Back to the Miracle Factory

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SIX WHITE HORSES
January 1993. Bill Clinton. Somalia. Bosnia. Automatic for the People. We know already: This is what we'll remember, one of those moments that sticks in the memory, and an album that may always, for many of us, be the soundtrack of that moment. Everyone's listening to it. Sure seems that way. And not just once, but over and over. A hit? No, something much more meaningful than that. A touchstone. A common reference point. Something private and collective, both at once. Shared intimacy on a universal scale. Why? What do we like about this record? I'm not claiming to be able to answer this question. But I think it's worth asking.
Why?
The album Automatic for the People reminds me of is Rubber Soul. The texture or mood of it, most of all, and a modest yet very striking fresh creativity (inventiveness!), and then the way the record hangs together as a whole. I like every track. That's very unusual. And there's no single song I want to hear over and over at the expense of the others. Want to hear 'em all over and over, a few favorites at any given moment and different ones every day. Keep playing the record. Like Rubber Soul: more than the sum of its parts. Album as unitary, total experience, hanging together as slick and mysterious as a song. Like Murmur, like (my personal favorite still) Fables of the Reconstruction. Welcome back. To me, as well as you. This is what music is s'posed to do for us.
So this is an essay about hearing voices. Familiar voices, for the most part. R.E.M., Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bruce Cockburn, Television, and Sonya Hunter are the authors of the new albums in and beside my CD player this week, and of these Sonya's is the only voice I haven't communed with on many a past occasion.
But what's exciting is this feeling that I'm hearing new messages. What messages? Big game with Automatic for the People: What's he saying? Sometimes it's better not to know for sure. Leaves doors open. Allows the mind to go wandering. The mind needs to go wandering. That's one of the gifts words and music can give us.
The quantity and quality of new music being released nowadays is overwhelming. One of my difficulties in writing this essay is I actually feel guilty about the exciting new albums I'm not choosing to talk about here--a few that I've heard and liked, and many others I'm simply unaware of. Then there are whole categories of music unrepresented here--my self-image wants to present me as someone who's aware of all the best new bands, alternative, metal-edged, hip-hop, techno, grunge, whether underground/indie or worthy megapla-tinum or bubbling on the edge of famiosity. But I'm not, not even a little bit. I'm a guy in a record store, dazzled and confused and eager to get out without spending too much money but with at least one CD under my arm that will speak my language and make me feel special for a few weeks or years. I'm forty-four, but I think I could be just as confused and self-conscious if I were fifteen or twenty-one. Too many choices. What speaks for me?
I know it may very well be Copper Blue by Sugar, but I haven't got around to buying that one yet. Let me tell you about the ones that have ended up on my turntable.
AUTOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE.
R.E.M. First track: "Drive." Just what the doctor ordered: It pulls me in and in and in and excites me so I shout and sing along, and never reveals anything. A very good beginning. The last couple of R.E.M. album-openers left me cold--why, I ask myself, does this one, another conscious effort to make a radio-friendly single, work so well for me? I like the way it goes round and round; I like the tension that builds and builds and breaks open in unexpected places (strings and "ollie ollie ollie" climax erupting somewhere just past the halfway point). I like the impenetrable but still satisfying lyrics ("nobody tells you where to go"), whereas I hated the words to "Radio Song"--did the singer's attitude shift, or mine, or maybe we met in the middle somewhere? This is not perhaps too early to mention R.E.M.'s songwriting process: The three instrumentalists work out stuff together (each bringing ideas in) and then give working tapes to the singer who chooses some of these not-yet-songs to put words to. Processgoes on from there, but anyway we can understand that first there was a hypnotic little thing going through (in this case) Peter Buck's mind, then the thing was wrestled into something approaching form (odd form, lovably unorthodox form) by Berry, Mills, and Buck, and then Michael Stipe put these words on top of it and into it, magnifying riff and mood and augmenting structure and feeding the whole concept back into itself until with a few further twists it became a performance, a recording, a statement. "Hey! Kids! Rock and roll!" It's the tone of voice that matters, that speaks of something neither straightforward nor ironic. And tone of guitars. The quality and particular texture of the echoes. R.E.M. is a riff-oriented band, but not at all like the Rolling Stones. It's like these riffs are exo- rather than endoskeleton. Anyway, the damn thing works. Not as apocalyptic as "Gimme Shelter," certainly (these are different times), but a no-release-of-tension album-opener worthy of being mentioned in the same breath. Speaking of which--
Second track: "Try Not to Breathe." Good thought. Good sound. Sometimes R.E.M. seem to achieve the soundof thought. Good vocals deserve a lot of credit. And good production. Some mysterious evenness of sound (amidst and made up of all sorts of eccentricities). Good harmonies in new places. I like it when arrangement and vocals and melody and sound and words are all moving in the same direction, and it's a firm and unfamiliar direction. I like being carried along like this. And the music does not betray the words' seriousness--nor vice versa. For a song about dying, I find it oddly heartening, full of encouragement towards life. Thanks for the good advices.
Third track: "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite." If there's a contest on to see who can borrow and bend and update a riff most tastefully and effectively, these guys win hands-down. The Beatles used to be masters of this sort of assimilation, but R.E.M. in a good year (1985, 1992) have a quirky intelligence that actually helps me hang in for those desirable multiple listenings (Beatles used to and still do wear thin on me faster; de gustibus, of course). The Cat in the Hat and insufficiently-substantial-soup sections of this song are magnificent, in lyric and particularly in performance of lyric. Pay attention: top-level rock-and-roll singing happening here. The riff (performance of riff; band action) makes it possible, creates singer's and listener's mood, pushes and supports that freeness and subtlety and humor, one form of delight feeding another, which obligingly feeds back. Did someone ask how it's done? Creativity breeds more of the same, we spark off each other, somehow also helping each to stick to the project at hand."Phoning to wake her up"--the pictures come through loud and clear, even if the words don't always. Music is simple but steady as Gibraltar or Creedence. And melody! And those surprisingly perfect string parts, crafted by John Paul Jones. (Led Zeppelin meets Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Tokens at an R.E.M. session. Hey, only in the never-never land of rock and roll are such things possible.) "You've got a boogie-woogie groove on this one!" indeed. Pluck a track from this album to stand beside anything R.E.M. has created and I think this'd be my candidate. The message? Love of life again. Why do they say this is a downer record?
Maybe it has to do with the "feel" of the next bunch of performances, and especially "Everybody Hurts" (fourth track). Sounds so sad. But it isn't. At first I thought this was the track that would grate on me after a few listenings, the one I'd want to skip over. But it isn't. It pushes it, that's for sure--that lugubrious pace, right on the edge of schmaltzy classical or the worst of new age; hell, I think R.E.M. may actually be doing their own cocktail version of Pachelbel's "Canon" here, but ... I am surprised. Again. It works. Get closer and it doesn't get uglier, nor tedious; it gets prettier and lighter and pleasantly underspoken. The words--what they are and what they are not--help tremendously, but still I wouldn't want to hear this song done by anyone else. It's that group-mind performance, coming from a good space this time out, playful, sincere, inquisitive, respectful of each-other-self, specifically including the listener. Song sounds sad to catch the ear of our sadness. And because of the respectfulness, it works (some) even for proud ones like me who think we're not gonna slut our self-pity around, or be seduced by would-be (platitudinous) comforters. But in fact what the song title says is true. And the song touches me. Even ends up seeming bold and risky. And caring. Oh well. Thanks. I'm not admitting anything here but (maybe) I needed that. Hmm. A song sung like a self-absorbed cry of pain that turns out, as we listen more, to be rather the antidote ("No no no, you're not alone"--great moment). I probably wouldn'ta listened to it on any other album.
Fifth track: "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1." Good programming. We needed a break. CDs are too long. This sweet interlude relaxes and refreshes and helps the whole thing hang together somehow.
Sixth track: "Sweetness Follows." Peter Buck, quoted in Q, says he doesn't play lead guitar (i.e., his job is rhythm and riff and sound sculpture, not soloing)--"but I love guitar feedback. 'Sweetness Follows'doesn't need a solo, a melodic restatement, so instead you get a wash of sound that fills the space and pushes the song to a different level." Yes. Sound of pain again (especially since the only words you're sure to catch are about burying your father and mother) (and this is not a teenage hate song), but instead of walking the schmaltz line this one is elegant, feedback keening like a Celtic rite, furious and gentle. Another insight into R.E.M.'s technique (Buck again, quoted in Pulse): "Michael likes to conflict what the lyrics are saying with the music or the way he's singing it sometimes." The thing with riddles is they have to be timed properly: solve 'em too fast and you lose the magic. I loved "Roxanne" (first Police hit) until I realized the crazy intense "You don't have to put on the red light" refrain was actually a literal bit of narrative in a song about falling in love with a hooker. Blah. Stipe is very good at riddles, and he varies 'em nicely: "Sidewinder Sleeps" reveals parts of itself as you listen closely (and parts of itself on first listening too; feelings and sonic pleasures that aren't betrayed as you get to know the lyrics better) and other parts of it delight but never resolve as segments of a larger narrative, leaving the mind free to, um, do whatever. "Sweetness Follows" is very hard to catch (don't know how long it would take to hear the chorus phrase if it hadn't been chosen to be the title), but the funny thing is if you sit down with pencil and paper and write the words, you can get ninety percent of 'em with no trouble. And the song unfolds as an excellent essay on just what it feels to be about, only simpler, more straightforward. The singer has learned the power of indirection: "Readying to bury your father and your mother"--but he sings just that first word in such a way that you can't be sure what you're hearing, and that leaves the meaning of the whole verse up in the air. Also an intentional touch of openmouthed Southern accent on "why" ("why did you bother") turns it into "what" when it runs up against the "d" sound of the next word, and again we are so effectively and gently thrown off the chase. Not a game, but (this time out) a kind of artfulness. It works. (My mantra for this record.) The speaker has something to say. If he's too direct about it, it will sound condescending. He doesn't want that. He finds a way. And he is guided, in his finding, by the music he's listening to, the nonverbal form of that message, ever pointing a subtle and specific direction. Collaboration. They in turn respond to him. Something comes together, comes forth. Something really beautiful this time, and yet again it's a song I thought would get old quickly; instead gets younger and fresher slowly and steadily, pulling me into this mood where I don'twant anything but Automatic for the People on my phonograph. Wow. Those two words (the title) are a superb marriage--it's all about sounds, isn't it--and the connotations of sounds. "Flows" and "swallows" are conjured up without ever being brought in directly. And melody. The history of these R.E.M. creations is all about the moment (s) of the arrival of melody. Music then words; words implied by music; melody implied by words and born in singing and brought forward by more musicking. Process. Mystery. Finally I have to acknowledge the way he balances specific sister and brother image with addressing you and me as "my sister and my brother"--perfect, he dodges the disadvantages of either interpretation while reaping the full benefits both ways. Ambiguity rules and flourishes. Swell ending to side one of the record, and how come that comes through so clearly even though I have a CD?
Seventh track: "Monty Got a Raw Deal." Ambiguity is not enough. Michael Stipe and R.E.M.'s DNT (Disjointed Narrative Technique) works because (and when) they truly do have a story to tell. Substance lurks behind, and peeks through, the disjunctions. My wife Donna, after a few dozen listenings, hadn't read the song title but loves the song, and couldn't quite catch that first word ("Monty," as in the first line and natural title of the song: "Monty, this seems strange to me"). I wondered, then, what it seemed to her to be about. She suggested "forgiveness," as in the phrase that jumps out at (and lingers with) her: "You don't owe me anything." More generally, she feels it as a song of lost love, which also (my personal favorite attribute in a rock-and-roll song) is about "what seems to be going on on the planet now." Planet news. Planet waves. Late world roundup. Okay. This is important information about how we hear songs, particularly "rock" songs: strong impressions left by snatches of phrase, rather than by the narrative as a whole. "I can't get no satisfaction" or "How does it feel?" are the messages that sink in; the verses often are more of a blur, an experience, a sound. Felt by the body. Whereas those phrases that jump out are simultaneously felt by the body and heard by the mind. Powerful effect. Donna notes the attractive quality of an album that urges us (track four), "Hold on, hang on" and (track seven), "Just let go; just let go." Good! It works! Contradictory feelings are normal; we recognize them; we like having them acknowledged and celebrated. We know, without having to think about it, that "try not to breathe" as a sung phrase, with this music and this timing, evokes the value of breathing. It is like saying, "appreciate breath"--but it's a cooler way of saying it.
So. Disjointed narrative. Behind the phrases and images that jump out at you, a story is being told. Sometimes it's implicit: "Everybody Hurts" is exhortatory, but when you hear it as a guy--assumed persona--speaking to a girl, it can become a fictional fragment, a story. "Sweetness Follows," by offering more specifics, more overtly conjures up story context, while still speaking in a monologue addressed to an intimate "you." (Lots of self-reflective stuff, too, as though he's speaking to himself, but still standing in front of "you.") "Monty Got a Raw Deal" is in the form of explicit (third person, past tense, "this happened and then that happened") narrative: "I saw you buried in the sand." "I saw you strung up in a tree." These could be dream images or visions (à la "Hard Rain"), except that they are preceded by establishing circumstances ("I went walking through the street") and followed by little conversations in which the person (stranger) with you tells me not to look at what's going on, not to speak of it. (Donna wonders if the woman saying "hold your tongue" is also saying the next words, "You don't owe me anything / Don't you waste your breath.")
These scenes, added to the repeated word "mischief" in the second and last verses, suggest that this is a story about someone who is being messed with in a playful but sinister fashion. The word "movie" in the second line fits in with the cinematic effect of the narrative: song starts in second person, narrator addressing "Monty," and continues in that form (except for that nice elusiveness in the bridge regarding who's saying "you don't owe me anything," and to whom) until the last verse, which is still second person but seems directed towards listener/record producer/journalist or police secretary writing this down ... "Monty" here is in the third person, and he's lying low (so low, the singer clearly implies, he may in fact be six feet under). But I'm cheating.
I'm cheating, or I've been cheated, because I have a more specific idea about this narrative, communicated not through the song itself but (in a trick used particularly by U2 and R.E.M. over the years) through an interview in the press with a band member, which interview may also be recommunicated through a disc jockey's comments on radio or MTV or through regurgitation in a review like this one. Monty (I "know" from reading R.E.M. talking in Pulse and Q) is Montgomery Clift; during the recording sessions, Michael Stipe heard some stories from a guy who took photos of Clift during the shooting of The Misfits, and this song resulted. It takes place on a movie set. The narrator is (partly) the photographer: a stranger who notes thatsomething peculiar is going on. The song gets this across extremely well--even when one doesn't have this "clue" dropped into the media. I say I may have been cheated because I can't hear the song now without thinking about what might have been going on during that movie shoot; I may in fact receive less of its magic now that its context has been made (irreversibly?) more specific for me. And I've just passed the contagion on to you. Sorry.
But all this talk of words, which are the most familiar elements of narrative, certainly, mustn't distract us from the pleasures and misdirections of the musical part of the story. That wonderful bit of Orientalia--clichéd Japanese/Okinawan scales, that recurs at key moments--what's that? How does it fit with any of this? And yet it fits so deliciously! Disjunction à la Stipe and Company is achieved as much through tone of voice or tempo of music at odds with apparent emotional content of lyrics, as through juxtaposition/mystification /omission in the lyric-writing. But always what is vital (and somehow this is true even in the music that apparently existed before there were words and a title and a conscious subject) is that there is a real story in each performer's mind (not always the same story), and it's something he wants and needs to share. (Why the obfuscation, then? Hey, we all do this, a lot of the time. We cry for help while concealing and denying our feelings. We want to tell our secrets almost as much as we want to protect them, or is that vice versa? R.E.M. just picks up the common usage and runs in some funny directions ... )
Eighth track, "Ignoreland," is angry and fun. Hmm. Definitely the best "political" song R.E.M. has yet recorded. By way of disjunction /obfuscation I particularly appreciate the "1979" motif in the semi-audible narrative, which somehow saves the song from being an overobvious blast at the Reagan-Bush gang. (It is, but what is this story he's telling about 1979? If it were 1980--election year--or '81, first year of their administration, it'd all fall neatly in place, but thankfully it doesn't, and is an infinitely better song, in my opinion, as a result.) I like picking up words a few at a time, after one, ten, a hundred listenings ("CBS-TV tells a million lies"). Great beat, great sound. Again, it's all a matter of personal taste, but (although there are days when I'd rather not hear it) I find myself listening to this track with pleasure, enthusiasm, satisfaction, long after the point at which"It's the End of the World as We Know It" had passed saturation for me. This one goes beyond cute. It's righteously and rightlyangry, and funny, and intelligent, and it builds and builds and breaks at the right places and builds again. "I know that this is vitriol ... but I feel better having screamed it!" Me too. A very necessary and timely release. Especially since the title/chorus points past all the obvious villains of the tale, through to those of us who are in fact responsible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. "Someone's got to take the blame ..." All right. Rock and roll.
"Fuck Me Kitten" (track nine) is announced as "Star Me Kitten" on the album packaging, in the tradition of the Rolling Stones' "Star-fucker" (aka "Star Star"). Funny though, how, if it were called (and sung) "Star Me Kitten," it could be the one unsuccessful song on the record--that one word, and the charge it still comes with (especially when used as a transitive verb), give this odd excursion shape and personality and the drama it needs to be effective. Among other things, the title phrase offers a neat melange of the appealing (to me; but then Brigitte Bardot always did more for me than Marilyn) and the repugnant (there's something demeaning about the phrase "Fuck Me Kitten," isn't there?, ok or great in a moment of passion maybe but out of place in anything as public as a recorded love song). So we get, on the surface, another example of the patented Stipe love song as anti--love song (pop song as anti--pop song), a genre I'm tired of in general but hey this particular one in the context of these other performances twists my tail appropriately, comes through finally as another riddle (to which only the listener has the answer). Singer's really gargling this time. So we hear a monologue that's deliberately unintelligible until climaxing in the final stuff about "You are wild, and I am your possession ..." This is the key. I first heard it (and I imagine I ain't alone) as "You are mine, and I am your possession," which is ordinary and somehow depressing: Hey, let's objectify each other, and then have sex. But "You are wild" puts things in a totally different light, because now he never claims ownership of her; quite the opposite. A song of surrender, and courtship. Rekindling old fires. (I think I hear him say " ... from our driveway"; domestic touch, eh?) And these singsong chords, that could easily be repugnant, they're appealing, too; that one word (not "fuck" but "wild") transforms the speaker's intention for me, and I sympathize, identify, am caught up in the possibility of these people's rediscovery of each other. Molasses tempo on this one. Does it work? Mmmmm ...
(Mike Mills on the creation of those ghostly background vocals on "Kitten": "I sang seven or eight different notes and put them on faders on the board. You play the board like an instrument, fadingthe notes in and out." God, you get the impression these guys actually enjoy making records.)
Tenth track: "Man on the Moon." Okay, a great chance to talk about melody. How am I going to do this? Maybe it's not possible. I want to say melody is like beauty, like color, but these comments are neither helpful nor true. What I do know about melody is that it's attractive, and it puts hooks in us, won't let go, "lingers on," as the old song has it. This song can be seen as a sort of acknowledgment and celebration of the power of melody: This tune is so pleasing, so catchy, the lyricist seems to be thinking, so beguiling and articulate in and of itself, that I can juxtapose a handful of half filled-in word-pictures here with no discernible link between 'em except the momentum of the music, and get away with it. Indeed, the result may be more charming, more full of delight, more appropriate to the tune, than if a comprehensible narrative thread had been offered. When melody takes charge, it puts feelings first; it asserts the meaningfulness of these feelings regardless of the mind's ability or inability to make sense of them. "If you believe they put a man the moon ..." Where's the declarative clause that's supposed to follow a conditional one? Implied. Like a missing subject implied by a verb, here's a statement that sums up and ties together everything, missing, known only through the implications of the dependent clause that tries to introduce it, and through the music that dances and shouts its message.
Jaunty rhythm. Good melody has something to do with that, too: it helps inspire a groove. In music, melody and rhythm come together (within a structure; could be a sonata, a jazz improvisation, a pop song) and create something magical, and the purpose of words if any is to direct our minds towards the intended feelings while simultaneously distracting them and keeping them out of the way.
"Here's a little legend for the never-believer" ("yeah yeah yeah yeah"--those "yeahs" so similar to and so different from the ones in the chorus of "Ignoreland," subtle symphonic touches on this album, links between different movements), "here's a little ghost for the offering." Yes. Song about song, about the power of belief, if you will, about the intimacy we can feel with a character on our TV set (even if or especially if he's been dead for years), or a singer calling to us from a CD. With historical characters, even. And the desire to be children together, playing games. "Andy did you hear about--?" Gotta like this one. It's funny (that echo, "man on the moooooon"). It's bouncy. It's the melody, and the way the performance delights in it. Got me spellbound. Got me mindless. Got me feeling something.I appreciate it. (Don't always appreciate having it still on my brain when I wake up the next morning, though ... )
Eleventh track: "Nightswimming" " ... deserves a quiet night." Now we come to the heart of the matter. Is this the only track on the album where virtually all of the words can be heard easily, and where those words, on close attention, resolve into a single train of thought? (I realize in this essay I've used the word "narrative" to mean the train of thought that moves through a song or poem or essay, as well as in its more literal sense of the act of telling a story--because each train of thought in an aesthetic context is in fact a story, a deep, sequential story about who the person is who's speaking, with at least hints of everything that's brought him or her to this moment, these feelings.) (And R.E.M. use multiple and/or broken narratives--both qualify as "disjointed"--to represent accurately the complexity of who we are. I mean our shapes are fractal, not geometric. We are the intersections of waves, of many waves.) Maybe. Certainly it stands out in many ways, while remaining very much a part of the fabric of the album-as-a-whole. We are also told, through the interviews, that it is a lyric written back before the previous album was completed, a lyric that arrived before the music in this case, and that the band failed, in a number of tries, to fit music to it to their own satisfaction. Until now.
Until now. My friend Jonathan, suddenly raving to me about this song while we sat waiting for Television to come onstage at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, pointed out its connection to one of R.E.M.'s defining moments, the exquisite "Gardening at Night" on their early EP Chronic Town--he believes/feels both these songs to be metaphoric references to that which the group's name also refers to, our night life, that huge mysterious fearful and vital realm of sex and dreams. Nightswimming. "And what if there were two side by side in orbit, around the fairest sun?" A song also about swimming through the ocean of stars, our metaphysical and astrophysical existence (In the Night Kitchen).
Ahem. But not a pretentious song (for me, even "Losing My Religion" is somewhat contrived or pretentious, though I dearly love it). "Nightswimming" is primarily and simply about seeing a photograph reflected in a car's windshield while driving at night, a photo presumably of a night swimming party at a neighbor's waterhole in Athens, back when BBM&S and the community around them were more innocent and youthful ("fear of getting caught" because the neighbor didn't appreciate these naked kids on his property), a songfull of respect for a past moment and the implications, not of its passing, but of its memory and continued existence inside us. A song not of sentiment but of sentience, remembering, awakeness. "I'm not sure all these people understand. It's not like years ago." A simple evocation of a specific scene and moment, framed within a second scene (friends standing by the water; individual driving around town) and so perfectly realized, so astonishingly beautiful, it's surprising how quietly its beauty sneaks up on you, and how gently it holds you (heart to heart) once it has your attention.
Mike Mills (surely the secret genius of this album, as Stipe is the obvious one, and the group as a gestalt--four plus more--the ultimate and necessary one) is responsible for the magnificent piano-playing on this; the only other musical accompaniment is John Paul Jones's string section. And it works so well, heartfelt vocal actually a foil for the shattering eloquence of the words and the piano, strings filling in the musical spaces and tying this track in tight with the sound of the album as a whole. "These things they go away / Replaced by everyday." Easy couplet. And, in this song, on this record, at this moment in our individual and collective lives (age fifteen or twenty-one or forty-four or seventy-three), as brilliant and successful an expression of "how it feels" as any poet might pray for. "The recklessness of water. They cannot see me naked." Go boys go. An amazing performance.
Twelfth track: "Find the River." Back to disjointed narrative. Washing over us. Great words (and melodic fragments) jumping out at us here and here and there. Reminds me of "Maps and Legends." I love it. New sounds from beginning to end of this record. Mills (in Q): "I asked everybody to sing a background part for the chorus without hearing any of the other guys. Mine was really emotional, and Bill's was totally the opposite, cool and low-key. They really worked together. That's the kind of thing that keeps it from being too processed; that lets you know that it's not being machined to death, that there are human beings doing it." Amen. A demo, but it sounded so good they just kept it. "This life will pass before my eyes." A very good ending. Was that really forty-nine minutes? Let's hear it again ...
Then there's these other records (CDs, actually; and I've also copied them onto tapes for the car and the Walkman) I've been listening to. Where do they fit in? This is complicated. Automatic for the People isn't perfect, but it is extraordinary, larger than life, (almost)endlessly nourishing: that which we look for in a musical album and very seldom find. And yet it's not enough for me.
The geography of my current listening would be simpler to describe if it were limited to a single disc. But that's not what's happening. My attention spills over, spills out, and just this once I want to write about this larger, messier experience. I'm not sure how to do it. I'm not going to go track by track through five more records. Instead, I guess I'll just start talking--
HARVEST MOON
(Neil Young) is strange. It's the nearest thing to a failure among the records discussed here. There isn't a single great song on it, the lyrics throughout are unsuccessful at best, banal and embarrassing at worst, and some of the melodies and arrangements go over the line into real sappiness. And yet there's something about it ...
It sounds like I'm trying to find something nice to say about a mediocre record because I like the artist. No. Neil Young is a great songwriter/performer/creative force, but he's famously uneven, and if this were another forgettable record like This Note's for You or Long May You Run I'd say so. But it's not. It's certainly not a great great great record like Ragged Glory, but it doesn't try to be. It's another concept album (no one else has come close to making as many albums, each with its own goofy and/or brilliant [subtle and/or obvious] unifying "concept," as Neil Young, undisputed king of the concept album, yessir)--and what an intriguing idea. Harvest, Neil's fourth solo album, released in 1972, was his most commercially successful record (if others have sold more units it's because the market as a whole has expanded; but no Neil Young album since Harvest has been close to as popular in absolute terms). Ever since then record companies have been pressuring Neil to "make another Harvest" ... and now he's done it, self-consciously, twentieth-anniversary edition, same all-star band and backup singers, and with a title meant to ensure that you don't miss the point. But how to go about making "another" version of an existing album? Neil's answer hinges, as does the R.E.M. album, on the question of melody. It's a less successful, far less satisfying use of melody than R.E.M.'s triumph, but it is innovative in an odd way, and definitely rewarding if you can scale your expectations down far enough. Why bother? Because it might give you a new perspective on how music communicates. And because you might (I've been taking a survey of Neil fans whose musical tastesI respect, and the odds seem to be about fifty-fifty, much higher than I expected) like it.
I'm not certain if I like it.
I know what most gets in the way of my liking it: the lyrics. Many of Neil's most endearing lyrics have been dumb and/or absurd ("Sugar Mountain," "Cowgirl in the Sand"), but they've worked, hit the bell, they still do, they're evocative, attractive, affecting, compelling. That doesn't mean, however, that any sort of nonsense can be okay just because it's dumb (or just because it's Neil). My friend Jonathan said he thinks "Natural Beauty" (the album-closer) may turn out to be a great song on repeated listenings; my response was and is that the central lyrical statement, "Natural beauty should be preserved like a monument," is such bad poetry, such an unapt and inappropriate image, that it serves as an insurmountable obstacle to the song's achieving what it reaches for. Let's be literal, okay? Natural beauty should not be preserved like a monument. That's really the opposite of what Neil presumably wants to say. A monument is, to most of us (language is what we hear, images are what we see when the word is spoken, get away from that dictionary), a dead stone thing, solid unmoving and made by human hand. Natural beauty should be "preserved" (already a bad word) in the wild, as a living thing, unemasculated, full of its native power. Like a hurricane. Natural beauty is an expression of God, of life, not (as the song's refrain seems to suggest) an abstract concept to be legislated. Truthfully, "should be," "preserved," and "like a monument" are all three inappropriate, clunky, contrary word-phrases to attach to the feeling of "natural beauty" that this song's melody and performance clearly strive to evoke. Is there some value, maybe, in the contradiction? No, not this time. It's too unconscious.
There's no grace, not even goofy awkward wacked-out grace (Neil's specialty). It's a simple case of fucking up.
There are redeeming aspects. "Don't judge yourself too harsh, my love" is a good line, could be a very moving line if the song weren't built on such a wimpy verbal foundation. I don't care for the "video screen" image but it's the sort of thing that Neil can force on me and make it work (stretch me, surprise me) when he's inspired. Some of the dumb words and images in Ragged Glory achieve transcendence (others, including entire songs, remain dumb, but I still flat-out love the album). But "Natural Beauty" is crippled by infelicitous word choices and perhaps by something deeper: a shallowness or laziness that's in direct contrast to the commitment required by the subjectmatter. I grant you I like it better than "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)" on Ragged Glory. Oh well. It would be easy to say Neil should stick to love songs (and angry/passionate/sensitive/confused observations on the rock-and-roll life). But in fact it's probably more true that he's reaching for something here he really cares about, and he should go back and work it even harder, till he captures in sound-story what's biting him, till he untangles this truth and makes it bite back with all the ferocity and beauty of "Over and Over" or "Love to Burn" or (soft sentimental melody-sound okay, just as long as it works) "After the Gold Rush."
David Geffen sued his former friend Neil to try to force him to deliver an album like this (rather than a computer music album followed by a fifties retro album followed by a mainstream country album) when he was under contract to Geffen Records. Neil resisted. Now he takes up the challenge as though it's an aural experiment, like 1991's Arc (a thirty-five-minute CD composition made up entirely of feedback segments from the Neil/Crazy Horse tour earlier that year; a surprisingly likeable piece of music).
Taken purely as sound, Harvest Moon works. The weird thing is, it works best at arm's length, CD playing in the background while you go about the everyday business of your life. To call an album "background music" is an insult where I come from, though Brian Eno's Ambient series may have removed some of that stigma; the thing about Neil Young, however, is that he's made so many albums he has a right to narrowcast them, and this one may just retain its dignity by virtue of the fact that it's self-consciously "adult contemporary" (aging ex-rockers seek mellow sounds, identify Neil Young with memories of "Heart of Gold" and his sensitive singer-songwriter days) and that Neil knows that them AC fans aren't listening too, er, closely. So he gathers up the Harvestmusicians and backup vocalists (big-name talent used modestly: James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt), goes for similar instrumentation, mix, overall sound, and then consciously recasts the memorable melodies and rhythms of the earlier record into slightly new combinations, a little like Holland-Dozier-Holland rewriting the last Motown hit to make the next one, but lovingly, and with a wink (like the wink HDH gave us when they put out a Four Tops hit called "Same Old Song"). A sonic patchwork meant to be heard peripherally. Okay, but ...
But where's the meat? Ragged Glory re-created and updated the sound of "Down by the River" and "Like a Hurricane" so successfully that it actually becomes a new reference point, quite possibly Neil'sbest album.Harvest Moon re-creates but doesn't update the sound of Harvest, and the identity of its own that it takes on is a very modest one. "Come a little bit closer, hear what I have to say," he sings to his wife on the title track, and if we take him at his word we find that there's very little to hear, neither lyrically ("From Hank to Hendrix" is promising, but the payoff line--"Can we make it last, like a musical ride?"--is almost as bad as the dreadful "American Dream" stuff Neil wrote for the last CSN&Y album) nor melodically ("Unknown Legend" promises good old musical delights in its intro and then bops us with every possible steel guitar and backup vocal cliche before the first verse is over).
"I'm still in love with you" is a perfectly valid message, but we've heard much more convincing expressions of it on the last two studio albums, Freedom and Ragged Glory. Ironically, what's lacking on this journey into sensitive-songwriter land is vulnerability. The original Harvest was in fact a very uneven record ("There's a World" is Neil at his emptiest and most overblown, "Alabama" is musically cliched and horribly condescending lyrically, and "Words [Between the Lines of Age]" is just boring), but the vulnerability of the best songs was totally authentic and I still get my guts twisted listening to both the sound and the words of "Out on the Weekend" or "A Man Needs a Maid." Harvest Moon is an experiment to see what happens when you sample yourself, when you bring your famous old sounds and melodies back together for a twenty-year reunion to see what's become of them and us, without compromising your self-honesty. And what it proves, I think, is that though melody may be at the heart of the magic, sound and melody alone are not enough. The R.E.M. album achieves what it achieves because each band member struggles mightily and at considerable personal risk to pursue the uncharted paths that a good melody can point us towards, over and over, song after song. And as a result the ambiguities and obfuscations in both lyrics and performance can take on profound meaningfulness, moment to moment, for both performer and listener. Neil's ambiguities and obfuscations have done the same for us at many's the past moment, and will again, but not on Harvest Moon. And yet ...
"I wanna see you dance again." He knows what we want. And maybe we love him because we identify with his conflicted desire to satisfy us and to withhold himself at the same time. Maybe--in fact I'm sure of it--this album that comes down strongly on the side of withholding is more palatable and reassuring to our everyday selves than albums that scream "You'd better take a chance!!" to cacophonousCrazy Horse accompaniment. And wasn't Harvest all about self-conflict in the first place? Yes. But I don't just want to see you dance. I want you to win my heart. Every time. Harvest Moon doesn't deliver. But it does add an important new footnote to the saga of how it feels to try to be (both in public and private) "Neil Young."
NOTHING BUT A BURNING LIGHT.
Bruce Cockburn. A great album. I bought a copy when it came out last June, and didn't connect with it at first; I guess I got the impression it was slow, dark, not fun. Wrong! Fortunately it crept back onto my stereo sometime this fall, and this time grabbed ahold and wouldn't let go. An amazing set of songs and performances by one of the finer troubadours (traveling song-poets) of our era. Terrific production by T-Bone Burnett. Terrific guitar-playing (as my musician pal Cindy points out, Cockburn is an underrated master, and he outdoes himself here).
It's an unusually long record (sixty minutes; bye-bye, vinyl), and I'm not always in the mood for the leisurely pace of the second half. But when I am in the mood, it delights me, even or especially the oddball stuff: the two instrumentals--the first cooks deliciously, worthy of an album that features Booker T. on organ on nine out of twelve tracks; the second strikes me as a deeply moving nonverbal coda to the previous song, "Indian Wars"--and Cockburn's charming but plodding retelling of the Christmas story, "Cry of a Tiny Babe."
But if you ask me "Why great?" I have to point to the first seven songs (every CD has an EP inside it, consisting of the first batch of songs in the sequence, which is heard two or three times more often than the album as a whole), and to three performances in particular: "Mighty Trucks of Midnight," "Soul of a Man," and "One of the Best Ones." These seem immediate candidates to stand with Cockburn's finest work, alongside the likes of "Hills of Morning" and "If I Had a Rocket Launcher" and "Tibetan Side of Town." Worthy also to stand besideAutomatic for the People as music that speaks to and for the heart of our personal, political, spiritual moment. We need songs like these. They make a difference.
They make a difference, first of all, by being different. "Mighty Trucks of Midnight" would be a huge hit single in the aesthetically appropriate alternate universe of my imagination, blaring at us over this seven-week period from storefronts and boom boxes and every radio we happen to turn on. It has that clean fluid soulful electricblues sound reached for by most every rocker and captured on record by very few, and then only at rare and magical, unforgettable, moments. And the lyrics fill that sound and amplify it, sending it out as a personal message of pain and reaffirmation and awakening to all those parts of our bodies that feel most deeply. Cockburn's version of Disjointed Narrative Technique involves, in this case, seeming to change the subject with every new verse--and then commanding us, by the sound of his voice on the unchanging chorus, to understand viscerally that these separate and even contradictory stories are in fact facets of a single, chilling, liberating truth. "Mighty trucks of midnight, moving on ... moving on." I see the night highways of North America, full of sinister power, rearranging our financial and physical realities in ways we can neither affect nor comprehend. This vision arises naturally from the lyric of the first verse, a novel compressed into a song stanza, perfect poetic summation of 1993:
"Used to have a town but the factory moved away Down to Mexico where they work for hardly any pay Used to have a country but they sold it down the river Like a repossessed farm auctioned off to the highest bidder."
Hair-raising. The next verse starts appropriately with a comic portrait of the aggressive manipulators of Ignoreland, efficiently conveyed in the form of a declaration of independence therefrom ("Wave a flag, wave the Bible, wave your sex or your business degree / Whatever you want but don't wave that thing at me"), but then takes the sort of quick turn for which seatbelts were invented: "The tide of love can leave your prizes scattered / But when you get to the bottom love's the only thing that matters."
This is true. And once again, like the first verse, it is a novel or epic poem condensed into a couple of lines. (I apologize to Mr. Cockburn for quoting his entire song here, but it's the only way I can effectively share my awe and appreciation for what he has crafted. Besides, exquisite as the lyrics are, they have nil resale value separated from their music. Buy the record, folks.)
But what shall we do with this non sequitur between job flight and the destruction of communities--and the pathos of those who articulate the "moral" rationale for all such godless, self-serving activities--and the sudden appearance of love in the song, passionate, painful love, the kind that may break hearts, families, self-images, but that, when you get to the bottom, cannot be gainsayed, cannot bedismissed on behalf of something more "important"?
And (chorus chimes in) what do those mighty trucks have to do with love, anyway?
Third verse is last, and must resolve (Stipe songs don't always, I know, but Cockburn songs come at you from a different angle of incidence). Now we get personal (starting with the word "I") and philosophical (for Cockburn "philosophical" and "spiritual" are practically the same word, and my own sympathies lie very close) in a big way:
"I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever Everything that exists in time runs out of time somedayGot to let go of the things that keep you tethered Take your place with grace and then be on your way."
What is he saying? Well you'll listen and feel for yourself, of course, but what I hear is a direct contradiction to the implicit or expected political argument of the first verse, which is that there are evil forces tearing apart everything of value, forces that must be identified, fought, and stopped. This last verse says, in effect, not, "Don't stand in the way of progress," but rather, "Don't try to stand in the way of death." This, like so much else on the album (and for better or worse, I guess), is a mature perspective. And for Cockburn it's a hopeful, defiant, and even loving perspective. Don't stand in the way of death, because death and change are inevitable, are freedom, are finally the only sources of new life. Meanwhile we must shine as best we can during the brief moment of our presence.
"Mighty trucks of midnight," after this extraordinary stanza, are still sinister and powerful, but the image they convey has become bigger and more intimate both at once--out between these cities, through all the hours of darkness, Time and Fate are doing their work, rolling down the road, silent and relentless but not perhaps merciless if we open ourselves to the mystery of Time's mercy, Death's mercy, God's inexplicable mercy which makes it possible for us to be here, to love, to lose, and finally makes it possible for us to leave here again, free at last. And now I/we can find the sequitur in the split middle verse: the subject is values. These are indeed separate novels that have been compressed here, but novels that belong together--the story of the (seemingly purposeless) loss of what's valued, and the story of the discovery (rediscovery, probably) of love as the only reliable value, the only one worth fighting for, except you fight for itby loving, by having the courage to love even in the shadow of the inevitability of loss. (Who was it in Pogo who said that the reassuring thing about life is that "it ain't nohow permanent"?)
Which is not to say, "Don't resist the forces of decay." It is simply to acknowledge that the political life and the spiritual life, both exemplified in the work of Bruce Cockburn over the last twenty-three years, raise questions and feelings (anger hope despair acceptance) that totally engage us but that cannot be answered or resolved except perhaps in our knowledge of God, and insofar as love itself can be an answer. We fight the forces of decay by loving, and this song/ performance is an example of that activity at its best.
One person's opinion. This is (part of) what I experience and feel, as I listen.
"Soul of a Man" is almost equally profound, and it fits the album so well and sounds so much like Cockburn's lyrical and musical voice, it is a shock to discover it's a Blind Willie Johnson song from circa 1930. What a great sound Cockburn and Burnett (and the players; on this track, Michael Been on bass and veteran Jim Keltner on drums and washboard) have created here! As marvelous as the guitar-playing is, it is always contained within the glorious rhythmic framework built by bass and percussion; and Cockburn's intense but restrained vocal rounds out the effect--a piece of music that drips power at every moment yet never distracts from the lyrical narrative that is the proper focus of the listener's attention.
"Won't somebody tell me," song and singer ask, "tell me what is the soul of a man?" What makes Cockburn relatively rare among popular artists of this or any era is that he lives with his eyes, ears, and heart open, looking, listening, and feeling, so when he does write and record a song he (more often than not) speaks with the voice of someone who genuinely has something to say. This is achieved in the performance as much as in the writing: anyone might sing these words, but very few could succeed in making them so immediate, so personal, so heartfelt.
I don't mean to suggest that this is primarily a matter of vocal (or guitar) technique. It has to do with something both simpler and more mysterious, something that's approached by words like vulnerability, humility, honesty, aliveness. Maybe I just like this song because the answer Cockburn and Johnson come up with is the same one I arrived at (in part through twenty years of studying the I Ching) and wrote about in a book calledRemember Your Essence; they report:
"I read the Bible often I try to read it right As far I can understand It's nothing but a burning light."
Gooseflesh. But maybe you had to be there. Which is, I think, the opportunity this record offers.
There are a lot of fine songs on this album. "Kit Carson" is spooky, a history lesson in a handful of words, reminding us that evil is not always impersonal, that in fact it usually comes down to the acts of individuals, based on the decisions each of us must make, over and over, as to what is right, and how we express those decisions in our actions. "A Dream Like Mine" is a good album-opener, a likable rocker with an inspiring message having to do with where courage and conviction can be found. "Indian Wars" is a well-written finger-pointer, calling attention to the fact that genocide is not just something our forefathers perpetrated. "Great Big Love," "Somebody Touched Me," and "Child of the Wind" are familiar, effective, rhythmic /melodic Cockburn love songs that express the joy of being alive in the world of nature (a world that includes both "the pounding of hooves" and "engines that roar") and in the presence of both divine and earthly (man-woman) love.
Attractive songs, performed with affection, fire, grace. My favorite, alongside "Mighty Trucks of Midnight" and "Soul of a Man," is "One of the Best Ones," a gentle (almost mournful) love song to the singer's spouse or life companion. This is the song Neil Young tried to write, over and over, on Harvest Moon, without success. It's not an easy song to write. The lyrics, and the way the melody wraps itself in and around the lyrics, like a shy toddler in his mother's skirts, speak of love and passion from the perspective of one who has "paid a lot of dues to get here," looking into the eyes of another such. They (words and melody both) ring like haiku, mysteriously simple and touching. How long does it take to learn (or even care about) the meaning of the word "sincerity"? This quiet song has an immediately recognizable depth of life experience within it and behind it. The verses drop like petals onto a pond, the shimmering water of the performance, beautiful and silent and full of personal meanings for each listener. "Guess I'd get along without you / If I had no choice" (reminding us almost unavoidably of how we'd have said and felt the opposite at twenty, and how, paradoxically, these words show a shift towards more, not less, commitment). "Done a lot of getting readyfor this / Some things we learn so slow." "There are eight million mysteries / In the naked body." This music invokes for each listener what we value most in our love relationships: the affection, the sharing, the respect. And the wonder. Cockburn really is our poet laureate of wonder. Long may he ride.
TELEVISION.
Television. I went to see these guys when they came to town last month--for me it was a historic event, my favorite band of the late 1970s reunited after fourteen years, and I expected the club would sell out quickly. Naw. Television was a critics' favorite during their brief era (two albums, in 1977 and '78), and has been acknowledged as a primary influence and inspiration by the members of U2 and R.E.M., but most folks have never heard of them, and the band's astonishing comeback passed without much notice even in musically hip San Francisco.
Too bad. The shows were thrilling. Certain rock guitarists--Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Pete Townshend--can get a sound from their instruments that is uniquely their own, and Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, playing together, belong to this pantheon and have not lost the magic. With the other two original members, Fred Smith on bass and Billy Ficca on drums, they filled the Great American Music Hall with what can only be called Television music. I'm sitting here at a loss as to how to describe what it is about that sound that makes my heart beat fast and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, but anyway the important news about those shows and this new album is that they are in fact the real thing; the passage of years and the rise and fall of rock empires have meant nothing to this band who sounded from the beginning like they existed outside of normal time.
How to describe it? This album, which would be easier to talk about if it had a title, is not quite the equal of the two from the seventies, Adventure and Marquee Moon, but it is very much a continuation of the same eccentric vision, sonically and musically as well as lyrically. Tom Verlaine, who sings and writes the words as well as playing lead guitar much of the time, is a professional weirdo--when he sings "that cat's from Mars!" we know he's only echoing what people say about him. The songs he creates with Television have a sound that may be partly a matter of playing at a certain pitch, choosing chords and keys that resonate with the textures of the songs,music pictures (and rhythm pictures) to go with the word pictures. Whatever it is, it's addictive; even when the songs as songs don't seem memorable, their sound is--you want to hear it again, be transported like that again, and you won't find it anywhere but here. That weird voice. Those metallic guitars.
What do we listen for? Different reasons at different times. Television can never be the sort of intimate friend that Automatic for the People is for me, but it offers another kind of friendship. Like Neil Young, Tom Verlaine projects the archetype or persona of "the loner"; and there are times when the loner in me needs nothing so much as sitting quietly nearby another loner (not too close), staring together at something unseeable in the middle distance.
I say "sitting quietly"--the quietness is in the music, even though it is strong rhythmic rock and roll throughout. The lead track of the album, "1880 or So," is a good example (the song could have been called "Rose of My Heart," but then we might actually be able to remember it by name--Verlaine works hard at erasing such conveniences). It has a lovely metronomic (nonelectronic) drum figure running through it, creating (with bass and rhythm guitar) an exquisite feeling of regularity, universal pulse, solid, steady, full of the quietness of waves eternally and reliably breaking on a sandy shore. There is quietness also in the tone of Verlaine's voice, along with tremendous color and character. The voice doesn't try to ride the rhythms of the music, exactly, but it draws its power from its relationship with them.
The next song, "Shane, She Wrote This," is louder and more emphatic but still has that feeling of regularity and calm running through it, forming a beautiful contrast with the excitement and intensity in the song's melodic and rhythmic structure. What am I saying--that there are two sorts of rhythm here, both conveyed by bass and drums, one soft and steady and the other fierce and explosive? Yes, but they coincide in a manner I can't quite explain. This music bounces--not cutely but in some way that speaks directly to certain pulses in my own nervous system. I twitch along to the music, feeling mysterious happiness.
In these songs, guitar solos generally speak more clearly than words. And sound of voice communicates where words alone would mystify. Feeling and emphasis are primary. Words, like instrumental sounds, lack specific firm conceptual meanings but carry emotional weight. Occasionally a phrase emerges: "In my world, come and go / What I want, I just don't know" (from "In World," the third song on the album). Mostly the words are cryptic. We suppose the first trackis a love song because of the repeated "rose of my heart" phrase. A close listen makes it possible to identify almost every word but the narrative remains elusive. "I don't belong to misery." Well, I can certainly make that mean something. "In the fragrant sweep of the evening air / I could leave this world quite without a care." But is he talking about love, or detachment? It's a lovely phrase anyway, evoking feelings even if I can't give a name to what it is I feel. Something. Something rather precious. And that tasteful lead guitar commentary that follows, movement one and movement two, and the way it interacts with the drumming. The closer I listen, the more seems to be going on here. "The time is brief, now the shadows swim." The words will never yield up their mystery. The guitar lines too stay ambiguous in their eloquence. But my tapping foot knows something.
I like the first three tracks particularly well. While each track on the R.E.M. album strives (successfully) to find some way to stand out for us, to establish its special identity, the songs on Television strive for anonymity. It's an album that grows on you, sounds much better after six or seven listens, and takes another huge leap forward after maybe fifty spins. No reason to think you'll be moved to make such a commitment to it, but if you are, you'll be rewarded. Some kind of endorphin feedback effect kicks in, and the pleasures of the music suddenly multiply themselves. Pleasures of guitars, of rhythm instruments, vocal performance, song structure, and of bits of lyric and melody sticking to the mind and helping it feel its unity with the body and soul and all that.
What do we listen for? Pleasure? Insight? Companionship? An opportunity to release emotions (anger, anguish, confusion, joy)? All of the above? No doubt. And then when we say we do or don't like a particular record, what are we reporting? That it doesn't do anything (none of the above) for us? That it doesn't meet the expectations we had? That it gives us everything we ever wanted from a record album and more, across the spectrum of possibilities? That it makes us feel good in certain ways that are fulfilling and that right now we're not finding anywhere else?
Sometimes I listen to the Television album and it's opaque to me, I just don't get it. Other times, however, it pleases me so much more than I expect it to, and then I wish I had words to explain, even to myself, what it is I'm so delighted by, what I'm responding to. "Shane, She Wrote This" is a wonderful song. Why do I like it? I like the rhythm. I like the chorus, the chord that starts it and the funny guitar figure that follows: chord / "She gives me" / guitar figure/ "all her love" / guitar figure again / "Maybe I don't understand" / follow-up figure ... Hey, I can't even describe it, but that follow-up thing, transitioning back to the word "Shane" and the next verse, is so great, the sound of it, the rhythm (bass/drums/guitar), the way it comments on and incorporates the music that's gone before, the unique tone of it, and then the extraordinary instrumental break halfway through the song, blossoming out from the chorus, all sorts of stuff going on in here that tickles me, that illuminates, suffuses me, without my being able to begin to say what it is I feel or see.
The words don't help me explain. They're good words, like the sounds are good sounds, but this is not the kind of song (not like Bruce Cockburn's, say) that speaks in words to my conscious mind even as it speaks with music and the sound of words to some larger part of me. There's no verbal anchor here. I mean, the song is about the singer's feelings for a woman, or it purports to be, or it partly is. It's also about a kind of religious experience. ("Rapture is mine now as I behold / All turning holy and bright"--or is that "altar," and are there words I'm missing?) It's certainly about that repeated phrase that builds to the song's climax, "I want to know," but at the same time I could turn to you after you've listened to this record fifty times and ask you which song he sings "I want to know" on and you could look at me like, Yeah, that rings a bell, but I'm not sure, I mean I'm drawing a complete blank. These songs hide within themselves. They are perfect puzzles that, unlike the songs on R.E.M.'s album, don't require or request solving. We experience them without thought. They wash over us. They touch our bodies in magical ways and then disappear into the night.
They are brilliantly realized creations, built to exacting specifications that no one but Tom Verlaine would ever have come up with and that no one but Television (not even Tom alone) could possibly meet. The discipline involved is remarkable, and the results are--peculiar. But inspiring. I said this album is not quite the equal ofMarquee Moon and Adventure but I'm not sure about that. It doesn't have a single song that I love as much as "Carried Away" or "Friction"--but ask me again in six months or a year and I may tell a different story. This stuff fits no mold. It just grows on you. At first you try to brush it off. But it won't go away.
Like a ringing in the ears. I don't know what Tom Verlaine's intention was in writing and recording this album, but I can tell somehow that it's exactly as he wanted it to be. Weird person. Andthen what about me--why do I enjoy listening to it so much? It's those sounds. You can hear them particularly in the instrumental passages ("No Glamour for Willi," say), although I suspect the sound of the voice is what sets us up to really hear the instrumental stuff. New colors, or rather ancient colors newly rediscovered, brought to light. Textures dimly remembered by brain cells, revived and set to dancing, and it stirs my DNA, stirs something long-forgotten and deeply significant. Not significant like the Archduke's assassination, significant like the smell of a particular childhood neighborhood on a rainy day. And those rhythms. They unlock things--
I don't like this record at all sometimes. Sometimes I love a handful of songs and am uncomfortable with the others. Sometimes it all sounds amazing to me, perfect in its eccentricity, its musical freshness and clarity. If I had to say what it is, I'd call it a collection of love songs, to girls with different names who may nevertheless be the same person, that are also love songs to music and deeply personal expressions of that most valuable of our possessions: a sense of wonder. Verlaine is in awe of this world he finds himself in. He shares his awe, points to some of what is most striking to him, rhythms and colors and chords and sounds, representations of the immeasurable. Synapse music, some kind of synesthesia. It crosses my wires. "When I see the glory ..." That's a line from the second album, but they haven't stopped seeing it. Haven't forgotten how to turn it into music, either.
I delight in this album. It may or may not tickle you, but if you think it might, give it five or six spins before deciding. If it is for you, you'll be glad you made the effort. No one else speaks this musical language. And no other language can capture the people and places and spaces enclosed in these songs. This is what we listen for: new messages. We don't have to be able to say what they mean. We just like the way it feels when we receive them.
FAVORITE SHORT STORIES.
Sonya Hunter. I didn't precisely choose the records included in this essay; this one in particular chose me, catching my attention (I met a guy who runs a small record company and he sent me some things; this CD jumped out from the group and demanded to be heard again and again) at a moment when I was in a mood both to listen, and to write about this experience of listening. The point is, I guess, that I am defined not only by my favorite album of the moment, butby the cross-section of stuff I'm currently into. I have an almost-eighteen-year-old son who is currently enthusiastic about Arrested Development, Pearl Jam, and Garth Brooks. This is normal, though you won't find a radio station that plays all three of these talented and popular artists. We have to be our own radio stations now, punching buttons in the car and stacking CDs on the home player, maybe making compilation tapes for the Walkman if we're so inclined. We mix and match, painting subtle or blatant self-portraits as we do so. I am not trying to paint a self-portrait here. I am trying to paint a portrait of the universe, at this instant in time, based on what I see when I look out the window. Window of music. This 1991 album that just showed up in my life is part of what I see hear feel this month. It pleases me. I'm not writing about it because I want to introduce you to a new artist. I'm writing about it because it makes me happy.
I like the songs (some more than others). I like Sonya Hunter's singing--the sound of her voice and the way she makes use of it, her performance. I like the arrangements. I like the way the album hangs together as a whole, the "feel" of listening to it.
A good voice is something new under the sun. Once you meet it, your world is bigger. In a certain sense a voice and a personality are the same thing. Or voice and individuality. An artist's voice (paint on canvas, words on paper) is, at best, the soul of that person, shared with someone else at this moment of contact. Monet's voice--unmistakable. Shakespeare's voice. Billie's voice. Chaplin's voice (the voice of silence, the voice of face). It surprises me that this modest album has grown on me to the point where I'm not ashamed to speak of it in terms of what art is all about for me. It's about meeting real people. Voices that touch me. Voices I listen for, look for, wait for. Voices I remember.
Thank God for new voices. Thank God for old voices, too.
On this album, I am starting to realize, Sonya Hunter stakes her claim to possibly be an old voice, old musical friend, someday. Hello. A future Neil Young, perhaps, and people will say, "How come she doesn't do another album like Favorite Short Stories?" Oh well. I'm not saying this is a great record. But it's a wonderful record. There's a subtle distinction.
Three things that help it to be wonderful, help it to be an effective introduction: its length, its ensemble, and its thematic unity.
Its length: It's short. You can get the full experience in half an hour (thirty-one minutes), which especially when you're first meetingsomeone is a real advantage over hourlong albums like Cockburn's, Young's, and Dylan's. There are eleven songs here, and they all feel whole and complete (except "View from a Sidewalk," which isn't supposed to), though most of them are less than three minutes long. Refreshing.
The ensemble: Musicians are used with some of the sparkle and intelligence that occurred on Bob Dylan's early ensemble recordings. These are people with voices of their own, and they are encouraged to use them full heart while at the same time they have the advantage that here there is a strong guiding musical vision for them to be themselves within. Because of this strong vision, different sets of musicians and different combinations of instruments can exist side by side very effectively. "Once I Had a Sweetheart" features a brilliant Chuck Prophet rave-up on electric guitar; "Foggy Moon" showcases Steven Strauss on upright bass, Ben Demorath on oboe, and Chris Cacavas on accordion--along with Sonya on acoustic guitar, a fantastic combo. "The Frost Will Melt" is piano-based, with bass and percussion; "Feathers" is just acoustic guitar and upright bass; "Not Yet," guitar and cello; five other songs feature electric guitar/bass/ percussion combinations with various excellent musicians; and the last song, "New Year," is the only solo performance (acoustic guitar). Good arrangements and well-chosen instrumentation and songs and sequencing can turn an album into a tapestry, some kind of rich remarkable texture, unity in diversity. It happens here.
The thematic unity is partial and understated and it works very well. It is announced with marvelous flourish in the opening track, the only "cover" on the album (song not written by the songwriter/ performer, in this case a traditional, probably Irish, folk lament): "Once I Had a Sweetheart (But Now I Have None)," done with gloriously intense rock and roll (or electric blues) keening and hypnotic marching-band rhythms, all supporting Sonya's cool, devastatingly believable vocal. She seems to move effortlessly between detachment and desperation, perhaps because (for the character she's portraying) each is a mask for the other. Whatever. The point is that she plays this character (note the album title; these songs, true or not, are presented as narratives, as fictions), the jilted woman, with irresistible conviction. The character shows up again on the other three standout tracks, nicely spaced through the album (1, 4, 8, 11): "Wedding," "Not Yet," "New Year." The closing song, "New Year," is subtle in its expression of the theme (balancing the opener's flamboyance) --only her voice makes it clear that she's singing about lossof love. Great lyrics: "No resolution / My plans have all gone / A good vacation / Who doesn't need one?" Great singing. The singing on all four of these jilted woman songs is exceptional, and anyway, the effect is that the album grabs hold of the listener--on first listen (and second and third) it is clearly about something--and it communicates that something uniquely and indelibly. We are happy to give the other songs a chance to grow on us while we wait breathlessly to hear these performances again.
The other seven songs all have their charms, particularly the vocal and instrumental performances. The "jilted" songs showcase the bluesy side of Hunter's voice and personality; there is also a lyrical, playful side displayed on songs like "Feathers" ("Get your free feathers here!"--my teenage daughter immediately responded to this one), "Paint," and "Foggy Moon." The elasticity and expressiveness of her voice as she subtly changes mood and attitude, between and within songs, is striking. "Foggy Moon," a personal perspective on crime in the city, is my favorite after the big four already mentioned. "Break the lock, come right in / Browse around, steal something," she sings cheerily and sadly. Catchy tune. The hook in the chorus--"Trust is dangerous ..."--is memorable, even haunting. I like the light, sure way she sings against the pulse of the upright bass. The phrasing and timing of her performance illuminate these songs, making her seem at times a better songwriter than she really is. "The Frost Will Melt" is a useful example of the risks of disjointed Narrative Technique; the intriguing pieces of implied story that don't quite fit together have to not fit together in just the right way (Stipe a master of the technique; Neil Young more of an intuitive primitive, a hit-or-miss genius). Many aspects of this song are terrific but I find it hard to love because I can't quite juggle together the title phrase and the "obedient dog" images and the Jezebel reference and end up with any kind of satisfying sense of what she's trying to tell me. Is she flirting, or being humiliated? Is she the Jezebel (I do get that it's a song about talking to oneself), and if so, why? I'm left hanging. Some fine vocal moments, though. Check out "View from a Sidewalk" for an example of Sonya as songwriter dancing just out of reach of my comprehension and making it work for me; good DNT, I like the words even though I'm not sure what they are.
Straightforward narrative techniques still have their place, of course, and the standout short story on the album, "Wedding," uses ironic understatement and unusual dramatic perspective (song sung by a woman involved in a prenuptial affair with the groom) to splendideffect. Funny, deadly performance. This and "Sweetheart" are the performances that hooked me on first listen to this album and brought me back for more. But the tracks that have weathered the best for me are the plaintive (definitely haunting) "Not Yet" and the equally sad, equally delicious "New Year." Melody plays a big part here. Good melodies are pleasing to the soul. Good melody combined with good story (conveyed by good performance) keeps me coming back real well. Sing it for me again please.
The album is highly recommended, not for promise but for what it powerfully and richly delivers. As for promise, I recently heard Sonya sing live (opening for Television at the Great American Music Hall). She was killer the first night, way off the second (opening act is a tough gig, and anyway, in my experience real performing artists blow hot and cold while "entertainers" stay tepidly consistent). But what I want to tell you, apart from seeing her sing if you get a chance to, is that I heard more than enough outstanding new songs at her shows to know she's got a next album in her that should be better than the first, and probably many more after that if she can hang in there. Not an easy thing to do, of course, as one tries to pay the rent and keep the faith and catch the ear of those music biz investment banker guys (still guys, mostly). But I wish her Godspeed and perseverance. This first album (co-produced by Sonya Hunter and Patrick Thomas) is a textbook example of how it's possible to make a great-sounding record on a tiny budget. Also a textbook example of how hard it is to sell any records on a tiny budget, no matter how wonderful the album is. Oh well. If voice is personality, it is also spirit, and we can hope that this woman's strong, distinctive voice is indicative of an equivalent strength of spirit that will allow her, somehow, to keep singing and making records.
I want to hear more.




Speaking of endurance, Good as I Been to You is Bob Dylan's fortieth album (including the two with the Traveling Wilburys). It's also, remarkably, the first solo acoustic album he's made in twenty-eight years. Why so long? Probably (ask Neil Young) because he just didn't want to do what people wanted him to do.
And he hasn't. He's found a new way instead. New old way. He's playing acoustic guitar and harmonica and he's singing songs he never wrote. An album of covers, not goofy and detached like Self Portrait or quirky and wildly uneven like Down in the Groove, but affectionate,modest, intimate, and committed. My friend Jonathan nailed it: "There are no grand gestures on this album." That's right. I love the grand gestures Dylan performed in his solo cover spots on tour in 1988--showstoppers all, the climax of each evening--"Barbara Allen," "Trail of the Buffalo," "Eileen Aroon," "The Lakes of Ponchartrain." But this isn't that. This is something new, again. A new way of being with a song, of speaking through performance.
In a different way from Blood on the Tracks, in a different way from The Basement Tapes, it is an intimate album. I think indeed it may be the most intimate album Bob Dylan has ever recorded.
Secrets of the heart.
Singers love songs. It's a simple truth, but not always remembered in this day and age. They love 'em, they love to mess with them, they love to hang out with them, they love to sing them. Bob Dylan successfully uses his voice and his guitar-playing to express and explore his great affection and respect for every one of the thirteen songs on this record.
This is an astonishing accomplishment, and I know I'm not the only listener who finds his thoughts turning to something Dylan said to Nat Hentoff in 1962, quoted on the back cover of Freewheelin': "I don't carry myself yet the way Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin' Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they're older people."
We know a friend is sharing a secret of the heart, a privacy, when he tells us straight-out about his pain and longing, as Dylan does on "You're a Big Girl Now" or the less obviously confessional "Most of the Time." But we also feel our friends' hearts' truths when they speak of them indirectly, speak of them through tone of voice, through posture while sitting or walking, through movements of hands and shoulders and facial muscles, through a fleeting look in the eyes. Often this is inadvertent, but there are also moments when we know a friend is consciously, purposefully communicating with us in this fashion, asking us to receive something that cannot be put in words. This album's like that, I think. You can come real close on this one.
At the risk of repeating myself: Intimacy is not the same as confession. Our confusion on this point is a reflection of our People magazine culture. Intimacy is closeness, mutual sharing. Dylan's embarrassing and/or incomprehensible performances on national television in recent years are expressions of his inability to pretend to be communing with another person (his listener) in a context which in fact he experiences as extremely uncomfortable, dishonest, and humiliating."One should never be where one does not belong." The converse of this statement is that when one is where he belongs--as determined by the heart, not the intellect--then one enjoys a certain freedom from prosecution, from the pressures of outward censure or inner guilt. It is in this personal oasis that intimacy exists. Time out from the universe. You and me in this room.
Stories have drifted down through the years, of Dylan playing songs for the other musicians before or during a recording session, or sitting around with friends in a hotel room, folk songs, rockabilly, country, blues, pop standards, even "White Christmas"--amazing snatches of performance that are often incomplete, that come and go in a moment, but that are remembered with awe by the people who happened to be there. This album, recorded rather spontaneously (Dylan had done a lot of recording for a completely different record, involving various other musicians, when he suddenly went into the studio for a day or two and did this one instead), seems to me to be the official opportunity for a public peek at the backstage Dylan, not what he says or does, but what songs he sings, and how he sings and plays them, when he's by himself or with one or two other people.
All of the songs on "Good as I Been to You" are traditional, with the exception of "Hard Times" by Stephen Foster, "Tomorrow Night" by Coslow and Grosz (a huge hit record for Lonnie Johnson in 1948), "Sittin' on Top of the World," which was written and recorded by Jacobs and Chatman of the Mississippi Sheiks in 1930, and "You're Gonna Quit Me," recorded and probably written by Blind Blake in 1927.
The range of source material is fascinating, and reveals a side of Dylan few people are aware of: He is, in his own way, a song scholar, and throughout his career has learned many more songs than he has ever performed publicly. He likes oddball sources, though he's not a showoff about it; he doesn't hesitate to include very familiar songs--"Frankie and Albert," "Blackjack Davey," "Froggie Went A Courtin'"--alongside more unusual choices. He has not gone out of his way to rework these songs--rather, each is to some extent a tribute to the source he learned it from, and it comes out sounding similar to or different from that source, depending on Dylan's mood as he sings it, what feels good to his fingers or his voice, what key he's comfortable playing it in, and so forth. Dylan apparently learned "Arthur McBride," an Irish song from the eighteenth century, from Paul Brady's 1976 recording; and his appreciation of Brady is there in the performance even though Dylan's assumption of the personality ofthe narrator is so complete you'd swear the cousin in question just told you the story himself.
It's a virtuoso performance. Dylan's ability to identify with victims of injustice and members of the underclass fills this story--about a couple of punks who verbally and then physically resist the predations of His Majesty's recruiters--with an immediacy that is riveting. The subtlety of the singing and the guitar-playing is characteristic of this album, and very much the work of a mature artist. His voice is amazing--it reminds me of what a peculiar and brilliant creation Dylan's original assumed vocal persona was, that hybrid Okie accent, not measurable against any standard because it was sui generis, a "Bob Dylan accent," his private vehicle. This Irish accent of Dylan's is not Irish nor American but is born rather of the song itself, its key and chords and musical texture, its ironies and understatements and emphases. It is an accent created spontaneously by an inspired, hardworking artist who is looking for the right vehicle to transverse the space between this singer and this song at this moment of performance, a place where the feelings he gets from the song can become sounds, a place where the sounds of the words can become music and the colors and textures in the melody can become narrative. A voice. Every song on this album has its own voice, each a unique creation and not for show but for the specific purpose of honoring and getting across the song. Each performance full of respect for history, and for the human feeling and experience that is back of that history. "Christmas morning." When he sings the words he is not Bob Dylan. He is Arthur McBride's cousin. We've met him, and unlike the sergeant in the story, our lives have been enriched by the experience. New messages. As great artists mature, their work often becomes simpler and more deeply felt. Dylan--Dy--lan the performer, not Dylan the songwriter, who's semiretired despite the genius displayed at the Oh Mercy sessions--is no exception.
This is not an album for all moods and moments. It's a thrilling musical and emotional expedition better suited to regular rediscovery than to saturation repeat listenings. Not a pop record, in other words, though it is certainly capable of speaking directly to many different sorts of listeners.
"Jim Jones," an early-nineteenth-century song about a prisoner's boat trip to the penal colony in Australia, is an exquisite example of the beauty Dylan's ravaged voice is capable of when it finds a melody that delights it. This is a song about the dignity of the human spirit; Dylan's portrait of Jim Jones is compassionate, unsentimental, uncompromising,and extraordinarily lucid--his voice is a paintbrush, wielded by a free and confident hand, subtle, supple, exulting in the finest detailwork while never losing the sweep and character of the performance as a whole. The guitar's support is invaluable, full of imagination, intelligence, consciousness. Listen to him sing this couplet: "With the storms raging round us and the winds of blowing gales / I'd rather have drowned in misery than gone to New South Wales." Maybe you're still looking for some other Bob Dylan, voice of some great remembered collective moment. That's okay. But are you missing, through the singleness of your search, the ongoing work of a great artist alive and actively working among us now?
Every song a painting. Every painting filled with light, and full of details that become visible at different moments, on different listenings. The first four songs on the album are classic narratives, their purpose is to tell a linear story; this is also true of "Arthur McBride" and "Froggie Went A Courtin'" (though in the latter we're not so much interested in the story as in the chain of images the storyteller conjures up, lightly, of course, almost a parody of narrative, but still your basic "series of pictures" song in a tradition that Dylan reinvented for much of his most distinctive work, from "Hard Rain" to "Chimes of Freedom" to "Series of Dreams"). Other songs here are what I might call "implied narratives," where there's clearly a story behind the song but we aren't told it directly or in sequence--"Little Maggie," "You're Gonna Quit Me," "Diamond Joe." We know the singer of "You're Gonna Quit Me" is going to jail, but we don't know why, and the song's not intended to tell that story. Rather, it speaks of the situation, a man speaking to his woman whom he believes is abandoning him (presumably because he's no good to her in prison). A song like "Tomorrow Night" is pure situation; no story except, Tonight you're here with me but I wonder how you'll feel tomorrow. And yet it is still Dylan's character as a performer to imbue the song with an astonishing narrative moment. He sings, "Your lips are so tender / Your heart is beating fast / And you willingly surrender / [long pause] To me, but darling will it last?" That pause is so rich in sexuality (I imagine Dylan heard the song as a young teenager and thought it very daring, which it is), and more than that: the dominance of the male, he who is surrendered to, is immediately transformed into vulnerability; the singer feels helpless in the face of his desire for this moment to be repeated, and his knowledge that his fate is now entirely in her hands. The narrative quality I refer to is the feeling we get, largely because of that pause, that he has justdescribed their actual lovemaking, that we are there as it's happening. We also feel the shift take place as confident lover becomes uncertain supplicant. It's a sweet song. Dylan's voice, to my tastes, is gorgeous here; his harmonica playing full of compassion, appreciation of beauty, and resignation. And other things. No simple answers. Rich complexities of the human heart.
I also love the texture of his voice on "Hard Times." This is purely a matter of taste (no accounting for it), I think, the way one is drawn to a particular color in a painting or finds beauty in a particular body and face. I hear the sound of his voice here and I get chills, I get all sorts of feelings, there's a quality to it that pulls me, ear candy, someone else might hear it as nails on a blackboard and how could I argue or explain? I can praise, however, the uniqueness of the sound here created, another new message, new creature. I am intrigued by Dylan's ability to convey to me both the guilt and compassion of the narrator, who is part of a more privileged class ("While we seek mirth and beauty ..."), and also the feelings of the sufferers themselves--when he sings the chorus he is not the narrator quoting the miserable ones, he is himself one of them, feeling and living the pain, hope, hunger, and despair of the situation and again deeply communicating the dignity of the human spirit at the same time. (This dual role of the singer can be expressed also in the question, is it the hard times that are lingering "all around my cabin door," or is it the poor themselves, or the song they sing that plucks at the conscience? I suppose it is probably all three.) Obviously a timely and well-chosen song, and far from simple in its implications and reverberations. But it is a vehicle for feelings first; thoughts and politics are strictly secondary, or more accurately, the singer believes they appropriately arise from feelings.
The album is full of moments. When Dylan sings, in "Blackjack Davey," "She answered him with a loving smile," I can see and feel that smile. It's the inflection in his voice, the way he's inside the song, the charm and conviction of the storyteller. Lust in his voice--the girl's lust, not the gypsy's. How does he do that? And how about that guitar-playing? My god. I don't think he practiced for months in preparation for making this album, but the difference between what he does here and on the other songs and what he's been doing onstage (as a guitar player) for the last many years, is staggering. It seems clear that the gift is in him, as great as ever or more so, needing only an occasion it's willing and inspired to rise to. The seducer, the charmer, the gypsy poet guitarist comedian rock-and-roll star, has resourceshe'll always be able to call on if so moved. It's the sweetness of the lady that's the variable, from his point of view--is there an audience I care to charm, after all these years, can you somehow make me want to strut my stuff? Evidently someone was able to.
Maybe Bob just woke up in love with his audience one week, and moved quickly to execute this project before the feeling passed.
(Actually, this happens all the time at his live shows--I mean affection for and openness to his listeners, expressed in the performance of a song. But it's not such a consistent occurrence in the studio. And I can think of only a few occasions--certain concerts or segments of concerts over the years--when he has shared himself so openly and unself-consciously.)
"Step It Up and Go" is in some ways a key to the album: it reminds us that the guitar is a rhythmic instrument as much as a melodic one, and that there is a strong rhythmic element in the performance of all these songs, even if this is the only real rock-and-roller in the bunch. It's an old jug-band song, often called "Bottle Up and Go," and among other things it tells us that Bob Dylan understands the history of American music in the twentieth century, knows where rock and roll came from and maybe where it's going to. Certain feeling, makes you want to get up and dance. Listen to that voice! His fingers are a complete band. "Everybody's gonna have a wonderful time tonight." He doesn't sing that but we can hear it. I can also hear, for example, "Silvio," but this is a much better song (or is transformed into one by a much better performance). Twenty-eight years ago I used to listen to "Snaker" Dave Ray sing "Go My Bail" accompanied by himself on 12-string and wonder why I loved it so much and what was the difference between that and rock and roll? I'm still trying to work it out.
Rhythms. How come he plays the same "Sittin' on Top of the World" he helped Big Joe Williams record thirty-one years ago, and yet it sounds like Reverend Gary Davis (and the Stones) doing "You Got to Move"? Just something his fingers got into, I guess. Rhythms. They float freely between songs and performers and eras and styles of music just like melodies do, recurring over and over in new forms and permutations. With melodies it's called "the folk process" (steal everything) (it ain't theft if it never was private property to begin with). Anyway. I appreciate that none of these songs are primarily nostalgic in content or effect. The point is just the opposite, really: They are alive now, have as much or more to say about our present condition as any new stuff that's being written.
And I like the album title, too. Very funny. Certainly Bob Dylan has been good to us. But certainly he hasn't done it because we wanted him to. No chance. He just happened to notice that we were walking in the same direction, and thought he might offer to entertain us while we walk along. "Hey, I know a love song, and a dance tune, and a story about a girl who disguised herself as a tar and shipped out on a Navy boat. You wanta hear them?" And he tapes a list of songs to his guitar strap. And starts singing them to us.
And we can't get him to stop.




I've been listening to Bob Dylan for more than thirty years. I've been listening to R.E.M. since 1985. A friend gave me Television's first single in 1975, but like a fool I didn't go see them live while I lived in New York, and didn't really get into them till Marquee Moon came out in 1977. I've been fascinated with Neil Young since I first saw Buffalo Springfield, in 1966. There've been a few albums of his I didn't buy over the years, because he'd disappointed me the last few times, I guess, but I've always come back and so has he. I got turned on to BruceCockburn and Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw in 1983, three years after the album came out. Sonya Hunter, as you know, is a 1992 addition to the ever-changing list of voices I'm interested in. What does it mean to have all these voices in my life?
It is a blessing. I don't listen to music all the time. I like to be able to give it my attention, which is one reason I like to write about it: it gives me an excuse to spend hours and hours and hours with Automatic for the People, intimate time, quality time, diving deep into each song, each performance, and the feelings it draws forth from me. I recommend this process to you, as much or more than I recommend any given record I've talked about here. Music offers education, self-healing, communication and connection with "the world," that amorphous, huge, ill-defined community of common consciousness that we try to make real by apportioning it into smaller communities that we feel some link with, Americans, Democrats, Christians, Jews, men, women, rock-and-roll fans, R.E.M. listeners. Artists create their own audiences; popular artists create communities of listeners. Less popular artists create smaller (often more intense) communities of listeners. We benefit from our participation in these communities. They expand and deepen our awareness of "the world."
"Maybe I ride, maybe you walk, maybe I try to get off, baby ..." "Hey, kids, where are you? / Nobody tells you what to do, baby." It's1993. Maybe that means something, maybe it's an illusion, I'm not sure. Time is a concept. Newspapers tell us what day it is and what's going on that's Important, but I don't trust newspapers. I do trust music. This is not a pledge of allegiance. It's simply an acknowledgment of what seems to work for me. I'm not necessarily looking for truth. I'm looking for pleasure. Melody, rhythm, and narrative. Tell me a story. Sing to me. Give me something to move to.
I'm still hearing voices. The purpose of this essay has been to talk with you about what I hear on these shiny round CDs (notice that they're mirrors? that they're prisms?) when I take them out of their square plastic boxes. New music. New messages. Somehow I think this keeps me alive, keeps me connected, keeps me healthy, keeps me reaching out for something. I need friends. It sounds ugly to say I buy them in a store, but that's only a small part of the process. The real connection begins when I give my attention, and discover (sometimes) that they, the artists, have been giving their attention to me. Have been waiting for me to come along and listen. Have something to tell me, to share with me.
And they do. Sometimes they do. This month they do. It excites me. I wanted to tell you about it.

Copyright © 2002 by Paul Williams