Star Maker Debuts: Grace Jones

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

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Grace Jones: Inspiration

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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

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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.

Useful Numbers: 14th Street

Laura Cantrell: 14th Street

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The picture above says it perfectly. You are looking down the middle of 14th Street in New York City. On one side of the street, the buildings are all a washed out brown color. On the other side, the buildings look vibrant and alive, decked out in that rich reddish brown. 14th Street marks the northern border of Greenwich Village, the famous Bohemian enclave. In Laura Cantrell’s song 14th Street, her narrator seemingly comes from the brown side of the street, while the man she walks behind is from the reddish side. Most of Cantrell’s songs are on the folk or country side of things, but this one is pure timeless girl-pop bliss. That works perfectly for this tale of a woman who is trying to find the courage to act on a crush.

Useful Numbers: 2541

Robert Forster - 2541

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  When Husker Du broke up at the end of 1987 it was drummer Grant Hart who released the first solo recording, an EP named "2541". The following line pretty much sums things up:
 "Now everything is over /Everything is done/Everything is in boxes/ at 2541"


  A little googling identifies 2541 as the street address of the old Husker Du office and practice space, but Grant Hart told Spin Magazine that, coincidentally, it was also the number on a house he shared with a lover.

   "I wrote the song while waiting for the truck to move me out of this apartment where me and this person had just split up. And there were so many parallels with the dissolvement of (Husker Du)'s office and our being a  band."

   Must have been some place: "Billy put down the money and I picked up the keys/We had to keep the stove on all night long so the mice wouldn't freeze".


   As you've probably already noticed, I'm not offering Grant Hart's version . (You can hear it here.) I have a soft spot for a cover version by The Go-Betweens' Robert Forster. It's from an album of mostly obscure covers called I Had A New York Girlfriend.

Useful Numbers: 24-7-365

Keni Stevens: 24-7-365

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24-7-365 is the number that “gets you on the loveline” with Keni Stevens (except, presumably, in Olympic years). It’s the sort of lyric one might expect from a 1980s soul song. But don’t let this slive of cheese mislead you about the soul stylings of the sadly underrated Keni Stevens.

The British soulster of distinctive style and voice released only three albums of sophisticated, cool soul. The debut, 1987’s Blue Moods is the best-known of them. The song here comes from the 1988 follow-up, You, which I consider to be the better album. Indeed, the first side of You is absolutely exquisite (when Stevens sings about the pain of heartbreak in 'Hurt This Way', you feel it with him), as good as any soul LP first side released in the 1980s. It's a superb laid-back soul album by a self-assured independent singer who never got his due.

Things could’ve gone better for the son of a US serviceman. Two singles he released on the independent Elite label in 1985 attracted interest from a few majors. Polygram reportedly offered him an £2,5 million contract. Stevens turned it down in favour of maintaining artistic independence. He became something of a favourite among British soul fans. Though he never bothered the UK Top 75 singles charts, Blue Moods sold 150,000 copies in Britain, and a reported million worldwide.

The saxophone on '24-7-365' is by Mike Stevens, who also did guitar duty. I presume that this is the same Mike Stevens who served as musical director for Take That and released a jazz-fusion album.

Useful Numbers: October 26

The Pretty Things: October 26


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This 1971 single sounds like one terrific hangover from a party so "happening" it must have been revolutionary.

   October 26, 1917 is the day after the Bolsheviks took over Russia and began spreading Communism in the 20th Century. The plan was to implement worldwide revolution. It didn't quite happen that way.

   But aside from the date, this song appears to be about the end of another revolution. This one was orchestrated by hippies and it ended after a ten month span in which The Beatles broke up and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Altamont concert-goer Meredith Hunter all died.

   For The Pretty Things "October 26" ends a string of remarkable albums ( S.F. Sorrow, Parachute) and singles cut at Abbey Road. At this point vocalist Phil May was the only original member of the band left. The single made no impact in the UK but broke the Top 30 in The Netherlands. You can find "October 26" on the re-issued Parachute album.

Useful Numbers: Dayton Ohio 1903

Randy Newman: Dayton Ohio 1903

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Randy Newman has become known for full band pop and lushly orchestrated soundtrack music. He does both things with wonderful artistry. His songs in recent years, especially the ones used in the Pixar films, display a tenderness that very few songwriters can match. But I first heard Newman in ballads like this one, arranged for just voice and Newman’s piano playing. All of the tender emotion of his later work is here as well. This is a sepia-toned song, with a wonderful nostalgic feel. The song is short, under two minutes in fact, but that’s all Newman needs to set the mood.