Cheers!

I first heard “Girl in the War” when it was posted on Canadian songwriter Matthew Good’s blog. Most who are even a little familiar with Matt Good know that he is a pretty straight up individual who writes dark, thoughtful music, and so when he posted that he’d just heard this song that made him weep, I knew I had to hear it. I was impressed, and sought out the rest of the album later that day. I’m glad I did – because I was ready.

So what does that mean? I’ve been establishing a few themes of music loving over the course of the last few installments of this series, and one is that your favourite albums sometimes become your favourite not just because they’re great. Obviously there is a lot of great music out there that I know objectively is great, but doesn’t move me. I think the other side of the coin is timing. Personally, I don’t have much more comment on this album and timing than that. There was no big moment in my life that was reflected in the music or words of this record – it was just the right time, and that’s enough.

I think I like this album so much because there is as much meaning between the lines as there is in the lines themselves. The Animal Years is about journeys to foreign lands, mystery women, the American mid-west, people and places out of time, literature. And then there are the songs.

“Monster Ballads” is an exercise in impressionistic lyrics set over a production mood that works perfectly. “Idaho” is dark and perfect – a capella unless you turn it up loud enough and stay silent enough to hear the gently plucked acoustic guitar that you can actually miss: it defies car listening, which I respect. “One More Mouth” is desire from a distance, set over mostly clean electric guitar and enough ear candy to keep the vibe interesting:

Honey why you gotta hide your face from me?

Will I starve in this eclipse while you treat every hungry kiss

Like one more mouth to feed?

In a lyrically economic song, this simple verse makes it worth it.

Clearly, “Thin Blue Flame” is the Pièce de résistance – an epic and ambitious 9:38 minute narrative with almost no instrumental breaks. It’s full of vivid images and, for lack of a better term…ideas. It’s a story, but not in the way you expect a story to be told – if ever there was a song that could be reduced to memorable pull-quote couplets, it’s this one. Check a few of these:

And the whole world was looking to get drowned

Trees were a fist shaking themselves at the clouds

and

He bent down and made the world in seven days

and ever since he’s been walking away

and

It’s a bible or a bullet they put over your heart

it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart

and

the raw smell of horses and the warm smell of hay

cicadas electric in the heat of the day

These lines are obviously not connected – they are merely random couplets I love that stuck with me. And I’ve left others out. Like I said – incredible descriptions and thoughtful ideas mixing together verse after verse. If it wasn’t so well crafted, I’d wonder if “Thin Blue Flame” were a calling card – this is how to write lyrics.

The album ends with “Here at the Right Time” – a finale carefully chosen to follow a song like “Thin Blue Flame.” It contains one of my favourite verses about the idea of a failed love:

I was a pretty poor cure

But my love for you was always pure

The bucket was broken

But the water was pure

A quick aside about writing: I think that, historically, the best songwriters who are revered lyricists are almost exclusively voracious readers. Dylan, in his autobiography, talks about spending his adult formative years (19-22 or so) reading all of the classics. The way he tells it, it sounds like he didn’t even leave the house for two or three years. Cohen, as everyone knows, was a poet and writer first. Even Bono, who is arguably one of the better lyricists in rock music, was and is a big fan of all kinds of writers, like Bukowski and Kerouac, whose influence is clear in their 90s work. Josh Ritter recently published a novel, though his interest in the written word is clear from his earliest songs.

Are lyrics everything? Absolutely not. If the music is not compelling, a lyrically interesting album feels like an audiobook, and that’s not fun. But I think the writers I mentioned above (which includes Ritter) have endured – and will endure – because words are important. Stephen King has a great quote about this in his book “On Writing”:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time to write. Simple as that.

I think there is a lot of great music out there with shitty lyrics because the musicians have honed their skills in one department, but haven’t in another. Perhaps that’s a silly statement – no one’s perfect at everything, and there is always going to be room for improvement. I just find, in general, that there are a lot fewer true lyricists out there. Music is a surefire way into the heart, and even into the mind. The question is – once it’s in there, is it a good conversationalist? I think you can sit and talk with Josh Ritter’s The Animal Years for a long time.

But this one isn’t about Lover/Fighter, it’s about Death Cab for Cutie’s Plans, another album that takes me to a specific place.

This is a spring album for me. I’d like to say it’s because of a certain vibe within the songs, like the obvious “Summer Skin,” but in truth it’s just an album I bought and explored in the spring.

A little insight into my thoughts on DCFC: I think they are an underrated band. This may sound funny to those who know them at all, as they had a huge indie following prior to the major label release of Plans (and still do?). At this point in their career, they’re relatively mainstream, compared to their obscurity as little as five years ago. They’ve always had fans, and critics have been kind.

So why are they underrated? Because DCFC – for a while – suffered from being “cool,” and this is a big problem for a lot of bands. Because cool is a curse. Because you will inevitably go through not being cool, and you will be analyzed in relation to how cool you are or how cool you used to be. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the songs, which in DCFC’s case, are simply great.

I also think Ben Gibbard is often underrated as a writer. He definitely has his faults – sometimes things get a little too dour, but overall, I think the band has managed a career full of pop-rock songs that are clever and have depth. I also think it’s worth noting that those descriptive words can’t exist in the same sentence for most bands.  Even the successful pop-rock bands – if they’re lucky – grasp either clever OR funny, but rarely both.

DCFC manage to continue to put new spins on old ideas, which is the goal, isn’t it? Plans is an album about Loss (capital L), and they illustrate it well in word and sound. “Marching Bands of Manhattan” keeps with their consistent trend of great opening tracks, and the aforementioned “Summer Skin” is full of simple, striking imagery that captures a season and the move away from it. These guys absolutely understand the necessary flow of an album, and the record arcs and bumps in the right places – “Brothers in a Hotel Bed” is a damn near perfect late side B mood setter.

I have since fleshed out my DCFC collection, and I love Transatlanticism probably as much as Plans, and there was a period when I was on the road last summer when I listened to The Open Door EP almost too much. But, as I’ve said in a previous Record Player, you always remember your first when it comes to these things.

I feel that way about David Gray’s Lost Songs 95-98.

Now, even when I discovered this album years ago, David Gray was hardly a secret. It was right around the time that the song “Babylon” was changing his life and giving him the fanbase that allowed him to continue to make music for a living. The monumental success of that album was a blessing and a curse though, as the song was put into every movie trailer for a span of about three years, and – though the man had released 3 albums worth of good songs before White Ladder – people perceived him as a bit of a ‘one hit wonder to be.’ White Ladder also become a part of everyone’s ‘chill out’ mix, and Gray was perceived – wrongly I think – as a bit of a shoe-gazer whose vibe always stayed the same. If you’ve listened to all of his albums, you’ll know that’s not the case. But personally, I don’t think a lot of people really gave the other albums the proper chance. Gray actually speaks about that in the “Commercial Reception” section here.

Anyway, all of that context aside, the point of this is Lost Songs 95-98 – an ingenious “follow-up” to White Ladder. The album is entirely acoustic (in comparison to the loops and such that filled out Ladder). Lost Songs goes straight for vibe and sparsely solid songwriting. In fact, those are the two things I love about David Gray in general – the songwriting, and the mood it puts me in.

First, the songs. “Flame Turns Blue” is all about being a tonally welcoming first track with a brilliant lyric of loss and hope. This is not meant as a personal comparison of artists, but I’ve often felt “Sparrow,” the first track on The Evening Light is my “Flame Turns Blue” due to its ‘introductory’ qualities. “As I’m Leaving,” with pinpoint lyrics, great harmonies on the chorus, and beautifully articulated piano and drums, gets me every time. “Tidal Wave” is a go-to example for me of almost Hemingway-esque writing that articulates beautifully something simple and yet often overstated: the act of remembering.

Ever since your fingertips
Ever since your eyes
Talking with the light oh
Bluer skies

Even if I wanted to
How could I explain?
Coming through my head now
This tidal wave

Does it get any simpler (and yet more complicated) than that?

I’ve always felt like Gray understands melody extremely well – these songs stick in your head, and yet the lines don’t sacrifice the word choice – they serve it.

The other part of my love of this record is that it sets a mood for me, and I feel like that’s more complicated than most people give credit for. I think there are a contingent of people out there who think that if all the songs on a record are acoustic-based and the singer doesn’t scream, then it has “a good laid back vibe.” While that might be true on the surface, it certainly doesn’t mean it’s good. To me, Lost Songs not only puts me in a certain place, but it makes that place interesting to me. This is not background music, it’s another life in rainy London, maybe in Fall or Winter. It’s the promise of a Friday night, or the mystery at the top of a long set of steps in a stranger’s house. It’s Tuesday afternoon coffee shops when it’s raining outside, it’s about being under covers when it snows. It’s about scarves and hem lines. Am I being random? Absolutely. That is the nature of trying to describe a mood that goes beyond ‘happy’ or ‘sad.’ And that’s the beauty of a set of songs that are married to one another so perfectly on an album.

Back to the ‘music belongs to me’ thing from the beginning. I know a lot of people who say they love David Gray, and they all own White Ladder or A New Day at Midnight. I know very few people who own this album, or at least, I didn’t really know anyone who owned it and talked about it back when I picked it up. Probably because it didn’t do very well by comparison. And that made it easier to love. Not because I was being ‘elite,’ or because I’m ‘anti-commerical’ or anything (it’s still David Gray and it still sold more copies than I will probably ever sell in my lifetime, after all). But there were no other opinions or press quotes that were easily accessible about it in my corner of the world, and if there were, they passed me by. So I just listened to it as a collection of songs. And I liked what I heard. Simple as that.

Amazing how rare that kind of simple is.

It’s because Springsteen fans are a certain breed, and I’ve quickly realized I am not of their blood. The typical Springsteen fan that I’ve met over the years loves Born to Run, and they want to hear “Atlantic City” fairly regularly. They believe Nebraska is the ultimate Springsteen ‘acoustic songwriter’ record. I don’t believe any of this.

I do still enjoy – and even love – some of the things I’ve described above. But to me, Devils and Dust – the third in Springsteen’s acoustic trilogy that includes Nebraska and Ghost of Tom Joad – is his crowning achievement when it comes to ‘songwriter songs.’

Devils and Dust is a collection that, from my understanding, grew out of writing the title track sometime in the early 2000s. That song is definitely amongst the strongest and most commercially viable on the album – it’s hard to find people who don’t like it once they’ve heard it. The rest of the record deals with various themes and narratives relating to mothers and sons (“Jesus was an only Son,” “The Hitter”), and microcosmic stories relating to Mexico and The United States (“Reno,”  “Matamoros Banks”).

Does any of this sound interesting to you? I’ll be honest, it doesn’t really sound it to me when it’s put down on paper. If the point of music is to move and articulate something about our world, then this album should miss the point when it comes to my own life. The theme is interesting but doesn’t ‘jump out’ at me, and what do I know about the lives of illegal aliens and the political relationship between the US and Mexico?

But that is the brilliance of Devils and Dust: when I listen to this record, I do care about all these things, and it does move me, and that’s why I think it’s Springsteen’s best achievement as a writer. Much like a great novelist, he brings to life characters that the listener likely knows nothing about, and – filtered through often note-perfect empathy and narrative style – makes their stories matter. The album is far more of a stretch in terms of characters and situations then either Nebraska or Ghost (which both sketch out characters that have become the ‘typical tragic Springsteen anti-heros’), and the production of the album simply sounds more inviting while still maintaining a raw production style. Yes, it is amazingly cool that Springsteen recorded Nebraska in his kitchen, but check out the clicks and buzzes from the slide guitar on “Reno,” mixed with the subtle string section. It takes the catharsis level of the story through the roof…

Lyrically, Devils and Dust solidifies Springsteen’s place amongst the true songwriter poets of the twentieth century. He has had great stories over the years, and has always been a cut above as a rock n roll singer in that department, but he has also been satirized for the endless car metaphors and descriptions in his 80s work. The E Street Band work is brilliant for the kind of religious experience rock show they can put off, but that kind of sound often comes at the sacrifice of certain kinds of lyrical stories. On Devils and Dust, those stories are front and centre, and literally read like poetry at times, full of evocative imagery and packed with meaning. Check out the first verse of “Black Cowboys”:

“Raney William’s playground was among Haven’s streets
Where he ran past melted candles and flower wreaths
Names and photos of the young black faces
Whose death and blood consecrated these places”

“Jesus was an Only Son” is another kind of achievement – a retelling of the life of Jesus from a secular standpoint. As Springsteen has said about the song, the power of that story can come from the loss a mother feels for her son, and while Jesus had earthly brothers and sisters according to the way scripture approaches it, every verse of the song describes a scene where Jesus was alone, save for his earthly mother Mary’s love for him – as a child growing up in Nazareth, in the garden of Gethsemane, on Calvary Hill:

“Jesus was an only son
As he walked up Calvary Hill
His mother Mary walking beside him
In the path where his blood spilled”

Powerful stuff. The album ends on a dark note with the previously mentioned “Matamoros Banks,” a story about a mexican refugee trying to escape into the United States and getting shot at the border. The story is told in reverse, and so ends with his hope for redemption. The first verses are:

“For two days the river keeps you down
Then you rise to the light without a sound
Past the playgrounds and empty switching yards
The turtles eat the skin from your eyes, so they lay open to the stars

Your clothes give way to the current and river stone
‘Till every trace of who you ever were is gone
And the things of the earth they make their claim
That the things of heaven may do the same”

What writer can you name who can set up a story in two verses with more emotion, description and dark beauty than that? There is a complexity there that I absolutely love and respect.

It’s funny to me when I talk about the darkness of this album. There is some light as well – songs like “All the Way Home,” “Long Time Coming,” “Leah, and “All I’m Thinkin’ About”), but they are outnumbered by the heavy subject matter here. And yet, I find this album hugely inspiring, and I feel lifted when I listen to it, in a strange and complicated way. Obviously, the stories and music can put you in a certain sombre state, but I suppose it’s the skill and mastery of a story well told that gets me excited. Springsteen has always been a songwriter who has pursued the idea of telling the stories of those who can’t tell their own. I also think an element of great art in general is bringing the dark into the light, and thus making it clean.

Devils and Dust is a great example of those two ideas.

Record Player: Civilians

This edition of Record Player features Joe Henry’s Civilians album.

I have a confession to make. I often judge a book by its cover.

Yep. And I’m the worst kind of hypocrite. I know there’s a broader meaning to that cliche, but I mean I literally judge books by their covers. I did a degree in English Literature, and it almost always held true, even then. Ever see the cover for Ethan Frome? Here’s what my copy looked like:

I can’t even find the cover of my edition of Pélagie on google to post it here. Think about that. I can’t find it using google…You get my point…

I’m not saying I use this as my sole criteria for reading a book or not. But life is short, and there are a million pieces of art waiting to change my life, somewhere out there in the big, bad world. I might as well start narrowing down the short list with some broad spanning criteria.

I also have proof that this works for me sometimes, and Joe Henry’s album (not a book, but same principle) came to me this way.

I am ashamed to say I knew nothing of Joe Henry before seeing Civilians on the shelf at Fred’s Records one day. I was thinking about a cover for my album Room in the City at the time, and I wanted something that evoked characters who were not me (as my album contained a lot of stories). When I saw Henry’s cover, I was intrigued. It spoke of a different time and place, and threatened to take me there (and this was before I’d heard the music). The cover, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, is at the top of this essay.

Anyway, none of the above would have mattered if the music wasn’t good. But the cover opened the door to this world, and invited me to take a peak. The music laid out the view for me, and then quickly pulled me down. From the opening track – Civilians – I was taken to a world of impressions and specifics. Characters that were menacing yet exciting. “Life is short, but by the grace of god, the night is long.” Thanks for the thesis statement in the first paragraph, Joe.

The album is full of ‘moments,’ which any album should be. A song like “You Can’t Fail Me Now,’ is brilliant lyrically, and the imagery is sharp:

I know that fan is moving air
I can see it in your hair
but I can’t bear to breathe it in somehow
I’ll rise and fall with you cause you can’t fail me now

Check out that rhyme scheme. And the slide guitar solo is killer on this slow jam.

The man is also the king of first lines, which is no small feat. A first line is like a pick-up line. The best efforts are mostly all cheese or forgettable, and most people forgo them all together in an effort to grab attention later in the conversation. Joe goes right for them:

“I don’t know you to wear a hat” – the first line of “Civil War,” with a remaining verse that reads:

But I came home late and there it sat
You rose to show what hats are for
When living through a civil war.

A verse based in personal (or actual) history, a verse about loss, about leaving? It’s wide open, and we’re one verse in. Another sign of songwriting mastery.

I had a chat with a friend recently about how “Our Song,” from this album has the greatest first verse ever when it comes to intrigue, specificity, and ultimately, seeing that specificity and intrigue through and making it worth it. Here’s the verse:

I saw Willie Mays
At a Scottsdale Home Depot
Looking at Garage Door Springs
At the far end of the 14th row.

When I told my friend this, he thought it was ridiculous in its banality. Then he listened to the song, and agreed I was right. I won’t get into more detail here – just go listen or at least look up the lyrics yourself so you can read the ‘story’ in the song. It’s great.

I guess I love this album because of many of the usual reasons: it evokes memories of a time in my life, and of a season. This was a late fall, early winter album for me – a great time for music to take hold. Maybe it’s the introspection that Fall brings, and the spare time and hibernation that winter brings. That said, it’s also a great measuring stick for album quality, at least for me. I put time into albums, and I’m a thoughtful listener. I need meat on the bones of a record during that time for it to really grab me – the lyrics have to mean something to me on a personal level, and I need the music to have depth and feel enough to keep me coming back to analyze it.

I think I also love Joe Henry’s music in general because it evokes a whole life I haven’t lived. I’ve since purchased Blood From Stars and his newest album Reverie, which are probably equally good (I write about this one because you always remember your first). I find that his music has that ‘other life’ vibe, which is the highest compliment I can give. While I fully endorse many different methods of songwriting – the brill building era of pumping out songs on a 9-5 basis, the multi-artist collaborations, etc – the stuff that gets in my blood is the stuff that feels like it as much the soundtrack to the artists’ life as it could be to mine. Many songwriters claim their music is their world, but I find that often feels disingenuous in actual practice. Maybe because many songwriters write mostly about love and their own dealings in it, whereas life – the overarching concept of life – is obviously far more encompassing than that.

This essay is in danger of geting really over-the-top and big picture, so I’ll try to keep the focus on this one record, but suffice to say – I think the beauty of music with lyrics is that it has the potential to create that ‘whole world feel’ if it’s crafted just right. An album – or a series of albums – can speak to you the way a friend would: whole-heartedly. They can tell you things you can easily relate to through the words, and the music can fill in the more indescribable blank spaces that exist in our interactions with one another: a certain look, the way one stands, the way they sigh, etc. The things that tell us so much if we’re ready and willing to see or hear it.

I feel like this is something most people feel about their favourite albums, even if they don’t say it this way. Consciously or unconsciously, we often place a lot of emotional weight on the shoulders of our favourite music. We want it to tell us where to go and what to do, and, most importantly, we want it to represent a landscape we can feel at home in, even if it’s not our own.

I feel a sense of place when I listen to Civilians. That sense of place may have come from it coming along at the right time. Luckily, the depth and breadth of this album means that when I go back there, there are a lot people and places to visit.

…and it has a sweet album cover…

(quick aside: has anyone else noticed that the abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo – sounds like a kick-ass Norse god name? Anyway…)

I’ve chosen this first entry based on it being timely. This November, U2′s Achtung Baby celebrates its 20th anniversary. I’m not nostalgic for that anniversary, per se – this was not an album I picked up upon its initial release. In fact, this album didn’t really hit me until my final university days in 2003. But when it really hit, it stuck.

I can tell you that I probably know more about Achtung Baby than a large percentage of the population. That’s not bragging. In fact, sometimes I think it’s a little sad. If I were to tell you I wrote the book on this album, I’d be lying, but I can say I’ve read several books about this album and about U2′s career at this time in general, and I’ve also written multiple papers on this album. I’m not kidding. I did a course in university called “Religion and Popular Music” where I wrote about religion and post-modernism throughout this record. Yep. I got all the girls with that one…

In all seriousness though, beyond the actual songs, I know so many anecdotes that surround the band during the early 90s, it’s hilarious. Their dalliances with Bill Clinton and Salman Rushdie. Their trysts with supermodels. The batch of stories from the various members’ personal lives that prove Achtung is probably the most lyrically and musically complex album they ever released (beating by far the other fan favourite, The Joshua Tree). But I’ll go back to my beginnings with the album:

This record was given to me by my friend Ray when I was still in High School. I don’t really remember much of our conversation about it at the time – I just remember really liking “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” and “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” and that was about it. Nothing more to really say about it for several more years. This illustrates one of my favourite ideas about music as art – some music you have to wait for. It’s not about how high or low art it is. It’s not about you being ‘not smart enough,’ or ‘not evolved enough’ for it either. Sometimes, you just need certain music at different points in your life. When I was sixteen, I didn’t need Achtung Baby.

But then I was twenty, and twenty one, and things had changed. Aside from changes to my musical taste, I found myself reading some of the writers I would later learn had inspired the direction of Achtung (Charles Bukowski being one of those writers). I’d also found myself intrigued by the philosophy surrounding the album, which is another of my favourite ideas about music as art: that a collection of songs done right can be more than that. It can be a world onto itself, just like other artistic mediums like the novel or a film. Yes, the songs have to be great (which they obviously are), but to me, there has to be more meat on the bones for an album to step across the line from really good to truly great. And we all know that not every album has the gravitas to do that – sometimes songs are just songs.

This one was more than that, though, and I think it defined what I looked for in an album when it came to the above paragraph’s idea. I’m not a huge fan of “the concept album” in a strict sense. Personally, I find it either fails on the level of not developing said concept well enough, or does so to the detriment of the songs themselves. An album with strong themes, however, is much more attractive – at its best, I think such albums go for the heart in the microcosm of the individual song, and yet hint at the larger world in their connection to one another. And the best part is it’s not elitist in the slightest. If you put on Achtung Baby at a party, most people (who are in their late twenties and above) will comment/react in the following ways if they like the album (1) They will try to dance awkwardly to “Even Better Than the Real Thing” or “Mysterious Ways” (for the record: both are un-danceable), (2) they may try to dance romantically to “One,” (oh the irony) (3) if it’s in video form, they will remark about how ridiculous Bono looked/remark about how cool Bono looked at the time (4) They may talk about the three different videos for “One” (5) They may mention the crazy stage show for that tour (which has since been overshadowed by later stage designs, but should be commended as being the first of its kind for them). All of these things are fine, if that’s what you’re into. Say what you want about the band, but U2 are a group of smart people. They knew they wanted to have fun with their image at that time because they were being crushed by their own ‘virtue.’ But they are also a band incapable of truly ‘under-thinking’ their actions. Even if you start listing their failures (Rattle and Hum, Pop, etc.), you can quickly see they were the result of over-thinking what they were doing, not under-thinking. And so Achtung Baby is surface glitz and glam skewered by honesty and depth. And that is what I love about it.

One of my final courses at MUN was a history course in Rock n Roll, taught by a man named Skip Fischer. In his opening lecture, he said a sentence I will never forget: “Rock n Roll helps me to understand things.” A very simple sentence that rang very true to me at the time, especially in the context of describing why it’s important. There are people out there that don’t value music beyond being a soundtrack to more important things in their lives. And then there are people who love music, but feel that most rock n roll – especially mainstream rock n roll – is throwaway. But the best stuff – mainstream or not – has the potential to help you understand your world. It does this both by providing the aforementioned soundtrack to your life, but it also adds an indescribable depth to your experiences through the combination of music and lyrics. It might involve some posturing and silliness, but that’s a part of our lives too, isn’t it? It’s funny to think back to my experiences as a twenty year old, when I would listen to certain songs on this hugely popular album made by four superstars from Ireland and feel like I was living the verses and choruses; they knew the score for the kid from St. John’s. Seemingly ridiculous, but that’s the magic, isn’t it?

I think describing this sort of thing could be likened to trying to describe being in love. As in: it’s powerful, it’s at least slightly embarrassing in description a lot of the time, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I feel sorry for you and hope you feel it someday. And our love affairs with albums diminish over time. I certainly don’t spin Achtung Baby as much as I did almost ten years ago. But it was there when I needed it. It was there when it was supposed to be there.