 1980s, I think that is definitely should be. With two huge hits in the form of Tom’s Diner and Luka, Vega created some of her best work for Solitude Standing. It is an album where the deeper cuts are fascinating. Night Vision, Calypso and Tom's Diner (Reprise) are incredible songs. I love Vega’s singing and writing throughout. What appears to be unassuming and almost gentle performances are so full of depth and nuance. Originality and feeling. It is a stunning album. I want to draw a couple of features together that highlight a mesmeric album from the wonderful Suzanne Vega. Hi-Fi News revisited Solitude Standing in 2019:

“The runaway success of her 1987 single 'Luka' propelled this singer into the limelight leaving the album from which it was taken somewhat in the shade. Yet this delicate mix of sharply observed stories told with unassuming vocals is as iconic as they come

The unexpected success of Suzanne Vega's 1985 debut album put her under considerable pressure from her manager, Ron Fierstein, to record a follow-up. Despite that pressure, the album she delivered in 1987, Solitude Standing, pole-vaulted her to international multi-platinum status, establishing Vega as the pre-eminent female singer-songwriter of the era.

Although born in California, and having studied dance at The New York School of Performing Arts (aka the 'Fame' school), that debut album had made her the darling of the Big Apple's Greenwich Village left-of-centre folkie set and she found herself being described as a 'frail, wan, waif-like poetess of enormous sensitivity'. She was determined that Solitude Standing would present her in a different light.

Pop The Question

'With the proceeds from my first album I had bought a house out on Cape Cod,' she has revealed, 'and we decided to do what was called woodshedding. We lived in this house all together, with my band, and we would practice in the basement, and some of the songs came together that way.'

Having been writing songs from an early age, Vega had a considerable backlog of unrecorded material to draw on, which included 'Gypsy' from the late 1970s, 'Tom's Diner' from 1981 and 'Luka' from 1984. It was these latter two which would rocket her to a level of stardom that she found somewhat uncomfortable. 'I was confused 'cause "Luka" was a hit and I was never expecting it to be one. So I became popular, which made it pop. So this made me confused. Am I pop, am I folk?'

Harrowing Tale

The album opens with 'Tom's Diner', an immediately arresting a cappella rumination about a day in 1981 when she visited a local restaurant. 'It's a real diner. It's called Tom's Restaurant. It's a pretty average place. Even now, when I go in there I have to wait 20 minutes for them just to get a coffee. And they have misspelled my name in the menu.'

The lyric, with a few imaginary additions, vividly describes what Vega saw in the diner that day, but she did not originally conceive of it as a solo vocal piece. 'In my mind, when I heard the song, it had a piano playing in my brain. I don't actually play piano so that was awkward. Then I realised that since I can't actually write music, I couldn't write out the part, but I wanted to try it out and I didn't want to have to wait for a piano player and all that stuff, so I decided just to try it a cappella and it worked better than I could have imagined.'

Next up is 'Luka', the harrowing tale of an abused boy which, understandably, she had never imagined as a potential hit single. Indeed, it provoked an argument between Vega and Fierstein. 'Ron said, "Is this a song about child abuse?". And I said, "Yes, it is actually". And he said, "I really think that song could be a big hit". I just thought he was out of his mind.' Nevertheless, Fierstein initiated some extra production which transformed the simple folk song into a radio-friendly track that peaked at No 3 in the US.

Vega has always been careful to stress that, although there was a real boy called Luka living in her apartment block, he was not to the best of her knowledge an abused child. 'I sort of appropriated his character for the song. It took me a while to figure out the angle of how to write it – the idea of it being a child singing to a neighbour – then the whole thing seemed to write itself in two hours one Sunday”.

Actually, there are a couple of other features worth sourcing. Vega’s 1987 masterpiece was discussed by Udiscovermusic.com last year in an illuminating piece:

“1985 was a key year in the career of California-born singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, with her first national and international success. Then 1987 brought her breakthrough to platinum-selling status. We’re remembering the creative, critical and commercial success of her sophomore LP Solitude Standing, released on April 1 that year.

After crossing the country to emerge via New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene, Vega had done well with her self-titled A&M debut album. Its signature song “Marlene On The Wall” became an MTV and VH1 video favourite of the day and peaked just outside the UK Top 20. The long player itself peaked at No.91 in America, but found significant audiences in the UK as well as Holland and New Zealand.

Far from solitude

In 1986, her profile remained high with the single “Left Of Centre,” featured on the soundtrack of the hit movie directed by John Hughes, Pretty In Pink. Then, in April 1987, Vega unveiled her second album, little knowing that it would become the most popular of her career.

Solitude Standing was produced by Steve Addabbo and Patti Smith’s former guitarist Lenny Kaye, who with Steven Miller had overseen the debut set. And although the majority of the new record was written after Vega’s 1985 emergence, its best-known songs predated her major label debut.

The original, a cappella “Tom’s Diner,” which opened the album, was composed in 1981. It went on to give Suzanne’s career the most unexpected helping hand when a 1990 remix by the British group DNA became a pop and dance smash. It hit No.2 there that year and No.5 in the US, where it went gold. The unlikely mix added more publicity both to her then-current third album Days Of Open Hand and to the LP that contained the original.

The first single from Solitude Standing had been the typically delicate, folk-inflected “Gypsy,” written as far back as 1978. It wasn’t a hit, but served as a flavorsome appetiser for the album. It was followed by the 1984 composition “Luka,” her affecting story of child violence, which became Vega’s first US chart single. It climbed all the way to No.3, and hit the UK Top 30.

The album also included another song dating from 1984, “Calypso,” and “Ironbound”/“Fancy Poultry,” the latter with music written by film composer Anton Sanko. Other collaborators included Marc Schulman on “In The Eye” and Michael Visceglia, on several tracks including the title song.

‘An absorbing second album’

Critics lined up to praise the new album’s artistry and song craft, with the Philadelphia Enquirer calling it “Suzanne Vega’s coming of age.” Thom Duffy of the Orlando Sentinel described the “dreamy sound that serves well her unique musings.” Chris Willman in the Los Angeles Times heard an “absorbing second album…full of characters whose sharp self-awareness is shaped by their isolation.”

Solitude Standing has remained close to Vega’s heart, and to her audience’s. In 2012, she marked its 25th anniversary by playing the record in its entirety at four shows, three in the US and one in London. In September 2017, she played three dates at New York’s City Winery where she again performed the whole album as well as all of 1992’s 99.9F”.

To finish off, I want to source a review from The Young Folks. As I said, maybe Solitude Standing is underrated when it comes to the albums deemed the best of the 1980s. It is a brilliant and beautiful album that warrants a lot of new study and love ahead of its thirty-fifth anniversary on 1st April:

“What makes Solitude Standing such an impressive entry into the rock canon is Vega’s ability to tell a story.  Whether fictional or not, many of the songs on this project can be relatable, comedic, or mature.  Vega has an acute sense of detail that has developed in the indie-rock genre for quite some time.  It feels almost poetic at certain points.  Her descriptive language used on the first single, “Tom’s Diner” is funny, light, and engaging.  Vega goes a cappella on this track, and many consider this to be her most well-known song of her career (or at least a version of it is: A dance remix by the DNA Disciples was a Top 5 hit around the world in 1990).  The rhythm that she uses with just her voice has lead to artists creating different remixes with instruments and electronic sounds for this track.  She sets the mood nicely here as well by starting the song with lyrics like, “I am sitting in the morning at the diner on the corner.”  It’s easy to sing along to, and there is some light and enjoyable comedy mixed in as well.

Because Vega likes to use storytelling as a device in her lyrics, she does an excellent job setting up not only the plot, but the characters as well.  For example, in one of her most mature songs, the hit single “Luka,” she addresses the topic of child abuse.  Vega got the inspiration from an actual boy playing in the park who seemed different to her, because he was separate from the other kids.  The contrast between the catchy instruments behind the mature lyrics creates something that people will really have to listen to a few times to understand.

Vega creates this world on the album where her characters in each song want to break away from the depression or angst that they may be feeling.  Whether she does this through a certain point of view, or through a first person account, each track uniquely represents something different.  On “Iron Bound/Fancy Poultry, Vega sets this dark and depressing background showing the inner conflict that her main character possesses.  With a slow-tempo guitar riff behind the lyrics, this is considered another gem on the EP.  She uses a first person point of view on “In the Eye” where she has more catchy instrumentals to go along with her almost menacing voice.  Lyrics like, “If you were to kill me now I would still look you in the eye,” shows Vega’s insistence on making herself known through love.  She goes into more of a folk-style production on “Night Vision.”  This song almost reminds me of a Lord Huron song from their second album.  While the story in this track is fictional, it is still inspired by poetry and has a more belonging theme to it.

The title track, “Solitude Standing” is more alternative-based and pop influenced.  Vega incorporates solitude as a character here trying to set things straight with her personality.  Vega seems to be trying to find herself here on this song, leaving the impression that she has been fighting with solitude for awhile now.  “Calypso” is taken straight form the story of Odyssey, where Vega uses instances from that play to tell a heartbreaking love tale.  Much like in “Luka,” she has a lyric like “My name is Calypso” to set up the story from the beginning.  Very moving track.  On the song, “Gypsy”, Vega takes a storyline out of a book to put her own style in music form.  Over a slow-tempo guitar, she talks of belonging once again much like “Night Vision.”  Vega seems to be fighting with solitude as the album progresses on.

What ties this album together nicely is, the “Tom’s Diner” instrumentation at the end.  Vega just has a violin playing to the rhythm of her first song on the project, without lyrics.  It’s like the listener has to put the two together and envision it his/herself.  While Vega has not come out with anything as impactful preceding Solitude Standing, this album has still shown people that storytelling mixed in with a folk-like production can create something that is socially relevant.  Vega creates this world that people can relate to, and have their own perspective on.  Bands like Lord Huron will try to emulate her style, but the challenge will be difficult”.

I shall end there. One of the, in my view, greatest albums of the 1980s, Suzanne Vega’s sublime Solitude Standing still sounds entrancing and amazing. An album that every music fan needs to add to their collection, it has lost none of its power and potency…

AFTER thirty-five years.

FEATURE: It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn: Kate Bush and the Difference Between Excellence and Perfectionism

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It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in August 2014 performing Waking the Witch during the concert dress rehearsals for Before the Dawn/PHOTO CREDIT: Gavin Bush.

Kate Bush and the Difference Between Excellence and Perfectionism

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A subject I have broached and explored in the past…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Rex Features

there have been a lot of misconceptions about Kate Bush and perfectionism. I am minded of this, as I saw an article on the Express website that talked about Bush and this almost obsessive nature. The article, in a wider sense, looked at her mental puberty. How she changed in terms of her attitude, career and body between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two. She lost her mother in 1992 and split from Del Palmer (who she had been with on and off since the 1970s) in 1993. The article went on to explore why Bush returned to the stage in 2014 with Before the Dawn:

“The star began writing songs at the mere age of 11, and by 1978 had sold over a million copies of her debut album The Kick Inside. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Bush was the first female artist in pop history to have written every track on a million-selling debut album. A few years back, a former colleague at her label EMI spoke with The Mirror, who revealed some insight into the star’s work ethic and the process in which she goes through in order to produce her successful music.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 during filming for The Line, The Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari 

Known for keeping herself out of the spotlight, Bush released a compilation of rare tracks, cover versions and remixes from box sets back in 2019 which was her first music release since her 22-night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo back in 2014.

Speculating about why she leads such a private life, before her comeback in 2014, her former colleague told The Mirror: “Kate is a perfectionist, always has been and always will be.

“As much as she has enjoyed her time out of the spotlight, she knows she needs to get back on stage and share her musicianship to feel truly fulfilled.

“She’d probably describe herself as having mild to middling OCD.

 “Kate has had the final say on every detail. To say she has been hands-on is an understatement.”

Although Bush herself has never claimed whether she has OCD or not, the star has spoken in the past about struggles with her mental health, especially after turning 30 years old.

Speaking about the difficult period in the late 1980s, Bush said: “I think it’s a very important time, where there’s some kind of turning point”.

I don’t believe Kate Bush has OCD or is even borderline. Obsessiveness would, I guess, result in her doing the same thing over and over again. Bush is always evolving and creating something new. There is never an obsession to obtain perfection. She has said this in interviews. Regarding the Before the Dawn gigs, her being hands-on and making sure everything was as she wanted is the result of an artist who wants excellence. Look back at 1979’s The Tour of Life, and she was involved with the whole process. After coming back with a huge show thirty-five years after that tour, it is no wonder Bush was determined to make it as special as possible! I guess there are misperceptions about artists. If someone like Kate Bush spends a lot time recording an album or she is heavily involved in a live show, that means she has OCD or is a perfectionist?! Maybe she is undiagnosed, but it is much more likely she is striving for something that represents her vision. As a woman in music who was subject to sexism and parody early in her career, one can understand why she spent intervening years taking control and working to be taken seriously. The part of the Express article that discussed her mental-health and growing up in the spotlight is relevant today. So many big artists talk about burn-out and struggling with attention. Whether it is social media comments or pressure between albums, the likes of Charli XCX have recently come out to express their concern. As a fan of Kate Bush, Charli XCX seems similarly innovative and inspiring.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Charli XCX

I do worry about artists now and the combination of a lack of streaming royalties, pushing themselves performing live and having to deal with social media and the demands and spotlight of the media and labels. Being branded or judged, women especially have so much crap to deal with. Things were not that much easier for Kate Bush from 1978. Exploding onto the scene with such an unusual and successful single like Wuthering Heights, there was expectation and eyes on her. It took until 1985’s Hounds of Love for Bush to be taken seriously and get the acclaim she deserved. That was the album when she produced solo and seemed to be happy and at her best. Even then, I do not think there was any need for perfectionism. Such a visionary and ambitious artist, people who worked with her in the studio got on very well. Everyone has a nice thing to say about Bush and those times! It does make me think of modern music and also Bush today. I wonder whether, in this streaming age, people appreciate the sheer effort and hard work artists put into the music. From recording to promotion, things seem more disposable than they used to. It is no wonder artists like Charli XCX can feel burned-out or upset by what they read on social media (although her new album, CRASH, has received incredible reviews and ranks alongside her best work). What about Kate Bush? Maybe she is obsessively working on the nuts and bolts of a new album though, if there is any music being made, it is not going to be this overly-worked and perfected thing. She will operate as she has since the start: putting her heart and soul into everything to ensure that the music is true to her. Not working as tirelessly as she would have done in the 1970s and 1980s (due to the fact she has her own record label, Fish People, that she releases her albums on), it is exciting to see what comes next. A wonderful producer, innovative songwriter and true icon, Kate Bush was and remains…  

AN inspiration to so many.

FEATURE: Didn’t Know What Time It Was... David Bowie’s Starman at Fifty

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Didn’t Know What Time It Was…

David Bowie’s Starman at Fifty

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THIS 28th April…

 PHOTO CREDIT: EMI

it will be fifty years since the release of David Bowie’s iconic hit, Starman. I know I am going in early, but I wanted to look ahead to a classic track and a big anniversary! The lead single of his fifth studio album,. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (which is fifty in June), it one of Bowie’s best-known and loved songs. I think that therw was a lot of curiosity about space and space travel in 1972. Elton John released Rocket Man (I Think It's Going To Be A Long, Long Time) in April 1972. In 1969, David Bowie released the Space Oddity album. It’s title cut came out in July that year. It was an exciting age of space exploration, so it is only natural artists would reflect this. I wonder how people will mark the approaching fiftieth anniversary of Bowie’s epic Starman. I want to bring in a couple of features that give us more depth and story regarding the creation and release of one of the best songs ever. Bowie Bible are first up:

“David Bowie’s ‘Starman’ single was released in the United Kingdom on 28 April 1972.

Sales were initially slow, and it was at number 41 in the charts at the time of Bowie’s game-changing Top Of The Pops appearance in early July.

Bowie had not had a hit since ‘Space Oddity’ in 1969, and many assumed that ‘Starman’ was its follow-up – despite having released several albums and singles in the interim. Yet the new single cast off the image of the old long-haired singer-songwriter, and Bowie’s glam image spawned a legion of imitators.

The success of ‘Starman’ lifted the sales of Bowie’s back catalogue, and led to reissues of some of his earlier works. It also guaranteed interest in The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, which was an instant hit upon its release.

Then ‘Starman’, backed with ‘Suffragette City’, was released as a single on 28 April in the UK. Suddenly we were on the radio again, and when the Ziggy Stardust album itself came out on 6 June it went straight in at Number 7, peaking at Number 5. Finally we were headline news.

Mick Woodmansey

Spider From Mars: My Life With Bowie”.

Almost fifty years after its release, there is still speculation about Starman and its origins. As Ziggy Stardust, Bowie created this alter-ego (one of many) where he was almost alien and subterranean. Whereas Ziggy was retired in 1973, this brief incarnation was among the most fascinating. Starman is one of Bowie’s greatest moments. Far Out Magazine provide some lucid and rich detail about a song that has taken on a life of its own:

“Ziggy Stardust once had a dream and, in his dream, he was advised by something called ‘the infinites’ to write a message of hope, that despite the world ending in a matter of five years, Ziggy would have to deliver the news of belief to the youth of the masses, explaining that they are now the leaders of the world – the future. This ‘message of hope’ is David Bowie’s second and milestone hit, ‘Starman’.

In an interview with the American writer William Burroughs for the Rolling Stone, Bowie explained that he wanted to turn Ziggy Stardust into a musical. “The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of a lack of natural resources. The album was released three years ago,” said Bowie to Burroughs.

When he wrote his fifth and life-changing album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, he had envisioned creating a musical out of the album. Within this context, imagine ‘Starman’ as the central musical theme of the show; it is played at the beginning of the musical and at the end of it.

The song truly solidified Bowie’s character of Ziggy Stardust within the minds of impressionable youths as the rock alien’s anthem. ‘Starman’ was the first single for the record and would secure Bowie’s imminent rise to fame. The story of ‘Starman’ is told from the perspective of someone listening to Ziggy Stardust’s message from the sky.

Bizarrely enough, despite this song being Ziggy’s manifesto, it was the last song to be written for the record, almost as an afterthought. He wrote it in response to the head of RCA, Dennis Katz’s request for a single. It would end up replacing a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Round and Round’. It was written in the same session as the tragic denouement of the album: ‘Rock n’ Roll Suicide’.

“So, we came out of the studio and in about a month he had written ‘Starman’ and we were back in the studio by January,” Spiders From Mars’ drummer, Woody Woodmansey recalled. “It was an obvious single! I think Mick and I went out in the car after David played it for us the first time, and we were already singing it, having only heard it only once.”

He continued: “It might seem strange, but we just hadn’t done anything that commercial before. I always thought Bowie had that ability, that any time he felt like it, he could write a hit single. He just had that feeling about him. I think he chose not to right through his career. If he felt like it, he would write one, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. That was just the impression of working with him. It’s not a fluke to be able to write all those amazing tunes.”

How did Bowie write ‘Starman’? Legend has it that he took the octave jump in Judy Garland’s ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ and adapted it to the chorus of ‘Starman’. When Bowie performed it at the Rainbow Theater in August of 1972, he would sing “there’s a starman, over the rainbow”.

1972 was glam rock’s year, and Bowie paid full attention to it; after all, he would play an integral part in influencing it. The key ingredients that went into the song were T-Rex’s ‘Telegram Sam’ and the Motown song ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ by The Supremes, which is where Bowie got the idea for the ‘morse code’ sound from and uses it on the instrumental bridge leading into the chorus. Spiders from Mars’ Mick Ronson, while he doesn’t always receive the credit that’s due, helped Bowie tremendously with the arrangements of his songs, and ‘Starman’ is no different”.

Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary on 28th April, I wanted to write about Starman. A song that is beloved by Bowie and non-Bowie fans alike, I think we will be discussing this incredible anthem (if that is the right word?) for another fifty years – so strong and compelling is Starman. A magnificent opus from an artist who sadly, is no longer with us, through Starman, the iconic David Bowie…

WILL live forever.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Fifty-Eight: Laura Nyro

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

Part Fifty-Eight: Laura Nyro

___________

I included Laura Nyro…

in A Buyer’s Guide last year. On 8th April, it will be twenty-five years since we lost her. Still an underrated artist, her legacy and influence are huge. Her music stunning, beautiful and unique. I am going to end with a playlist of songs from artists influenced by her. Before that, as I did last year, I am grabbing some biography from AllMusic:

“During the singer/songwriter movement in the late '60s and early '70s, Laura Nyro was one of the most celebrated tunesmiths of her day, penning soulful, literate songs that took the folky introspection of her peers and infused it with elements of soul, R&B, jazz, and gospel, giving them an emotional heat that set her apart. Nyro was a well-respected recording artist, whose confident piano work and rich, expressive vocals made albums like 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and 1969's New York Tendaberry classics, and she demonstrated how powerfully classic R&B and girl group material had influenced her on the all-covers set Gonna Take a Miracle, recorded in tandem with Labelle. However, while she made great records, Nyro's passionate style was considered too idiosyncratic for the Top 40, and her songs were better known in versions recorded by other artists; the 5th Dimension, Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Peter, Paul & Mary all scored hit singles with her material. Nyro's frustrations with her lack of success as a performer, coupled with her desire to maintain her privacy, led to her periodically retiring from recording and performing, but latter-day efforts like 1984's Mother's Spiritual and 1993's Walk the Dog and Light the Light revealed she was still a compelling singer and pianist, while her social, political, and environmental concerns pushed her lyrics in new directions.

Laura Nyro was born Laura Nigro on October 18, 1947 in the Bronx section of New York City. Her father Louis Nigro was a jazz trumpet player who also tuned pianos, while her mother Gilda Nigro (born Gilda Mirsky) was a bookkeeper. By her own admission, Laura was not an especially happy child, and she retreated into music and poetry, teaching herself to play piano and soaking up the influences of her mother's favorite singers, among them Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, and Leontyne Price. By the time she was eight years old, Laura had started writing songs, and she would later attend the Manhattan High School of Music & Art, where developed a greater appreciation for folk and jazz styles. (Laura would also attend meetings at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, citing the latter as a major influence on her progressive political views.) In her teens, Laura would enjoy the sounds of the harmony groups who would gather at parties and on street corners, and developed a special fondness for girl group sounds, soul, and the great songs that came out of the Brill Building.

In 1966, Artie Mogull, a veteran A&R man and music publisher, hired Louis Nigro to tune the piano in his office, and Louis persuaded Artie to listen to his daughter sing her songs. The next day, Laura sang "Wedding Bell Blues," "And When I Die," and "Stoney End" for Mogull, and he quickly signed her to a publishing deal, while Mogull and his business partner Paul Barry became her managers. Laura had been using a variety of assumed names for her music at that point, and she settled on Laura Nyro as her professional handle once she turned professional. Nyro's new managers got her gigs at the famous San Francisco night club the Hungry i, as well as the groundbreaking 1969 Monterey Pop Festival, and that same year, she released her first album, More Than a New Discovery, on Verve-Folkways Records. Sales were modest, but Peter, Paul & Mary scored a hit with their version of "And When I Die," and Nyro's career began to take off.

David Geffen took over Nyro's management, successfully suing to void her previous contracts as they were signed when she was under 18. With Geffen's help, Nyro established her own publishing company and signed a new record deal with Columbia Records. Nyro's first album for the label, 1968's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession, was a more personal and sophisticated effort than her debut, in both songs and arrangements, and it received enthusiastic reviews in the rock press. Sales were good, though not up to the level of her critical acclaim, and the same was true for 1969's New York Tendaberry. However, Nyro was increasingly well regarded as a songwriter; the 5th Dimension had scored major chart hits with their versions of "Stoned Soul Picnic," "Sweet Blindness," "Wedding Bell Blues," and "Blowing Away," and Blood, Sweat & Tears hit the charts with "And When I Die," which drew discerning listeners to her original recordings of the songs. By the time Christmas and the Beads of Sweat was released in 1970 (which produced Nyro's only Top 100 single, a cover of "Up on the Roof"), she had sold her increasingly lucrative publishing company for $4.5 million, as more hits continued to flow from her pen; "Eli's Coming" was recorded by Three Dog Night to great success, and Barbra Streisand's album Stoney End featured three of Nyro's songs (and Streisand's version of the title track bore no small resemblance to the original recording on More Than a New Discovery).

In 1971, Nyro released Gonna Take a Miracle, in which she covered a handful of soul and R&B tunes she loved in her teenage years, with the vocal group Labelle helping her re-create the girl group harmonies of the originals. Later in the year, Nyro married and announced her retirement as she found herself at odds with her growing celebrity and embraced small town life. 1973 saw Columbia reissue More Than a New Discovery in a revised edition titled The First Songs. By 1976, Nyro had divorced, and she returned to the recording studio to cut the album Smile, which reflected a more relaxed, jazzy sound and a greater interest in Eastern philosophical and spiritual concerns. While most of Nyro's live performances had found her accompanied only by her own piano, she assembled a band to tour in support of Smile, and the concerts produced her first live album, 1977's Seasons of Light. The album was originally intended to be released as a two-LP set, but Columbia opted to edit it down to a single disc; the songs that were cut were later restored for a 2008 CD reissue. Nyro's next album, 1978's Nested, was recorded as she was expecting her first child, and while she played a few shows following its release, after she gave birth Nyro once again walked away from the spotlight to devote herself to her family.

It wasn't until 1984 that Nyro delivered another album, Mother's Spiritual, a lighter and more folk-oriented set that often reflected her views on feminism, the environment, and parenthood. Four years later, Columbia Records was eager for Nyro to record a new studio album, but she preferred to go out on tour with a band in tow. Columbia had no interest in releasing a live album from the tour, and 1989's Laura: Live at the Bottom Line, which included five new songs, was instead released by the A&M-distributed Cypress Records. (One of the songs, "Broken Rainbow," was written for an Oscar-winning documentary on the forced relocation of a Native American reservation in 1983.) .

From the late '80s onward, Nyro toured frequently, but it would be 1993 before she released another studio album, Walk the Dog & Light the Light (issued by Columbia), in which she added animal rights to the list of causes she supported in song. In 1994, Nyro would begin work on another album, but progress on the project came to a halt when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Nyro worked with Columbia Records to compile 1997's Stoned Soul Picnic: The Best of Laura Nyro, a two-disc career spanning anthology of her recordings. It turned out to be her swan song, as cancer claimed her on April 8, 1997.

In 2001, the unreleased studio recordings from 1994 and 1995 were issued by Rounder Records in a collection titled Angel in the Dark, while Christmas shows from New York's Bottom Line club from 1993 and 1994 were collected on the live release The Loom's Desire in 2002. 2004's Spread Your Wings and Fly: Live at the Fillmore East was another archival release that gave belated release to a concert recorded in New York in 1971. In 2017, Real Gone Music reissued the monophonic mix of Eli and the Thirteenth Confession and the original sequence of More Than a New Discovery in a package titled A Little Magic, A Little Kindness: The Complete Mono”.

To show how many fabulous artists have been influenced by Laura Nyro, the playlist below is a selection of songs from some hugely talented people! In October, we will mark what would have been her seventy-fifth birthday. Even though Nyro died nearly twenty-five years ago, her incredible music lives on. It will inspire people for decades to come. Here are some artists who definitely follow Nyro or they have been moved by her…

PHENOMENAL music.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Ninety-Seven: Toni Braxton

FEATURE:

 

 

A Buyer’s Guide

PHOTO CREDIT: FAULT 

Part Ninety-Seven: Toni Braxton

___________

PERHAPS an oversight on my part…

but I have not featured Toni Braxton in A Buyer’s Guide as far as I can see! I have featured her before, but not in this series. To remedy that, I am going to highlight the albums of hers that you need to own. Her ninth studio album, Spell My Name, came out in 2020. Let’s hope there are plenty more albums from the R&B legend. Prior to getting to the albums, here is some biography from AllMusic:

“Blending fire and finesse, Toni Braxton has wielded broad appeal throughout a career studded with Top Ten pop and R&B/hip-hop hits, multi-platinum certifications, and major award recognition. Soulful enough for R&B audiences yet smooth enough for adult contemporary play lists, sophisticated enough for adults but sultry enough for younger listeners, and equally proficient at heartbroken and seductive material, Braxton made her solo debut at full power during the early '90s. Her first two albums, Toni Braxton (1993) and Secrets (1996), both went platinum eight times over, accompanied by a string of hit singles that included "Un-break My Heart," which ranks among the longest-running number one pop hits of the rock era. Each one of her subsequent albums has been treated as an event, whether it has followed a brief or extended break in studio activity. They have regularly debuted within the Top Ten, highlighted by Love, Marriage & Divorce (2014), a set of duets with long-term collaborator Babyface that made her one of the few artists to be handed Grammy Awards in each of three decades. From "Love Shoulda Brought You Home" to her first single of the 2020s, "Do It," Braxton's Top Ten R&B/hip-hop hits span a similar length of time. The latter appeared on her first album for Island, Spell My Name (2020).

Toni Michele Braxton was born in Severn, Maryland, on October 7, 1968. The daughter of a minister, she was raised mostly in the strict Apostolic faith. Encouraged by their mother, an operatically trained vocalist, Braxton and her four sisters began singing in church as girls. Although gospel was the only music permitted in the household, the girls often watched Soul Train when their parents went shopping. Braxton's parents later converted to a different faith and eased their restrictions on secular music somewhat, allowing Braxton more leeway to develop her vocal style. Because of her husky voice, she often used male singers like Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, and Michael McDonald as models, as well as Chaka Khan. Braxton had some success on the local talent show circuit, continuing to sing with her sisters, and after high school studied to become a music teacher. However, she soon dropped out of college after she was discovered singing to herself at a gas station by songwriter Bill Pettaway (who co-authored Milli Vanilli's "Girl You Know It's True"). With Pettaway's help, Braxton and her sisters signed with Arista Records in 1990 as a group dubbed simply the Braxtons.

The Braxtons released a single in 1990 called "The Good Life," and while it wasn't a hit, it caught the attention of L.A. Reid and Babyface, the red-hot songwriting/production team who had just formed their own label, LaFace (which was associated with Arista). Braxton became the first female artist signed to LaFace in 1991, and the following year she was introduced to the listening public with a high-profile appearance on the soundtrack of Eddie Murphy's Boomerang. Not only did her solo cut "Love Shoulda Brought You Home" become a substantial pop and R&B hit, but she also duetted with Babyface himself on "Give U My Heart." Anticipation for Braxton's first album ran high, and when her eponymous solo debut was released in 1993, it was an across-the-board smash, climbing to number one on both the pop and R&B charts. It spun off hit after hit, including three more Top Ten singles in "Another Sad Love Song," "Breathe Again," and "You Mean the World to Me," plus the double-sided R&B hit "I Belong to You"/"How Many Ways." Toni Braxton's run of popularity lasted well into 1995. By that time, Braxton had scored Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Female R&B Vocal ("Another Sad Love Song"), and tacked on another win in the latter category for "Breathe Again."

To tide fans over until her next album was released, Braxton contributed "Let It Flow" to the Whitney Houston-centered soundtrack of Waiting to Exhale in 1995. Again working heavily with L.A. Reid and Babyface, Braxton released her second album, Secrets, in the summer of 1996, and predictably, it was another enormous hit. The first single, "You're Makin' Me High," was Braxton's most overtly sexual yet, and it became her biggest pop hit to date. However, its success was soon eclipsed by the follow-up single, the Diane Warren-penned ballad "Un-break My Heart." The song was an inescapable juggernaut, spending an amazing 11 weeks on top of the pop chart (and even longer on the adult contemporary chart). Further singles "I Don't Want To" and "How Could an Angel Break My Heart" weren't quite as successful (hardly an indictment), but that didn't really matter; by then Secrets was already her second straight multi-platinum hit. In 1997, she picked up Grammy Awards for Best Female Pop Vocal and Best Female R&B Vocal (for "Un-break My Heart" and "You're Makin' Me High," respectively).

Toward the end of 1997, Braxton filed a lawsuit against LaFace Records, attempting to gain release from a contract she felt was no longer fair or commensurate with her status. When LaFace countersued, Braxton filed for bankruptcy, a move that shocked many fans (who wondered how that could be possible, given her massive sales figures) but actually afforded her protection from further legal action. She spent most of 1998 in legal limbo, and passed the time by signing on to portray Belle in the Broadway production of Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Braxton and LaFace finally reached a settlement in early 1999, and the singer soon began work on her third album. The Heat was released in the spring of 2000, and entered the Billboard 200 at number two, matching the highest position held by Secrets. Lead single "He Wasn't Man Enough" was a Top Ten hit and an R&B/hip-hop chart-topper. A brisk seller out of the box, The Heat eventually cooled off around the two-million mark and led to yet another Grammy win for Best Female R&B Vocal ("He Wasn't Man Enough").

Following the release of the holiday album Snowflakes, Braxton appeared in the VH1 movie Play'd and recorded More Than a Woman. Released toward the end of 2002 with half of its songs co-written with sister Tamar, it broke Braxton's streak of Top Ten studio albums and prompted a temporary move to the Blackground label. Libra, supported with the singles "Please" and "That's the Way Love Works (Trippin')," started a new streak of Top Ten entries in 2005. In Europe, it was re-released the following year with the addition of the Il Divo collaboration "The Time of Our Lives," the official 2006 FIFA World Cup anthem. It was around this time that Braxton became the main performer at the Flamingo Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. Her show, Toni Braxton: Revealed, ran until April 2008, when she joined the cast of the competitive reality show Dancing with the Stars. After lasting five weeks before being voted off the show, Braxton completed Pulse, her first full-length for Atlantic. Issued in May 2010, it became her fifth Top Ten album.

Braxton further boosted her 2010s comeback profile by participating in another reality TV series, the long-running Braxton Family Values, which focused on her relationship with her mother and four sisters. Meanwhile, she reunited with Babyface to record the duets album Love, Marriage & Divorce. Released by Motown in 2014, it went to number four just before the duo starred in a Broadway production of After Midnight. Love, Marriage & Divorce won the Grammy Award in the category of Best R&B Album just months before Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir was published. The book detailed Braxton's triumphs, as well as her business and health struggles behind the scenes, and led to a similarly titled biographical television film.

Braxton's affiliation with the Def Jam label began in 2015 with her second holiday recording, Braxton Family Christmas. Although lupus complications hampered Braxton's touring schedule, she worked on a new album and in 2017 accepted a Soul Train Legend Award. Sex & Cigarettes, a set dominated by aching ballads, arrived in 2018. It reached number 22 and led to a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album, while "Long as I Live," a Top 20 R&B/hip-hop single, was up for Best R&B Song and Best R&B Performance. The Top Ten R&B/hip-hop hit "Do It," featuring Missy Elliott, followed in 2020 as the first result of a new deal with Island Records. Spell My Name, on which she was also joined by H.E.R., arrived that August”.

I am going to whittle down her nine solo studio albums to the best four, the underrated gem, in addition to her latest studio album. There is a memoir that I thought I would also highlight. This is the essential work of the…

SENSATIONAL Toni Braxton.

_____________

The Four Essential Albums

 

Secrets

Release Date: 18th June, 1996

Labels: LaFace/Arista

Producers: Babyfac/eKeith Crouch/David Foster/R. Kelly/L.A. Reid/Tony Rich/Soulshock & Karlin/Bryce Wilson

Standout Tracks: You're Makin' Me High/Talking in His Sleep/Let It Flow

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=96174&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0Uy6GD6CqvEkWAdzxy7S1x?si=rwpUIdb1T22BCXdx0tCfXA

Review:

“Although she’s the daughter of a deeply conservative apostolic minister who didn’t allow her to listen to pop music when she was a little girl, it must not have been very difficult for Toni Braxton to relate to the songs crafted for her by writer-producer Kenneth ”Babyface” Edmonds. Babyface venerates love; for him, romance is a religion to be both studied and enacted. And on Braxton’s new album, Secrets, the singer and her recording mentor offer up a series of secular hymns to attraction and affection, betrayal and brokenheartedness, cooing and cohabitation.

You can hear their devotion in a song such as ”How Could an Angel Break My Heart,” cowritten by Babyface and Braxton. Over a lulling ballad melody, the singer makes her agony a thing of beauty, pausing with daring vocal timing over the lyrics’ details of a lover’s wayward behavior. And you can hear a different sort of testament to the redemptive powers of love in ”You’re Makin Me High,” the album’s airily funky first single. Both ”High” and the finger-poppingly upbeat ”Come On Over Here” give the lie to doubters who thought Braxton could sell only slow songs effectively.

Having sold more than 7 million copies of her self-titled 1993 debut album, Braxton had to face up to a big challenge. Toni Braxton had yielded a string of hit singles (”Another Sad Love Song,” ”Breathe Again”), and ”Let It Flow,” from the soundtrack to Waiting to Exhale, is presently a staple of urban contemporary radio. But sophomore albums are, as the cliche goes, jinxed, and Braxton must have worried, just a little, whether all those young one-name female upstarts — Brandy, Monica, Monifa, and their sisters — might render her languid take on love irrelevant.

But instead of trying to pursue the cutting edge and emulate the youngsters’ melding of R&B and hip-hop, Braxton has opted to skew older: Secrets offers space to veteran songwriter-producers Diane Warren and David Foster, who between them have worked with a slew of middlebrow behemoths from Barbra Streisand to Michael Bolton. Warren came up with ”Un-Break My Heart,” a tearjerker so grandiose and yet so intrinsically, assuredly hit-bound, it’s the kind of mass-appeal grabber that’s probably already sent a jealous Diana Ross diving for a comfort gallon of Haagen-Dazs.

Easily the worst song on Secrets and therefore worth lingering over for a second, ”Un-Break My Heart” (produced by Foster, so Babyface is guilt-free) is one of those the-verses-exist-only-for-the-swelling-chorus showstoppers that allude to emotions without ever actually embodying them. Braxton does her darnedest to plug some life into the song, to no avail. And no matter: This is the sort of MOR fodder that becomes a radio standby in spite of itself. Its selection by Braxton and coexecutive producers Antonio ”L.A.” Reid and Babyface was, in this sense, a shrewd, if artistically disappointing, one.

Braxton gets more solid material from other outsiders, like R. Kelly (whose ”I Don’t Want To” is a cool tune about romance in denial) and Tony Rich (co-writer of ”Come On Over Here,” a neo-Motown composition in the manner of Rich’s own best work).

As for the core Braxton/Babyface collaborations, well, they are diverse, witty, and exquisitely modulated. Indeed, Babyface’s ”Let It Flow” (also included here) is one of Braxton’s most successfully adventurous moments. A sultry tune that requires the singer to reach down to her lowest register, ”Flow” has a sinuous power, and it flows into the next track, ”Why Should I Care,” in which Braxton ascends to a high, breathy croon. Taken together, this pair of songs not only demonstrates Braxton’s technical range but confirms her ability to deliver Secrets’ sermons of sensuality — little gospels of good and bad loving — with unusual eloquence. A-“ – Entertainment Weekly

Choice Cut: Un-Break My Heart

The Heat

Release Date: 25th April, 2000

Label: LaFace

Producers: Teddy Bishop/Keith Crouch/David Foster/Jazze Pha/Rodney ‘Darkchild’ Jerkins/Keri/Daryl Simmons

Standout Tracks: Spanish Guitar/Just Be a Man About It/Maybe

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/master/143318-Toni-Braxton-The-Heat

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0UZsKcXzOehMvFWTiBlwMi?si=iBpV0MW9RX2i_QI3u0e_Jw

Review:

“Toni Braxton went through a lot in the years separating her star-making Toni Braxton and her 2000 comeback The Heat. Yes, she became a star, but she also went through a painful bankruptcy that delayed her sequel for years. Fortunately, you wouldn't be able to tell that there was so much behind-the-scenes drama from The Heat -- it's a confident, assured, sexy effort that reaffirms Braxton's status as one of the finest contemporary mainstream soul singers. She may not be as street-smart as Mary J. Blige, nor does she push the boundaries of the genre the way TLC does, but she has a full, rich voice that instantly lends her songs a sense of maturity and sensuality, especially since she never, ever oversings or misjudges her material. And, while that material can occasionally be a little generic, much of The Heat is built on solid ballads and smoldering, mid-tempo dance numbers. Producers as diverse as Babyface, Rodney Jerkins, Daryl Simmons, Teddy Bishop, and David Foster are responsible for various tracks on the album, which is typical for a big-budget, superstar release like this, but rarely are the tracks quite as consistent and cohesive as they are here. The skittering beats of "He Wasn't Man Enough" and "Gimme Some" are every bit as effective as the simmering title track or ballads "I'm Still Breathing" and "Spanish Guitar" -- or "Just Be a Man About It," an instant classic telephone breakup song, with Dr. Dre playing the wayward lover breaking the news to Ms. Braxton. True, The Heat slightly runs out of momentum toward the end, but there aren't many dull spots on the record -- it's all stylish, sultry, seductive, appealing urban contemporary soul that confirms Braxton's prodigious talents” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: He Wasn’t Man Enough

More Than a Woman

Release Date: 18th November, 2002

Label: Arista

Producers: Babyface/Gerrard C. Baker/Big Bert/Irv Gotti/Rodney Jerkins/Keri Lewis/Mannie Fresh/Andrea Martin/Ivan Matias/The Neptunes/No I.D./Chink Santana

Standout Tracks: Let Me Show You the Way (Out)/A Better Man/Lies, Lies, Lies

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=151013&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/4loWAxPQnpNreGRDEmPMDo?si=eXvZXptcS_SGMqco5-4Z6Q

Review:

“Long before the likes of J-Lo and Britney Spears hypnotised the world with their frequently photographed rumps and midriffs, Toni Braxton spearheaded the cluster of desirable females with a knockout combination of seductive looks, silky vocal tones and an inclination towards dresses which seemed to be produced during a cloth shortage. But image aside, Braxton's career CV can't be laughed at. With six Grammys, seven American Music Awards and a total of 25 million worldwide album sales, record company bosses will be relying upon her to deliver the goods with her latest offering.

More Than A Woman is a diverse blend of danceable club numbers, trademark Braxton ballads and experimental tracks which borrow from the genres of rock and jazz.

First off is the feisty "Let Me Show You The Way (Out)". A new woman's anthem for 2003? I truly think so. Over a hammering hip-hop bassline, angry incessant piano chords and Braxton's calm but commanding vocals lies a telling tale of infidelity, which sets the theme for the majority of the album. Nothing demonstrates this so magically as "Hit The Freeway". What at first sounds like a quintessential Neptunes track - melodic synthesiser, staged handclaps and funky drum patterns - later transpires into an impressive slice of pop R&B. The chorus: "Farewell my lonely one, nothing else here can be done, I don't ever wanna see you again" is eagerly contagious. Revenge has never sounded sweeter.

For your dosage of classic love songs, turn to the elegant "Always". Harking back to the Toni of yesteryear,this is a tenderly honed R&B ballad with rich, multi-layered vocals, which add balance to the edgier, street-orientated tracks.

The album's surprise comes courtesy of Braxton's hubby, Keri Lewis who produced the standout track "Lies, Lies, Lies". The most notable element on this record is the usage of live instrumentation. Toni's vocals also provide an interesting mix, as her gravelly tones are pit against an electric guitar.

There's no doubt that More Than A Woman will sell bucket-loads. At age 34 Braxton is in a great position to serve both middle-of-the-road listeners with her high-powered ballads, as well the comrades of the streets with her attitude-ridden take on modern day living” – BBC

Choice Cut: Hit the Freeway (featuring Loon)

Sex & Cigarettes

Release Date: 21st March, 2018

Labels: Def Jam/Universal

Producers: Fred Ball/Antonio Dixon/Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds/Dapo Torimiro/Stuart Crichton/Tricky Stewart/Pierre Medor

Standout Tracks: Deadwood/Sex & Cigarettes/Sorry

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1334468&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1nmxUznbVkZorzeY4olXco?si=L6x7ZjMFSwiN3NYvSU6FuQ

Review:

“Toni Braxton may have just got engaged to hip-hop mogul Birdman, but there isn’t any sign of a heel-clicking, lamppost-swinging flush of love here – she seems permanently marooned in a Mariana trench of post-breakup misery. This is of course her dominant mode. She remains best known for Unbreak My Heart, where the dejected singer knows how impossible the task of the title is, but is powerless not to request it. Lyrically, even upbeat hits such as You’re Making Me High are freighted with a quiet pain. Like Billie Holiday, Braxton’s voice reflexively bends towards sadness, and it continues to do so even when there’s a diamond on her finger.

A very strong trio of songs open this record, beginning with Deadwood, which has a fantastic singalong chorus alongside acoustic strumming and chardonnay-doused strings. Perhaps it could have benefitted from a more traditional power ballad arrangement, but it’s very good nonetheless. Braxton’s intonation of “deadwood” – putting the emphasis bitterly on the “dead” – is the kind of impactful, classy detail you can only paint after a lifetime of heartache songs.

The smooth R&B single Long As I Live has an even stronger central melody, but it’s the title track, a piano ballad, that really dominates this opening salvo: a tale of emotional abuse with Braxton at an Unbreak level of trauma, pleading “at least lie to me, lie to me” to a cheating lover who doesn’t bother to mask his scent of sex and cigarettes. By the end you can practically hear the snot and tears as she crumples. Lesser singers would tip it into camp; Braxton makes it shockingly raw.

She doesn’t quite reach those heights again, and there is some slightly rote production: the Viva La Vida ripoff of Coping and the already passé tropical house of Missin’. But there’s still a masterly emotional range: from simmering anger on FOH (“Boy you must be suicidal / Is that bitch right there beside you” scans with a chilling brilliance) to tender regret on My Heart. No real joy or happiness, mind – you do rather feel for Birdman listening to it for the first time” – The Guardian

Choice Cut: Long As I Live

The Underrated Gem

 

Toni Braxton

Release Date: 13th July, 1993

Labels: LaFace/Arista

Producers: Babyface/Vassal Benford/Bo & McArthur/Vincent Herbert/Ernesto Phillips/L.A. Reid/Daryl Simmons/Tim & Ted

Standout Tracks: Another Sad Love Song/Seven Whole Days/I Belong to You

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=96167&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/73ojqvZakvdkBxSg9pyPqz?si=-UE90LFMTAaT6GyOTB9gPA

Review:

“The music-buying public of the UK was not holding its breath for the first solo album from Toni Braxton, the perfect, pure voice from US gospel troupe The Braxtons (with her sisters Traci, Towanda, Trina and Tamar). However, when they heard her sumptuous phrasing, saw how beautiful she looked and heard her enormous hit, Breathe Again, she was made most welcome. Suddenly, it was as if she was everywhere. In her white vest, Braxton became an antidote: both to Mariah Carey stretching unlimited mileage out of every single note, and Whitney Houston, now a remote superstar in the wake of the global success of her box office blockbuster, The Bodyguard.

Spotted by producers and songwriters L.A. Reid and Babyface, Braxton was singled out from her group to record Love Shoulda Brought You Home, a track the duo had written for 80s torch songstress Anita Baker. The match worked. As a result, half of Braxton’s debut album sounds like Baker’s best work since 1986. Seven Whole Days is such an update on the Rapture singer’s formula, you actually think you are listening to Baker herself, and You Mean the World to Me is a very affectionate homage to Same Ole Love.

However, if it was simply pastiche, it wouldn’t have sold so well and been held in such high regard. It was the tracks on which Braxton found her own voice that made this album special. Another Sad Love Song showed how well an accomplished production team could perform when married with a superior vocalist. But it was the album’s third single, Breathe Again, that fully established Braxton. A delicate ballad that refused to resort wholly to cliché, it is brought to life by Braxton’s dreamy, breathy delivery. And it was huge. Breathe Again went to the US top three and to number two in the UK.

The single made the album sell and sell. Toni Braxton topped the US chart and made the UK top five. It was spritely, mature soul at its best – and just urban enough to make it the bedroom album for the hip hop generation. There’s no denying how glossy, overcooked, and, at times, overwrought it is, but there is little point in denying its beauty“ – BBC

Choice Cut: Breathe Again

The Latest Album

 

Spell My Name

Release Date: 28th August, 2020

Label: Island

Producers: Paul Boutin/Chris Braide/Toni Braxton/Ghara ‘PK’ Degeddingseze/Antonio Dixon/Kenneth Babyface Edmonds/Hannon Lane/Missy Elliott/Akeel Henry/Jordon Manswell/Jonathan Martin/Soundz/Dapo Torimiro

Standout Tracks: Dance/Gotta Move On (featuring H.E.R.)/Spell My Name

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1797844&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7cVfHcCdsGH28PMMRdTQg5?si=NiTZAdVrRxOfhSDAEV1mBA

Review:

“Toni Braxton was one of the biggest pop and R&B stars of the 1990s, and after a few years out of the spotlight, began a career resurgence began with 2014’s “Love, Marriage & Divorce” album with Babyface, which continued with 2018’s “Sex & Cigarettes.” Now, a mere two years later, she’s back with “Spell My Name,” possibly her strongest album since her halcyon period in the mid-to-late ‘90’s.

She’s brought along several longtime collaborators. Antonio Dixon penned the song “Long As I Live,” and he’s all over this album, chiming in with the second single, the shimmery summertime disco stomper, “Dance.” He also co-wrote “Do It” with Braxton and Babyface, who is also omnipresent, not only as a songwriter but because this album was recorded entirely at his Brandon’s Way recording studio.

For her part, Braxton cowrote nearly every song on the album, and she and her collaborators have succeeded in deftly meshing her signature minor-key R&B sound with production and vocal arrangements that keep things classy but contemporary. The mistress of melancholy, Braxton has made a career out of heartbreak and this record is no exception: Even “Dance,” the only fully upbeat song here, arrives as the remedy to a break-up. Meanwhile, “Gotta Move On” featurs a slow and meditative 4/4 beat with swooping strings and Ernie Isley-esque guitar solos from special guest H.E.R.

Of course, Braxton brings powerhouse vocals to the songs.. The emotive, scene-setting chords that begin “Happy Without Me” is one of her best-ever recorded performances, with lyrics to match: “Nothin’s bruised but my ego/ Nothin’s hurt but my pride.”

With just eight songs (plus a remix), the album actually harkens back to the vinyl age, when the physical limitations of an album meant shorter track lists. But that’s just part of the overall vibe. This is a not an R&B record made on a bedroom laptop: It’s expensive sounding, with a stellar cast of collaborators and dramatic orchestrations. And by the time the country-soul closing track rolls up — fittingly, a Babyface number, with a put-your-hands-in-the-air chorus’ — fans will be ready to start the whole thing over” – Variety

Choice Cut: Do It (with Missy Elliott)

The Toni Braxton Book

 

Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir

Author: Toni Braxton

Publication Date: 20th May, 2014

Publisher: It Books

Synopsis:

“The bestselling solo R&B artist finally opens up about her rocky past and her path to redemption

While Toni Braxton may appear to be living a charmed life, hers is in fact a tumultuous story: a tale of personal triumph after a public unraveling. In her heartfelt memoir, the six-time Grammy Award-winning singer and star of WE tv's hit reality series Braxton Family Values is unapologetically honest in revealing the intimate details of her journey.

Toni and the entire Braxton clan have become America's favorite musical family, but what fans may not know is the intense guilt Toni once felt when she accepted a recording deal that excluded her sisters. That decision would haunt Toni for years to come, tainting the enormous fame she experienced as a popular female vocalist at the top of the charts. Despite her early accomplishments, Toni's world crumbled when she was forced to file for bankruptcy twice and was left all alone to pick up the pieces.

Always the consummate professional, Toni rebuilt her life but then found herself in the midst of more heartache. The mother of an autistic child, Toni had long feared that her son's condition might be karmic retribution for some of the life choices that left her filled with remorse. Later, when heart ailments began plaguing her at the age of forty-one and she was diagnosed with lupus, Toni knew she had to move beyond the self-recrimination and take charge of her own healing&;physically and spiritually.

Unbreak My Heart is more than the story of Toni's difficult past and glittering success: it is a story of hope, of healing, and, ultimately, of redemption” – Amazon.co.uk

Order: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unbreak-My-Heart-Toni-Braxton/dp/0062293281

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Eighty-Seven: Jenny Hval

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

PHOTO CREDIT: Jenny Berger Myhre

Part Eighty-Seven: Jenny Hval

___________

ONE of the finest artists in the world…

this Modern Heroines concerns the brilliant Jenny Hval. Although she has released seven solo albums prior to Classic Objects, I want to make her current album the main focus. Iconic and among the most acclaimed songwriters around, Hval is Norwegian singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and novelist. A stunning artist whose music is absolutely phenomenal. Recorded at Øra Studio in Trondheim, Classic Objects is one of the best-reviewed albums of the year so far. I am going to end with a playlist of her best solo songs to date. Before that, I am going to combine a couple of recent reviews, alongside reviews for the fantastic Classic Objects. In this NPR interview, we discover why (compared to some of her other albums) Classic Objects is a brighter and more Pop-oriented release.:

“All of Hval's albums, in their own way, attempt to untangle the same struggle: the reality that her art, her desires, her body, plagued by history's gaze and capitalism's exploitations, have to be continuously reclaimed. Her latest, Classic Objects, expands on that project with a fluid, lively meditation on what it means to center her identity around being an artist, while grappling with the reality that her art exists tethered to a wider marketplace — one which constantly threatens to erode the personal, radical nature of her work.

A press release for the album claims Classic Objects is Hval's "version of a pop album," but the music here isn't pop so much as it's lighter than her more foreboding past work. Gone is the darkwave of The Practice of Love or the medieval gloom of 2016's Blood Bitch, replaced here with a jazzy, New Age sound. On songs like "Year of Sky" and "Cemetery of Splendour," thunderous bongos and shaken percussion give the songs an earthy, ritualistic aura, the latter ending with a spoken list of oddities found outside — branches, pine cones, cigarette butts — and the sounds of buzzing insects and revving cars and cyclists.

There's also long been a fervent religiosity to Hval's work, from the straight line she draws between her own sensuality and the ecstatic visions of Joan of Arc on 2013's Innocence Is Kinky to the throbbing, church-worthy instrumentals of Apocalypse, girl. Even her lyrics, which tend to unspool in poetic, casually conversational threads, can sometimes sound like sermons. Here, she continues her fascination with chest-clutching, Americana spiritualism on songs like "Year of Love," with its flat, pop Manzarek-style organ, and "American Coffee," which has a soulful choir tracking Hval's wild-out vocals. Once you get to the line where she sings about nursing a UTI and staring back at her own blood in the toilet, you know what it means to be a congregant of Hval's church: to remember that underneath society's projections, you're just flesh and blood.

The brightness of the music on this album reflects the ways in which Hval's more theory-driven tendencies as a songwriter are pulled back a bit. On Classic Objects, Hval's radical politics tend to hang in the background, bobbing in and out of the music's line of vision like deflated balloons that have clustered at the edges of a party in its last hours. The album opens up when Hval latches onto one of them and pulls it close to her, reminding herself that, actually, maybe she isn't as in control as she thought.

Classic Objects vibrates with the tension of "what could have been" had Hval made different life choices. On the album opener "Year of Love," she cheekily surveys the weight of her marriage — an act that arguably threatens her artistic and financial independence — like a museum attendee circling a sculpture. "In the year of love I signed a deal with patriarchy," she sings. But she also fills the album with voices and faces from her personal past — a studio space partner; roommates; her mother, scared in childbirth — revisiting life-shifting details like a scrapbook, cataloging the moments that have informed her art and made her her — more than just an artist, more than just a married person. And yet a shadow version of herself remains, a concept she confronts on "American Coffee": "Not she who stayed behind / She who quit everything, music and identity."

For Hval, music and identity is everything, and often one and the same. And art and what it means to protect it, to keep it an experimental extension and reflection of her selfhood, is a central concern of Classic Objects — sometimes ambiently, sometimes directly. On "Jupiter," she confronts the reality that not all art shares her same revolutionary ideals, looking at her reflection in the designer product-lined windows of the gluttonous installation "Prada Marfa" in the Texas desert. "Sometimes art is more real, more evil," she sings. "Just lonelier." Elsewhere, in the middle of the album's finale, "The Revolution Will Not Be Owned," Hval takes a meta beat to call witness to the political limitations of her own art embedded in the fine print. "This song is regulated by copyright regulations / And dreaming doesn't have copyright," she sings, the song's instrumentals building up around her. "I guess you could say: The revolution will not be owned."

Hanging over every minute of Classic Objects is the reminder that art and self-expression in its most potent form — vulnerable and politically unsparing — is precious, always threatened by the prospect of commercial ruin. Hval's work isn't easily codified, messily pushing and prodding against preconceived ideas about gender, sex, labor and desire, and so it constantly runs the risk of being flattened. And when she excavates her discomfort here with institutions like marriage and easily marketable strains of art, she shines a spotlight on the ways in which capitalist forces reorganize both art and love, threatening to mute their possibilities. Even the last few minutes of "Cemetery of Splendour," in which the trampling steps and trash of humans have invaded a natural terrain, traffic sounds dueling with the buzzing of insects, hold so much tension in such a small invasion”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Jenny Berger Myhre

The Guardian recently spoke with Hval. They opinion how, whereas she has used her music to discuss pornography and patriarchy, Jenny Hval feels like a hypocrite for tying the knot. There were also some perks for Hval when it came to the recent pandemic lockdowns:

“Classic Objects isn’t wholly preoccupied with marriage. Hval’s pandemic experience looms large over much of the record, with the legal restrictions placed on artistic performance providing plenty of food for thought. The fact that live music events were halted gave her the impression that her work was generally considered “dangerous yet unimportant” – the perfect perspective, she says, for “any authoritarian government” wanting to make changes to society.

Even as things open up again, Hval is concerned that the music industry is continuing its slide into a “more conservative” mindset, with the economic toll of multiple lockdowns cementing the shift. In order to guarantee ticket sales, venues that “started out as subcultural hubs” are now “hosting bands that are already signed and touring the world”, she says. The datafication of music also rewards existing success. “I wonder if that trend will just keep going now that we try to measure everything,” says Hval. “There are so many numbers – they can distort good creative decisions.”

Yet lockdown had its perks. Hval felt the physical benefits of pausing her itinerant lifestyle; she has coeliac disease and felt liberated from the constant challenge of finding suitable food while on tour. She also entered a period of cosy domesticity, spending time with her husband, who got very into fermenting food and looking after their puppy – a task that led to the semi-passive consumption of endless trashy movies, the only art form undemanding enough to accommodate the pair’s newly dog‑centric attention spans.

Hval came to the conclusion that she “would be quite happy to be a hermit artist”, but a recent return to live performance reminded her that touring’s sacrifices are accompanied by a unique joy. “There’s some kind of magic about being on stage that I only remember [when I’m there],” she says. “There are some parts of me that only exist in that stage moment.”

Instead of turning her into a permanent recluse, the pandemic, and the change of pace it required, fed into a new approach to songwriting: “simple stories” to echo her experience of a simpler life. The lyrics in Classic Objects are more immediately intelligible than on her previous offerings, but pared-back Hval is still rich and complex. The gorgeously searching, organ-backed American Coffee references everything from Guy Debord and her mother’s fear of driving to watching French cinema while suffering from a brutal UTI. She admits her songs “did get more adventurous than I anticipated”, which, in retrospect, she is relieved about. “Otherwise I think I would have written something that I didn’t actually agree with”.

A truly awesome artist who is going to continue to bring us music of the highest order, Jenny Hval is most definitely an artist who will be looked back on as a legend and iconic artist of our time. She is one of the most astonishing lyricists I have ever heard. Classic Objects is among her best albums to date. DIY had this to say when they reviewed it:

“There was a painter in my first studio space,” Jenny Hval recalls on the title track of ‘Classic Objects’. “I remember she used to attach her own hair to her paintings.” Delivered with a conversational tone that runs throughout this eighth studio album, it holds up a mirror to Jenny’s pairing of the abstract and the personal. Much like the physical incorporation of the painter’s body into their work, ‘Classic Objects’ places personal experience front and centre, yet envelops it in a conceptual bubble. Not new to turning private developments into works of art, here Jenny adopts a new level of candour. Inspired by the lack of artistry during the pandemic, ‘Classic Objects’ is the response to a question asked by many over the past two years: Who am I? The answer lies throughout several personal stories, each recounted with a matter-of-factness at odds with the otherworldly sound. On standout ‘American Coffee’, a tale of global exploration is momentarily replaced by French philosophy, leading to a disarmingly abrupt finish. The album’s two epic set pieces close with natural sounds that directly contradict the tangible nature of the story at hand. ‘Cemetery Of Splendour’ concludes with a spoken list of objects, painting a haunting picture of the balance of the natural world and humanity. It all accompanies a sound that harks at traditionalism and modernity, driven by Jenny’s distinctive soft vocals. Yet what on previous records had created something ethereal and untouchable here generates something altogether more physical and tactile. ‘Classic Objects’ walks the line between art and humanity, between nature and fabrication, between the real and the conceptual. It’s the audible equivalent of a painting affixed with human hair”.

I am going to close with a glowing review from Pitchfork. Not normally ones to give albums acclaim (they tend to err more on the side of caution a lot of the time!), they were impressed by Classic Objects:

“She plunges further into the divide between seeming and being on “Jupiter” and the album’s title track. On the former, she squares herself against the beige concrete corners of the Prada Marfa art installation in the West Texas desert. “I am an ‘abandoned project,’” she sings. The line recalls Lydia Davis’ singular “Tropical Storm,” with Hval offering a lightly funny reminder of the constant upkeep and occasional chaos of the corporeal form. But it also brings to mind the premise that Joan Jacob Brumberg presented in her 1998 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, which examines the historical arc of pervasive messaging to girls about physical self-improvement. Hval further ponders material differences in “Classic Objects,” wondering whether the items in her hands are art or stuff, and how to kiss passive gold and marble.

Within the confines of her humanity, Hval settles into the contradictory realities of her existence—among them, being a proud feminist and independent artistic woman who decided to marry a man. She recoils at being subjected to the “industrial-happiness complex,” as she puts it. “‘It’s just for contractual reasons,’ I explained,” she sings on “Year of Love,” with black jeans offered as another signifier of efforts to defang the proceedings. The song’s jumpy organ melody feels like a feverish calliope, as if the carousel of “The Circle Game” had somehow gone a little lopsided.

Hval’s perspective gradually expands outward across the record, shifting from small personal details to bigger-picture observations. The heady “Year of Sky” spins from the appeal of finding oneself back to losing it again, where time and place are temporary anchors to an infinite expanse, and Hval ponders the afterlife in “Cemetery of Splendour,” with a plodding, earthy bass tone that cedes to a long tail of a woodsy field recording. She takes inventory of her environment in a voice of breathy wonder—leaves, birds, cigarettes, gum! gum! gum!—illustrating her exterior world with lovely and ugly things alike.

From the harp-dappled lilt of “Freedom,” where she wonders about institutional promises, Hval builds toward the stormy, piano-driven finale of “The Revolution Will Not Be Owned.” She basks in the notion that an interior world is the only space where absolute unbridled freedom exists—even songs are subject to copyrights, as she sings. She frames dreaming as “the plan without the plan,” a carnival of unconsciousness. It’s here that the being and the seeming collapse into nothing, where it’s possible to be free of the world and all its impositions. Absolute freedom, Hval suggests, lies in the willful abandon of opening up to the wild possibilities of the interior. In the great conflicting unknown, pleasant surprises, profound revelations, and life-changing love abound”.

One of the music world’s most important and respected artists, I am curious where Jenny Hval will head next. As she is married and her music has taken on a new tone and lyrical direction, this will be a new and exciting phase for her. If you have not discovered Hval and her beautiful music, then spend some time to immerse yourself in the wonder of…

A modern-day icon.

FEATURE: Paul McCartney at Eighty: Twenty-One: The Beatles on Film: A Hard Day’s Night

FEATURE:

 

 

Paul McCartney at Eighty

Twenty-One: The Beatles on Film: A Hard Day’s Night

___________

AS part of this forty-feature run…

ahead of Paul McCartney’s eightieth birthday in June, of course, there will be more than a few dedicated to The Beatles. I have already spent some time with their albums and best tracks. I will rank the studio albums, perhaps, in another feature. Today, I want to start a mini-run of The Beatles’ films. Starting at the beginning with 1964’s A Hard Day’s Night. Alongside the phenomenal album, I think this was The Beatles’ best film. In terms of the acting, every member is superb. There ia argument that Ringo Starr and George Harrison provide the best performances, though I love Paul McCartney’s acting. I shall explain more and give my impressions on the film soon. Before that, I want to bring in some details about a tremendous film. Here, first, is its synopsis:

“At a railway station, The Beatles (John, Paul, George and Ringo) run, hide and adopt disguises in order to evade their fans.

Cocooned on a London bound train, they are accompanied by Paul's irascible, wayward Irish grandad, their manager Norm and factotum Shake. In their carriage, a middle-aged gent, clearly a member of the class that thinks they own the railway (''I fought the war for your sort") challenges the group over opening a window and playing a radio.

After Ringo rejects a 'come hither' advance from a sophisticated lady in another carriage, they join Norm and Shake in the buffet car, where they make passes at two schoolgirls. Grandad causes a scene and is placed in the baggage compartment, where the lads join him. The Beatles engage in a jam session with the schoolgirls watching. The train arrives at Paddington, where hoardes of waiting teenage fans are held back by police.

In their hotel room hundreds of fan letters have arrived. Ringo receives an invitation to visit Le Circle casino club. This is seized upon by granddad who steals an elderly room attendant's suit and visits the club himself. The Beatles visit a nightclub, and on their return to the hotel find the stripped room attendant in a cupboard, who tells them what happened. Recognised by the Le Circle doorman in spite of their casual dress, the four manage to rescue granddad.

A limousine takes The Beatles to a television studio, where they are topping a variety show (which also features dancers, operetta excerpts and a magician) that evening. Again, there are hordes of fans outside. The four attend a press reception. During rehearsals, the television director becomes increasingly anxious, as the Beatles continually 'do their own thing' rather than follow the diktats of those in authority like himself. They take a break on the fire escape and visit a nearby playing field, where they are told to move on as it is "private property".

George visits an advertising agency where Simon, concerned with spotting "tomorrows trends today", is launching a new range of shirts for teenagers. As George is regarded as a 'trendsetter', Simon wants his opinion (pre-scripted, of course). George tells him what he really thinks of the shirts. Ringo does his own thing and goes walkabout along a river bank, where he chats to an urchin, visits a secondhand clothes shop and a pub. He is soon taken to a police station, as is granddad for aggressively hawking Beatles publicity photos. Granddad escapes and George, Paul and John arrive to rescue Ringo, and are subsequently chased by policemen.

The Beatles perform their songs on the TV show before a hysterical studio audience of teenage girls, climaxing with 'She Loves You'. The performance is a triumph, to the amazement of the TV director. The Beatles are bundled into a helicopter, and as it takes off into the stratosphere their publicity photographs are scattered to the crowds below”.

I often wonder what it was like turning up on that first day to film their very first film. Naturally, there would have been expectation and some nerves. They would have been excitement too! The Beatles Bible give some information about that fateful day in March 1964:

“On Monday 2 March 1964 The Beatles joined Equity, the actors’ union, only minutes before they began shooting their first film, the as-yet untitled A Hard Day’s Night

Their union memberships were proposed and seconded by Wilfrid Brambell and Norman Rossington, their main co-stars in the film. All gathered at London’s Paddington Station, where their train left at 8.30am from platform five. However, no filming took place at the station itself.

The specially-hired train was destined for Minehead and back, where for the next three days scenes were filmed in the suitably cramped setting. There was a dining car for The Beatles to eat in, yet during their designated 40-minute food break they preferred to sit outside the stationary train.

The Beatles’ dialogue was recorded using microphones hidden inside their shirts, but numerous retakes were required due to sound problems.

The train bit embarrasses us now. I’m sure it’s less noticeable to people watching in the cinema, but we know that we’re dead conscious in every move we make, we watch each other. Paul’s embarrassed when I’m watching him speak and he knows I am. You can see the nervous bits normally in pictures: things like the end – you make that on one day, and on the next day you do the beginning. But we did it almost in sequence. The first we did was the train, which we were all dead nervous in. Practically the whole of the train bit we were going to pieces.

John Lennon, 1964

Anthology

One of the actresses present on this day was Pattie Boyd, for whom George Harrison took an instant liking. They began dating shortly afterwards and married in January 1966.

The scenes of Beatlemania which greeted the group as they embarked on their journey caused a rethink in subsequent days’ filming. For the next five days they boarded at Acton rather than Paddington, and in the evenings were met by their chauffeurs at a variety of smaller suburban stations”.

Paul McCartney appeared with The Beatles in films such as Help! and Magical Mystery Tour. Alongside the film and the album, there was promotion. By the time A Hard Day’s Night was filming, Beatlemania was certainly growing! The band are seen in the film’s opening scene being chased by hordes of fans. It is pretty close to what life was like for them! I think A Hard Day’s Night stands out, is because it is the young band in a film that is about their daily lives. Directed by Richard Lester, it wonderfully features Wilfrid Brambell as John McCartney, Paul's grandfather. I love that relationship and story strand. All of the band are great in the film, but I feel McCartney offers a good mix of emotions. He does not ham things up too much; his acting is solid, and he is very charming and funny throughout. I am not sure whether fans and the media would have defined each Beatle in terms of their personality. Maybe Lennon was the more serious one; Starr the funnier one. McCartney was, maybe, ‘the cute one’. Never parodying the band or heightening the reality, A Hard Day’s Night looks and feels beautiful in black-and-white. McCartney is in some of the best scenes and moments. Him trying to keep his mischievous grandfather in check is brilliant! The bond he has with Lennon is especially endearing and important. At an early stage of their career, you can see Harrison, Lennon, Starr and McCartney enjoying themselves! I hope that McCartney remembers the film fondly. As he is eighty soon, it must be strange looking back on a film that is almost sixty years old!  A Hard Day’s Night is a hugely influential film, inspiring numerous spy films, The Monkees' television show and a tonne of Pop videos and future films featuring groups (one feels Spice Girls’ Spiceworld was directly inspired by A Hard Day’s Night). In a landmark and still-amazing film, Paul McCartney offers up…

A wonderful and warm performance.

FEATURE: Experiment I: Returning to the Notion of a Kate Bush Tribute Album

FEATURE:

 

 

Experiment I

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993 during filming of the short film, The Cross, the Cross and the Curve/PHOTO CREDIT: Guido Harari 

Returning to the Notion of a Kate Bush Tribute Album

___________

HAVING read reviews…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for Army Dreamers (1980)/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

of the recent album, Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono, I have been thinking about Kate Bush and the lack of tribute albums out there. The Yoko Ono is a variety of artists covering her songs. It is a great album, and it will introduce her music to new people. Maybe not one of the most accessible or played artists, I think it was high time there was a tribute album! Although Kate Bush’s music is better known, I still feel there is something that can be done to make people aware of the full extent of her brilliance. Listen to the radio and, mostly, it is the bigger songs that are played. Rarely do stations go off the script and play a deeper cut. Because of this, I feel a lot of people define Bush too rigidly or have a narrow view of her music. Proper fans spend time listening to her album tracks, but I wonder how much of the wider world beyond that understand and are aware of songs like, say, The Wedding List? There are so many people that do not know some brilliant songs. Not that a tribute album would change that is a massive way. It is more of a salute to an innovative and pioneering artist who has so many supporters and fans. Seemingly more relevant than ever, demand would certainly be there for a tribute album!

 IN THIS PHOTO: Florence Welch (Florence + The Machine)/PHOTO CREDIT: Rhys Frampton for Sorbet Magazine

It would definitely not be the first time artists have been brought together for an album like this. In the past, there have been projects. They tended to feature smaller artists who are less widely-known. Look at some of the newer artists like The Anchoress who are inspired by Kate Bush. As I have said before, The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon is a fan. I have just interviewed Nerina Pallot about Bush. She has previously covered Moments of Pleasure (The Red Shoes). Even though some of Bush’s big musician fans have covered her music before, there is opportunity to organise a tribute album. The aim would be to look at deeper cuts, rather than the ones that everyone is familiar with. Everyone from Big Boi, St. Vincent, Rufus Wainwright, Guy Garvey, Anna Calvi, Fiona Apple, k.g. lang, Courtney Love, Darren Hayes, Björk and Florence Welch are fans. In terms of who could appear, there is no reason why major artists would either refuse or be expensive to book. In a previous feature, I think I suggested profits could go to a charity. Bush is a supporter of many, so proceeds could go there. Maybe the cost of putting it on vinyl would mean a big financial hit if that was where the profits were going. In any case, I would be fascinated to see how artists we know and love combine with upcoming acts. Tackling songs that show Kate Bush’s true depth and musical dexterity, they would put their own stamp on these songs. Maybe recording the songs at a studio that Bush has worked out of, like Abbey Road or AIR Studios.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy)

In terms of the number of tracks, I think there could be fourteen. Trying to take a song from each of her nine studio albums (I am leaving out 2011’s Director’s Cut), songs that have not been shared or played that much are brought to life and reinterpreted by some brilliant artists. I know The Anchoress likes the song, Egypt (from 1978’s Lionheart). Maybe Big Boi taking on a song from The Dreaming (Pull Out the Pin?). St. Vincent grappling with Waking the Witch or Mother Stands for Comfort? Nerine Paollot has performed Moments of Pleasure. I would like to hear what she does with a deep cut. I think Neil Hannon could do a brilliant rendition of a song such as James and the Cold Gun (The Kick Inside) or the brilliant Mrs. Bartolozzi (Aerial). I think there would need to be some bands in the mix. Perhaps pairing artists together. Anna Calvi together with Charli XCX? I am just putting it out there but, when it comes to Kate Bush-related projects, there has always been this gap that a tribute album could fill. I don’t think Bush could have any objections. Artists celebrating her work and showing their respect is not only a perfect way to mark her legacy. Maybe it would motivate Bush to record more music at some point. As there are U.S. artists who might not be able to get to the U.K. and record, they could record their parts closer to home. I was eager to put the notion of a tribute album back out there. I love the song, All the Love (from The Dreaming), and I have suggested it as a podcast title. It would actually suite a tribute album! Songs such as Experiment IV (the single from the 1986 greatest hits album, The Whole Story), The Song of Solomon (The Red Shoes), and The Fog (The Sensual World) would be brought to…

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Anchoress (Catherine Anne Davies)

A wider audience.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Carson McHone

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Carson McHone

___________

I do not feature too many…

Country and Americana artists in my Spotlight feature. It is an oversight, and one I am trying to rectify. I only recently came across the music of Carson McHone, but I really love what she does. Her latest album, Still Life, is magnificent! Certainly one of the musical treasures of the year so far! I am building everything to a review of that album. Before I get there, it is worth putting in some background and interviews with the fabulous artist from Austin, Texas. Her debut album, Goodluck Man, came out in 2015. Since then, she has built her sound and fanbase. McHone is an artist that everyone needs to check out:

“There is something almost excruciating about the places in between. The feeling of falling. A reassertion of gravity as one step leads to another but just before the foot lands. The purgatory between borders, before clarity becomes whole.

Still Life, Carson McHone’s third album and second release with Loose Music, quivers like a tightrope, with songs about existing within such tension and surviving beyond the breaking point. These are stories of sabotage, confusion, and surrender. The album is a testament to the effort of reaching, sometimes flailing, for understanding and for balance. Still Life invites us to gasp at our own reflection and acknowledge the unsettling beauty in this breath.

McHone’s 2018 internationally released Carousel (Loose Music), produced by Mike McCarthy in Nashville, was a reimagining of songs from her formative years coming of age playing in Texas bars. It established her as a shrewd lyricist who raises unconventional questions with language equally at home in a short story or a poem. Still Life addresses a broader picture. It is thematically more refined and yet more daring. McHone’s voice remains front and center, but it’s richer, darker. Wielded more than woven. A gorgeously wrought instrument for pushing meaning forward.

McHone wrote the songs of Still Life in quiet moments between tours in her hometown of Austin, then recorded in Ontario with Canadian musician and producer Daniel Romano. McHone says of the session, “Daniel is a perceptive player, and his response was intuitive and organic. We attacked these songs as a blank canvas. Shadows sharpened and came to life as full vignettes that felt familiar in a magical way, a product of keeping things emotionally open. I think we picked up on things that were unwritten.” Together in a home studio they cut almost the entire record themselves, calling on two friends, the versatile Mark Lalama on accordion, piano, and organ, and David Nardi with some savvy saxophone, to round it out. The phrasing and tones recall John Cale, The Kinks, Richard and Linda Thompson—like-minded artists of the late ’60s and early ’70s, another era of transition and innovation.

On Still Life, this first-time collaboration between McHone and Romano reveals a compelling dynamic; the musical punctuation is intricate, erratic, and at times even playful. The arrangements provide texture to the landscape of the songs while sustaining the underlying thematic tension. The album opens with “Hawks Don’t Share,” a literary allusion to the creative sabotage that often confronts artistic alliance. A pair of sparring electric guitars sets the scene, mirrored in the line, We’re both boxers babe/ we don’t make love. Bright horns pop between phrases overtop a tight rhythm section. A jangly twelve-string leads into a driving chorus with big vocal harmonies and layered synth. The title track plays out an anguished spiraling.

Right at the point where language fails, the vocals break away into fuzz guitar and violent, incessant piano, as if the turmoil can only be expressed by music. In “Sweet Magnolia,” the strings, horns, and piano create a perfect orbit for the mannered intensity of a song that soars but is essentially spoken. “End of the World” builds with dark and dissonant violins over a repetitive major guitar progression, leaving us hanging on its final line, “Tell me what do you know of restraint?”. The punchy sax and tumbling toms of “Only Lovers” play into the ruse of pretending you haven’t already fallen when you have. The background vocals are like a playground taunt. On the buoyant “Someone Else,” McHone’s assured vocal delivery cuts to the punch: I’m caught between the two/ sweet despair and hope renewed/ say it ain’t profound babe. Behind her, the rollicking organ and hammering piano conspire to bust down the door and pull us along.

More than timeless, Still Life is timely, inherently modern, immediate. The final song, “Tried,” acts as a kind of eulogy for the in-between spaces these songs embody. The bardo one must emerge from. The album challenges us to take responsibility for what we experience and how we negotiate gravity moving forward. Still Life summons us to the present in all its complexity, daring us to join in the deliberation. Here is an exposé of conscience, and a confirmation of the inherently hopeful act of creation.

Let’s find a new language to use so we’re not confused”.

I did not know much about her prior to coming to this feature. It has been fascinating researching. I want to combine a couple of recent interviews. SPIN chatted with McHone about Still Life. She is someone whose musical has grown and diversified since her debut. It is hard to categorise and define her sound:

“Despite growing up around a subculture of musicians doing their best to mimic cowboy tropes, McHone was more interested in how songs become timeless and manifest in succeeding generations. “I grew up listening to a lot of Celtic music,” she continues. “I’ve always loved melodies that feel ancient but so, so urgent and still relevant.” As a result, McHone’s been able to assimilate folk, grunge, blues, and yacht rock sounds into kinetic, breathable compositions.

Four years after Carousel, she’s blossomed far beyond the genres she’s never fit into. Her Merge Records debut, Still Life, is a sweeping collection of technicolor and crooning balladry, a country vibrato that toes the line between alternative and Americana. The record’s orchestral arrangements, supplied by Ontario bulwark Daniel Romano, turn McHone’s songwriting three-dimensional. The project germinated at the beginning of the pandemic, when she and Romano retreated to Toronto and used the country’s lockdown protocols to hone their compositional chemistry and generate a palette of arresting, streamlined lyricism. “It’s the first record I’ve made where it’s an intimate thing between just two people,” McHone says.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chad Wadsworth 

The night before our video call, McHone says she watched Cool Hand Luke for the first time. She quickly picked up on the parallels between the infamous “failure to communicate” line and her own, “let’s find a new language to use so we’re not confused,” in “Fingernail Moon.”

“That’s all we’re trying to do, communicate, and the language that we use is so personal and it’s all based on our past experience, the things that we collect,” she says. “You have to, first, be in touch with yourself to know what you want to say, but then there’s this element of mystery about how people are going to interpret it.”

Taking linguistic inspiration from books like A Moveable Feast and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, McHone is a vivid storyteller. Her lyrics have always been solemn, straight-to-the-point yet spacious; emotionally sprawling and inviting, even in her barnstorming, DIY days. During the zenith of “End of the World,” she asks the listener: “Tell me what do you know of restraint?” It’s a question McHone’s been workshopping the answer to because she writes such acute, centered language – but it’s her interactions with liminal space, and her articulation of tension, that establishes such good resonance. She, beautifully, gives us her life story, but empathetically leaves room for us to glean our own stories from it, too. “As an artist, the catalyst for involving yourself in the creative process is very personal, but you do have to take into account your audience,” McHone adds. “You want to be understood, but you also want to allow people to arrive themselves”.

I think that Still Life is one of the best albums of the year. Glide Magazine shared similar sentiments when they spoke with the remarkable Carson about Still Life recently:

“It’s only February, but I feel confident in saying that one of the best albums you will hear this year is Carson McHone’s Still Life, due out this Friday, February 25th on Merge Records. The Austin-based singer-songwriter has been performing much of her adult life and forged a respectable folk-rock meets country sound on her previous full-length albums, 2015’s Good Luck Man and 2018’s Carousel. Yet Still Life exists on a higher plane. The album is rich with instrumentation that feels full and commanding yet warm and inviting, with sentimental accordion, twelve-string guitar, horns, choir-like background vocals, and organ all coming together in one beautiful symbiotic wave of sound. McHone also seems to be tapping into a range of new influences, including British folk-rock, soul, 60s and 70s pop, and glam rock, all of which form a sound that, mixed with her complex lyricism, is vibrant and timeless. In other words, Still Life is not the kind of album you throw on once and forget about.

To make the album, McHone decamped far from her home base in Texas to the Great White North of Ontario. Here she linked up with the prolific Daniel Romano, who somehow found a break from constantly releasing albums to be able to produce and record the album along with a handful of super talented players. Romano – who has never been afraid to take his sound in new directions and shift from a country album to psych rock to paisley pop and more – clearly has a chemistry with McHone as Still Life truly feels like a collaborative effort.

As we emerge to a state of normalcy after a depressing couple of years, Still Life is exactly the piece of art that can lift spirits. McHone, who hasn’t played a show in two years, will also be hitting the road this spring with Romano and his band where she will undoubtedly treat listeners to these new songs. Recently, she took the time to chat about the making of the album, finding its sound, musical inspirations, collaborating with Romano and more.

You seem to be moving away from a more country-influenced sound to something a little more rooted in pop and soul on this new album. Were you consciously pushing towards a different sound than your last album?

I just followed where the songs lead. It’s not so much that my interests have changed, it’s more so that I’m learning how to listen to things more as a creator, in a way that I can pick things out and put them to use myself.

You worked with Daniel Romano in Canada on this album. Did being away from Texas and working with Daniel make you approach the music in a different way?

Daniel has made all kinds of music over the years and as we explored different feels, he could facilitate different options on the drums, or bass, guitars, etc. We made this record in the living room, because that’s where we were, and because things were locked down, but I do believe that making it when and where we did gave me some healthy perspective. Approaching these tunes in a completely different space, faraway from the place where I’d written them, physically and emotionally, solidified them – the things they carried either fell away or became clearer and more potent, standing there stripped of context and with a different backdrop.

When were these songs actually written? Would you say you were inspired to write during the pandemic?

All of these songs were written prior to the pandemic, but recorded during a lockdown, and the album seems to embody that time in an uncanny way. Time and space seemed to hover in this strange limbo, which is where these songs exist, in these elevated moments of introspection – it was a sort of pause, but it’s in that beat that change can begin, a shift can happen – the literal isolation allowed me that in a way”.

I want to end with a review for the stunning and instantly affecting Still Life. Holler. commended the range and excellence of Carson McHone’s third studio album:

“With Still Life, Carson McHone proves just how broad a church Americana really is; stirring up her own personal melting pot of musical experimentation and influences to create a diverse third full-length album.

From listening it becomes clear why she’s drawn comparison to the likes of Gillian Welch. Throughout the record, she displays a similar mastery of poetic lyrics, written from her hometown of Austin, Texas, then taken north across the border to Canada, to be arranged and recorded with producer Daniel Romano in Ontario.

The album’s title track has mazy guitar lines and genuine Americana warmth that pulls back and forth around McHone’s direct vocals. She nods towards Tom Petty’s band, the Heartbreakers, on ‘Hawks Don't Share’, with its duelling guitars, economical delivery and power pop undertone, as she sings: “I’ve got a soft spot for your madness and your fierce embrace / And the quiet violence in your face.” This pop-orientated approach is also heard in ‘Someone Else’, a jumpy and urgent track, and on ‘Only Lovers’, with its ironically jolly arrangement.

At its best, Still Life ticks every emotional and musical sweet spot, perhaps most notably with ‘Sweet Magnolia’, as McHone tries to avoid looking back with rose-tinted spectacles, lyrically capturing shades of Randy Newman’s peerless, pin-sharp evocations of place and time. On ‘Fingernail Moon’, choruses of layered, heavenly harmonies explore the sincere hope to “find a new language to use so we’re not confused”.

 Going in a completely different direction, ‘Spoil on the Vine’ features chiming guitar under McHone’s distorted, echoing vocals, making the song’s sentiment feel more distanced and otherworldly, as she pleads: “won’t you cry into my ears so that I can hear your tears.”

Contrasting with the more elaborate constructions and layers elsewhere, three tracks deliberately pare everything down and take it back to basics. ‘End of the World’ has acoustic guitars noodling away under McHone’s doubled-up vocals. ‘Folk Song’ lives up to its name, with keening tune and folky delivery of lyrics including the world-weary observation that “all the sense in all this round world will never save me from myself.”

Taking this formula to the extreme, her apt closing number, ‘Tried’ is short, spare and stripped back to almost nothing, just vocals and simple guitar. Maybe McHone is asking the listeners to muse carefully about what they’ve heard when she finishes the entire record with the entreaty, “when you write it say that I tried.”

Stripped back or full-blown, there’s something for everyone who loves Americana here - McHone is really flexing her musical muscles. Very promising”.

An artist that you need to check out and add to your rotation, Carson McHone is an amazing talent. Go and follow her on social media and listen to Still Life. Although we are not that far into 2022, it is most certainly one of the best albums…

OF the year.

____________

Follow Carson McHone

PHOTO CREDIT: Sam Kossler 

Official:

http://www.carsonmchonemusic.com/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/carsonmchone13

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/CarsonMcHoneMusic

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/1IOeIjSSt8AcZXEriZXcvx?si=Uznc3F9uTj2ryVR5cLbKeg

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/carsonmchonemusic

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf3bEdSCBEY3F0M3TmrU8Tg

FEATURE: Blessed: The Iconic Jill Scott at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

Blessed

The Iconic Jill Scott at Fifty

___________

THE iconic and magnificent…

Jill Scott turns fifty on 4th April. The Philadelphia singer, songwriter, model, poet and actress is a legend whose albums are absolutely amazing. I especially love her 2000 debut, Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1, and 2011’s The Light of the Sun. To mark her upcoming birthday, I will end with a playlist containing her best cuts and finest moments. Prior to that, I am going to pull in AllMusic’s biography of the R&B/Soul queen:

“A poetic R&B powerhouse who handles slower, sensual material and bright anthems of pride and self-empowerment with equal aptitude, Jill Scott introduced herself at the beginning of the millennium with the Top 20 and multi-platinum Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1 (2000). This debut also resulted in four Grammy nominations, including one for Best New Artist, an indication of the promise the singer has fulfilled and overshot throughout her career. After a pair of Top Ten, gold-selling sequels in the Words and Sounds series, Beautifully Human (2004) and The Real Thing (2007), and a Grammy win for the latter album's "Cross My Mind," Scott topped the Billboard 200 with her fourth and fifth LPs, The Light of the Sun (2011) and Woman (2015). Her substantial collaborative work is highlighted by three more Grammy-winning recordings: the Roots' "You Got Me," which she co-wrote, in addition to George Benson and Al Jarreau's version of "God Bless the Child," and Lupe Fiasco's "Daydreamin,'" both of which feature her vocals. Her extensive synchronous work as an actor includes multiple Tyler Perry projects, main roles in series such as The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, and Black Panther, and an NAACP Image Award-winning role in Sins of the Mother.

From North Philadelphia, born and raised, Jill Scott planned on becoming a high school English teacher. However, she left behind her secondary education studies at Temple University to pursue theater, joined a local troupe, and eventually landed a role in a Canadian production of Rent. Back in her hometown, while reading poetry at the October Gallery, she caught the attention of the Roots' Questlove. Asked by the drummer if she wrote songs, Scott said yes -- which she later confessed was a lie -- and consequently became a co-composer of the Roots' "You Got Me." Scott was also the original featured vocalist, but MCA, the Roots' label, demanded that the group record instead with the established Erykah Badu. Issued as a single in January 1999, "You Got Me" became a Top 40 pop hit. Although it didn't feature her vocals, Scott did perform the song live with the Roots, as documented on The Roots Come Alive, released that November. The studio version went on to win a Grammy in the category of Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. Since it wasn't a songwriters' award, Scott didn't receive one.

Two weeks after the street date of The Roots Come Alive, Scott's name appeared on the back of another new release, Will Smith's Willennium. She delivered the chorus for album finale "The Rain," co-produced by Smith's partner, DJ Jazzy Jeff, and it was with Jeff's support that she secured a deal with Steve McKeever's Epic-distributed Hidden Beach label. After working with Jeff, the Roots, and other Philly natives such as longtime creative partners Dre & Vidal and Carvin Haggins, Scott made her solo debut in July 2000 with Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds, Vol. 1.

One of that year's most favorably reviewed albums, it peaked at number 17 on the Billboard 200 and reached number two on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. "Gettin' in the Way," its biggest single, set the tone for Scott's career with its high placement on the Adult R&B chart, reaching number three. The Recording Academy responded by nominating Scott for three Grammys: Best New Artist and Best R&B Album, and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for "Gettin' in the Way." In 2001, a later single off the album, "A Long Walk," narrowly missed the Top 40, went Top Ten R&B/hip-hop, and made Scott an R&B Vocal Performance nominee in consecutive years. Experience: Jill Scott 826+, a double album of live and studio material (including a soaring 4hero collaboration), appeared that November. Its nine-minute, three-movement version of "He Loves Me (Lyzel in E Flat)" resulted in Scott's third straight nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance.

The next two volumes in the Words and Sounds trilogy, Beautifully Human and The Real Thing, were released respectively in August 2004 and September 2007, and entered the Billboard 200 within the Top Five. The first of this pair yielded a number ten Adult R&B single with the slow jam "Cross My Mind," which bagged a Grammy for Best Urban/Alternative Performance -- Scott's first win, to go along with another set of nominations for Best R&B Album and R&B Vocal Performance, the latter thanks to another loved-up single, "Whatever."

The Real Thing followed another Grammy award -- "God Bless the Child," a collaboration with George Benson and Al Jarreau, won Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance -- and generated the deeply contrasting Adult R&B hits "Hate on Me" and "My Love." More Grammy nominations followed suit: Best R&B Album and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance (for "Hate on Me"), while Lupe Fiasco's Scott-enhanced "Daydreamin'" won Best Urban/Alternative Performance. Between Beautifully Human and The Real Thing, the singer performed at Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Additionally, the original version of the Roots' "You Got Me" received commercial release on Home Grown! The Beginner's Guide to Understanding the Roots, Vol. 1, while Collaborations, compiled by Hidden Beach, rounded up "The Rain," "God Bless the Child," "Daydreamin'," and other songs Scott graced, headlined by the likes of the Isley Brothers, Kirk Franklin, and Mos Def.

Scott wouldn't release another studio album until well into the next decade, but she was busy as an actor. Hidden Beach mitigated the absence of their star artist with Live in Paris+. Supporting roles in Hounddog and Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married?, and a main role in the series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, built up to a very active 2010 highlighted by the series Black Panther and the film Sins of the Mother. Scott's performance in the latter was acknowledged with an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Television Movie, Mini-Series, or Dramatic Special, handed to her after more than a dozen nominations in music and other acting categories that dated back to her first album. Scott didn't take a complete break from music during this period. She appeared on the Grammy-nominated "Love" by Chuck Brown, the godfather of go-go -- a distinctive D.C. style Scott had referenced in her own output.

In June 2011, Scott returned with her fourth proper album, The Light of the Sun, through her new arrangement with Warner Bros. It crowned the Billboard 200 and placed at number three in the Adult R&B Songs Top Ten; it included "So in Love," featuring Anthony Hamilton, and "Blessed," both chart-toppers. Another four years transpired between Scott LPs. Her most notable musical appearance during this phase -- involving roles in Baggage Claim and the biographical drama Get on Up, for which she portrayed Dee Dee Brown, James Brown's second wife -- was on Robert Glasper Experiment's "Calls." Woman, issued by Atlantic in July 2015, became Scott's second number one album, promoted with the Top Ten Adult R&B singles "Fool's Gold," "Back Together," and "Can't Wait." Meanwhile, Hidden Beach kept cranking out catalog titles, following a series of remix compilations with anthologies such as Golden Moments in 2015 and By Popular Demand in 2018. By the end of the decade, Scott had more than enough featured appearances to fill out another Collaborations-styled compilation, having uplifted material by Dr. Dre, Pusha T, De La Soul, and Big K.R.I.T.”.

Ahead of the fiftieth birthday of the wonderful and hugely inspiring Jill Scott, below are a collection of songs showcasing her at her very best. To be honest, her album deep cuts are pretty damn good too! If you are new to her work or need a reminder of how great Jill Scott is, then I think the songs below should give you…

A great taste of her brilliance!

FEATURE: Pass the Mic: Beastie Boys' Check Your Head at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Pass the Mic

Beastie Boys' Check Your Head at Thirty

___________

BY the time their third album…

arrived in 1992, Beastie Boys moved in a new direction. Although their first album, 1986’s Licensed to Ill, was successful, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique did not connect with critics straight away. Its sample-heavy and denser sound meant that it took years for the album to gain proper recognition. Check Your Head is the Beastie Boys moving away (to an extent) from a large amount of samples to using more natural instruments. Pass the Mic, Gratitude and So What'cha Want are classic slices from Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D. Produced solely by Mario Caldato, Jr. (who was one of the producers on Paul’s Boutique), Check Your Head made number ten on the Billboard 200. It was well-received, even if some were confused by the cross-pollination and new direction. At twenty tracks, Check Your Head is never sprawling and composed or too many weak tracks. With no track lasting as long as five minutes, there is focus and concision in terms of song length. I think that there will be a lot of celebration of Beasties’ classic third studio album on 21st April. It is one of the trio’s strongest albums. I am going to come to a couple of reviews. Before that, it is worth checking back on a couple of features that spotlighted an album that helped to revive and maintain the careers of one of Hip-Hip’s most important and innovative acts.

Loud Wire marked the twenty-ninth anniversary of Check Your Head on 21st April last year. Maybe out of necessity, Beasties moved to relying less on samples and playing their own instruments. They still managed to be uniquely them and hugely innovating regarding their sonics and lyrics:

“The trio had long shown their rock influences through samples on their Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique albums, but with Check Your Head, they began to shift more toward playing their own instruments and reclaiming the punk and hardcore roots of their pre-fame days before rap put them on the map. Part of the reason for this was the increasing restraints on sampling that were happening at the time.

In a 1992 interview with Uncut, Mike D. stated, "It's kind of a drag cause there's no real established guidelines … You just kind of have to do it and then try to make a deal for it." In doing so, they ran into a few issues. The Jimi Hendrix estate initially denied a wealth of samples used in the song "Jimmy James," but later granted the group permission. They were not as lucky when it came to a sample of James Newton who took the group to court over the use of a portion of his track "Choir" in "Pass the Mic." The band had paid Newton's label, but the artist was not happy with the situation. Eventually, the Beasties were found not liable for the sample.

But even with the sampling issues, the Beasties were already planning on breaking new ground. They started by building their own G-Son Studio with the help of producer Mario Caldato Jr. and keyboardist Money Mark. After the studio was built, it allowed the band the time and access needed to work out musical ideas without having to worry about studio budgets.

"There was talk of making it an instrumental record for a while," explained Mike D. on the 2009 Check Your Head reissue commentary. "For the first year and a half where we just came into the studio and played our instruments every day, we didn't even mess with the vocals for a long time." As a result, the band ended up with funk-based instrumentals like "Lighten Up" and "Groove Holmes," while other tracks were more jam-based like "POW" and "Namaste."

But this approach shouldn't surprise anyone knowing the Beasties' history. "Pretty much from our first indie record, we just do what we do in the moment," Mike D. told Hangin' With MTV. "We're just fortunate that other people are able to deal with it".

It is shocking to think that Beastie Boys needed to prove themselves on Check Your Head. A misunderstood classic, 1989’s Paul’s Boutique was too rich and accomplished for critics who were expected something simple and overly-accessible. Check Your Head was not a compromise; rather, it was an album that granted them the recognition and acclaim that they deserved all along. Albuism cast an eye back in 2017. They discussed the Beasties moving to Los Angeles (from their native New York) and almost starting over:

“Check Your Head, the Beastie Boys’ third official release, was a critical comeback album. People who weren’t there may have trouble believing that, but it’s the absolute truth. Paul’s Boutique, their dizzying, Dust-Brothers-produced, sonic-collage sophomore effort, now widely regarded as a classic, was nearly a career-killing commercial flop when it arrived in 1989. Yes, Paul’s Boutique may have gone Gold. But it was originally shipped platinum by Capitol Records, the Beastie Boys’ new label, on the heels of their five-million-selling 1986 debut Licensed to Ill on Def Jam, after a lengthy contract dispute during the late eighties.

So, what to do now, after making a highly slept-on, sample-based-symphony, which also served as a tribute to New York City, an album that by any commercial measurement, flopped?!? Well, move to Los Angeles, of course. Then, over the course of 1991, while as lifelong friends in their late-twenties having fun in the sun, workshop this garage-rap/rock “musical masterpiece.”

Make no mistake, Check Your Head saved the Beasties’ career. It also drew up a blueprint for the territory they would go on to mine for the duration of their shared prime. This formula might have taken them outside the realms of what true-school folks consider hip-hop, placing them perilously close to the alt-rock campfire that was raging at the time. But that was never truly their bag. This album remained true to who the Beastie Boys actually were. And in the words of Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye, in Last of the Mohicans, a film released during the same year, Check Your Head would go on to make sure that these three-brothers-from-another-mother, would “Stay alive, no matter what occurs.”

The Beasties did more than stay alive. With the Check Your Head’s release one quarter of a century ago, the Beasties would go on to thrive. Blessed with hindsight, we don’t think about this album in those terms now. But I clearly recall the first time I heard this album. It was near the cement stairs of a major bank in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall off Market Street, where a wonderfully multi-ethnic group of young skaters were pumping it on cassette out of a boombox while my friends performed rail-slides. As a hip-hop junkie, I’d already all-but-forgotten the Beastie Boys. Shortly after hearing “Pass the Mic,” the lead and arguably most crucial single on the album, the loud music coupled with teenage rebellion resulted in cops showing up. Next thing we all knew, we were running for what felt like our young lives. I will remember the way that new music, and moment, made me feel for the rest of my lifetime”.

In spite of some not completely bonding with Check Your Head, the reaction in 1992 was more supportive than back in 1989. Maybe at the time it was unusual for Beasties fans. Check Your Head is very different to Paul’s Boutique. Now, it was  bridge to their 1994 album, Ill Communication. AllMusic wrote this in their review of the masterful and dazzling Check Your Head:

“Check Your Head brought the Beastie Boys crashing back into the charts and into public consciousness, but that was only partially due to the album itself -- much of its initial success was due to the cult audience that Paul's Boutique cultivated in the years since its initial flop release, a group of fans whose minds were so thoroughly blown by that record, they couldn't wait to see what came next, and this helped the record debut in the Top Ten upon its April 1992 release. This audience, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, was a collegiate Gen-X audience raised on Licensed to Ill and ready for the Beastie Boys to guide them through college. As it happened, the Beasties had repositioned themselves as a lo-fi, alt-rock groove band. They had not abandoned rap, but it was no longer the foundation of their music, it was simply the most prominent in a thick pop-culture gumbo where old school rap sat comfortably with soul-jazz, hardcore punk, white-trash metal, arena rock, Bob Dylan, bossa nova, spacy pop, and hard, dirty funk.

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What they did abandon was the psychedelic samples of Paul's Boutique, turning toward primitive grooves they played themselves, augmented by keyboardist Money Mark and co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr.. This all means that music was the message and the rhymes, which had been pushed toward the forefront on both Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique, have been considerably de-emphasized (only four songs -- "Jimmy James," "Pass the Mic," "Finger Lickin' Good," and "So What'cha Want" -- could hold their own lyrically among their previous work). This is not a detriment, because the focus is not on the words, it's on the music, mood, and even the newfound neo-hippie political consciousness. And Check Your Head is certainly a record that's greater than the sum of its parts -- individually, nearly all the tracks are good (the instrumentals sound good on their subsequent soul-jazz collection, The in Sound From Way Out), but it's the context and variety of styles that give Check Your Head its identity. It's how the old school raps give way to fuzz-toned rockers, furious punk, and cheerfully gritty, jazzy jams. As much as Paul's Boutique, this is a whirlwind tour through the Beasties' pop-culture obsessions, but instead of spinning into Technicolor fantasies, it's earth-bound D.I.Y. that makes it all seem equally accessible -- which is a big reason why it turned out to be an alt-rock touchstone of the '90s, something that both set trends and predicted them”.

I will finish off with a review from The A.V. Club. Even if Check Your Head is quite accessible and has been part of the landscape for almost thirty years, it is an album that is quite unconventional and odd:

“Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head has been a dorm-room staple and cultural touchstone for so long that it can be easy to overlook how staggeringly odd it actually is. It was just as radical a reinvention as its predecessor, Paul’s Boutique, but listeners by then were expecting the Boys to take big chances. They embraced the group’s strangely organic evolution into adventurous sonic astronauts who segued effortlessly from punk (“Time For Livin’”) to Meters-style funk to trippy psychedelia to ominous metal-infused rap-rock (the monster single “So What’cha Want”).

Head was a homecoming on multiple fronts, as the group headed back to New York after a fertile sojourn on the West Coast, and simultaneously returned to using guitars, drums, bass, and Money Mark’s powerhouse organ to recreate the sounds in their heads and record collections. With Head, the Beastie Boys treated the studio as their favorite instrument. They went a little crazy with the studio motherfuckery, though given the optimism and infectious good humor that pervades the album, it’s altogether likely that they piled on the distortion to avoid losing hip-hop credibility and revealing what nice, responsible young men they’d become. The remastered two-disc Head reissue includes a bonus disc of goofy outtakes and B-sides, though for every essential track like the Soul Assassin remix of “So What’cha Want,” there are a few ragingly inessential novelty numbers like “Boomin’ Granny,” “Honky Rink,” and an endless live jam with Biz Markie. The second disc compiles a lot of the silliness the Boys apparently had to get out of their system before they could release an album this (relatively) mature”.

On 21st April, we get to mark thirty years of the immense Check Your Head. Ingenious and overflowing with fruitful and hugely impactful ideas, I wonder whether some of those who put the album down slightly in 1992 will reassess in 2022. I do feel Check Your Head is an album that houses so many tracks the Beastie Boys’ best moments. Check Your Head contains a track called Pass the Mic. With their 1992 missile, Beastie Boys confidently…

DROPPED the mic!

FEATURE: Homesick: Remembering Deacon Blue’s Graeme Kelling at Sixty-Five

FEATURE:

 

 

Homesick

IN THIS PHOTO: Deacon Blue’s Graeme Kelling in Glasgow in 1999 

Remembering Deacon Blue’s Graeme Kelling at Sixty-Five

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ON 10th June, 2004…

IN THIS PHOTO: Deacon Blue (Dougie Vipond, Ricky Ross, Lorraine McIntosh and Graeme Kelling) on Bells Bridge, Glasgow, reforming for BBC Music Week and charity gig in 1999

the world lost Deacon Blue’s Graeme Kelling. The Scottish band’s original guitarist, he was integral when it came to their success and sound. Written by Paul English and containing photos and interviews with the band and memories from fans, the 2021 book, To Be Here Someday, has an affectionate tribute/chapter to Kelling. The band and fans talk about him and what made him so warm, popular and special (I will end with a few quotes). Much-missed, I wanted to spend a bit of time discussing Graeme Kelling. 2001’s Homesick - recorded in 2000 - was the final album to feature him (he was battling cancer but didn’t feature on the bulk of it). I want to end with a playlist of some of my favourite Deacon Blue songs. Ones that showcase Graeme Kelling’s guitar work and, as I said, prove how essential he was to Deacon Blue and their brilliance. The Independent wrote about Kelling in June 2004:

“As guitarist and founding member of Deacon Blue, Graeme Kelling helped the Scottish band establish themselves in the British album charts at the tail-end of the Eighties and well into the Nineties. In April 1989, the six-piece group topped the listings with their second album, When the World Knows Your Name, while the following year their Four Bacharach and David Songs EP reached No 2 in the singles chart when the lead track, a cover of "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" - originally recorded by Dionne Warwick - received an incredible amount of airplay.

Graeme Kelling, guitarist and songwriter: born Paisley, Renfrewshire 4 April 1957; married (one son, one daughter); died Glasgow 10 June 2004.

As guitarist and founding member of Deacon Blue, Graeme Kelling helped the Scottish band establish themselves in the British album charts at the tail-end of the Eighties and well into the Nineties. In April 1989, the six-piece group topped the listings with their second album, When the World Knows Your Name, while the following year their Four Bacharach and David Songs EP reached No 2 in the singles chart when the lead track, a cover of "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" - originally recorded by Dionne Warwick - received an incredible amount of airplay.

Despite considerable investment from Sony Records, Deacon Blue never repeated their UK success overseas and broke up in April 1994 after releasing two Top Five albums, Fellow Hoodlums (1991) and Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (1993), and the No 1 collection Our Town: the greatest hits of Deacon Blue”.

Born in Paisley in 1957, Kelling was raised according to the beliefs of the Brethren sect but turned away from their strict teachings in his teens. In 1984, he joined Dr Love, the Glasgow band led by the singer and songwriter Ricky Ross, who had secured a publishing deal with ATV Music on the proviso he formed a group to perform his compositions.

For a while, the six-piece could do no wrong. In 1991, they masterminded The Tree and the Bird and the Fish and the Bell, a charity album featuring the likes of their fellow Scots Hue & Cry, Texas, Lloyd Cole and Eddi Reader. Deacon Blue also appeared in a William McIlvanney BBC TV play, Dreaming (1990), and, following the release of their third album, Fellow Hoodlums, toured Europe and ended the year with a triumphant gig at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall broadcast on Radio 1 on New Year's Eve 1991.

The swirling single "Your Town" produced by the Perfecto dance team of Steve Osborne and Paul Oakenfold signalled a change of direction for the 1993 album Whatever You Say, Say Nothing but, despite a big international push, its success remained confined to the British Isles and Deacon Blue split the following year. Graeme Kelling subsequently ran his own recording studio and wrote soundtrack and incidental music for film and television.

In May 1999, he rejoined the original line-up of the group, ostensibly for an event benefiting the Braendam Family House at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow which sold out in 90 minutes flat. Renewed interest led to Deacon Blue's touring and recording again”.

Deacon Blue are touring this year. I hope to go and see them soon enough. I know that the band (Ricky Ross, James Prime, Lorraine McIntosh and Dougie Vipond (together with Gregor Philp and Lewis Gordon) miss Graeme Kelling very much!

I was eager to find an interview with Graeme Kelling. In 1999 (that year, Deacon Blue brought out Walking Back Home: their first album together since they disbanded in 1994). Guitarist spoke with Kelling before the release of a much-anticipated L.P. (that contained some older tracks together with some new compositions). It is archived on the Glasgow Skyline website, and it was conducted by Paul English:

“He may have co-written some of the songs that helped make Deacon Blue a household name in the 80s and 90s, but Graeme Kelling couldn't have penned a spookier script for the moment his son, Alexander Joseph, popped into the world.

"My wife was just reaching the final stages of delivery," says Kelling, picking up the story. " For some reason or other they had the radio on in the corner, and just as things were nearing their conclusion, Real Gone Kid came on. It was utterly unbelievable. My wife was lying there screaming - 'Get that thing off'. It has to be one of the most uncanny things that has ever happened to me."

After the band unplugged for the last time in summer 1994, its driving force, Ricky Ross, went solo, Lorraine McIntosh took a part in the films My Name Is Joe and Psychos, and formed a new band called Cub, while drummer Dougie Vipond became a TV presenter and occasionally plays for The Swiss Family Orbison.

Guitarist was lucky enough to meet their ex-guitar weilder and proud father, Graeme Kelling...

There must have been a few times at the height of the band's success when you had those 'I really can't believe this is happening to me' vibes.

Totally. My full time occupation when I was with the band, was making nonsense of it, because it's a totally unreal situation to be in. I spent eight years living out a fantasy, selling millions of records and touring the world with six other people. I played along with legends like Chris Rea (on 'Raintown') and Little Richard at a tribute to Woody Guthrie in the States. But it had its down sides too - we went busking once on Buchanan Street once and only made £4.20!

After Deacon Blue split up, Ricky Ross claimed that the band had run its course. Did you agree?

There was a period after it had been announced when we were on our 'Greatest Hits' tour when some of us said 'Why are we splitting up?' But we felt that we'd achieved all we were going to achieve musically. After a time, you get really familiar with the way that everything's played and you get really used to doing things in a certain way. We worked with Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osbourne on our last album to break that up. But in retrospect we were trying to force ourselves in to another jacket - a terrible looking spangly one - and didn't realise that what we had was actually quite special.

On the last studio album, 'Whatever You Say, Say Nothing', guitars became the major focus. Were you happier to see things going in that direction?

Yeah, I suppose a lot of songs before that were keyboard orientated, but Ricky wrote that album on guitar, and the songs were a lot more direct. Woody Guthrie had Guitar Kills Fashion written on his guitar, and that to me is what guitar playing is all about. I think people have lost a bit of the attitude that guitarists have. They can give you the directness to go straight for the jugular with a song.

What's your favorite Deacon Blue riff?

I love the intro to The Day That Jackie Jumped The Jail which is a bugger to play on my own. There's this bottleneck guitar part and I have to quickly scramble right down to the bottom of the neck. I think it was always crap when we did it live, but Mick does it now. That song also has a bottleneck wolf-whistle and I regret not having done more in the way of musical effects. A lot of what Frank Zappa did musically fitted the lyrical idea perfectly. So many of his tracks are amalgamations of musical ideas fitting lyrical ideas, and that's immensely entertaining”.

On 4th April, it would have been Graeme Kelling’s sixty-fifth birthday. I’d like to think he’d be in the band still, happily and loyally playing the hits! I can imagine that Ricky Ross and Lorraine McIntosh will raise a glass to him. Maybe James Prime and Dougie Vipond will share memories or think of him. I love the albums Deacon Blue released after Kelling died, but I think that their very best and most interesting work was with him in the fold. So connected and cemented into the band, he brought something that no other musician could provide. Many of the songs in the playlist below show the sadly-departed and phenomenal Graeme Kelling at his very best. Ahead of his sixty-fifth birthday, I was thinking about a Deacon Blue song or album that would act as an appropriate title for this piece. Maybe When the World Knows Your Name (the band’s second album), or Your Constant Heart (from When the World Knows Your Name). I thought that Homesick was the right choice. It was the final album to feature Graeme Kelling. Like one pines for home and misses that stability and sanctuary when they are far away, so many people miss Kelling and what he gave to the world.

I want to end by quoting some lines from Paul English’s excellent recent book about Deacon Blue, To Be Here Someday. There is a fantastic chapter and section of the book that pays tribute to Kelling. We get these memories from the band, in addition to amazing words and insights from his wife, Julie. Drummer Dougie Vipond remarks: “Graeme brought such coolness…There were times when he just knew what I was going to do, and he would sit in these wee bits in between. He sat in a song’s groove, he gave us a grooviness that without him wouldn’t have been there. He was an amazing player”. Jim Prime (keyboards and pianos) says: “Graeme brought a dimension of cool to the band. He knew the right things, the right places, the right clothes”. Lorraine McIntosh (their amazing singer and soul of the group) stated: “When we listened to Fellow Hoodlums for #TimsTwitterListeningParty earlier this year (2021), I really appreciated how imaginative his guitar parts on that album were…He always made me laugh, Graeme”. Lead songwriter Ricky Ross had this to say: “We had an understanding of each other’s background, because we’d both been raised in the Brethren. Graeme came out of all that as Mr Rock’n’Roll, but we both knew that world. So he was the guy I wanted to take to the NME interviews, because I thought they would make mincemeat of me. But not Graeme”. There is still a lot of love for Graeme Kelling among the band members, From some bigger guitar parts to some great lines and notes where he was not necessarily at the front, below are some Deacon Blue songs…

IN tribute to the Paisley-born great.

FEATURE: A Long-Overdue Honour… Kate Bush and Her 2013 CBE

FEATURE:

 

 

A Long-Overdue Honour…

PHOTO CREDIT: PA 

Kate Bush and Her 2013 CBE

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I wanted to revisit…

 IN THIS PHOTO: On 30th November, 2014, Kate Bush attends a champagne reception at the 60th London Evening Standard Theatre Awards at the London Palladium/PHOTO CREDIT: David M. Benett/Getty Images

a great moment in 2013 when Kate Bush was awarded a CBE. On 10th April, this was a rare trip to see The Queen. I have written before how Bush has not received a Damehood or any further honours. I feel she is the sort of person who would welcome it. Some refute such honours, mainly because of our current government and their ineptitude. The CBE was a moment when Bush was recognised for her services to music – some thirty-five years after her debut album came out. It would be a year after this when she returned to the stage with her Before the Dawn residency in London. Rhino looked back on a great day for Kate Bush in their 2017 feature:

“Four years ago today, Kate Bush was named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, which – we think you’ll agree – was a most excellent decision by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

Kate Bush has never been what you’d call a social butterfly, so the mere fact that she made a public appearance to receive her CBE from the Queen was impressive in and of itself. In a highly unsurprising move, Bush opted not to speak to journalist in the wake of receiving her CBE, but she was kind enough to release a statement on the matter:

“I feel incredibly thrilled to receive this honour, which I share with my family, friends and fellow musicians and everybody who has been such an important part of it all. Now I’ve got something special to put on top of the Christmas tree”.

I bring up the CBE of 2013, as Kate Bush is nominated for the second year running induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Although she is deserving of a space there, I don’t think it will be her year (this is the third time she would have lost out). Often seen as a queen of music, meeting our actually Queen would have been quite an event for Bush! It was not the first time Kate Bush had met The Queen. In 2005, she seized on the opportunity to ask her for an autograph! Of course, The Queen does not give out autographs – Bush has said in interviews since how she made a tit of herself that day. I love the fact that she got to meet again our monarch – whose platinum jubilee is this year – and receive an honour that was long-overdue. I do wonder she will become a Dame at any point, or whether there are more honours coming her way. In terms of music prizes, it is also the right time for somebody to bestow her a lifetime achievement award or something similar. Given the rising acclaim, influence and fanbase she has, I do feel it is very much deserved! Such a phenomenal artist who is among our most treasured and loved, the day Kate Bush visited The Queen in April 2013 was a…

 PHOTO CREDIT: PA 

DEFINITE career highlight.

FEATURE: Going Out: Supergrass' In It for the Money at Twenty-Five: The Jubilance, Musicianship and Diversity

FEATURE:

 

Going Out

Supergrass' In It for the Money at Twenty-Five: The Jubilance, Musicianship and Diversity

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APRIL is packed with…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Gie Knaeps/Getty Images

important album anniversary. Supergrass released their second studio album, In It for the Money, on 21st April. Following the amazing I Should Coco (which contained Alright), I think they strengthened on In It for the Money. This is my favourite album from them. In terms of the confidence, you can feel that they are hitting a real stride. As I do with album anniversary features, I am going to combine some features and reviews. When it arrived in 1997, Britpop was still going, but many of the bands who cemented and defined the movement had moved on. Supergrass were part of Britpop, and I think they retained some of the Britpop sound on In It for the Money. Their second album is broader and grittier than that. Songs like Richard III and Late in the Day are polar opposites. Hollow Little Reign and Sometimes I Make You Sad are brilliant album closers. Great deep cuts that are almost as strong as the singles, we have Sun Hits the Sky, Richard III, Cheapskate and Late in the Day. My favourite song is the incredible Going Out. It is the moment Gaz Coombes, Danny Goffey Mick Quinn and Rob Coombes at their coolest, most swinging and infectious! A lot of bands who put out albums in 1994 and 1995 took a different direction by 1997. The same is true of Supergrass. Maybe darker and edgier in places, those expecting something exactly like I Should Coco were disappointed. Though few were!

This was the band maturing and showing the full extent of their talents. There are a couple of articles that offer interesting perspective on the mighty In It for the Money. Loud and Quiet explored the album on its twentieth anniversary in 2017:

“So when ‘In It For The Money’ arrived twenty years ago today, it was slightly bamboozling: a band known for their lightheartedness had returned with what, from a certain angle, appeared to be a rather serious second album – thoughtful, expansive and gently melancholic, with distinctly fewer barrelling japes. If ‘I Should Coco’ was giddy with youth, ‘In It For The Money’ was the sound of growing pains, and two months after Blur had re-emerged with ‘Beetlebum’, it seemed Supergrass were keen to ensure that Damon Albarn et al didn’t have the monopoly on Britpop bands testing out more mature territory in 1997.

That said, ‘In It For The Money’ doesn’t represent a personality transplant in the vein of ‘Blur’. There are still the blaring horn riffs, sticky key changes and pop-punk passages that made ‘I Should Coco’ so loveable, and thankfully so – after all, one of pop’s most tiresome tropes is a once-playful band suddenly requesting decorum. Alongside that existing template, though, the band added colour, calm and a gentle complexity, but crucially never in a splashy way. Indeed, perhaps the album’s finest characteristic is exactly that modesty: songs like ‘Cheapskate’, ‘Sun Hits The Sky’ and the raucously enduring ‘Richard III’ are marked progressions in Supergrass’ songwriting and playing – there’s an extra chord investigated here, a neat prog-influenced flourish there – but it’s never presented remotely triumphantly. It all makes for a record of progress rather than reboot, which rather magically combines all the fun of their melodic guitar pop with a more composed joy of witnessing a maturation.

And nowhere on ‘In It For The Money’ is that spirit best encapsulated than on the gloriously resigned ‘Late In The Day’. The stripped-back first verse, sly extra half-bar in the bridge, the back-to-back solos – it all adds up to a sense of expanded imagination, of a gravity without earnestness. And then, as if to remind everyone that despite the solemnity this is still Supergrass, the attendant video – initially a piss-take of Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ promo that descends into footage of the band larking about on pogo sticks – dodges any accusations of pomposity quite gleefully.

Nonetheless, it’s clear from ‘In It For The Money’ that three years being thumbs-up cheeky-chappy Supergrass was taking its toll, and lyrically, escape was on the brain: “Here I see a time to go and leave it all behind,” runs the album’s opening overture. The very next song sees Gaz Coombes yelling to himself, “I know you wanna try and get away, but it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever know”, and ‘It’s Not Me’ confesses that, “as everyone listened my head turned away”.

Even if there was not an instant anthem like Alright on In It for the Money, there is greater musicality and depth. A more adventurous album, In It for the Money is a defining moment from the Oxford band. Guitar.com revisited Supergrass’ second album in 2020:

“Yet the big shift between In It For The Money and its predecessor lies in how much the band upped the ante in terms of production and musicianship in the few years between writing the songs. While the second record lacks a timeless pop single like Alright in among its 12 tracks, what it offers instead feels like witnessing The Beatles’ musical transformation on fast-forward.

Going Out, the first single, was released almost a year before the album, in February 1996. Opening with a catchy 60s fairground-organ riff, it was a genie let out of the bottle: a great Townshend-esque guitar riff driven by Goffey’s pugilistic drums, its brief respite of a horn and piano section, its jam-session climax fading gradually into extended tremolo and ending with a guitar jack being pulled out, here was a taster of the experimentation to come.

They’re in it for the music…

The rest of the album, recorded in the sequestered setting of Cornwall’s riverside Sawmill Studios with engineer John Cornfield, continues the hyperactive burst of creativity and energy hinted at by that amazing single. With swerves at every turn, it weaves in a record collection’s worth of references and telling touches that disappear in a flash.

PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Natkin/Getty Images 

The title track sets the tone with a series of builds and releases that pack in menacing Happiness Is A Warm Gun-esque descending arpeggios, retro vocal harmonies, brass lines and a wall of OTT distortion and organ sound, topped off with an abrupt shrug of an ending. Next up is the rampaging Stooges stomp of Richard III, as magnificently manic as anything on I Should Coco but with just enough melody in the basslines to sweeten the dissonance in the furious guitar parts, which flit from octaves to wah lead lines to soothing hammered-on sus4 chords in the blink of an eye. There’s also a Theremin solo that you didn’t know you needed.

The rocky shuffle of Tonight flits expertly between distorted wall-of-sound rock guitar and brass flourishes, before the album’s musical high point, the majestic Late In The Day, takes the spotlight. The fade-in of a late-night Neil Young-flavoured strummed acoustic intro with major seventh chords smoothly gear-shifts into a harmony-laden 60s-pop jaunt worthy of the Kinks, before the middle section’s Moog solo foreshadows a mighty guitar solo with expressive unison bends – it’s pure melody, through a distorted lens.

Elsewhere, G-Song offers a downtempo, Blur-like psychedelic foray with a bombastic guitar solo tricked up with feedback, whammy bar, sustaining notes, harmony guitar, unison bends and tongue-in-cheek attitude. Sun Hits The Sky condenses around seven songs into its five minutes, happily smashing together ominous indie-rock chords and AC/DC-esque breakdowns with a wacky prog-rock-parody keyboard solo and a bongo outro.

Sonic juxtapositions like these make perfect sense on In It For The Money. It’s Not Me punctuates tender acoustic guitars with filtered synth bass and Cheapskate melds funk with backwards-reverb vocals and busy Paperback Writer-esque riffs, but the underlying sense of humour means none of it seems jarring or try-hard”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Brian Rasic/Getty Images

It is worth collating a coupe of reviews for the supreme In It for the Money. AllMusic highlighted the textured nature of an album that nods back to their debut at various moments:

“Supergrass' debut album, I Should Coco, rushed by at such a blinding speed that some listeners didn't notice the melodic complexity of its best songs. On their second album, the cleverly titled In It for the Money, the band brings the songs to the forefront, slowing the tempos considerably and constructing a varied, textured record that makes their ambition and skill abundantly clear. From the droning mantra of the opening title track, it's apparent that the band has delved deeply into psychedelia; hints of Magical Mystery Tour are evident throughout the album, from swirling organs and gurgling wah-wahs to punchy horn charts and human beatboxes. Supergrass substitute such sonic details for I Should Coco's punky rush, and while that means the band only occasionally touches upon the breakneck pace of their debut (the hard-driving "Richard III"), it also deepens their joyful exuberance with subtle songs and remarkably accomplished musicianship. There might not be a "Caught by the Fuzz" or "Alright" on In It for the Money, but that's not a problem, since the bright explosion of "Sun Hits the Sky" and the nervy "Tonight" are just as energetic, and the album features introspective numbers like the gorgeous "Late in the Day" and "It's Not Me" that give it substantial weight. Even with all this musical maturity, Supergrass haven't sacrificed their good-natured humor, as proven by the detailed production and the bizarre closer, "Sometimes I Make You Sad." Sometimes, maturity turns out to be everything it's supposed to be”.

Finally, I want to quote from Pitchfork’s review of Supergrass’ In It for the Money. They reviewed the Remastered Expanded Edition last year. Despite some minor reservations, they do praise and admire the studio-born songs and the sense of confidence the band had when making their 1997 classic:

“Indulgence can be its own reward. Take In It for the Money, the wild, careening sophomore set from Supergrass. Flush with success and fresh out of adolescence, the Britpop trio embraced all the new adventures heading their way, a journey that steadily pulled them away from the frenzied pleasures of their 1995 debut I Should Coco. Where their peers sang of common people and wonderwalls, Supergrass concerned themselves with teenage thrills: buzzing on speed, getting busted by cops, telling dirty jokes, and hanging out with friends. At the center of the album was the smash hit “Alright,” an incandescent pop song about being young, dumb, and free. Other bands might have chased the charts by attempting to re-create the spirit of “Alright.” Supergrass instead chose to see how fast and far they could run.

In It for the Money isn’t so much a departure from I Should Coco as a progression. Often, it feels as if Supergrass are attempting to offer a crash course in the history of British rock, cramming in elements borrowed from the swinging 1960s and 1970s classic rock, then filtering these well-known sounds through the irreverence of punk. They still sound vigorous—witness the rampaging single “Richard III”—but they lack the exuberance that fueled their first album. The shift was necessary for their long-term survival. “Alright” threatened to pigeonhole Supergrass as loveable teenage imps, a role they played to the hilt in the song’s supremely silly video. (They played their part so well that Steven Spielberg believed Supergrass would be ideal candidates for a gen-X spin on the Monkees.)

Supergrass turned down Spielberg, choosing instead to do the things normal rock’n’roll bands do: play an enormous amount of shows before hunkering down in the studio to make another record. It helped that Supergrass had arrived just as the Britpop wave crested, its rising tide not only lifting the shaggy group into the Top Ten but putting them squarely within a happening scene. They shared space on charts and festival bills with the amiably straightforward likes of Cast, Sleeper, the Bluetones, and Ash, yet they were qualitatively different, possessing punk-pop smarts to rival Elastica, a brawnier musicality than Oasis, and a self-evident sense of humor.

All of this comes to a head on In It for the Money, an album where the riffs and jokes are wrapped in woolly psychedelia, blaring horns, and splashes of sweet melancholy. Where I Should Coco blew by at a breakneck pace, In It for the Money unfolds with a deliberate sense of drama, slowly coming into focus with the menacing swirl of the title track and proceeding to ebb and flow across its 12 songs. The record feels so unified that it’s remarkable to realize they entered the studio in 1996 with only two completed songs in tow, forcing them to write the bulk of the album during the recording sessions. Along for the ride was Rob Coombes, a keyboardist who was the brother of Supergrass frontman Gaz. He’d been on the band’s periphery for a while, hammering out the piano to “Alright” and playing woozy organ on “Going Out,” the stopgap 1996 single Supergrass released between their first and second albums, but he’s an integral part of In It for the Money, earning writing credits on all 12 songs and adding distinctive color throughout. (Rob Coombes would officially become a member of Supergrass in 2002.)

Listen closely—or spend some time with the clutch of monitor mixes and rough versions that fill the second disc of the new 3xCD deluxe reissue of the 1997 album—and it’s apparent that Supergrass did indeed write In It for the Money in the studio. Many of the songs are rooted in vamps that blossom into full songs: The slinky funk that propels the verses of “Cheapskate,” the circular stomp on “G-Song,” the lazy, shambling gait of “Hollow Little Reign” all bear telltale signs of compositions that began as group jams. None of these songs sound tossed off, though, littered as they are with overdubs, backwards guitars, and sound effects. Supergrass couldn’t resist any bit of studio trickery when they were making In It for the Money, yet they retained their sense of concise craft. The record feels vibrant, not overstuffed.

The triple-disc reissue of In It for the Money can dampen some of the album’s energy. Some fine B-sides, such as the tuneful neo-music-hall ramble “Melanie Davis,” are buried among the alternate mixes and working versions on the second disc, a collection of ephemera that plays better as individual tracks than as an album. The disc of live recordings is another story. Anchored by a full show from January 1998, a concert given nearly a year after the release of In It for the Money, the live disc shows Supergrass at full roar, turning these studio creations into breakneck rockers.

The title of In It for the Money is a nod toward Frank Zappa’s anti-hippie classic We’re Only In It for the Money. Supergrass may not sound anything like the Mothers of Invention, but their choice reflects the extent to which they were steeped in rock history. Supergrass never attempted to be innovators. They were magpies who busied themselves with figuring out how to assemble pieces of glam, psychedelia, punk, and pop in fresh, surprising ways. They would continue to hone their craft, making sleeker albums than In It for the Money, yet the group’s enthusiasm and imagination are at a peak here. They sound delighted to discover their full potential, and that giddiness remains infectious decades later”.

On 21st April, so many people will mark and celebrate a remarkable album. It came out when I was thirteen, and I was instantly and affectionately struck by the album. I followed Supergrass since then and still love them to this day! Whilst they released other incredible albums, I feel their finest moment is In It for the Money. It came out almost twenty-five years ago, but it still has the ability to surprise and offer up its multiple rewards. From its big hits to those deeper cuts, In It for the Money is…

IN a league of its own.

FEATURE: Mighty Fame Throwa: Saluting Pavement’s Debut Masterpiece: The Timeless Slanted and Enchanted at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Mighty Fame Throwa

Saluting Pavement’s Debut Masterpiece: The Timeless Slanted and Enchanted at Thirty

___________

THROUGHOUT April…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Gail Butensky

some enduring and wonderful albums are celebrating big birthdays. One of them is Pavement’s genius debut album, Slanted and Enchanted. Released on 20th April, 1992, it is often ranked as one of the must-hear and greatest albums ever. Led by the incredible Stephen Malkmus, Pavement followed their acclaimed debut with the equally-brilliant 1994 album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. The California band released a masterpiece in 1992. Prior to its thirtieth anniversary, go and get the album on vinyl. Like I do with album anniversaries and stuff like this, I will highlight a couple of features about the album, ending with some reviews. One of the defining albums of the 1990s, Slanted and Enchanted is still played widely today. In a feature from last year, Guitar.com reviewed the album and discussed the background of Slanted and Enchanted. They also revealed how Pavement formed:

“Pop music catches on like a meme. It just takes a little bit of tinder, and it can become a phenomenon.” Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus astutely reflected in 2018. In the same interview (with Esquire) the then 52-year-old indie-rock godfather revealed that he was always keeping an ear to the ground, dissecting the modern pop charts mathematically to try to unpick its ever-changing, winning formula.

Little wonder that Malkmus is keen to decode the mechanics of success, his band’s unanticipated rise to the pinnacle of indie rock primacy some 27 years before wasn’t achieved via heavy major label promotion or deft chart-chasing, but by a conscious upturning of listener expectations. His breezy attitude to the recording process – and life in general – became central to Pavement’s slacker-rock appeal.

In 1991, the 24-year-old Malkmus was nervously putting the finishing touches to his band’s debut full-length album. Capturing the ramshackle sound of three young men pushing at the limits of listener tolerance, Slanted and Enchanted’s 14 tracks might have been intended as a wry 90s update of Stephen’s post-punk influences (The Fall and My Bloody Valentine in particular), but, through a combination of unkempt, dissonant chord structures, tangled, grubby riffs, tuneful, vibrant melodies and coolly delivered (but earnestly intelligent) lyrics, Slanted and Enchanted was a felicitous moment-seizer. And one which prescribed the DIY ethos of independent music for decades to come.

Maybe maybe

Formed by high school friends Malkmus and Scott Kannberg (aka Spiral Stairs) in Stockton, California, the pair’s initial ideas (aside from having fun playing local open-mic nights) was that they would experiment with freeform musical expression, and write material that evaded the howling anguish of the then on-the-rise grunge scene, or the pomposity of stadium rock. Malkmus and Kannberg were middle-class, suburban kids – and that’s what they wanted their own music to reflect. “Whatever soul you have being a suburban kid like us, what can you do that’s right that way?” Malkmus explained to MOJO in 1999, “Because we’re not Black Sabbath, we’re not working-class heroes and we can’t get away with that. Luckily we’re not hanging out at Met Bar, either, we’re not New York City hipsters or anything, so that’s our earthiness.”

Freeing themselves from the pressure of trying to be something they weren’t, the duo’s early sound fizzed with raw elements that would soon come to enthral the local indie scene. Early tracks such as the spritely jog of the heartbroken Box Elder or the ominous, angular spikiness of She Believes revealed Malkmus and Kannberg’s predilection for using their guitars as a diverse musical paintbrush. Complementing, and competing, with each other.

These songs, along with three others, were recorded at future drummer Gary Young’s ‘Louder Than You Think’ home studio in one four-hour session. The resulting first EP, Slay Tracks: 1933-1969, pulsed with Malkmus and Kannberg’s noise guitar, purposefully captured in tinny, near-transistor-radio quality (this was stressed by the wash of radio noise on EP opener You’re Killing Me. Pavement’s homespun production aesthetic was born. “When I first heard them, I did not understand it.” Young reflected in an interview with Vice in 2015, “I’d tell my friends in New York I just made this weird record and I don’t really know how to describe it.”

This gloriously sloppy debut EP was a riveting listen, organically shifting between furious squalls of guitar, and shaky arrangements that were barely able to stand, before decaying into abstract expressions of fury. Occasionally bolstered by an eccentric (and often improvised) rhythms – a result of Young’s spontaneous decision to leap behind the drumkit during the sessions. Another crucial ingredient in the developing stew, was Malkmus’s vocal delivery, which veered from a sardonic, idle cool, to a hormonal wail across the EPs run time.

Just 1,000 copies of Slay Tracks… were pressed, and released to surrounding independent stores by Kannberg’s self-run label Treble Kicker. This very first Pavement release was soon recognised as a word-of-mouth, underground gem by indie rock scribes and attentive devotees of their local Stockton scene. It was enough to pique the interest of Chicago-based Dan Koretzky, who was in the process of founding his own label Drag City. Recognising Pavement’s potential, he promptly signed the outfit, and two further EPs quickly followed.

Across Demolition Pilot J7 and Perfect Sound Forever Malkmus and Kannberg were given space to develop their sonic universe. At this point, Gary Young joined the Pavement ship full-time – squaring off competition from their then live drummer Jason Turner”.

The Quietus also shone a light on the brilliant Slanted and Enchanted in their feature from 2012. Reviewed in the month of its twentieth anniversary, the debut album from Pavement still sounds utterly stunning and fresh:

“On first listening to the album you'd be forgiven for thinking it was a demo, home-recorded on Portastudio using cheap cassette tape. And it would be an assumption not a million miles wide of the truth. The album was actually recorded at the home-studio of ex-hippy and Pavement drummer Gary Young and done so with little equipment or experience and on a very tight budget.

Though this might not sound particularly appealing at first, specifically to the auto-tuned ears of some readers, this is one of those many aspects of Slanted and Enchanted that makes it so magical.

The lo-fi production gives the listener an affinity with the band because knowing that the songs are not indebted to a producer's signature sound or vision, or sullied by over-production provides one with a more precise sense of what it was like recording this album, an impression almost of what it would have felt like to have been there at the time.

Because of this, Pavement's work has most often been likened to that of The Fall - specifically their early releases. Both groups embrace a raw, unpolished sound; one that seems to welcome dissonance and seeks to give the listener immediacy to the recording process.

And this is not just the opinion of music critics. The frontmen of both Pavement and The Fall (Stephen Malkmus and Mark E Smith respectively) have each acknowledged the apparent similarity, the former through his well documented love and indebtedness to the Manc post-punk outfit and the latter through a less flattering description of Pavement as Fall "rip-offs", saying "it's just The Fall in 1985, isn't it? They haven't got an original idea in their heads."

Aside from the shared sound, what also links the two bands is their lyrical content. Like Smith, Malkmus excels at a stream of consciousness lyrical style, one that baffles and entertains in equal measure.

Take the opening to the stand-out track form the album, 'Trigger Cut' where Malkmus sings "Lies and betrayals / Fruit-covered nails / Eeeee-lectricity and Lust". I've listened to this album countless time and still don't really know what that means. And yet, just as Smith's lyrics perfectly complement the chaotic music of The Fall, so too do Malkmus' with Pavement.

But odd lyrics and Fall-inspired musical simplicity can only take you so far. And what makes Slanted and Enchanted a truly great album (rather than just a good one) is the quality of the songs.

'Trigger Cut' remains one of the band's finer moments and arguably one of the most memorable and enduringly appealing indie tracks to emerge from that decade. It possesses everything that's good about Pavement, surreal cut-and-paste lyrics, Malkmus' unusual delivery, stripped-down production and an irresistibly catchy sound.

And it's the last of these that is most important. Without the band's capacity to craft genuinely catchy hooks and melodies, Slanted and Enchanted would have just been artless noise; or Yo La Tengo if you prefer. [Saucer of milk for Mr Keoghan! Ed]

And this ability to create order from the clutter, letting the undeniably wonderful song-writing of the band shine through, is evident on much of the album. Almost as impressive as 'Trigger Cut' are tracks such as 'Zürich is Stained', 'Here', and 'In the Mouth of a Desert'; each one succeeding in walking that fine line between genius and chaos.

But that's not to say that there aren't some dodgy moments. While not necessarily bad, songs such as 'Conduit for Sale!' and 'Chesley's Little Wrists' are significantly weaker than the rest. They probably could have been left off the album because their inclusion needlessly reveals what happens when a desire to create a messy-sound trumps song-writing, illustrating that the band is capable of sometimes getting it wrong.

But then what album, let alone what debut album, is without its faults? And Pavement at their weakest are still a hundred times more interesting than lots of other bands at their best.

I'd advise anyone who's never listened to Slanted and Enchanted to do so as soon as possible and those of you who haven't listened to it for a while to go back and enjoy it in its entirety.

This is music in its natural state, free from the modern belief that the trickery of the studio contains the key to success. It might be unpolished, messy and at times confusing but that's exactly what helps make it so great”.

I am rounding off with a couple of reviews of Pavement’s debut, Slanted and Enchanted. Even if their debut, debatably, was eclipsed by Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, Slanted and Enchanted is a timeless introduction that will live and inspire for generations. This is what PopMatters observed in their 2004 review:

“No album title from the ’90s describes its sound so perfectly as this album. As grunge began to become oversaturated in 1992, Slanted & Enchanted offered a lackadaisical, sunny, Northern California alternative to all the heroin-drenched misery of Alice in Chains and Stone Temple Pilots, helping to initiate the “lo-fi” trend of the early ’90s, which would be continued in subsequent years by the likes of Sebadoh, Beck, Guided By Voices, and Liz Phair. Recorded over a couple weeks at Young’s home studio, with Kannberg playing bass lines on a tuned-down guitar through a bass amp, it might seem on the surface an amateurish, cacophonous recording, but amidst the hodgepodge are some superbly constructed, albeit idiosyncratic pop songs. Unlike the often impenetrable, artsy noise rock of Sonic Youth, Slanted & Enchanted is actually fun: it’s noise you can hum along to.

The opening track alone is a knockout. “Summer Babe” starts off innocuously, with distorted, Dinosaur Jr. style guitars and Young’s pounding drumming (punctuated by a little hi-hat flourish after every two bars). Any notion of this being just another indie rock song is thrown out the window when Malkmus delivers his unforgettable first verse: “Ice baby / I saw your girlfriend / She’s eating her fingers like they’re just another meal / She waits there / In the levee wash / Mixing cocktails with a plastic-tipped cigar.” This isn’t just pretentious gibberish. A brilliant bit of surrealist poetry that bears a slight similarity to West Coast poets Lew Welch and Bob Kaufman, Malkmus depicts a scene of summertime ennui and longing that sticks in your head immediately. Kannberg’s solos are sloppy, but mellifluous, as the song builds to the climactic chorus of “Every time I sit around I find I’m shocked.” It’s the ultimate slacker love song.

The hooks on the rest of the album are plentiful, as are the oblique lyrics of Malkmus, which are often ridiculously obscure. The fabulous “Trigger Cut” contains whimsical wordplay (“Lies and betrayals / Fruit-covered nails / Eeeee-lectricity and lust”) and a simple, yet contagious melody, complete with a fantastic break of “sha la la” falsetto vocals. The befuddling, Sonic Youth-ish “No Life Has Singed Her” has Malkmus intentionally garbling the words in the chorus (singing “No life for Ginger”), “In the Mouth a Desert” features a great guitar melody that breaks into a gorgeous solo at the end, not to mention a rare impassioned moment from Malkmus (“I’ve been crowned, the king of it / And it is all we have so wait / To hear my words and / They’re diamond sharp”), while “Zurich is Stained” boasts more of a breezy, country feel. “Loretta’s Scars”, the noise-drenched “Perfume-V”, and the exhausted-sounding “Our Singer” (featuring Malkmus’s great vocal delivery in the opening line, “I’ve been waiting / An-tiss-ipating”) sustain the momentum for the rest of the album, but it climaxes on the stunning ballad “Here”. Opening with the classic lines, “I was dressed for success / But success it never comes,” it perfectly encapsulates the plight of directionless, twentysomething Generation X-ers wondering what to do with their lives, but Malkmus then delves into more esoteric poetry, seemingly spewing words that just happen to sound good with the song’s plaintive melody: “And all the sterile striking it / Defends an empty dock you cast away.” It’s a beautiful mess of a song.

Malkmus and Kannberg may have been the driving creative forces behind the band, but Gary Young was their secret weapon. Pounding away relentlessly on the kit like the muppet Animal, Young has two settings: stop, and go. His fluid, often overly powerful drumming sometimes comes close to overwhelming the songs (just listen to those cymbal crashes near the end of “Summer Babe”), but his playful style works perfectly with the other two members, as his distinctive fills help set this album apart anything else you’ll ever hear. Young would go on to record the Watery, Domestic EP in 1992, but by the end of the year, his erratic behavior would force his bandmates to replace him with the more skilled, yet duller Steve West. As a result, the four albums that followed would lack the relaxed, goofy charm of the first record.

In “Conduit for Sale”, a song obviously inspired by his hero Mark E. Smith of the Fall, Malkmus hollers stream of consciousness lines, screaming “I’m trying!” 16 times in a row, and facetiously mispronounces the word “scion”, but in the middle of this mess hides a line that epitomizes what Pavement was all about: “Between here and there is better than either here or there!” On Slanted & Enchanted, Pavement lurked in the fringes, swiping sounds and hooks from myriad styles, doing things their own way; they refused to be categorized, and that quality is what makes the album still sound strong today. The glorious 2002 re-issue Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe, with its wealth of rarities and live performances, hammers home just how great this album was, a perfect introduction for curious younger listeners. Every bit as important and influential as two other albums from the same time period, Nirvana’s Nevermind and My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, it’s the definitive sound of ’90s indie rock”.

I might actually wrap it there. Such a remarkable and original album that can be appreciated and loved by anyone who hears it, there will be a lot of celebration for Slanted and Enchanted on 20th April. For further reading, I will direct you to this 2012 feature from The New Yorker. Already cemented their talent and promise on their debut, Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted is…

SUCH a magnificent debut album.

FEATURE: O Superwoman: Laurie Anderson’s Groundbreaking Big Science at Forty

FEATURE:

 

O Superwoman

Laurie Anderson’s Groundbreaking Big Science at Forty

___________

QUITE a few…

IN THIS PHOTO: Laurie Anderson in 1982/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

pioneering and classic albums celebrate big anniversaries in April. On 19th, Laurie Anderson’s Big Science turns forty. Although the album was reissued in 2007, there is a new red vinyl version coming out on 9th April. I would encourage anyone to get the album, as it is a work of art! Coming out on the Nonesuch label, they provide us with some detail about the pioneering Laurie Anderson, and how Big Science came to be:

“In the early 1980s, Laurie Anderson was already respected as a conceptual artist and composer, adept at employing gear both high-tech and homemade in her often violin-based pieces, and she was a familiar figure in the cross-pollinating, Lower Manhattan music-visual art-performance circles from which Philip Glass and David Byrne also emerged. While working on her now-legendary seven-hour performance art/theater piece United States, Part I–IV, she cut the spare "O Superman (For Massenet)," an electronic-age update of 19th century French operatic composer Jules Massenet’s aria "O Souverain," for the tiny New York City indie label 110 Records. In the UK, DJ John Peel picked up a copy of this very limited-edition 33⅓ RPM 7” and spun the eight-minute-plus track on BBC Radio 1. The exposure resulted in an unlikely #2 hit, lots of attention in the press, and a worldwide deal with Warner Bros. Records.

'Cause when love is gone, there's always justice.

And when justice is gone, there's always force.

And when force is gone, there's always Mom. Hi Mom!

At the time of its original release, the NME wrote of Big Science, "There’s a dream-like, subconscious quality about her songs which helps them work at deeper, secret levels of the psyche." With instrumentation ranging from tape loops to found sounds to bag pipes, Big Science anticipated the tech-savvy beats, anything-goes instrumentation and sample-based nature of much contemporary electronic and dance music. On the album’s 25th anniversary, Uncut noted, "The broader themes of alienation and disconnection still resonate, while Anderson’s use of loops and traditional/synthesized instrumentation is prescient."

"In the ’70s I traveled a lot," Anderson recounts. "I worked on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, hitchhiked to the North Pole, lived in a yurt in Chiapas, and worked on a media commune. I had my own romantic vision of the road. My plan was to make a portrait of the country. Big Science, the first part of the puzzle, eventually became part two of United States I–IV (Transportation, Politics, Money, Love). My goal was to be not just the narrator but also the outsider, the stranger. Although I was fascinated by the United States, this portrait was also about how the country looked from a distance. I was performing a lot in Europe, where American culture was simultaneously booed and cheered. But the portrait was also a picture of a culture inventing a digital world and learning to live in it. Big Science was about technology, size, industrialization, shifting attitudes toward authority, and individuality. It was sometimes alarmist, picturing the country as a burning building, a plane crash. Alongside the techno was the apocalyptic. The absurd. The everyday. It was also a series of short stories about odd characters—hatcheck clerks and pilots, preachers, drifters and strangers. There was something about Massenet's aria ‘O Souverain’—which inspired ‘O Superman’—that almost stopped my heart. The pauses, the melody. 'O souverain, ô juge, ô père' (O Lord, o judge, o father). A prayer about empire, ambition, and loss”.

There are a few really interesting articles out there about the tremendous Big Science. An Avant Garde and Art-Pop masterpiece, I wonder whether there were any albums quite like Big Science in 1982. The early-1980s saw a lot of innovation in terms of Electronic music and pushing the boundaries. On its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2017, The Vinyl Factory talked about the context of Big Science and how Laurie Anderson’s debut heralded in a new age for music:

“When she married Velvet Underground founder Lou Reed in one of music’s most sustaining partnerships, they came together as creative equals. On another, more artistic note, current enthusiasm for its 45th anniversary shows that Anderson also picked cannily when she distilled her 4 ½ hours-long orchestral and multimedia performance, The United States of America, into the comparative brevity of Big Science’s eight pungent tracks.

With her postmodern pixie haircut – allegedly first snipped by Winston Tong, the singer of West Coast art-rockers, Tuxedo Moon — Anderson was a fresh paradigm, who programmed to her own drum sample. Perhaps anniversaries act as too easy an anchor in our chaotic culture, but Big Science deserves its re-assessment. It seems now to have a quality of eerie prophecy.

The album’s anniversary is being celebrated as a birth of synthesized art-rock – pace Brian Eno — but let’s also dig Big Science as the harbinger of intersectionality that it is, sizzling somewhere between music and drama, social observation, politics, history, projection and humour; and with its sound just as unexpected, melodies, more abstract soundscapes, and for at least some among us, the pleasing and unexpected skirl of the bagpipes on the very funny ‘Sweaters.’

On the track ‘Big Science’ itself, her gentle vocal persuasion counterpoints a dirge of a drone, that could recall the harmonium and voice of Nico, Reed’s early bandmate/muse – except that Anderson’s tough fragility is tones apart from Nico’s deadpan, near-dead affectlessness.

Something about the brutish optimism of the early 1980s prompted the frequent use of the word “Big” (Disclosure, I co-created a TV music show back then called Big World Café and noticed we were part of a “Big” Moment before we said Moment, including this LP and the Tom Hanks flick.) The title’s nod to Science acknowledges the dream of technology as hope – and its limits.

There’s a suggestion of the era’s hysterical expansiveness in Anderson’s butterfly-wing-subtle deliveries, fluttering fast through meta levels of wry wit and seismic sighs at the human condition. Above all, right now, it is the chilling suggestion of creeping authoritarianism that makes Big Science feel so scary timely. Modestly lilting, the folksy intimacy with her characters makes her odd rigor all the more powerful. Take the airline pilot of opening track, ‘From The Air,’ professionally, detachedly and yes, robotically, steering the passengers through the imminent Big Crash. Is this the inner voice of the guardians of nuclear buttons in today’s Lukewarm War?

Beyond the famous early-girl-with-synthesiser aspect, perhaps the biggest surprise is how the emerging trends of the time, which proved durable, are so clearly limned: the neo-African kalimba-like sound, and above all the experimental fireworks of free jazz, sparkling off in several directions.

The entire exercise is steeped profoundly in the harmolodic concept of Ornette Coleman, a figure who also loomed large in her marriage; L&L, as Lou’n’Laurie called themselves, were regulars at Ornette soirees and events; he represented one of the few key constants and touchstones in their select pantheon. The biting spoken verse of the young Coleman’s wife, firebrand activist poet Jayne Cortez, also seems to resonate deep inside Anderson’s polished rage.

They called it art-rock but it is simply, timelessly, avant-garde.

The ultimate triumph of Big Science, and the key to Anderson’s longevity, resides beyond her mind and music’s admirable keen-ness, giddy hilarity and somber empathy. It is that growling animal thing, the wolf howling within the minimalism, rendering the supposedly cold synthesizer into an all too human instrument”.

I want to end with a couple of reviews. Even today, Big Science sounds so futuristic and unmatched. Whilst many artists have been influenced by the album, I don’t think anybody has managed to synthesise the same sound and visions as Laurie Anderson. It is a staggering work! This is what Pitchfork wrote about Big Science in 2007:

“Big Science comprises songs from Anderson's also quite prescient United States project, a multimedia performance art piece cum opera ("It seemed like everyone I knew was working on an opera," she recalls) that depicted America on the brink of digital revolution and capitalist nirvana, where the dollar trumped tradition and the apocalypse-- cultural, political, technological-- loomed large. In fact, given its themes and presentation, much of Big Science sounds every bit about "the present" as "O Superman" does, and its idiosyncratic execution (with stylistic nods to the minimalists and pal William S. Burroughs) has helped the disc weather the passage of time remarkably well. It's less a document of the early 1980s than it is a dark glimpse of the future recorded at the dawn of the Reagan era.

Anderson's ingenious move, musically, was utilizing the vocoder not as a trick but as a melodic tool. It's the first thing you hear on Big Science, looped in "From the Air" like some bizarre man-machine synth. The rest of the track revolves around a circular pattern of blurted sax figures and hypnotic drums. There's virtually nothing about it that screams its age as Anderson intones a wry announcement from a (caveman) pilot of a plummeting flight. "There is no pilot," she speaks. "You are not alone. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time." It's a metaphor for every frightening thing about 20th (and now 21st century) living you can think of, and in its spare way it's enough to scare you silly.

The gloomy ghost town future-music of the title track sounds like the rueful ruminations of someone who sees the end of the world on the horizon and can't help but to chuckle a little at their impending doom. The austere soundscapes of "Walking & Falling" and "Born, Never Asked" convey a similar chilliness laced with a despair at once aloof and oddly wistful. "Example #22" is like a Can/Yoko/Eno chop-shop, its funky wordless denouement part chant, part celebration of the absurd.

In fact, one of the elements that makes Big Science so special is Anderson's sense of humor. In "Let X=X", Anderson offers, with a wink, "I can see the future, and it's a place-- about 70 miles east of here." It's a perverse punchline to some cosmic joke, and the human element back and forth of "It Tango" does little to dissipate the feeling that on Big Science it's the machines that are getting the last laugh at the expense of their masters. The future was yesterday. The future is now. Welcome to the future”.

I will finish with another review. AllMusic showed their admiration and respect for an album that was unlike anything at the time. Big Science was definitely not a commercial compromise or sell-out on behalf of Laurie Anderson:

“There was a backlash against Laurie Anderson in "serious" musical and artistic circles after the completely unexpected mainstream commercial success of her debut album, Big Science. (The eight-plus-minute single "O Superman" was a chart hit in England, unbelievably enough.) A fair listen to Big Science leaves the impression that jealousy must have been at the root of the reception because Big Science is in no way a commercial sellout. A thoughtful and often hilariously funny collection of songs from Anderson's work in progress, United States I-IV, Big Science works both as a preview of the larger work and on its own merits. Opening with the hypnotic art rock of "From the Air," in which an airline pilot casually mentions that he's a caveman to a cyclical melody played in unison by a three-part reeds section, and the strangely beautiful title track, which must feature the most deadpan yodeling ever, the album dispenses witty one-liners, perceptive social commentary (the subtext of the album concerns Anderson's own suburban upbringing, which she views with more of a bemused fondness than the tiresome irony that many brought to the subject), and a surprisingly impressive sense of melody for someone who was until recently a strictly visual artist. For example, the marimba and handclap-led closer, "It Tango," is downright pretty in the way the minimalistic tune interacts with Anderson's voice, which is softer and more intimate (almost sexy, in a downtown-cool sort of way) than on the rest of the album. Not everything works -- "Walking and Falling" is negligible, and the way Rufus Harley's bagpipes intentionally clash with Anderson's harsh, nasal singing and mannered phrasing in "Sweaters" will annoy those listeners who can't take either Yoko Ono or Meredith Monk -- but Big Science is a landmark release in the New York art scene of the '80s, and quite possibly the best art rock album of the decade”.

On 19th April, Big Science turns forty. Still astonishing and unique, I think people will discover Laurie Anderson’s debut fresh. It will be quite a realisation and revelation! An album that is still creating tremors, Big Science is one of the all-time great L.P.s. If you have never heard it before, then do yourself a favour and experience…

A marvellous and groundbreaking album.