When we last met, I was having a bit of an identity crisis because I had suddenly started to like James Taylor again. Of course, my hope was that I probably just needed to give it some time to subside, but now, a week has gone by, and I still kind of like him.
It wouldn’t be a problem if I was a girl. For a girl, it’s normal to like James Taylor; but for a guy, well, it’s just not accepted. Usually, if a guy likes James Taylor, it’s either because he’s at the point where he’ll do absolutely anything to get any girl to hang around with him, or because he has lost all self-respect for himself as a man, and he knows that if other men discover his secret, they may descend on him like a pack of lions on an antelope and rip him to shreds. Basically, it’s a sign of helplessness.
A couple of years ago, I turned fifty, and a musician friend told me that at that age, it’s a good idea to get a rectal exam, because a lot of guys get cancer of the colon. In retrospect, he may have just been enjoying a bit of harmful fun at my expense, but at the time I did take him seriously, and (in a relative explosion of responsibility) I voluntarily submitted to an inspection of my nether area.
As you might imagine, I was nervous, and made a bit of a joke to the doctor as he was putting on his rubber gloves that I had really not been looking forward to this event that much. Unfortunately, not only did I not get a laugh -I barely got a reaction of any kind, and at the time I thought, well, the least a guy should be able to do at a time like this is laugh at your jokes!
Later on, though, I decided that not laughing at all might be better than laughing too much -after all, it’s not really a time for frivolity, and heaven forbid he come out with a whole bunch of funny lines of his own. I started to realize that a doctor in this situation is really in a rather precarious situation, audience response-wise. Eventually, I realized that when I volunteer to be put in a situation like this, liking James Taylor doesn’t seem half so bad.
Thinking back, I probably haven’t checked out his last few releases all that closely, though I do have a friend who played me some highlights, which (luckily for whatever minor esteem I have left as a rocker) sounded pretty boring. The last things I remembered liking were in 1975 on an album called “Gorilla”, a cut called “Mexico” and a beautiful ballad called “Sarah Maria.” However, that album also contained the dreaded “How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You”, so I ran like hell, and my past never caught up with me until now, when I find myself once again sheepishly admitting, oops! I like James Taylor.
Listening to his latest, “October Road” (Columbia), was surprisingly satisfying in a comfort food, meatloaf kind of way. He hasn’t changed, and none of the songs are startling or showy, but they still have lots of wonderful voicings and details and great acoustic guitar playing and the modest virtues of great songcrafting. It seemed to me to have more interesting songwriting than I’ve heard from him in a long time, like he’s doing more than going through the motions, though he still has the wisdom to always make it sound like he’s coasting.
The opening “September Grace”, “Carry Me On My Way”, “Baby Buffalo”, “Caroline I See You” -all have classic grace, depth, beauty, and thoroughbred lines; there’s even a much-needed change-up or two, in the funny, Cole Porter-ish “”Mean Old Man” or the anti-war screed “Belfast to Boston” (the latter surprisingly features cameo appearances from Kay Hanley and Michael Eisenstein of Letters to Cleo.) And there’s no age problem at all, seeing as he always seemed like he was about fifty anyway. )I’ll bet his doctor laughs like hell at all his jokes.)
All in all, I actually like the whole album very much.
I must be losing my damn mind.
Friday, September 27, 2002
Friday, September 20, 2002
Lori McKenna
Singer-songwriter Lori McKenna comes to the First Encounter Coffeehouse in Eastham next Saturday, September 28th, complete with an intriguing little handful of mysteries. For instance:
How does a fledgling folksinger from Stoughton raised on Broadway musicals, J. Giels, and James Taylor end up with the strong, lonesome peal of a Nashville veteran?
How does a thirty-two year-old mother of four find time for writing, recording, traveling, and playing shows?
How could someone who describes herself as by nature quite a reticent performer (she says she “never really intended on leaving my house”) end up with this incredible air of authority to her work, in the process attracting a large enough following to sell out large venues like the Somerville Theater surprisingly early in her career?
She sings with such assurance, like she’s telling you the plain truth, like it or lump it, totally direct and definite. She’s not a blaster, but when she lays it down, it stays down. And she’s got this definite country thing, this twang, even in her pronunciation (when she sings, that is; it’s not a part of her speaking voice) that she insists arrived without her ever having heard much country music at all. She’s never winsome, never whispery, never cute -she somehow cuts right through all that and goes straight to the meat at the heart of her songs, which are more often about things being wrong than things being right.
And she doesn’t just sound country -she sounds tough. She doesn’t know how she got this voice, though she does say her whole family sang a lot: “I have one sister and four brothers, and they all sang better than me. I was the quiet one, because everyone else could really sing. I really don’t know where it comes from. I did have a grandmother that always loved to sing and couldn’t sing; there’s maybe some of her in it...”
True to the folk genre in their mostly autobiographical nature, her lyrics are sometimes as sharp and deep as her voice, as on the chorus of what might be her best song, “Never Die Young” (dedicated to her mother, who died when Lori was four):
I am the one who will never die young
I am a martyr and I cannot hide
But I’m not a winner, I’m just brilliantly bitter
I’m sealed by my skin, but broken inside
At her best, her lyrics are thoughtful, incisive, and almost novelistic, but (again, paradoxically) she insists she isn’t much of a reader (though, when pressed she confesses admiration for the writer Toni Morrison and Anita Diamant’s recent “The Red Tent”, adding that she loves Oprah Winfrey and used to read a lot of Oprah’s Book Club recommendations, but “got embarrassed being the one with all the books with the ‘O’ on them.”)
So far, she’s released two CDs: 1998’s “Paper Wings and Halo” and last year’s “Pieces of Me” (both on Catalyst); the latter features guest turns from Richard Shindell, Jennifer Kimball, Ellis Paul, Meghan Toohey, Kris Delmhorst, and a full band. She says musicians love her because she never tells them what to do (“I just say, ‘OK, here’s the song -don’t mess it up’, and then I love whatever they do”), but adds that Meghan Toohey (“Ms. Smarty-pants arranger-person”) has been helping out a lot (“her overthoughts counter-act with my lack of any thought.”)
Her next release will be something she calls “the kitchen tapes”, which she said she recorded by herself at home on her new mini-disc recorder, somewhat in the warts-and-all tradition of Springsteen’s “Nebraska” or Michelle Shocked’s “Campfire Tapes.”
Recording at home? With four kids? “Well, this was before my one year-old was born -I just had to wait until they went to school.”
The result will be an internet-only release that she’ll also sell at live shows. Meanwhile, she’s also starting sessions for her next “official” album with her band at High & Low in Boston (a loft studio originally set up by Morphine’s Mark Sandman), sandwiched in between increasingly high profile gigs (she’s already done the Newport Folk Festival and Lilith Fair) and -oh yeah! -raisin’ them pesky chillens, some of whom are morphing into road managers and guitar players as we speak.
Not to mention reading all those books with the “o’s” on them...
How does a fledgling folksinger from Stoughton raised on Broadway musicals, J. Giels, and James Taylor end up with the strong, lonesome peal of a Nashville veteran?
How does a thirty-two year-old mother of four find time for writing, recording, traveling, and playing shows?
How could someone who describes herself as by nature quite a reticent performer (she says she “never really intended on leaving my house”) end up with this incredible air of authority to her work, in the process attracting a large enough following to sell out large venues like the Somerville Theater surprisingly early in her career?
She sings with such assurance, like she’s telling you the plain truth, like it or lump it, totally direct and definite. She’s not a blaster, but when she lays it down, it stays down. And she’s got this definite country thing, this twang, even in her pronunciation (when she sings, that is; it’s not a part of her speaking voice) that she insists arrived without her ever having heard much country music at all. She’s never winsome, never whispery, never cute -she somehow cuts right through all that and goes straight to the meat at the heart of her songs, which are more often about things being wrong than things being right.
And she doesn’t just sound country -she sounds tough. She doesn’t know how she got this voice, though she does say her whole family sang a lot: “I have one sister and four brothers, and they all sang better than me. I was the quiet one, because everyone else could really sing. I really don’t know where it comes from. I did have a grandmother that always loved to sing and couldn’t sing; there’s maybe some of her in it...”
True to the folk genre in their mostly autobiographical nature, her lyrics are sometimes as sharp and deep as her voice, as on the chorus of what might be her best song, “Never Die Young” (dedicated to her mother, who died when Lori was four):
I am the one who will never die young
I am a martyr and I cannot hide
But I’m not a winner, I’m just brilliantly bitter
I’m sealed by my skin, but broken inside
At her best, her lyrics are thoughtful, incisive, and almost novelistic, but (again, paradoxically) she insists she isn’t much of a reader (though, when pressed she confesses admiration for the writer Toni Morrison and Anita Diamant’s recent “The Red Tent”, adding that she loves Oprah Winfrey and used to read a lot of Oprah’s Book Club recommendations, but “got embarrassed being the one with all the books with the ‘O’ on them.”)
So far, she’s released two CDs: 1998’s “Paper Wings and Halo” and last year’s “Pieces of Me” (both on Catalyst); the latter features guest turns from Richard Shindell, Jennifer Kimball, Ellis Paul, Meghan Toohey, Kris Delmhorst, and a full band. She says musicians love her because she never tells them what to do (“I just say, ‘OK, here’s the song -don’t mess it up’, and then I love whatever they do”), but adds that Meghan Toohey (“Ms. Smarty-pants arranger-person”) has been helping out a lot (“her overthoughts counter-act with my lack of any thought.”)
Her next release will be something she calls “the kitchen tapes”, which she said she recorded by herself at home on her new mini-disc recorder, somewhat in the warts-and-all tradition of Springsteen’s “Nebraska” or Michelle Shocked’s “Campfire Tapes.”
Recording at home? With four kids? “Well, this was before my one year-old was born -I just had to wait until they went to school.”
The result will be an internet-only release that she’ll also sell at live shows. Meanwhile, she’s also starting sessions for her next “official” album with her band at High & Low in Boston (a loft studio originally set up by Morphine’s Mark Sandman), sandwiched in between increasingly high profile gigs (she’s already done the Newport Folk Festival and Lilith Fair) and -oh yeah! -raisin’ them pesky chillens, some of whom are morphing into road managers and guitar players as we speak.
Not to mention reading all those books with the “o’s” on them...
Friday, September 6, 2002
Emersonmania
Well, I certainly don’t think anyone’s going to be very happy with me this week, since I’ve once again failed to cough up even the faintest scent of anything remotely reportable. That is to say, Greetings! It is the news once again I don’t have.
I don’t mean to make excuses, but sometimes I get a little depressed around this time of year from both mourning the summer and dreading the winter, which this year seemed to descend even more abruptly than usual on the dot of Labor Day, instantly making things cold, gray, and gloomy.
Sometimes it’s quite impressive how on schedule life can be. One minute I’m surfin’ in the sun with my wahini baby, and the next, I’m a drone, intermittently punching keys in the glow of the cathode ray, too dead to dream, a burned-out zombie at the end of the line. Which, I hope, somewhat explains if not altogether mitigates the frustratingly low quality of my writing in the winter months (roughly, September through June), not to mention the subsequent dull, muffling effect it has on my, uh, personality.
I do try harder to write good in the summer, the better to attract the attention of many more rich white people/prospective patrons. Many of them has complement me on my writing two or three time. While my writing, I think, at its best, has never really been about winning awards so much as not winning them (which it has done more of), it is my writing that is here, now, and thus most likely to be read by you at this time!
And with that, let’s check our top (only, really) story: the new Chris Emerson record is out, and he might be from Cape Cod!
The reasons I think he might be local are: I just started getting his emails out of nowhere, and my editor got his debut CD, “Tourist” somehow, and it’s on Monomoy Records. All the evidence screams Cape Cod.
Except that he sounds like Bryan Adams. In one of the reviews (from the electronic press kit someone emailed me), my Boston Globe colleague Steve Morse compared him to Richard Marx; and, while I don’t think I’ve ever heard or would like Richard Marx, I’ll bet he sounds just like Bryan Adams. Chris is very slick, competent, arena-ready, and bland -maybe even a guy who actually likes arenas. All in all, I guess I’d say no great shakes in the music department. I have not seen the future of rock and roll, but I’ll bet it’s not Chris Emerson.
It being the first week after Labor Day, though, the Chris Emerson phenomenon demanded further investigation (my thinking being, basically, so what if he’s boring, he’s the biggest story to hit this sleepy burg all week, and let’s dig up all the dirt we can, without actually working on it much.) I have to admit, the result in the office has been a veritable explosion of Emersonmania that almost raged out of control for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes, as I furiously sped from one internet dead end to another.
First, I went to his website, www.chrisemersonmusic.com. For about ten seconds, it flashed the word “loading”; then it types out the words "chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied even by synchronized typing sounds, and then the computer crashes.
Or, at least, my computer did a couple of times; but then, I have a very old computer, actually a 1965 Hoover Flashtalk 4000, one of the great vacuum companies’ last steam-powered versions. I’m thinking of getting a new one, as it’s getting harder and harder to find parts and re-fills, etc., but I love the old, wood-cabinet look.
Then I went back to the electronic press kit and was amused to find a line about his being like “a young Darryl Hall!” and also having had one of his songs used on “Dawson’s Creek”, and then remembered how much I had disliked Aerosmith and the Doobie Brothers when I first heard them and then considered the possibility that Chris Emerson might someday be a very rich man, the kind of man who could buy or sell a little maggot like myself any day of the week.
Then I noticed that someone had emailed me a “Chris Emerson E Card”, and I didn’t even know what an E Card was! It turned out to have links to four of the songs I’d already disliked from the album, and then, all on its own, it typed out the words “chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied again by synchronized typing sounds, and by another crash of my computer.
So I was not really able to find out all that much about Chris Emerson, and still don’t know, for instance, if he’s even from Cape Cod or not. He strikes me as an enigma, a man who makes the sounds I don’t need to hear much of; but from where?
I don’t mean to make excuses, but sometimes I get a little depressed around this time of year from both mourning the summer and dreading the winter, which this year seemed to descend even more abruptly than usual on the dot of Labor Day, instantly making things cold, gray, and gloomy.
Sometimes it’s quite impressive how on schedule life can be. One minute I’m surfin’ in the sun with my wahini baby, and the next, I’m a drone, intermittently punching keys in the glow of the cathode ray, too dead to dream, a burned-out zombie at the end of the line. Which, I hope, somewhat explains if not altogether mitigates the frustratingly low quality of my writing in the winter months (roughly, September through June), not to mention the subsequent dull, muffling effect it has on my, uh, personality.
I do try harder to write good in the summer, the better to attract the attention of many more rich white people/prospective patrons. Many of them has complement me on my writing two or three time. While my writing, I think, at its best, has never really been about winning awards so much as not winning them (which it has done more of), it is my writing that is here, now, and thus most likely to be read by you at this time!
And with that, let’s check our top (only, really) story: the new Chris Emerson record is out, and he might be from Cape Cod!
The reasons I think he might be local are: I just started getting his emails out of nowhere, and my editor got his debut CD, “Tourist” somehow, and it’s on Monomoy Records. All the evidence screams Cape Cod.
Except that he sounds like Bryan Adams. In one of the reviews (from the electronic press kit someone emailed me), my Boston Globe colleague Steve Morse compared him to Richard Marx; and, while I don’t think I’ve ever heard or would like Richard Marx, I’ll bet he sounds just like Bryan Adams. Chris is very slick, competent, arena-ready, and bland -maybe even a guy who actually likes arenas. All in all, I guess I’d say no great shakes in the music department. I have not seen the future of rock and roll, but I’ll bet it’s not Chris Emerson.
It being the first week after Labor Day, though, the Chris Emerson phenomenon demanded further investigation (my thinking being, basically, so what if he’s boring, he’s the biggest story to hit this sleepy burg all week, and let’s dig up all the dirt we can, without actually working on it much.) I have to admit, the result in the office has been a veritable explosion of Emersonmania that almost raged out of control for a good twenty, twenty-five minutes, as I furiously sped from one internet dead end to another.
First, I went to his website, www.chrisemersonmusic.com. For about ten seconds, it flashed the word “loading”; then it types out the words "chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied even by synchronized typing sounds, and then the computer crashes.
Or, at least, my computer did a couple of times; but then, I have a very old computer, actually a 1965 Hoover Flashtalk 4000, one of the great vacuum companies’ last steam-powered versions. I’m thinking of getting a new one, as it’s getting harder and harder to find parts and re-fills, etc., but I love the old, wood-cabinet look.
Then I went back to the electronic press kit and was amused to find a line about his being like “a young Darryl Hall!” and also having had one of his songs used on “Dawson’s Creek”, and then remembered how much I had disliked Aerosmith and the Doobie Brothers when I first heard them and then considered the possibility that Chris Emerson might someday be a very rich man, the kind of man who could buy or sell a little maggot like myself any day of the week.
Then I noticed that someone had emailed me a “Chris Emerson E Card”, and I didn’t even know what an E Card was! It turned out to have links to four of the songs I’d already disliked from the album, and then, all on its own, it typed out the words “chrisemersonmusic.com”, accompanied again by synchronized typing sounds, and by another crash of my computer.
So I was not really able to find out all that much about Chris Emerson, and still don’t know, for instance, if he’s even from Cape Cod or not. He strikes me as an enigma, a man who makes the sounds I don’t need to hear much of; but from where?
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