My Musical Advent Calendar

"Christmas Must Be Tonight" /
My Morning Jacket

And then on Christmas Eve itself you get so busy doing all the rituals -- wrapping the presents, filling the stockings, watching A Christmas Story on cable -- that you completely forget to open the last door on your advent calendar.

But when you do -- probably after dinner on Christmas Day -- there's a baby Jesus in a manger and the whole nativity scene, which is after all the point of the advent countdown.

So here's my nativity scene, courtesy of My Morning Jacket -- a faithfully Americana cover of this 1977 modern carol song by The Band. 

And because it's a holiday, I'll let the song speak for itself -- except to add, Merry Christmas to all!

True Love Ways / My Morning Jacket

I've always had three reasons to love Buddy Holly:  His band The Crickets inspired the name of the Beatles; his death was the chief inspiration for the iconic song of my youth "American Pie"; and, best of all, his last name was my first name.  Though he came along well before my time (okay, a little before my time), I love  his classic rock and roll sound, the way it bubbles with upbeat youthful energy.

Nevertheless, an all-star Buddy Holly tribute album to  commemorate the 75th anniversary of his birth wasn't exactly high on my list of albums to buy.  At least, not until I learned that Nick Lowe had been tapped to contribute a track.  Then, of course, that album went from a curiosity to a must-have in my book. ( Even though I am still annoyed with Nick for agreeing to open for Wilco on their fall tour -- nothing against Wilco, but really, shouldn't Nick be headlining?  And tickets have been absurdly hard to get, which isn't fair to Nick fans.)

But I digress.

So I went ahead and got the Buddy Holly tribute album, Rave On.  The line-up is an interesting mix of older and younger artists, definitely skewed toward the indie-cool part of the spectrum.  You know who I'm talking about -- The Black Keys, Fiona Apple, Florence + the Machine, the Detroit Cobras, She & Him.  I mean, Julian freakin' Casablancas -- c'mon, these people weren't picked for their Buddy Holly affinities.  Even the older artists are definitely downtown types: Lou Reed, Patti Smith.  The one true Holly acolyte is Paul McCartney, and yet his frenetic rendition of "It's So Easy" is a distinct disappointment; it loses most of the charm of Buddy's original.

As for Mr. Lowe, he acquits himself respectably, covering "Changing All Those Changes." How clever of him to pick a less well-known song, and one which would allow him to go into rockabilly territory.  As a cover it's quite decent, and much less intrusive than some of the tracks.

My top picks?  Justin Townes Earle does a neat job with "Maybe Baby," and as expected She & Him deliver "Oh Boy" with perfect retro spunk.  And Patti's "Words of Love" is absolutely fantastic, taking the tempo down a notch and going for a sincere huskiness that Buddy himself might have grown into if he hadn't died so young.  Kudos to Patti.

But my number one favorite track is this one by My Morning Jacket, who just keep on rising and rising in my estimation.Who knew when we saw them open for Ray Davies in Chicago five years ago? That day they  seemed like just another shaggy sloppy jam band, but they've won me over since then.

Take a listen:




Isn't that sweet?  I love the strings, with their 50s-vintage fills, just like the original. (In fact this arrangement is a little less glossy and hokey than Buddy's, which also lays on a sax, angel harps, and cocktail piano.)  In stripping it down, Jim James and his cohorts have really plumbed the gravity and tenderness of this song, in a way that I'd bet Buddy himself would have appreciated.  Jim's earnest warble is beautifully suited to this song; it's the antithesis to show-bizzy busyness.  And as the song builds -- dig those da-dah-da-dum string flourishes -- MMJ lets vocal harmonies flower, taking the emotions up another swoony notch.

Listening to this, it strikes me that "True Love Ways" manages somehow to be sad and happy at the same time.  How did Buddy pull that off?  That husky beginning, "Just you know why...." signals intimacy from the very start; it's like a private conversation between him and his special girl.  The guy is exulting in the private world of love that they've forged between them; nobody else will ever know but them.  At the same time, though, he's shouting it to the world, so joyful that he can't keep it to himself.

And yet, and yet . . . he still sounds tremulous, awed, disbelieving.  He admits that their life, even with this great great love, isn't perfect -- "Sometimes we'll cry / Sometimes we'll sigh,"  he remarks, tinged with awareness of mortality. It's as if he's discovering for the first time that love isn't an end in itself, but a way of being; he isn't just living in the moment anymore, but putting his love into a long-term perspective.  Astonishingly mature, when you consider how young Buddy Holly was when he wrote this, and how immature the rock and roll genre still was at the time.

I suppose a little of the sadness, too, comes from knowing that this song wasn't even released until after Buddy's tragic early death.  Of course Buddy couldn't have known that, couldn't have put that into the song.  But it still has a mysterious, elegaic quality, doesn't it?  That trademark MMJ reverb underscores  that haunting note, too.

Usually I'm an advocate of artists adding their own mark to a cover song -- I hate slavish copies of the original -- but way too many of the other artists on this album went overboard, distorting the essential sweetness and lightness of Holly's songs.  My Morning Jacket, though?  They show respect.  And if Buddy Holly doesn't deserve respect, nobody does.

Sorry -- I've been distracted for a few days trying to find a cover version of "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat" -- yes, the Nicely Nicely Johnson showstopper from Guys and Dolls -- by, of all people, Elvis Costello. I could swear I'd heard that somewhere. Now, even worse than getting a song stuck in your head is getting a song stuck in your head that doesn't exist. This was driving me CRAZY.

Well, the mystery's finally solved. There is no such recording -- at least not publicly available -- because I heard it at a dress rehearsal for Prairie Home Companion, when Elvis was the guest star, and apparently they decided against including that number on the final aired show. I'd've voted for keeping it in, personally, because Elvis's rendition was just smokin'. Think about it for a minute -- Elvis hoarsely declaiming "For the devil will pull you under / By the wide lapels of your pinstriped coat . . . " Trust me, it was stunning.

But now that I've got that off my mind, we can move on to other things . . . like

"Librarian" / My Morning Jacket

My middle son is starting to look at colleges. And so we begin that great American ritual of the Campus Visit -- a whirlwind couple of hours in which, like greedy wasps, parents and their teenage children try to suck out the essence of a school. (In between, of course, are hours of studiedly casual highway driving and/or plane rides, in which you do everything you can NOT to act like this is a big deal. Because it is.)

Personally I love college campuses. I was a total grind when I was in school, of course -- are you surprised? -- and so my favorite part is always the library. Let me loose in those stacks and I'd never come out. (Forget that most kids today do their research on line.) So when I first ran across this song, it almost felt as if it had been written for me.



I love how it starts with a long panning shot: "Walk across the courtyard / To the library / I can hear the insects buzz / And the leaves 'neath my feet." That perfectly captures the hushed tone, the rural picturesqueness, of the campus. Idyllic, eh? I can just picture it, like a scene from The Sterile Cuckoo. And the gentle acoustic guitar picking goes right along with that, harking back to MMJ's earlier alt-country twanginess. (A sound that's not so common by the time of this album, 2008's Evil Urges.) Even that trademark reverb makes sense, as if Jim James' voice is echoing off the marble walls.

Combing his hair in the bathroom, he muses, "When God gave us mirrors / He had no idea." (Must be a philosophy student.) It seems a random observation -- but wait. The songwriting is just about to blossom.

He wanders into the periodical room (my favorite line: "Since we got the Interweb these hardly get used") and spies a librarian "listening to the AM radio." It's such a private glimpse -- I love that she's disturbing the Shhh library silence; I love that it's shallow Top-40 AM.

He notes, almost unthinkingly, the song she's listening to -- "Karen of the Carpenters" -- which reminds him of the mirror again ("Another lovely victim of the mirror's evil way . . ."). Of course you have to know that Karen Carpenter died of anorexia to get that connection, but if you do, it's a shimmering transition, and then a deft leap of logic from Karen Carpenter to the beautiful librarian herself. "It's not like you're not trying / With that pencil in your hair / To defy the beauty the good Lord put there."

A few more instrumental sounds are gently layered in -- some echoey synths and a soft, nearly undetectable drumbeat -- as the student/singer beholds her in all her glory: "Simple little bookworm / Buried underneath / Is the sexiest librarian." Up to now, the melody has been little more than one repeated phrase, in a tentative, wistful key -- but now it relaxes into the sunshine of a major chord as he murmurs longingly, "Take off those glasses and let down your hair for me." Yeah, yeah, it's an old movie cliche, older even than Marian the Librarian in The Music Man: The prim and proper library lady, who only needs to whip off her glasses and uncoil her bun to morph into a stunner. But Jim James keeps it light and subtle; he's tracing a cameo, not painting an oil portrait.

And in fact, it's all in his mind. He's peeping through a gap in the bookshelves, fantasizing about them at dinner, then in bed having pillow talk. (Note that it's an ordinary life he dreams up, not a hot sex scene.) As far as we can tell, he hasn't spoken a word to her. Sure, the song's billowed in volume and richness, but it's the power of his imagination that's doing that.

Which leads up to the riddling last verse, sung with just the right touch of bombast: "What is it inside our heads / That makes us do the opposite / Makes us do the opposite of what's right for us? / 'Cause everything'd be great / And everything'd be good / If everybody gave like everybody could." He's onto something, he really is -- and then he leaves it there, drifting off in repeats of that chorus.

There's just the faintest touch of creepiness about this song -- he could be a stalker, I suppose, could even be her ex-husband, tiptoeing into the library to watch her unbeknownst. I almost imagine him dreamily whacking off, there in the stacks. But the main point is that he's not taking this any farther, is he? He's doing the opposite of what's right himself -- backing off from his impulses, hesitating to reach out and make contact.

So who's the lonely figure -- the spinster librarian, listening to her tinny little radio, or the guy watching her from behind the bookcase? Both, I suppose. What really matters is the distance between them, that chasm of shyness and doubt -- it's such a poignant statement of human isolation. Who knew this unassuming little song would pack such a wallop?

"Magic Marker" /
Monsters of Folk

I bought this CD in early October, but I lent it to my college-age son -- and presto, just like magic, it disappeared into his music collection. I finally retrieved it at Thanksgiving, but by then I was deep into a self-induced Kinks coma and couldn't listen to anything else. In fact, thanks to the hangover from Kinks Month, I still haven't been able to listen to much new music lately. But I left Monsters of Folk on rotation on my CD player, and this week it suddenly jumped into the forefront. I'm digging it now, just as I suspected I would.

Background: Monsters of Folk is what's nowadays called a "side project" -- what we used to call a "super group" -- composed of Matt Ward (who records as M. Ward), Jim James from My Morning Jacket (herein given the endearingly goofy pseudonym Yim Yames), and Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis from Bright Eyes. I already had all of them on my iTunes, but I'd never have thought of mixing them together -- Bright Eyes' breathy pop cleverness, My Morning Jacket's rootsy earnestness, and M. Ward's snarky existential indie-folk seem to live in different realms. The first few spins, I felt compelled to tag each song as a Matt song, a Conor song, or a Yim song. But now I've relaxed into its overall genial vibe -- their collaboration seems more like Travelin' Wilburys than, say, Little Village -- and as each talent steps up to the mike, I can enjoy his distinctive idiom for what it is.



"Magic Marker" -- one of the Yim songs -- feels like the heart of the album for me. It's such a mellow, retro-sounding song, the first time I heard it I thought it was a cover of some well-loved old favorite (from some reason, I keep imagining it's late Graham Parker). Acoustic, with a gently rollicking rhythm, it pours out like maple syrup on pancakes. Like a lot of James' songs, the lyrics are a little opaque, but I like that; that laidback simplicity is deceptive.

There's something deeply reassuring about the chorus: "Ordinary don't mean nothin' no how / Look what's ordinary now." (I imagine Yim, in his flannel shirt and beard, flicking around the TV channels in disgust.) Who would want to be "normal" in a world where Lady Gaga and Russell Brand can appear on network TV? And I love the chorus's next image: "It's got a magic marker stain / On its face and it needs a shower." I can look around my desk right now and see papers defaced where some Sharpie has bled through. It's a striking visual detail that perfectly defines the soiled, spoiled nature of modern culture. Yim may be a Young Codger, but he's awfully sincere.

The first couple of verses baffle me, as if I just stumbled into an ongoing conversation. He's talking about some "frozen kid" (himself?) who's feel ostracized; it seems that he's gone out on a limb to impress somebody (a girl?) -- as he puts it, "All the freaked-out measures / I took, tryin' to make you sick of smilin'". But in the third and fourth verses, he hits his stride, with his central image of a Tootsie Roll Pop: "There's something sweet waiting in the center / Taste and see. . . . How many licks does it take to get / To the center where there's something sweet." Underneath all the poses, he promises her, is something geniune and wonderful; he's urging her to work a little to find his real self.

Okay, so that's all there is to it. Two arresting images -- the Magic Marker bleed-through and the Tootsie Pop -- and that dumbstruck remark "Look what's ordinary now," which gets repeated over and over, in Yim's hushed and husky vocal. Every verse more sounds get layered in -- another guitar, a dobro, a bass, synths, backing vocals, finally even drums -- but it remains gentle and light. With a minimum of fuss, Yim spins us through the shallowness of modern relationships, the tackiness of our mass culture, and the importance of being real -- and all without one bit of preaching or poeticizing. That hook seems so gentle, but it ingratiates itself until you wake up singing it. Like I said, syrup on pancakes. It's a winner.

"Wordless Chorus” / My Morning Jacket

Okay, I’ll admit I was wrong. I saw My Morning Jacket in 2006, opening for Ray Davies at the Taste of Chicago festival, and I was not impressed. Granted, they had two things working against them – 1) the sound system was atrocious, and 2) I couldn’t wait for Ray to get on stage. I noticed a small throng of MMJ devotees crowding the stage, garbed – like the band – in what looked like Neil Young’s cast-off ragged jeans and combat jackets. For the life of me I couldn’t get the attraction. I was just glad they cleared out in time for us to grab the front row seats.

It’s taken me this long to give them a second listen. (I’ll admit that for a while, I confused them with My Chemical Romance – another strike against them.) But I’ve been driving a lot this summer, and every time My Morning Jacket came on the radio, I liked what I heard. Really liked it. The debt to Uncle Neil is still clear – Jim James’s voice can't help but sound like Neil Young -- but they’ve got many more cards up their rumpled sleeves.

This 2005 album, Z, is probably what they were playing when I saw them (yeah, like I remember), and it’s a treasure. This song kicks off the album with a whoosh, grooving along on a funked-up reggae beat. (So much for the alt-country label.) The same syncopated melodic line repeats, trance-like, throughout the verse, dipping down and then gently levitating upward. Like a latter-day Marvin Gaye, Jim James soulfully muses, “So much going on these days / Forget about instinct, it's not what pays.” Ah, but that copasetic groove, it’s all about instinct, isn’t it? My irony detector’s beeping already, and it goes into overdrive when he adds, “A carton of eggs think it's all worthwhile.” (I kinda like the egg-carton image, weird as it is.) Looking askance at the me-too pursuit of the Next New Thing, he adds, “Tell me, spirit, what has not been done? / I'll rush out and do it -- or are we doing it now?”

Then, with a single cut-off beat, the song shifts gears, morphing into a lush wall of sound, a full bank of shifting vocal harmonies singing . . . well, “Ahh – wahh ahh – whoa-oh ahh.” Aha, the wordless chorus of the title. James wheels around on top with some falsetto yips and howls, and you’re carried away on the sheer soulfulness of it.

In verse two, he bucks the trend, declaring, “But you know all of this can change / Remember the promise as a kid you made.” Considering the throwback honesty of their sound, this stuff about original intentions makes perfect sense to me. And after another repeat of that wordless chorus, he plants his flag: “We are the innovators, they are imitators.” Pretty bold talk for such a young band, but by this point, in my opinion he’s earned the right to say it.

Apparently Jim James -- the singer, the songwriter, and pretty much the soul of the band -- fell off a stage in 2008 and the band hasn't performed much since. He has, however, recently released an album with Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and M. Ward (more on him soon), performing as the Monsters of Folk. I like the track or two I've heard; I also like the bits I've heard of James' solo EP of George Harrison covers, Tribute To, which is a benefit for Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. But already I'm torn, wistfully hoping My Morning Jacket will survive too. And to think, six months ago I made gagging noises whenever anybody mentioned this band to me. Well, anybody can make a mistake!

Wordless Chorus sample