Star Maker Debuts: A Mixed Bag

Tomorrow will be taken up in my house with preparations for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, so I don’t expect to have time for another post on this week’s theme. So here are three artists I wanted to get to this week who have nothing else in common.

Mance Lipscomb: Police Station Blues

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When I listen to acoustic blues from before World War Two, I often wish I could take modern recording equipment back in time, and capture these amazing performances the way they deserve to be heard. Luckily, some of these artists were recorded better during the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Many of these artists have been on Star Maker Machine before, but not Mance Lipscomb. Lipscomb is not the best known, but he was a very talented musician. Just make sure you never called him a bluesman. Lipscomb was born in 1895, and he represented a link to a tradition that predated the blues. He called himself a “songster”, and his repertoire included songs like Shine On Harvest Moon, which clearly were not blues at all. But, listening to Lipscomb’s music, I can hear the influence of the blues in everything he played. Lipscomb also was unusual among folk revival artists in that he was not discovered until after the war. He made his first recordings in 1960.

Rokia Traore (with The Kronos Quartet): Bowmboi

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Rokia Traore is one of the best known singers in Africa these days, despite the fact that she has only done four albums. The foundation of her music comes from the traditions of her native Bambara tribe of Mali, but she is not a traditional singer. Traore gets a much smoother vocal tone than traditional singers, and her songs incorporate elements from many lands and peoples. This, the title track from her album Bowmboi, is one of two collaborations on the album with The Kronos Quartet, and the results are stunning.

Save Ferris: Come On Eileen

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Finally, I could not resist sharing this one. You know Come On Eileen from the original version by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, but have you ever heard the ska version? Save Ferris made an EP that got them signed to a major label for their brand of ska. Their Come On Eileen was on their major label debut, a wonderful pop-ska album that I can heartily recommend. But, by the time they recorded the follow-up, the band was moving away from ska, and into unremarkable pop. They broke up soon after that follow-up was released. But there was a brief moment when they made one of the most fun albums I have ever heard.

Star Maker Debuts: Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy Cliff: Universal Love (Beyond The Boundaries)

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It seems we've posted Bob Marley 4 times, but we've yet to post anything by another great reggae breakout artist who helped popularize the genre worldwide in the 60s and 70s. Jimmy Cliff had his first hit record in Jamaica at the tender age of 14, had a series of global hits in the late 60s, and featured in a reggae-based film, The Harder They Come, a worldwide success, in 1972. This song comes from the 1978 album Give Thanx and is one of my favorites of his. Of anyone's, actually.

Star Maker Debuts: Danny O’Keefe

Danny O‘Keefe: The Road

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I posted this song two years ago on my own blog, Oliver di Place, and it drew the most comments I think I have ever had. The Road is a song that seems to resonate with people. Most first heard it on Jackson Browne’s album Running on Empty, and they think Browne wrote it. But here is the original, by Danny O’Keefe. O’Keefe personally had his greatest success with Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues, and Farewell to Storyville is another personal favorite. In short, O’Keefe is a wonderful songwriter, so if you like this, you will want to go deeper, and find more of the treasures in his songbook.

Star Maker Debuts: Turtle Island String Quartet

Turtle Island String Quartet: Crossroads (Robert Johnson cover)

Turtle Island String Quartet: A Night In Tunisia (Dizzy Gillespie cover)

[purchase]

Yeah, we don't usually post jazz fusion string quartet music, so I suppose these songs are particularly low hanging fruit for this week's theme. But before two-cello pop song covers were all the rage, and the String Quartet Tribute To Every Band Who Ever Sold More Than 50,000 Records trend started to boil the life out of the greatest hits catalogs of every major radiorock band on Earth, the Turtle Island String Quartet were the real thing, using cello, viola, and paired violins to push the limits at the intersection of jazz fusion, be bop, swing, classical, bluegrass and folk, in the process crafting several albums powerful enough to stay on my top 100 playlist all the way through my late teens and twenties.

Founded by violinist and composer David Balakrishnan in 1985 as a Master's thesis, the team has had several roster changes since its inception. But the quartet - who have dropped the word "String" from their most recent incarnation - remain a major player in the crossover world: winners of the Best Classical Crossover Grammy twice over in the last decade alone, their most recent recordings, which pay tribute to John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix, respectively, truly reimagine the works of these two very different artists rather than merely retreading.

In sum: the band affectionately called TISQ by its fans deserves credit and kudos for a tight body of work and an experimental spirit that paved the way for everyone from Crooked Still to Ben Sollee. Oh, and those damn string quartet tributes, I suppose. But you can't really blame them for that.

Star Maker Debuts: Garage Rock Revivalists

Eagles of Death Metal: San Berdoo Sunburn

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The Libertines: I Get Along

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Larrikin Love: Six Queens

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I'm not sure if any of my previous posts would lead you to recognize my seekrit love of a genre known as "garage rock revival," which seems to be an overarching category encompassing a lot of plain fun and loud music best played from a car stereo. Here's a batch of 'em: one American and two British groups from the mid- …er, what are we calling the last decade anyway? The aughts? The 00's? At any rate, all of these groups are new to SMM (and all make our cutoff of 2005 and before).

Eagles of Death Metal is Josh Homme's other group (the first one is Queens of the Stone Age). He partnered up with a childhood soccer buddy for this combo, in what he describes as "bluegrass slide guitar mixed with stripper drum beats and Canned Heat vocals." It's pure California—the "Eagles" irreverently references the pop/rock group, not the bird.

Pete Doherty, vocalist of the British band the Libertines, kept the tabloids cranking for several years when he was 1) dating Kate Moss and 2) getting serially arrested for abuse of what the Brits call Class A drugs (mostly of the opiod family). He and bandmate Carl Barat had a long-standing, emo-chaotic bromance often reflected in their lyrics. Amidst all the scandals, they managed to release two fine albums before their messy implosion.

Fellow Brits Larrikin Love only managed one album, and they never made the tabloids at all before they called it quits. Still, I really like this frenzied tale of a bloke who's a self-admitted "cherry-lipped little cheap tart"; what I imagine Walk on the Wild Side would sound like as a full-blown punk tune.

Star Maker Debuts: Grace Jones

Grace Jones: Love Is The Drug (Roxy Music cover)

[purchase]

Grace Jones: Inspiration

[purchase]


I came thisclose to posting Grace Jones during great album covers week, but I ran out of time. Oh, hai, looks like I posted it anyway. I love this week's theme!

Grace made her compelling brand of club dance/electronica in the eighties. I don't know why her mesmerizing contralto voice fell out of favor; I certainly kept playing her stuff in the nineties and beyond. She released a number of covers of top musicians like Tom Petty, the Pretenders, Iggy Pop, Sting, Sly and Robbie, and the Marvelettes… Still, even though she was Jamaican/American, her music was always more popular in Europe than in the states. She was one of the first female stars to incorporate costuming as part of her distinctive, androgynous style. She also modeled and acted. Still does, I think.

The first song is a pretty faithful Roxy Music cover, and the second is an ethereal tune that my sister-in-law put on a mix tape for me a loooong time ago.

2001 => Star Maker Debuts: Sliding Delta

Ben Harper: Sliding Delta

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I first heard Ben Harper in 2000, like so many other people. He had been releasing albums since 1992, but in 2000 his song Steal You Kisses broke through to a wider audience. Steal Your Kisses is a great pop song, but nothing about it suggests that Harper should be any good at the blues. But it turns out that the blues was Harper’s first musical love, and he got his first major gig opening for Taj Mahal on a tour. So it makes sense that he was chosen in 2001 to contribute a song to a tribute album to Mississippi John Hurt called Avalon Blues. Ben Harper shows that he deserves to be there with his take on Sliding Delta.

2001: The Cowboy Bebop Edition

The Seatbelts: Slipper Sleaze

The Seatbelts ft. Mem Nahadr: Butterfly

The Seatbelts ft. Raj Ramayya: Ask DNA

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I've been wanting to feature music from the many soundtracks of Cowboy Bebop for yonks but never had the chance to properly write it up until now.

Short summary: Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese anime series about futuristic bounty hunters traveling the universe on their spaceship, the Bebop. What is especially noteworthy, especially for us, is the Americentric music that was integral to the series. In fact, it's so Western---jazz, mostly, but also fusion, blues, hip-hop, funk, country-western, pop, alt-rock, and electronica---that I bet I won't even get flamed for posting it. Each episode had a unique musical theme, with names reflecting that: Jamming with Edward, Bohemian Rhapsody, Speak Like A Child, Black Dog Serenade, The Real Folk Blues…

Nearly all of the music was composed and arranged by Yoko Kanno, (think John Williams for anime scores, except she also sings from time to time). The music performance is credited to The Seatbelts, a changing mix of dozens of Japanese, American, and French musicians. Kanno and the Seatbelts released seven or so albums for Cowboy Bebop. Luckily for us, three of them were released in 2001. I swear, though, it was hard to narrow it down to just three songs, and I hope to be able to feature more in future SMM themes. Or, you know, you could check out the albums yourself!

Slipper Sleaze, from Cowgirl Ed is a laid-back jazz fusion piece that features a pretty sweet guitar/piano/bass melody.

Butterfly, from Future Blues the soundtrack to Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is a slow jazz ballad, with gorgeous English vocals by Mem Nahadr.

Ask DNA, from the album of the same name, is an alt-pop tune. The guy who sounds like Rob Thomas, is actually Indo-Canadian singer Raj Ramayya.

2001: Back In Black

Hayseed Dixie: Back In Black

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Coverlovers know 2001 as the year that Hayseed Dixie released their debut album "A Hillbilly Tribute To AC/DC," thus introducing the world to "rockgrass", and the inevitable imitators that would follow.

It's hard to find the real story behind the absurdism here. The band's entirely implausible mythos, as presented in this picture-perfect parody of a down-home Disney YouTube video, has them as true redneck hillbillies, all coveralls and beards, shotguns and twang, who discovered the complete works of namesakes AC/DC when a city slicker's car crashed on their rural Appalachian property. The Boston Globe says they're "way out of left field"; Word Magazine says their music is like "The Beverly Hillbillies suddenly gripped by a death wish"; their first show ever was at SXSW; their most recent album is in Norwegian, and no one is sure why. Feel free to put on your ironic hipster glasses before rejoicing in their faux-thenticity.

2001: Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version)

Calexico: Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version)

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The name of the band Calexico arises by combining California with Mexico. Chrystal Frontier (Widescreen Version) comes from an EP of flip sides and rarities, but the song is a perfect example of how the band mixes these two places. Mexico, in this song, is a land still haunted by the ghosts of ancient cultures, and also a wild place of violence akin to the Old West. Immigrants to California come seeking a place that has been tamed, but they also bring some of that modern wildness and ancient magic with them. The song presents a few of these immigrants at the border, caught between the old and the new. The music includes the Mariachi horns that are such an important part of Calexico’s sound, but also a modern beat that you can dance to. Both lyrical and musically, Calexico makes the combination work.

2001: Linger

Jonatha Brooke: Linger

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It's funny the things you remember. I was only ever in Missouri for a few hours, when I flew into the St. Louis airport to visit a friend living in Southern Illinois, and yet in my few hours there, I purchased this album.

This song became my favorite from the album, I loved the lyrics. A few years later when I was attending grad school I used a quote from this song as an away message on my computer. The quote being:

You saw me through the key hole
Of a door that I kept locked
But I decorate the threshold
Just in case you knocked.
I thought it made a nice away message, and one of my roommates at the time very much agreed. She saw it and instantly loved it and wanted to know what it was from. I ended up making her a mix with the song on it. She was grateful, but thought the song didn't live up to the marvelous quote. I had to explain that Jonatha Brooke was what they often referred to as a "songwriter's songwriter" and it took a few listens to fall in love...as I had felt the same way when I first listened to her and now she is one of my favorites. And indeed, my roommate kept listening and then began to adore it. It's always a fond memory when you can share something you love with others and see the light go on for them as well.

2001: Joy

Silverbullit: Joy

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Silverbullit - one of all of those great bands destined to die in obscurity. Though they partly have themselves to blame for that; not only are they unproductive (three albums in fourteen years, and not a new album since 2004), they're also notoriously reluctant to do anything that might be considered crowd-pleasing.

The first album Silverbullit, released in 1997, was a hell-raising, high octane rock 'n' roll juggernaut inspired by The Stooges, MC5 and The Doors. After much turmoil, the follow-up Citizen Bird was released in 2001. Despite being recorded on and off for several years in a few different studios and with six different drummers, Citizen Bird has no problem holding together like one cohesive and mightily impressive album.

While it in parts retained the all American Detroit-tinged boogie r'n'r' energy, the band now took most of its cues from Spiritualized/Spacemen 3, The Velvet Underground, Suicide, DAF, Joy Division/New Order, krautrock and old school computer game music, creating something wholly unique and endlessly fascinating.

No doubt one of my favorite albums of all time. Get your copy today.

2001: The Wedding Song

Charlie Robison (with Natalie Maines): The Wedding Song

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The Wedding Song is a duet, and it came out on a major label from their Nashville division. So you would expect a lush production with a wall of strings, and you would expect to hear a couple proclaiming their undying love for each other. What you get is evidence of why Charlie Robison probably should never have been on a major country label, despite the fact that the album made a respectable showing on the country charts.

At the time of this song’s release, Charlie Robison had been married to Emily Robison of the Dixie Chicks for two years, but his duet partner here is Emily’s bandmate Natalie Maines. To the ear, The Wedding Song is indeed a love ballad, based on an acoustic guitar, and sweetened with pedal steel. Other than that, the production is refreshingly low key. But then there are the lyrics. Robison and Maines each sing one of the first two verses, and each of those verses starts with these lines:

“Well, you are still here,
And I am still here,
Whether I ever loved you is
Not perfectly clear.”

Hardly the stuff of romance. As I see it, there are two ways to read this. Maybe the song is about a couple whose lack of romance means that they are realistic about what they have, and therefore their marriage is likely to endure. Or maybe the song is a droll send-up of romantic love ballads. I have always felt that this kind of ambiguity is a mark of great songwriting, and I stand by that here.

2001: Baby, You're My Light

Richard Hawley: Baby, You’re My Light

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Richard Hawley, a former member of Britpop groups Longpigs and Pulp, has produced a series of delightful and always affecting albums that started with his full debut in 2001, Late Night Final (it was preceded by a self-titled EP in 2000), and culminated in a masterpiece with 2009’s Truelove Gutter. The gorgeously melancholy, late night mood of that great triptych of Hawley albums — Coles Corner, Lady’s Bridge, Truelove Gutter — is already evident on the debut, from which the lovely ‘Baby, You’re My Light’ comes. His voice has now dropped a register and the arrangements have become more intricate since Late Night Final, but the basics of the Hawley sound, and the quality, are already there.

Most Hawley songs that address the fancies of romance are downbeat, speaking of loneliness, longing or disappointment. ‘Baby, You’re My Light’, as the title suggests, takes a more upbeat direction as we follow the narrator’s through three stages. First we meet the young man who is awkward in matters of the heart, then the more confident adult who allows himself to take the risks of a broken heart, and finally the seasoned campaigner in romance who yields to love. The opening line is quite wonderful: “First time, the longing in you wears the girl that grows it.”

2001: Angeldust (Please Come Down)

Jump, Little Children: Angeldust (Please Come Down)

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Jump, Little Children was an alt-rock band made up of students studying classical music at North Carolina's School of the Arts. They started by playing live traditional Irish music, then added a dash of Delta blues before switching (mostly) to their own stuff. The group's vocalist, Jay Clifford, wrote all of the songs on this, their sophomore release. Yes, his voice reaches some pretty high ranges, isn't that cool? Are you surprised, given my affinity for falsetto, that I love this band? Most people who have actually heard them did, too, but unfortunately not enough of us existed, so sadly they called it quits after album #3 in 2004.

The islands off the coast are on fire
Orange and violet,
Standing on a thundering beach
Frozen in silence.
The rising sound of burning ground
Is like a carbon echo of a smoking gun.

2001: Broken Things

David Byrne: Broken Things

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By 2001, new wave music had happened twenty years earlier. Talking Heads had made some of the most original music of the 80s, but now leader David Byrne was well into his solo career. Byrne had always thrived on defying expectations. By 2001, that could mean making heavily produced music, with live strings and other orchestration. In Byrne’s hands, this evoked the sounds of Brazil, and that was the basis for much of his 2001 album Look Into the Eyeball. Broken Things is something of a throwback to Byrne’s earlier sounds. Yes, there is a horn section, but it is used with great subtlety. This one has real bite, more so because of the music that surrounds it on the album. As for lyrics, Byrne has always been an elliptical writer, but the most important repair to be made in this song is emotional rather than physical.

Useful Numbers: 3

Bob Dorough: Three Is A Magic Number

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De La Soul: Magic Number

[purchase]

Jack Johnson: The 3 R's

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My first choice for this theme has already been blogged, and Anne described my attachment to it so well. But this eleventh-hour 3x3 submission, while a bit minimalist and tongue in cheek, is nonetheless as important as a phone number. And the song tells you why.

Bob Dorough is a great Jazzman, but he's best known as composer and occasional vocalist for the Schoolhouse Rock series, from whence this came. Playful hip hop pioneers De La Soul sampled and remade for their 1991 seminal 3 Feet High...and Rising. Jack Johnson transforms, rewiring the lyrics for a modern, green society.

There's good covers out there from Elizabeth Mitchell (gentle) and Blind Melon (grungy), among others. But then our numbers would've come out all wrong.

3. It's the magic number. No more, no less.

Useful Numbers: # 807

Pieta Brown: # 807

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Number 807 is a street address, and Pieta Brown takes us to the front door, and then opens it. This begins a series of slides which show a man living on the bad side of town. The song may present one character or a series of different men, and the ambiguity is deliberate. We the listener see their poverty, but also their humanity. The slides are in black and white, but are no less real for that. The bluesy groove that accompanies this slide show is perfect.

Useful Numbers: 1865 (96 Degrees In The Shade)

Third World: 1865 (96 Degrees In The Shade)

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This song has both date and temperature – a twofer! It describes the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica, a protest turned riot turned massacre, in which over 400 black citizens were killed and a further 300 executed without trial by the English colonial government.

Reggae band Third World, riding the wave of reggae-love beyond their Jamaican shores, released the title track of their second album in 1977, and it became one of their most popular songs.

Useful Numbers: 853-5937

Squeeze: 853-5937

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853-5937 is one of those songs I liked as a child and I can look back on and say I am proud of childhood me for choosing Squeeze (I liked their other single "Hourglass" from their 1987 album Babylon And On even better) over a lot of the other stuff they were playing on the radio. I remember thinking back then that when I was older and had my own phone I would want to sing the chorus of this song as my answering machine message. Oh, how things change, but this song is still fun to sing along with.

Squeeze is a pop rock band from England that was making music from the late '70s, so when Babylon and On came out they weren't a new band, but new to most American ears, as this song and the previously mentioned "Hourglass" became their only hits in the U.S. The song is cute and catchy. A cute little story of a guy freaking out because he keeps calling his girlfriend's number and she never answers, and then he calls his best friend and he doesn't answer either and he starts getting paranoid that they were off somewhere together. They just don't make songs like this anymore.