Mickey Newbury

This news makes me very happy. Mickey Newbury's classic trio of albums from the early '70s, long out of print, are about to be reissued. Newbury was a Nashville outsider long before the days of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, etc. He didn't cultivate an outlaw image. He just wrote devastating songs about the downtrodden and the losers, and his album Looks Like Rain (one of the three about to be reissued) hit me right in my adolescent gut. His songs were unspeakably sad; little vignettes of lives unraveling in cheap motel rooms, lonely people sitting by themselves watching a phone not ring. It's no wonder Music City didn't know what to do with him. This wasn't glitzy Nashville heartbreak. This was the real, 3:00-a.m.-staring-at-the-ceiling deal.

Check out these albums and discover a songwriter's songwriter.

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DRAG CITY TO REISSUE MICKEY NEWBURY AN AMERICAN TRILOGY MAY 2011


Mickey Newbury. The name may not be familiar to everyone, but the songs and the performers they are associated with should be: “An American Trilogy,” (Elvis Presley) “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” (Kenny Rogers and the First Edition) “She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye,” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings,” (Tom Jones) are just a few of the songs in the Newbury catalog.

He was a songwriter’s songwriter at the dawning of the era of the singer-songwriter, yet he was also an unknown name on the Billboard charts. His early success writing in Nashville and his selfless and relentless championing of his friends and contemporaries paved the way for Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and David Allen Coe. Newbury songs have, to date, been recorded over 1300 times by more than 1000 performers including Johnny Cash, Scott Walker, Ray Charles, Joan Baez, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, the Box Tops, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Nick Cave. He is the only songwriter ever to have number one hits (with different songs) in the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts within the space of one year (and three of those songs were in the charts simultaneously!). But Mickey Newbury himself was by far the best interpreter of his own songs.

A visionary album in the vein of Love’s Forever Changes and Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Looks Like Rain immerses the listener into a vividly-painted emotional landscape of heartbreak, madness and despair tracked by the sound of wind chimes and rain. Mickey followed this masterpiece with another, 1970’s ‘Frisco Mabel Joy—recently voted number 6 in an Uncut reader’s poll of the 50 greatest ‘lost’ albums. Here he broadened the palette, incorporating the sound of the Nash philharmonic, an ‘orchestra’ consisting of electric and steel guitars, to produce what Mojo described as “an hallucinatory suite of sad, soulful songs”. The cycle of Cinderella Sound albums ended in 1973 with a third epic, Heaven Help The Child, by which time Mickey’s increasing confidence in the studio was clear and he had definitively laid out his stall as a recording artist.

Grammy winning engineer Steve Rosenthal and mastering engineer Jessica Thompson have restored the original analog master tapes believed for many years to have been destroyed in a fire but recently re-discovered in the Elektra records vault and created stunning new remasters of each album specifically for this release, making this the first ever CD issue of these landmark albums using the original tapes.

An American Trilogy provides a rich and compelling trip to the deep space of Mickey Newbury, one of the most extraordinary and unique artists in American popular music.

Battle of the Bands

Battle of the Bands, at the Image Journal blog.

Over the Rhine -- The Long Surrender

My review of the new Over the Rhine album The Long Surrender at Paste Magazine.

The Winter of Twee

Other than a few recent albums I’ve had to review, I’ve been blissfully unaware of newly released music for the past few months. That’s because I’ve been caught up in exploring the musical genre that goes by the unfortunate name of Twee. The dictionary defines the term as “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” Yep, it is that. Supremely catchy, too.

A Pitchfork article describes the label’s application to music as follows:

For their musical cues, they looked to the quaintest, least-cool roots of youth-culture music: girl-groups, 1960s guitar jangle, bubblegum chirp, rainy-day balladry. Their lyrics toed the lines between schoolboy earnestness and arch, bratty simplicity. Their guitar playing revolved around elementary chord strumming, and their production ranged from no-frills to downright primitive. Their performances were so amateurish that the word "shambling"-- as in "shambling along"-- became one name for the scene. Their fashion sense was deliberately plain, like children dressed by their mothers: stripy shirts, librarian skirts, and enough anoraks (parkas) to make that word a genre name. Their gender politics weren't just egalitarian: If anything, they celebrated the girly and the sweet, so much so that the word "twee"-- pronounced the way a baby might say "sweet," and meaning cloying, or overly precious-- became the biggest insult leveled at them.

So, there you go; music for nerds, dweebs, and nebishes. Sign me up.

The truth is, I had already been sorta signed up for a while. The best-known exponents of the genre – UK and Scandinavian dweebs Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, Kings of Convenience, and The Clientele – were already well known to me. They were bookish, a little shy and socially awkward, and supremely melodic, traits that serve bookish music fans perfectly well. But I had never really explored the genre in depth.

That all changed with an album that showed up in my mailbox in the fall, the debut release from Allo Darlin. Allo Darlin was the brainchild of a London-by-way-of-Australia waif named Elizabeth Morris. She and her band sounded like a Cockney version of The Shangri-Las or The Ronettes, and wrote songs that managed to quote Weezer, Johnny Cash, and Doris Day and still sound utterly fresh in their quirky specificity. One song recounted how she fell in love with her boyfriend while making chili. It was the kind of homespun detail that just sounded right, like something that might actually happen in the usual extraordinary life. The songs had breezy melodies, witty lyrics, chiming guitars, and a serious backbeat, and they were all about being young, full of life, and in love with music. Plus, they rhymed "platonic" and "gin and tonic" while the guitars played the riff from Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl.” I was sold.

A little Internet research revealed that Elizabeth Morris was also in a band called Tender Trap, a throwback name to the ring-a-ding ‘50s, but a full decade ahead of that reference point in their sound. Again, Phil Spector’s girl groups were the touchstone, but this time Elizabeth was content to play guitar. The vocals were handled by one Amelia Fletcher. And who was this Amelia Fletcher? It was Internet research time again. Oh, my God. Or, more correctly, Oh, my gosh.

Amelia Fletcher, it turned out, was merely the godmother of Twee. A quarter century, three band name changes, and a dozen albums later, she was now fronting Tender Trap. But what had come before was mind boggling.

Let’s start with Talulah Gosh, since that’s where it all starts. The only album you’ll find, and the only album you’ll need, is Backwash, which compiles the only 25 songs the band recorded. It’s a masterpiece, front to back, a 5-star album that effortlessly captures the appeal of the entire genre: manic, jangly guitars, sweet girl group harmonies, and songs about falling in love. There’s an appealing, to-hell-with-it amateur patina over the whole enterprise. It sounds like, and probably is, the product of smart kids who love music and who never thought that their garage band bashing and chiming would go anywhere.

Amelia’s ensuing bands – Heavenly, Marine Research, and Tender Trap – merely continue the tradition, albeit in slightly more polished, better produced ways. Nearly all of the dozen albums are great. I would guess that two-thirds of my listening time over the past three months has been taken up with this music. I don’t regret a second of it. I would vote for Amelia Fletcher as Empress of the Universe.

But I should note a few of the other notable discoveries of the Winter of ’11. There is, of course, an American counterpart to the sound, and the primary exponent is one Rose Melberg. Rose’s earlier bands – Tiger Trap (not to be confused with Tender Trap), Gaze, and The Softies – pick up where Talulah Gosh left off.

An outlier, Wales’ The School, released a superb Twee album called Loveless Unbeliever last summer. I’m late to the party, but it’s wonderful.

Australia’s The Lucksmiths make consistently great guitar-based pop music that might be Twee, and might be merely R.E.M.- and Go Betweens-influenced jangle. Whatever it is, you’ll find ten or so soft rock/jangle/precious albums that feature one exquisitely crafted pop song after another.

And Columbus, Ohio’s own Super Desserts are a worthy addition to the party, making idiosyncratic, chirping music that owes as much to Sufjan Stevens as it does to Belle and Sebastian on their album Twee as Folk.

Icepocalypse Playlist

Ice Age – Birdmonster
Back Street Slide – Richard and Linda Thompson
Always Crashing in the Same Car – David Bowie
Ice on the Wing – Nada Surf
Jesus I’m Freezing – Garageland
Icebound Stream – Laura Veirs
Slip Slidin’ Away – Paul Simon
Buried in Ice – The Felice Brothers
Assume Crash Position – Konono No. 1
In This Home On Ice – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Kingdom of Ice – Woven Hand
Hockey Skates – Kathleen Edwards
Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day – Jethro Tull
A Cold Freezin’ Night – The Books
If the World Should End in Ice – The Handsome Family

The Fleetwood Mac You Don't Know

Fleetwood Mac has gone through guitarists the way Spinal Tap went through drummers. They don't spontaneously combust. But they self-destruct in the usual (and a few unusual) ways just the same, giving way to their addictions, to mental illness, and, at least in one case, to religious brainwashing and the influence of bizarre cults.

That young, handsome fellow on the left is Danny Kirwan, who played guitar for Fleetwood Mac from 1968 through 1972. Incredibly enough, that was already "mid-period" Fleetwood Mac, the original blues/boogie band led by Peter Green and Jeremy Spencer (two of the early guitarist casualties) giving way to a kinder, gentler jamband led by Kirwan and Bob Welch. The coke-addled, mate-swapping pop juggernaut led by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks was still a few years off.

Frankly, that mega-successful incarnation of the band never measured up to the band of the early '70s, in my opinion. That's because Danny Kirwan was a brilliant guitarist and a fine, sensitive songwriter. The three albums on which he has the spotlight -- Kiln House, Future Games, and Bare Trees -- are unheralded masterpieces. I've been listening to them again over the past few days, and they've held up as well as any music from the period. At least a few of Danny's songs, among them "Station Man," "Child of Mine," "Dust," and "Sands of Time," deserve to be staples on classic rock radio. But you'll never hear them.

By all accounts, Danny Kirwan was a difficult son of a bitch to work with. He was fired from the band in 1972, not because he wasn't talented, but because he was a drunken, drug-addled asshole whose perfectionist tendencies (he was known to spend an ungodly amount of time tuning his guitar in the middle of a concert) exasperated and alienated his fellow band members. He recorded a couple solo albums that died a quick commercial death. And since the late '70s he's been in and out of mental institutions and homeless shelters. He's now 61 years old, a seemingly hopeless alcoholic, mentally there some days, and others off on another planet.

For my hard-earned record money, he was the best part of the long history of one of the most successful bands in rock 'n roll. It's a sad history, in spite of the massive success. Danny Kirwan is a big part of the reason why.

A Death Panel of One

A death panel of one, at the Image Journal blog.

Charlie Louvin

Charlie Louvin died earlier today. I first heard The Louvin Brothers' songs through the usual Baby Boomer sources -- Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons. But the real deal, courtesy of Charlie and Ira, was even better. Nobody ever sang harmonies better. Ever. He was a great one.

In honor of his passing, I'm resurrecting an old article from Paste.

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It may be the most startling and strangest album cover in music history. In 1960 the Louvin Brothers, arguably the greatest country duo of all time, released an album called Satan Is Real. The cover art has become something of a kitsch classic. A beaming Charlie and Ira Louvin stand in the foreground, adorned in snowy white suits, arms outstretched in a come-home-to-Jesus pose. Behind them a bed of smoldering lava threatens to inundate the would-be evangelists. And in the background is the cheesy masterstroke: a 12-foot cardboard cutout of Beelzebub himself, a crude rendering of the devil complete with horns, slanted eyes, a pitchfork and vampire-like protruding fangs. It is so garish, so over-the-top, that it would have amused even the most zealous of Bible-thumping fundamentalists.

The devil looks like he’s ready to pounce. And Ira Louvin would have certainly confirmed that that was no laughing matter. Ira would have told you that the album title simply reflected personal experience. He alienated and abused almost every single person who crossed his path. He drank constantly, cheated compulsively, married and discarded three wives, and walked around with three bullets buried near his spine — the work of his third wife, who shot him five times after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. “Ira Louvin was the meanest son of a bitch I ever met,” one of his former managers stated flatly. And therein lies the conundrum; Ira Louvin lived like he was haunted by demons, and sang like a slumming angel.

Ira Louvin and his brother Charlie, three years younger, were born and raised in the hills of northeast Alabama, and even when their music took on a more sophisticated, urbane sound in the late 1950s, they never lost the characteristic bite and yelp of their Appalachian heritage. They also never lost their lifelong enmity for one another. They occasionally loved like brothers, but mostly they fought like brothers, and when their voices intertwined, they sang with a transcendent beauty and a palpable tension that perhaps only brothers can create.

It was a tension between the sacred and profane, and it defined both the lives and the music of the Louvin Brothers. Ira, the raging drunk, and Charlie, the pious churchgoing teetotaler, could not have been more different in temperament, and their differences reveal themselves repeatedly in the music. Sometimes they played it straight, and songs like “The Family Who Prays,” “The Christian Life,” “The Angels Rejoiced Last Night,” and the be-saved-or-be-nuked Cold War classic “Great Atomic Power” are now recognized as standards of the country gospel genre. Sometimes they played the part of grieving, heartbroken lovers, and songs like “When I Stop Dreaming,” “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” “You’re Running Wild,” and “You’re Learning” provide the template for the close-harmony singing of The Everly Brothers and Simon and Garfunkel. Gram Parsons, who recorded their songs as part of The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers, brought the Louvin’s music to a new generation of rock ‘n rollers, and then passed it on to Emmylou Harris, who has carried the Louvin torch throughout her career.

It is as fine a body of work as country music has produced. But it is Ira’s gospel songs, the songs of the conflicted, raging drunk -- full of not love, but fury, not grace, but judgment, not joy, but deep regret – that continue to haunt and trouble me. Ira fought a pitched battle with God and Satan, who were very real -- and lost on both counts. In early 1965, on a song called “The Price of the Bottle (Is Just a Down Payment)” he sang:

I talked to myself one night in my room
And looked back on my wasted years,
Just me and my conscience while facing my doom …
A slave to the bottle that makes a man fall
And sink to a life of regret.

It’s the stuff of classic country music, played on honky-tonk and truck stop jukeboxes all over America. But Ira Louvin was simply singing his life.

So maybe he knew, somehow, what the end was to be. It is startling, in retrospect, to hear the number of Louvin Brothers songs in which drunk driving and violent death figure prominently. It is the logical end of those for whom Satan is all too real, who cannot escape the clutches of their addictions, and Ira sings these cautionary tales with the sure knowledge of one who wishes to be saved and yet knows he is doomed. One of the last songs the brothers recorded, the suitably melodramatic “Wreck on the Highway,” finds that potent mixture of the sacred and profane that characterized all their best work. Now it sounds prophetic:

O who did you say it was, brother?
Who was it fell by the way?
When whiskey and blood ran together
Did you hear anyone pray?

In June, 1965, Ira and his fourth wife, singer Anne Young, were killed by a drunk driver in a fiery collision outside of Williamsburg, Missouri. He was forty-one years old. At the time of his death, he had a warrant out for his arrest on DUI charges. Charlie, now in his late seventies, still occasionally performs, and toured with the rock band Cake as recently as 2003.

The brothers’ harmonies remain; soaring and otherworldly, alternately sweet and jarring, beautiful and harrowing, a musical tug of war that echoes into eternity.

Roger Miller

When I was a kid my parents owned about 20 albums, and they played them over and over again: Frank Sinatra, Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass, Ferrante and Teischer, The Ray Conniff Singers, Andy Williams, etc. It was a representative if small collection of what suburban adults were listening to in the mid-60s. The album that didn’t make sense, that never quite fit in with the rest of the collection, was Roger Miller’s Golden Hits. Naturally, that was the album that I listened to over and over again. Those songs may be imprinted in my DNA.

Roger Miller was, ostensibly, a country singer. That’s how he was categorized and marketed, and that’s how the Country Music Hall of Fame considers him. But to my pre-adolescent ears he simply wrote funny songs. Aside from his biggest hit “King of the Road,” which still doesn’t sound like a country song to me, his best-known songs were novelty numbers full of goofy lyrics. “You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd,” one of his songs proclaimed, and I never doubted it, although I sang along like a fanboy. Another one announced, “Roses are red, violets are purple, sugar’s sweet and so's maple surple." As a ten-year-old, I was enthralled by the poetic genius. It was a neat dozen songs in about half an hour, and it was my favorite childhood album.

A few weeks ago I picked up the expanded version of Roger Miller’s Greatest Hits. There were 20 songs this time, and at least a few of them sounded like country tunes. One of them was on the original Golden Hits from my childhood, but it was the song I always skipped in favor of the novelty tunes. This time I listened:

Two broken hearts,
Lonely, lookin' like houses
Where nobody lives.
Two people each havin' so much pride inside,
Neither side forgives.

The angry words spoken in haste,
Such a waste of two lives.
It's my belief pride is the chief cause
In the decline in the number of husbands and wives.

A woman and a man, a man and a woman.
Some can, and some can't, and some can't.

Maybe I knew even as a kid. There might have been a reason why I skipped that song. Pride is as good a reason as any, and Roger had that right. Other contributing factors might have included adultery, alcoholism, and mental illness. At any rate, I listened to these songs from my childhood and wondered what in the world had drawn me to them in the first place. But not “Husbands and Wives.” I love that song, and now I listen to it again and again. Next week would have been my parents’ 57th anniversary. They’re both long gone. They were both long gone even when they were alive.

Aradhna - Namaste Sate

Aradhna's new album Namaste Sate is out today. You can find out more details, and listen to some song samples, here.

I will reiterate what I’ve said before. I’m not really a fan of contemporary worship music, but I love this band, and what they do. In a sea of virtually interchangeable worship music, Aradhna sounds like nobody else. Nobody else could possibly sound like they do, because they write out of who they are, and who they are is an utterly unique mixture of east and west. They are Canadians and Americans and Brits raised in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh. They love Jesus, and they love India.

And that’s a hopeless mixture that probably dooms them to perpetual obscurity. Most Americans won’t know what to do with a bunch of hippies in weird robes who sing in Hindi, and most churches won’t touch them because Hindi sounds a lot like Hindu, and we can’t have that. But at some visceral level that can’t be fully articulated this music touches me in ways that no other worship music has ever done. It reaches me at the level of Miles Davis and Sigur Ros and Van Morrison, pretty much my holy trifecta of worship musicians. It goes deep down.

I would like to say that this is worship music for people who don’t like worship music, and I suspect that will be true for at least some portion of those who hear this album. But it’s also simply glorious music. It’s quiet and contemplative at times, other times bursting with the kind of pent-up passion that Sigur Ros delivers at the end of those long, glacially slow buildups. It’s soul music in all the best senses of the term.

I suppose, in the interest of full disclosure, that I should also admit that I’ve done some PR work for the band. But I’m first and foremost a fan, and I assure you that I’m not writing these things because I’m compelled to do so in any business sense. I’m writing them because I think they’re true, and I hope, as a fan, that more people will discover this marvelous music.

When You Are Old

I might end up like this. Most white Americans do. They live to a ripe old age for the most part, 78.1 years on average, and if cancer doesn't get them earlier, they tend to fade away gradually, the organs sputtering and eventually shutting down, the eyesight and hearing failing, the bowels loosening, the bladder slackening. We come in peeing and shitting the bed, and we tend to go out the same way. Perhaps we are fortunate if our memory goes before we have to suffer these indignities.

In any case, we are not in control. We think we are for a while, but life has a way of battering such nonsense out of us, and if job loss or wayward children or the death of those we love doesn’t do the trick, then the ultimate ignominy of bedshitting will. What, you think you’re somebody special? You’re soiling your sheets, Skipper.

I once had a pastor who hammered home the point, in sermon after sermon, that one of the toughest aspects of the Christian life was holding on loosely, and then letting go. He said we either learned the lesson a bit at a time, over the long course of a life, or we learned it the very hard way toward the end. Either way, we learned it. If we hold out for some sort of doctrine of fairness, of just rewards, of getting what is coming to us, then it is likely that we will only learn it the very hard way toward the end. But perhaps we can pick up a few lessons along the way. Here is one: I am so thankful for my wife and kids. I am blessed beyond measure. And here is another: I am so thankful for my sister Libby, celebrating her 47th birthday today. Cancer has spread throughout her body, and she will not live to be old and gray. This saddens me beyond measure. And I am thankful for her beyond measure. I am learning to let go, and it’s a hell of a classroom. But I am learning.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
-- W.B. Yeats

The Great CD Sale of 2010

At the Image Journal blog.

America's Next Top Homeless Person

Meet Bart “Scoop” Scrivener, America’s Next Top Homeless Person. Scoop may look like a derelict. In fact, he is. But he’s just waiting to be discovered by a camera toting, kind-hearted passerby who happens to stumble upon his makeshift campsight behind an abandoned warehouse in Youngstown, Ohio. Will today be the day that changes Scoop’s life? Will you be the angel who helps him find his deserved fame and fortune?

A Pulitzer Prize winning journalist in 2003, Scoop fell on hard times when his former employer, The Ashtabula Times Picayune, laid him off in favor of carrying shorter stories via Twitter. At first Scoop tried adjusting to the new format, with his “Am I doing this right? WTF?” @Scoop tweet considered one of the finest early examples of meta-tweeting. But the past three years have been brutal. “I tried being concise,” he says. “I tried not using adjectives or verbs, abbreviating wherever I could, using smiley faces. It was no use. I couldn’t say anything worthwhile in less than 140 characters.” Left to fend for himself, but still driven by the insatiable need to use words, Scoop took to ghostwriting books for former Presidential candidates. When that well dried up, there was nothing to do but post lengthy diatribes on his personal blog, bitter harrangues that would have constituted dozens of individual tweets. “It’s sad,” he admits. “But nobody reads blogs anymore. At one time I could count on 10, 20 comments per day. Now I’m lucky if I get spammed for erectile dysfunction medication.”

It doesn’t have to end here. Will you help Scoop become America’s Next Top Homeless Person? Scoop is available for interviews (in-person or Skype), the occasional journalistic puff piece, and celebrity endorsements.

Bottomless Pit - Blood Under the Bridge

This one snuck up on me, perhaps because with that name I was expecting Norwegian death metal odes to Lucifer. But I checked out the skimpy back catalogue, and I was wrong.

Bottomless Pit emerged from the charred ruins of Silkworm, one of the better if unheralded post-grunge bands that dotted the indie landscape in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Charred ruins, in this case, is more than a dramatic metaphor. The band dissolved in 2005 when drummer Michael Dahlquist was killed when a woman intent on suicide intentionally slammed head-on into his car. The surviving band members, stunned and grief-stricken, called it quits. Founding members Andy Cohen and Tim Midgett took some time off to heal (theoretically, at least), then re-emerged as the nucleus of Bottomless Pit two years later.

And they’ve been trying to work it out ever since. The group’s debut album, 2007’s Hammer of the Gods, was a raw, open wound, a sustained howl of unresolved rage and disbelief. The new album is a little more nuanced and slightly more upbeat, but it’s hardly butterflies and rainbows. Cohen and Midgett split the songwriting and singing duties, with Cohen handling the world-weary, declamatory Lou Reed side of the equation, and Midgett rasping his way through the more blustery material. What stands out, though, is the jaw-dropping guitar work, clearly influenced by Neil Young/Crazy Horse as filtered through the slacker wankery of Malkmus, J. Mascis, and Doug Martsch. Not many bands are still working early ‘90s guitar god territory, but Cohen’s and Midgett’s intertwined leads and shards of feedback suggest that there is still plenty of life left after Pavement, Dinosaur Jr. and Built to Spill.

The songs suggest at least a tentative resolution. Winding, pensive opener “Winterwind” suggests a weary rapprochement, as Cohen resolves to consider “what it means to be careful, what it means to count.” But this is a band that has made its mark by raging against the dying of the light, and they’re not through yet. “There are so many fuckers in this world to line up and trade for you,” Midgett sings on the corrosive “Late.” There is no replacement for a unique and infinitely valuable human life. It’s that perspective that transforms Bottomless Pit into a band that truly matters, and Blood Under the Bridge into a terrific album.

The Future of Liberal Arts

My wife and I have seven college degrees between us. We share more layoffs than that. All those degrees, minus the dubious M.B.A. I earned a few years back, are in Liberal Arts fields. This may also help to explain those layoffs, although I suppose that sheer workplace incompetence can never be ruled out entirely. All I know is this: I’m sure they exist, but I’ve never yet met a laid-off engineer or accountant. Laid off English majors? Umm, yeah, I’ve met my share.

There was a time, as recently as the mid-1970s, when I was earning Liberal Arts degree #1 in Creative Writing, when the conventional wisdom held that the mere possession of a college degree opened up shining vistas of middle-class respectability and privilege. You might not get rich, but you could buy a tract home in the burbs and vacation at Myrtle Beach. Now a college degree – at least a Liberal Arts college degree – will get you a barista job at Starbucks. The cost of education has risen astronomically, and the value of that education, at least in terms of potential dollars and cents, is more dubious than ever. Question: how many lattes do you have to serve to pay off a $100,000 student loan? Answer: It’s a trick question. You’ll never pay off a $100,000 student loan making $7.00 per hour. A collection agency will repossess your iPhone, laptop, and guitar. You’ll end up living in your parents’ basement. I assure you that this is a prospect that frightens children and parents alike.

Both my daughters are currently in school, piling up enormous debt. My oldest daughter is working on Liberal Arts degree #2, and my youngest daughter is about to finish up Liberal Arts degree #1. It’s unfortunate, but genetics is working against them. They are indisputably the products of Liberal Arts parents. They can’t help themselves. They could no more major in the sciences or business than Rush Limbaugh could serve as the executive director of the ACLU.

The conventional wisdom these days would tell them that it’s not worth it, and that the ROI is absurdly low, if not non-existent. Me? I’ll encourage them to be themselves, to learn as much as they can, and to let the chips (which most assuredly cannot be cashed in) fall where they may.

The conventional wisdom also holds that the liberal arts teach people how to think. Or, as they told me long ago, a liberal arts education prepares you for everything and nothing. You’ll have to forge your own path, often with machete in hand, but you’ll be a well-rounded individual who is adept at integrating disparate fields of knowledge and evaluating different and sometimes contradictory information.

It seems to me that “different and sometimes contradictory” is very much in the ascendancy in our culture. As a nation, Americans are bombarded with information, much of it baffling and utterly skewed. On Halloween weekend, one news network reported that approximately 2,000 people showed up for a political rally in Washington, D.C. Another news network reported that a quarter of a million people showed up for the same rally. I am admittedly not a math/science person, but this seems to stretch the boundaries of “different and sometimes contradictory” to new levels. And even I remember how to count.

In the face of this kind of world, it behooves us all, engineers and baristas alike, to remember some bottom-line facts that don’t show up on income statements. An ex-president once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.” Here’s the truth: it’s best if you’re not one of those people, regardless of your job prospects. I would like to think that a good liberal arts education can offer some needed perspective in the crazy world in which we live. I’m also hoping my kids remember how to count.

The Kindle Report

Christmas brought the long-awaited Kindle, and the early returns are positive.

Aside from the hour I spent scrambling to locate the password to the wireless network I never use, setup and registration was a breeze. The Kindle’s display is crisp and easy on the eyes, navigation is intuitive, and downloading books is as easy and fast as advertised. I’m very pleased.

One of the delightful surprises for me was the abundance of free books available from the Kindle bookstore. I spend most of my reading time trying to catch up on the world’s classic literature, and I had not realized until I gave the Kindle its test run that almost all of this literature is available for free. The rest is available for pennies. As a cash-strapped parent of two college students, I’m very appreciative. So I downloaded Fielding’s Tom Jones, several Fitzgerald novels, a couple Chesterton detective stories, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels for $0.00. I downloaded the complete works of Dickens for $1.99. The Scrooge in me was delighted.

My only quibble concerns page numbering. Or more correctly, the lack thereof. Given the 6-inch display screen, it’s obvious that conventional page numbering will not work. And given the fact that different editions of the same book will use different page numbers, it’s probably not a big deal anyway. But it’s a little disconcerting to see a progress bar (marked off by percentages) at the bottom of the screen, and to see fairly bizarre bookmarks (I’m currently at 10,897 of 13,097 in Tom Jones, for instance) instead of page numbers. Since we’re currently three-quarters of the way through Tom Jones in my book club, it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to provide the locations of specific passages I’d like to discuss. I’ll get used to it. It’s just a little odd.

But you can certainly count me as a very satisfied customer.

Bruce Springsteen, Promises Made and Promises Broken

At the Image Journal blog.

Worker's Song

You know, I'm thankful to have a job. But that doesn't mitigate the frequently distasteful nature of Slaving For the Man. Thank God for Dick Gaughan and his Scots brogue.

Come all of you workers who toil night and day
By hand and by brain to earn your pay
Who for centuries long past for no more than your bread
Have bled for your countries and counted your dead

In the factories and mills, in the shipyards and mines
We've often been told to keep up with the times
For our skills are not needed, they've streamlined the job
And with sliderule and stopwatch our pride they have robbed

But when the sky darkens and the prospect is war
Who's given a gun and then pushed to the fore
And expected to die for the land of our birth
When we've never owned one handful of earth?

We're the first ones to starve the first ones to die
The first ones in line for that pie-in-the-sky
And always the last when the cream is shared out
For the worker is working when the fat cat's about

All of these things the worker has done
From tilling the fields to carrying the gun
We've been yoked to the plough since time first began
And always expected to carry the can

John Lennon, Thirty Years Later

John Lennon died thirty years ago today. Howard Cosell broke into the Monday Night Football broadcast to announce Lennon's assassination, and I broke in to my sleeping roommates' bedrooms to tell them, and we all sat up for most of the night, watching on TV as the crowd which formed spontaneously around the Dakota Hotel sang "Give Peace a Chance." We talked quietly among ourselves. Mostly I felt sick. My roommate Mike, then 20, a child of the post-Beatles generation, shook his head and said, "I just don't get it." The rest of us simply looked at him. Nobody had the energy to explain. You had to be there, and if you were there then you didn't need to have the arbiters of culture explain to you the importance of John Lennon. Mike was right. He just didn't get it.

John Lennon was an icon, and everybody knew it. He wore an invisible sign around his neck that read, "I am the '60s." He was flower power and anti-war protest, Woodstock (even if he wasn't there) and hippies and radicalism and idealism that actually believed it could change the world. Incidentally, he was also an incredible songwriter and performer.

I don't have to recapitulate the phenomenon that was The Beatles. Suffice to say that during one heady week in April of 1964 The Beatles had the five best-selling songs in America. The Top 5. At the same time. No other performer or band has even come remotely close to that kind of mass appeal and musical dominance. But it didn't satisfy. In retrospect the massive hit "Help" should have been an eye-opener, but it wasn't. And in 1970 Lennon hit the wall. Who needed the Beatles? Certainly not Beatle John. All of the fame, all of the drugs, the shrieking girls and adulation and #1 singles and money and cars - all of it was bullshit. If all you needed was love, then where was it?

Lennon got it all out of his system on his first solo album called The Plastic Ono Band, a great primal scream of pain and loss. It was psychotherapy set to a backbeat, and it was one of the most brutal and awe-inspiring albums ever recorded. The opening lines of the opening song set the tone: "Mother you had me/but I never had you/I wanted you/But you didn't want me." By turns raging, wailing, desperately sorrowful, Lennon confronted his demons and captured the ensuing melee on magnetic tape. It was his finest moment in a career full of fine moments. Near the end of the album Lennon sang:

God is a concept by which we measure our pain
I'll say it again
God is a concept by which we measure our pain
I don't believe in magic
I don't believe in I-ching
I don't believe in Bible
I don't believe in tarot
I don't believe in Hitler
I don't believe in Jesus
I don't believe in Kennedy
I don't believe in Buddha
I don't believe in Mantra
I don't believe in Gita
I don't believe in Yoga
I don't believe in kings
I don't believe in Elvis
I don't believe in Zimmerman
I don't believe in Beatles
I just believe in me
Yoko and me
And that's reality
The dream is over
What can I say?
The dream is over
Yesterday
I was the Dreamweaver
But now I'm reborn
I was the Walrus
But now I'm John
And so dear friends
You'll just have to carry on
The dream is over

Those who might be inclined to look for heresies can surely find them there. I just hear the sadness. It was an infinite sadness, bottomless, because it was a litany of despair. It was the sound of hope dying.

We've carried on for thirty years now, and some of us now hold on to a different dream. It's a dream where people can change and be changed, radically, where you need a lot more than love, where, in fact, you need God. There are days when it seems like far more than a dream, when it seems like life itself. But I understand, too, that part of John Lennon that rails against the false idols that promise so much and deliver so little. He was one himself, and I think he knew it.

John Lennon was a great man who was broken and deeply flawed, a man full of contradictions, equal parts cynicism and idealism, peace and love and strident anger. I suppose that, except for the greatness, he's always reminded me of me. Perhaps that's why, in some inexplicable way that will only make sense to those who understand icons and why people might honor them, I truly loved him. Perhaps that's why thirty years down the line I still miss him, and why today is a sad day. Sometimes you need a lot more than love. Sometimes you need a damned bullet-proof vest, and I hate that. The cynical part of me asks, well, what did you expect? The idealistic part of me mourns that that was and is so, laments that the dream is over, and remembers strawberry fields gone forever.

Favorite Albums of 2010

Years from now, when music historians gain some perspective, I suspect that 2010 will go down as one of the legendary years. Like 1956, 1965, or 1978, pop music took a decided turn for the better, and there were great albums being made on every front, in every genre. Consider the fact that two albums that got bumped from my Top 10 list – Janelle Monae’s The Archandroid and Allo Darlin’s self-titled debut album – will deservedly go down as classics.

Meanwhile, nobody bought any music. A crippling economic recession coupled with the free (albeit illegal) availability of music on the Internet meant that even the best and/or most successful musicians were scrambling to make ends meet. Christina Aguilera noted that she was available to sing at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.

Yes, it was that kind of year. So perhaps it shoudn’t be surprising that my favorite album of 2010 was released in 1998. I can’t help it. I didn’t hear it (or even hear of the artist) until this year.

The Top 10

10. Jamey Johnson – The Guitar Song

The Guitar Song doesn’t have the startling immediacy and autobiographical grit of its predecessor, 2008’s That Lonesome Song. But it’s a country music tour de force just the same; a sprawling double album that lays serious claim to the notion that Jamey Johnson is his generation’s greatest country singer, a worthy successor to fellow outlaws Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, and that he fronts one of the most raggedly righteous bands in the world.

9. Bruce Springsteen – The Promise

Three years in the making, 32 years in musical Limbo, and here it is: Bruce Springsteen’s lost masterpiece. And if the resulting album is just a tad shy of the “masterpiece” label, it needs to be said that this is still Broooooce in his prime, that the E Street Band has seldom rocked more majestically, and that the title track is the second-best song Bruce Springsteen ever wrote. The best? “Thunder Road,” of course, and that second-best tune adds some mournful commentary on what happens when that glorious road out of town ends at a brick wall.

8. Elizabeth Cook – Welder

With a sweet little girl voice and a worldly-wizened attitude, Elizabeth Cook isn’t a typical country singer, and here she sounds like Dolly Parton at CBGBs, a sort of punk/Appalachian mashup that is alternately withering and heartbreaking in its approach. The writing is spectacular. She skewers her drunk boyfriend’s impotence (“When you say Yes to beer you say No to booty”), laments her heroin-addicted sister , and delivers an account of a loving but dysfunctional family on “Mama’s Funeral” that is worthy of Eudora Welty. Stereotypical country fare this is not. And then she caps it off with a shitkicking honky-tonk duet with Buddy Miller. Burn on, Elizabeth.

7. The Bad Plus – Never Stop

The gonzo jazz covers of indie rock anthems have been fun, but this is even more impressive: ten original tunes that roil and churn and shimmer with beauty. The Bad Plus are, as usual, a piano trio on steroids, and Ethan Iverson’s Rachmaninov sturm und drang is matched only by Dave King’s strident punk drumming. But don’t let the aggression fool you. This is a jazz/rock/punk band that is fully committed to improvisational interplay, and the results are frequently breathtaking, from the Bill Evans-like pensive introspection of “People Like You” to the joyous, explosive detonation of “Beryl Loves to Dance.”

6. Mavis Staples – You Are Not Alone

Mavis Staples continues her late-career comeback. The formula on You’re Not Alone isn’t radically different from what she has employed throughout her previous solo albums: mix some traditional gospel numbers with some rock and pop mainstays, douse liberally with soul, then simmer over a medium-tempo flame. The difference between good and great this time comes from Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, whose production allows Mavis’s regular backing band more room to burn behind her, and whose previously unimagined ability to write a first-rate gospel tune is the musical highlight of the set. The title track, written by Tweedy, is achingly lovely, and makes me think that future Wilco efforts may not turn out to be tiresome dad rock after all.

5. Anais Mitchell – Hadestown

On paper it sounds like a horrible idea: a Folk Opera that recasts the Orpheus and Euridice myth. It calls to mind the path that Spinal Tap might have taken in their dotage, after the failure of the big Stonehenge number. But in reality it works spectacularly well. Newcomer Mitchell, who wrote all the music, brings a charming naivete to the role of Euridice, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon plays Orpheus as a romantic dreamboat with just a hint of menace. But it is gravel-voiced folkie Greg Brown who steals the show as Hades, the lord of the underworld. Brown half sings, half cackles like a crazed Tom Waits, and in “Why We Build the Wall” he delivers a chillingly pragmatic exposition on oppression that just might be my favorite song of the year. This is something of a miracle: a musical I genuinely love.

4. Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

A holy mess of a Rawk album that mixes ragged vocals, loud, distorted guitars, bagpipes, Texas saloon piano, Salvation Army horns, and literary pretensions in equal measure. It’s one hell of a concoction; a conceptual saga about the Civil War that also manages to work in allusions to Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg, New Jersey freeways, and dissolute drunkenness. Oh yeah, and the darkest, most desperate expressions of self-loathing and cutural malaise I’ve heard in years. No, it doesn’t hang together. No, it doesn’t make complete sense. But it’s enough to revel in the audacity of the cockeyed concept, the bitterness of the bile, the raging rock ‘n roll, and the poetry that pours forth in spite of the bleakness of the vision.

3. The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

I keep waiting for the drop in quality, but it hasn’t happened yet. This is arguably better than Neon Bible, the sophomore slump album that didn’t slump. It’s unarguably a more tightly constructed album, with recurring lyrical motifs and a unifying concept that gets poked and prodded in all kinds of different ways. Musically, Arcade Fire still do Sweeping and Epic, aiming for the back row of the arena every time. And lyrically, there is as much poignancy here as finger pointing. Yes, the suburbs are soul deadening. But they were home, even for Win Butler. It’s not surprising that he’s left this world behind. What is surprising is that he convincingly expresses a sense of loss.

2. These New Puritans – Hidden

Let’s get the inevitable Kid A comparisons out of the way up front. Yes, this is an album that borrows heavily from Radiohead’s clattering electronic dystopia. Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, too, in the way it uses a children’s choir to comment ironically on the horrors of war. And Joy Division’s monotone chants. And your community’s Salvation Army Band in its ragged use of horns. In other words, this sounds like nothing ever previously recorded, and it’s a staggering achievement, one of the most startlingly original and chilling albums I’ve head in many years.

1. Bill Fox – Shelter From the Smoke

Bill Fox led a modestly successful Cleveland punk band in the mid-‘80s called The Mice. Then he dropped out of sight. He emerged in 1998 (or 2010 when you live in my world) with this album, which is as far removed from punk as can be imagined. Taking The Beatles and Dylan as his touchstones, as thousands of musicians have done before him, he simply delivers a superb folk/pop album drenched in memorable melodies, indelible singalong choruses, and surrealistic poetry. Almost everybody tries this at one time or another. Few do it well. Bill Fox did it as well as anyone I’ve ever heard. Why he wasn’t recognized as the Sixth Beatle, or The Next Next Next Dylan, is beyond me. Maybe it’s Cleveland.

Honorable Mention

The Acorn – No Ghost
Alasdair Roberts – Too Long in This Condition
Allo Darlin’ – Allo Darlin’
Anders Osborne – American Patchwork
The Autumn Defense – Once Around
Beach House – Teen Dream
Belle & Sebastian – Write About Love
The Black Keys – Brothers
Blitzen Trapper – Destroyer of the Void
Brad Mehldau – Highway Rider
Carolina Chocolate Drops – Genuine Negro Jig
Chip Robinson – Mylow
The Claudia Quintet – Royal Toast
Deer Tick – The Black Dirt Sessions
Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest
Doug Burr – O Ye Devastator
Dr. John and the Lower 911 – Tribal
Elvis Costello – National Ransom
Esperanza Spalding – Chamber Music Society
Free Energy – Stuck on Nothing
The Fresh & Onlys – Play It Strange
The Gaslight Anthem – American Slang
Gov’t Mule – By a Thread
Harlem – Hippies
Jack Rose – Luck in the Valley
Jaga Jazzist – One-Armed Bandit
James Blackshaw – All Is Falling
Janelle Monae – The Archandroid
John Mellencamp – No Better Than This
Johnny Flynn – Been Listening
Josh Ritter – So Runs the World Away
Justin Townes Earle – Harlem River Blues
Konono No. 1 – Assume Crash Position
Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can
Laura Veirs – July Flame
LCD Soundsystem – This is Happening
Lizz Wright – Fellowship
Local Natives – Gorilla Manor
Magic Kids – Memphis
Male Bonding – Nothing Hurts
Manic Street Preachers – Postcards From a Young Man
Mary Gauthier – The Foundling
MGMT – Congratulations
Mogwai – Special Moves
Mono – Holy Ground: NYC Live With The Worldless Music Orchestra
Mountain Man – Made the Harbor
Mystery Jets – Serotonin
Nada Surf – If I Had a Hi-Fi
The National – High Violet
Nick Curran and the Lowlifes – Reform School Girl
No Age – Everything In Between
The Old 97’s – The Grand Theatre Volume 1
Owen Pallett – Heartland
Paul Thorn – Pimps & Preachers
The Pernice Brothers – Goodbye, Killer
Peter Case – Wig!
Peter Wolf – Midnight Souvenirs
Prefab Sprout – Let’s Change the World With Music
Railroad Earth – Railroad Earth
Ray Wylie Hubbard – A. Enlightenment B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is No C.)
Real Estate – Real Estate
Richard Thompson – Dream Attic
Robert Plant – Band of Joy
The Roots – How I Got Over
Ryan Bingham – Junky Star
Sam Amidon – I See the Sign
Sarah Jaffe – Suburban Nature
Scout Niblett – The Calcination of Scout Niblett
Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings – I Learned the Hard Way
Spoon – Transference
Strand of Oaks – Pope Killdragon
Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises
Superchunk – Majesty Shredding
Surfer Blood – Astrocoast
Swans – My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
The Tallest Man On Earth – The Wild Hunt
Teenage Fanclub - Shadows
The Thermals – Personal Life
Two Cow Garage – Sweet Saint Me
The Unthanks – Here’s the Tender Coming
Vijay Iyer – Solo
The Walkmen – Lisbon
Wartime Blues – Doves and Drums
Watermelon Slim – Ringers
The White Stripes – Under Great White Northern Lights
Wildrums & Peacebirds – Rivers
Woven Hand – Threshing Floor
!!! – Strange Weather, Isn’t It?

Disappointments

Not that many, in all honesty, and even the disappointments were decent enough. Disappointment, in this case, simply means that I had exceedingly high expectations that weren’t fulfilled by the resulting albums. And yes, there were far worse albums released in 2010. But when you expect nothing in the first place, it’s hard to be disappointed.

Best Coast – Crazy For You
The Hold Steady – Heaven Is Whenever
Jonsi - Go
Sleigh Bells - Treats
Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – The Brutalist Bricks
Vampire Weekend – Contra