My Favorite Albums of 2014

The Voyager / Jenny Lewis

Maybe it's a girl thing, but I drag my feet when it comes to Jenny Lewis.  (Note that this is the LAST post in my Favorite Albums of 2014.) She's like the cool girl that everyone else in school adores -- not the homecoming queen, but the smart pretty one with quirky fashion sense. (If this were Heathers, she'd be Winona Ryder.)  And, face it, I'm jealous of her indie It Girl status.

And yet, when I finally sit down and listen to her albums, her songs get stuck in my head, and the lyrics eerily reflect my own outlook on life.  She spins a world in which everything is tentative, provisional, unreliable, a worldview perfectly reflected by her wary, waifish voice.

I might as well give into it. This is her third album, and I've liked every single one of them.  Who am I kidding?

 From what I can tell, Jenny Lewis is not the kind of chick that men ignore. Yet here she is, clinging to a relationship in which she does NOT have the upper hand ("bet you tell her I'm crazy") and slowly coming to the realization that the Other Woman's strength is precisely that she is not quite such as handful as our girl Jenny.

"She's not me / She's easy" -- maybe for you guys, that's an easy equation to work out.  But for me and my (intentionally or not ) complicated female friends, watching this play out is HARD. I've been there; I've done that. But in the long run....

I love how the harmonies bloom on significant syllables, how the sophisticated guitar line weaves in and out like a watchful friend.  It's a world of maybes, couldas, possiblies, and the song has just the right amount of doubt hanging it all out to show.

One of the reasons I hate year-end "best of" lists is that, sometimes, it takes a while for a song or an album to worm into your brain. This Jenny Lewis album is like that.  The more I listen, the more I . . . well, like isn't the word. Absorb, maybe, or eventually click into the mindset of it.

Unfortunately, we live in a crowded musical universe where everybody's jostling for clicks, hits, downloads. Jenny Lewis's Indie It Girl profile may help her here; I'm willing to bet that there are another three or four unheralded singer-songwriters that I'll never know about that I would have loved, whose work will never percolate to the top.

But that's no reason not to finally admit it:  Okay, Jenny Lewis. You're now officially one of My Girls.

My Favorite Albums of 2014

Counterfeit Blues / Corb Lund

My favorite Albertan. (I would say my favorite Canadian musician, but that would be unfair to Ron Sexsmith, Neil Young and Dan Bryk.)

I'll give my good friend Nick S. credit for turning me on to Corb Lund, although to tell you the truth he only planted a seed -- it was 2012's Cabin Fever, stumbled upon in a year-end frenzy, that really leapfrogged him into my roots-rock pantheon. Oh, hell, let's admit it, he's a country singer. And me, who grew up vowing that I hated country music -- well, let's just say I know what I like and I like this.

Though I'm tempted to focus on the haunting "Truth Comes Out,"  I'm just too in love with this track -- "Gonna Shine Up My Boots" -- to pass it up. And -- bonus points! -- the video is a total hoot.

 

 

 

While this album starts out with a Dylan-esque talking blues track called "Counterfeiter's Blues," note that the album itself is called Counterfeit Blues -- and I'm guessing that's because Corb Lund has too sunny a personality to do more than fake the blues.  That must be why these smarty-pants comic songs of his are so infectious. 

 

But really, it's a tightly crafted little song.  Our cowboy hero has such a simple agenda:  "I'm gonna shine up my boots / I'm gonna go into town / I'm gonna scrape up twenty dollars / I'm gonna throw it around."  (Love how each line of that refrain move up a triad, with the escalation of hope.)

 

Of course, it never stays simple. Next thing he knows, he's bought a dance, and met a girl, and in order to win her hand he's got into a card game. And when he wins, he buys a ranch, and then -- well, I won't give away the ending, but you can see where this is going. 

 

The repeated chorus, with its parallel phrases, helps anchor us in this shaggy-dog time-telescoping tale. (It makes me think of that wickedly wise John Mellencamp song "Love At First Sight.")  But it's worth noting that the cowboy himself is no fool -- he's the one telling us where all this is going. And in the last verse (wait for it), he resolves everything with a down-to-earth shot of wry wisdom.

 

This song makes me smile every time I hear it come on.  And hey, that's no small thing.



My Favorite Albums of 2014

Lights Out / Bishop Allen

Just when I was starting to feel sad that there hasn't been a new Bishop Allen album since 2009's Grrr -- lo and behold, the guys have come out with a new one, Lights Out.  Memo to self:  Do everything you can do to help promote under-the-radar bands like these, the antidote to the Justin-Bieberized mass-market conglomerate that is slowly strangling modern music.

But I digress.

Besides my well-documented penchant for pop singers with glasses, there's a lot to love here. Bishop Allen may have started out documenting the neuroses of first-date jitters, but on this album they've moved into fruitful new territory:  the neuroses of keeping a long-term relationship going. If it's not quite yet #Music for Grown-ups, it's getting close.

Justin Rice's flat-tish vocals convey such a weariness with modern life, played against the uptempo jangle of the background.  (Dig how back in the mix they keep those baffled vocals.)  Those repeated "if's" tell us what a crossroads he's reached.  She's misunderstood, he's sorry, but at some point he has to stop apologizing.  "If I could give you the keys to the kingdom, I would," he offers, but she seems to have moved past that. "Start again" doesn't mean a fresh start for these two, it means her veering off to begin a new life -- and at some point, that begins to sound like a relief for him.

Smart as they are, these guys don't go overboard with the poetic lyrics, but there's still some deft songcraft, as in the sustained film imagery of "Play the song, roll the credits / Let it fade to black / Out of script, out of time, / And the scene is done." Sometimes all it takes is a repeated word:  "Call a car, call a friend / If you can, call anyone." (Reminds me of John Hiatt's wrenching "What Do We Do Now?" -- "should we call the kids or call the cops?")

Subtlety like this is in short supply these days, and yet these guys produce it track after track. Nuanced songs like "Black Hole" ("all those years collapse in the tiniest of shrugs"), "Skeleton Key" ("Let the gates from their hinges swing with your skeleton key"), and the deceptively simple "Breadcrumbs" ("The only thing you ever leave me is breadcrumbs / The only place they never lead me is home") -- the finely calibrated wit goes on and on.

Musically, it's agreeably straightforward, which I also dig -- who says you have to wow everybody with your multi-world-hyper-sophisticated musicality?  (Vampire Weekend, I'm watching you.)  Sometimes all you need is a cool smart friend to lament your life woes with. Bishop Allen provides that service. I'm so happy they're still here.

My Favorite Albums of 2014

Dottie's Charms /
Jill Sobule

What?!  I haven't written yet about Dottie's Charms?  Man, I really can't believe I missed posting this, because this totally endearing concept album by Jill Sobule floated me through several dreary months this year.

Here's the concept, in a nutshell:  Jill bought this charm bracelet on eBay and began to muse about what each charm symbolized in the life of its anonymous owner.  She asked several writers and poets each to write lyrics about one of the bracelet's charms, which Jill then set to music. (When I saw her this summer at the City Winery, she actually passed that precious bracelet around the audience -- gotta love it.) 

It's a life in miniature, and in other hands it could have turned out hokey. But Jill's genuine curiosity about what makes people tick is one of her defining traits. She's one of the special ones, the artists whose work plumbs to the heart of what makes us human.

A sample track, for your delectation:

As a child of the Midwest, this one goes deep.  I remember my (possibly all-time closest) friend Beth Wood doing her term talk on Mackinac Island, making it sound so alluring. It's still on my travel bucket list.  

Jill's lyricist on this one was music journalist David Hadju -- a New Jersey guy, granted, not a Midwesterner. Still, he gets a lot of things right -- not just the fine points of Mackinac/Mackinaw pronunciation, but its essence ("quaint as crochet," "it's like Bermuda in Michigan," and -- spot on, here -- "No glitz, no buzz / Preserving a history that never quite was.")  Of course he can't resist mentioning the 1980 time-travel fantasy Somewhere in Time, filmed on Mackinac, and its male lead, the late great Christopher Reeve. (Moment of silence.)  Yeah, yeah, I know the original novel Somewhere in Time was set in New York City -- I'm a huge fan of that book, I even once snagged a signed letter from its reclusive author Jack Finney. But I'll give the moviemakers a pass for changing the location, because who could resist filming on Mackinac Island?

Then, hidden inside the travelogue, we discover a wisp of a story about a fleeting affair. The details are few and tantalizing -- "The kiss in my vestibule, / The stain on my slip." I can't help imagining it was illicit, maybe even adulterous. But Dottie's sure not telling.

Jill's musical setting is perfect:  A little old-fashioned finger-picking, almost square-dance music, switching to a dreamy waltz in the chorus.  Sung in her winsome girlish voice, it's a tentative reverie, a page from a private memory book.  I can just picture sixty-year-old Dottie twirling the charm on her bracelet, lost in reminiscence.

Did she love the guy?  Was he the great love of her life?  Probably not -- but it meant enough to her that she bought that charm for her bracelet.  Along with ten other charms, all with tracks of their own, telling other pieces of Dottie's patchwork life.  

I highly recommend Dottie's Charms. In my humble opinion (okay, I can't resist), it's the year's most charming album. 

My Favorite Albums of 2014

Vanishing Act /
Edward O'Connell

I've been a fan of this guy's work ever since I happened across his 2010 album Our Little Secret. What a pleasure to find this new installment of his trademark wordsmithery and power-pop songcraft. Here's a taste:

I've always been a sucker for laid-back rock waltzes, a particularly apt choice for this regret-soaked song about a relationship that can't live up to its promise. O'Connell can work a metaphor like nobody's business, and he masterfully threads imagery of a magician act throughout -- the blindfold, the smoke and mirrors, a "trick to amaze and astound."  He wraps it all up in the chorus:

The years disappear
But is love hiding near
In a heart where it needs to be found
Let nobody see that we're bound
To burn the ropes, 
Break the chains and then kill the magician 
There's no point in wishing 
For a curtain to pull back 
If our love's a vanishing act.

Let's call the whole thing off, in other words, but he uses his own verbal prestidigitation to soften the blow. 

The thing is, it isn't just clever word play, it's intimately tied to hard-won wisdom about how love can slowly veer off the rails, racking up disappointment after disappointment, souring and curdling until there's nothing left. Yes, O'Connell's voice and singing style bear an eerie resemblance to Elvis Costello, and you know in my book that's a huge plus.  But whereas Costello's early deft word play was sometimes empty cleverness, O'Connell's always reflect some psychological acuity.  Music for Grown-Ups, to the nth degree.

Early Elvis was bitter and sometimes downright mean;  O'Connell instead has a gently weary persona of the sympathetic loser, the good guy who's been unlucky at love.  It's a bit of a magic trick to combine that wittiness with true-hearted yearning, but he masterfully pulls it off, track after track -- and it's immensely satisfying.  Engaging head and heart -- that's not so easy to do.  Kudos, Mr. O'C.