Singer-songwriter, famed Irish busker and Oscar winner, Glen Hansard was killed last week in a motorcycle accident at just 56. Anyone dying that young in a horrific accident would be tragic. This one though appears to have hit a specific chord in the zeitgeist, or at least the music community for which I remain tethered in both the social media realm and my general exposure to news, as I have retreated from the day-to-day to avoid the horrors and stupidity that reign supreme lately. The phalanx of tributes from all over – the famous to the not-so – went beyond grieving a death but of what was clear to me on the surface to be the erasing of a genuine soul, who loved music more than breathing, gave of himself selflessly and routinely, and if given the choice, preferred standing on a corner and playing his beat-up guitar and singing from the burrows of his heart to anyone who might listen. This is something Hansard did as a kid; and by kid I don’t mean euphemistically when he was a teenager or his early 20s, but a child, who’s teacher was moved to just tell him to dump school and pursue this thing he adored to not waste any time with the normal maturing available to the rest of us.
And I think that is the nut when it comes to Glen Hansard, and those like him (many of whom I know personally) who give of themselves with little fanfare and financial reward, never mind fame. They do it because they must, because this is what defines them, not to be recognized for merely being an influencer or a celebrity. Hansard was an artist, a dedicated one that did so publicly and with a passion for expressing and sharing that passion. He embodied what we’d all like from those we come to admire as fans, whether solo acts, bands, or even filmmakers and other creatives. We want to see them, not an image-laden version of them. This yearning is far more prevalent in 2026 than ever before when considering a world invaded by Artificial Intelligence and auto-tuning, Internet algorithms and YouTube one-off sensations. Hansard was a welcomed throwback, at least for those of us who choose to remember when playing your instrument well and singing with a singular purpose was a virtue, a window into the vulnerable truth of the songwriter, the performer, the musician.
Hansard, of course, became very successful, a lofty place not afforded to everyone who plies his trade. I was first introduced to him like a lot of people my age from his turn as a guitarist in the 1990 ensemble film, The Commitments, a musical comedy-drama directed by Alan Parker. Set in the Northside of Dublin, it tells the story of a young rhythm and blues fanatic who assembles a group of like-minded, working-class youths to form a soul band named The Commitments. It is a terrific movie filled with great music played by the actors, most if not all of them accomplished musicians, including Hansard, who had just formed his own band the Frames months before filming. But it wasn’t the Frames, who released six albums over a sixteen-year run, that put Hansard on my radar. That would occur with a little indie film, Once hitting theaters in 2007. Make a movie about music and those who create it and Campion is there, and so, after 1997 when we got together and 1999 when we married, I dragged my wife to these – every uneven biopic, most documentaries (now my pal, Eric Hutchinson and I make the scene, two obsessives running around downtown New York). This one was different – quaint, touching, and a balancing of the melancholic with an uplifting edge. We adored it.
The Frames bassist, budding screenwriter and director, John Carney tapped Hansard and a woman for which he had just collaborated with for his first solo effort, The Swell Season, Markéta Irglová to star. In essence, the film was a recreating of their own meeting through music. Hansard discovered the Czech singer and multi-instrumentalist as a teenager when playing a festival in her home country. The two would go on to combine their unique voices in an eerily familiar way, as if Irglová was genetically engineered in a lab to sing with him. This resulted in Hansard and Irglová’s Oscar win for Best Original Song in a Film. The two, Hansard in his mid-thirties, Irglová barely twenty, famously fell in love, which was captured on the silver screen as they musically and personally melded into one. Their ensuing romance was later framed in the gripping 2011 documentary, The Swell Season, covering both their rise to fame, their celebrated tour together, and eventually the relationship’s sad ending.
That’s when I kind of lost track of Hansard. But that’s on me. I knew of his work, but after his debut solo effort, which remains in my estimation his seminal statement both lyrically and musically, it was spotty. I vaguely recall his annual Christmas busking tradition that spread into a wider audience with the occasional cameo from Sinéad O’Connor and Bono. Then, in the early 2010s I saw a clip of the Swell Season’s appearance on a 2008 taping of Austin City Limits in which Hansard welcomes up the late, great Daniel Johnston to join the band for his brilliant 1994 song, “Life in Vain.” This was jolting on a few levels. Firstly, I had been a disciple of Johnston since the mid-80s along with every budding musician and songwriter worth his/her salt, and we all knew Daniel had made his bones in Austin passing off his homemade cassettes early in his career. I also had not seen Daniel in some years, as he was in and out of mental institutions – a drama that would later be stirringly documented in the 2006 film, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Johnston was older, heavier, his hands shaking spastically as he read his lyrics from a paper, his voice ragged and shaky, but his aim as pure and unadulterated as the art he created for years battling mental illness. It came from as pure a place as ever mined by an artist, including Hansard. From that moment, I connected the two as brothers in arms, and for Hansard to not only have him appear but back him with enthusiasm was forever endearing. It is still one of my favorite clips to watch when I question my commitment to music writing and it solidified Hansard for me as the genuine article.
And that, I would learn when he passed, was not a miscalculation. He dedicated his life to that pursuit of pure art. We always need more of that in any and every generation, but maybe now more than ever. And because we had this in Glen Hansard and he proved its worth, we remember him fondly, but perhaps what we’re grateful for is what he represented most of all.
Since we’re taking a one-week hiatus from the 300 Favorite Albums podcast this week (thanx so much for listening!), I received a rather detailed missive form the desk of producer/musician and all-around great guy, Wil Masisak, who, as you may remember from Episode 20, co-produced Dan Bern’s magnificent, New American Language – an album that is ranked #9 in my 300 Faves. Wil loved the episode, but had some additional information we did not cover. There is some cool stuff in here about not only Dan’s process, how the record came together, but behind-the-scenes stuff for music geeks everywhere. This was kind of my aim with Profonde Musique, so I turn the floor over to Wil for his deeper dive in what we couldn’t cover in the great episode.
Wil was kind enough to cite the parts of the episode where we touch upon an event or story, but do not provide the gory details. Following that is his take.
Dan Bern: “The only holdover from the Smarty Mine sessions was Wil Masisak. That was a total accident that he was in the band. He had been along as kind of touring manager, driver, just to make things easier on the road. And one day, we had done soundcheck. It was in a place called The Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which coincidentally is where I played last night and where I’m still today. But we were in the green room and we heard some piano from the stage. And it was like, it was like really good. And a couple of us looked at each other and we started looking around to see who was in the green room and who wasn’t. And we were like, is that, that can be Wil, is that Wil? And we went out and there was Will Masisak playing the piano. And from that moment on, he was part of the band and he became not just part of the band, but co-producer of New American Language and really musical director, I guess he would call it. And so, he was a big part of that and he brought his friend, Eben Grace.”
Wil: There is a background to that story. I met Bernie in 1997 when he couldn’t find a cute girl to let him and Josh Zawaduk crash on her couch after a show in Nederland, CO. Out of better options, he and Josh spent the night at my tiny house in Boulder with me, my wife, and our dog. They planned on leaving in the morning but it turned out we had a giant surprise snow storm of around 36 inches and they were stuck in my driveway. Then their gig that night was cancelled because the snow caused the roof to cave in… and that’s how they ended up staying for three days! We got to be friends and competitive rivals from that. Then later in the year we went to a Rockies game and his manager Amanda asked me if I wanted to come on the tour to play accordion and also help drive and deal with the logistics. There was an actual tour manager, Tom Ianiello, but it was real DIY touring.
Sounded like it would be fun, except I very early on discovered that Bernie’s method of tuning from his harmonica and his ear for what constituted his guitar being in tune was formed over years of playing alone and was, in a word, idiosyncratic. Bassist Tige Decoster had decided to deal with the problem of Dan not being tuning to some actual notes by playing the fretless bass. If Dan was a little off, Tige could adjust. But playing accordion? There’s no fretless accordion! This, to use another word, was a nightmare.
Culmination of this was us playing at the Bottom Line and Elvis Costello being rumored to be in the house (he came to see the opener whose record he had produced and then left). Anxiety was high. Soundcheck was unsuccessful––in those days, Bernie had a lot of issues getting his monitors right. We basically ran out of time to do much. Show starts and I come out for the first song I’m going to play, which was probably “One Thing Real.” As soon as Bernie starts the song, I’m all–something is up: this is way out of tune. He was playing almost a quarter tone flat of E major. Making matters worse, Tige couldn’t hear him properly, knew it was a bit off-key so he was playing in Eb. I’m stuck. There’s nothing I can do that won’t make this train wreck worse. But, I am literally out in the front of the stage at a meaningful show and have to do something. Can’t walk off stage because I have to sing. So, I decide I will pantomime playing, sing my part and try to get us to re-tune after the song.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
The front of house mixer had no idea of any of this–he just saw a guy playing accordion and couldn’t figure out why he couldn’t hear it. I could see him fighting through it, moving knobs and faders frantically. I tried to shake my head to him to stop him but eventually he had my accordion mic cranked all the way up and at some point, my pantomiming resulted in what otherwise would have been an insignificant squeak but which was so loud in the house speakers with everything cranked up that it caused an unbearable feedback so bad everybody stopped. It was straight out of one of those nightmares people have about being in front of a crowd and something disastrous happening.
Bernie, of course, blamed me–– he fired me. He was actually going to send me home from the tour–bye bye smartie mine and NAL and swastika and Burbank and Fleeting Days etc lol–but softened into just no more playing.
That’s what led up to the story he told about soundcheck in Ann Arbor.
P.S.: just 5-6 years ago, I met a mixer at a studio here in Brooklyn where I had some gear and hung out occasionally. We were telling stories and he mentioned that he was the long time front of house mixer at the Bottom Line. I was like, did you mix Dan Bern there? And we started telling each other the same nightmare story. He said he’s been telling that story–from the other side of the stage– for 25 years! When I told him what had actually happened, his mind was blown. He had no idea.
Re: Sweetness
Dan Bern: “I had actually written it some years before when I was just living in LA. I may have been messing around with an electric guitar at that time, but I just know that it was laying there and sitting there in these songbooks. And we had finished the record. I was in the Boulder studio. I was basically living there. And so, everybody had gone home, and I was just there on my own. And I was just pounding through some old songs from these songbooks. It’s probably from, oh, early 90s, I’m guessing, with no particular idea about what I was doing or that this was going to be part of anything. I was just, you know, and this song came up and I was playing it. And I was like, and this happened a lot actually in making any number of records. Like you think you have the thing, and you think you’re done, and then something pops in. And I was playing this thing and I was like, oh my God, I’ve got to start with this.
Wow. So, I want to start, because we had had, you know, the title track, New American Language, as the start. And it’s a different kind of start.
It’s much gentler and it’s a slower opening and it kind of builds. But this is like, boom. You know, we had put so much work in all this and I was like, oh, no, how am I going to tell Wil – ?
Wil: He leaves out some good parts of the story.
We were at Velvet (my studio in Boulder) and I was doing editing and some pre-mixing in preparation for us going to Atlanta to mix the record. I think maybe there were 2-3 days before our flight and I was already pretty tight on time, especially with making a ton of “which of your children do you want to sacrifice” edits to background parts on “Thanksgiving Day Parade.” So, just Bernie and me in the studio, where he is basically just sitting in on perhaps the most repetitive sort of work on a record… and it’s just KILLING him. He wants to do something but there’s nothing for him to do but stew. First, he’s irritated, then mad, then frustrated, then becomes the cartoon where the guy’s head turns into a steam whistle… imagine trying to work in the control room with him like that. So, I for self-preservation, I came up one of the most accidentally great ideas ever:
I said, “Bernie, you know how there’s that foot locker of 14 songbooks up in the loft here and we’re always saying you should go through them and record them for posterity?” I set him up in the studio with an electric guitar, a microphone, a music stand, and a remote control. I routed his signal through a separate part of the mixing console and to the DAT machine he could see through the glass window into the control room, set to record but in pause. I said, “refresh your memory about the song (these are basically words on paper with maybe an occasional chord written down) and, when you’re ready, aim the remote, just press ‘play’, and record it. When you’re done, press ‘pause’ and go on to the next song.”
So, it gave him something to do, I was able to get back to work on my own tasks in the control room, and every once in a while in between edits, I’d check to see what his recording sounded like. Pretty good I thought and he seemed happier. Let’s just say he not only got distracted by this–he got OBSESSED with it. At some point, he had filled up an hour-long DAT, so I showed him how to get another tape started and gave him a stack of fresh DATs.
When I packed it in for the night, he was still going.
Next day, I come in and… he’s STILL GOING. He’s been awake for more than 24 hours straight, and he’s crazed. By the time I fiddle for a bit on editing, he’s accumulated EIGHT hours of actual recordings of songs, doesn’t want to stop, and I’m a little bit worried about his health.
When I come back from a dinner break, hours later, he accosted me and, with a wild man, The Shining kind of look in his eyes he says, “I FOUND THE OPENER FOR THE RECORD!!!” You know, the record that is done being recorded, is sequenced, and which we’re supposed to start mixing in another city roughly two days from now.
Suffice to say I was a bit skeptical, but he was insistent so I agreed to humor him by hearing the song. He played it for me and I thought, ‘great song’ and I said, “Listen, when we do the next record that should be the leadoff song.” Still, he was insistent that we had to record it before we headed to Atlanta–despite me pointing out that Colin and Brian were like 12 hours away–he was both out of his mind with sleep deprivation and dead certain. So, I said what I always say–my whole life when presented with a crazy, impossible idea, “OK, let me see what I can do.”
When I first heard it I immediately thought that, if it was going to be the opener, it needed to be styled into a rocker like the ‘Elvis Costello’ side of Dan’s 2×2 (Dylan-Costello by Springsteen-Guthrie). You mentioned Keith Moon, which is fair (and we’ll get to that), but the sound I had in my mind was Pete Thomas. The rhythm track I had in mind was like Pony St. from Brutal Youth, which I was listening to at the time. Listen to Pony St. for like 30 seconds and the drum and bass from Sweetness are there. The solo on “What’s So Funny ‘Bout Peace Love and Understanding” is the direct ancestor of Eben’s solo and so on. Amateurs borrow, professionals steal, and artists homage.
I read that Nick Lowe told Elvis Costello part way through recording Brutal Youth that he wasn’t a melodic enough/technically gifted enough bassist to do some of the songs justice and that Declan should hire his nemesis, Bruce Thomas. In this scenario, I am a Nick Lowe sort of bassist and Brian Schey is Bruce Thomas… although the polar opposite of Bruce Thomas’s reported personality. Brian is the glue.
I had thought about making the connection between Jake and Bernie for a little while. Jake just had the right kind of juice to inject into the touring band and he was more of a rock drummer/wildcard compared to Colin’s tasteful and mostly understated playing. Brian Schey would say now that thing I like about Jake’s drumming is overplaying but I love the energy of that kind of thing. (The Who, The Attractions, Ben Folds Five.). And Jake has an unusually definitive groove, which a guy like Bernie needs, since it’s very hard for him to not be the orchestra and he had spent 10 years fighting drummers for control. If you know how much I value groove/pocket AND the unbridled energy of the bands I mentioned, you will understand why I really wanted to play with Jake and get him in our world.
I managed to get him, at least, for a session the next night and thought, you know, for the style and for what we were after, I could be a Nick Lowe sort of bassist for the session well enough. If we needed to have Eben overdub or whatever, so be it.
The session was a blast. Jake just raised the rock and roll cred of the record up a few notches and my playing didn’t hold us back that much. I did, in fact, have to encourage Jake’s drum fills on the outro–guys coming in for studio sessions always lean to keeping it simple and great ones generally have to be pushed into showing off or big personality parts. I may have mentioned “Keith Mooning the shit out of the outro.” lol. I overdubbed the organ, Eben cranked out some amazing guitar overdubs, and we knocked out the background vocals. One big night and it was going on the record in the opening slot it so richly deserved.
I am reminded of someone asking Chuck Plotkin what a Record Producer does and him telling a story about recording Shot of Love, the Bob Dylan record.
Story starts with Chuck making the studio fastidiously ready and getting everyone set up and ready–he’s going to produce his idol! Only, halfway through day one and there’s no Bob. Bob operates on a somewhat different timeline or a different planet, possibly. They finally found him late that afternoon, still home in Minnesota. “oh… was that today?”
Next day, the musicians in the studio are playing and Chuck arrives for the session. Bob walks in and picks up a guitar. Not really much is happening in the way of a song, but Chuck looks into the control room and realizes the recorder isn’t running. He goes into the control room and says, “Hey, you know we’re making a Bob Dylan record for the biggest record company in the world. We have a nearly unlimited budget… just roll tape any time something is happening!
A few days later, Bob is struggling to explain to Jim Keltner what kind of a drum part he wants Jim to play (despite the fact the only way Dylan can record is to be standing 3 feet from the drummer, facing him and using body language to indicate if he wants faster or slower or a fill or what have you).
Chuck sees Bob isn’t getting anywhere so he steps in to explain/translate for Keltner. As he’s explaining, he and Jim realize Bob is drifting over to the piano. Wait–it looks like Bob is going to play something impromptu. Chuck, anxious, looks into the control room, where the engineer gives the signal that tape is rolling. Then, Chuck notices in horror that Bob is playing and sure looks like he’s going to sing… only there’s no microphone there for singing.
So, Chuck grabs a microphone stand/mic w from the drum kit and lunges over toward the piano–he sticks the mic in front of Bob’s face, just as he begins to sing his one and only studio take of Every Grain of Sand.
Chuck, telling the story, says, “So, basically, that’s what a Producer does!”
Re: New American Language
Dan Bern: “I think it all just flowed. At the very, very end, there’s all kinds of, you know, it’s a pretty long outro, and there’s all kinds of stuff that is really Will’s doing in terms of… We were pretty wide open and experimental. We did a lot of stuff that you might not even hear consciously. You know, there’s, I don’t know, there might be some German in there. There might be some backward stuff in there.
There’s a lot of mixed up, linguistic stuff.”
Wil: More or less just borrowed from George Martin and the boys and did a digital version of ‘chop up all the random recording of stuff and then put the snipped pieces in a new collage in random order without even listening to it all until it was completely reassembled. Digital musique concrète. There’s definitely some German in there, forward and backward.
Re: Alaska Highway
Dan Bern: “I know that there was an immediacy to it because maybe more than anything else on the record, it was brand new when we recorded it. Like I had just been to Alaska, wrote the song up there, came back to where we were doing this, and it was the new song, and boom, we recorded it like right away. So, we were learning it, and it was, there was no, there was no artifice, it was just, it was just forward motion, you know.”
“For me, in a way, it’s a hat tip to the guys I’m playing with, because now I’m playing with the likes of him, ain’t never going to settle for less, my friend. Well, I’m not settling for less, you know, I’m playing with Eben Grace and Will and Brian and Jake and Colin and Paul Kuhn. And to me, these guys are on that level and in that pantheon. And I’m so lucky to be playing with these guys. And I’m not, yeah, I’m not settling.”
Wil: It think it was the very first thing we recorded when we moved from Kansas to Boulder, which is coincidentally the day the brand new ProTools system I’ve spent $15K on broke down, I was stressed and under the console trying to fix it, Hall of Fame Producer Chuck Plotkin is sick and laying on my extremely questionable faded pink divan which has recently been picked out of a dumpster, everyone is annoyed and itching to get going, and I have just discovered I have lumps all over my body and I think this will be the last recording session of my life because I’ve been so focused on it, I didn’t realize cancer was taking over my body*. So, suffice to say it was a lot of pent-up anxiety. When we finally got it rolling, it was like the start of the Kentucky Derby.
* – I lived with this for almost a week without telling anyone–stressed out of my mind–because I was afraid they’d send me home when they found out I was dying. When I went to my doctor, she was like, “Did you fight off a cold a week or so ago? (Yes). Are you experiencing stress (YES YES YES)? Turns out it was all of my lymph nodes saying, “hey, buddy: SLOW TF DOWN!” Crisis averted.
Dan Bern: “I don’t know, probably. I’m a bridge nerd. I love bridges as you do. Those early Beatles bridges, particularly, are just gold. And that’s the master class, really. And then Elvis Costello, same thing.”
Wil: Dude, I think one thing that unites music journalists, Songwriters, and producers is our love of bridges. I mean, really, they are little separate compositions that sneaked their way inside of other, almost unrelated songs. Subversive. They are like the film within a film. The thing that pleases me the most about my own songwriting is when a bridge finds its way into the song and exits seamlessly back into the next verse. Bernie had also just uncorked his “double bridge” manifesto at that point (where you have, say, a bridge-solo-bridge in the middle), a la the Beatles. I said that was pushing it and you were only really doing that because you loved the bridge so much you wanted to hear it again without having to rewind.
Speaking of ‘Cheech and Rae Dawn Chong-can’t we all get along’, my take on Dan Bern Songwriting secrets is:
1. clever bridges
2. putting the most ridiculous part of the rhyme couplet first and the more normal part second. For example, if you say:
Why can’t we all just get along
West Palm Beach and Cheech and Rae Dawn Chong
you’re a hack
but flip it and you’re a songwriting genius
3. build around universal images that everyone can not only relate to but interpolate into their own lives and thoughts–whether you use icons who represent something culturally that taps into the zeitgeist shorthand or just universal ideas like, “I would like to go back in time and change things only it’s stupid to think I could change anything”
4. fun with internal rhymes
5. the use of words just for the sound of their syllables and the cadence thereof, like the way rappers use them
Dan Bern: “And Will’s swirly stuff, you know? Well, that swirly stuff is like, sometimes he’s playing the organ, sometimes he’s playing the piano, sometimes he’s playing the mellotron.”
Wil: My secret is I have 8 arms.
Re: “God Said No.”
James: Let’s talk about this chord progression. Let’s talk about the melody, too. Do you remember when this all came to you?
Dan Bern: Yeah, I was in that house in Kansas. We hadn’t even started recording yet, but I’d been there, I don’t know, maybe just a few days. And I had been working on this idea of going back in time and making things right. I’d been working on that for probably a few years, and I hadn’t quite gotten myself around it yet. I hadn’t satisfactorily made that song yet, but it had been bouncing around in my mind. But it was one of those nights where you can’t sleep and you’re feeling really uneasy about everything. I think I was maybe nervous about going into this whole process. And I think I felt a fair amount of pressure maybe because I had been on this big label and then the whole industry changed suddenly, the whole Napster, whatever. And then my company folded into another one and they let everybody go. So, I was kind of out there on my own a bit. Anyway, that all somehow fed into just the anxiety of this. And it[…]”
He was beyond worked up the day before the night in question. He wanted to fire everyone (this is a running theme) and start over or even give up on making a record. There were a few times over the years I have talked him off the ledge–sometimes being on the phone with him literally all night–and he was in a pretty dark place. I managed to–I thought–get him picked up a little. And I went upstairs to sleep (This is when the two of us were staying in William S. Burroughs’s house in Lawrence, KS.)
I woke up a couple of times in the night and I heard the twinkle of a few guitar notes–I knew he was not able to sleep.
The next morning, I come down the stairs and he says, “Come sit and play with me––I think I might have written something.” Understatement of the century.
As good as you think the record might be and how much it might give you the feels, I had the best seat in the house for the best performance ever. Luckily, I recorded it on a memo recorder. You can’t quite get the same experience from the crappy recording but you too can hear it presented to the world.
Wil: The thing about Cobain & Burroughs… if you look at this photo, this is exactly the spot in the room where he played it for me. He was right where Cobain is and I am right where Burroughs was… only about three years earlier.
James: “You could ruin a really great song by making a lousy record. You could absolutely, now we said about the bones, but you could absolutely elevate a song the way this is elevated by making a great record. So even though most of this is just you emoting, the band really does lift you up. I’m assuming that’s Paul Kuhn on his famous cello caster, adding all of those ethereal sounds in the background to just give it that, we’re not quite on earth here. It has that whole Robert Johnson at the crossroads; you’re at the edge of town meeting with the other guy. He’s meeting the devil and you’re meeting God.
Dan Bern: It’s kind of like film acting versus stage acting when you’re making a record, and especially when you have this kind of musical bed to work with. The tendency, you just got to pull back, you got to keep pulling back, and that’s what I had to do. I think I must have done 50, 60 vocals of this, and I think finally the one that we, and maybe Wil comped it, you know, Wil did a lot of stuff.
He had a lot of tricks up his sleeve…”
Wil: I heard Chris Isaak’s recording engineer say once that Chris’ vocal for “Wicked Game” was comped from roughly 53 takes–out of a total of maybe 100 takes. “God Said No” wasn’t that wild but it was a comp from 37 of roughly more than 50 takes. I was pretty proud of the comp, too, because I don’t think you can tell and it still seems like the right choice.
Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth on the production of this record: did it all serve the song? Was there too much happening at times? It took me a few years to reach acceptance and hear it more as it might sound to the non-involved listener. I’m really glad that you and others like it–there was a lot of debate back then amongst the hardcore Dan Bern fans about whether he was better solo and whether they liked the “band” records. That was a pressure he felt a little but that I felt a lot.
And just wanted to clarify that (along with the lovely cellocaster of Paul Kuhn) the swirly, cloud-like chordal texture in the background–the thing that defines the sound of “God Said No”– is primarily Eben Grace playing electric guitar through a volume pedal and effects. It’s an absolutely genius thing he does that we’ve used a handful of times on various records. I’ll just be like, “you know, do the clouds thing in this part”. It makes producing easy when you have a guy like that who can do anything and who just spits out amazing musical ideas.
Re: Albuquerque Lullaby
Dan Bern: “I think it’s when Chuck was with us, and I remember he and Colin working real hard on that swirly brush thing that Colin’s doing on the drums, which he does so well and is a great example of what makes him really one of my favorite people to play with in the world. But yeah, when you have that kind of a bed on it, then that little picking thing I’m doing, it just reads so much more than if I’m doing it on my own. And for a lot of this, even at that time, I was still doing shows on my own.”
Chuck really pushed for a different arrangement we recorded that featured an arpeggiating 12-string Danelectro electric and was very much in Bruce territory. It might have been the only time Chuck gave input on something that we were like, “What? I don’t get it?” As special as the album version is, Bernie and I were talking one day a few years ago and we both agreed that the Chuck version was so good! I’m not sure where that alt-take lives but if I find it, I’ll send it someday.
James: “I’m going to give you the highest compliment I can. This chorus, don’t let your heart get broken by this world. It’s Buddy Holly good.”
Wil: Fuck yeah. Great pull.
Re: Tape
James: “Are you playing the Wawaw guitar on this?
Dan Bern: “I think that’s Eben. No, that’s Eben. Okay.
That’s really cool.”
Wil: First off, I love Eben Grace an unnatural amount. If he gets credit and praise, I am here for it. The little Dickie Betts/Steve Gaines solo he digs out of the dirt on Tape is just so indicative of his playing on this record. So many times when listening to this (heck, when making it), Eben played some part and I just had to go back and listen again. His solo proper in “Alaska Highway” is a neatly packaged beauty, his ride out solo on that song was100% first take, and you can always just count on him recording something with touchstones to the greatest players and licks of all time, but with his own voice. Magical sometimes. But.
There’s no wah wah guitar on Tape. It’s my wurlitzer 200A through a wah pedal (an idea Eben started me on one day, by handing me his spare wah pedal and saying, “I think you need this.” Me and wurlie wah are panned left and Eben and guitar are panned right.
Eben and I played a lot of gigs together: with Bernie, each others’ bands, with lots of different people and in different styles. We realized sort of early on that we were so much alike musically that we gravitated toward the same kinds of parts, but we were almost always on opposite sides of the stage, so sometimes didn’t know what the other was doing.
Funny story: we did both “Tape” and “Honeydoo!” on the same day, same setup. By sheer accident, on the winner take of Tape we couldn’t hear each other at all during recording. We went to listen to the playback with trepidation that maybe we were stepping over each other. Then we listened to it and it’s like a perfectly choreographed dance in the dark. So, we decided we purposely wouldn’t listen to each other in “Honeydoo!,” and that was even better in terms of the interplay.
Re: Honeydoo!
James: “And again, getting back to your sublime bridge, real quick, exactly. Just two lines, this one’s only three. “Drop by Albuquerque sometime when you need to.” You built on that better, even though I think your voice is magnificent on this record. But this song is the closest to like, foot stomp and Nashville sound.”
Dan Bern: “Well, I think of it as like early rock and roll, which is early country, which is, you know, it’s all, yeah, it’s exactly that. I think we did three different versions of this. There was one where we imagined it as early Beatles. There was one where we imagined it as early Stones. And I don’t even remember which of the three this was. Will could probably tell you, but I know it was it was just mad fun to do.”
Wil: As I recall we did three versions. Neat and tidy Early Beatles/Carl Perkins, messier early Stones, then a what-the-hell Ramones/no-holds-barred version. The album version is the last one. I have to confess a sort of a romanticized wish that we’d have used the less messy version––it was really good. But I suspect I mostly feel that way since it’s been 25 years since I’ve heard it!
James: “Ten minutes and twenty-seven seconds, my friend. How does someone write like something like this? How does someone write “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands?” How does someone write something this long, sweeping, but not it’s never boring? And I know, again, the way it’s arranged, that every music, it’s like the end of “Hey Jude.” I wrote about it, like everything George Martin does in that, where every na na, all 19 of them, each sweep around some new instruments added, some other thing.”
Wil: Have to admit, when he first played it, we LOVED the song but also we were like, “Is there any of this that could be cut?” Like, this is seriously long, man! The thing no one ever thinks about with a song like that is how long the process becomes. Every take is a regular take x 4. Every time you listen back or want to test eq or whatever, it’s x 4. When you review, edit or mix, three times through is more than a half hour. And we did A TON of takes, overdubs, edits, mixing, etc.
We did cut the Australia verse at first, but once we got well into the finished version, sadness was expressed that we ditched the Australia verse and I was like, if it’s going to be 10 minutes long, what’s another 45 seconds? So, we spliced bass and drums from another verse, overdubbed some banjo and whatnot and back in it went.
It took many attempts to get a take that in retrospect now feels effortless. My favorite of Colin’s drum tracks, because I know how we fought tooth and nail about the groove and where the beat should fall and it made nailing it perfectly feel like we’d won the Super Bowl.
To answer your question, not only was there no click track, we recorded two different versions of the song, spent a couple of months trying to decide which one to use, deciding we liked the basic tracks of one take and the candy and overdubs of the other. Since we couldn’t make up our minds, it was like, “Boy I wish we could have half of one and half of the other!”. I said, “Let me see what I can do.” (another running theme).
Despite no click track I spent a couple of days frankensteining and speed shifting it all together–a massive undertaking only a crazy person would even attempt.
We did make one edit to the song–cut out part of the musical interlude in the harmonica solo before the last verse. That was the only place where it felt like it dragged a bit.
Dan Bern: “The sequencing of it, oh man, it was so hard. And that’s, Chuck helped so much there, but it took, I think it took over a month just to sequence it. Wow. Like, like not casually, like, like actually like working at it, like steadily, because for that exact reason, you know, you want it to feel like it’s, I mean, to say it like it’s a story, I mean, I, I, you can’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know how to like say, but you know, internally, there’s, there’s like it, you want it to hang together, and you want it to feel inevitable, each, each one, as you say, from one to the next. I, I always think of Will’s Mellotron starting this track, you know, before you hear anything else, you just hear this, and then I think the, and then I think the, the vocal comes in before anything else after that.
Yeah.”
Wil: We actually had a whiteboard on the first day in Kansas where we said, okay we’re making a record. I remember specifically saying New American Language was a two-slot track and Bernie telling me it was our leadoff number. But honestly, many of the songs on that first sequence didn’t make the record by the time we finished 18 months later. (“Nuclear Bomb,” “Feel Like a Man,” “Bike,” “Dress,” “Witness” (those latter two featured my personal favorite of my solos ever and then a track that was basically Massive Attack with me overdubbing every weird musical and noise idea I could generate. So much fun and so obscure now) and especially “Walking Through Glass” (maybe my favorite Dan Bern bridge of all time and a recording featuring our dear friend and the somewhat Walking through Glass-like… the late Lisa Donnelly).
Point is, sequencing was always a part of making a record. If you weren’t thinking about sequencing, you weren’t actually committed to making a record.
And if you think sequencing is hard work, in those days I was obsessive (actually obsessive is understating it) about the space between songs in the sequence. Give me a few minutes in the mastering session and I will convince you there is a magic spot for when the next song should start.
Dan Bern: “The tour we did right out of this one, like really the tour of this one, that fall, 9-11 happened. I don’t remember this, but Will swears that this record dropped the day 9-11 happened on that Tuesday. You know, within a week or two, we were on tour.”
Wil: The official release date was the following week I am told but I am certain we had promo copies out and the label was working the record on Tuesday morning, because that was when the new releases went out and when record companies (especially indies) had a chance to plug records with stores and radio. Regardless, the release date meant any momentum was thwarted.
The best thing that happened was not only that we played a show very soon after 9/11 in NYC with first responders in the audience who were moved beyond belief by God Said No among others. It really was a record that was tailor-made for the exact time it came out in.
As a giant fan of the A History of Rock in 500 Songs podcast, hearing the record discussed on your show was the second-best podcast I can think of being mentioned on. To paraphrase Chuck lol. I think it’s pretty unlikely Dan will be mentioned on 500 Songs (his spirit would just leave his body if that ever happens) let alone me, but I have been enjoying hearing the names of several people I’ve played with or met making appearances on the show. I’ll add being mentioned on your podcast to my most cherished honors.
Thank you again for being such a great supporter of Dan’s and for keeping this record in your soul and your heart unbroken by this world.
That is one mouth-full title. Mainly because I need to qualify that this week’s column is not meant to be demonstrative, pejorative or even lock-solid opining. I’m on the proverbial fence for this one. I mean only to ask the question and try and answer as best I can without insult or overt judging: Is it compelling for a legacy band to continue on without a key member? I have always been conflicted (less so now – will explain) when it comes to fractured versions of bands I love. This goes way back for me, as I was forced yet utterly enjoyed seeing bands like The Rolling Stones and The Who in their early-eighties iterations, by which I mean not currently the members of which who are in their eighties now, but the decade. Still, it’s become ever more prevalent in an age where rock music has slid off the side of the earth and much of its fanbase has retreated to modern country (which is essentially early aughts power pop songs about pickup trucks and beer) – am I already judgmental? – or the sight of ancient bands rolling out nostalgia tours with in some cases like Foreigner zero original members.
This question has returned due to a very surprising reuniting of bassist, singer, and songwriter, Geddy Lee and original guitarist and songwriter, Alex Lifeson to form a new victory-lap version of the once lauded if not mostly overlooked Canadian fusion power-trio, Rush. Not that it is surprising any legacy band fresh from a woefully overdue Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and Lee’s recent memoir, which included an extensive media tour, would consider hitting the road, despite the death of its dynamically unique drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart. These things happen all the time, and usually for summer. Take The Eagles, with several key members gone, most notably founder and major voice, Glenn Frey, who died ten years go. His son now takes his chores, which is heartwarmingly weird. There is also Journey without signature voice Steve Perry, and for a while Pink Floyd without mostly main songwriter and voice, Roger Waters, and on and on.
I initially thought the Pink Floyd thing was a little silly. Waters pretty much dominated the band’s final years and always lent the thematic lyrical thread to their songs, but he was and remains an unrepentant megalomaniac, who treated his bandmates like session cats to do his bidding. They were glad to jettison him when they disbanded and came back together in the 1980s for a mega-successful run, much to Waters chagrin. As guitarist, and songwriter, David Gilmour once mused, “I can play the local pub across the street from Madison Square Garden as David Gilmour or sell out the arena with Pink Floyd. What are you choosing?”
And far be it from me to begrudge musicians making a buck. Even aging famous ones. Since the Napster revolution and now streaming it is nearly impossible for anyone in the music industry to make any money on record sales (whatever that is these days) Everyone must tour. Even Taylor Swift, who sells more of everything than anyone. These Rush shows are selling out as fans clamor for a bit of rock nostalgia. And many of us are aging out anyway, so fuck it! This is why I eventually, some say inevitably, bagged this flimsy philosophy of purity in my bands, specifically in 2010 when I saw the last incarnation of KISS amble around MSG. I had a blast. Who cares who’s left wearing the make-up? Purity is for the young.
But back to Rush: Neil Peart was a vital cornerstone of the band, its themes, its drive, not to mention his mind-blowing drumming being non-parallel. When he died in 2020 at 67, Rush had been around in some form (Peart wasn’t even their original drummer or on their first album) for 58 years. It’s not like when Keith Moon or John Bonham died in their thirties when the bands they drove were still relevant – never mind lead singer of AC/DC, Bon Scott up and dying to leave the band to release the biggest selling rock album of all time, Back in Black in his wake with a replacement, Brian Johnson, who is still there today. This was a bunch of old guys making the call. Six years ago, in their late sixties, after decades behind them, Lee and Lifeson pretty much hung it up. But, ultimately, they’re musicians. Musicians play music. And they’re great friends, unlike Pink Floyd. So, they decided to do this legacy tour and it has been widely well received and attended. No one at these shows are conflicted in the least, if concert tickets sold is any indication. Those ain’t cheap these days. In fact, they’re deplorably over-priced no matter what budget you’re working with. People must have really wanted to see Rush, Neil Peart or not.
And this is to not even to broach Rush’s fabulous current drummer, Anika Nilles, a 43-year-old German virtuoso who previously toured with the late Jeff Beck’s band. Watching clips of this woman absolutely crush some of the most intricate drum patterns and time signature shifts in popular music history on YouTube recently left me awe-struck. She’s fucking amazing, and has breathed new life into their songs. And so, no beef there. I find it less egregious than The Stones continuing on without Charlie Watts, simply because of the indescribable groove Charlie lent to those songs. There is no one, not even the brilliant, Steve Jordan (a Watts protégé who played with the band’s entrenched guitarist, Keith Richards solo band, the X-Pensive Winos) can replicate. An uber-talented Nilles, can do this with Rush songs, because they’re like charted segments whose specificity makes them classic. Watts was a swing machine that laid the groundwork. Peart played parts that if funneled through a master can make you close your eyes and dream the man who wrote them is still there. Not so much for Charlie.
But it’s still weird, right? Neil Peart is not just any drummer. His legacy is one of ingenuity and originality, reinventing how the instrument was approached. No matter how good Nilles is, Peart’s presence is almost mandatory for Rush to be… ya know… Rush. No? And I am sure on a personal level it must be tough at points for Lee and Lifeson to not see him back there. It’s human nature. Playing those songs they’ve played with Peart for all those years. Has to be a nightly emotional rollercoaster – honoring him, while missing him.
I honestly wonder how Rush fans feel about this, after they buy the tickets, make the trek to the arena, and leave the place with some measure of bittersweetness. I don’t know. I’m not a big fan of Rush. I know their work as any serviceable music journalist should – even those cranks who never respected them – but this question remains for all fans of aged-out rockers or any genre of music in which your favorite group is torn asunder by death or otherwise. Are we good with this? Or more importantly, does it really matter if we are or not?
On the cusp of his 84th birthday, Paul McCartney has released arguably his most revealing, poignant and personal of records, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, a musical memoir of his days before fame and fortune, before Elvis Presley and Little Richard, before John Lennon, the Beatles, Ed Sullivan, Shea Stadium, Sgt. Pepper’s, “Hey Jude,” Linda Eastman, the break-up, the dust-ups, Wings, and decades of hits and experimental albums of varying degrees of quality. The entirety of his canon, vast and sprawling, as of a piece, in the span of a lifetime spent becoming the most prolific and successful songwriter ever.
It is the kind of artistic statement one would want from an aging composer, a personality who is as recognized as any in the history of celebrity, and who’s time in the limelight has been both an open book and a hazy mystery – a man once presumed dead because he decided to decamp to a run-down cottage in Scotland with his wife and kids for a spate, a man who has survived the death of two bandmates and his beloved wife of nearly 30 years. Yet, we know so little about how McCartney sees his life in song, how he views the destiny-altering moments that make up his story. He was hardly ever the Beatle who wrote from the first person – that was John’s thing, and sometimes George Harrison. Paul wrote third-person character studies about Eleanor Rigby, Lady Madonna, Uncle Albert and Auntie Gin, lovely Rita the meter maid and someone called Maxwell wielding a hammer.
This makes, as stated above, The Boys of Dungeon Lane a remarkable document, a nostalgic notation from a man who clearly wants to get this down and put it out before those memories inevitably dim. His voice on the record is indeed ragged with mileage, softer than his halcyon days, surely, but his composing still displays a razor-sharp alacrity for melody and storytelling. This time, as his old mate John did with Plastic Ono Band at age 30 and Bob Dylan did with Blood on the Tracks at 32, he’s aimed his microscopic deconstruction of the human condition on himself – not Beatle Paul, but young Paul from the lazy riverfront hamlet of Speke some eight miles from the center of Liverpool.
I was moved to give the album, named after a road in his hometown, a listen simply because I felt committed to comment, having written a book essentially about Paul McCartney as told through his most lasting song, Take a Sad Song – The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, published in 2022. That was Paul as a 26-year-old rock star on top of the world, falling in love with the woman for which he will spend every waking hour from that time forward, and as comfort for the son of his songwriting partner, five-year-old, Julian, whose father would be leaving his family for a new love, Yoko Ono. Let her into your heart. Researching that song and the subjects that inspired McCartney then brought me to his losing his beloved mother, Mary to breast cancer when he was 14 and she was only 47, and how John Lennon too had suffered a similar trauma at 17 when his mother was killed by a drunk motorist. Take a sad song and make it better. That connection in grief, in drive, in a passionate need to express through the salvation of rock and roll informed their best love songs that reflected the search for a woman to fill the void.
But although John was quite open about this, Paul never was, instead giving us songs celebrating the universal mother in “Your Mother Should Know” and “Lady Madonna.” It is not until the final track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane, “Momma Gets By,” perhaps his last and most precious statement – assuming the mid-eighties into his nonagenarian twilight doesn’t produce anymore music – that we’re invited into that chasm. The lilting verses with notions of a strong, impenetrable woman, who imparts her own philosophy of life, but agrees to be someone’s wife: And even though hе’s complicated, she takes it in her stride, he sweetly intones, singing What are his silly faults compared to what she feels inside? The final words sung on the album, She loves him / She loves him with all her heart and soul is moving stuff.
But McCartney, like David Bowie’s Black Star or Warren Zevon’s The Wind, albums by dying artists as their last statement, decides instead he’d like to stick around to see how this creation will land. It is so Paul. He makes music to please, not to expunge. And these songs are good, solid numbers, truly the work of a pro, as always. Right from the start with the bouncy, “As You Lie There,” McCartney treads the line between rock ephemera and Beatle-esque charm, but it is telling that an album that closes with the ardently dense, “Momma Gets By,” which significantly follows “Salesman Saint” with its opening lines, My father was a salesman / My mother was a saint launches with a song about a young girl Paul had a crush on but could never get. The most eligible bachelor in pop music history, the one that had all the girls clamoring for, wistfully recalls looking up at her window wondering (some seven decades hence) what she thought of him, if anything. Her name, we’re told in story is Jasmine, but never in the song. She is distant but inside his head, as he wonders if he is inside hers. He does tell of a chance passing, nothing that would matter to her, but is everything to him – preluding his love life for years, as the loss of his mother would. It is important to note “As You Lie There” is the longest track on the record at nearly five minutes (the second longest, ahem, is the closer, “Momma Gets By”).
McCartney follows “As You Lie There” with two songs about his second and third favorite subjects after women, and that’s music and eternal friendships. “Lost Horizon” – apparently an older song from about a quarter-century ago – hints of his hearing Music from a distant fairground; the fête in which he first met a rough and ready teenage John Lennon fronting the Quarrymen – the legendary history-altering détente that Was the start of the first day of forever. “Days We Left Behind,” is a contemplation on what a young man ignores along the way to stardom in smoky bars and cheap guitars, but nothing built to last. Touchstones and road marks. Who pays attention to details then? McCartney did, or at least reinvents new ones, as we all do with our faulty memories.
Later in the album McCartney uses conveyances like buses and their destination to express growing up with “Down South,” which means heading into Liverpool proper and then later into London to make his fortune. It is on a bus where Paul meets a 13-year-old George Harrison and puts him on a path to audition for this Lennon kid (on the same bus-line) and join a band that will tilt the axis of the planet: The morning bus was where we two would meet / I sat beside you on an empty seat / We’d talk about guitars and rock and roll / They were the subjects that would nеver grow old.
Ringo, the only other living Beatle, gets his time to shine too, as he debuts the first-ever recorded duet between he and Paul in “Home to Us,” a quaint ditty about growing up working class where the roses in the yard began to wilt, and then they turned to dust / But it was home to us. This one, like most of the songs here, support the lyrics with musical nods to the period, like on “Salesman Saint,” where Paul’s dad, James, of the Jimmy Mac Jazz Band, is honored with old-timey fanfare in the background. McCarney showing off his well-worn talents to tell aural stories as well as literal ones. Plaudits too must go to producer, Andrew Watt (Lady GaGa, Justin Beiber, Post Malone), who is given writing credit on four songs, something to not take lightly on a Paul McCartney record. He also produced the upcoming Rolling Stones album and worked with Elton John. He can apparently jump generations with ease.
But McCartney holds out one memory of love in “We Two,” which he transmutes into Linda, the mother of his children, a woman for which he will spend only a handful of days apart starting in 1968 until her death in 1998. Although not meeting the timeline of this romantic excursion into the past, it is difficult to ignore the first mention of “two” in a McCartney-penned title since the exquisite, “Two of Us” that both he and John harmonized beautifully back in 1969. Many, including me, always thought it was about their journey in songwriting and rock star partnership, but it was about escaping the world to disappear into Linda. Two of us riding nowhere / Spending someone’s hard-earned pay / You and me Sunday driving / Not arriving on our way back home. With half a century in between them Paul sings, My thoughts return to you… / Always, always, my friend / You’ll be my only one, concluding with a nod to recalling Mother Mary who comes to him in a dream in one of his epic ballads, “Let It Be” – Last night I dreamed of you / And all that we could do / Together, side by side / We two can do.
These are just some examples of what the 14 tracks, maybe Paul’s finest or at least most compelling songs in some time, offer. The album is a triumph in framing a life before the life. A tribute to those who loved or despised or even ignored him for him, not an icon in his winter years looking back in fondness, as only Paul could ever do. His emotional currency still worth every shilling.
Do-It-Yourself has many connotations in every walk of life, whether home improvement, auto repair, cooking, fashion, or using technology to create, but in the music biz it is a rarity. So many producers, engineers, and studio musicians, never mind bandmembers! But when it does occur, it can be magical, the way something insular and without outside influence can enhance the creative process. There is a high-wire-without-a-net sense of danger that emerges, including times when the artist may go “too far,” although some fans might dig that journey, even if the music travels beyond what they expect.
Sometimes DIY is due to need, as in it is cheap and compact, but then that means the singular voice and accompaniment must be of a higher level than what can be achieved with a full arsenal of assistance. Although that is noble and endearing, there is also the singular statement made from choice, the desire to strip away the accoutrements of the pop life to parse it down to the essentials – song and artist unencumbered.
I use the singular to frame my DIY Top 10, as I steered clear of bands going off on their own and achieving a masterwork outside “the system” – the most famous of these would be the Rolling Stones, seminal Exile on Main St., written and performed on the fly in a French basement far from music business interference, or The Band’s debut album, Music From Big Pink, another homemade creation with the five members hacking away at songs while a reel-to-reel captured the proceedings. But this list is primarily one artist toiling alone (and one very young duo), sometimes in a proper studio, sometimes at home with their own equipment, and in one instance captured on tape by a campfire.
When it’s done right, either by design or happenstance, a musical DIY is a thing of pure beauty and most times reveals an underlying aspect of the artist, his/her methods, personal expressions, and themes never achieved in any other format. In some cases, the artists never quite get to this level of unfiltered brilliance again, forced to chase it during their career arc, and in others, they view it as a one-off wherein they had to escape the parameters of their oeuvre to reset and begin anew. Regardless of reason or execution, this list is a celebration of the quality and surprises music lovers get when we stumble on a DIY album.
There are very little guidelines for this one, beyond these records must be made with almost, and in some cases, no creative support beyond maybe an engineer to capture the performances or minimal complement added after the original sessions. Again, some of these might be bold artistic statements and others reduced to a solo venture due to circumstances beyond their control. There are many to cite that didn’t make the list, so let me know what I missed, share your favorites beyond these, or perhaps your thoughts on what you may have discovered from the truly great albums below.
10. Ani DiFranco – Ani DiFranco
We begin with Ani, because we must. This could easily be #1 on this list, and certainly higher when considering all that goes with it. But she goes first, because Ani Difranco remains at the forefront of this exercise for not only creating her debut album (it was originally a cassette she recorded and whisked around New York City in 1990) by her lonesome, but putting it out with zero assistance. And so was born Righteous Babe Records, a singular operation run from her hometown of Buffalo, New York that would go on to produce all her subsequent work, hire a host of hearty souls, and launch or usher along many careers (not the least of which my pal, Dan Bern). Along the way, she refused millions thrown at her from big record companies to instead win Grammys and build a dedicated fanbase.
This all begins with Ani Difranco, featuring her uniquely percussive guitar playing and a penetratingly staccato vocal delivery that is adorably trenchant and unwaveringly powerful. The black and white photo on its cover of a bald and defiantly impenetrable 20-year-old songsmith, who appears to be looking beyond limitation and into the infinite, tells the tale of what is inside – songs that cover the gamut of love, lust, regret, fear, anguish and longing that are lyrically beyond her years but nevertheless evoke a sense of earned wisdom.
When I saw Ani preform in the mid-90s, she was backed by her famous rhythm section of Sara Lee on bass and drummer, Andy Stochansky, an intrepid power trio that provided unique insight into how DiFranco would have sounded by herself bouncing around dives in Greenwich Village while conjuring this music. It was one singular rhythm machine, chugging and bopping beneath her quasi-rap delivery that sparked an underground female revolution.
9. Dirty Mind – Prince
Okay, so when you think of a “solitary entity” pop artist – as I put it in my latest book, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era, you think of Prince Rogers Nelson, as many of his albums boast: Produced, Arranged, Composed and Performed by Prince. He was the ultimate control-freak taskmaster, who wore down engineers, as he jumped from the drums to guitar, then bass, and a host of keyboards like a madman on a mission. But Dirty Mind sticks out for me, because as he put it in a rare 1980 interview upon its release, Dirty Mind was his “bloodstream on vinyl.” Although unlike his previous two records, For You and Prince, this one featured keyboardist, Matt Fink on a ripping solo for one song and pianist, Lisa Coleman’s voice in a spoken-word cameo for another, the rest, however, is pure Prince.
Alone in his Minneapolis home studio on the banks of that town’s many lakes, and away from the prying eyes of his label, Warner Bros, who amazingly granted him full control of his music as a teenager, Prince tackled several genres, from new wave to funk, soul to punk, distilling the essence of new and powerful pop music. But beyond its sonic schizophrenia, the subjects covered on the songs inside his “dirty mind” were a buffet of sexual deviancy. These included masturbation, incest, bisexuality, infidelity, sexual addiction, along with the thorny subjects of war and social revolution.
Prince, well known for building myths, put himself at the center of this maelstrom, becoming, as he preached to his touring band, “pure sex.” In many ways, this is the album that propelled the theme-heavy, world-building Prince that went on to dominate the 1980s, not only as an iconic pop star, but a shapeshifter and paradigm-exploding phenomenon. The promise of this ascent is in the grooves of his most compelling, controversial and singular proclamation that floored critics and eradicated the racial boundaries of his era’s musical landscape.
8. The Campfire Tapes – Michelle Shocked
The making of Michelle Shocked’s first “album” is a tale of many DIY heroes. Starting with Pete Lawrence, who had never been to the United States before he attended the Kerrville Folk Festival that ran from May 23 to June 1 1986 in Central Texas. As founder of a brand-new independent label, Cooking Vinyl (very DIY), the hearty Brit was intrigued by the festival, founded by husband-wife team, Rod Kennedy and Nancylee Davis, in 1972 (super DIY), in a town 65 miles northwest of San Antonio. There he met 24-year-old proto-anti-folk antecedent, Karen Michelle Johnston, who was going by the name of Michelle Shocked. Searching for unsigned talent, the fish-out-of-water Lawrence found Shocked, who was looking for a label that believed in her hybrid folk/punk/jazz compositions played exclusively on a beat-up acoustic guitar (mega-DIY). The two landed by a campfire on the outskirts of the festival where the budding record exec pleaded with her to play some songs. Shocked entertained Lawrence with a dozen of them.
Shocked has always claimed that Lawrence ran his Sony Walkman secretly as she casually demoed the songs – the crickets serenading in the background, as a fire crackled in the foreground. Lawrence remembers telling her he’d needed to tape the proceedings to present to his staff. Regardless of the purported serendipity, what Lawrence captured that night was a strange combination of impassioned singing of insightful to playful lyrics, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and the sounds of a Texas night. Good ol’ by-the-campfire crooning – rural, Southern American style with a strong female edge.
Lawrence was, as the English say, gobsmacked by what he heard on that tape and convinced Shocked that she should release it as her debut, free of stale studio environs or adorned by seasoned pros who didn’t get her organic stylings. To her credit, because there are a bevy of imperfections that could have been tightened by takes in a proper studio, Shocked agreed. After moving to Europe, the two released the aptly titled, The Campfire Tapes later that year.
The album’s unfiltered charm became a humble curiosity in a world of big-hair pop-rock, rap, and mega-superstar releases, rising to #1 on the British independent record chart. It was later picked up in the U.S. by Mercury Records, which is how I discovered it whilst working at Record World in Westchester, NY and began my love of stuff like this – raw, independent music made by artists unafraid of the warts of playing that music from the heart. I immediately began recording my own songs this way into tape machines, further inspired by some of the works further up this list.
Michelle Shocked would go onto a fair career of pushing her un-style to the masses, but for me, this was her apex. She seemed to understand this too, later releasing a version of The Campfire Tapes in 2003 as a two-CD set called Texas Campfire Takes by her own label, Mighty Sound (mega-meta-DIY).
7. Life’ll Kill Ya – Warren Zevon
When Warren Zevon made Life’ll Kill Ya essentially in his apartment during the final months of the 20th century for indie label, Artimas Records, he’d already authored one hell of a “career” of wild abandon: Greek-level-tragic missteps, spectacular alcohol and drug abuses, insane antics aimed at the very hands that fed him personally and professionally, and general mayhem that only he could engender. Label founders, Danny Goldberg, former manager of Nirvana, and Daniel Glass, an industry titan, had mercy on him, because through it all, including a truncated time when everyone knew him as the “Werewolves of London” guy, Zevon was a master songwriter with few peers.
The trail of tears in his wake attested to this. As I covered in my 2018 book, Accidentally Like a Martyr – the Tortured Art of Warren Zevon, the Californian satirist cum songsmith put it all on the line in every one of his compositions that usually covered a wide range of crazies, criminals, outcasts, and the broken-hearted. It may have been difficult to be around Warren Zevon (his son, Jordan described it to me like “trying to hug a hand grenade”), but it was apparently well worth it.
Zevon did not know he would only live another four years when he wrote and recorded the songs on the ironically titled, Life’ll Kill Ya, which was released in the first month of the new millennium, but it sounds like he may have intuited it, for it confronts a lifetime of irrational behavior with some regret and a ton of that Zevon dark humor. The album is a paean to the experience of dancing on the dangerous edges with an intimate forlorn penance. But Zevon, as always, leaves plenty of space for bizarre turns. Having been sober for nearly 15 years, he noted to journalists upon the album’s release that although desperation and lack of funds forced him to confront such isolation, it brought out the best/worst in him that was thankfully captured on tape.
6. Metal Machine Music – Lou Reed
The most famous FUCK YOU ever handed to a record company, Metal Machine Music was Lou Reed’s most avant-garde statement of a career swollen with grand avant-garde statements. It is hard to find anything from a rock artist, even one as contrarian as Lou Reed, that resembles this record on any level of dissonant ambient craziness. The entire (double album!) consists of screeching, moaning and careening from electric guitars into and out of amplifiers at incomparable volumes. I wish I could properly explain how unlistenable this is, and how I can barely make it through four minutes of any of it. It is less album than a test of one’s tolerance.
Irrespective of its unpalatable aural assault, Metal Machine Music, featuring only Reed, his guitar, a cranked amp and a lot of chutzpah, make it a DIY extravaganza. No songs, no production to speak of, or certainly no mixing decisions here. Mind-bendingly horrific and concussive aural explosions emanating from one man.
Now, if one deigns to fathom that Reed, infamous for his truculent press interviews and general ennui, was not fucking with RCA in the summer of 1975, then to hear him tell it, this was a genuine attempt at musical exploration. Firstly, his tuning all the strings of his guitar to the same note was his homage to the mid-1960s drone music of La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music, whose members included previous Velvet Underground bandmates, John Cale and Angus MacLise. But while Young’s atonal machinations can be a direct link to the Velvet’s work, its connection to this chaos is stretching credulity. When pressed further on whether this was an actual attempt at art or just spiteful meandering, Reed began citing Beethoven, which was lost on critics and fans.
Much later, after Reed’s death, live performances of Metal Machine Music were attempted with minimal interest, but at the very least cemented Reed’s candid expressions as legitimate music and not just an elaborately blaring prank.
5. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? – Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish was 17-years-old when she began the proper sessions for what would become her debut album alongside her brother, Finneas O’Connell, who was 21 at the time. As many creative siblings might do – pooling their imaginations and resources to make something fun – they retreated to a bedroom in their Highland Park, California home and started making songs. Well, they started making sounds: slithering, beat-orientated music beds that evoked dread and allure with sinisterly impish delight. You know, kids being kids.
O’Connell created all this with some combination of a Logic Pro X, a Universal Audio Apollo 8 interface funneled into a pair of Yamaha HS5 studio monitors with an H8S subwoofer because it was convenient and private, which is why kids retreat to bedrooms to make stuff in the first place. But later he and his sister surmised that the environment was the key to the music, as it reflected the type of intimacy that you hear on Eilish’s unnervingly near-whispered vocals that are eerily detached and menacing. And there is plenty of tongue-planted humor in here too – the record opens with the two of them laughing, as if they might let you in on the joke.
What was no joke was the immense effect When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? would have on popular music, the charts, and the zeitgeist in 2019. That little girl stumbling out of her bed in a darkened room on its cover, her eyes, an alien rolled-over white, spoke volumes. This was a missive like no other of its time. The two kids would go onto make more pop records, and to their credit they did not go for a more direct sequel, but none of them has yet presented the original ingenuity of what came out of that room.
4. Pink Moon – Nick Drake
Holed up in his apartment suffering from deep bouts of depression and smoking copious amounts of marijuana, the soon-to-be 26-year-old Nick Drake was determined to express his plight in song alone. The British singer-songwriter with a soulfully English tone to his unique brand of traditional folk had been convinced to make two albums for Island Records, both of which are still sublime listens today, Five Leaves Left (1969), and Bryter Layter (1970), featuring an abundance of overdubs by seasoned studio musicians. Drake felt these embellishments made his intimate songs of love and loss overly saccharine. A recent listen to the stripped-down versions of his first album released as a box set last year bears this out.
Defiant of his record company’s wishes and boosted by the fair argument that his first two albums did not sell anyway, Drake spent nearly a year by himself with only an engineer, who claims the singer-songwriter never once looked up at him, working out the songs for what would become Pink Moon, an introspective foray into the depths of melancholia. This unsettling missive not only perplexed and concerned his dwindling fanbase, but confounded critics, who pounced, spelling the end of Drake’s career, which set him adrift for two more years until his apparent suicide by overdose of the antidepressant pills he’d refused to take earlier in his life.
Drake’s death at 26 in November of 1974, deemed a suicide, left Pink Moon, released in 1972, as his final statement of pain and loneliness. Nevertheless, the album, along with his legacy, was given a boost in the 1990s with the advent of alternative folk and a more elevated and empathetic understanding of depression in artists and young people in general. Many filmmakers have used Drake’s work to great effect, noting his relentless search for truth within his suffering in much of his music, which resonates in its greatest form on this, his final album.
3. Hi, How Are You? – Daniel Johnston
Daniel Johnston, the crown prince of DIY, was a solitary kid, and when he was alone, he was a creation machine – films, animation, comic books, poems, paintings, and songs. Tons of songs. Weird songs. Sad songs. Beseeching songs of sorrow and imagination. Each of these songs, adorned with sound-effects from children’s toys, archaic overdubbing between two boomboxes, and crude percussion accompaniment, as he banged on anything available to him, were recorded hundreds of times in garages and basements on out-of-tune guitars and clunky pianos. Then Daniel, who was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, collected those sonic and lyrical oddities onto cassettes, drew surreal images of strange characters and audacious creations from his head on their covers, and marched around Austin, Texas, handing them to whomever he’d meet on the street or the McDonald’s in which he worked.
Hi, How Are You? remains Johnston’s most recognizable of those collections, mainly due to its drawing of a frog-like alien creature he called Jeremiah the Innocent that dominates its iconic stark-white cover. He would later paint Jermiah as a mural on the side of a record store. It still exists today as a single wall after the building was torn down, as Austin citizens wanting to “keep Austin weird” welcome the thousands who come to it as if a religious pilgrimage each year. I’ve paid my respects twice.
Around the time of this cassette’s release in 1983, MTV came down to Austin to cover its growing music community and after Johnston bugged them incessantly, the influentially hip network put him on the air. This was seen by many in the growing alterative and grunge scene, not the least of which Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain, who was just one of thousands of us who discovered this wunderkind, famously wearing a tee shirt of the cover of Hi, How Are You? at the 1992 MTV Awards.
This all culminates in the low-fi sonic purity of Daniel’s naive wittiness on Hi, How Are You?, performed with a desperation rarely displayed by most of us who are not dealing with mental illness, who can somehow survive a dangerous and uncaring world with filters unavailable to singular souls like Daniel Johnston.
2. Living with Ghosts – Patty Griffin
The 22-year-old Patty Griffin recorded a batch of brilliant songs with just her acoustic guitar and her magnificent voice hoping to get signed, which she did, by A&M Records. The label then put her in a studio with a professional collection of musicians, as they tried in vain to capture the heart-wrenching beatific quintessence of those songs. No one knew what to do about this. So, Patty queried A&M, “You signed me on the strength of those recordings, why not put those out?” And to the label’s credit, they did in May of 1996.
Patty told me in 2004, “I didn’t really have much choice at the time. I was really pretty down about having my record that I made with all the fanfare rejected, so I was not in a very good mindset to make another one. But that’s how I played those songs then. That was the way I performed them live. I never really played with a band before, so it made a lot of sense to me that that would be the way they would be done best.”
Living with Ghosts is what a singer-songwriter is at its core. There is no artifice, no production, no accompaniment, just a woman and her incredible talent shining through. The songs sound, because they are, intimate and personal and inevitably soar on the strength of the very elements that make us human with all the messiness and imperfections. But it is that voice, the pained, pristine, undeniable splendor of the way she delivers her quaint, brain-scarring melodies, proving that to add anything else to it is artistic malfeasance. And so, this album remains her opening salvo in a career that would grow into more collaborative avenues but always remained true to its source.
1. Nebraska – Bruce Springsteen
The mother of all DIYs (Patty Griffin and Ani Difranco both told me this inspired them on their minimalist quest) has been celebrated now in literary and cinematic form. Famously, Bruce Springsteen took a dramatic left turn from his arc of 1970s albums that followed his and his generation’s evolution culminating with The River, which contained his first ever radio hit, “Hungry Heart,” and disappeared into a room inside a rented Central Jersey ranch house to record alone on a four-track machine. The song themes shifted radically from personal to uber-personal through characters that reflected the eroding times for the early-80s working-class America, desperate outcasts reduced to ghostly romantic figures trapped in a national identity crisis. And when the E Street Band couldn’t make heads or tails of these stripped down, haunted demos, Springsteen tossed the beat-up cassette to master engineer, Chuck Plotkin to make into a record. And what a record!
Nebraska is no mere statement, it is a manifesto, and it is Springsteen at his finest as a storyteller (Bruce has insisted for years it is his best work and I am inclined to agree, as it is the only Springsteen album I ever bought and enjoyed, mainly because he told me and a bunch of kids sitting around the Stone Pony one night what he was doing out at that ranch and how excited he was about it). And the distorted, low-fi grit of these songs resound in the type of heightened rock and roll theater that Bob Dylan once captured so perfectly in his early one-man-with-a-guitar period.
Springsteen pained over these compositions, re-writing lyrics and trying alternate vocal intonations. His constant editing took on a novelist approach to the repetitive rewriting needed to find what F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “high white note.” What is on that tape and the nucleus of Nebraska is a disciplined determination of the craft of songwriting and performance, which served the Boss well throughout the rest of his career that was never a safe foray into rote but a personal challenge to grow without fear.
Ironically, Nebraska may be Bruce Springsteen’s most rock and roll of albums, for there is nothing louder than a man possessed in his own idiom alone and without amplification that seduces grandeur, when all of it, like all the records noted here, reaches this pinnacle of DIY.
In the year 1900, Mark Twain, the father of American letters, took a stab at parody songwriting and penned new lyrics to the “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a stirringly beautiful ballad written by Julia Ward Howe during the American Civil War often associated with the presidency and assassination of then President Abraham Lincoln. By using this war-themed and wholly ingrained melody as a backdrop to his biting commentary about American imperialism run amok, which began rearing its ugly head two decades before and continues today unchecked by our lunatic, criminal president what’s his name, he doubles down on the theme.
For your dancing and listening pleasure, I offer Mr. Samuel Clemens’s first verse:
Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword;
He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger’s wealth is stored;
He hath loosed his fateful lightnings, and with woe and death has scored;
His lust is marching on.
Man, is this spot-on, like most of Twain’s work that after a century-plus still kicks the ass of modern critique. And so, now, 126 years later we have another broken administration entangling America in another senseless imperialist money-grab conflict. As we await new songs to refute this horror show, we’ll have some fun and look back this week on my Top Ten Anti-War Songs of all time.
As usual, whether my 300 Favorite Albums podcast or any list I’ve presented here thus far, we have some rules. The songs below must be general commentaries on war – as you can neatly apply Twain’s ditty to the current stupidity going on in Iran. Fun fact, in the nearly 250-year history (“celebrated” this July), the United States has been at war for 235 of them. This includes the twenty-plus years of war we just endured or more pointedly ignored from 2002 to a couple of years ago. Fifteen years of peace. Wow! It’s like celebrating a country that allows a Black man to play baseball a century after the freeing of African Americans from slavery, which, again, necessitated a war that slaughtered over 600,000 Americans.
But I digress. There are also no specific wars referenced in the songs here. This includes Northern Ireland, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” by U2, or the Viet Nam War, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die” by Country Joe & the Fish,” “Lay Down Your Arms,” Doron Levinson’s commentary on the Yom Kippur War, or the Cold War dirge by Sting, “Russians.” I also veer away from songs that speak of the racist slant of war (Marvin Gaye’s masterful soul classic, “What’s Goin’ On”) or our government using the poor (Creedence Clearwater Revival’s raucous beauty, “Fortunate Son”) to fight their battles.
And so, in the wake of our latest madness for today, tomorrow and likely forever around here, and the return of selective service for all American men from 18 to 25 coming later this year, I give you my Top Ten Anti-War Songs list.
10. “Political Science” – Randy Newman (1972)
We begin with the 20th century’s version of Mark Twain, America’s finest musical satirist, Randy Newman, with a song that celebrates wiping out the world because “they hate us anyhow, so let’s drop the big one now.” The unreliable narrator in Newman couldn’t help inhabiting the persona of the subjects he skewered – a bigot in “Short People’ or a slave trader from the title track of the album in which “Political Science” resides, Sail Away. Here he voices a crazed power-mad grievance master, which eerily reflects our current commander-in-chief, with just the right amount of shrugging to underscore how little powerful nations care about mass destruction. Newman always winced when he performed this live, often remarking on how surprised he was by audience snickers (it is damn funny), who in his humble estimation were unable to fathom the song’s authenticity or discomfort. Either way, Randy, as usual, like Mr. Clemens, nails it.
One – Metallica (1989)
Perhaps the most unsettling and trenchant of all the songs here, it is difficult to comprehend its tragic framework; so perfectly couched in a melancholy dirge befitting its subject. A true departure from the thrash-metal kings, Metallica, it was written by guitarist, James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, portraying a severely wounded solider by a land mine. He is blind, deaf, and unable to speak or move and begs God to take his life: “Hold my breath as I wish for death / Oh, please, God, wake me!” Oof. A disturbing music video, intercut with haunting scenes from the 1971 anti-war film, Johnny Got His Gun, depicts the victim attempting to communicate with the hospital staff, spastically jolting in his bed while he spells SOS in Morse code. Strangely, or maybe not considering our fascination with war around here, this was one of the underground band’s biggest hits, winning a Grammy, and helping to set up their rise to one of the most potent bands of the era.
8. The Gunner’s Dream – Pink Floyd (1983)
In one of the darkest commentaries on the generational ravages of war, Roger Waters, songwriter, bassist, and main lyricist for Pink Floyd in the seventies into the early eighties, weighs in on the personal trauma of losing his father in World War II in this haunting song about a fallen “hero” as mere systemic fodder. A sequel to The Wall, essentially a treatise on the terrible fallout of that war on a swath of artists, film-makers, and mostly musicians that grew out of its horrors, prompting a failure in wiping it all away with fame, drugs, loose women, and empty songs of pseudo-revolution, The Final Cut, in which this song is the centerpiece, strips away all the metaphor and gets down to the pure fear and loathing therein. The doleful refrain of “no one kills the children anymore” is obliterated by the more realistic depiction of government-sanctioned murder, as “What’s done is done / We cannot just write off his final scene/ Take heed of the dream.”
7. After the Parade – Dan Bern (2004)
My friend, the prolific singer-songwriter, Dan Bern planted “After the Parade,” a forlorn and gripping snapshot of a wounded veteran of war dealing with its fallout beyond the pomp of metals and parades, in an EP he titled My Country II during his yearlong protest-tour against the two wars that defined the opening years of this century. On the front lines, so to speak, with him, during this time, I was in the studio for some of these recordings, and I can tell you Bern was not, as he never is, fucking around. His defiance on the tall tales of “weapons of mass destruction” that were clearly fantasy but which sent hundreds of our best into a killing zone sent him on a quest to question it all by taking on the voice of the soldier. Like Randy Newman, with less snark, it is a powerful way to express the senselessness of war and the family wreckage it leaves in its wake: “Who do you think will push my chair / After the parade is done?”
6. Phil Ochs – ‘I Ain’t Marching Any More’ (1965)
Ochs opens this ditty as if an Irish jig, casting a strangely chipper pall on the stanzas that count down the ceaseless violence facing generations of soldiers from the Battle of New Orleans (War of 1812) to the slaughter of General Custer’s murderous legion at Little Big Horn (1876), the great land-grab boondoggle of the Mexican-American War to the human meatgrinder of the American Civil War (early 1860s), the “War to End All Wars,” WWI (1917), its planet-devasting sequel, WWII (1941-1945), to the endless skirmishes of the Cold War (the second half of the American Century). One of the few songs here or anywhere that runs the gamut of infinite engagement, throughout, Ochs sounds equal parts exhausted, disgusted, and angry, while maintaining a Woody Guthrie level of preaching. Powerful stuff. For any generation.
5. War – Bob Marley & the Wailers (1976)
This one is interesting because in “War” Marley comes to the sad conclusion that war is inevitable if things keep going the way they’re going: “Until the philosophy which holds one race / Superior and another inferior / Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned / Everywhere is war, me say war.” However, it also points out that Marley is aware of the futile machinations of governments to mend their differences without it, and, moreover, dismiss the less fortunate in their systemically racist construct.
After surviving being wounded in an assassination attempt a few months after “War” was released on the Wailers fourth album, Rastaman Vibration, Marley courageously brought together rival political leaders Michael Manley and Edward Seaga on stage at the One Love Peace Concert on April 22, 1978, in Kingston, Jamaica, to symbolize unity during intense political violence, earning him the U.N. Peace Medal. More than anyone on this list, he put his life on the line for his beliefs in a volatile environment time and again, and although many of his songs comment on the inequality of the Jamaican political system, here he centers on humanity’s inexplicable initial and instinctual reaction to social challenges with violence – righteous or otherwise.
4. Masters of War – Bob Dylan (1963)
By far the meanest and most direct of any of Bob Dylan’s “finger pointing songs,’ as he once called them, “Masters of War” dispenses with symbolism and goes for the proverbial throat with lines eviscerating powerful, rich, clueless greed-mongers in a blanket appraisal of their evil intentions. Dylan was just 23 when he wrote this in the looming storm of the Cuba Missile Crisis and the tailwind of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning of the Military Industrial Complex driving the western hemisphere into perpetual war. Considering the man who led the U.S. military efforts to save the world from fascism wagging his finger at the very machinery that would one day explode the national debt beyond our wildest nightmares, Dylan spats in the song’s coda, “And I hope that you die / And your death will come soon / I’ll follow your casket / By the pale afternoon / And I’ll watch while you’re lowered / Down to your deathbed / And I’ll stand over your grave / ‘Til I’m sure that you’re dead.”
3. War Pigs – Black Sabbath (1970)
Like war, this one is loud, terrifying and vibrates long after experiencing it: Black Sabbath at their most politically potent with lyrics by bass player, Geezer Butler and siren vocals by the late, great Ozzy Osbourne, who was put on earth for this type of gruesome statement. You believe him when he whines about generals gathering as witches at black masses plotting to “bring death and hatred to mankind.” The opening drone-riff is pure plodding havoc, which leads ultimately to the gloriously distorted staccato breaks heralding a requiem for us all “as the war machine keeps turning.” Then, just when you’re blown back on your heels the song cruises into a funky groove driven by the thunder-struck drumming of Bill Ward adorned by Tony Iommi’s wild guitar runs that sound like bullets slashing through the sky into your brain.
2. War – Edwin Starr (1970)
You know it, “What is it good for?” And in case you’re wondering, “Absolutely nothing!” But if you were the millions of Jews being slaughtered in Europe or felt the need to kick despots from the island of Cuba you might have a word with Mr. Starr, but nonetheless this is the anti-war song that everyone knows and nearly everyone covers and is never out of fashion. When considering all the wars in which this country’s been embroiled (noted above), this is akin to Christmas songs that return every season and always have a purpose for being. Like Sabbath’s more somber trudging through the muck of human misery, Starr’s funk-addled stomping breaks, guttural ooh-ahh vocal percussion echoed by horns, and his preacher-like phrasing puts the world on notice about our never-ending fascination with death and destruction. The damn thing is aptly titled. “Good God, ya’ll!”
1. Give Peace a Chance – John Lennon (1969)
Why not end on a positive note? I mean, ya know. This has been grim. But one thing that John Lennon could always be counted on is going for the grand statement; the over-arching concept of imagining a world with no religion or borders (two main culprits in this war thing) or telling us with zero irony that all you need is love. This one, written on the run with his new bride, Yoko Ono on a peace jag abroad and then recorded live in a honeymoon bed open to the public in Toronto, Canada with Tommy Smothers and a bunch of hippies chanting his chorus, presents a blustery half-measure of hope that by asking us to consider the alternative to war we may be onto something. The pre-rap style verses (“Everybody’s talking ‘bout Revolution, Evolution, Masturbation, Flagellation, Regulation, Integrations, mediations, United Nations, congratulations!”) cut a swath through the earworm refrain that reverberates into infinity. Lennon was still Beatle-John in 1969 and understood more than most that a good tune might do better to change the world than a march, and although we hardly ever give peace a chance, it’s nice to hear someone trying.
It is as vivid today as it if happened last week. But it was ten years ago. Today. Prince Rogers Nelson died. Gone. Silenced. Forever. And by that evening I am sitting in the breakfast nook of my kitchen on a writing jag fueled by memory and grief, disbelief and anger, agony and plain shock It turns out in retrospect to be the purest of my writing. It is the one I bring out once a year, on this day, for now, shit, ten years, and still try to fathom. I can’t. I don’t expect to. Too soon. Not him. Not now. Prince died. Fuck. And my deadline loomed. Cover story. Write the requested eulogy. Just me. I’d written about Prince many times for the Aquarian Weekly. This was the plan. Because they’d sent me to a press-only Artist Formally Known as Prince event in 1997 at the Roseland Ballroom. I’m the guy to do it, my editor said. Little did he know. Little did my readers know, it was personal. And that’s how I started.
Ten years ago, somewhere in the late afternoon, I received an email from my sister-in-law, Shannon. Prince died. What? Although the news was shocking, and it was still a developing international story, it made sense it came from her. Shannon and I had shared Prince’s music at nearly every family gathering by then for nearly twenty years. Her sister, my beloved wife, is also a fan, but it was always Shannon who insisted we blast Purple Rain at certain periods of long weekends and would request a Prince song or five when we’d all inevitably be dancing around the living room with or without the kids. Shannon had to be the one to alert me.
Soon after, I received a text from my dear friend and drummer from my 1980s band, Anthony, who also shared in real-time those classic Prince and the Revolution songs and albums from the period – much of which I cover in my most recent release, Revolution – Prince, the Band, the Era.
Not long after, the call came for me to put down the shock and sadness I felt. Try and frame what Prince’s art had meant to me when music was my livelihood, and I held onto his genius, his madness, his dynamic presence as much as I could as a creative and later understood its impact further as a music writer. Moreover, I had to voice the anguish of millions of Prince fans. I had to dig deep. I had to mourn, it turns out, my youth. That is what the Boomers told me when John Lennon was murdered. Their youth was slain. They grew up with him, he spoke to them, he became a voice, an architype for their generation. Gunned down at forty. Distant memories of a time when the music mattered more than bills, taxes, commuting, the usual adult shit. Obliterated.
And so, I wrote about this and kept writing. I eventually just gave out and sent it to press by midnight, and it was widely read – on the cover – less than a week later. But I didn’t read it, would not read it, at least until the one-year anniversary when it dawned on me that I did, in fact, write about me in the thing. There’s stuff about Prince in there, of course, but this was ultimately a requiem to youth and how music takes us there and makes us think of those who were there too, who remember it all as if it were still happening because that is what good music does, what it always does and should always do. It is part of our DNA – our present and our past – what I have based my 300 Favorite Albums podcast on, that magical elixir of nostalgia meets immediacy. It is magic.
And Prince was, after all, a magician, and he never let us forget it. He was always on – the fashion, the sounds, the mystical mumbles that seemed to be prophetic and unhinged, as were the lyrics that were alien guideposts of a clarity unknown.
But enough of this rant. Why not unearth this cover piece one more time? Why not let this free-form regurgitation out of its cage once more? Okay. Sure. Below is what I wrote that day, and what I barely edited, because I didn’t want to write it much less read it. And although I still wince at its brutal, raw-boned honesty about my own sorrow, it still makes sense to me. Maybe it will to you.
Seventy years ago, this spring (March 23, 1956), RCA Victor released the self-titled debut album from a twenty-one-year-old rockabilly crooner from Memphis Tennessee named Elvis Presley. Within the month it would reach the top of the U.S. charts, the first such feat for what certain deejays around the country were calling rock and roll. Elvis Presley Rock n’ Roll, as it was titled in the UK, subsequently topped the charts there. No one knows the first rock and roll record for sure. Some say “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, which was Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm in disguise due to contractual obligations, the year before. Still other music historians point to earlier recordings that more than hint at a similar driving backbeat style in Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “Strange Things Happening Every Day” (1944), Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1947), a song Presley recorded as one of his first sides in 1954, and Goree Carter’s “Rock Awhile” (1949). But we do know for sure that Elvis Presley heralded this new music into the apex of popularity.
If anyone challenges the well-worn moniker King of Rock and Roll for Elvis, something I have done on more than one occasion, this is one factoid you can point to in his defense.
By the spring of 1956, Elvis was on a precipitous rise similar to Frank Sinatra’s a generation earlier – a stronghold on the fascination of the youth market, specifically women. Beyond his voice, however, Presley’s spastic movements on stage, a raw sexually charged combination of Beale Street shimmying and Baptist Church gyrations he picked up as a kid from the Black communities around Tupelo, Mississippi, set the course for his success on stages across the South. From the seismic release of his first single, “That’s All Right,” a sparkling boogie cover of bluesman, Authur Crudup’s 1946 hit, Presley came on as a naive hybrid sensation – a mish-mosh of country-blues-gospel-swing in an unfiltered package. Produced at Sun Records in Memphis by Sam Phillips, who spent years promoting Black acts like Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, and B.B. King among others (Phillips cut “Rocket 88”), the song’s infectious rhythm, created by just Elvis on acoustic guitar, Bill Black on bass and Scottie Moore on guitar, shook the music industry to its core.
It was Phillips’s invention of the famed slap-back reverb sound that when combined with Elvis’s youthful yip-yelp phrasing, easing in and out of falsetto into a smooth timbre, backed ably with the groove of those instruments, which charted wholly new musical realms. Phillips would go onto record 24 revolutionary tracks at Sun with Elvis’s trio (and eventually foursome with D.J. Fontana on drums) between 1954 and 1955, ten of which he released on five two-sided singles. Then Elvis signed with the notorious Colonel Tom Parker, and when the big New York City labels came calling, the former carny huckster convinced RCA to pony up 40-grand (around 490-grand today) for Elvis’s Sun contract and back catalog by the end of ‘55.
Ten days into the new year, Elvis, along with Scotty, Bill and D.J., aka the Blue Moon Boys, convened at the Methodist Television, Radio and TV Studios in Nashville, Tennessee to begin recording their first RCA tracks. On day one, they completed arguably the most important and groundbreaking records of the 20th century, “Heartbreak Hotel.” With assistance from legendary Nashville session cats, guitarist Chet Atkins and pianist, Floyd Cramer, the single was awash in echo, a desperate attempt to recreate what Sam Phillips had wrought on all of Elvis’s best Sun recordings. This inadvertently gave “Heartbreak Hotel” an eerie moaning, almost mystical quality – Elvis sings as if facing his mortality in infinite loneliness. Seventeen days later it was on the radio, in stores, and being played across the Pond to thousands of teenagers like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who snapped into Beatles and Rolling Stones in its wake as if hit by a bolt of beatific lighting.
“Heartbreak Hotel,” penned by Nashville songwriters, Mae Boren Axton and Tommy Durden (Elvis was given credit – thanks, Colonel) from a suicide note published in the Miami Herald, obliterated culture, creating a firestorm across the universe and making Elvis Presley one of the most photographed, filmed, and written-about humans on the planet from that week forward.
By that point, Elvis Presley was pretty much in the can, as the Blue Moon Boys and a tireless Elvis cruised through seven tracks in the remaining weeks of January after cutting “Heartbreak Hotel.” Five more songs previously tracked by Phillips filled out the long player (sans the single), which was rushed out a mere two months later to a frantic public, who’d been quite recently introduced to Elvis’s swiveling hips, shaky knees, and flopping, long duck-tail greasy hair swaying atop his bopping head on this new-fangled invention called television. An entire generation waylaid by Chittlin’ Circuit furies pulsing through the vigorous limbs of this whirling dervish snarling and mumbling strange vibrations broadcast on variety shows like the Stage Show, Milton Berle Show, Steve Allen Show, and the Ed Sullivan Show.
My mom, Phyllis, then a plucky teen, watched the Ed Sullivan appearance and was hooked, explaining to me recently she’d had a dissimilar experience than the one written in history – Elvis as this alien creature set upon the conservative, sleepy black-and-white 1950s. In the Bronx that night, Elvis was the kind of beacon John Lennon once mused, “Before Elvis there was nothing.” She told me, “He was one of us. He made us feel like he was a part of our group, nothing old but entirely new.” Never one to speak in glowing terms at any age about anyone (sans Grace Kelly – the woman loved Princes Grace), Phyllis mused to me, “I played that record so much, my mother begged me to stop. And then my friends came over, and we played it a few times more. Drove my mom crazy.”
Photos of the copy of that very record, my mom’s beat-up 1956 original, is shared throughout this piece. She bequeathed it to me sometime in the 1970s and it remains in my collection, although I can’t play it. Man, did she ever play the shit out of that thing. No stylus of mine is going anywhere near it. But it is history – American, cultural, familial history. So, it remains tucked in there just the same. “I remember when I got it,” my mom told me. “I ran and grabbed it off the shelf. I was ready to fight anyone for it. You had to go to stores at specific times, or they would be sold out. It was rare to even see a copy.”
To fathom the light-speed in which Elvis Presley went from regional oddity to world-wide phenomenon can give you the bends. Elvis Presley was a sonic boom in every sense of the word. It helped create a chasm in generations separated by song and style and set the course for endless discussions on sex, race, gender, delinquency, culture – and invasion of the American psyche with a new lexicon for figuring cool.
Its iconic cover, cropped from a photo of Presley performing in Tampa, Florida the previous summer, shows a man possessed, mouth agape in blissful song, his body a fluid kinetic wire untethered by mere gravity. There is a danger there in that he looks as if he does not care about anything other than the promise of that song.
The record inside lives up to its place in pop culture history. Enamored with three precursors to his rise, first Sun Records label-mate Carl Perkins, and the Black, gay, outrageously spirited Little Richards, Elvis kicked off each side with spectacular (“Blue Suede Shoes”) and serviceable, (Tutti Frutti”) renditions of their most famous work. He also made sure to include rhythm and blues giant, Ray Charles’s first hit, “I Got a Woman,” a reworked gospel cum raucous boogie-woogie, which Elvis had played at every single one of his shows up to then.
Other highlights of the album include a rockabilly Sun track, “Just Because,” wherein Elvis’s voice playfully bounces around the chugging rhythm effortlessly, “Tryin’ to Get to You,” a pulsing bluesy number he growls with blood-red passion, and a tender ballad, “I Love You Because” that shows off the unbridled range of emotions he would later perfect but with less honest solemnity.
Elvis Presley changed the look, sound and philosophy of this new thing called rock and roll. The album spent ten weeks at number one on the Billboard Top Pop Albums chart that year and became the genre’s first million-selling album. There would be more from rock and roll, of course, and you may have heard of those, but you could make a fair argument that none of them happen without this one. But that is a story for another column, so I’ll let Phyllis Campion have the final word: “When you played Elvis’s music, you had to play it loud.”
Celebrating Women’s Month (apt for this writer as both his mom and daughter celebrate birthdays in March), with a list (in no order of quality or sales or even adoration) of some of the most impactful and stirring opening musical statements by talented women of various genres. Although I’ll hang in the pop/rock/folk/funk/country/hip-hop territories, and this is not a complete list (remind me of what I missed and I’ll likely agree), I will not be a stickler for an actual debut album. This is the case for at least four of these artists, as their most rousing debuts can be found in a rebirth of their work that would come to define them. Most importantly, what are below are true expressions of what these incredible artists, and in some cases entire bands (and if a woman leads a not all-female group, that still counts here), will accomplish in their stellar careers.
Many of these albums were created in times when women were not expected to branch out as songwriters, lead singers, musicians, never mind producers and captains of their own professional destinies, while others had to overcome the industry’s stringent parameters on beauty, strength and authenticity in women’s music that men rarely contend with.
And it would be foolish to just place the albums below in the context of their times and social and political terms alone, as these are foundational creative efforts that add to the evolution of music for their genres and stand alone as excellent works that not only exploded at the times of their releases, but continue to influence and inspire artists and fans today.
Madonna –Madonna(1983)
Slamming club bangers from a pop icon, who’s underground debut changed how women, especially denizens of the sexually empowered post-feminism 80s, would be perceived, marketed and eventually sound throughout the rest of the decade with club and radio hits like “Border Line,” Holiday,” and “Lucky Star.”
Whitney Houston – Whitney Houston (1985)
The highest selling album by any female artist ever introduced the world to the extraordinary pipes of a young, fun-loving American sweetheart, producing a staggering three #1 singles, “Saving All My Love for You,” “How Will I Know,” and “Greatest Love of All.” It is difficult to translate how huge this record was and how much of a pop game-changer Whitney was because of it.
Lady Gaga –The Fame(2008)
The sheer audacity of declaring notoriety on a debut was both brash and prophetic as mega-hits, “Just Dance” and “Poker Face” scaled new electropop heights worldwide, setting the new glam icon for a generation up as someone who’s music was already primed for stardom.
Patti Smith –Horses(1975)
The godmother of the CBGB’s downtown NYC punk, next-generation movement, and the first of that wave to get a record deal, be played on the radio, appear on television, and create (with its iconic cover) the pansexual dynamo that enhances the music that will obliterate antiquated ideas of a woman as poet, rocker, and shape-shifter.
Pussy Riot – “Kill the Sexists” Single (2011)
Hunted, arrested, and made example by the Vladimir Putin fascist regime in Russia turned out to be a fine publicity stunt – which the band had a supreme understanding to the seditious nature of – like their infamous “guerrilla performances” expressing feminism, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, and causing general mayhem for art’s sake. This single recorded by original members, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevich kicked it off.
Aretha Franklin –I Never Loved a Man the Way I loved You– (1967)
After enduring seven excruciating years recording for Columbia Records, which tried to turn her into a sappy torch-song singer awash in strings, Franklin, sidled up to a piano to play with natural panache and escaped to the soul-based Atlantic Records that encouraged her to infuse her unique brand of gospel, R&B and a little rock and roll to launch an unparalleled Lady of Soul period with “Respect.”
Taylor Swift –Taylor Swift(2006)
This is country Taylor taking Nashville by storm by turning it back into the Music City for the pop world with chart-topping narrative-driven hits like “Our Song,” “Should’ve Said No” and sneaking “Teardrops on My Guitar” into the Billboard Top 10. The 16-year-old singer-songwriter with plenty of stories to tell was, as they say, on her way.
The Bangles – All Over the Place (1984)
Susanna Hoffs, sisters Vicki Peterson and Debbi Peterson, and Michael Steele comprise the finest all-female rock group ever. Fight me on this: musicianship, harmonies, songwriting, live performance, and one of the best debut albums of any gender. This one heralds the next decade of their hit-making prowess fueled by the raw energy of a punk band with exquisite pipes.
Fiona Apple –Tidal(1996)
The sexy contralto vocals spreads over trenchant piano, riding devil backbeats to ferry tempestuous lyrics that become a feminine tonic to the grunge movement with as much moxie as one can jam into a long player. A Top 20 hit “Criminal” and the MTV staple, “Sleep to Dream” kicked it into Grammy levels.
Lauryn Hill –The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill(1998)
Fresh from the Fugees and motherhood, Ms. Hill brings all the pain, joy, confusion and pure street grit to this sprawling debut of hip-hop/soul/funk. The older it gets, the more poignant this album lands, as it was her only one thus far. Personal and professional setbacks, along with an uneven touring reputation scarred what should have been a long and fruitful career, but taken as a one-off, it towers over the competition.
Patty Griffin –Living with Ghosts(1996)
The record company didn’t know what to do with Patty Griffin’s original demos that intimately heralded her sultry, countrified voice accompanied by only an acoustic guitar, as no one seemed to be able to top them, so they released them as-is, making this debut the finest DIY album by a woman ever, which launched a career of country/folk majesty.
The Runaways –The Runaways(1976)
Before the Runways, there were no all-female rock groups, especially none with a this raw, sexually explicit, razor’s edge. Lead singer, the 15-year-old, Cherie Currie backed by later solo stars like Lita Ford and Joan Jett on guitars, bassist, Jackie Fox, and drummer, Sandy West trailblazed the way for many of the bands mentioned here. But youth and the wayward lunacy of their manager, Kim Fowley, cut them down too soon.
Tracy Chapman –Tracy Chapman(1988)
At the height of slick pop dominated in synth/drum machine/digital sounds, butting up against hair-band metal mania, comes a Black woman with a deep voice playing folk songs on an acoustic guitar. No one seemed to need or ask for this, but when they got it, Tracy Chapman exploded. “Fast Car,” one of the finest compositions of the decade, famously resurrected in 2023 by country star, Luke Combs, sounded in 1988 as a seditious remedy and a return to the lost voice of the singer-songwriter.
Cheryl Crow –Tuesday Night Music Club(1993)
Former background singer and industry insider makes a fun album reminiscent of an actual Tuesday Night Music Club she attended in L.A. in which much of this material – fueled in a party/jam, milieu – was created. Sparked by laid-back groove the hit, “All I Wanna Do” the record would go on to win three Grammy Awards and set the course for Crow to become one of the most respected singer-songwriters of her generation and help anchor the groundbreaking all-women, Lilith Fair Festivals.
Alanis Morrisette –Jagged Little Pill(1995)
Like Aretha, no one in Canada knew what to do with Alanis, as she blossomed from teen-scene star into Grrrll icon for the 1990s. Camped out with songwriter/producer/mentor, Glen Ballard, who understood the 21-year-old’s desire to express her emotions without a safety net, the result was one of the biggest sellers of the 1990s with smash Top 10 hits galore, “You Oughta Know,” “Hand in My Pocket,” and the #1, “Ironic.”
The Go-Gos –Beauty and the Beat(1981)
Proving the core axioms in rock and roll in one monster debut, Belinda Carlisle, Charlotte Caffey, Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine, and Jane Wiedlin write, sing, and perform some of the catchiest pop music of the early 1980s, while proving that not only young men can act like wild animals and tear through tours in notorious splendor. “I’ll Lips Are Sealed” is a glorious pop/rock number for any time.
Britney Spears –…Baby One More Time(1999)
Bubblegum pop returns with a vengeance, as Britney reinvents the teen-girl-sings-and-dances craze for a new generation and explodes into the zeitgeist as a fully formed pop star. Hatched from Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club factory that would also bore Justin Timberlake, Spears wastes little time setting herself up for mega-stardom from the jump. Everyone knows or has parodied or hates or adores but cannot forget the title track on its inevitable rise to #1.
Tammy Wynett – Stand By Your Man (1969)
Although, like Aretha and Alanis, Tammy had a career, and in her case, four albums, before this, the woman who emerged from this record would solidify her place in the country music and pop culture realm as the prideful antidote to the feminist backlash against the life of a simple woman who loves her man. The fact that the title track, a chart-topping global smash, would arrive at the apex of the first feminist wave is something to behold.
The Sugar Cubes –Life’s Too Good(1988) Hello unsuspecting world, here’s… Björk! Whatever this diminutive, quirky Icelandic woman was offering is difficult – even now nearly four decades hence – to comprehend, much less describe in mere words. Her singing, phrasing, weird melodic turns in this post-new-wave pop/rock masterwork has stood the test of time and influenced countless female vocalists, although, who the hell is approaching this? No one.
Tori Amos –Little Earthquakes(1992)
A remarkable achievement in musicality, virtuosic piano playing, intensely unique songwriting, and painfully beatific honesty in its lyrics, this debut set a standard for a long and fruitful career of pushing boundaries and framing the core of womanhood’s sexual and political hopes, dreams, and fears. Every song on this record is an absolute gem.
Lana Del Rey –Born to Die(2012)
There are better Lana Del Ray albums, but you get none of them without this (I guess you can say that about all debuts). However, sleeping on this is a mistake, for it not only introduced the concept of the psych-rock genre she invented, but it set in stone Lana’s one-of-a-kind understated phrasing and acute sexual parsing, becoming the longest-charting album by a woman on the Billboard 200.
Adele –19(2008)
To my knowledge, the only debut to reveal the age of the artist on it, and I would gather the only MySpace demo gal to gain a record deal, Adele’s magnificent voice and emotional phrasing pushed two singles, “Chasing Pavements” and Bob Dylan’s finest ballad, “Make You Feel My Love” into the UK Top 10. A British balladeer with a soulful cadence, crashed pop music’s woman-as-sex-object-and-rebel-queen party to usher nostalgic elegance back onto the charts.
The Pretenders –Pretenders(1980)
Lead singer, main songwriter, Chrissie Hynde was a mid-American ex-pat roaming through punk-addled London, bouncing off the Sex Pistols and the Clash, when she formed a band to kick everyone’s ass. In my high school, there wasn’t a girl worth her salt that didn’t sing, “Brass in Pocket’ as if a feminine national youth anthem. In fact, after I blithely broke it off with one of those girls, she quite correctly, if not surprisingly to my non-plussed parents, blasted the song outside my house (ala John Cusack in Say Anything). So, yeah, 17-year-old me, take that!
Carole King – Tapestry (1971)
Until Whitney Houston came along, no woman sold more albums than Carole King’s pristine masterpiece in songwriting length and breadth. Former Brill Building teen prodigy gone Laurel Canyon hippie, pens songs from the heart and soul, invades the charts and wows critics. A perennial album of the golden age of the singer-songwriter with “You’ve Got a Friend,” “So Far Away,” “It’s Too Late,” and the landmark, “(You Make Me Feel Like) a Natural Woman.”
Mariah Carey – Mariah Carey (1990)
This is how big this record was out of the gate: a dear friend and songwriting partner of mine at the time, uttered without irony, “We all have to love Mariah Carey now?” Ummm… yes. And how we loved those pipes, that inhuman range, the ability to smile as she sang (you can actually hear this woman smile on these tracks), on her way to breaking pop chart records set by man or woman on the wings of four (count ‘em) four #1 hits, “Vision of Love,” “Love Takes Time,” “Someday,” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry.”
Hole –Live Through This(1994)
Okay, so Hole’s first official album is Pretty on the Inside, but anyone who knows knows that this is the introduction of songwriter, lead singer and guitarist, Courtney Love from quasi-punk hanger-on to Kurt Cobain’s wife to undisputed grunge queen. Joined by two women, Patty Schemel on drums and bassist Kristen Pfaff, along with lead guitarist, Eric Erlandson, Love emerged from the daunting shadow of her husband’s suicide with an honest and powerful collection of songs.
Olivia Rodrigo –Sour(2021)
A modern take on the pop sensibilities that have carried the youth surge of post-World War II to the edge of the new century from a 17-year-old singer-songwriter helped spark a rising generation of women to dominate this latest surge of troubadours. Her tender forays on the teen spectrum of heartache and confusion (hence the album’s title) wrapped in a genuine communicative voice subsequently became the first debut album to produce two #1 debuts on the Billboard Hot 100: “Drivers License,” “Good 4 U,” followed by “Déjà vu” and “Traitor” invading the top 10.
Amy Winehouse –Frank(2003) The throwback’s throwback that sounds like a young woman being blasted out of a jazz-adorned canon into the British pop charts bloated with boy bands and nubile flash-in-the-pans. It is not Amy’s best work, as she attested at the time, but it was refreshing to hear the come-hither, smoky rich contralto voice from another time and place, as the title of the album suggests (Hello, Sinatra!). Unfortunately, her soap opera tragedies and untimely death overshadows her music, but it nonetheless remains her true legacy.
Billie Eilish –When We Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?(2019)
Its creepy, alluring, funny, and catchy as all get-out. Nothing before or since has sounded like this – a stirring debut by two teen siblings (Billie and her bro, Fineas) holed up in a bedroom making sounds and songs that will soon conquer the pop world. Although her trajectory shot into the stratosphere, much of the naivete and blessed strangeness has since been removed from later works, and for those who were given this spectacular promise, it’s a tough hang.
When I was a kid, in my house, Barbra ruled. My dad loved her voice. And when I couldn’t think of anything to get him for a birthday or Father’s Day, bam! Barbra album! This one, I think, I got him, and then years later scored an original Columbia release. But if you want to hear a 21-year-old with a soaring operatic range with lightning quick phrasing and a biting sense of humor crush every song on an album, here ya go.
Pat Benatar –In the Heat of the Night (1979)
Where Billie had her bro, Pat had her boyfriend and later husband, Neil Geraldo by her side to assist in realizing her voice. – a powerful roar worthy of the best male leads. Eschewing new wave or disco, which was the genres on a roll in 1979, Benatar instead returned to good, old-fashioned sexy, punchy rock and delivered a bombastic debut featuring radio and MTV staple, “Heartbreaker.”
Regina Spektor –11:11(2001)
Independently released collection of exquisitely composed and arranged songs on piano introduced this New York City by way of Russia original to the world as a jazz/blues enthusiast aching to take those genres and package them later into a whirlwind creative spirit. Spektor would go onto to produce some of the most uniquely sounding albums of the early century and it begins here by her lonesome, unaffected.
Ani DiFranco –Ani DiFranco(1990)
Speaking of unaffected and completely autonomous music-making, here is the launching of the Righteous Babe empire cut on her own, published on her own, and pitched around early-90s New York City… on her own. The striking vocal cadence, the slicing lyrics, the feral, rhythmic acoustic guitar that sound like a band, changed underground sounds for men and women forevermore.
I rarely have the time to catch one music documentary when it’s released, much less three. But this past week-plus, I’ve had the pleasure to take in a trio of gems, all of them presenting the stories of worthy subjects – the life and music of Billy Preston, Paul McCartney’s journey from the Beatles through his years in Wings, and Elvis Presley’s late 60s Las Vegas residency. Each of these films tell their tales in far different ways, but all three are compelling, educational, and entertaining storytelling.
The music doc has evolved over the past decade into several incarnations, from a bevy of distended voices filling out the visuals (2024’s compelling One to One: John & Yoko, Todd Hayne’s stellar, The Velvet Underground from 2021) or using talking heads (Questlove’s dynamic,Summer of Soul, Netflix’s comprehensive, The Greatest Night in Pop from 2024 covering the “We Are The World” recording). There is the fly-on-the-wall cinema verité of Peter Jackson’s rightfully heralded The Beatles: Get Back from 2021, which restored countless hours of footage of the Fab Four’s creative process through painstaking experimentation of AI technology, and 2018’s Amazing Grace, which took good old-fashioned human elbow-grease to rescue the original film from technical difficulties that shelved the telling of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 live recording of gospel standards in a Los Angles church. There are tell-alls, Amy (2015) covering in painful detail the rise of tragic fall of Amy Winehouse to comprehensive four-hour band epics, Long Strange Trip (2017), an exhaustive chronicle of the Grateful Dead or Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men (2019) that tracks the story behind one of the most influential hip-hop groups of all time.
For the record: I do not necessarily consider a straight concert film a documentary, unless it includes interviews, backstory and perspective. Interestingly, I think Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz as both a doc and concert film manages to balance indisputably the greatest concert movie of all time with commentary but falls short as an inclusive a documentary as one would hope on the band or their times. Yet, the medium in the hands of a unparalleled fictional storyteller like Scorsese, who unfolds a sweeping aural guidebook to an entire era through the performances, and one of the directors of these three new documentaries I cover here, can artfully infuse a thematic edge to the process. I’ll elaborate later.
No matter their agenda or process, these three films tell a larger story about each artist in original and captivating ways. In two, the voices of the dead testify to their experience from random, edited interviews to wrest a tired narrative from the clutches of history, and in the third, a man in his eighties tries to make sense of a life lived in the spotlight he simultaneously strived to remain in and sought shelter from.
Let’s do them in order of my seeing them.
BILLY PRESTON – THAT’S THE WAY GOD PLANNED IT
Thanks to my dear friend, the inimitable singer-songwriter deluxe, Eric Hutchinson, who got the tix and invited me along, we checked this out at the legendary Film Forum three weeks back. Directed by industry veteran of film and television, Paris Barclay, That’s The Way God PlannedIt, titled after Billy Preston’s first big hit as a solo artist, chronicles the truly extraordinary, six-decade career of the Grammy-winning keyboardist from his incredible rise as a child prodigy on organ appearing on the Nat King Cole variety show through his touring work backing such legends as Ray Charles and Little Richard, which had him crossing paths with the Beatles and the Rolling Stone, both of whom he would record with and in the case of the Stones tour with, to his inevitable chart-topping stardom.
Barclay depicts Preston, as he was known in his lifetime, as a cheerful, ebullient personality that enlivened every session or show he participated in with as humble a reserve as could have possibly been displayed by someone so musically gifted. This was, sadly, a front for a person in great pain, which the film explains covering his conflicted childhood in Baptist churches joyfully singing and playing, set against alleged sexual and violent abuses from family members. This left Preston closeted from not only his homosexuality and proclivity for young boys later in life but displayed how folding into himself kept those close to him or his musical collaborators from seeing his trauma. This, Barclay surmises through dozens of interviews, led to Preston’s future drug and alcohol abuse as a kind of self-loathing penance.
The true highlight of the film is the archived footage of the dynamism of Preston’s amazing performances soundtracked by commentary from those who knew and loved him from family to friends and famous musicians whose music was enhanced by Preston’s work, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, and more. It’s quite moving to hear how deeply the usually reserved and off-putting Eric Clapton speaks so emotionally about trying to save Preston from his addictions, relating to his demons as a former heroin addict, paining to keep his friend from falling into ruin.
And this is where the complicated legacy of Bill Preston is written in That’s The Way God PlannedIt, ultimately, with crimes including drug possession, insurance fraud (in which he was eventually convicted and served time) and being caught time and again with teenage boys. The film doesn’t redeem or excuse any of this, of course, but in its coda and summation, Preston turns his life around, cleansed of substance abuse, to return from prison a man understanding his talent had always been his true refuge from the pain and sorrow he kept hidden, filling out his days not as a cautionary tale of someone who’d reached the heights and lost everything to someone who still cherished his music (the man had a ton of hits, many of which I bought at the time) and the roots of his culture to finally admit out loud his sexual truth a day before he died at 59-years-old.
MAN ON THE RUN
When I reviewed Tom Doyle’s wonderfully written Man on the Run – Paul McCartney in the 1970s in 2013, I was convinced it would make a great movie. I wasn’t thinking documentary, but considering the state of music biopics these days, I’m glad it went in this direction. Oscar-winning filmmaker, Morgan Neville’s Man on the Run, like his 20 Feet from Stardom (2013), which for the first time covered the unsung life and times of backups singers, neatly combines the music of Paul McCartney with a portrait of his life and times. Despite being hounded throughout his career as both a Beatle and a solo artist for not using his music as biography, as his songwriting partner, John Lennon was lauded for achieving, Neville finds that there was, indeed, a narrative forming behind McCartney’s most beloved pop hits.
Beyond using the songs as guideposts to McCartney’s resurrection from the ashes of his band’s demise – one that he tried like hell to keep together but was forced to abandon and then blamed for breaking up – we hear the 83-year-old composer speak candidly about what he was going through at the time deflecting the misconceptions of his lawsuits against the Beatles and his fight to reinvent himself as a solo performer.
The ghost of the Beatles, particularly Lennon, haunts McCartney during the initials days of the breakup in which the film does a terrific job of depicting with archived and recent footage of he and Linda’s run-down Scottish cabin he retreated to in order to heal his emotional wounds. And from this blessed isolation, Paul begins to make music again and most importantly reignites his passion for live performing, which the Beatles, much to his consternation, refused to do after 1966.
And that is the other interesting slant to Man on the Run: McCartney’s struggles to recreate in some way a band construct for him to once again find comfort to produce and eventually perform his magnificent songs. Choosing his wife, Linda to build this new group, a boldly controversial move at the time, and what turns out to be another spiritual connection like he had with John as a teenager, Paul pieces together as best he can a democratic unit. From its perceived humble beginnings, that band, Wings was a rag-tag experiment that never seemed to come up with a solution of whether they were there to serve the main man’s wishes or add viable input.
Neville masterfully takes us on Wings’ ascent from this underappreciated and poorly marketed unit to one of the most celebrated and successful (if not critically harangued) acts of the 1970s. And just like the Beatles neatly tied up its 1960s story, the journey of Wings spans the decade, wrapping up with the same anticlimax as his previous band by 1980. Throughout there are many twists, turns, and personnel changes – Paul and Linda, along with their kids, quite literally on the run constantly stitching together sustainable combos to present their music, beyond lifer, Denny Laine (late of the Moody Blues).
And as Paul McCartney remains the greatest living songwriter and one that with his long list of hits and albums has, when combined with his Beatles output, continued to enthrall us, having a portion of his ouevre – and this is some heady portion – dissected is welcomed by fans and the curious (is there still people unaware of this?) alike.
EPIC
Baz Luhrmann, yet another Englishman obsessed with the complicated balance of the ancient American deep south, its voices, its music, its traditions, its sins, its magic and the grotesque exploitation of showbiz, has put a new coat of glittery paint on Elvis Aaron Presley. Like the British Invasion before him, his reverence for the image and texture of Elvis as a heroic if not damaged figure of American myth is both inspiring and irreverent. The director already made an uneven if not entertaining biopic of the King of Rock and Roll, with 2022’s Elvis, and with the same fervor for meshing myth with reality and modernity with the stale echoes of American schlock, his EPIC (Elvis Presley In Concert) is a rousing tribute to a rarely examined portion of Presley’s career – his post icon-shapeshifter early mid-1950s period into the army and then out to Hollywood live performance era. What Luhrmann’s frenetically paced film (and I use that term adoringly, as I love his style), does best is circles Elvis as the ultimate musical archetype and exceptional stage performer, but despite what the trailers promised of letting the King tell his own story, he, in fact, tells Luhrmann’s story of how he views Elvis – with the same nods to painting Colonel Parker as the devil as his ’22 biopic did (the film’s graphics are the same, denoting this is a companion piece).
Luhrmann, in many ways, is in his films, something critics debate over incessantly – should we notice the filmmaker in the story he is telling? It is impossible for me to separate those aspects of filmmaking. Part of the draw to see EPICwas Luhrmann for me. But he cannot escape himself – the hyper-editing, tricky audio devices like repeating sung or spoken lines for maximum thematic effect or morphing old into new footage, as he as he did with music in his previous films like Moulin Rouge, The Great Gatsby, and the first Elvis flick, including mashups of traditional songs with modern sounds.
It is through this aural and visual prism that Presley becomes a man stuck in a time capsule, forever bedazzled in polyester jumpsuits with his awkward karate moves and sweaty scarves tossed to frantic middle-aged women. As he was in his many kitschy 1960s films, which Luhrmann drives home was Elvis’s ultimate prison, he traps him again in the garish ballroom of the International Hotel, singing his hits with a smirk and a wink. Hey, look at me when I was young and dumb. And that is always been my fuck-you! to the smarmy 1960s Elvis. That is until EPIC’s new footage found from the 1972, Elvis on Tour film set against his 1950s TV appearances revealed that Elvis always thought what he was doing was goofy, but not in a self-mocking way, but as a not-taking-this-too-serious way that ironically EPIC with its grotesquely over-hyped title suggests. Just as the bounding “Also sprach Zarathustra” heralded his highness to the stage bloated with three-dozen musicians and singers. But in masterful surround sound and through mesmerizing cutting, Luhrmann supremely resurrects what made Elvis special: he was a natural.
One key highlight from found 1972 cutting room floor footage is how utterly joyful and lost in the music Elvis always was and would be until his dying day. His most honest and relaxed interplay is during rehearsals with his incredible band, which in every incarnation during this period is fire. An incredible ensemble with the Sweet Inspirations singing their hearts out is mind-boggling stuff. This is what cuts through all the playful Luhrmann pomp, and it is where Elvis lived. So, in essence, he didn’t need to “tell his story.” His voice, his passion for the stage and to envelope song is what tells that story best.
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