« April 2008 | Main | June 2008 »
May 27, 2008
* "black on white was the news today...."
(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- You probably won't believe this, but the above lyrical snippet is actually the very first line of a song written in the 1970s by Mark McKinnon. Yes, that Mark McKinnon, the one who last week announced he was stepping down as chief advertising strategist to John McCain because, to use his words, "I just don't want to work against an Obama candidacy."
The song is called "The Fever" and, despite its uncannily prophetic opening line, it's not by any means a political number. It's your basic yearning-for-love tune -- later in that first verse, he laments, "I guess what I really need is to fall in love again" -- but it's a pretty good one, especially as sung in 1977 by Julie Griffin (who would later become Julie Miller) on the one and only record by an Austin band of that time called Partners In Crime (which I wrote about last year in this blog entry).
"The Fever" is, far as I can tell, one of very few surviving relics from McKinnon's modest musical heyday. The only documentation I've found of McKinnon singing and playing his material is on a ten-disc Kerrville Folk Festival compilation covering the festival's first ten years, 1972-1981 (released in the late '90s on Silverwolf Records). McKinnon's song is called "Back On The Street" and is the third track on Disc 5, featuring performances from the 1976 festival. (McKinnon's name also appears in a mostly-complete online listing of finalists in Kerrville's New Folk songwriting competition; apparently he competed in 1975, along with the likes of Lucinda Williams and Tom Russell. Nobody seems to know who won that year.)
I believe I have that ten-disc Kerrville collection somewhere in a box in the closet (which I failed to locate in three or four hours of searching last night, but at least I finally got the bulk of the other CDs sorted and shelved in the process). There are, however, 30-second snippets (different ones) of the song on both Amazon and allmusic. The chorus goes, "When you've lost that old desire, and your life's just not complete / It's time to set your soul on fire again, and get back on the street."
McKinnon's modest musical aspirations ultimately met a dead-end as the '70s waned. He explained to Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, in an interview which aired on Austin PBS station KLRU in 2003, that "the one time in my life where I really exercised some wisdom was to recognize the limits of my musical ability. I figured on the trajectory that I was on, I'd end up at a Round Rock Holiday Inn when I was 45. And I shifted gears into politics and journalism."
The first stop was The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas; McKinnon was its editor in the 1980-81 school year. I missed him by three or four years -- I did some work at the Texan during my college days at UT in the mid-'80s -- but I do remember, as a high school journalism upstart in Austin, hearing about how McKinnon had (if I remember this correctly) spent a night or two in jail for refusing to reveal a source. (I've searched the web in vain for details of that incident; if anyone reading this may recall the particulars, feel free to add a comment toward that end.)
Over the following two decades, McKinnon made a gradual transition from Democratic media-and-politics expert -- including stints as press secretary for Lloyd Doggett's 1984 U.S. senate campaign (lost to Phil Gramm) and for mid-'80s Texas governor Mark White -- to independent consultant with the company Public Strategies and his own firm Maverick Media, and finally to George W. Bush's inner circle, first as media/advertising director for Bush's Texas governor re-election campaign in 1998, then in the same role for Bush's 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
Given that he's crossed the Democrat/Republican divide before, his actions last week were perhaps not entirely surprising. While he's made a point to insist that he still plans to vote for McCain and to act as a sort of informal adviser, he apparently decided quite awhile back that if the election came down to McCain vs. Obama -- a rather unlikely scenario many months ago -- he'd step aside. McKinnon said in a June 2007 interview with Cox Newspapers' Washington bureau, "I don't think Barack Obama needs the mirror of politics to reflect who he is. I think he has a deep character and good judgment. I also think he's wrong on some fundamental issues. But I believe he is honest and independent and if he were elected, I think it would send a great message to the country and the world."
This seems, in a way, to echo something McKinnon said in a lengthy 2005 interview with PBS. It strikes me as a sort of mission statement about McKinnon's political beliefs:
"...one of the things that occurred to me, in my development as a political consultant, is how important character is to a candidate. ... Character I saw as really an important characteristic for officeholders, because I had seen Democrats who sort of met an ideological litmus test but failed miserably in the character department. So when the important decisions came, they weren't necessarily making those decisions based on the right reasons. And so I saw over time, working with people like former [Houston] Mayor Bob Lanier, former [Texas] Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, people who ... were the sorts of people you'd look at and you'd say: 'I may not agree with everything you say, but I know what you're saying; I know what you believe; I know where you're going, and I admire and respect you for that. You're predictable. You have a backbone. You believe in something.'"
The irony, of course, is that McKinnon applied that very litmus-test to the up-and-coming Texas governor George W. Bush, and decided that he wanted in. We've all seen how that has turned out. On the one hand, I'd expect that McKinnon would still staunchly defend Bush as someone who believes in what he's doing; on the other hand, it's almost impossible to dispute, at this point -- from either side of the aisle -- the ill effects of what Bush has done during his eight years in office.
That McKinnon subsequently ended up in the camp of McCain -- whom he'd helped attack and defeat in the 2000 battle for the Republican nomination -- is a telling and colorful side-story in its own right, as McKinnon related to Evan Smith in a March 2008 Texas Monthly interview:
"I only got to know him in 2004, when he was traveling with the president. We had our bonding moment at one of the general election debates. Because it was in Arizona, McCain hosted us. We were in the greenroom waiting for the debate to begin. I noticed a television in the corner. There was a news story on about Pat Tillman -- about how Jake Plummer, Tillman's former teammate [at Arizona State and with the Arizona Cardinals], had put a sticker printed with Tillman's number on his helmet and had gotten in a fight with the commissioner of the NFL, who said it was a violation of the uniform policy. And then it cut to video of McCain blasting the commissioner, saying that it was absurd that he hadn't allowed Plummer to honor his friend. So I went over to McCain, and I said, 'Senator, I just saw this story about Tillman, and I'm not surprised, as he was a constituent of yours, that you would be defending him like that.' And I said, 'By the way, I have very profound feelings myself about Pat Tillman. I thought it was an example of sacrifice and humility when he joined [the Army] and a tragedy when he was killed. It had such an impact on me that I wanted to remember him every day, so I got a tattoo of his [jersey] number, which was 40, on my arm.' So McCain said, 'Bullshit, let me see it.' I took off my coat and rolled up my sleeve to show it to him, and he grabbed me by the shoulders and kind of teared up and hugged me and said, 'I knew there was a reason I liked you.'"
And so, McKinnon's battle within himself rages on: Having initially played the aggressor against McCain because he believed in Bush, only to bond later with McCain and take up the Arizona senator's cause, he now removes himself from the fight because he believes Obama to be too much a man of character to attack.
Let's return, for a final word, to the previously-referenced 2003 Texas Monthly/KLRU interview. The original topic of conversation which led to McKinnon's self-critical assessment of his musical shortcomings was that, as a youth growing up in Colorado, McKinnon had been befriended and mentored by a fellow named Kris Kristofferson.
"I was a wild teenager and I loved music and wrote music, and Judy Collins was my baby-sitter growing up," McKinnon related. "And he [Kristofferson] heard our band and liked us, and tried to get us a record deal -- he came up to Colorado, and we spent a week or two in the studio. The record deal never worked out, but I got the bug badly, and I ran away from home, and went to Nashville and lived with Kristofferson, and ended up staying there for three or four years, and wrote music and hung out, and he put up with me. It was a great chapter in my life."
Kristofferson's left-leaning world-views are no secret; thus it's natural to wonder what the songwriter has made of McKinnon's long and complicated journey through the American political landscape. There was some back-and-forth about this two years ago in the letters section of The Austin Chronicle, in response to a feature that the alternative-weekly had run on Kristofferson in February 2006. First, a letter-writer asked why the interviewer (Andy Langer) hadn't asked Kristofferson about McKinnon, to which Chronicle editor Louis Black responded: "I spent several days traveling with Kris Kristofferson last year, and he made it very clear that this was a topic about which he had nothing to say."
And yet perhaps more revealing was another letter that followed two weeks later, shortly after Kristofferson and McKinnon had apparently encountered each other at the Austin Film Festival Awards show. Letter-writer Kelly Jackson observed that "Kristofferson and McKinnon were seen at the Austin Film Festival Awards hamming it up on the red carpet, including a moment when Kristofferson grabbed McKinnon, put his arm around him, and turned to the cameras laughing, 'Red state and blue state!'"
Just as McKinnon wrote, many decades ago, that "black on white was the news today," so did Kristofferson write, many decades ago, a lyric that nails Mark McKinnon to the core:
"He's a walking contradiction."
It's from "The Pilgrim (Chapter 33)", which Kristofferson once introduced as being "a song I started out writing about Dennis Hopper, and ended up writing about Johnny Cash...and Chris Gantry...and Ramblin' Jack Elliott...Bobby Neuwirth...Freddy Neil...David Blue...Eric Andersen...Paul Siebel." Or perhaps various other names, depending on who came to mind at any given time he may have sung it from a stage.
Dunno if he's ever mentioned Mark McKinnon in that recitation. But it sure seems like it fits. Especially this verse:
"And he keeps right on a-changin'
For the better or the worse
Searching for a shrine he's never found
Never knowing if believing is a blessing or a curse
Or if the going up was worth the coming down."
Posted by Peter at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 22, 2008
* "these people hold me, and i hold them...."
Forgive me for going all Glen Hansard on y'all the past few days...but there is one other project Hansard was involved in that I've been meaning to mention for awhile now, as it seem to have been largely overlooked in the marketplace, if for understandable reasons.
The record's called The Cake Sale and it was recorded by.... well, The Cake Sale, sorta, in that the inside credits on the record include a passage stating "The Cake Sale are:" and then listing all 24 musicians who took part in making the record. In reality, it's essentially various-artists collection, but there are a lot of interweaving ties: Hansard, for instance, contributed the song "All The Way Down" (which he and Marketa Irglova recorded for the Once soundtrack), but it's sung here by Irish singer-songwriter Gemma Hayes. Hansard, in turn, sings lead on the track "Too Many People", which was written by Ollie Cole of the Irish band Turn. Similar twists exist throughout, with songs and/or vocal contributions from the likes of Josh Ritter, Damien Rice, Bell X1 members Paul Noonan and Dave Geraghty, the Thrills' Conor Deasy, and Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol.
A record of such atypical structure -- and with no feasible way to tour behind it -- was almost inevitably going to fall through the cracks; indeed, it seems mostly to have gone unnoticed since its overseas release in December 2006 as a benefit for Oxfam, an international organization fighting poverty and injustice. (The record received a U.S. release in November 2007 via Yep Roc.)
This one deserves a closer look, though, because of how well it hangs together as a whole -- which is maybe why they decided to present it as a "band" album rather than a various-artists collection. Ritter's rendition of Noonan's "Vapour Trail" is one of the catchier numbers he's recorded, while Nina Persson of Swedish band the Cardigans delivers a lovely reading of Canadian singer-songrwiter Emm Gryner's "Black Winged Bird". Pretty much every track here works, and they wisely held it to just nine songs, rather than allowing the oversized collective to create an overblown album that dipped into less-significant or self-indulgent material.
I'm not exactly sure who was the ringleader here -- or if anyone really was; they've certainly gone out of their way to present it as a very egalitarian endeavor -- but whoever all was responsible, they deserve kudos for doing such a fine job. It's a record that deserves better than to fade into oblivion.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 18, 2008
* scattershot snapshots of a second Swell Season show
Having made the relatively modest drive up to Richmond, Virginia, on Friday night to see another Swell Season gig after Thursday's Raleigh show, a few comparisons/contrasts and observations:
* Even in a smaller market such as Richmond, it's clear that Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova have well outgrown the nightclub circuit. Richmond venue Toad's Place (apparently a cousin to the storied New Haven, Connecticut, original) would probably be a comfortable venue for acts drawing under 1,000, but the sold-out crowd of 1,500 was a little bit more than the room could reasonably handle. On the one hand, it was kind of nice to see the band in a space where you could walk around and observe the show from different angles and perspectives; but in the end, too many patrons were relegated to watching primarily the TV-screen monitors instead of a stage they couldn't quite glimpse from the back bar or the balcony. Still, it was partly worth the drive just for one last chance to see the Swell Season in a club setting.
* Beyond that, it was also worth the drive for the rousing, show-closing cover of Van Morrison's "Into The Mystic". Probably the best reason for having seen the Raleigh show over the Richmond show was Hansard's mid-show solo rendition of "Astral Weeks"; the converse was the case with "Into The Mystic", which had the added attraction of Irglova's uplifting harmony vocals (not to mention the full-band backing). Better yet to have gone both nights and seen both songs. I don't know if you could fairly call Hansard the heir to the Irish legacy of Morrison's muse, but one thing is clear, he gets Van The Man, and grandly channels the true spirit of Morrison's music.
* A couple other set-list shifts in Richmond allowed for two more Frames numbers ending up in the mix. "Red Chord", an anthemic number from their 1996 album Fitzcarraldo (and the 2002 live disc Breadcrumb Trail), proved a fiery late-set high-point. Earlier, when Irglova departed for a brief stretch (apparently struggling with allergies), they cranked out "God Bless Mom" from 1999's terrific U.K.-only Dance The Devil. Compared to typical full-on Frames shows, it was a modest performance of what is arguably Hansard's best rock song. Inarguable, at least for me, is that Hansard's vocal re-entry after the bridge is the most dramatic passage he's ever fashioned: When he screams out "You see how haaaaaaard it can be, to keep your side of the deal" with the full force of the band behind him, it ranks up there with Springsteen's "The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power-drive" and, yes, even Roger Daltrey's legendary scream on The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" among the most powerful and emotional moments in all of rock 'n' roll.
* And yet, Hansard got by far the most overwhelming audience response of the night when, during a mid-set solo excursion, he casually tossed in "Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy", the minute-long, made-up-on-the spot ditty from a charming little scene in the film Once. Given the vast and vehement audience sing-along that spontaneously erupted, it would appear that the song Hansard spent the least amount of time writing in his entire catalogue has paradoxically become one of his most popular, which he acknowledged with equal-parts amusement and chagrin. Take it where you can get it, one supposes, and hope they find their way eventually to "Seven Day Mile"....
* Finally, Hansard effectively tweaked his introduction to "Falling Slowly" in Richmond. The metaphor was the same -- about how 7/8ths of him was amazed at how far he kicked the ball, and 1/8th of him just wanted his ball back -- but he changed the numbers to "99%" and "1%". Which works much better, in part because we humans don't respond as cleanly to fractions; and also because, well, 1% is about as much of an underdog as you can get...and everyone loves to root for the underdog.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
May 16, 2008
* ND #75 Revisited, Part 2
Picking up where the last entry left off, paging through our final issue of No Depression from the feature stories onward:
* It was important to Grant and me, for obvious reasons, to do some of the more substantive writing in the final issue. It was my good fortune that the Weepies, who I'd been wanting to write about since falling fully for their 2006 disc Say I Am You, were releasing their new disc Hideaway during the window of our last issue. Grant's turn follows with his piece on Hayes Carll; and Grant also had the honors of doing our "Artist of the Decade" cover story (partly because I'd writted written the cover story of ND #74, and also the cover story for our LAST "Artist of the Decade," Alejandro Escovedo, back in 1998).
* Speaking of Grant's cover story on Buddy Miller, I've had an inordinate number of folks comment to me about Thomas Petillo's photos accompanying the piece. My sense was that it was not only great photos but also great art-direction by Grant, in the way he used the shots to string through the piece as a sort of visual connective tissue. And something about that concluding shot, with Buddy setting down the guitar and away, seemed to tell our own story as well.
* A couple notes on headlines in the 4-page features: I saddled Sera Cahoone with the chorus lyric of Bobby Sherman's "Seattle" (from the old TV show Here Come The Brides), hoping perhaps it had some resonance to her home turf, but also as an acknowledgment of ND's roots (when we started the magazine, all of us lived in Seattle).... The Blue Mountain headline (Muscle memory") was a nod to both Laurie Stirratt, who'd used the term in a quote from the story about how natural it was to start playing the old Blue Mountain songs again, and to bassist Cindy Toth of the Reivers, who'd mentioned something similar about her band's reunion just prior to the shows I reviewed in the Miked section.... The Weepies headline is, as many of you probably recognized, the title of one of Iris DeMent's finest songs (covered by Merle Haggard, even).... As for the Hayes Carll headline, which reads, duh, "Hayes Carll," forgive us for falling down on the job there. That piece was at one point slated to be the two-page opener for the Town & Country section, where we use the artists' name as the headline; when it ended up getting expanded to a four-page feature, we forgot to come up with a "real" headline and somehow never caught it in the proofing process. Ah well, I guess "Hayes Carll" can speak for itself (er, himself).
* Roy Kasten's lead to the Billy Bragg piece was maybe my favorite of all the pieces Kasten has written for us over the years. It nicely tied in some of the magazine's prehistory to the piece, while also subtly making note of current political realities (i.e., we're STILL enmeshed in Iraq). All in all a very nice profile of an artist who has been somewhat of a beacon for me ever since i first heard Talking With The Taxman About Poetry back in 1986.
* Jason Crosby's illustration opening the Robert Forster piece was a beautiful work of art, and seemed perfectly fitting to the subject. By stroke of good fortune I struck upon a headline to match by tapping the title of an old song that the Carter Family used to sing (among many others). We were also indebted to publicist Robert Vickers (a former Go-Betweens member) and photographer Stephanie Chernikowski for helping us dig up some nice historical shots of Forster's old band.
* Having John Marks write what I believe to be the definitive piece on the Old 97's was something of great personal reward to me. I'd stumbled upon Marks just a few months earlier, sort of by chance via a blog-entry he'd written about our #73 Shelby Lynne cover story, and ended up becoming a big fan of his recent documentary film Purple State Of Mind. That he gladly found the time to write for our last issue was a nice reminder of why this magazine has been so much fun over the years: As much as anything, it's about working with really talented writers.
* Same would be true for Britt Robson's piece on Pinetop Perkins, in fact. We'd also discovered Britt only recently (thanks to a referral from Ellen Stanley of Red House Records) but really wanted to get him on a longer feature while we still had the chance, and it surely paid off with the Pinetop piece. Didn't hurt that Todd V. Wolfson's photos were a work of art as well.
* The lead items in the two record-review sections -- Whiskeytown in Not Fade Away, Alejandro Escovedo in waxed -- couldn't possibly have been more fitting closers. Full disclosure mandates mentioning that I wrote the liner notes for the reissue of Whiskeytown's Strangers Almanac; but seeing as how they were the lead Town & Country piece of our first issue, and appeared on the cover of ND #10 when Strangers Almanac was released, there wasn't much doubt that it was the obvious lead review for the reissue section. All the more apropos that we got David Menconi, who did that T&C piece in ND #1, to write it. And Bill Friskics-Warren's take on Escovedo's new Real Animal album nicely referred to our long history with Escovedo, helping to bring our "Artist of the Decade" discussions full-circle.
A special "citation of merit," if you will, for Jesse Fox Mayshark's sidebar-review of the Abigail Washburn & the Sparrow Quartet disc. Mayshark's always been one of our finest and smartest writers, but I thought he really went above and beyond here, with such a perfect take on the record that I'm confident there will be none better to appear.... And finally, it was a nice coincidence that the very last record review to run in ND was of a Heybale disc titled: The Last Country album.
* Probably not much needs to be said about the last-page Screen Door piece that I didn't already say on the page. Suffice to say that it seemed to almost write itself. The bit at the end about the wire-mesh screen that we used for the logo seems trivial, in a sense....but to me, it felt, in a strange way, like the heart of everything we've been about.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
May 13, 2008
* ND #75 Revisited, Part 1
If you've read this blog with any regularity over the last couple of years, you'll know that I do this little editor's commentary about the current issue shortly after each one is published, usually just mentioning a few stories or photos or headlines that had some sort of particular personal significance, or that I perhaps wished to shed a little additional light on.
With our final issue, which arrived on the racks and in subscribers' mailboxes over the past few days, I'm afraid there are too many of those kinds of details to cover in a single entry. So I'll break this up into two parts, the second to follow later this week.
It probably comes as no surprise that our last issue meant a great deal to both Grant and me and thus carried quite a bit of content that reflected the finality of the occasion. Looking back through its pages when it arrived, however, I was struck by just how much was drawn directly upon the magazine's history, and/or my own musical journey. Some of what follows will speak to that.
First, though, there were the letters. That old Wilco song-title which has served as our letters-page title for all these years didn't quite suffice this time, as the box wasn't full but overflowing. The two pages we printed were just a fraction of what we received, and that's not counting the 200-odd comments on our website. To those who wrote and whose letters we couldn't fit in, our apologies, but also our thanks for letting us know what ND meant to you. The elegance of your expression, and the variety of ways in which y'all expressed it, was a great inspiration as we put #75 together.
This issue's Most Valuable Player profile, David Menconi's interview with Eric Heywood, originally had been scheduled for #74 but there wasn't room. It seemed fitting that it ended up in the final issue instead, given that Heywood was onstage with Son Volt in July 1995 when I traveled to Minneapolis to see their first performances at 7th Street Entry while working on our debut issue's cover story. I've since seen Heywood bring radiant color to the music of several other fine artists (Alejandro Escovedo and Richard Buckner come to mind especially), and have long been impressed by not just his musical ability but his personable nature -- both qualities no doubt highly prized by songwriters who have taken him on the road. Can't think of anyone I'd have rather featured in the MVP slot for our finale.
That the Miked section was framed by Paul Cantin's review of the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session concert and my own review of the Reivers' reunion show spoke significantly to the path that led to the launching of No Depression. Though neither were tagged "alt-country" in the 1980s, both acts incorporated elements of country and alternative approaches into their music.
The kicker was that the section's penultimate review was Holly Gleason's account of a Jackson Browne show at the Ryman. You'll just have to trust me on this, but many years ago (the date on the word-file in my computer says May 21, 2000) I made out a list of the Top 25 albums of all-time which had most greatly influenced me -- not necessarily a critical "best albums" assessment, but a more personalized reckoning -- and the top three were Jackson Browne's The Pretender, the Reivers' Translate Slowly, and the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session. Somehow they all ended up in our final live-review section together.
One of the most gratifying consequences of the surge in advertising that allowed us to publish 144 pages was that we were able to add a few extra Town & Country pieces rather late in the game; as a result, from start to finish, that section is packed with acts who really deserved a place in our final pages. The Carolina Chocolate Drops had played at our Merlefest booth last year and were clearly rising stars in our midst; we'd written about them briefly in the live-review and record-review sections, but they very much deserved a profile. Grant had been quite taken with the Hope Nunnery disc that had showed up in the mail recently. Kyla had been telling us how taken she was with this new Seattle band called the Fleet Foxes that was preparing to sign with Sub Pop. Dawn Landes was someone I'd encountered in New York during a meeting with the folks from Hem (with whom she toured for awhile), and whose name just kept popping up in the years hence (indeed, I'll see her later this week when she opens for the Swell Season in Raleigh).
Band Of Annuals I'd stumbled upon by chance at the Tractor Tavern in Seattle a couple months back and was certain they were going places; I'm pretty sure they're the first Salt Lake City band to be in our Town & Country section. The Whipsaws were actually the second (if I recall correctly) act from Alaska we'd done a T&C on; I'd seen them at SXSW with Tim Easton and doing their own stuff and was rather taken with their songs and their spirit. The Waybacks clearly have made great strides in recent years, thanks in part to the recruitment of Warren Hood, whose late father Champ was one of the true good guys in Austin during my formative years there. The members of the Rite Flyers were also around during those Austin coming-of-age days, if in different bands; what they've created together in the present strikes me as something special, as was evident when they opened for that Reivers reunion show back in February.
That'll wrap up Part 1, then....check back later this week and we'll move on to the features and record reviews. Meantime, hope y'all are enjoying reading our print-bimonthly finale as much as I enjoyed working on it.
adios,
peter
Posted by Peter at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
May 7, 2008
* "there's hope for us all...."
The subject-line might lead you to think this is gonna be a post-NC-primary political ramble -- but no; we'll leave that to Daily Kos and the like. If you're a Nick Lowe fan, however, you probably also recognize that quote as the chorus-lyric of what may be the finest song Lowe has ever written.
There'd be a boatload of arguments against such an assessment, no doubt -- not so much against "Hope For Us All" (from Lowe's latest labum, At My Age), but in favor of landmark Lowe tunes such as "Cruel To Be Kind" or "I Knew The Bride" or "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding", or somewhat lesser-known gems such as "All Men Are Liars" or "High On A Hilltop" or "The Beast In Me", or any number of other selections in Lowe's catalogue. Trying to single out his best song is a bit like trying to pick out the best peak in the Colorado Rockies; the whole range is pretty spectacular, you know.
I come today, however, to praise "Hope For Us All", and to write at some length as to precisely why. In particular, I'd like to present this song as an example to all aspiring lyricists of just how well a song can be written. Which is not to suggest everyone should go out and write a song like this -- imitation obviously isn't the point in art, and besides, it took Nick a long time to get this good -- but rather to posit "Hope For Us All" as an apex toward which to strive.
Let's start with the simple part. Almost every great song has a simple part. In this case it's the chorus. Lowe builds everything around these straightforward but heartfelt eleven words:
If even I
Can find someone
There's hope for us all.
That says a lot, with true brevity, a rare commodity in songwriting.
From there, things get complicated, from a craft perspective -- but you'd never know it as a listener, because Lowe makes the whole thing sound so natural, so effortless. Looking at things closely, I see three distinct examples of real brilliance which take this song from the simple to the sublime:
1. Metric diction. That's a complicated-sounding term to describe the rhythm Lowe employs in the line which bridges the verse to the chorus. It's a classic poetic turn, really -- akin to that phrase "iambic pentameter" you may occasionally hear in reference to Shakespeare and other masters (though I don't believe the syllabic pattern quite bears out this example as fitting the specific "iambic pentameter" numeric designation).
The intent and effect, though, is very similar. After starting the song with a rather unassuming couplet -- "People are remarking on the change that's come over me/It can be explained very easily" -- he digs into the meter on the next line:
OUT of the BLUE someone's COME into MY lonely WORLD and now I'M walking tall
It all reads like one continuous line -- no breaks or pauses, but rather syllabic stresses which propel the lyric straight into that simple chorus:
And if even I
Can find someone
There's hope for us all.
There is, of course, the obligatory rhyme ("tall" with "all"), but unlike most songs, the rhyme isn't the crux of the structure; rather, it gracefully marries the other elements of language that are driving the song.
He repeats the form in the second verse, but with a different line (which gets repeated later in the song):
I must adMIT there were TIMES when all I ever DID was climb THE wall
The meter, and the careful choice of words to fit that meter -- i.e., "metric diction" -- puts a skip in the song's step, sets it apart, seamlessly segues the listener from one stage to the next. You can hear how well it works immediately; taking a closer look shows just how clever and not-so-easy it is to pull off.
2. The bridge. Plenty of songs falter here; as a mostly amateur songwriter myself, I find it to be the toughest thing to write well, to create sensibly or naturally. Nick uses a simple little trick here to bring it home: He ties his chorus to the end of the bridge.
It's basically a two-verse bridge, kind of a classic "middle-eight." The first stanza is the setup: "Even in my darkest hour/There was still a light somewhere/Letting me know by its glow/That I'd find comfort there." Nothing particularly special to that, though the internal-rhyme of "know" and "glow" within the third line is a nice touch.
It's the second part that does the trick. "I walked a lonely street/Waiting for love to call/And if even I can find someone/There's hope for us all." The catch in writing a bridge is that you have to find your way back into the heart of the song. Lowe does this with exquisite ease, simply setting up the latter half of his middle eight to flow right back into his chorus.
I wish I could do that.
3. The grand finale. I use that term loosely and hesitantly, because it suggests the sort of overblown-instrumental-bombast conclusion that's common to modern pop but is almost entirely absent from Lowe's repertoire. What he does at the end of "Hope For Us All" is far more subtle, but also far more grand, from a lyrical perspective.
He appears to be just returning to the chorus, which is generally what most songs will do as they finish or fade out. But wait, there's something more here:
But if even I
A feckless man
Who's thrown away every single chance he's ever had
Can find someone
To check his fall
There must be hope for us all.
This is transcendent on multiple levels. First, he perfectly fits three new lines into the fundamental framework of his initial three lines -- and not just tacked on to the front or the end, but intertwined. The lines of his primary chorus are lines 1, 4, and 6 here. What he's woven into the narrative with lines 2, 3, and 5 doesn't sound out-of-place; on the contrary, it sounds like the whole six-line stanza could've been the original chorus.
Further, look at the words he's using here. When was the last time you heard someone sing "feckless" in a pop song? And it's precisely the right word: "having no sense of responsibility; indifferent; lazy" (per definition 2 at dictionary.com) -- a spot-on description of the man who's being transformed in the course of the song. Even better, perhaps, is the way he describes finding a true love: "Someone to check his fall." Again, this is not typical language, and it's all the more compelling for its singularity.
Finally, consider the emotional impact of that expanded chorus, which is ultimately all that really counts. Instead of just returning to the same words you've already heard a couple of times, he hits you with something that makes you listen fresh again -- and which portrays the character more dramatically and vividly than anywhere else in the song. This is a guy who's desperate, who's feckless, "who's thrown away every single chance he's ever had." And yet even he has found someone.
Indeed, there must be hope for us all.
adios,
peter
P.S. -- A live performance of the song:
Posted by Peter at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)