"This is it, boys, this is war - what are we waiting for?"

fun. - Some Nights

Fueled by Ramen/Nettwerk, 2012

4.5 stars

 

Over the past few months, fun.'s "We Are Young," the first single off of their fantastic sophomore album, has been infecting mainstream music in ways that music by bands I love very rarely does: a prominent feature spot as the coda song of a Glee episode, a fantastically well positioned Super Bowl ad, and plenty of facebook statuses quoting the lyrics. A few years back, after my first listens to the gloriously strange pop record that was Aim & Ignite, I can't say I would have envisioned fun. as a mainstream pop act. No doubt, the songs were terrific, from the explosively catchy "Be Calm," to the gospel-infused "Benson Hedges," to the "Boys of Summer" reference at the end of "Walking the Dog," all the way to the Lion King-esque chants at the start of the epic closer, "Take Your Time (Coming Home)." To this day, I don't quite know how to describe the overall sound of Aim & Ignite: Glammy rock? A rave-up block party of musical influences? Some bizarre combination of circus music and alternative rock? The most straightforward song on the record, the lyrically driven love ballad "The Gambler," probably provided soundtrack for a lot of blooming relationships (including my own), but I could never have imagined hearing even that on mainstream pop radio.

Despite all this, when fun. started blowing up with "We Are Young," it really did make sense, because the song, regardless of the band's debut record, is a bonafide anthem in a time of far too few: it's a chorus just begging to be shouted by a crowd in any environment, from a college party to a huge music venue, and it is a song that a lot of people are going to identify with. Frontman Nate Reuss is no stranger to big choruses: he wrote one of the most infectious of the past decade on  "The First Single (You Know Me)" with his previous band, The Format, and he loads this album with so many of them that "We Are Young," while a terrific song, is hardly even a standout. 

The opener, the "Some Nights Intro" (strangely titled, since it's almost two and a half minutes and could easily have been a standalone song), builds from the sound of a broken down piano into a Queen-aping power ballad. Reuss sounds so much like Freddie Mercury here that for a moment, I almost expected a classic-rock record, but the band has other things in mind. The title track, with another killer chorus and a terrific delivery from Reuss, is an early contender for album highlight, while an autotune breakdown late in the song indicates the direction that this album is heading in. Ahhhh, autotune, such a ubiquitous, and yet widely misunderstood, tool in today's music industry: most mainstream pop music is positively drenched in it, always made more obvious when those artists perform live and a trainwreck ensues (several examples could have been found in last week's Grammy ceremony). Still, even the most talented singers in the industry tend to use autotune, mostly due to the fact that we as listeners have come to expect perfection in our studio recorded albums. Recently, a wave of T Pains and the like have given autotune a more gimmicky application, and fun.'s record uses it as such here, but it's done in a way that suits the songs and one that results in a record that is a true sonic feast. Make no mistake, Reuss is a terrific vocalist (for proof of this, look no further than "Carry On," another infectious pop song that would function just as well in a stripped-down acoustic arrangement as it does on record, with bass and heavy drum machines buffing up the sound). Even for those who have trouble getting used to the autotune as a part of this band's sound, by the time "Some Nights" explodes into a climactic spoken word section, I have a feeling they'll be hard pressed to care.

On my first listens to this record, I couldn't help marveling at the classic pop melodies Reuss and co. seem to come up with so easily: melodic verse lines and irresistible choruses that are so instantly memorable that I found myself wondering how no one else had stumbled upon them yet. "Carry On" is certainly one; "Why Am I the One," with an intro guitar part straight out of a Modest Mouse song and sweeping chorus harmonies, is another. "All Alone" and "All Alright" defy their titles, with the former being a ridiculously catchy pop song that's destined for a more than a few dance-in-the-car moments and the latter being one of the album's more subdued numbers (subdued being a relative term). "I've got nothing left inside my chest, but it's all alright," Reuss sings, over a bed of pianos, synths, bass and a choir, and surrounded by a massive wall of pop production. Much like Mat Kearney did with Young Love last year, Some Nights takes what is more or less fun.'s traditional sound and filters it through a more beat heavy, hip-hop influenced production. The result is a record that will prove polarizing among fans, but one that I think is ultimately more rewarding than the band's debut. 

That said, Some Nights isn't free of miss-steps, and when they occur, it's more the fault of the production than it is the songwriting. "One Foot" is a perfect example: it's a good song that circulated in a live version prior to the release of the record, but it doesn't quite gel with the studio arrangement or production. The song is still more than worthwhile, but there's a definitely sense that it could have been something greater. Elsewhere, "It Gets Better" is a textbook example of filler, a throwaway track with a grating chorus that steals a spot that would have been much better occupied by "Out on the Town," the album's "bonus track" and one of the best songs here.

Ultimately, the proper closer, the seven-minute "Stars" will epitomize everything that fans of the album love about it and everything that detractors think is wrong with it. In my eyes, it's the high water mark for the album: a masterfully climactic blend of pop, the band's alt-rock roots, hip hop and electronic music that serves as the perfect showcase for Reuss's vocal talents, the band's new musical direction, and the album's undeniably impressive production work. While it begins as a fairly straightforward pop-rock song, "Stars" builds into a haze of auto-tune and heavy beats, climaxing with a euphoric chorus of vocodor-enhanced voices. "No one's gonna save me now," Reuss sings, and despite the fact that his voice is layered with production and altered ten times over from its original state, it's the most vocally cutting and emotional moment of the album: even after a dozen listens, chills still run down my spine at that moment, and that alone is enough to make me a champion of the electronic influences the band adopts here. 

Just as the album began in Queen territory, it finishes thoroughly enthralled in the influence of Kanye West, whose 2010 album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy served as the band's primary influence throughout the recording process. That album's co-producer, Jeff Bhasker, masterminds the sonic orchestra on display here, and Reuss and his vocodor carries the album out in a way that very much recalls West's "Runaway," another epic song that the band actually covered on their last tour. That song and album's influence run rampant throughout the entire record, supplemented here and there by hints of Bon Iver (also involved with Fantasy and another figure who's been redefining what autotune can do), or by the eternal presence of classic pop acts like the Beatles and the Beach Boys. The resulting album sounds as fresh as it does musically-referential, and despite the fact that many fans of fun. and the Format will probably find the pervasive hip hop and electronic motifs jarring, in time I think this record could easily be regarded as the album where one of the best bands working in the industry today rightfully rose to the top. Who knows, if these guys get a few more big hits under their belts, maybe a Grammy could be in their future. And while, in light of the new Bruce Springsteen album (which is a masterpiece--more on that later), I can no longer say what I initially wanted to about this album (that it's the best thing I've heard all year), it's certainly a more than worthy runner up, and I'd be willing to put money on it ending up somewhere in my top ten at the end of the year. There will inevitably be cries accusing the band of "selling out," but as long as their doing so sounds this good, all the more power to them.

The Grammy Post

There aren't a lot of hardcore music fans that take the Grammy Awards seriously these days, and it's not terribly difficult to figure out why: the Grammy Awards have always been a chance for the music industry to pat themselves on the back, often awarding the albums that spawned the most pop hits, or handing out sentimental trophies to old veterans or recently departed legends to pay tribute to them. There is nothing wrong with this practice as, it's worth noting, the Grammy Awards have rarely handed the Album of the Year prize to a legitimately bad album. Indeed, a handful of my all time favorite albums have won the prize, from The Joshua Tree to Rumours to Sgt. Pepper. That said, the Album of the Year award's history, for the most part, is a study in curious decisions. Like the fact that the Beatles only won the award that one time, or that Bruce Springsteen lost to Lionel Richie in the year that he took over the world with Born in the U.S.A. (or the more depressing fact that Born to Run didn't even score a nomination). And recent years have seen the award go to either country-pop crossover stars (Taylor Swift, the Dixie Chicks) or to legendary figures in music (Ray Charles, U2, Allison Krauss, Herbie Hancock): none were poor choices, but it would be hard to argue any of them as the best album released in their individual years.

I really thought that last year, Grammy had turned a corner. Rather than handing the Album of the Year award to a huge seller (Eminem's Recovery) or a newly minted pop music icon (Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster), the Academy opted for Arcade Fire, a critically acclaimed indie-rock act from Canada, and their concept album The Suburbs. In my eyes, that victory was truly magnificent: rather than going for something that was just a collection of singles, the Academy went for a true album, with recurring themes, sounds, ideas and characters. In an age where many have proclaimed that "the album is dead," that album defended the format, and it proved why it not only works, but why it will always be more artistically relevant than the single. Those people who were championing the rise of the digital single as the predominant musical format do have a point, though, since iTunes has indeed rendered the album obsolete to casual listeners. But it's still Album of the Year that is announced at the very end of the Grammy ceremony, and Arcade Fire's victory last year, backlash and all, was a poetic defense of the format that has defined the music industry since the 60s.

After that, I must confess that this year's nominees disappointed me a bit, even though two of them landed on my best of the year list. Still, the Academy is likely to avoid adding to their list of "curious decisions" this year (unless you count the nominees, which no one seems to remember after the fact anyway). Below, I list my thoughts on the nominees for the evening's biggest categories, as well as my reasons for tuning in again this year (however distractedly) and my predictions. (Spoiler: Adele).

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1. Record of the Year

Adele - "Rolling in the Deep"

Bon Iver - "Holocene"

Bruno Mars - "Grenade"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Katy Perry - "Firework"

Will win: "Rolling in the Deep"

Should win: "Holocene"

A lot of people don't understand the difference between the Record of the Year and Song of the Year categories, but really, they're miles apart. One is simply about the songwriting at hand, while the other is awarded not only to the performing artist, but also to the producers, sound engineers, and other important team members who turned it into a stellar recording. As a result, Record of the Year is far more in recognition of the studio work done on a song than it is of a particular performance, unless the artist someone like Butch Walker who writes, performs and produces the track, which doesn't usually happen in mainstream pop music, and as a result, doesn't usually happen in this category. This year, though, there is one artist in this field who did all of those things, and the resulting recording is one of the most outstanding achievements in production of last year. That artist is Justin Vernon, the mastermind behind Bon Iver, and his song, "Holocene," which builds from a simple acoustic arrangement into full band ambiance. It's not the most sonically spectacular song on the album (that title would belong to one of the album's bookends, but it is, fairly easily, my favorite work here. That said, "Rolling in the Deep" is the biggest hit and will walk away with this category fairly easily. I'm fine with that, since producer Paul Epworth (who also worked on Florence + The Machine's Ceremonials), did some of the best production work of the last year.

2. Album of the Year

Adele -21

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Lady Gaga - Born This Way

Bruno Mars - Doo Wops & Hooligans

Rihanna - Loud

Will & Should Win: 21

Now here's an embarrassment of a category. I had high hopes for this year's album of the year slate after the Academy defied the pop music world and gave the award to a record that not only had no hits, but a record by a band that many Grammy viewers had never even heard of. The ensuing backlash was one of the funniest things I've ever seen take place on the internet, and caused me to lose any faith I had left in the music consumerist population. This year's category could have been a really killer one too, with all of the records from last year that gained a ton of critical acclaim and a fair amount of success (Bon Iver and M83 come to mind), not to mention a handful of leftovers from the previous year, like Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, which earned perfect scores from nearly every publication known to man and will likely go down as the most well received album of this decade. And it must be good, because I even like that record, and I've never enjoyed another rap album in my life. Or there was Taylor Swift's Speak Now, which actually does appeal to the pop music listener to me, and is a superior album to the one she won the prize for just two years ago. Kanye will get a consolation prize in the rap album category, but Swift isn't up for anything big tonight.

The biggest waste of a nomination here is for the Bruno Mars record, which I can say from personal experience is terrible. The singles are the only tracks worth hearing at all, and even those display pretty much every pop music cliche in the book. I've never liked Rihanna either, and I'd be willing to wager that her albums are just vehicles for a handful of chart topping singles, and are loaded with filler, but I've never listened to an entire Rihanna album, so I guess I will never know. And even my girlfriend, who loves Lady Gaga, couldn't find much to enjoy with Born This Way, though I personally find it to be a better than average pop music album with a couple of killer songs ("You & I" and "Edge of Glory") closing it out. The latter, which features a self-referencing saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons, was the last song the virtuoso ever recorded or played live, and is the kind of sonic feast that should absolutely be up for Record of the Year.

That said, the other two albums on this list both made my top 25 of last year, and both are terrific. Foo Fighters made their best album in at least a decade with Wasting Light, where the band sounds loud, rejuvenated and nostalgic, all while delivering some of the best tunes of their career. It's all water under the bridge, though, since Adele will win this category by a landslide, and it really is a deserved victory. Not only is 21 the best selling album of the last year (and it just recently had its strongest week of sales, almost a year after its release), it has also unleashed three terrific singles ("Rolling in the Deep," "Someone Like You" and "Set Fire to the Rain") and has truly moved a lot of people. The album's pop drenched break-up songs recall one of the best Album of the Year winners in the award's history: Fleetwood Mac's near perfect masterpiece Rumours, and I can easily see 21 becoming that album for this generation. I've heard way better break up records, but to hear pop music this great captivate the entire world in the way it has is a real triumph, and its hard to remember a winner of this category that defined its year more than 21 has. 

3. Song of the Year

Kanye West - "All of the Lights"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Bruno Mars - "Grenade"

Bon Iver - "Holocene"

Adele - "Rolling in the Deep"

Will Win: "Rolling in the Deep"

Should Win: "Holocene"

A long list of songwriters marks this album's one miss-step, proving that sometimes, too many cooks really do spoil the broth. That song is "Grenade," one of the most cliched and grating pop songs, not only of this year, but in the history of pop music. Rebecca Black's "Friday" is a better song.

The rest of the category is actually pretty stellar (or as stellar as a Grammy category can get), though "All of the Lights" is a better record than it is a song, I think: there are far better songs on that album. I'm glad to see Mumford & Sons up for these awards, although the album "The Cave" comes from released in 2009 and really shouldn't be in contention for an awards show taking place in 2012. "Holocene" and "Rolling in the Deep" round out the nominations, with the former being the better song (Pitchfork agrees), but with the latter taking the prize. I'd argue "Someone Like You" will prove to be Adele's trademark (and her most iconic hit), but "Rolling in the Deep" was a hell of a breakthrough.

Best New Artist

The Band Perry

Bon Iver

J. Cole

Nicki Minaj

Skrillex

Will & Should Win: Bon Iver

This category is one of the biggest jokes in any awards show, as they routinely nominate artists for their sophomore album, or in some cases, much later. One of the funniest occurrences of this took place in 2004, when they nominated Fountains of Wayne for the award, following their one hit wonder success with "Stacy's Mom;" the band had been together since 1996.

Anyway, the obvious outlier here is Bon Iver, who released his first album under that moniker in 2007, a year before Adele released her debut, even though she won this same award three years ago. Regardless of the questionable way in which these voters define the word "new," it's better late than Bon Iver, who completely steamrolls over everyone else in this category. The Band Perry had a pop gem this year with "If I Die Young," but even attempting that holds a candle to Bon Iver's near perfect record is laughable.

Best Rock Song/Best Rock Performance

Coldplay - "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall"

The Decemberists - "Down By the Water"

Foo Fighters - "Walk"

Mumford & Sons - "The Cave"

Radiohead - "Lotus Flower"

Will & Should Win: "Walk"

People have trouble differentiating Record and Song of the Year, but these two categories are, right down to their nominees, exactly the same. Certainly one of the stronger categories of the night, with the Decemberists sneaking in with a solid track from their great record The King is Dead. Foo Fighters should be sitting pretty here, though, with both the best song and the only Album of the Year nomination backing it up.

Best Rock Album

Jeff Beck - Rock 'n' Roll Party Honoring Les Paul

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Kings of Leon - Come Around Sundown

Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You

Wilco - The Whole Love

Will Win: Foo Fighters - Wasting Light

Could Win: Jeff Beck

This category often turns either into a consolation prize for a could be/should be album of the year winner (Quentin Tarantino presenting it to Green Day in 2005, when they had the best record but it didn't matter in the midst of the Ray Charles tributes) or part of a sweep on the way to the big prize (U2 taking it for the terrific How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb the year later). This year, I'm going with the consolation prize theory, as Foo Fighters have no chance at Album of the Year, but could do pretty well here. The questionable spoiler is Jeff Beck, a virtuoso veteran paying tribute to a recently departed figure of rock 'n' roll evolution. I'm split either way, but it's actually a really solid category this year, so I'm less inclined to care.

Best Alternative Music Album

Bon Iver - Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Death Cab For Cutie - Codes & Keys

Foster the People - Torches

My Morning Jacket - Circuital

Radiohead - The King of Limbs

Will & Should Win: Bon Iver

This is often one of the better categories of the night, and while I think this slate is less inspired this year, the fact that it's one of the bigger categories the Bon Iver will likely pick up keeps it on my list of ones to watch. 

But all of these categories and predictions aside, the real reason I'll be tuning in is quite simple: Springsteen and the E-Street Band will be performing. And really, I'm hoping for a Clarence Clemons tribute, though it seems likely he might get a bit upstaged by the recent passing of Whitney Houston. As predictable as that is, and as great as Whitney's voice once was (I'm pretty sure it wasn't anymore...), she didn't create the most perfect two minutes in the history of rock and pop music...

But Clarence Clemons? Yes, yes he did.

Albums Revisited: Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker

Ryan Adams -Heartbreaker

Lost Highway Records, 2000

I've been on the biggest Ryan Adams kick this past week: playing old favorites, rediscovering albums I always left underrated, digging deeper into his catalog towards the stuff I never gave a fair chance to, and scouring the internet for all the odd b-sides, sessions and unreleased albums that he's recorded over the years. This kind of thing often happens after I see a band live for the first time, but with Adams, it's like I'm tackling the work of 3 or 4 artists at once. This guy has so many different sides and sounds, and like I said in my live review, has got to be the most prolific singer/songwriter of the past decade or two. He's like Dylan back in his glory days, or Springsteen around the Darkness/River period, leaving a plethora of songs unreleased for decades at a time.

I've never spent as much time with the Whiskeytown material as I should. Ryan's solo career is such a vast undertaking in and of itself that I've never delved very far beyond that. Many music critics (Pitchfork being the most obvious), would argue that Ryan never made a worthwhile album after his solo debut, the sparse, Nebraska-esque Heartbreaker. Interestingly, this record is far from my favorite thing that Adams has done, but I can certainly understand (and agree with) the praise. Like all Ryan Adams records, I think there are a handful of throwaways, and they're positioned about Heartbreaker's in such a way that I've never really been able to get into it as a whole. That said, when the record gets things right, it gets them very right. The proper opener, "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)," is pretty much the closest anyone has gotten to replicating the Highway 61 era Dylan sound, and it's really no surprise the song became such a soundtrack staple in the years following the release (high class art films from Old School to Accepted used the song at key moments).

Beyond that one song, I've never felt that Adams' veered too much into Dylan territory on this record. The loud, electric opening gives way to an album full of thoughtful, broken-hearted, stark acoustic songs, and they showcase Adams at his best, if not musically, then at very least lyrically. No example is better than the gorgeously fragile "Oh My Sweet Carolina," where he duets with Emmylou Harris, herself an alt-country legend, over the greatest verses he's ever written. Seriously, who else was writing lines like these in the year 2000? Lines like: "I was spending money like the way it likes to rain," or "I ain't never been to Vegas, but I gambled up my life," or "The sunset's just my lightbulb burning out." Harris's vocals float through the background, combining with the lyrics to make a song that is both thoroughly haunting and indescribably beautiful. I have a theory that Conor Oberst was trying to recreate this song when he wrote "Landlocked Blues" (from the 2005 Bright Eyes album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning), which also featured an artist at the top of his game, lyrically, and also featured Harris on back-up vocals. In a big way, Wide Awake works as a companion to this album, so maybe that's why I've always been so drawn to both of them at similar times in my life. And both records are ones that I was unsure about on my first listen.

Despite the fact that Heartbreaker has always felt a tad uneven and incorrectly sequenced to me, the number of truly great songs here cannot be ignored. Most of the record is understated, low-key acoustic guitar songs. It's always amazed me how broken and bare Ryan's voice sounds on songs like "Call Me On Your Way Back Home" or "In My Time of Need," but then he can turn around and deliver something like "Be My Winding Wheel," which is really just a perfect pop song in acoustic/alt-country dress, or "Come Pick Me Up," which is pretty much the ultimate break-up anthem. And that a record that starts with such a lively rock song ends with something like "Sweet Lil Gal" is mindblowing to me. "In the field where the plane went down..." Ryan repeats over and over again throughout that song, his hushed vocals and a distant piano laid bare over the powerful imagery. Every time I listen, that song just makes me want to press play all over again

A Little Bit of Everything

Ryan Adams and Dawes (among others)
Live at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival
Hill Auditorium
Ann Arbor MI, 1/27/12

Back at the end of 2009, one of my favorite blogs (here) named Ryan Adams as the artist of the decade. My vote for that title, quite obviously, would have gone to Butch Walker, who put out half a dozen of my favorite albums and became a world class producer in that time, but looking back, it's hard not to think of Adams as the definitive musical force of the '00s. His eclectic and prolific solo career began after his old band Whiskeytown, the poster-boys of the 90s Americana movement, broke apart in 2000. His first record, a sparse acoustic set of break up songs called Heartbreaker, released later that year, beginning what would be a ridiculously busy ten years, consisting of ten officially released studio records spanning numerous genres, sonic palettes and topics; meanwhile, at least as many unreleased projects made their way onto the internet and into the hands of fans everywhere. So many things about the decade in music were reflected in Adams as a figure: his struggles with his record label, his prolific, overarching musical ideas, his tendency towards excess, and his choice to embrace the growing internet music phenomenon, among others; a lot of Adams' music sees him looking back, channeling influences or directly referencing them, but at the same time, he's remarkably current: a troubadour for a new age.

I can't recall exactly when I became a Ryan Adams fan (though I would trace my earliest interest back to his haunting cover of Noel Gallagher's Oasis tune, "Wonderwall," which released as part of the Love is Hell album back in 2003. It wasn't until 2009 that I tackled the rest of his vast, challenging catalog (including unreleased works like The Suicide Handbook and 48 Hours, which sit amongst his best material). Adams very quickly rose to prominence on my Last.fm top played artists chart, not only due to the quantity of the material, but also to the quality: there is a Ryan Adams record for every mood, and when I wasn't in the mood for the upbeat acoustics and the collision of influences on Gold (still my favorite record of his), chances were that the icy piano ballads on Love is Hell or the masterful alt-country, roots rock of Jacksonville City Nights were likely to hit the mark. Then last year's Ashes & Fire, Ryan's first true solo album in years and the first since the dissolution of the Cardinals, who served as his backing band for years, made it onto my list of favorite albums at the end of the year. And last Friday, I added Adams to another list: that of the artists I've seen live.

Ryan Adams served as the headliner for the first night of the Ann Arbor folk festival, which also included acts such as Carbon Leaf, Elephant Revival, Devotchka and Dawes, another band who appeared on my end of the year list for 2011. The show, which kicked off at 6:30 p.m. at the University of Michigan Hill Auditorium, was emceed to great effect by comedian Heywood Banks, who brought a welcome sense of levity and glee to the proceedings with his jokes and his comedic singalong routine. Unfortunately, the evening's seven acts was at times dull and exhausting, and had me counting the minutes until Banks would return and speed things up a bit. Blues-folk singer/songwriter Sunny War, who took the stage first, was the epitome of this, and boring songs and a lack of stage presence made War's five song set feel much longer than it was. David Wax Museum also fit into this category, with a lead singer who shouted his way through the band's entire set of Mexican-influenced folk music.

Elephant Revival and Carbon Leaf were two of the brighter spots in the show's first act: the former filled the Auditorium with their rich, unique sound, their orchestral instrumentation and haunting lead vocals (courtesy of Bonnie Paine, who also played the band's percussion on a washboard) making use of the venue's stellar acoustics. The latter gathered around a single microphone and performed a set of Celtic infused folk, with their gorgeous vocal harmonies becoming a high water mark for the night up to that point. Both are bands that I'm interested in exploring further.

Dawes shook the place awake with the most exciting, involved set of the night. Though their five song set was far too short, the band made perfect use of every one of their 30+ minutes onstage, making me understand perfectly what I've been reading about them since the first time I heard their albums: that they're great on record, but even better live. Opener "Fire Away" was a perfect example of this, and the song thrived in new ways in its live format. Frontman Taylor Goldsmith delivered a rousing guitar solo that, in one fell swoop, made me wish the band were co-headlining the show. "That Western Skyline," the opener from the band's 2009 debut North Hills made me resolve to give that record more listening time, and the set's brevity didn't stop the band from playing my two favorite songs in the form of the bookends from last year's Nothing is Wrong. The first, "Time Spent in Los Angeles," was hampered somewhat by feedback issues and disproportionately heavy bass, but still proved to be every bit as electric as it is on record, and the second, the lyrically stunning "A Little Bit of Everything" saw the band turn the venue into a ringing cathedral for five minutes. The fifth and final part of the set, "When the Time Comes," was the perfect finale to the show's first act, with its anthemic, singalong chorus and Goldsmith's pristine vocals sending the band off on a high note.

For reasons unknown to me, Devotchka (another Mexican folk band), were given near co-headliner status, and played for almost double the time of Dawes. While the band's level of musicianship was obviously high, it seemed to me that their melody challenged songs and meandering arrangements would have been better suited for serving as the score to some indie-comedy (which they have, in 2006's Little Miss Sunshine) than they did as the backbone to a compelling live set (which they didn't). The fact that they were allowed to play for the better part of an hour while their more talented (and more musically varied) predecessors were relegated to extremely brief sets was something I found quite upsetting, and was a big strike against the Folk Festival's structure for me. Luckily, Heywood Banks returned to the stage just as my irritation was reaching a fever pitch, and his stand-up comic routine made the minutes fly by as Ryan Adams set up for his set.

Adams arrived onstage shortly before 10:30 p.m., picked up his acoustic guitar, sat down and began to play. As Adams played his first song ("My Sweet Carolina," a highlight from his first record), the capacity crowd of the 3,500+ people fell to complete silence and it was magical. Over the next hour, Adams morphed the regal Hill Auditorium into an intimate, coffee-house setting, playing 13 songs with nothing but acoustic guitar, harmonica and piano, and without the assistance of a single other musician. The Ashes & Fire material (the title track, "Dirty Rain" and "Lucky Now" all made welcome appearances in the set-list) thrived in the sparse acoustic setting, and it struck me how, perhaps more than any other artist I've seen, Adams' voice sounds as good live as it does on record. Adams dug deeply into the Heartbreaker album, which became the most well represented of his records in the 13 song set, and the album's songs were obviously very at home in such an intimate setting. "Carolina" seemed like an especially appropriate opening to his set, as Emmylou Harris (Saturday Night's folk fest headliner), lends backing vocals to the studio version. "Be My Winding Wheel" was every bit as good, and Heartbreaker's closer, the gorgeously restrained "Sweet Lil Gal" gave Adams his first trip to the piano in a moment as breathtaking as any that played out on the stage all night.

As far as songs go, none were more welcome for me than the inclusions from Gold: a slowed down performance of "Firecracker" reminded me why I love the song so much, and a piano take on that record's opener, "New York, New York," which became somewhat of an anthem following the September 11th attacks, struck a more mournful, emotional chord than its album counterpart. Adams was clearly aware of the set's slow tempo, and made several sarcastic, self-deprecating remarks concerning it, from "and here's another ballad" to "man, we gotta slow things down here." At the end of such a long night of music, Adams' low key set could have come across as a bit anti-climactic for some, but I've always loved seeing artists strip their songs down to their bare essentials, and the intimacy of the show had an electricity about it that was palpable even from the back row of the second balcony. 

"Come Pick Me Up," Adams' signature song and the most memorable cut from Heartbreaker, served as a fitting, if somewhat sudden, conclusion to a stellar set, with the profane lyrics, piercing harmonica, and heartache drenched subject matter bringing full circle what was, in effect, a condensed retrospective of Adams' solo acoustic material. Though the set-list was obviously trimmed considerably from what he's been playing on other tour dates, it was still a joy to hear some of his best songs come alive in such a venue. It would have been easy for Adams to come out with the full band, rock the house for an hour, and leave the audience with the loudest, most raucous, most climactic set of the night, but the fact that he was able to command the audience in the way he did with such sparse, acoustic material was the mark of a true veteran. From the moment he walked onstage on Friday night, Adams had the audience in the palm of his hand, to the point where you could have heard a pin drop, and that proved very quickly that, even after six other acts, he was simply in another class.


Setlists

Dawes
1) Fire Away
2) That Western Skyline
3) Time Spent in Los Angeles
4) A Little Bit of Everything
5) When My Time Comes

Ryan Adams
1) My Sweet Carolina
2) Ashes & Fire
3) Dirty Rain
4) Be My Winding Wheel
5) Sweet 'lil Gal
6) Everybody Knows
7) Firecracker
8) Please Do Not Let Me Go
9) Lucky Now
10) Let it Ride
11) Two
12) New York, New York (Piano)
13) Come Pick Me Up

Bruce Springsteen Retrospective Part V: The River (1980)

"But I remember us riding in my brother's car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I'd lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she'd take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse?"

By the time Bruce Springsteen reached his fifth LP, he wasn't the international icon he should have been, but he was a star with a good following and a handful of terrific records under his belt. He'd moved from the Dylan worship of his first two albums comfortably into a rock 'n' roll sound that was all his own, and he had the eclectic, electric talents of the E-Street Band behind him. What better time to attempt the double album, that mystical Holy Grail of rock music? Ever since the Beatles entered into the double album conversation with The White Album in 1968, it has undergone a colorful history that has seen works from everyone from Pink Floyd  to the Smashing Pumpkins, Led Zeppelin to the Foo Fighters,  from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to M83. To attempt the double album is to enter into an ambitious task that has proven, time and time again, nearly impossible to succeed in completely. Double albums overflow with songs, sounds and ideas; they allow artists to indulge in their quirks or in their adoration of genres outside of their comfort zone, and while they often result in some of the most creative and engaging material of ant artist's career, they also often come out gloriously flawed, with more throwaway filler material than should ever make it onto a full length album.

Bruce Springsteen came into The River with enough material for three or four albums (and b-sides from it make up at least a full disc of the Tracks collection). Like his predecessors, he stumbles into a few of the double album's inherent traps, but the resulting record is one of his most brilliantly compelling. The River, like many double albums, could be considered a blend of Springsteen at his loudest and his softest, his most raucous and his most introspective. Throughout the album's two discs, Springsteen presents a set of songs striking in their duality, one half bar-band rock 'n' roll, the other half among the darkest material he ever recorded. The opener, "The Ties That Bind," is a classic Springsteen rocker and perfectly encapsulates the record's louder sound. At first, the record was going to be a single-disc effort, and "Ties" was going to be the title track. That changed as some darker material began to emerge in Springsteen's writing, ultimately resulting in the stunning title track that closes the first disc. If "The Ties That Bind" captures Springsteen's more joyful side, "The River" finds him at his most inward, as he takes us on a journey through memories shrouded in shadow and regret. His portrait of young love in hard times captures an entire relationship in the course of five minutes, from the ecstatic euphoria of first love to the end of innocence, and the result is one of his best songs. Next to "Thunder Road," I don't think Springsteen's lyrics have ever hit me harder. His vocal is also a revelation, as he delivers his evocative lyrics with emotional honesty and intensity that is, quite frankly, chilling.

"The River" follows in the footsteps of Darkness on the Edge of Town, and like many of the songs on that album, it examines what happens after we wake up from the American Dream, after Thunder Road runs out and we realize that maybe we weren't born to run after all. It's heavy subject matter, and it permeates the best songs on The River, like the gorgeously sad "Independence Day," a song that Springsteen wrote about the day he finally moved out of his father's house. Springsteen and his dad never saw eye to eye, often fighting when they were young, but even despite this, his love for the man is palpable on "Independence Day," and the result is one of the most revealing songs he's ever written. It reminds me of one of the greatest recorded moments in the Springsteen collection: a live version of "The River" that was released on the Live: 1975-85 collection, along with choice cuts of many of Springsteen's most notable songs. This version is arguably better than the one on the album, full of all the sound and the fury that comes out when Springsteen cuts loose live, but the best part is what comes before the actual song. Amidst an elegiac rain of accompaniment from the E-Street Band, Springsteen tells a story about his father and the relationship they shared:

"I remember I got into a motorcycle accident once. I was laid up in bed and he had a barber come in and cut my hair, and man, I can remember tellin' him that I hated him and that I would never ever forget it. And he used to tell me: 'Man I can't wait 'til the Army gets you. When the Army gets you they're gonna make a man out of you. They're gonna cut all that hair off and they'll make a man out of you.'

And this was in, I guess, '68, and there were a lot of guys from the neighborhood going to Vietnam. I remember the drummer from my first band comin' over my to house with his Marine uniform on, sayin' that he was going, and that he didn't know where it was. 

And a lotta guys went and a lotta guys didn't come back. And a lot that came back weren't the same anymore. And I remember the day I got my draft notice. I hid it from my folks, and three days before my physical, me and my friends went out and we stayed up all night. And we got on the bus to go that morning...man, we were all so scared.
And I went and I failed. I came home. It's nothin' to applaud about...but I remember coming home, after I'd been gone for three days, and walking in the kitchen, and my mother and father were sittin' there.
My dad said, 'Where ya been!?'
I said, 'I went to take my physical.'
He said, 'What happened?'
I said, 'They didn't take me.'
And he said, 'That's good.'"

The first time that version really hit me, I was in the middle of a lonely drive home after a weekend of concerts, one of which was my first Springsteen live experience. It was late a night, barely a car on the road aside from my own, and I had nothing but my thoughts and my music to keep me company. I played that version of the song, and by the end of Springsteen's speech, I was in tears. I never heard "Independence Day" the same way again after that night, and it remains one of my favorite things Springsteen has ever done. With so many Springsteen songs, it feels like he's writing from the point of view of another: telling a story with complex characters, giving voice to the everyman: hell, it was his ability to write like that which earned him the nickname "the Boss" in the first place, but "Independence Day" is such a special song because it is completely personal and because it comes right from his heart. As the years go by and my relationship with my own father continues to dwindle, that song just hits me harder and harder.

Aside from those two landmark songs, the first disc of The River is actually fairly upbeat and fun. "Sherry Darling," which first originated during the Darkness sessions, is one of the catchiest songs Springsteen has written (he'd imitate the song's style a lot two and a half decades later on Magic). Disc One also contains numerous great bar band rave ups. Springsteen and co. sound like they're having an absolute ball on "Crush on You" and "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)," and "Two Hearts" and "Out in the Street" are almost equally enjoyable. None of them are among Springsteen's best songs, nor can I say that they're more worth of being on the record than a few of the Tracks stand-outs ("Take 'Em As They Come," "Restless Nights," and "Be True," among others), but Springsteen has never sounded as spontaneous on record as he does here. Disc One also yields the pleasantly pretty slowdance of "I Wanna Marry You" and "Hungry Heart," a song with a radio ready chorus that earned Springsteen his first top ten hit.



I've often felt with double albums that the artist begins to lose steam somewhere during the second disc. Looking back at my favorite double albums, it's hard to find one where I legitimately prefer the second disc, but on disc two of The River, I think Springsteen laid down some of the finest songs of his career. The opener, "Point Blank," is one of the most haunting introductory tracks I've ever heard. A slow-burning masterclass in intensity, "Point Blank" epitomizes the kind of mournful regret that defines much of The River's second half, and it's only the beginning. It's the same sense of urgency that infects the narrator on "Fade Away," a simplistic break-up song that Springsteen injects with every ounce of heartache that comes with the end of a once brilliant relationship.

Gorgeously downbeat electric guitar chords and piano flourishes herald the arrival of "Stolen Car," and over the course of four minutes, the song has consumed me, time and time again. Perhaps more than anything Springsteen has ever recorded, "Stolen Car" is entrancing and hypnotic, and to this day, even after listening to it hundreds of times, it still breaks my heart. Over the course of those four minutes, we watch the love between two people evaporate and drift away. Springsteen doesn't have to say much: it's three verses and two choruses, but the song's atmosphere is so utterly, hopelessly heartbreaking that the song, which comes at the end of the record's third side, has always stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks. Amidst the song's mournful atmosphere, Springsteen delivers what might be the most perfect lines about falling out of love that I've ever heard:

"She asked if I remembered those letters I wrote
When our love was young and bold
She said last night she read those letters
And they made her feel one hundred years old"

It's a simple verse, a mere four lines long, but in those four lines, Springsteen fits an entire relationship, from the first days, so full of excitement and spontaneity, to the falling in love, all the way to the present, where the narrator feels so broken and lost that those early days feel like a part of another life. Is he really driving a stolen car? Did he commit a crime to feel alive and spontaneous again? Is he really that far gone? Or is the car a metaphor for a life and a love that has gone so completely off course that he no longer knows how to find his way back. "Each night I wait to get caught, but I never do," Springsteen sings. With either interpretation, the line is drastic and powerful, and the song ultimately comes to the same meaning: this man is lost, and he needs someone else to wake him up again. Springsteen has never written a more shattering, hopeless song; I don't think any other songwriter has either.

The closing trio of songs (along with "Ramrod," another big bar rock song) make up one of the best sides to any record in the Springsteen catalog. "The Price You Pay" finds our protagonist (whoever he may be) in the same situations that have defined so much of the music on this album or on Darkness. The American Dream has faded, the age of innocence and youth has come to an end, and the characters of these songs have woken up to a world that is bleak and unforgiving, but much like Darkness's closing title track, "The Price You Pay" finds that character in a state of resignation and defiance. The song's gorgeous, often biblical lyricism, and simple, almost hymn-like musical structure build into an unexpected anthem, with Bruce's voice rising above the chaos until it reaches it's rousing peak in the song's final moments. "Drive All Night" is the song's spiritual sequel, and it is certainly no mistake that the songs are back to back, near the end of the record. That same defiance and redemption found in "The Price You Pay" continues to grow here, and Springsteen comes to an ultimate conclusion that has often left me wondering why "Drive All Night" isn't this record's finale. Despite the fact that his life has taken a different course than he envisioned in his dreams, the protagonist has, at very least, finally answered one of the key questions of life. On "Born to Run," Springsteen sang "I wanna know if love is real," and here, he comes to the realization that, not only is love real, but it has this massive power to heal and support. In the song's final verse, he sings:


"There's machines and there's fire waiting on the edge of town
They're out there for hire, but baby they can't hurt us now
Cause you've got my love
Through the wind, through the rain, the snow, the wind, the rain
You've got my love, heart, and soul."

Those lines are among my favorites that Springsteen has ever written. In the midst of this busy, disjointed record, full of boozy rock and roll and regret, there is this one grand moment of clarity. The protagonist knows there are always going to be hardships, but here, he's turning to face that darkness on the edge of town that's been dogging his steps for ages, and he's ready to fight. Love will be the thing to save him: what could be a more romantic ideal than that?




The River closes with "Wreck on the Highway," a moody, subdued post-script of a coda that does just what Springsteen has always been the best at in his songs: it tells a story. While driving home from work one night, the narrator comes upon the scene of a hit and run that has left a man half-dead on the side of the road. He calls the police, they take the man to the hospital, and then he continues home, but thoughts of the scene continue to haunt him. He lies awake at night, thinking about what he saw, imaging the death of the man and the reactions of the people that loved him, and he finally realizes the astounding brevity of life. Though The River seems to end in the same sadness and shadow that defines its best songs, I think there is a message of uplift here as well. The narrator realizes how our time here on Earth can be cut short in a split second's time, and though he doesn't say as much, I've always heard a resolve in his voice to try harder: to live more fully, to love more completely, to work harder and cherish the world around him and the people in it. For a record about characters getting over their regrets and failed dreams, there could be no more appropriate ending.

Over the course of The River's 20 songs, Bruce Springsteen covers a lot of subjects and sounds, from elegiac ballads to honky-tonk rock and rollers, from songs about family and love, both lost and re-affirmed, to fun ditties about fast cars and girls.  It feels disjointed, uneven, sometimes even completely directionless, but I'd argue that that's part of the point. The River, above all else, has always felt to me like a journey through adulthood: where Born to Run epitomized the endless opportunism of youth and Darkness captured the post-innocence shock of discovering a much crueler world, The River finds its characters settling into that world, learning to survive, love and (dare I say) thrive in it. Many have problems with the flow or the album's personality crisis, but life isn't consistent or easy or obvious: it's messy. Human existence is the messiest thing of all, and this record mirrors that. As a result, The River is a long, challenging record, and it actually took me quite a long time to recognize how truly spectacular it is. There have always been other songs I wish had made the cut, and it's length and tonal inconsistency has kept it from getting the kind of play Born to Run has over the years, but when I do put the record on, it still completely absorbs me. All double albums are flawed, but Springsteen made one of the greatest ones here, and I would argue that, aside from the untouchable Born to Run, he hasn't made another record nearly as compelling, memorable, or indeed, as great as The River.

***Lots of exciting news in Springsteen world in the past week, what with new album information and tour date announcements. Needless to say, I'll be offering my thoughts on the album as soon as it is in my hands, and I'll also be at the Concert at the Palace in April. Counting the days!***

"And all at once you look across a crowded room to see the way that light attaches to a girl..."

 A Tribute to the Music of Counting Crows

When I think about the bands that have defined my musical experience the most, there aren't many that I can list higher than Counting Crows. Back in the mid-90s, my music listening was limited to whatever CDs my parents would play in the car or whatever albums my brother would bring home one day to play on his boombox. I remember afternoons and evenings sitting around in the basement, listening to his CD collection, picking out the ones I liked most, and having him make me cassette tape copies of those. There are albums and artists I fell in love with back then that I still listen to regularly: The Wallflowers' Bringing Down the Horse remains one of my favorite albums; I'm still waiting for the new Matchbox Twenty album, still wondering what would have happened if Oasis ever made another record as good as Morning Glory, and most certainly still enthralled by the flawless trinity of songs that ends Third Eye Blind's self-titled album. Hell, I might even still have some of those tapes. I believe Green Day's Dookie and Weird Al's Bad Hair Day were also among the collection. I was super cool.

One of my earliest musical memories was hearing Counting Crows for the first time. We were climbing into the car after some bike trip, and my brother slipped my step dad's copy of August and Everything After into the CD player. "Mr. Jones" issued from the speakers, and I loved it immediately. It's a moment I would think of a lot a little less than a decade later, when I bought the band's greatest hits collection (called Films About Ghosts, after one of my all-time favorite lyrics from "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby"). 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 CD, which contained 16 of the Crows' songs, was a turning point. Throughout that winter, I played that record almost every day, and those songs brought life into the bleak winter weather that covers my hometown every year: the rip roaring electricity of "Angels of the Silences," the emotional swell of "Round Here," the lyrical perfection of "A Long December" and "Mrs. Potter," and the nostalgic beauty of "Recovering the Satellites," they all became a part of me.

Naturally, my impulsive purchase of the greatest hits record only made me want to delve deeper into the band's back catalog, a key event in my musical evolution. Up to that point I'd always pretty much been a "singles" guy. I had a couple of albums (again, not proud), but most of my listening revolved around the mix CDs that I made out of songs I heard on the radio or on TV shows (most of these are still at least partially listenable, thankfully). That was about to change. I dug up my parents' copy of August and my brother's copy of Recovering the Satellites and I dove in. I still maintain the former is one of the greatest records of all time, and I was shocked that most of the album's best songs ("Round Here" and "Anna Begins" being the exceptions) were left off of Films. Over the years, every song on that album has come to mean something to me. The lyrics of "Time and Time Again" took my breath away, while the climactic scope of "A Murder of One" (and an impeccable vocal performance from frontman Adam Duritz), made it one of my favorite songs. "Sullivan Street" became one of my go-to nighttime drive songs when I finally got my first car, and the palpable emotion I could hear in Duritz' voice on key album cuts like "Anna Begins," "Raining in Baltimore" and "Round Here" keep him on the list of my all-time favorite singers. For all of those reasons and many more, August remains my favorite album of the 90s. The loneliness and desperation of those songs have kept me coming back, year after year, even as other records that I loved as a kid have begun to fall hollow; that record was one of the first times I realized just how much visceral, emotional power music could have, and that discovery is one that continues to drive my love of music, even to this day.

 

Recovering the Satellites was (and is) a much more challenging record. On "Mr. Jones," Duritz sang, "when I look at the television, I wanna see me staring right back at me." It was a big pop song from a guy who wanted to be big and popular, and the irony was, it was just the song that granted him those wishes. Satellites finds him looking around at what his life has become since he wrote that song and rebelling against that fame. Right from the first two tracks, the scorching back to back duo of "Catapult" and "Angels of the Silences," it's clear that this isn't the same band that laid down the folky jams on August. The first half of the record finds them turning up the electricity and delivering a set of songs full of anger, confusion and nostalgic yearning for simpler times. It's a master class in intensity, from the blistering build of "I'm Not Sleeping" to the memorable riff on "Have You Seen Me Lately," though it's broken up a bit by the dusky nostalgic of "Daylight Fading" and the gorgeous alt-country lilt of "Goodnight Elisabeth." It's when the rage begins to dissipate and the amplifiers go down that the record becomes an enigma, and I've always had a much harder time getting a handle on the second half for that reason. The songs range from stark piano ballads ("Miller's Angels," the most depressing song Duritz ever wrote) to almost blues-rock experimentation ("Another Horsedreamer's Blues," "Mercury") to what might be the strangest album cut I've ever heard from an established band ("Monkey"), but amidst this oddly appealing collection of deep cuts are three of the best songs in the discography: the title track, "A Long December" and "Walkaways," which I've often thought of as my favorite Counting Crows song. It's less than a minute and a half long, just 16 bars of Duritz and an acoustic guitar, bidding a bittersweet farewell to...well, I'm not so sure. "Someday, I'm gonna stay," he sings in the album's dying moments. "But not today."

Satellites has never been my favorite Counting Crows album, but every time I listen to, it draws me in and beguiles me. I've always thought of it as an inconsistent record, not in the strength of its material but in its mood and sound, and the result is a disjointed, confusing collection of songs, but it's also a truly captivating one. It's a portrait of a troubled mind and of a man who got everything he wished for and realized it was both a blessing and a curse. Duritz has often stated his belief that Recovering the Satellites is the band's finest work, and while I don't necessarily agree with him, I can see where he is coming from.

 

The following summer, I bought Hard Candy, which was, at the time, the band's most recent record. Awhile ago, I wrote a blog post about the importance of the "summer soundtrack" album in my life, that album that comes along and defines the long, glorious months of that season. Hard Candy was my first summer soundtrack album, and even as I've grown up and summers have come and gone, I can still come back to it on a beautiful, warm summer night and feel the same way I always have. On "Up All Night," Duritz sings, "we could drive out to the dunes tonight, 'cause summer's almost here," and on "Miami," it's "the bus is running, it's time to leave, this summer's gone and so are we." Those songs are the cornerstones of this record, and they've pretty much bookended each of my summers since the day this record came into my life. The former takes me back to those nights just before summer breaks, when you can almost taste the coming season, and when I hear the latter, I hear the endings of half a dozen perfect summers and my heart still aches for them. When I listen to records for the first time today, the first thing that strikes me is the emotional aspect in the singer's voice, and that's all thanks to listening to Adam Duritz for so many years. I still remember the first time I listened to "Miami." The way that song builds into this climactic vocal tour-de-force still blows me away, but back then, I don't think I'd ever heard anything like it. And yet even despite how terrific that song (and many others) are, Hard Candy has always been written off by fans, considered by some to be the weakest link in their discography. There aren't many more misunderstood records in my collection. The naysayers saw Candy as the record where the long tortured Adam Duritz sold out, cheered up, and wrote bunch of bubblegum pop songs; nothing could be further from the truth. The hooks are the brightest the band has ever written, drenched in sunny pop production and instrumentation, but underneath that are some of the most strikingly dark songs Duritz has ever written, whether he's imagining a suicide ("Black & Blue"), struggling with his longstanding battles with insomnia and depression ("Goodnight L.A.," "Holiday in Spain"), dealing with a miscarriage ("Carriage"), or going through a particularly damaging break-up ("Miami"). The combination of the album's bright pop hooks with its dark subject matter has always been incredibly compelling to me, and it's something that's kept me coming back to this album over and over again. It reminds me, in that regard, of Butch Walker's Letters, and much like that album, it's an absolute love letter to all kinds of pop music, from rootsy classic rock ("If I Could Give All My Love"), to spiraling synth-pop ("New Frontier") to songs that sound like they would have been right at home in a classic stage musical ("Butterfly in Reverse," "Why Should You Come When I Call?"). There's not a bad song on the set, and for a long time, Hard Candy was my all time favorite album.

This Desert Life and Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings are the lesser pieces of the catalog, in my eyes, though the former is another fantastic, interesting direction for the band to take, and the latter contains some truly stellar songs. Desert Life was the last of the initial four that I got in to, and the one I liked the least of those, but there are a lot of moments on that record that still bring back great memories. The outstanding lyricism in "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" put the song among Adam's greatest accomplishments, while "Speedway" is one of his most effective break-up songs and "Colorblind" is one of the most hypnotic songs ever, by anyone. And then there's the vaguely experimental atmosphere running through the likes of "High Life" and "I Wish I Was a Girl" (another very, very strange song), the gorgeously downbeat "Amy Hit the Atmosphere," and the gloriously climactic "get into my car and drive!" moment at the end of "St. Robinson in his Cadillac Dream," the album's finale. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is, I think, the only less than stellar record in the discography, though when it came out, I didn't think so. I bought it on release day, in March of 2008, nearly six years removed from Hard Candy's arrival, and I played the hell out of it. The Saturday Nights portion has always been great, revitalizing the sound the band used on Satellites, and culminating in "Cowboys," the kind of furiously angry anthem you play at full volume in the car when you're pissed off (I can't do this anymore, since I drive far too fast when I do). The Sunday Mornings portion is blessed with some truly gorgeous folk songs ("Washington Square," "On Almost Any Sunday Morning," "When I Dream of Michelangelo"), but I've always thought it gets more and more bogged down by its concept as it goes. That doesn't stop the Crows from delivering a typically strong closer (the fantastic "Come Around"), but there's a preponderance of filler ("Tuesday in Amsterdam" is the dullest song Adam Duritz has ever written), and the record ends up feeling both overlong and not quite effective in its themes. That said, and despite the fact that its fallen out of regular rotation since 2008, I'm not sure if there was a record I played more that year. It dropped three days before my spring break, after an endless wait for new music from the band and what had felt like the longest winter of my life, and it pretty much became the soundtrack for that break (an impromptu road trip to New York City) and the rest of the spring that followed.

And now there's a covers album on the way. It's called Underwater Sunshine, out March 27th, and featuring a long slate of songs that the Crows have been playing and making their own for years now. Many of them have made fairly regular appearances in live shows (and have likely made their way onto the iPods of Crows fans, thanks to the band's open door policy for bootleggers), and a few have even been recorded in the studio before (hell, I downloaded their version of "Start Again" on the same day that I first heard "Up All Night). My point is, I've always known many of these songs more for the band's covers of them than for their original versions, and as a result, I'm thinking this will almost feel like a brand new, full-length record from them, to me. Anyway, here's the song list:

"Jumping Jesus" by Sordid Humor
"Start Again" by Teenage Fanclub
"All My Failures" by Dawes
"Meet On The Ledge" by Fairport Convention
"Like Teenage Gravity" by Kasey Anderson & The Honkies
"Ballad of El Goodo" by Big Star
"Coming Around" by Travis
"Four White Stallions" by Tender Mercies
"You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" by Bob Dylan (originally recorded by The Byrds)
"Untitled (Love Song)" by The Romany Rye
"Ooh La La" by The Faces
"Hospital" By Coby Brown
"Return of the Grievous Angel" by Gram Parsons
"Mercy" by Tender Mercies
"Amie" by Pure Prairie League

I, for one, am excited about this record. One of the great things about the Counting Crows is their obvious love of music, a love that permeates every moment of every record they've made and probably every live show they've ever played. I still haven't seen them live, but their aren't many acts with better bootleg collections, and listening to live versions of their songs is riveting because of their tendency to reinvent things on the spot. It's still amazing to me that, even after months spent not listening to this band, a live version of "Round Here" can still pop up on shuffle and blow my mind. The way Adam invests himself emotionally in his live performances, that song in particular, is a stunning thing to hear, and it places this band near the top of the "artists I need to see live" list. My hope is that we'll get a tour for this covers record, or that maybe it will even inspire Adam to start work on another full length record. But even if Duritz is at the point of his life where he wants to do the band on a more part-time basis than he once did, and even if he never writes another record (this does seem possible, judging by the ever increasing gaps between albums), at least I still have the records: I'll always have August for those rainy days, Satellites for those gloomy, wintery afternoons, Hard Candy for warm summer nights and This Desert Life for every first day of Spring. And, above all, I'll always have the memories of how those records came along when I was 13 years old and changed my life.

"You still get my heart racing for you"

Safetysuit - These Times

Universal Republic Records, 2012

Four stars (out of five)

 Three and a half years ago, I think I finally started to grow up. The end of my junior year of high school brought a lot of changes: saying goodbye to some of my best friends in the world, facing failures that I'd never had much experience with before, summer jobs and, along with my first car, more responsibility than I'd ever had before. That car also brought me a lot of freedom, and that summer was an exciting, unpredictable time in my life. Indeed, I spent many nights out of the house, hanging out with friends, terrorizing the town, staying out until all hours of the night, and through all of that, music started to play an even bigger part in my life than it already had up to that point. So many records came alive on those late night drives back home throughout that summer, perhaps none more than Safetysuit's viscerally emotional debut, Life Left to Go.

Life Left to Go wasn't a perfect record: there are a few songs in the second half that I still skip roughly half the time, songs that I think veer a little too far into the realm of generic modern rock, but when the songs were good, they were great. The band had this ability to blend both pop sensibilities and U2-sized stadium rock and roll into a sound that was, while not wholly their own, instantly distinctive. There weren't a whole lot of opening tracks as good as "Someone Like You" last decade, but that was only the tip of the iceberg of what that album had to offer. There was the stunningly emotional build of "Anywhere But Here," the visceral force of "Something I Said," the hurricane of sound on "Annie," the shattering resignation of "Gone Away" or the chilling pleas of the title track, which closed the record in truly powerful fashion. Those songs were all massively important to me then, and they remain so now. They take me back in time, even as I form new connections with them, like only the best records can ever do. There are only a handful of albums that I've formed a personal connection of that level with, and for a short period of time, I think a part of me didn't want a follow-up; I just wasn't sure if the band could deliver another record like that on the second time around.

For awhile, it seemed like These Times would never see the light of day. The first single, the hook laden and lovelorn "Get Around This," dropped last April on the band's website, and the record was set for a tentative June release. It was soon pushed back to October, then to November, and then into the New Year. As disappointing as those delays were for fans, they merely allow These Times to be the first record on a fairly blank slate of music for the year, and despite my initial feeling that it was a step down from Life, repeat listens have uncovered more emotional nuances than I originally noticed, and I now think that it's something I will continue to revisit throughout the year. The torrential, anthemic opener "Believe" is a contender for album highlight, as frontman Doug Brown's voice rises through a familiar feeling verse to a soaring chorus. The song picks up right where the last record left off, recalling at once both Life Left to Go's opening (the stadium ready, guitar heavy sound) and it's closing (a few lyrical callbacks), and it feels both refreshing and reminiscent of their older material. After my mixed reaction with the band's choice of a second single for this record, "Believe" reminded me immediately that they were still the same band I fell in love with nearly four years ago.

That second single is called "Let Go," and it's also the band's biggest hit to date: a dance/electronic-influenced pop song, co-written and produced by OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder, and bearing every one of his fingerprints. It's not a bad song by any means: indeed, "Let Go" is the kind of song I would be glad to find on the radio waves (were I forced to listen to that medium, that is), but it's well below the band's usual standards. It takes a big step towards the kind of generic, repetitive pop music that I think the band avoided so well on their first record, and when I first heard it, I was afraid that These Times would fall into many of the same traps. Luckily, "Let Go" is an anomaly, and most of the tracks on this record would have fit pretty snugly on Life Left to Go. That's not to say that there's nothing new offered here, though: "Crash" is a harder-driving rock song than the band has tried in the past, while "Things to Say," the gorgeous penultimate track, employs a dusky, folk-country inspired sound that is completely new for them. Just like on Life Left to Go, though, many of this album's best moments are firmly grounded in the grandiose, from "Believe," to the politically-minded title track, to "Never Stop," perhaps the band's purest love song to date. 

Safetysuit save what might be the best for last in the form of "Life in the Pain," a beautifully subdued moment, full of ringing guitars and gentle acoustics, the band providing the perfect bed for Brown's fantastic vocals. Brown's voice has always been the secret weapon for this band: their lyrics are fairly simple and blunt, both on this record and it's predecessor, and they could easily come across as bland and cliche in lesser hands, but Brown delivers them with such thorough conviction that they still somehow manage to hit home. Maybe it's because the things they write about are so easy to relate to, but I always have just felt their songs, and this new album, especially its closer, is no different. Their last record found me at a crossroads of sorts in my life: like I already said, that was the summer where I really grew up, at least where I started to. These Times finds me at a similar crossroads, bidding farewell to things that have been a big part of my life for a long time and embracing new opportunities, but the music still resonates with me just like it did back then. Albums like this are a gift: they come into your life in a serendipitous instance and they remind you why you love music so much, remind you how some things never change, how a perfect song can still come along and take your breath away. Like its predecessor, These Times isn't a perfect record, but it is a sublimely moving one, and sometimes, that's even more important, and as long as this band continues to write records like that, I'll continue to listen.