WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE
My son told me yesterday that when he hears me say I like someone's music, he automatically assumes it's someone English. Hmmm -- am I that transparent? Let's consult the shuffle and see...
1. "When It Sings" / Elvis Costello
From North (2003)
If I'd still been listening to Elvis Costello in 2003 -- which I wasn't -- I too might have been baffled by this tender album of jazz-drenched ballads. But finding it retrospectively, after Elvis' marriage to Diana Krall, it all made perfect sense. And doesn't Elvis live in Vancouver now? Does he still qualify as English?
2. "The Things We Never Said" / Thea Gilmore
From Rules for Jokers (2002)
Ha! Thea isn't English; she's from Scotland. A wonderful singer-songwriter, by the way.
3. "London Look" / Herman's Hermits
From The London Look EP (1968)
Not only a song by an English band, a song about London from an English band -- I am not doing so well here. What's worse, the Hermits did this song exclusively for a promo EP, sponsored by Yardley Cosmetics (remember the cologne Oh! De London? I wore nothing else for a year.) The basic idea is to stuff in as many London place names as possible. Who cares? It's a delightful, delicious little track.
4. "Nervous on the Road (But Could Not Stay Home)"/ Brinsley Schwarz
From Nervous on the Road (1972)
Despite the affected country drawl on this romping picaresque number about a touring musician, Nick Lowe is English, it's true.
5. "Don't Be Ashamed of Your Age" / Jerry Lee Lewis and George Jones
From Last Man Standing (2006)
Aha! Nobody's more American than that old rockbilly devil Jerry Lee and the king of country music George Jones. Normally I hate duet albums; this odds-defying LP is the exception to the rule. Listen to these two sly old dogs twiddling through this Bob Wills chestnut.
6. "Saint Beneath the Paint" / Nick Lowe
From Radio Daze (1984)
Not just one but two Englishmen -- the aforementioned Nick Lowe and his sometime colleague Paul Carrack, on particularly juicy bootleg live album. This obscure track from Nick's obscure LP The Abominable Showman (for that title alone he ought to be hung) is greatly improved with harmonies by Paul and a little boogie-woogie piano.
7. "Fool for a Lonesome Train" / Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals
From Life Line (2007)
Another American -- whew! -- singing a trumpery bit of country blues. I still haven't quite figured out the riddle that is Ben Harper, but I keep on trying -- that voice can make any song sound better than it should.
8. "Rivers of Babylon" / The Melodians
From The Harder They Come (1972)
Do Jamaicans count as English (being former colonials) or American (being in the same hemisphere)? Like most American kids my age, Jimmy Cliff's Jamaican gangster movie was my introduction to reggae, and I played it so often, it's still hard-wired in my memory. "And let the words of my mouth / and the meditations of my mind / be acceptable in your sight" -- I still sing this song under my breath whenever I hear that blessing in church.
9. "Queen of Sheba" / Nick Lowe
From Nick the Knife (1982)
Not this one again! (Like I mind.)
10. "Knapsack" / Amy Rigby
From Diary of a Mod Housewife (1994)
Well, at least we're ending with an American -- not only an American, but a country punk female (talk about defying cliches). Fantasizing about the guy who checks her bags at the bookstore -- I picture the old Shakespeare and Company on the Upper West Side -- that's enough to fuel this Mod housewife's daydreams for week.
Showing posts with label george jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label george jones. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE
Plug in your earbuds and take a ride with me!
1. "Passing Through" / Marshall Crenshaw
From Jaggedland (2009)
One of the great neglected albums of the past year. I love how the twangy guitar line weaves around, while Marshall's reverbed vocals gently meditate on the passage of time. When I saw him last fall, he mentioned that he wrote it while stuck at an airport in Alaska, but its sense of life's transience is bigger than that.
2. "Dream Baby" / Waylon Jennings
From Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964
Waylon's outlaw country persona dominates his image, but he's been around a lot longer than that. Here's a blast from Waylon's rockbilly past -- and what a great vehicle for his voice!
3. "Where Will You Go" / The Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
At least part of the Minus 5 (Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey) are in the Venus 3, Robyn Hitchcock's frequent collaborators. There's a genial goofiness to some of their stuff that I find appealing, though the songs (usually written by McCaughey) don't make a hundred percent sense. I dig the unspooling guitar riff that stitches this song together.
4. "Tears in Heaven" / Eric Clapton
From Unplugged (1992)
Oh, I know it's the big sappy hit, written about his son's early accidental death, and I've considered deleting it a dozen times. But here it still is, tugging on the heartstrings. Absolutely nothing that makes Eric Clapton a major musical figure makes an appearance in this song (okay, there is that one deft little guitar twiddle). The soporific pace is putting me to zzzzzzzzz....
5. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" / The Testotertones
From Singing in Hormony
A CD by the a capella group at my kids' high school, which was our constant road trip accompaniment for a couple summers when the kids were younger. I've never heard the original, but it sounds like something they'd sing on Glee. Nice harmonies, though, which was kinda the point.
6. "Seein' Her" / Paul Westerberg
From Besterberg
Now this is more like it. Replacements-style crunchy garage rock, with a frantic beat, tapping right into the uncritical exuberance of new love. "Everything about her, I like everything about her / I like everything about her" -- sometimes it really is that simple.
7. "Love Me Dead" / Ludo
From You're Awful, I Love You (2009)
This funny, snarky indie track is a perfect follow-up to "Seein' Her" -- this is what happens when the teen love goes sour.
8. "Birthday" / The Beatles
From the White Album
I want this song sung to me every birthday. Those doubled guitars just spank the hell out of that riff, and Ringo's drumming is insane. "I would like you to dance / Birthday! / Take a ch-ch-chance" -- wild and crazy.
9. "I Got the Love" / Nick Lowe
From Pinker and Prouder Than Previous (1988)
What a boppy little gem! Such a light touch, just a perky loping bass line and few exhalations of organ, a tinkle of piano keys here and there. It's like the rockabilly lovechild of reggae and bluegrass, with fantastically simple lyrics ("I've got the love / And I want to shout it / I've got the love / The rain has gone...And if it don't stop / I'm-a gonna pop!") It's entirely possible that this is Nick Lowe's worst album ever, but I have to admit, I kinda love it.
10. "I'm A Fool for Loving Her" / George Jones
From I Am What I Am (1980)
You want extravagant emotions? George Jones is the master of love triangles, infidelity, and every other brand of misplaced affections, and he knows just how to wring it out, with deft yelps and yodels. There's a lot of country music I don't like, but George Jones? Brilliant.
Plug in your earbuds and take a ride with me!
1. "Passing Through" / Marshall Crenshaw
From Jaggedland (2009)
One of the great neglected albums of the past year. I love how the twangy guitar line weaves around, while Marshall's reverbed vocals gently meditate on the passage of time. When I saw him last fall, he mentioned that he wrote it while stuck at an airport in Alaska, but its sense of life's transience is bigger than that.
2. "Dream Baby" / Waylon Jennings
From Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964
Waylon's outlaw country persona dominates his image, but he's been around a lot longer than that. Here's a blast from Waylon's rockbilly past -- and what a great vehicle for his voice!
3. "Where Will You Go" / The Minus 5
From Down With Wilco (2003)
At least part of the Minus 5 (Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey) are in the Venus 3, Robyn Hitchcock's frequent collaborators. There's a genial goofiness to some of their stuff that I find appealing, though the songs (usually written by McCaughey) don't make a hundred percent sense. I dig the unspooling guitar riff that stitches this song together.
4. "Tears in Heaven" / Eric Clapton
From Unplugged (1992)
Oh, I know it's the big sappy hit, written about his son's early accidental death, and I've considered deleting it a dozen times. But here it still is, tugging on the heartstrings. Absolutely nothing that makes Eric Clapton a major musical figure makes an appearance in this song (okay, there is that one deft little guitar twiddle). The soporific pace is putting me to zzzzzzzzz....
5. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" / The Testotertones
From Singing in Hormony
A CD by the a capella group at my kids' high school, which was our constant road trip accompaniment for a couple summers when the kids were younger. I've never heard the original, but it sounds like something they'd sing on Glee. Nice harmonies, though, which was kinda the point.
6. "Seein' Her" / Paul Westerberg
From Besterberg
Now this is more like it. Replacements-style crunchy garage rock, with a frantic beat, tapping right into the uncritical exuberance of new love. "Everything about her, I like everything about her / I like everything about her" -- sometimes it really is that simple.
7. "Love Me Dead" / Ludo
From You're Awful, I Love You (2009)
This funny, snarky indie track is a perfect follow-up to "Seein' Her" -- this is what happens when the teen love goes sour.
8. "Birthday" / The Beatles
From the White Album
I want this song sung to me every birthday. Those doubled guitars just spank the hell out of that riff, and Ringo's drumming is insane. "I would like you to dance / Birthday! / Take a ch-ch-chance" -- wild and crazy.
9. "I Got the Love" / Nick Lowe
From Pinker and Prouder Than Previous (1988)
What a boppy little gem! Such a light touch, just a perky loping bass line and few exhalations of organ, a tinkle of piano keys here and there. It's like the rockabilly lovechild of reggae and bluegrass, with fantastically simple lyrics ("I've got the love / And I want to shout it / I've got the love / The rain has gone...And if it don't stop / I'm-a gonna pop!") It's entirely possible that this is Nick Lowe's worst album ever, but I have to admit, I kinda love it.
10. "I'm A Fool for Loving Her" / George Jones
From I Am What I Am (1980)
You want extravagant emotions? George Jones is the master of love triangles, infidelity, and every other brand of misplaced affections, and he knows just how to wring it out, with deft yelps and yodels. There's a lot of country music I don't like, but George Jones? Brilliant.
Monday, September 28, 2009
"Mr. Fool" / George Jones
Country music. Growing up in Indiana, I had to declare myself on one side of the fence or the other, and I definitely went for the rock 'n' roll side. Damn, I'd even go for soul over country. (Motown was very big in Indianapolis.) You cannot understand this unless you know what it was like to have to suffer through Midwestern Hayride when there was nothing else on TV, back in the days when there were only four channels.
One of the reasons it took me years to discover John Hiatt -- even though I knew the kid from my neighborhood growing up -- was because he was working in Nashville, and I assumed that meant he was writing country music and I didn't want to hear about it. Can you believe that? For years, there was Johnny Hiatt writing this incredible music, and I remained ignorant of it because of my old country music prejudices.
But here's another thing I have to thank Elvis Costello for. On that very same compilation CD where I discovered Nick Lowe, Elvis also included this track by George Jones. Now, I had relaxed my anti-Nashville bias by 2005; I even saw Tammy Wynette (George Jones's ex) in 1976 when I was in graduate school at Oxford, in England. So somehow this George Jones song wriggled onto my playlist. And before long Elvis's 1981 album Almost Blue and Van Morrison's 2006 Pay the Devil served as my crash course in all the country classics I'd closed my mind to all those years. Finally, I could let my ears accept the fact that, mixed in with all the cynical Nashville dreck, there is a hell of lot of great music out there, classified as country.
There's a kind of purity to this recording, which is early George Jones (I can't find the original album release, though it's on compilations of his Mercury years, 1955-1962, as well as an import called Don't Stop The Music, which I can imagine Declan MacManus hearing as a kid in Liverpool). "Mr. Fool" is a classic honky-tonk two-step, complete with twanging pedal steel intro, plangent fiddles, and a slight yodel in George's vocals. I don't want string sections in my country music; I want a slide geetar and fiddle. And "Mr. Fool" obliges, thank you very much.
As far as the sentiments go, this song is the most basic human stuff -- universal loss, humiliation, and heartache -- and the lyrics trot out a string of romantic cliches, all scattered tears and shattered dreams and broken vows. No doubt they seem even more cliched now, after 50-odd years of pop music have worked the same few rhymes to death. But such cliches became cliches because, when all is said and done, this IS the way love works.
And this song is craftier than it appears, a psychologically acute portrait of how past, future, and present vibrate together at moments of pain. In a low, confidential voice, George starts out by projecting into the near future: "I've got a feeling / You'll soon be leavin'" (I love the slide in his voice, replicating that sickening feeling). Then he loses control, as his voice soars, "But I won't beg you not to go." You can tell he wants to beg, but his mind flashes to the past, remembering how he's been burned before: "Because I've always been / A fool to cry for you" (get that woeful strain of his voice on the word "fool"). There's so much history in this song -- all those "alwayses" and "nevers" and "befores" and "no mores" -- it doesn't take much for us to reconstruct the needy, pleading slob he's been. Listening to George Jones reminds me that singing isn't just about timber or volume; the genius stuff is all phrasing and technique, those artful wobbles and snags that betray where the passion really lies.
Taking his own emotional temperature, George assesses his present frame of mind in the second verse: "I know this time it's / Really over." That being the case, there's only one thing he can cling to: The last shreds of his dignity. I picture him with his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, kicking a little dust up with the toe of his cowboy boot, as he proclaims, "No one can ever call me Mr. Fool no more." Hey, at least he's got his pride. Right?
In the final verse, he draws a breath (the slippery fiddle solo in the middle eight) and fixes a smile on his face. Now he projects his emotions farther into the future -- "For time will heal a heart that's sore." (Listen to the hopeful -- but not quite convinced -- lift of his voice on "heal"). Scarred and battered, he's ready to move on, "And I will never be the fool I was before / No one can ever call me Mr. Fool no more." Okay, lovely, good luck with that.
Because frankly, what lasts in my mind is the image of Mr. Fool, not the image of no-more-Mr. Fool. I've never been one for the tough guys anyhow; I like a man who can throw his heart into the ring. And you know what? If he really does heal, we'll know it when he becomes Mr. Fool again over some new woman.
Mr. Fool audio
Country music. Growing up in Indiana, I had to declare myself on one side of the fence or the other, and I definitely went for the rock 'n' roll side. Damn, I'd even go for soul over country. (Motown was very big in Indianapolis.) You cannot understand this unless you know what it was like to have to suffer through Midwestern Hayride when there was nothing else on TV, back in the days when there were only four channels.
One of the reasons it took me years to discover John Hiatt -- even though I knew the kid from my neighborhood growing up -- was because he was working in Nashville, and I assumed that meant he was writing country music and I didn't want to hear about it. Can you believe that? For years, there was Johnny Hiatt writing this incredible music, and I remained ignorant of it because of my old country music prejudices.
But here's another thing I have to thank Elvis Costello for. On that very same compilation CD where I discovered Nick Lowe, Elvis also included this track by George Jones. Now, I had relaxed my anti-Nashville bias by 2005; I even saw Tammy Wynette (George Jones's ex) in 1976 when I was in graduate school at Oxford, in England. So somehow this George Jones song wriggled onto my playlist. And before long Elvis's 1981 album Almost Blue and Van Morrison's 2006 Pay the Devil served as my crash course in all the country classics I'd closed my mind to all those years. Finally, I could let my ears accept the fact that, mixed in with all the cynical Nashville dreck, there is a hell of lot of great music out there, classified as country.
There's a kind of purity to this recording, which is early George Jones (I can't find the original album release, though it's on compilations of his Mercury years, 1955-1962, as well as an import called Don't Stop The Music, which I can imagine Declan MacManus hearing as a kid in Liverpool). "Mr. Fool" is a classic honky-tonk two-step, complete with twanging pedal steel intro, plangent fiddles, and a slight yodel in George's vocals. I don't want string sections in my country music; I want a slide geetar and fiddle. And "Mr. Fool" obliges, thank you very much.
As far as the sentiments go, this song is the most basic human stuff -- universal loss, humiliation, and heartache -- and the lyrics trot out a string of romantic cliches, all scattered tears and shattered dreams and broken vows. No doubt they seem even more cliched now, after 50-odd years of pop music have worked the same few rhymes to death. But such cliches became cliches because, when all is said and done, this IS the way love works.
And this song is craftier than it appears, a psychologically acute portrait of how past, future, and present vibrate together at moments of pain. In a low, confidential voice, George starts out by projecting into the near future: "I've got a feeling / You'll soon be leavin'" (I love the slide in his voice, replicating that sickening feeling). Then he loses control, as his voice soars, "But I won't beg you not to go." You can tell he wants to beg, but his mind flashes to the past, remembering how he's been burned before: "Because I've always been / A fool to cry for you" (get that woeful strain of his voice on the word "fool"). There's so much history in this song -- all those "alwayses" and "nevers" and "befores" and "no mores" -- it doesn't take much for us to reconstruct the needy, pleading slob he's been. Listening to George Jones reminds me that singing isn't just about timber or volume; the genius stuff is all phrasing and technique, those artful wobbles and snags that betray where the passion really lies.
Taking his own emotional temperature, George assesses his present frame of mind in the second verse: "I know this time it's / Really over." That being the case, there's only one thing he can cling to: The last shreds of his dignity. I picture him with his hands jammed in the pockets of his jeans, kicking a little dust up with the toe of his cowboy boot, as he proclaims, "No one can ever call me Mr. Fool no more." Hey, at least he's got his pride. Right?
In the final verse, he draws a breath (the slippery fiddle solo in the middle eight) and fixes a smile on his face. Now he projects his emotions farther into the future -- "For time will heal a heart that's sore." (Listen to the hopeful -- but not quite convinced -- lift of his voice on "heal"). Scarred and battered, he's ready to move on, "And I will never be the fool I was before / No one can ever call me Mr. Fool no more." Okay, lovely, good luck with that.
Because frankly, what lasts in my mind is the image of Mr. Fool, not the image of no-more-Mr. Fool. I've never been one for the tough guys anyhow; I like a man who can throw his heart into the ring. And you know what? If he really does heal, we'll know it when he becomes Mr. Fool again over some new woman.
Mr. Fool audio
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