Weather Report: Waters of March

Cassandra Wilson: Waters of March

[purchase]

Listen to the words to Waters of March, and you may not hear why I am posting it for this week’s theme. There are a few mentions of rain, but it doesn’t appear to be the subject of the song. Actually, there doesn’t appear to be a subject, just a list of things and impressions. The music offers no particular assistance, offering the cascading gentleness that is a hallmark of Brazilian music. The key is that many of the objects named in the song are things that might be carried away in a sudden flood. Waters of March is by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and he hails from Rio de Janero. In Rio, the month of March marks the end of summer, and the month is known for sudden heavy rains. So Jobim sees this as a cleansing process which inspires a hope for spring. Jobim wrote versions of the lyrics for the song in both Portugese and English. The English version reaches for universal appeal, so it removes cultural references from the Portugese version that are specific to Brazil. Cassandra Wilson’s interpretation of the song is up to her usual high standards.

Weather Report: Hurricane

Alex Bach: Hurricane

[Purchase]

Being from South Florida, singer-songwriter Alex Bach probably knows a thing or two about hurricanes. So when she writes a song likening a man in her life to a hurricane we know she is talking about the destructive path he is laying.

Her song "Hurricane" appears on her 2002 album "Miles to Go" . The whole album is lovely, but my favorite thing about Alex as a songwriter is that she can put her lovely lyrics with the acoustic ballads such as this song, but can also just as easily rock your face off in the next song. I think it's quite a talent to be that versatile.

Weather Report: The Cape of Storms

Hyde: The Cape of Storms

Hyde: The Cape of Storms (Last Quarter Mix)

[purchase]

So where do I sail?
A ship losing control,
My cries swallowed up, lost in the raging sea.

So where has love gone?
Will I ever reach it?
The Cape of Storms echoes the pain I feel inside.

You can't really call this J-rock; it's really a power ballad (and quite angsty, to boot) and it's sung in English. Still, it's a solo effort by Hyde, the vocalist of L'Arc~en~ciel, definitely a J-rock band. It's from his 2002 album Roentgen, released in both Japanese and English. Both versions, however, have this song available only in its original English.

To me, what really makes this song is its arrangement: Sometimes, nothing beats a full chorus of strings swelling under a heartfelt lyric to get across strong emotion. And whoever arranged this tune had a real knack for cutting back and then rebuilding the tension. For contrast, I've tucked in the piano-backed remix. It's nice, showcasing the raw vocals the way it does, but it's not nearly as powerful as the full arrangement. Hey, I guess that's why it's called a power ballad.

Weather Report: Stormy Weather

Doc and Merle Watson: Stormy Weather

[purchase]

Weather in songs is often a metaphor for emotional turbulence. Stormy Weather is the classic example of that. Comparing raindrops to tears may be a cliché now, but it wasn’t so much when this was first written. Doc and Merle Watson do a great job here of finding the emotional truth of the song with their performance. Merle Watson takes a solo on slide guitar, Doc on regular guitar, and Sam Bush on fiddle. These solos are all brief but sweet. This Stormy Weather is fine example of artist taking an old familiar song and making it their own.

Weather Report: Rain, Sleet Or Snow

Paul Revere and the Raiders: Rain, Sleet or Snow

[ purchase]

Not everything Paul Revere and the Raiders recorded turned to gold. Their 1967 holiday album, A Christmas Present...And Past, never broke the Billboard Top 100 album chart or even launched a single. In fact one Columbia exec hated the album so much  he frisbee'd his preview copy across the room.

Rain, Sleet or Snow" would have been the single. A heavily distorted tongue-in-cheek rant from the point of view of an overworked holiday mailman, it sounds kind of like Aerosmith's "Sweet Emotion" at half speed.

On his website, singer Mark Lindsay admits the Christmas album is a mess but it reflected the counterculture attitudes of those times:
"Most of our singles weren’t political, but the Christmas album totally was. It was a disaster, but it reflected what we were feeling at the time. It was a good time for flower power and protest.”

Weather Report : Have You Ever Seen The Rain

Back in the late 60s / early 70s, it was Joey hearing a question...
There is some cataclysmic nature wending it's way about.

The Ramones - Have you Ever Seen The Rain
[buy it]



I hope everybody gets to be safe.
I hope everybody gets to hear less violent rains again.

Star Maker Debuts => Weather Report: Preston School of Industry - Caught in the Rain

Preston School of Industry: Caught in the Rain

[purchase]

I didn’t expect to be posting a transition song this week for two reasons. First, I didn’t realize that I had a weather song by a band that had never been on Star Maker Machine before. And second, sitting here in the path of Hurricane Irene, I wasn’t sure I would have electricity. At the moment, it is strangely quiet outside, which may mean that the storm will wallop us again soon. But hopefully, I can get this done and posted before then.

Scott Kannberg records these days under the name Spiral Stairs, but when he first left the band Pavement, he formed the group Preston School of Industry. The band lasted long enough to record one EP and two full length albums, and then went on hiatus in 2004. The album Monsoon included guest musicians from Wilco and The Minus Five. All of this added up to songs like Caught in the Rain. There is nothing very profound about the song. But breezy pop songs like this are harder to get right than most people realize. The first verse reminds me of the mud I experienced at the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival last year. That is about the happiest memory of mud I am ever likely to have.

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

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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)

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

The Libertines: I Get Along

[purchase]

Larrikin Love: Six Queens

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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

[purchase]

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)

[purchase]

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

[Purchase]

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

[purchase]

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.