2022 Contenders: Stick Season

Whenever I profess to liking the music of a youngster under the age of 30, I worry they might become popular, like Ed Sheeran popular, sell out, and then I'll have to delete all trace of my ever having been interested in them from the interweb.

25 year old Noah Kahan is from Vermont and makes "folk-infused pop" which already sounds a bit dodgy, and then I read his bio, which was either written by a pretentious Millennial arse from his record company or else it was written in Swedish and then translated into English via Google translate for a laugh...

"As Noah Kahan changes, he casts those experiences onto songs like light through a film projector. At the core of the music’s upbeat energy and unfiltered lyrics, you’ll hear who he was before and who he became—almost in real-time..."

I'll spare you the rest. I'm just hoping Noah didn't pen that himself.

So far, so not very inspiring. 

But.

Damn it if Stick Season, his latest track, isn't the best thing I've heard this week. I've no idea what it's about, but I'm digging the vibe, man.

Now I am stuck between my anger

And the blame that I can't face

And memories are something

Even smoking weed does not replace

And I am terrified of weather 'cause I see you when it rains

Doc told me to travel, but there's COVID on the planes

And I love Vermont, but it's the season of the sticks and I

Saw your mom she forgot that I existed and

It's half my fault, but I just like to play the victim

I'll drink alcohol 'til my friends come home for Christmas

And I'll dream each night of some version of you

That I might not have, but I did not lose

Now you're tyre tracks and one pair of shoes

And I'm split in half, but that'll have to do, ooh, ooh

Mid-Life Crisis Songs #67: Dylan & Son

As mentioned at the end of last year, I've finally reached the age where I'm starting to appreciate Mr. Zimmerman more. Lately I've been listening to Blood On The Tracks a lot, and yeah, I know it's the cliched choice, the Dylan album that all the critics love, but I'm still enjoying the hell out of it. A lot more than I enjoyed Blonde On Blonde when I bought a copy in my mid-20s and forced myself to listen to it for a week to try and see what the fuss was about.

I've even managed to get Sam into Tangled Up In Blue. Again, the obvious choice from the album, but it was the moment I realised Dylan had a sense of humour... and he knew how to use it subtly too... that really turned the corner for me.

She was working in a topless place

And I stopped in for a beer

I just kept looking at the sight of her face

In the spotlight so clear

And later on when the crowd thinned out

I's just about to do the same

She was standing there in back of my chair

Said, "Tell me, don't I know your name?"

I muttered something underneath my breath

She studied the lines on my face

I must admit I felt a little uneasy

When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe

 

What I didn't expect in the middle of all this was to also find myself suddenly drawn to Bob's son too. 

Jakub Dylan's band The Wallflowers recently got back together and released their first album in almost a decade, and it's pretty damned good. It must be tough being Bob Dylan's son and trying to make people listen to your music without them constantly comparing you to your dad, but The Wallflowers are a very different proposition... although there's some nice subtle humour in the lyrics here too.

Strange to see you this side of town

It's not your people or your kind of crowd

Just nobodies here, we're drinking flat beer

Away from the battleground

There's no sleigh bells in winter time

There's no top shelf or a decent wine

There's another slow jam, same awful band

It's the last stop, the end of the line

You're on the list or I'm easy to find

In the dive bar in my heart

2020 Latecomers: Ingrid Andress

Seeing as I got away with Taylor Swift the other week, here's something in similar vein. A Nashville singer-songwriter with one foot in the contemporary pop field (she's already written songs for Alicia Keys and Charlie XCX). Great storytelling lyrics too. 

I mean, it's very schmaltzy small town Americana, and probably won't be your cup of tea... but it's undeniably a great pop song. And being a grumpy old man, I rarely say that these days...  

2020 Latecomers: Bleachers

A few weeks back, the Algorithm decided I might like to listen to Bleachers. It wasn't a bad choice. For a computer that does my thinking for me.

Bleachers are a New Jersey band led by Jack Antonoff, formerly of Fun, a band I loved back in 2012 when their second album, Some Nights, was rarely off the CD player. (Ah, remember the good old days?) Being from New Jersey, they're obviously in thrall to that borough's most famous resident, and yes, they did get him to sing a verse on this, the first single (released late last year) from their forthcoming third album...

 

It's a good song, even more so because, despite the Boss's presence, it doesn't sound like a direct homage... unlike, say, the work of fellow New Jersey Bruce fans, The Gaslight Anthem. The fact that Antonoff claims to be influenced by the 80s teen movies of John Hughes makes me an even bigger fan.

And that's not all they've got for us either. Check out their next release, 45, and maybe you might get as excited about that forthcoming album as I am (though probably not - I accept, my passions are my own).

Mid-Life Crisis Songs #57: Still Feel Like A Kid

The latest album from Dawes has been a bit of a slow burner. I wasn't initially impressed with it enough to mention it in my year end countdown, feeling it was a bit too close to previous releases to really distinguish itself. Spending a little more time with it though has unearthed some lyrical treats, including this from the song Didn't Fix Me...

I got that book you recommended

About the spy in East Berlin

I really like the way it ended

How he forgive his friend who turns him in

And I think I see what you were saying 'bout how

Technically, it should but

It didn't fix me

It didn't fix me like I thought it would

And this, which is a proper Mid-Life Crisis song... from a band still in their 30s.

(I might play it to my Millennial Hipster buddy to make him feel old.)

I can't stay up past midnight anymore

But I still feel like a kid

There's always part of me that's a little sore

But I still feel like a kid

I got dreams of coaching little league

But I still feel like a kid

And I bet the day that I turn eighty-three

I will still feel like a kid

2020 Latecomers: Sex On The Radio

So there's a TV show on Netflix called Sex Education. I haven't watched it, despite the fact that it features Gillian Anderson. Then again, I haven't watched The Crown either, despite the fact that also features Gillian Anderson. The very idea of her playing Margaret Thatcher break my heart... and stamps on other parts of my anatomy too.

Louise has watched Sex Education though. Make of that what you will. The other day, she was listening to the soundtrack when I recognised a familiar voice...

Yes, it's our old pal Chip 'Wild Thing' Taylor. Perhaps not the first person you'd imagined to be featured in the soundtrack to a hip, yoof-oriented Netflix show... nor the first person you'd imagine to find covering a song by Regina Spektor about listening to Guns 'n' Roses. Despite all those facts... this is a belter.

2020 Latecomers: Taylor Swift

I have a lot of time for Taylor Swift, but it's fair to say that when she stepped away from her country roots a few years back to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, I wished her well and said bon voyage. She's made some great pop songs since then - arguably some of the best of her generation - but as I'm way beyond that generation, I felt like I couldn't really be a part of her crowd anymore.

Last year, she surprised everyone by hooking up with Bon Iver and members of The National (among others) to release two "back to her roots" albums of stripped back country storytelling, Folklore and Evermore. I'm not going to add much to the swathes of column inches devoted to those records other than to say I like them.

A lot.

Positive Songs For Negative Times #36: Stick That!

 

As Alyson observed last week, my blogging time has been rather curtailed at the moment by work and lockdown pressures. A member of staff at my workplace died of covid last week. Not someone I knew, but still. Despite that, our department has a Quality Review this week.

I'll pause while you take those two facts in, compare them, and scream at the screen. Or maybe that's just me.

Still, I think what we need right now is some more Positive Songs For Negative Times.

Here's Eric Church, the place where outlaw country collides with rock in the best possible way these days. I would declare this the first great single of 2021, except it's another 2020 latecomer... from way back in July, so I don't know how I missed it back then. Oh, wait, maybe I do...

I think Eric's plea here is for songwriters to write more about the world around them. To be honest, I'm not sure I want to hear anymore about the world around me right now. I come to music for escapism. The last refuge.

(Turns out this is one of the first songs Eric has ever recorded that he didn't write. And there's quite an interesting story behind it if you have the time.)

Still, it's great to hear him belt out, "Stick that in your country song!" with an angry snarl. (Wait till it gets going, you'll see what I mean.) I'm just leeching off his energy for a while...

2020 Latecomers: Just When You Thought It Was Safe...

 

Happy New Year, we said. 

2021 has got to be better than 2020, we laughed.

Then 2021 laughed back.

"Kids are going back to school," said Boris on Sunday.

"Kids are staying home," said Boris on Monday.

"Sam is going back to school," said Rol and Louise on Tuesday, evoking keyworker status I didn't even know applied to me last lockdown.

Do I feel guilty about sending him back to school in the middle of the 43rd wave? 

Yes.

But better he's there than stuck at home with two psychotic middle-aged job-hating lunatics on the verge of going postal every second. He's an only child, he needs company his own age. This family needs to cling onto the few last vestiges of our sanity 2020 hasn't yet stripped away. 

Judge us, if you will, but we tried the home-schooling while juggling two full time jobs last year and it nearly killed us all. There's the virus, and then there's mental health. Sometimes you have to weigh up the risks.

And I must be a keyworker: Morrisons gave me 10% off my shopping last week.

Here's a song from last year, about last year, that's more appropriate than ever today...

A party’s a cocktail we drink all alone

Our friends are a movie we watch on our phone

Our parents are teenagers sneaking around in the night

Our children are monkeys that are tied to our wrists

Our houses are wrecking balls tied to a list

A plan is a guess where the jester insists that he’s right

Oh 2020, you’re fading away

Your weeks into months and your months into days

As they all blur together like tears on the page

As if the angels were writing it down

At night I hear sirens and songs in the dark

And the roar of propellers like heaves of dry coughs

In the heart of the city, there’s a hole where John Prine still belongs

Mid-Life Crisis Songs #55: Please Let Me Go Round Again

 

Back to work today, and I don't even want to think about that as I type this on Friday evening... though it has blackened my thoughts for the past few days. If you feel the same, here's the Nicholas Cage coaster I got for Christmas. Don't have nightmares.

As the New Year begins, it's customarily the time that I begin sharing with you the songs that would have been included in my countdown of the previous year... if I'd discovered them in time. More of those will be coming up later in the week, under the heading 2020 Latecomers (there's one party we'd all happily have arrived late to... or missed altogether), but the first one deserves the Mid-Life Crisis heading even more.

I discovered the latest album from Jerry "Swamp Dogg" Williams Jr. a month or so ago because it features two of the last vocal recordings from the late great John Prine. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the album as a whole. At 78, Swamp Dogg has had a pretty amazing career, working with Patti Labelle, Gary US Bonds, Gene Pitney, Irma Thomas, Dr. Dre and Kid Rock, among others. He's been a songwriter, producer, A&R man and performer, though his record releases have tended towards the esoteric and satirical... but this is his country blues album, drafting in John Prine, Bon Iver and Jenny Lewis to help. The more I listen to it, the more I want to dig deeper into Swamp Dogg's back catalogue, though I have been warned not to expect anything else that sounds like this.

The song below, however - one of the very last John Prine would ever lend his vocals to - is in a league of its own. Especially for those of us hip-deep in what Sam has started to call "The Middle Ages" ("you and mummy are in the Middle Ages, you won't be old for a few years yet")...

Everything I put my hands on, I blew it

Women, jobs, money, friends, and I knew it

Actin' crazy, talkin' dumb all the time

I woke up yesterday, I was forty years old, life had passed me by

Please let me go 'round again

Oh, life, can't you afford me another chance?

If you'll let me go 'round again

I'll build a better mousetrap from a far more better plan

As I head back to work today, I wish I had the opportunity to go round again and build a far better mousetrap from a far better plan...

My Top Twenty of 2020: #1

 

Regular readers of this blog will probably find my choice for Album of the Year so, so predictable. Particularly anyone who remembers what 2019's Album of the Year was round these parts.

However, a few notes in my defence...

Prior to 2019, the last time I voted a Springsteen album as the best thing I'd heard all year was in 1987, with Tunnel of Love.

Prior to Western Stars, the last Springsteen studio album, 2014's hodge-podge contract-filler High Hopes, barely deserved a mention in my year end countdown.

And prior to that, there were any number of albums released with the resurrected E Street Band that I liked well enough (some more than others), but as much as they might have been good late-stage Bruce albums, they didn't really feel like good band albums. Ironically, the last great E Street Band album then, the last one that truly feels and sounds like the E Street Band... was Born In The USA. 

36 years ago. 

I couldn't quite put my finger on why this album sounded like a proper E Street record again after such a long time... until I read an interview with Steve Van Zandt in which he explained that unlike all the other records he's worked on with Bruce this century, this is the only one in which the band have contributed as much as they did in the 70s and 80s. All the other albums Bruce has made with them since their reunion, he's come to the room with finished songs and a producer, looking for a very specific sound, and the band have pretty much acted as session musicians to deliver his vision. This record though was recorded like the classic E Street albums of the 70s and 80s. Bruce just brought the songs - acoustic guitar and lyrics. Then he let the band do their thing. And it shows...

Letter To You sounds like a Greatest Hits set from an alternate reality. Most of the tracks would fit comfortably on the old classic albums, without any concessions for a contemporary sound. The opener, One Minute You're Here, wouldn't have been out of place on Tunnel Of Love, with maybe a touch of The Rising. 

Then comes the title track, which I was rather underwhelmed with on its own... yet hearing it in the context of the album as a whole (particularly coming off the back of the slow, acoustic opener) really kicks it up a gear. 

Three of the songs featured here were actually written prior to Bruce's debut album back in 1973, but have never been recorded by him. Of these, If I Was The Priest, is the one that really could have fallen of the edge of Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. - like much of that disc, it owes a huge debt to Dylan.

Meanwhile, Janey Needs A Shooter is an interesting one for Warren Zevon fans. A track Zevon heard Bruce playing live back in the day, before loosely adapting it as Jeannie Needs A Shooter on the album Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School. They're very different songs when played back to back, yet they do match up.  

The Power of Prayer evokes the chord sequences from Born To Run in a song that's as open to misinterpretation as Born In The USA. On the surface, it seems Bruce is getting in touch with his spiritual side (there's a subtext of growing old and facing up to one's mortality than runs throughout the record). A closer listen, however, reveals a deeper meaning - Bruce's prayer is live music, and this album rewards the listener with the next best thing to seeing the E Street Band playing live. 

Rainmaker takes a sly dig at Trump, but that's the only political song on here (despite his activism in the run up to the US election, Bruce decided it would be boring to write a whole album attacking idiot politicians... besides, he's already done that on Wrecking Ball). 

Rainmaker says white’s black and black’s white

Says night’s day and day’s night

Says close your eyes and go to sleep now

I’m in a burnin’ field unloadin’ buckshot into low clouds

Rainmaker, a little faith for hire

Rainmaker, the house is on fire

Rainmaker, take everything you have

Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, so bad

They’ll hire a rainmaker

Two tunes here really kick this album up into the higher echelons. House Of A Thousand Guitars starts (rather ironically) with a classic Roy Bittan piano solo before launching into the kind of bombastic lyrical mythologising only Bruce could get away with... with maybe a sly reminder of how much Jim Steinman owes his career to The Boss.

Here the bitter and the bored

Wake in search of the lost chord

That'll band us together for as long as there's stars

Yeah in the house of a thousand guitars

And then comes Ghosts, which is basically Thunder Road or Born To Run grown old, no longer burning to get out of this town, but looking back on a lifetime of running, glorying in the joy of still being alive. It's a love song from a 70 year old man to his 20-something self, full of gratitude and respect. And best of all, it tears the roof off like no Springsteen song has in decades...

I hear the sound of your guitar

Coming in from the mystic far

The stone and the gravel in your voice

Come in my dreams and I rejoice

It's your ghost moving through the night

Spirit filled with light

I need, need you by my side

Your love and I'm alive

I can feel the blood shiver in my bones

I'm alive and I'm out here on my own

I'm alive and I'm coming home

  

This is a very different record to last year's Western Stars, in which Bruce turned down the path not taken and gave Jimmy Webb a run for his money. By contrast, Letter To You sounds like exactly what you'd expect from a Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band album... just not one we've heard for a long, long time.

 

My Top Twenty of 2020: #2

 

When I started this countdown a couple of weeks back, I did point out that the rankings were pretty arbitrary up to the Top 3, and that most of the records prior to this might go up and down in my affections depending on the day, my mood, and the weather. 

But this... this was very nearly my record of the year, because it's an absolute belter. Chuck Prophet has made some great albums in his time, but nothing as consistently WOW as The Land That Time Forgot.

I won't feature the Trump song again, because it's had multiple exposures on this blog in the last 6 months, as have some of the other tracks below. But selecting only one just doesn't do this album justice...

My Top Twenty of 2020: #3

 

Six years ago, Canadian singer songwriter Kathleen Edwards turned her back on a successful music career and opened a Ottawa coffee shop called Quitters. A bad break up, disillusionment with the music scene, and depression led her to this decision... but thankfully, the coffee helped her cope, and early this year she released her first album since 2012, a revitalised collection in which she celebrates Total Freedom.

I've been a fan since her 2003 debut Failer (how could I resist a first album with a title like that?), so it was great to have her back. On top form too. 

My Top Twenty of 2020: #4

 

Local lad and restraining order waiting to happen (such is my obsession) Simon Armitage became the Poet Laureate late last year. In between writing poems for the Queen and the Sunday papers, he somehow found time to record a new record. Not with his former band, The Scaremongers, but with a new collective called LYR. (Apparently it stands for Land Yacht Regatta, so nothing to do with lyrics at all. That'll teach me to try to second-guess the Poet Laureate.)

An addictive set of story poems set to musical backing, full of northern humour and incisive lyrical detail, they've been a firm favourite at Top Ten Towers these past few months.

My Top Twenty of 2020: #5

 

A new Eels record was just what I needed as this sorry year drew to a close. 

E even got a Mad Man to star in his latest video...

Will we be alright again? Maybe through music.

My Top Twenty of 2020: #6

 

Jason Isbell cements his position as one of the best Americana songwriters currently working - at least when it comes to heartbreak. As usual, this collection reads like short stories, full of lyrical detail that plucks at the heart strings. I almost wish he'd lighten up occasionally, but I guess he's following a fine tradition in country music. George Jones would be proud.

Poison oak to poison ivy

Dirty jokes that blew right by me

Mama curling up beside me

Crying to herself

Why can't Daddy just come home?

Forget whatever he did wrong

He's in a hotel all alone

And we need help

My Top Twenty of 2020: #7

 

I make no secret of my love of Huey Lewis, but that said... he hasn't made an essential album since the career-topping Fore! back in 1986. Its follow-up, Small World, got a lot of turntable time from me back in the late 80s, but I haven't listened to it since, and his output following that consisted mostly of throwback rock 'n' roll covers sets. His first four albums, culminating in the aFOREmentioned, are all essential discs in my mind... though he gets a lot more respect for them on his own side of the Atlantic than he does here in the UK where serious musos turn their noses up at him.  

The buzz for Weather started a couple of years back - he'd found his mojo again, and this was going to be the most Huey album we'd heard in over 30 years. And then, tragedy struck. Huey contracted Ménière's disease, an inner ear condition that leads to severe tinnitus, hearing loss and vertigo. It's currently untreatable, and as it grew steadily worse, it soon put pay to the rest of the album, and any hopes of Huey touring again. Finally, the band decided to release the completed songs as a 7 track mini album, and fans got to hear what will likely be the final Huey Lewis record.

It's a very retro-sounding collection, despite being made up mostly of new compositions, along with one cover, Eugene Church's 1958 hit Pretty Girls Everywhere (also the debut single for The Walker Brothers), a track so out of step with contemporary mores that I love it all the more. 

There's nothing here that will win him any new fans, but oldies like me... and Brandon Flowers, Jimmy Buffet, Michael Keaton, Andy Garcia, Brad Paisley et al (all featured in the video below)... will take it to our hearts and cherish it forever. 

Thank you, Huey. Wishing you better times...

My Top Twenty of 2020: #8

 

I've banged on about my love of Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields plenty of times over the years, so I figured I'd let someone else persuade you to give his latest record a listen.

Here's Bruce Springsteen, a quote taken directly from his radio show...

"Stephin is one of our best American composers and songwriters, and if you haven’t gotten into his music, you owe it to yourself to check it out."

'Nuff said.

And here's a song we could all sing along to in 2020...

My Top Twenty of 2020: #9

 

I still haven't quite worked out how perennial English satirist, raconteur and Auteur Luke Haines ended up in collaboration with the guitarist from REM this year, but part of me doesn't actually want to know the truth. I'm sure it won't be half as interesting as the story in my imagination.

I have to be honest though: if you're an REM fan suffering withdrawal symptoms, this probably isn't the record to quench your need. It doesn't sound much like an REM record at all, despite Buck's involvement. It does, however, sound exactly like a Luke Haines record, full of mad lyrics, crazy theories and Haines's unique parallel universe vision of the world.

Yesterday's selection might have been the first time Bob Dylan has featured in my year end countdown... but this is the umpteenth time Luke Haines has troubled these parts. And he has another new album out in March, so I dare say he'll be here again next year.

My Top Twenty of 2020 #10

 

In 30+ years of compiling year end lists of favourite records, this is the first time I've ever included a Bob Dylan record.

Dylan purists will no doubt lament that fact, and also that I've chosen this particular disc to break my exile. It's not been his best-reviewed record in recent years, and a number of fans appear to have turned their nose up at it. 

But maybe I've finally reached the age where Dylan can speak to me. The last Dylan album I listened to as much as this was Blonde On Blonde, in my early 20s, when it was already getting on for thirty years old. And I only really did that in service of checking out Bruce's influences. 

It was Murder Most Foul that did it for me. 17 minutes in length, arguably Bob's own version of We Didn't Start The Fire (purists, irked: check), and yet I've heard this played on the radio at least 5 times now and each time I was enthralled. I mean, the rest of the album is pretty good, but this... this is just mesmerising.