Saints, Rhythm & Evil In The Garden: Rob Thomas' cradlesong

Initially, Rob Thomas' goals were lofty -- early murmurs by the singer noted that his second solo LP aspired to update Paul Simon's landmark Rhythm of the Saints. Even when one squints their ears and tries to imagine the broadest of connections between Thomas and Simon (both have off-and-on relationships with the musical outfits that made them popular; both like animals, consume oxygen) Thomas' ambition probably speaks more to his healthy self-regard than it does to the resulting LP. The resulting cradlesong, while a singles-packed LP of mainstream pop, speaks to the durability and Rhythm of the Saints. It also proves that recreating it is a task considerably out of Rob Thomas' league.

In 1990, Rhythm of the Saints (and Graceland before it) showed Paul Simon as a pioneering figure who sought to join world music traditions with currents of American pop music, a pursuit that took him two decades (starting with the A-side of Bridge of Troubled Water) and numerous trips to Africa, South and Central America. The record was a document that was both about and emblematic of a new era of musical globalism. It was key in sparking an explosion of mainstream interest in ethnomusicology that lasted the better part of the decade. Its meditative tunes concerned a shrinking world and the disparity between jet-setting imperialists and the struggling developing worlds. It was a bomb on the pop chart -- not a single tune entered the Top 40 in the States -- but it was nothing if not worldly. In retrospect, for Thomas to remake the record seems doomed from the outset; the jump from "it's three AM, you must be lonely" to shattered "streets quiet as a sleeping army" takes more than a helluva pair of bongo drums.

In the weeks before its release, Thomas' began the retreat, explaining to Entertainment Weekly that the songs he ended up writing "just didn't fit in [the Rhythm of the Saints] vibe." When it was previewed, the vibe of cradlesong was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not much like Paul Simon's record at all; it was more of the stuff that Thomas does best: populist, simply structured pop songs about troubled relationships.

Much about cradlesong can be discerned in the lead single, "Her Diamonds," a song concerned that concerns the mid-life ennui of a disenchanted lady, a electronic drum patter and a strident, one-size-fits-all chorus. A handful of the record's other singles -- "Give Me The Meltdown" and "Real World '09" (apparently a companion song to the lead off of Matchbox Twenty's '96 debut, "Real World") -- use a familiar blueprint: they're streamlined Top-40 jumbo jets that lift off into soaring choruses and are enigmatic enough to please, though certainly not challenge, the everyman of Thomas' broad audience. Compared to his first solo LP, Thomas' does demonstrate some evolution; even if his songwriting still follows a plain, homogeneous formula that he's slowly perfected since Matchbox Twenty, the production is brighter, more polished and more dynamically orchestrated. As for Rhythm of the Saints, all the big rock songs push it quickly out of mind; aside from a hand drum and choir of back-up singers on "Her Diamonds," Simon's trailblazing is retread little elsewhere throughout the LP.

We are only reminded again of Paul Simon -- however indirectly -- with the thudding drums behind the record's most ambitious tune, a bold 5-minute-plus "Fire On The Mountain." Apparently inspired by Dave Eggers' What Is the What, it's Thomas' darkest and most imaginative writing of the record. Like every other song on cradlesong, it still comes packed with hand-me-down one-liners (which, in addition to the title include "evil in the garden," "smoke on the horizon" and "blood in the water," though somewhat disappointingly not "smoke on the water"). When Thomas gets to the explosive chorus, he begs to know "How do you sleep while the city is burning?" It might be his most worldly moment on the record -- ringing a familiar bell with the Australian band Midnight Oil, who had only to contend with burning beds, not a whole city.

It's with "Real World '09," where Thomas' sounds most at home and least affected, making it both the record's most successful song and the one that demonstrates the fundamental disconnect between his attempt at recreating Rhythm of the Saints. Over a blissfully optimistic beat (quite perfect for the spin class), Thomas sings about the rude awakening into a "real world," where -- "boom shake" -- he can only cope with a cup of coffee and a shave. He turns on the radio, and the man on the radio says "Welcome to the real world, no body told you it was going to be hard."

In Simon's view, an ocean and a decades away, on a song from a record without a single radio hit, the real world looks quite different; a place far too complicated to be healed by coffee and a shave. He sings about "armies of engineers to analyze the soil," "food we contemplate, water that we boil," about a "winding river that gets wound around the heart." And a few seconds later he sings a line that might also be used to acknowledge the real difference between himself and Rob Thomas: "The music suffers. The music business thrives."

[This piece was originally written for Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Blog.]

R.I.P. Jay Bennett

I saw Jay Bennett perform just one time apart from his seven-year stint with Wilco at a Detroit dive called the Lager House, in the shadow of the abandoned Tigers Stadium. For me, a huge fan of Bennett's contributions to Wilco and his first solo record, The Palace at 4am, the performance was hugely deflating -- a drunken mess of bluesy, distorted bar-band rock that seemed completely incongruous with the subtle genius who made Wilco records come to life. Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy's greatest talent has always been the ability to surround himself with the right musicians, and Bennett's holistic, high-minded approach as the multi-instrumentalist yielded both artists' best work. But that was hardly the Bennett that showed up that night in Detroit; the blown-out versions of tunes from The Palace at 4am grew more defiant as the room grew emptier, ensuring that Bennett would capture only the most determined of Wilco's audience who had turned up. Foolishly, I left early.


[Read more at Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Staff Blog]

Bob Dylan's Together Through Life

As the decade closes, Bob Dylan's 67-year-old mug will grace yet another cover of Rolling Stone -- his eighth cover in 10 years -- a nearly obligatory commemoration of his 33rd studio record, Together Through Life. By all accounts, he's been worth it too; recent years have seen America's alpha songwriter enjoy one of the most fertile periods of his career and unanimous approval from a critical echo chamber that rings his name with a deafening din. This was punctuated by the Rolling Stone cover celebrating the last Dylan offering. The headline screamed: "The Genius of Bob Dylan."



Relatively, Together was anticipated and received rather quietly. Rolling Stone's David Fricke called it a "mixed bag" that lacked "the instant-classic aura" -- a far cry from when Modern Times had Robert Christgau stammering for comparisons from everyone from Matisse to Sonny Rollins. You can chalk up part of the limpid response to fatigue: the blue-faced stammer of critics over Uncle Bob has been on full tilt since 1997's Time Out of Mind. (Our jazz editor, Nick Dedina, loves to point out the shift in groupthink that saw unanimously high praise for last year's The Bootleg Series Vol. 8: Tell Tale Signs -- a record culled mostly from B-sides of critical bombs from the '80s and '90s.) While Together Through Life may not be shortlisted among Dylan's sunset triumphs as a whole, its success lies in the fleeting details: brief sparks of brilliant singing and playing that are more commanding, more chilling, more gutsy, more everything than anything on his most cohesive albums of late. Even if it misses the roaring approval of the critical community, it undoubtedly continues Dylan's streak of late greatness and is certainly the liveliest offering of the bunch.



And so what if Together Through Life lacks the consistency that defines Dylan's pair of widely adored late records? So what if it has neither the haunted, windswept loneliness of 2001's Love and Theft nor the codgerly spirit of 2006's chart-topping Modern Times? Maybe that's due to the restlessness of the songwriter himself, a man who has spent an entire career minting and mastering musical styles just to retreat from them. Here, Dylan is more rootsy, moody and erratic than on Modern Times: skating past "boulevards of broken cars" with a second-line Chicano strut on "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" and offering a wispy, sentimental steel-guitar weep on "Life Is Hard" (which he wrote for Olivier Dahan's My Own Love Song). He coughs up a rowdy Texas roadhouse toss-off in "Jolene" and lands with an acoustic, south-of-the-border lilt on "This Dream of You." But even if the themes are erratic and the lyrics (many of them co-written with longtime Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter) often feel dashed off, Together has two singular ties that bind it together: the excellent playing of the best band he's fronted in years (maybe ever) and his voice.



The former is likely the greatest and most consistent thrill, mostly demonstrated in the accompaniment of Los Lobos' David Hidalgo, whose accordion serves as Dylan's sidekick and foil, twisting a playful response to the sentimental lyric of "I Feel a Change Comin' On" (perhaps the record's most instantly enjoyable tune) and buoying the gate to "If You Ever Go to Houston." In a recent interview, Dylan said that the record was a "kind of a road trip from Kansas City to New Orleans," but Hidalgo takes the whole thing on a southwestern detour. Dylan is also joined by another crony in Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell, who takes to the range of writing with unfailing taste.



Even so, Dylan's emotive rasp is the most musical of the record's instruments - chortling and teasing, leering and moaning. He's able to sneer grab-assin' come-ons in "Shake Shake Mama," offer some desultory self-pity in "This Dream of You," mourn and scold a "Forgetful Heart" and crack and croon through "Life Is Hard." The writing isn't as keen as what runs through much of the recent years, but in his cackling one-liners he's doing a whole lot more with less, and when he does spit out a come-on, it feels a slight more dangerous than the weary old fart who name-dropped Alicia Keys in Modern Times. When he gets colloquial with "Its All Good," his croaking voice is evidence enough that his apocalyptic vision is anything but all good.



So what if Together Through Life doesn't exactly come together as a whole? When everything does line up, like the nasty, ass-kicked blues of "My Wife's Hometown," it reminds us that Dylan can delight through his scrappy little wisecracks just as easily as his arching, album-long artistic dissertations. Regardless of what the headline on next week's Rolling Stone has to say, the genius of Dylan continues to be news.



[Originally published in Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Blog]

McCoy Tyner & Marc Ribot @ Yoshi's

About halfway down the half page of scrawl I took home from last night’s performance of the McCoy Tyner trio with Marc Ribot is a note that made perfect sense at the time. It says, "This is the difference between what is and what should be." In the clear light of the morning, the stoner epiphany of that sentence seems exactly like the kind of thing you write down during a drug experience -- something so urgent, that life’s needle comes scratching off the record and you have to write it down immediately, fearing that your square, sober self will let the newly discovered answer to life’s mystery slip away. When you wake up the next day, head pounding and tongue thick, it’s happened again: the sagacious wisdom has melted into a bit of nonsense like "this is the difference between what is and what should be."

My best guess about the note’s origin lies somewhere in the midst of McCoy Tyner’s delicately constructed solo on "Peresina," a modal tune based on a simple left-handed strut, buried near the end on the appropriately titled 1988 album Revelations. From our side stage, in the very of the front row (a seat which, amazingly, sadly, can be had just by walking in to the late show on a Wednesday), you couldn’t see Tyner’s hands while he played it, only his face, framed by the arm of the propped-up piano lid, and the lid itself, showing the instrument’s hammers in its polished reflection. At 69, Tyner’s playing remains as agile and surprising as it ever was -- chiming clusters of chords and lacework lines that ascend the keyboard one second and are hammered down with a punctuated bass line the next. Even if the sentiment of the note from the performance doesn’t make sense later, it’s a powerful reminder that a great performance can be a transcendent, mind-expanding trip, illusive and impossible to fully revive the day after.

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When "Peresina" got done, with verses for Ribot and the rest of the trio, Tyner spoke right up close to the microphone, his voice sounding like a bag of gravel being dragged down a dirt road. "Now I’d like to do a blues I wrote about people hanging on the corner," he said. "I grew up in Philadelphia where people did that kind of thing. The City of Brotherly Love. People cared for each other, that’s what was going on."

Maybe he was inspired by this theme or the twisting melody, but Ribot stretched far out on "Blues On the Corner" when it his turn came up, pushing hard against of the driving, bone dry clang of the ride cymbal, playing less like the slightly awkward fourth wheel in a post-bop master class and more like the most inventive, genre defying guitar player of his generation. His playing, like his presence, added a fascinating tension to the set, a meeting artists from backgrounds which contrast as plainly as their outfits -- Ribot in a black leather jacket and Tyner in double-breasted pin stripes.

It certainly didn’t always work. There were times when the unlikely quartet would step on each other's toes while trading solos or stagger to the ending of a tune awkwardly. (Maybe Ribot himself even seemed the most at ease during the encore when he had the stage to himself for a second, when he let loose and went way out, bending the neck of his guitar, improvising lines that were, at times, based wholly on whispering fret noise.) But, when the hour-long set ended, it there was little question that we’d just witnessed something that rarely happens: artists of different generations, races and musical cultures challenging their personal and aestetic conventions. Maybe therein lies the difference between what is and what should be.

[This appeared originally in Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Staff Blog]

A Green and Red One

From an interview with Leonard Bernstein, conducted in 1989, recalling his debut at the New York Philharmonic:

I called Mama and Daddy at the Barbizon to tell them and you (Burton). And then I just had to hang around. I mean, I was all dressed; when it came to the crunch on that Sunday afternoon, I wore the one good suit that I had, a double-breasted suit. I had until 2:30 p.m. to kill before going to the hall in my sharkskin suit. In that hour or two, I sat in the drugstore [the Carnegie Hall Pharmacy, then located at the street level corner of the building]. I went in for some coffee. The druggist said, "What are you looking so pale about?" and he gave me two little pills, a green and red one. He said, "Look, before you go on, just pop these into your mouth. One will calm you down and the other will give you energy." I put them in my pocket.

....


As I was to walk onstage, I remembered the pills. I took them out of my pocket, flung them as far away from me across the backstage and I could and said, "I'm going to do this on my owns." I strode out and I don't remember a thing from that moment - I don't even remember intermission — until the sound of people standing and cheering and clapping.

CMJ, Ryan Star & Cory Chisel

A few years ago, I interviewed the Dodos, a San Francisco duo who was, at that time, trying to keep their heads during the disorienting situation that befalls a band who's being vigorously courted by record labels. We parked on the sidewalk of a café in the Mission District as the singer, Meric Long, spoke about the most bewildering gig he'd ever played, a few weeks prior, in the board room of a Manhattan skyscraper, to an audience of record industry decision-makers. For a musician of Long's pedigree -- a vet of San Francisco's indie songwriter scene who pens unapologetically nervy, decidedly un-commercial songs -- his obvious discomfort about the situation was evident then, and even more so when they issued their first LP on a reputable small independent label, French Kiss. The situation with the Dodos office gig was on the brain yesterday, sitting in a conference room on the 48th floor of a building near the chaotic center of Times Square (where Rhapsody's New York office makes its home) when Ryan Star strode in, guitar in hand, dressed in faded black, buttressed by a small trio of nervous, doting label operatives.
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Not to be confused with the female Ryan Starr from season one of American Idol (and subsequent bikini spread in Stuff magazine!), this Star was a former contestant of CBS reality talent contest Rock Star: Supernova. (He didn't win the contest but was awarded a consolation Honda CRV. My parents have one and love it. They really do love that thing.) With the rough-ish confidence of a performer with a share of gigs under his (Urban Outfitters?) belt -- in conference rooms and otherwise -- he played two songs that will likely appear on his 2009 LP.

The music performed in that situation can only be observed in objective, not subjective, terms -- more like watching a salesman's demonstration that the vacuum can, in fact, suck up the crumbs he's spilled on the carpet rather than a critique of how well it sucks. My impression of it is one of a paint-by-numbers rock yowl that, while unquestionably earnest, seemed about as genuine as the performer's name. And by the time the day had ended, the dinner conversation revolved around the concept that a colleague paraphrased from the autobiography of Dean Wareham, frontman of Luna: there are two kinds of people in the music industry, those who live for music, and those who live off music.

This is the kind of black-and-white disparity that is working against another young, recently signed hopeful, Cory Chisel (real name) and his band, the Wandering Sons, a few hours later. The Wisconsin-based singer recently signed a deal with a division of RCA and was blessed by playing an early slot at the label's CMJ showcase at the Bowery Ballroom, while everyone was still fresh. And the set that follows is something that isn't the stuff of conference rooms.

Chisel and his band play a straightforward brand of songwriter rock that toes a line between folk and soul inclinations, the influences of which might probably be best demonstrated by the set's two covers: a robustly harmonized version of Loudon Wainwright III's "One Man Guy" (though the performance begged the question if the band was more familiar with the excellently covered version by Wainwright's son, Rufus) and Chisel's solo reworking of Sam Cooke's "Change Gonna Come," tastefully dressed with pre-election left-leaning partisanship. Between these two covers were the band's own evocative tunes, selected from their Cabin Ghosts EP (the sinister, arching opener "Lovers and Friends" is an apt introduction to the band) and ones they're vetting for a forthcoming LP, which will probably come out in the fall of 2009.

Chisel's voice was the most immediately striking -- a thick baritone that owes no small part of its inflection to young Ray Charles -- but the core of the sound was in the well-ordered elements of the supporting cast: a lush, warm flannel comforter of eclectic guitar, woodwinds and the spectral harmony of pianist Adriel Harris. By the end of the long set, the room was mostly full and, to the band's credit, mostly silent, a feat itself. After a day of fretting about living off music, there was no way to leave without an affirming reminder of what it sounds like when you hear someone who lives for it.

[This was originally published at Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Staff Blog]

Tears for Levi Stubbs

Fans of any '60s icon share a similar gripe: the legacy of too many great artists is inextricably tied to too few of their songs in heavy rotation on oldies stations. These select tracks get played and played out, and eventually even the life-long Beatles fan reaches for the dial during the third daily course of "Yellow Submarine." Today, I cued up the Four Tops after reading about the passing of the band's leader, Levi Stubbs, who died in his sleep in his Detroit home at the age of 72, and was reminded about how this predicament is particularly hard on the stable of artists from '60s Motown: The Jackson Five is relegated to "I'll Be There"; Stevie Wonder, a Motown artist with as deep and wide-ranging catalogue of any, is on three times an afternoon with "For Once In My Life." For the Four Tops, the heavy-rotation hits come between 1964's "Baby, I Need Your Loving" and their final Top 10 in 1973, "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)." Of the handful of stuff between these bookends, some, like The Big Chill-approved "It's the Same Old Song," represent Motown's streamlined mainstream operation. Others, like "Reach Out, I'll Be There," speak to the group's power in the studio. But it's the outlying, oddly successful hit "Bernadette," a tune that is among their most popular and their most enduring, that best demonstrates Stubbs' power as a performer. It's the rare example of a heavy-rotation hit that lives up to its responsibilities...

Continue @ Play the Rhapsody editorial blog

Far, Far Away From Party Mountain There Is A Very Bad Place

Far, far away from Party Mountain there is a very bad place.
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Pete Wentz won’t quit chewing on with his herpe scab.



When did the DJ get into Ryan Adams?


Pro choice? You betcha!


The dog is going to catch cold.


Lauryn Hill brought by her new record, but it won’t play on anyone’s iPod.


It's Christmas time already!



Never come here again!

[Visit this cartoon at its home on Buddyhead]

Live: Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

It’s Friday at rush hour, and the show has only begun on the N Judah train line. Regular commuters clutch their briefcases, terrified, as a crowd of rowdy interlopers -- many in cowboy shirts, many in no shirts at all -- pack the car. The route is headed toward Golden Gate Park, where the eighth annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival commenced this afternoon, and two of the car's more enthusiastic riders are stone-giddy about the opening day headliner: "Robert f*ck*ng Plant, man," one says to the other in the blown-mind inflection that's the universal dialect of the three-day event. San Francisco might host a slew other open-air music festivals, but Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, a multi-stage festival of roots rock, country and bluegrass (paid for by San Francisco venture capitalist Warren Hellman) is probably the one that most accurately reflects the eccentricities of its host city. Starting with Robert f*ck*ng Plant.

[read more at Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Music Blog]

Jose Gonzalez and the Death of the Album

At a glance, last night's performance by Argentinean/Swede folk phenom Jose Gonzalez wasn't much to see: the final set of a two-day, sold-out stand at Yoshi's in Oakland, CA, mostly featured Gonzalez at center stage, hunched over a nylon-string guitar. Sitting between a heavy red curtain and a curious mix of the jazz club's typical chardonnay-and-maki crowd and reverent doe-eyed fans, he was occasionally buttressed by singer Yukimi Nagamo and percussionist Erik Bodin. There was almost no banter ("This song," he said in the honeyed shush of a yoga instructor, "is about tribalism") and few frills beyond those inherent in Gonzalez's faux-traditional Brazilian finger-picking and melancholic evocation of Joao Gilberto. Even the setlist -- drawn from his similarly elegant, bare pair of albums and scattered with new material -- didn't raise eyebrows, save for a forceful cover of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" that was trotted out for an encore. But, Gonzalez demonstrated that he's one of the most commanding songwriters of recent years by achieving the difficult task of what architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe called "an interesting plainness." The set also made it plainly apparent, and never more serenely unobjectionable, that Gonzalez, is also someone who thrives in an industry that's seen the death of the album-based career. He could be the poster child of its passing. [read more @ Play, The Rhapsody Staff Blog]

Tour D'Afrique

After applying some months ago to join a team from Lonely Planet in the 2009 Tour d'Afrique, I was ecstatic to hear that I'd been selected. Beginning in Giza, Eqypt and ending in Cape Town, South Africa, the Tour d'Afrique is one of the longest and most challenging cycling expeditions/races in the world. Lonely Planet will be fielding two relay teams to participate in the tour and put some muscle behind some of the related charitable work being done there. For two weeks in April, I will be riding the Zambezi Zone stage, which begins in Lilongwe, Malawi and ends in Victoria Falls, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. I have designs on recording of the training and planning for the event somewhere online in the coming weeks. I recently spoke to Karen Lotter, a writer for Suite 101, about the event and issues in volunteer travel. [See Suite 101's "Host Country – Ethical Travel"]

Related:
Lonely Planet rider profiles
Tour d'Afrique Foundation

On the Jayhawks

Hollywood Town Hall Meeting
From Play: The Rhapsody Editorial Music Blog