My Back Pages, Vol. 11: Bob Dylan - Blood on the Tracks

Welcome to My Back Pages, a collaborative staff feature that will survey a landscape of renowned classics and unheralded gems alike, most of which no one around here ever writes a word about. The rules are simple and loose: we won’t cover anything from this millennium and we will avoid all or most AP.net favorites—though we might make an exception if something is nearing a milestone anniversary. Beyond that though, anything is fair game. So if you have an album, artist, or genre you would like to see discussed in this feature, feel free to throw us a few recs.

Today, we're finally reaching the artist whose song gave our feature its name: Mr. Bob Dylan. How it took us 11 volumes to get to one of the greatest singer/songwriters of all time is a bit baffling, to be sure, but suffice to say that it hasn't been due to any lack of love for his work. Chris and I could have chosen any number of Dylan records to discuss this week, from 1965's revolutionary Highway 61 Revisited to the late-career masterstrokes of Time out of Mind and Love and Theft. Instead, we went for the record that might be Dylan's barest and most introspective: 1975's Blood on the Tracks. Written and recorded in the wake of Mr. Dylan's divorce from his wife Sara, Blood on the Tracks catapulted Dylan back into the spotlight after an otherwise lukewarm run of records in the 1970s. Over time, Chris and I have both come to consider it as Dylan's finest album. So head to the replies, hit play on the Rdio playlist, read along with our thoughts, and share your own opinions and stories about this brilliant masterpiece of a record.

Chris Collum: Bob Dylan has written scores of fantastic and very important songs over the course of his legendary career – now in its sixth decade – but the one for which he will remain most famous is inevitably "Like a Rolling Stone." That song was truly revolutionary for a number of reasons. In his 1988 speech honoring Dylan for his induction into the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen described the beginning of "Like a Rolling Stone" as "that snare shot that sounded like somebody [had] kicked open the door to your mind," and Springsteen wasn't the only person whose mind was blown open by the song. It was a long song – over six minutes, unheard of for a rock 'n roll song at the time, especially one intended to be a single. And yet New York City radio stations began demanding full, unedited copies of it after a discarded acetate snatched from a dumpster was worn out after being played on repeat all night at a trendy nightclub in the city. Furthermore, the song's subject matter was not normal at all. In contrast to the songs about love and/or love lost that by and large dominated popular music at the time, "Like a Rolling Stone" expects more from its audience. Dylan offers no answer to the repeated refrain of "how does it feel?" even as he asks the question with more and more vitriol as the song progresses.

But we're not here to talk about "Like a Rolling Stone," or Highway 61 Revisited, the masterful record that it opens. I began by talking about that song in order to draw a contrast between the revolutionary work Dylan did on his trio of masterpiece albums in the late sixties –Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde – and the masterpiece that is Blood on the Tracks, for Blood on the Tracks does not shy away from songs about love and losing love. Rather, it tackles such themes head-on.

Following the release of Blonde on Blonde in 1966 and the subsequent tour, Dylan's prolific stream of great music began to slowly taper off. He was recovering from a motorcycle accident, reportedly battling an amphetamine addiction, and the stress of being on tour constantly was starting to wear him thin. As that decade waned and the seventies began, Dylan quit touring altogether, although he still continued to release records. Just not ones that were nearly as good as his previous work: 1970's double LP Self Portrait to this day remains one of his most lowly records. That was the record that prompted Rolling Stone critic Greil Marcus to famously ask "What is this shit?" upon first listening to the album. In 1974, however, Dylan returned to touring with The Band in tow. Later that year he and his wife Sarah separated in what turned out to be a bitter and very public battle.

Following this, Dylan filled a little red notebook up with lyrics that would become the ten songs that are Blood on the Tracks. He recorded the entire record in an almost totally solo manner in New York City in a very short amount of time, but later re-cut some of the songs in Minneapolis at the advice of his brother who thought that some of the record's longer numbers could benefit from an arrangement that was less stark and bleak. The final version of the album contains cuts from both sessions. For example, "Simple Twist of Fate" and "Buckets of Rain" are both from the New York sessions while "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts" are the re-recorded Minneapolis versions.

If "Like a Rolling Stone" kicks down the door to your mind, "Tangled Up in Blue," the opening track on Blood on the Tracks gently eases you into the world of the record. The first thing one notices is the stunningly lush production work, particularly for a record of this era as the mid-seventies were notorious for spawning some of the most "dead-sounding" albums in rock 'n roll history. But none of the life is squashed out of the songs on these records. Lyrically I have personally always considered "Tangled" to be Dylan's finest work; he once described it as a song that "took ten years to live and another two to write." He's said in interviews that the narrative of the song is anything but linear, rather past, present and future coexist in the song's seven verses and meld and swirl seamlessly to form a true epic. The song deals largely with a long-term romantic relationship that went sour, and the narrator – presumably Dylan – reflects back on the last decade of his life, wondering how things wound up the way they did and whether there was anything he could have done to change them. Although Dylan insists to this day that the record is not autobiographical, given the circumstances he was in at the time it's impossible to think that his experiences weren't at least influential in his writing for the album. Furthermore, his son Jakob Dylan (of The Wallflowers) doesn't seem to buy his father's line; the younger Dylan has said in interviews that for him, listening to Blood on the Tracks he hears "my parents talking to each other."

"Tangled Up in Blue" is one of the long songs on the record that could be said to form the heart of the album's narrative. Another of these two is "Idiot Wind," presumably the song from which the record gets its name as Dylan references "blood" and "tracks" in subsequent verses. In contrast to much of the bleak and forlorn writing that surrounds it, the opening verse of "Idiot Wind" is one of the wriest Dylan had written since "On the Road Again" from Bringing It All Back Home. He sings that "They say I shot a many named Grey / And took his wife to Italy," and then as the plot thickens when the wife inherits a fortune and then dies, you can almost see Dylan shrugging ands grinning as he sings, "I can't help it / That I'm lucky." The song then twists and turns through a narrative about another relationship gone awry with Dylan concluding "We're idiots babe / It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves."

The third long-form song on the record is "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," a crime epic and murder ballad told partially by means of a card game allegory. The players include Big Jim, the owner of the town's diamond mine; Lily and Rosemary, who are his mistress and wife respectively; and the Jack of Hearts, a bank robber for whom Lily falls. It appears that Rosemary murders Big Jim after a night of hard drinking while the Jack of Hearts and his crew make off with a small fortune next door and Lily is trapped in the middle, but the genius of the song is that you could listen to it a hundred thousand times and still not necessarily come away with a clear linear picture of the story. It ties into the greater themes of betrayal and love gone bad found elsewhere on Blood on the Tracks in a very abstract way and in that sense is largely unique on the record.

Craig Manning: Chris already did a great job of placing Blood on the Tracks in the context of Dylan’s career, but let me venture back for one more moment before moving forward. For a long time, it was difficult for me to see how anyone could list an album other than Highway 61 Revisited as their favorite Bob Dylan disc. The unbeatable combination of “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” still stands as the greatest opener/closer pairing that isn’t “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland,” and the intermediary tracks – particularly the dim and biting “Ballad of a Thin Man” – still sound as fresh today as I imagine they did in 1965. How could an album with so many perfect songs be anything but its creator’s magnum opus?

Of course, that was before I started spending a lot of time with Blood on the Tracks. Released a decade after Highway 61, in the creative dry spell that was Dylan’s 1970s, Blood on the Tracks was a different kind of record than the ones that had made Bob Dylan an icon earlier in his career. Misguided – and in many ways, legitimately bad – albums like Self-Portrait and Dylan had people wondering whether or not the prolific singer/songwriter would ever again reach the heights of his 1960s material. At very least, it seemed that Dylan’s days as “voice of a generation” were long past over. Dylan could hardly have cared less about respecting his folk music roots; he certainly wasn’t going to govern his thematic conversations based on the whims of a fanbase who couldn’t keep up. Disappointed, fans and record labels alike began looking for a “new Dylan.” (Enter Bruce Springsteen.)

But then something happened: Bob Dylan got his heart broken.

The dissolution of a personal relationship has a way of bringing out the honesty in a songwriter like virtually nothing else can. From Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, from Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot out the Lights to Peter Gabriel’s Us, from Beck’s Sea Change to Adele’s 21 (not to mention pretty much every album by every artist from this scene), thousands of records filled with countless songs have purged the subject of a broken heart. Of course, they’ve all done it in slightly different ways, some with downtrodden depression, some with self-deprecating wit, some with bitter and hateful spite, and some with wistful reflection. Regardless of the mood, though, these types of albums and songs resonate because they bring us as the audience closer to the artist in question. There’s something incredibly engrossing and cathartic about listening to an artist as they stitch up their scars and find meaning in their relational wreckages. Or maybe we listen because all just horrible, sadistic, masochistic people. I don’t know. To paraphrase High Fidelity, do we listen to pop music because we’re miserable or are we miserable because we listen to pop music?

The point is this: there’s not much in music that’s more timeless than a break-up album, and Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks may well be THE break-up record. Sure, Tunnel of Love is more heartbreaking, Rumours is catchier, and Sea Change more accurately recreates the fall-out of a break-up (by making you want to give up on life and sit inside with the blinds drawn, of course). But as arguably the most lyrical songwriter in the history of rock and roll, Dylan hit upon things with these songs that other songwriters were never able to capture in their own songs.

Case in point, as Chris already noted, is “Tangled up in Blue,” the album’s opening track and mission statement. It’s funny: you’d never think of Dylan as sounding broken. His voice on record, from the heartfelt political entreaties of “Blowin’ in the Wind” to the embrace of impending death on “Not Dark Yet,” always gives off this mischievous air, like he knows something we don’t. The same is still true on most of the Blood on the Tracks songs, but pay attention to the lyrics of “Tangled up in Blue,” and it’s a parade of devastating moments. Right there in the first verse we get “Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed/Wondering if she'd changed at all, if her hair was still red,” a quiet moment of reflection for the woman that the narrator just can’t seem to let go. In the second verse, the two members of the relationship are abandoning their love, a metaphorical broken-down car, on a dark and lonely highway. In the last verse, Dylan sings, “All the people we used to know/They’re an illusion to me now,” recalling that moment after the death of a relationship where one party or the other deliberately loses touch with mutual friends because doing so is easier than seeing their old flame on a regular basis. And yet, even with all of this emotional weightiness flying around, Dylan still manages to end the song with a wry twist of sarcasm: “We always did feel the same/We just saw it from a different point of view.”

Chris spent most of his write-up discussing Blood on the Tracks through the prism of its long-form tracks, vut while Dylan is largely known for his longwinded album centerpieces, I’d actually argue that the finest songs on this record are the tauter, more concise moments. My favorite song on the album (and one of my favorite Dylan songs, period) is “Simple Twist of Fate,” one of the most gorgeously melodic tracks the songwriter has ever penned, but Blood on the Tracks doesn’t lack for other shorter-form triumphs. Were I to recommend an album for a first-time Dylan listener to check out, it would undoubtedly be this one, which sparks with immediacy and accessibility throughout. From the mournful dirge of “You’re a Big Girl Now” to the heart shattering wistfulness of “If You See Her Say Hello,” from the rollicking harmonica bursts of "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" to the slow-burn blues of "Meet Me in the Morning," and from the lovelorn fondness of “Shelter from the Storm” to the pleasant folk patter of album closer, “Buckets of Rain,” the shiniest nuggets of gold on Blood on the Tracks are simplistic, gingerly melodic, beautifully rendered acoustic songs.

It’s hard to compete with the sheer audacity of Dylan’s electric records, but as a return to the more gentle strains of his earlier work – albeit, with much better production – Blood on the Tracks marks itself as the most listenable, enjoyable, consistent, and cohesive record in Dylan’s collection. It might not have the immediacy of the “the snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind,” and Dylan himself may well not even like the record (“A lot of people tell me they enjoy that album,” he said once in a radio interview. “It's hard for me to relate to that. I mean, it, you know, people enjoying that type of pain, you know?”), but as both album and break-up album, Blood on the Tracks is unquestionably one of the greatest and most powerful collections of songs ever put on vinyl. Dylan made a lot of music before 1975 and has written a lot of music since, but none of his records stop me in my tracks (bad pun intended) quite like this one.

The New Basement Tapes - Lost on the River

My love of Blood on the Tracks is well documented at this point, but there are definitely days when I think that The Basement Tapes might be my favorite Bob Dylan project. Recorded in 1967, but not released officially until 1975, The Basement Tapes brought two of the brightest musical talents of the time—Dylan and The Band—together for an invigorating set of songs. Some of the tunes they recorded (most of the ones that made it onto the original record) were Bob Dylan compositions, now-classics like “Going to Acapulco” and “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” Some were traditional folk tunes. Others were covers of respected country artists like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. And all of them had an infectious looseness that was and is incredibly rare to find on a studio album.

It’s not difficult to see why the original Basement Tapes were so loose, creative, and dynamic. There was no expectation among any session members that the tapes in question would ever be released. And so they all played with reckless abandon—no pressure, no reservations—and made one of the most incendiary records in history as a result. None of those songs had the lyrical depth or eloquence of Dylan’s finest work, nor were they as emotionally resonant as what he came up with on Blood on the Tracks. But because of the fertile and collaborative environment in which they were recorded, the songs from The Basement Tapes became classics anyway.

And that brings me to Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, a project assembled by legendary Americana producer T Bone Burnett to see if that old Big Pink basement had any more magic left to offer. The project was born when Dylan’s publisher contacted Burnett and asked him if he wanted to do anything with a box of unused, handwritten Bob Dylan lyrics that had recently been found. Burnett, a producer always looking for unique projects in the roots music sphere (acclaimed soundtracks for a pair of Coen Brothers films, for instance, or a music supervisor post for the television program Nashville), jumped at the chance and quickly assembled what is arguably the ultimate modern day folk super group.

Elvis Costello, Jim James (of My Morning Jacket), Marcus Mumford (of Mumford & Sons), Rhiannon Giddens, and Taylor Goldsmith (of Dawes): these are the talented musicians, singers, and songwriters tasked with turning Dylan’s outtake lyrics into fully formed songs that honor the tradition of the original Basement Tapes. Each member chose different texts and set them to music individually, choosing the words that moved them, and bringing the contributions to the recording process. Because of this process—of starting separate and then coming together—each song on this record has the distinct flavor of the person who sings lead. However, because the lyrics were all penned by Dylan, and because the songs were all arranged, fleshed out, and recorded by the full group, Lost on the River ends up feeling a good deal more cohesive than you might expect an album with five lead vocalists to sound.

Probably the most refreshing aspect of this record is that no one ever shoots for straight imitation. The New Basement Tapes may be writing songs based around Dylan’s words, and they may be paying tribute to the freewheeling nature of the original Basement Tapes, but it is testament to the talent of these five individuals that Lost on the River never sounds like an attempt to approximate Dylan’s sound. Jim James gets the closest, with numbers like “Down at the Bottom,” “Nothing to It,” and “Hidee Hidee Ho #11,” hitting upon a vintage sound not far off what Dylan and the Band cultivated all those years ago. James even sounds like he’s doing a bit of a Dylan vocal impression during the latter of those three tunes, but he’s a talented enough musician and songwriter to make his songs sound fresh. “Down at the Bottom” is particularly splendid, alternating between moody atmosphere and rousing momentum for the perfect album starter.

If James gets the closest to Dylan’s sound, Goldsmith probably strays the furthest away. A sweet-voiced folkie who has always been compared to Jackson Browne, Goldsmith is tasked here with writing the collection’s most luxuriant songs. His contributions—“Liberty Street,” “Florida Key,” “Card Shark,” and “Diamond Ring”—rely heavily on piano and acoustic guitar, with Goldsmith’s voice providing a lullaby-soft wistfulness to the dusky arrangements. The songs are pretty, particularly “Florida Key” and “Diamond Ring,” and they allow Dylan’s lyrics to breathe in a way they don’t always do on James' or Costello’s more raucous numbers, or Mumford’s more pop-centric ones. When Goldsmith sings “If I ever get back to St. Louis again, there’s gonna be some changes made” at the beginning of “Ring,” it’s the perfect delivery, landing somewhere between the scathing, whip-smart fashion in which Dylan would have sung it, and the more measured insights that Goldsmith imparts on his own records with Dawes.

The problem is, the Goldsmith songs that made the record don’t take advantage of the frontman’s true talents. The best Dawes songs are big, almost church-bound slowburns like “Something in Common” and “A Little Bit of Everything,” songs that build from slow, modest beginnings into cathartic climaxes. Here, Goldsmith’s songs are pleasant little ditties, but they are admittedly lightweight compared to what everyone else is doing. (As stupid as the descriptor is, it’s telling that Pitchfork called his contributions “adult contemporary.”) Whether Goldsmith got pushed to the side because of the presence of bigger names, or simply didn’t bring his best material to these sessions, the fact is that he’s ultimately the only one of the five songwriters who doesn’t deliver an essential highlight.

Costello is probably the group’s key member, providing two of the three best songs here. His “Lost on the River #12” is particularly stunning, playing like something that could have come off this year’s fantastic War on Drugs album, Lost in the Dream. “Six Months in Kansas City,” meanwhile, is the perfect penultimate moment for this record, a wild runaway train of a track that gets each member of the band bellowing at the top of their lungs during the chorus. It’s the most spontaneous moment on the album, and one of the few spots where this album absolutely taps into the unpredictable atmosphere of the original Basement Tapes.

Marcus Mumford also earns his paycheck, penning the record’s most instantly infectious numbers. The complaint most often tossed off about Mumford & Sons is that they write songs that all sound similar, and that their lyrics are poor. Both problems are solved here, where Mumford either writes typical Mumford & Sons melodies, but gets to use them on top of great lyrics (“Kansas City,” featuring an electric guitar shredding cameo from actor Johnny Depp) or co-writes with other members to come up with songs that sound different than anything he’s ever done (the Goldsmith co-written “When I Get My Hands on You”). In both cases, his songs are terrific.

As for Giddens, she’s fairly easily the weakest link, delivering boilerplate Americana that you could hear at virtually any folk festival (“Duncan and Jimmy”) or slowing the first side of the record to a crawl with “Spanish Mary,” a song which wouldn’t have been too out of place amidst a few of the overlong clunkers on Dylan’s own Tempest. She also contributes the worst song on the album, a second version of “Hidee Hidee Ho” that boasts an awkward rhythmic setting of Dylan’s words, not to mention some remarkably flat vocals from Giddens herself. It’s the only number on the record that sounds amateurish, and it should have been cut. Still, even if Giddens is a weak link, she justifies her presence with “Lost on the River #20,” a haunting Appalachian folk arrangement of the same text that Elvis Costello already turned into a winner. In fact, her take on the text might be the best song on the record.

Some will undoubtedly trivialize the New Basement Tapes as a novelty project. Indeed, the whole idea behind the project is high-concept, to the point where many listeners and critics probably won’t be able to get past the Dylan thing to appreciate these songs as standalones. The thing is, though, these songs are great. While the record’s bloat does kind of compromise its overall consistency and cohesion, Lost on the River probably still has more of the year’s best songs in one place than almost any other album. It doesn’t quite match the fun or looseness of the original Basement Tapes, but it’s still both a worthwhile tribute to that album, and an impressive showcase of everyone involved.

Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow

Counting Crows - Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow
Cooking Vinyl, 2013
7.5/10

Let me preface this review by saying that it’s incredibly hard for me to say anything negative about Counting Crows. Without the lyrical grace and emotional inflection of frontman Adam Duritz, I probably wouldn’t be writing these words. One of my earliest musical memories was hearing this band for the first time. My family and I were climbing into the car after some bike trip, and my brother decided it was an opportune moment to slip my step-dad's copy of August and Everything After into the CD player. He skipped forward a few numbers, “Mr. Jones” issued from the speakers, and I fell in love immediately. That memory was one I considered a lot a decade later when I picked up the band’s greatest hits collection (called Films About Ghosts) and began to discover Counting Crows beyond just the singles. At that point in time, I think I owned about six CDs, half of which were Creed (I am not proud of this), but that record, which contained 16 of the Crows' “best” songs, was a turning point. Throughout that winter, I played the album almost every afternoon, and those songs breathed vitality and life into the bleak winter landscape that had taken up residence in my hometown: the rip-roaring electricity of “Angels of the Silences,” the emotional swell of “Round Here,” the poetic perfection of “A Long December” and “Mrs. Potter Lullaby,” and the nostalgic beauty of “Recovering the Satellites,” they all became a part of me.

In the nine-plus years since, Counting Crows have only released a single album of original content. Needless to say, I became a die-hard fan of the band at precisely the wrong moment. Following four terrific albums, spaced out on an every-three-year timeframe from 1993 to 2002, Films About Ghosts was the band’s way of telling the world they were taking a breather. Half a decade would pass before their fifth full-length—2008’s lukewarm Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings—hit the streets, and then Duritz and company would take another four years to come up with last year’s Underwater Sunshine, a well-executed cover album, but a cover album nonetheless. In the meantime, the band has done their best to mollify their fans’ growing restlessness with a series of live albums—a document of the Hard Candy tour in 2006 and a special full-album performance of August & Everything After in 2011—and their latest release, called Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow, is the next in that series.

To be fair, Counting Crows are a transcendent live act, and each of their live records bears its own significance and personality. Where their first concert album—1998’s Across a Wire—was a double-disc affair showcasing the band in both stripped-down acoustic and full-blown electric environments, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow finds them as a seasoned collective of professionals, comfortable with traversing their entire catalog, transfiguring old favorites, resurrecting deep cuts, and delivering covers like they’re originals. In fact, the finest moment of the disc is the Bob Dylan song that kicks it off. “Girl From North Country,” culled from Dylan’s 1963 breakthrough, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, is one of the legendary singer/songwriter’s most yearning compositions, and this cover is as good as they come. Performed at the start of the show, with just vocals and acoustic guitar, “Girl from North Country” is a stark and intimate reminder of Duritz’s ability to generate pin-drop intensity in a room. Where many bands from the 1990s radio-rock scene now rely heavily on old hits and crowd sing-alongs to carry their shows, the Crows’ greatest asset as a live band has always been their gift for maintaining rapt audience attention in less-familiar territory.

“Round Here” is a perfect example of the above phenomenon. Originally the song that broke the silence at the top of their debut, “Round Here” rarely maintains the same arrangement and format from tour to tour. (Legend has it that the song has also never been exactly recreated in the manner it appears on record.) While the general road-map of the song remains the same—the chiming guitar intro, the poetic verses, the dynamic emotional build-up—Duritz and company frequently pepper it with alterations, improvisations, and interpolations of other artists’ songs. The “Round Here” that appears with this collection is one of the best, bursting breathtakingly into loose improv sections and sly snippets of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing.” “Darling summer’s almost over, before the world gets too much colder/Come outside and run away with me,” Duritz wails spontaneously over the song’s elongated mid-section: for a moment, this feels like the Crows of old.

But beyond the first two tracks, the most notable thing about this particular live album is the setlist. For a band that has supported a bootleg-trading network within their fanbase for almost as long as they’ve had a fanbase, it doesn’t make much sense for Counting Crows to keep going back to the well for more “official” live releases, but if they’re going to do so, it’s at least nice that they try not to retread songs that have already appeared on previous concert discs (with a few exceptions). This particular release is loaded with deep cuts, from the harmonica-laced blues of “Mercury” (a forgotten gem from the experimental second side of 1996’s Recovering the Satellites) to a pair of songs from both This Desert Life (the road-trip folk of “Four Days” and the downright-bizarre “I Wish I Was a Girl) and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings (the hazy emotional breakdown of “Sundays” and the haunting siren song that is “Le Ballet d’Or”). But it’s Hard Candy—which celebrated its tenth anniversary last year—that supplies the rest of the highlights.

Often dismissed as a misguided and overproduced expedition into the realms of mainstream pop music, Hard Candy is one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned albums in recent memory. On record, the studio gloss and soaring hooks masked a complex lyrical web, a collection of songs that revealed Adam Duritz’s increasingly serious battles with insomnia, depression, and mental instability. On the gorgeous “Carriage”—one of the forgotten late-album tracks which gets resurrected here in wonderful fashion—amidst a gentle acoustic lilt, the burn of a lone trumpet player, and lyrics about “chocolate bars and baseball cards,” a once-meaningful relationship all but vanishes into the tragedy of a losing an unborn child. “Up All Night,” meanwhile, is one of the five best songs Duritz has ever written, the kind of glorious, dusky anthem you play in the car at night when the weather is finally starting to warm up.“This is a summertime song,” Duritz announces at the song’s outset. “Hard Candy was a late night album.” If you need any extra encouragement to catch the Crows on their tour with the Wallflowers this summer, look no further than this penultimate scorcher.

Ultimately, Echoes of the Outlaw Roadshow is a solid document of a great live band. The covers are good, the setlist is unique, and there are a few transcendent moments. But Counting Crows—Duritz especially—are too talented to become one of those bands that only plays live shows and releases cover albums. Maybe I’m biased, since I’d call August & Everything After the single greatest album of the nineties and since I love Hard Candy more than anyone else I’ve ever encountered, but I truly believe that Duritz has the skill, both as a songwriter and a frontman, to land in the pantheon of greats. Even if he never writes another song or never releases another album, he’s got a pretty killer legacy to leave behind. But I’d like to think that this band still has at least one classic left in them, and while frequent concert tours and live albums are nice to have, but I’m infinitely more excited for that next step forward.

Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience (Part I)

Justin Timberlake – The 20/20 Experience
RCA, 2013

B+

There’s nothing in music criticism that bothers me more than writers lambasting an artist and tearing down their latest work for “overreaching.” No matter the cause, be it one particular critic’s self-important, pageview grabbing arrogance, or the word of a listener who is so emotionally tied to an artist’s initial sound that they refuse to accept any new directions, attacking a musician for trying to do too much with their sound, or for trying to adopt influences outside of their initial wheelhouse, has always struck me as a “beside the point” sort of criticism. Isn’t the job of a music critic to judge the art at hand as a standalone product, and not to examine it in light of previous triumphs? That may be easier said than done, but I at least always try to appreciate an album for what it is rather than brooding over what it’s not.

And that brings me to The 20/20 Experience, Justin Timberlake’s third full-length record and his first foray into new music in nearly six years. Since 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds, Timberlake has filled his time acting (The Social Network, In Time, Friends with Benefits), hosting Saturday Night Live, and working on his comedy chops, but despite pleas from every direction, begging him to return to music, the pop star offered no indication until very recently that he would return at all. And you couldn’t have really blamed him if he didn’t. After all, Timberlake was basically a legend by the time he was 25: he’d conquered the world with ‘N Sync, transitioned into a successful solo career with 2002’s Justified—and its still-ubiquitous flagship single, “Cry Me a River”—ripped off Janet Jackson’s shirt on international television, and gained respectable critical approval with FutureSex/LoveSounds. Where could he go next? What did he still have to say or to prove? And would his long-awaited return to music even be able to meet the stratospheric expectations of fans and critics? Yes, it might have been safer for Timberlake just to call it a day. After all, 31 is a bit too young to enter the “past their prime” bracket.

But Timberlake, thankfully, has never been “safe,” and his latest album is the exact antithesis of the word. Those looking for another FutureSex will probably be disappointed. There’s no monster single here, no “SexyBack” or “Cry Me a River,” or even a “My Love” or “What Goes Around…” Where Timberlake’s sophomore album was largely grounded in up-to-the-minute pop sounds, dance-floor textures, and urban rhythmic drawl, The 20/20 Experience spends most of its runtime in classic, slow-burning soul and R&B mode. Timbaland is back in the producer’s chair, but the emphasis this time is more on atmosphere, flow, and mood than on catchy earworm hooks. And that’s not to say that these songs are forgettable, because the falsetto-driven hooks on songs like “Pusher Love Girl” and “Spaceship Coupe,” or the stadium-filling chorus of “Mirrors,” are as melodically resplendent as anything Timberlake has ever produced. Rather, these songs don’t quite have JT’s normal knack for latching themselves to the side of your brain after a single listen, and while that’s not really a shortcoming, it means that The 20/20 Experience probably won’t have the same pop-cultural ubiquity as his last two records did.

But if the album lacks something in the radio singles department, Timberlake more than makes up for it in terms of overall cohesion. The themes here are simple ones: love, lust, adoration, devotion, etc. etc., all likely inspired by Timberlake’s recent marriage to actress Jessica Biel. If the lyrics aren’t romantic gestures we’ve heard a million times before, they’re clumsy metaphors and analogies that would fall flat without the musical flourishes that prop them up. But Timberlake’s voice is, as always, a flawless instrument, lilting on gorgeous falsetto lines, delivering sultry, slinky melodies right and left, throwing in tasteful riffs, or moving into a full-on belt when the songs require it. Timbaland plays his part well too, somehow making the swirl of organic instrumentation, hypnotic samples, electronic loops, and other digital augmentations coalesce into sprawling sonic arrangements that feel both intimate and explosive, innately welcoming and dauntingly ambitious. Regardless of how listeners react to these songs on a personal level, there is no denying that The 20/20 Experience is an absolutely exquisite-sounding record from top to bottom, and with a pop music album, that’s sometimes half the battle.

Of course, all of the studio sheen in the world can’t save an artist if they don’t have the songs to back it up, and Timberlake certainly has a dense wall of material on hand this time around. The 20/20 Experience is only ten tracks long, but seven of them cross the seven-minute mark, and the two most-likely bids for mainstream radio airplay—the lounge-meets-club first single “Suit & Tie” and the brassy soul rave-up “That Girl”—still extend well past the accepted model of the three-and-a-half minute pop song. This album is long, full of shape-shifting tunes that drop from one style to another with almost no regard for genre boundaries. “Pusher Love Girl” swells at the top of the record with a string arrangement that feel ripped straight from a classic film score, morphs into a rousing piece of pop vocal bliss, and then settles into a magnetic neo-soul groove for its final minutes. The first half of “Strawberry Bubblegum” takes a cue from Frank Ocean’s tripped-out brand of R&B, while the outro accelerates into something that could almost have fit on an ‘N Sync album. And “Let the Groove Get In” begins as a hip-shaking nod to Latin music and ends as a pitch-perfect Michael Jackson impersonation.

And that’s where the accusations of overreaching will likely come in. It would be hyperbole to say that The 20/20 Experience has suffered a critical slapping, but compare its reception to the legacy of Timberlake’s last album—or perhaps even more notably, to the orgasmic praise that Frank Ocean’s similarly ambitious, similarly meandering Channel ORANGE earned from all corners last summer—and all the scores in the “8” or “B” ranges start to feel a bit more disappointing. Most writers, even the ones who like the album, accuse Timberlake of writing long songs for the sake of having epic track lengths, not because his musical creations actually justify those lengths. The review posted yesterday morning from The AV Club found the record so bloated that almost every song could stand to lose a minute in length—if not more—while Joe Caramanica of the New York Times essentially called the record a pretentious mess, a weak collection of songs disguising themselves in layers of false “artistry.”

But aside from a terribly-misguided rap verse on “Suit & Tie”—from Jay-Z, a once-great modern musical figure who now falls squarely into the “past their prime” bracket I referred to earlier—I can’t really find a minute here that I’d excise. Most of these songs save their finest moments for the back end, like the gloriously catchy “I’ll love you ‘til I make it pop” hook from “Strawberry Bubblegum,” or the dizzying conclusions to “Don’t Hold the Wall” and “Tunnel Vision,” where Timbaland meticulously builds layers of production elements into towers of sonic force. On “Spaceship Coupe,” Justin mixes the attitude and sound of Prince with a hook that could have been culled from a Beyonce record. The song  is hooky and fun throughout, but doesn’t reach its euphoric peak until nearly four minutes in, when an 80s-esque slow-jam guitar solo cuts across the center. It’s true that we could have reached these moments faster, but Timberlake gives the songs time to breathe, grow, and shift, and as a result, the peaks feel higher and more well-earned. Some listeners won’t have the patience to sit through one seven-minute song after another—especially on repeat plays—but for those who are, there’s a bounty of rewards to be found here.

By the time The 20/20 Experience takes its final left turn—with the gorgeous, somber ballad that is “Blue Ocean Floor”—Timberlake has truly run the gamut of pop music. A halting cassette-tape loop plays in the background, decaying with pulsing synths, distant piano lines, and a haunting tidal atmosphere as Timberlake delivers one of his most restrained vocal performances ever. “If my red eyes don’t see you anymore/And I can’t hear you through the white noise,” Timberlake warns on the cathartic chorus. “Just send your heartbeat I’ll go to the blue ocean floor/Where they find us no more, on that blue ocean floor.” It’s a strikingly intimate and serene ending to a record that often explodes in communal, lovelorn bombast, and for me, it’s the unquestionable highlight. But that’s the thing about The 20/20 Experience: this is the kind of record where everyone will have different favorite song, where what someone calls dull or overlong or indulgent will resonate perfectly with someone else, depending on that listener’s past musical tastes and experiences. And some critics may call that “overreaching,” may yearn for a more consistent style or wish that Timberlake didn’t try so many new things. But those kinds of people were also the ones who told the Beatles they were “just a pop band” when they started experimenting with studio art, or booed Dylan when he went electric. And we all know how those situations turned out.

Josh Ritter - The Beast in Its Tracks

Josh Ritter - The Beast in Its Tracks

Pytheas, 2013
8.5/10

After Josh Ritter’s last couple releases, I was beginning to wonder if his music would ever connect with me again like it had in the old days. His finest albums, 2006’s The Animal Years and 2007’s The Historical Conquests of... were both loaded with terrific melodies, astounding lyrical content, and emulations of musical influences that sit directly in my wheelhouse, from Bruce Springsteen to Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen. 2010’s slow-burning return, titled So Runs the World Away, largely sought refuge in a sunnier folk-pop vein, a la Paul Simon, but despite a few stellar stand-outs, fell short. And last year’s EP, Bringing in the Darlings, failed to connect with me on any level.

But heartbreak has a way of bringing about creative rebirth. It did for Dylan in 1975, when his break-up album masterpiece Blood on the Tracks reignited a decade that otherwise failed to reach the heights of its creator’s heyday; it did it for Springsteen, who wrote what was arguably his most unique, introspective, and confessional set of songs with 1987’s Tunnel of Love, just before his marriage imploded; and it has done the same for countless artists across the landscape of music history, from Italian opera to classic rock ‘n’ roll to modern emo. In that case, the recently-divorced Josh Ritter is hardly unique, but the fact doesn’t make his latest album, The Beast in Its Tracks, any less striking. In fact, Beast is Ritter’s most engaging and consistent record since The Animal Years...and probably his best as well.

Ritter has never lacked for great lyrical content. His signature song, 2006’s “Thin Blue Flame,” thrived on nine-and-a-half minutes of illusion-heavy verses, while the finest songs on So Runs the World Away were sprawling narrative epics. The songwriter’s propensity for dense poetic imagery and well-fashioned turns of phrase are very much intact here, but they’re also accompanied by more welcoming musical textures and stronger melodies than we’ve heard from Ritter in quite awhile. Witness the tremulous explosion of strings and acoustic guitars that opens the rollicking and biting “New Lover” (“But if you’re sad and you’re lonesome, and you got nobody true/I’d be lyin’ if I said that didn’t make me happy too,” Ritter croons over the song’s final moments) or the classic folk harmonies that give “In Your Arms Awhile” its heaven-bound grace. Meanwhile, it’s the enveloping mix of organic instrumentation and ambient sonic textures that lend more innocuous album tracks, such as the intimate “Nightmares” or the country-whine of “Bonfires,” a sense of cohesion with the rest of the record.

But The Beast in Its Tracks wouldn’t be a Josh Ritter album without at least a few home-runs, and luckily, the hits here are plentiful. Early-album triumph “Hopeful” is Ritter’s “Tangled up in Blue,” a winding relationship narrative that relates the stab of watching the person you love pack up and walk out the door better than almost any I’ve ever heard. “The sunlight corroded and the days started to fail/The rocks in the road sharpened shadows to nails,” Ritter sings, his very world turning against him as life spirals out of control. The aforementioned “In Your Arms Awhile” takes heartbreak to near-anthemic heights, while the chiming first single, “Joy to You Baby,” is the record’s most immediate stand-out. The redemptive penultimate number, “Joy to You Baby” is a flawless freeway slow-burn, a thoughtful evening song with bittersweet flickers of forgiveness floating through its glorious strains. “There’s pain in whatever we stumble upon/If I never had met you, you couldn’t have gone,” Ritter notes. “But then I couldn’t have met you, we couldn’t have been/I guess it all adds up to joy in the end.” Simple. Universal. Beautiful.

So many of my favorite musical works are break-up albums: there’s something about an artist baring their soul on record, tearing down the walls and letting their fans see them bleed and break, that has always felt so noble and romantic to me. I suppose it’s the relatability factor, or maybe the fact that I’ve always been partial to emotionally charged songwriting, but there’s a reason that Blood on the Tracks or Tunnel of Love or Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours or Butch Walker’s Letters land so high on my all-time favorite albums list. The Beast in Its Tracks offers the same kind of catharsis, and just like each of those albums, Ritter finds a silver lining in these songs. This is no pity party; in addition to his divorce, Ritter’s tumultuous past three years have seen his second marriage and the birth of his child. So when light breaks through the clouds—something that happens, appropriately, on the lush, acoustic number, “A Certain Light,” and the organ-drenched, slowdance closer, “Lights”—the results are both comforting and viscerally satisfying. And Ritter, one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation, guides the whole thing with a steady hand, giving us love, hate, loss, rebirth, resentment, redemption, forgiveness, and nostalgia, and encapsulating it all into 43 minutes and 28 seconds of smooth folk bliss. 2013’s bar has just been raised.

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Jagjaguwar, 2013
8.0/10

The first time I pushed play on We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic--the second full-length record from California duo Foxygen--and opening cut “In the Darkness” came cascading out of my speakers, I had to double check my iTunes to make sure I was listening to the right album. The sounds I was hearing--a wonky piano, a booming bass, a softly shimmering electric guitar, a chorus of distant back-up vocals, Sam France’s Lennon-esque croon, and some kind of vaudevillian trumpet roll--all of them told through a layer of 1960s vinyl distortion, instantly coalesced like some long-lost Beatles b-side. I felt like I’d just thrown on an alternate universe’s version of Sgt. Pepper (or maybe Magical Mystery Tour...), and it almost baffled me how perfectly France, band partner Jonathan Rado, and producer Richard Smith were able to capture that late-era, experimental Beatles sound. Indeed, “In the Darkness” is a thing to behold as an opener, a timeless slice of psychedelic rock, perfectly balanced between meticulous studio arrangement and tripped-out spontaneity, between avant-garde textures and pop sensibilities. I thought I was in for an album full of throwback Beatles imitation, and I could hardly have been more pleased.

But if there’s one thing Foxygen teach listeners throughout We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, it’s that we shouldn’t make ourselves comfortable with one specific sonic niche. As early as “No Destruction,” the record’s second track, things shift. France drops Lennon, opting instead for the disorienting drawl Lou Reed showed off so memorably on 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico. And before the song is even over, things shift again: France’s Reed impression morphs into rambunctious Bob Dylan gravel, the song traveling with him. Once a steady bass/piano/organ groover, “No Destruction” doubles down on its percussion elements and charges forward, France’s voice sliding and straining between spoken word and melody like he’s ready to bust into a well-timed cover of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

And those two songs are, quite literally, just the tip of the iceberg of musical reference that Foxygen scales throughout We Are. There’s the Elvis tribute of “On Blue Mountain,” where France directly quotes the melodic refrain from “Suspicious Minds” a numerous junctures; there’s the hazy California pop of “San Francisco,” which references a signature Tony Bennett song (you know, the one where he leaves his heart there), even while grounding itself more in classic, A.M. radio doo-wop or modern indie pop than with love-struck jazz standards; and the riotous title track sounds like it should have been on Exile on Main St., its scratchy production values and France’s unhinged vocal style perfectly distilling the spirit of rock music’s glory days for a new generation.

Somehow though, Foxygen manage to make their blatantly obvious references sound innovative and fresh within their wider musical context. A big reason for that--though certainly not the only one--is the way France and Rado are able to construct unusual, shape-shifting song structures with astounding ease. Revisit “On Blue Mountain,” which begins in organ-drenched Rolling Stones territory (think “Shine a Light”), accelerates towards Elvis appropriation, and then alternately pumps the brakes and slams the on the gas throughout the rest of its nearly six-minute running time. When the song finally reaches its climax--a smooth Clapton-esque guitar solo, surrounded by a cloud of noise and accented by France’s Jagger-like snarls--lsteners will almost have forgotten where they started. No less loose in construction is album stand-out “Shuggie,” a power-pop gem whose late-song funk-breakdown is legitimately impossible to resist.

A lot of artists write their own stories by the light of their record collections, and why not? We all love making playlists and mixtapes, soundtracking our day-to-day lives while hoping to project our musical preferences onto friends, family, and significant others. What Foxygen have done here is ultimately just an extension of that tendency. And they aren’t the first artists to do so, by any means: The Gaslight Anthem, for example, have saw a meteoric rise within this very scene, largely because of their ability to appropriate pieces of Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Pearl Jam, and old soul records into their own distinct sound. Albums like We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, however, are a rarer manifestation of this influence-collecting phenomenon. France and Rado show as much care for reference and tribute here, for capturing a distinct 60s and 70s mood, as they do for more conventional aspects of songwriting, to the point where We Are essentially becomes a treasure hunt for musical familiarities.

In lesser hands, such an intense focus on homage might have come across as a gimmick, or turned the finished product into little more than a glorified cover album. Foxygen pull it off though, and most of the credit for that triumph has to be pointed towards France’s chameleonic vocal ability. But if Jagger, Dylan, Reed, and Lennon are the singer’s main points of reference, they are hardly where the musical palette leaves off. Shades of Bowie’s trademark glam-rock, The Band’s rootsy Americana, The Kinks’ punked-up Brit-pop, and even the legendary L.A. “Mellow Mafia” sound, creep in around the fringes, while other listeners will catch everything from Creedence Clearwater Revival to the Byrds to Jimi Hendrix. And as France adopts a faux-Sinatra croon over the album’s final moments, things are at last brought back around to this century, his vocal quiver and articulation recalling hues of Brandon Flowers. All of this may or may not have been explicitly intended when Foxygen sat down to write We Are, but the impact is the same: the record is a jukebox boiled down to its greatest hits, a playground romp through the back-pages of pop music history, and in this case, the journey is well worth taking. The album title may call them the “ambassadors of peace and magic,” but the music inside tells a different tale: these guys are the 21st century ambassadors of classic rock ‘n’ roll, and it's damn nice having them around.

Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back

Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back

Rock Ridge Music

Four stars

“Michael McDermott's music, like Springsteen's and Van Morrison's, helped me to find a part of myself that wasn't lost, as I had feared, but only misplaced. That's why we love the ones who are really good at it, I think: because they give us back ourselves, all dusted and shined up, and they do it with a smile....Michael McDermott is one of the best songwriters in the world and possibly the greatest undiscovered rock and roll talent of the last 20 years."

-Stephen King

In the 21 years since the release of Michael McDermott’s debut (1991’s 620 W. Surf), Stephen King has always remained one of the singer/songwriter’s biggest fans, quoting lyrics in his books or offering testimonials like the above excerpt for the liner notes of McDermott’s albums. But while King was always McDermott’s most noted champion, he was never his only one. Upon the release of 620 W. Surf, many critics named McDermott as the next in a long line of legendary songwriters, the heir apparent to Springsteen, Dylan, or Van Morrison. As is clear now, though, history told a much different tale. The hype went to McDermott’s head: he was only 22-years old, a young, naive, free spirit with no idea of how to reconcile his future path with his sudden dream-come-true situation. He responded to that predicament by going off the rails, turning to drugs and alcohol, partying in a fast-lane, out of control manner, and scaring the hell out of the people closest to him.

One of those people was A&R man Brian Koppelman, who went on to become a noted Hollywood screenwriter and producer, and Koppeman’s first film, the 1998 poker cult-classic Rounders, carried a lot of this experiences with McDermott within its narrative. Matt Damon’s gambling protagonist actually shared the songwriter’s stage name (they call him “Mike” in the movie), while Edward Norton’s character, an out-of-luck ex-con with big debts to pay, carried the surname Murphy, McDermott’s actual birthright. Though they gave their hero his name, Koppelman and screenwriting partner David Levien both admitted that McDermott aligned more with the Murphy character, a notorious screw-up who just can’t seem to catch a break. And things went like that for a long time, McDermott compromising his talent to drink his way to the bottom of a bottle after every show, or colliding with law enforcement with the 2002 cocaine bust that befell him on the way to see a Wallflowers show.

It wasn’t until midway through the decade that McDermott finally began to find his redemption. He found it in love (he was married in 2009 and now has a daughter) and in Italy, where he discovered that his music had reached a much greater audience than it ever did in the states. 2009’s fantastic Hey La Hey showed off a lot of that redemption, shedding the scars of McDermott’s scorched past and pledging resilience and devotion in its best songs. The follow-up isn’t quite as consistently solid, but it has more highlights and its best tracks are among the best things McDermott has written, period; a fair trade-off, I’d say.

Past its hooky opener and title track (where McDermott addresses his alcoholism through an instantly infectious chorus) Hit Me Back spends a few ponderous, sluggish tracks (“Let it Go,” “The Prettiest Girl in the World”) getting started, but once the record does settle upon the right path, it’s a wall of hits right to the end. The haunting “Dreams About Trains” kicks off an incredibly strong mid-section, carried along by ghostly back-up vocals and striking lyrical portraits that, in McDermott’s words, evoke “Robert Frost, Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy, The Blues Brothers, and the fact that [he’s] always lived near train tracks,” all in just over five minutes. The result is a masterfully dense piece of songwriting, with enough nuances and beautiful textures to spend hours dissecting; luckily, it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
The shattering “Ever After” finds McDermott ruminating on the loss of his mother, who passed away shortly before the recording of Hit Me Back. “The further we went on, I knew something was wrong, I felt it in my gut/I thought Pandora was joking when she said some doors that open won’t ever shut/Like a lion in a cage, my hands are fists of rage,” McDermott sings in the song’s second verse, his anger, grief, confusion, and regret boiling just below the surface. “Scars From Another Life” is no less viscerally powerful, a skyscraping, Springsteenian power ballad whose spacious, reverb-soaked production and floating piano arpeggios immediately position it as the album’s centerpiece cut. McDermott is challenging his demons here, carrying on the battle he was waging on Hey La Hey (and even referencing that album’s title in the song’s emotional refrain), and the result is an uplifting, redemptive, and life-affirming piece of music; there haven’t been more than a handful of better songs written this year.

“She’s Gonna Kill Me” is a pop-laced rocker in the same vein as the title track, while gorgeous piano ballad “Is There a Kiss Left on Your Lips” is its companion. Both songs deal with McDermott’s adjustment to married life, his tendency for staying out late, and the guilt he feels in sneaking back into the house long after everyone else has gone to sleep. The former is all-out fun, turning a situation many of us are familiar with into a rootsy sing-along surrounded by blazing guitars; the latter is even better, a buoyant arrangement built around the perfect poetry that McDermott wrote on his bathroom wall following one of those guilty homecomings. Elsewhere, “Deal with the Devil” is a sustained scorcher, a dark, haunting, and atmospheric slice of Americana that reprises many of Hit Me Back’s major themes (McDermott’s struggle with past crises, his coming-to-terms with his mother’s passing) over a barely repressed electric guitar. And album-highlight “The Silent Will Soon Be Singing” is a flawlessly structured acoustic number, almost Dylanesque in its execution, which recalls the more folky lilt of his last few records without sacrificing the deeply cohesive feel of this one.

The closing duo, composed of the string-soaked “Where the River Meets the Sea” and the appropriately blissful “Italy,” conclude the album in strong fashion. The former feels almost liturgical, graced with a traditional-feeling piano line, a beautiful female backing vocal, and McDermott’s most poignant and passionate delivery on the disc; it’s hardly surprising that the song served as McDermott’s eulogy for his late mother. The latter encompasses every ounce of redemption that McDermott found in Italy, a country that he says changed the course of his life. The harmonica intro evokes Nebraska-era Springsteen, but the lyrical and melodic structures are more reminiscent of Woodie Guthrie, a simplistic sensibility that turns the closer into a “This Land is Your Land” for a new age.

For many listeners, both of these songs (and indeed, this entire record) will drown in excessive sentiment and in classicist songwriting ideals that we’ve all heard before. But McDermott pours every ounce of himself into these songs, tearing down the walls between himself and his audience and cultivating a connection that is sometimes uncomfortable in its intimacy (songs like “Ever After” hit almost too close to home), but which is always striking in its power. These songs left an indelible mark upon me, their moods and feelings refusing to leave even as their final notes drifted away to nothingness, McDermott’s struggles and triumphs becoming my own.

Too few people will ever hear Hit Me Back, but Stephen King was right: McDermott is one of those songwriters whose music is meant to heal you, and there are only a few guys playing the game these days who just naturally have that power. Springsteen has it, for sure; Van Morrison certainly had it, though I haven’t yet heard his new album to confirm that he still does; modern favorites of mine, guys like Will Hoge, Chad Perrone, and Butch Walker (at his most confessional), definitely have it as well. Some will always be uncomfortable with songwriters like these: they will mock them for their earnestness and write them off for not reinventing the wheel, but those people aren’t really listening closely enough. For me, the best songwriters are the ones who, as King says, “give us back ourselves,” the ones who can form the sort of honest, intimate connection with their audience that McDermott forms so easily here, the ones with the ability to write songs that feel positively vital, that get under my skin and change me, even in the smallest way. McDermott may not have fame, but he has the rest of the act down in spades, and Hit Me Back, opening stumbles and all, is arguably his most profound statement to date.

The Wallflowers - Glad All Over

The Wallflowers - Glad All Over
Columbia Records, 2012
Four stars

Next to the wailing harmonica and slamming screen door that kick start Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, few album introductions are as effective as the ringing guitar that heralds the arrival of The Wallflowers’ 1996 album Bringing Down the Horse. The song it belongs to, “One Headlight,” was where my whole big and messy obsession with music started, my first favorite song from my first favorite band, and 16 years later, it’s still in the upper echelons. The album remains in my all time top ten as well, a gorgeous array of steel guitars, ringing organ lines, and roots rock grandeur (and a true summer night staple) with lyrics that I could sing along to in my sleep. And somehow, as baffling as it seems now, those songs were making waves on the radio, too. But something happened after that album and the band fell out of the public consciousness as quickly as they had entered it. One particularly enlightened sports fan blamed the fall from grace on Springsteen himself, saying that, when Bruce joined Jakob Dylan and company onstage for “Headlight” at the 1997 VMAs, he “rediscovered his ability to rock” and turned the whole event into his own personal comeback, hijacking the ‘Flowers’ song “right out of their feeble hands” and crushing their spirits in the process.

Perhaps that was the case, but I would prefer to blame the band’s exit from the spotlight on the changing musical landscape. When The Wallflowers finally released the follow up to Horse in 2000 (called Breach), they could hardly have been further from what pop music had become. They were a folk-indebted classic rock band trying to survive in an age of boy band and pop princesses, and those recipes were never going to mix. Their next two albums, 2002’s Red Letter Days and 2006’s Rebel, Sweetheart, didn’t change that, remaining within the same roots rock wheelhouse where the band had always resided. But even though The Wallflowers never did evolve that much, I still loved them. Their songs were always deeply comforting and nostalgic for me: theirs was the kind of music I would put on at the end of a hard day or during some personal crisis. and it would whisk me off to the carefree days of my childhood without a second glance. More than any other band, save for perhaps the Counting Crows, The Wallflowers’ records were the ones I grew up on, and all of them remain incredibly important to me. Sweetheart, in particularly, is fantastic: a songwriting master-class that saw Jakob Dylan’s lyrical abilities reaching levels that reflected his heritage (his father is Bob Dylan, after all) and melodic strains that were unforgettable after a single listen.

For a long time, it seemed like Sweetheart would be their swan song. Dylan went solo, moving towards more overtly folk and country textures on a pair of records called Seeing Things and Women and Country, respectively. I enjoyed both, but for me, Dylan’s breathy rasp always sounded best with the full force of his band behind him, with electric instrumentation and the ringing surge of Rami Jaffee’s B3 organ serving as his accompaniment. So naturally, when I heard the band was pulling back together to record their sixth full-length (and their first album in six years), I was ecstatic. And while the result, called Glad All Over, rarely approaches the heights of its predecessor, it’s still hard for me to describe how happy I am to have these guys back.

When it dropped a few months back, first single “Reboot the Mission” made waves as a jarring shift for a band that listeners had always pretty much counted on to do some variation of a similar sound. Instead of a folk-y lilt, the song had a loud, harsh, Clash-esque drive to it, from the blatantly Brit-rock chorus to funky bassline to the retro guitar echo. Undoubtedly, Clash guitarist Mick Jones, (who guest stars on the song) had a lot to do with that direction (as does drummer Jack Irons, who, as Dylan notes in the song, "jammed with the mighty Joe Strummer" on his album Earthquake Weather), but his influence doesn't stop there. Glad All Over is louder, brasher, and more rock-based than any album in the band’s discography, from the groovy blues-stomp of opener “Hospitals for Sinners” to the throwback guitar solo on “It’s a Dream.” Sometimes the influence works perfectly, like on “Misfits and Lovers,” which surrounds a classic Jakob Dylan chorus with Jones’ sexy, freewheeling guitar riffs. Elsewhere it doesn’t work at all, like on the snoozer that is “The Devil’s Waltz,” a textbook case of filler material redeemed only slightly by another blistering guitar solo. Most of the time though, it’s a pleasure to hear the band sound so loose and spontaneous: these guys clearly know their way around a recording studio, and on Glad All Over they sound like a gang of seasoned vets.

But still, it’s the nostalgic nuggets, the songs that sound like they could have fit on Bringing Down the Horse or Breach that hit the closest to home. “First One in the Car” plays like the missing link between “6th Avenue Heartache” and “Bleeders,” the kind of gorgeous, organ-drenched mid-tempo rocker that Dylan has always been able to pull off at the most opportune moments. A steel guitar rings through “Constellation Blues” in chilling fashion, giving the song a spacious, road-trippin’ atmosphere that befits its penultimate placement perfectly. Dylan’s lyrics are in top form here, recalling his best and most poetic moments from Sweetheart and making me wish there were a few more traditional folk songs to delve into on this record. “My birthday’s in two months, I’ll be twenty-one/I am the second oldest to an only son/The third generation to carry a gun/I’ve got brown eyes like my mother does,” Dylan spits out early on, just one image in a series of vivid lyrical depictions that are all too easy to get lost in. And the wistful “Love is a Country” is the album’s highlight, a piece of full-bodied grandiosity that swells with acoustic guitars, echoes of pedal steel, and distant piano chords before it reaches a euphoric conclusion.

None of these songs reinvent the wheel: not the Clash-infused lead-single, not the Magic-era Springsteen-posturing (“It Won’t be Long (Till We’re Not Wrong Anymore)” or “Have Mercy on him Now”), and certainly not the traditional roots-rock approach of the album’s best songs. But The Wallflowers have always been a band that excelled at bringing new life to things we’d heard before, and that remains true on Glad All Over. It’s far from their best record and I might have expected a little bit more after a six year hiatus, but for my first favorite band, I’m willing to let a few things slide. Maybe Springsteen did break their spirits back in ‘97, but I prefer to believe that they gave him the exuberant rock ‘n’ roll experience he needed to realize how much he wanted to have the E-Street Band beside him once more. Either way, it’s great to see an outfit as tight as The Wallflowers still trucking, twenty years down the road from their debut and fifteen years past their last scrape with “relevance.” Here’s to another twenty more...even if that popularity never comes again.

Bob Dylan - Tempest

Bob Dylan - Tempest

Columbia Records, 2012

Four stars

Of the living legends still making music, none have created a legacy as remarkable, as challenging, and as endlessly rewarding as Bob Dylan. Since releasing his debut in 1961, Dylan has recorded 35 studio albums, altered the boundaries of both folk music and rock 'n' roll, won a Pulitzer Prize for his lyrical prowess, been the subject of numerous fascinating (and baffling) accounts, both in writing and on film, and morphed his sound, voice, and writing style on countless occasions. Along the way, he's made almost as many disappointments or duds as he has classics, but as of late, he's settled into a groove that it's hard to find much fault with. Ever since he entered his "late career renaissance" with 1997's Time out of Mind, Dylan’s output has been solid and occasionally brilliant. It’s also been relatively safe, resting mostly within a comfortable blues-rock tradition that suits his increasingly raspy voice incredibly well.

His 35th album, evocatively entitled Tempest, doesn’t look or sound too different on the surface. Songs like “Early Roman Kings” and the incendiary “Narrow Way” offer up the same kind of enjoyable yet derivative blues-rock exercises that have made up the bulk of Dylan’s last few albums. But as one delves further into the dense lyrical matter of these songs, or into the musical sweep of the album’s finest moments, they will find a collection that feels remarkably unsettling and resoundingly final. Rolling Stone called it Dylan’s darkest album to date, and the assessment isn’t far off the mark. The songs on Tempest are deeply mournful, saturated with death, doom, and defeat. “Long and Wasted Years” plays like a sequel to Time out of Mind’s masterful “Not Dark Yet,” from the warm, muggy instrumental atmosphere to its minimalist musical structure and meandering lyrical form. “We cried on a cold and frosty morn, we cried because our souls were torn/So much for tears, so much for these long and wasted years,” Dylan growls at the song’s conclusion. He sounds resilient, even in the face of regret and death, and that resilience is one of Tempest’s most palpable themes, as well as its greatest strength.

But while “Long and Wasted Years” may show off the album’s triumphs, from the aforementioned themes to Dylan’s strangely wry sense of irony, and especially to the warm and full-bodied musical backdrop (the band is in top form here, adding violins, banjos, mandolins, and steel guitars as the texture requires), it is also a textbook example of its greatest drawback. “Meandering" is a term that could be applied to much of Dylan’s work, even in his heyday. It’s that excessive aspect of his songwriting, along with his rough and unorthodox vocal style, that makes his music divisive for many listeners. And Dylan’s excesses are alive and well here: the average song length is just shy of seven minutes, and too many of them overstay their welcomes. There are exceptions of course: sometimes, Dylan’s strophic manner of songwriting works perfectly, like on the rollicking first single and album opener that is “Duquesne Whistle,” or with the haunting murder tale that he constructs on “Tin Angel.” Elsewhere, Dylan shows that he is capable of being concise, like with the gorgeous romantic sweep of “Soon After Midnight,” or the dusky guitar-driven “Pay in Blood," but occasionally, he just sounds like a broken record. Take the lurching, interminable weak point that is “Scarlet Town,” or even the centerpiece title track, which clocks in at just under 14 minutes. It goes on for twice as long as it should but it's still a vintage Dylan ballad that needs to be heard. A fiddle intro lends the song a lovely Irish lilt, and Dylan’s lyrical narrative – all 45 verses of it – gives the Titanic disaster the epic folk legend it deserves...right down to a referential appearance from Leonardo DiCaprio. It sounds like the kind of song Dylan would have written decades ago, more reminiscent of his folk-music roots than his rock ‘n’ roll revolution or his latter-day blues, and the return-to-form is a welcome change of pace. It’s too long, but that’s part of the form.

When Dylan announced the name of this record, many speculated that it was a curtain call. After all, Shakespeare’s final play bore the title The Tempest, and it seemed that, if the rock ‘n’ roll poet was going to go out on his own terms, he might as well do it in a similar fashion to the legendary artist with whom he shares the most in common. Dylan was the first to point out the lack of the word “the” in his own work, stating that its absence resulted in two different titles and no connection between them, but throughout, Tempest sounds like a man who is about ready to pull his last job. If that’s the case, then the gorgeous closer that is “Roll on John” functions as the perfect finale. “I heard the news today, oh boy/They hauled your ship up on the shore/Now the city’s gone dark, there is no more joy/They tore the heart right out and cut it to the core,” Dylan sings, over a ringing organ that evokes church scenes, and in the same ragged, Tom Waits-esque vocal style that has marked every line of the record. He doesn’t sound tired: he doesn’t sound broken or used up or even particularly old, but he does give off the air that he knows something we don’t. It’s in the manner that he references and borrows from old Beatles songs without pause, in the potentially parodic way that he eulogizes a man who has been dead for almost 32 years; and it’s certainly there in the music, a simple wistful melody which recalls that moment in a film right before the credits roll. If Tempest is the last piece of Dylan’s untouchable legacy, then it’s almost the perfect cap, one last curveball from rock ‘n’ roll’s most uncompromising figure. If it’s not, if he still has a few more surprises left in him, then it’s still his best record since Love and Theft. Coming along 11 years to the day after that record hit the streets, 11 years after it coincided with the most tragic day in recent American history, it seems like that might have been the point. But you can never really know with Bob Dylan.

John Mayer - The Complete 2012 Performances Collection

John Mayer - The Complete 2012 Performances Collection

Columbia Records, 2012

3.5 Stars 

Back in May, John Mayer delivered one of the best albums of the year (and one of his best to date) with Born & Raised. A couple months later, it remains an exquisite collection of infectious folk rock (“Queen of California”) and dusky alt-country (“Shadow Days,” the title track), and an indelible left turn for one of pop music’s most talented and consistent stars. True to form, Mayer landed the number one spot on the Billboard charts after a solid first week of sales, but the victory came with a bittersweet aftertaste: for the first time in his career, Mayer wasn’t able to ride out and meet his fans. Sidelined by a vocal condition called granuloma, the 34 year old guitar hero was forced to cancel the entirety of his summer tour, taking him away from the fans and the songs during what was arguably the creative peak of his career.

Mayer clearly felt the pain. Despite a vocal surgery looming (his second in less than a year), he couldn’t stay away from the music. Immediately following the release of Born & Raised, Mayer set a wildfire of rumors by commenting that he might just go ahead and begin work on the follow-up, and while the chances of him making good on those speculations and finishing an album by next summer seem doubtful now, he’s done the next best thing: released an EP before this summer even runs out. That EP, titled in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner as The Complete 2012 Performances Collection, features acoustic renditions of four of the tunes from Born & Raised, plus a previously unreleased b-side. And while this may not seem like anything to write home about in a day and age where bands release entire acoustic renderings of their albums, Mayer shows here that, even vocally impaired and left to his own devices in the studio, he’s still a force to be reckoned with.

Certainly, a full unplugged re-imagining of Born & Raised would have been even more welcome, but what we get here are four exquisitely re-imagined gems that, at worst, offer an interesting perspective on their more full-bodied counterparts, and at best, surpass them. Fitting into the former category is “Speak to Me,” already the original record’s weakest song, and one whose acoustic arrangement had little need for being stripped down further. Mayer speeds up the tempo here, his voice sounding loose, raspy, and rough. It’s an interesting take, but the re-arrangement misses the gorgeous backup vocals of the original, and ultimately comes across as a glorified demo. Slightly better is “Shadow Days,” which doesn’t thrive the same way it does on record (due mostly to the lack of steel guitar), but which is more than adequate nonetheless.

The treasures come with the other three tracks, however. Opener “Something Like Olivia” is a revelation in acoustic format, sporting an “Into the Mystic”-esque guitar part and a spontaneous, jazzy feel that allows Mayer to show off his chops. We often get to hear him wailing away on his electric, but up to this point, his acoustic moments have been relegated to balladry or to the adventurous “opening set” from 2008’s Where the Light Is: Live in Los Angeles. The songs here are very much in the vein of the latter, and just as that set gave deep cuts a chance to shine (the definitive recording of “Neon” can be found there), this one allows “Olivia” to reach new heights. “Queen of California” is another home run: the instrumentation translates fantastically, bringing out a countrified twang that the original, with its rousing guitar solo, didn’t really have. Mayer also cleverly rewrites the vocal melody, avoiding the higher notes and giving the song a dark edge that the sun-drenched album version lacked. As for the b-side, “Go Easy on Me” is a pleasant piece of traditional folk music, and while it’s not too hard to see why it didn’t make the record, it’s an undeniably gorgeous extra with some dependably nice guitar work and a Dylan-ish harmonica solo.



Mayer has come a long way in the past few years, working to shed his bad reputation and forced into a humbling situation with his vocal issue. Luckily for us, the music has only benefited from the change, and with this collection, it’s clear just how much the man’s fans mean to him. These five songs won’t make up for the canceled shows or satisfy all of the would-be ticket buyers, but it’s nice to know that Mayer is trying to make things right. The Complete 2012 Performances Collection is the sound of a guy who has no greater desire than to be out on the road, playing his songs, baring his soul, and making lots of other people happy. It’s little more than a supplement, but even with a handful of songs and half a voice, Mayer is still better than most of his contemporaries.