Neko Case got so much attention for this album when it came out that I forget sometimes how many people didn't experience her until KEXP started playing the haunting Deep Red Bells.  By then I already was in love with Furnace Room Lullaby.

Neko Case and her wailing power have no like.  She is a monster.   And this isn't the only album where she depicts herself dead.   Hell, even though it's true that this album is about heartbreak and death, theres plenty that's uplifting about it to me.  It's just about being in pain and making an amazing howl of it.  Plus there's a real amazing love song to Tacoma, and you don't see that very often.

Later on, her production gets smoother, and she refines her Women's-Lib-Aware Country Femme Fatale songwriting style to a more polished shine, but here it's not so smooth.  Just rousing country music songs with her voice slicing through everything like a knife.  There isn't a single song I don't love on this album, but there's a few that stand out to me.

First, there's Mood To Burn Bridges, her ode to giving the kiss-off to "Snooty Bitches":

Then, I am a huge sucker for the watery guitar and Patsy Cline style of No Need To Cry:

Finally, I think you're ready for the heavy hitter, the astounding South Tacoma Way.  Is it too inexact to just say I consider this an example of some kickass songwriting?  From the very first words, "I put on that sweater you gave me.  I woke up in the kitchen, a few minutes later.  I didn't know how I had gotten there.  Did you guide me?" to "couldn't pay my respects to a dead man, your life was so much more to me, and I chased it away with sticks and stones, but that rage kept following me" to "I can't comprehend the ways that I miss you, they come to life in my mistakes" to "the cross-streets bear your name."  (Which, I'm sure they do.)

Not everyone can stomach Joanna Newsom's "Lisa Simpson on Crack" voice, or twisty lyrics to get to the amazing meaty rhythms and poetry underneath.  Even I have to be in the right mood, but when I am, I can let the kaleidoscopic beauty of her masterpieces just wash over me.

It took me months of listening to even begin to crack the nut that was Joanna's last album, titled after the fabled mystical-city-swallowed-by-an-ocean: Ys.  Joanna packs enough puns, wordplays, turns of phrase, and subtle passion into one song to make listening something like trying to study a James Joyce story.

As impenetrable as Ys seemed sometimes, it's a light snack compared to the 3-CD wall of words she released as her latest album, Have One On Me.

On the first few listens I just hear little intriguing phrases, and it takes a while to start to piece together the whole picture.

Now, I'm finally starting to pull some favorites and sense out of these 18 songs which range from two minutes to eleven minutes totaling a full two hours, and I just wanted to share with anyone who wanted to come with me a little into her world.

For one thing, I think I can tell you without a doubt what most of these songs are about.  Much like Ys, the main theme is of Joanna Newsom expressing in a million ways how she's throwing herself in utter love and loyalty at the feet of a man who really just doesn't feel the same way about her.  Not an uncommon theme in pop music, but no one says it like Joanna.

She lays it out simply on the album opener "Easy".  She's easy.  Easy to keep.  He pleases her even in his sleep.  So (like Bloody Mary) he can just speak her name and she'll appear.  That's how goddamn easy she is.  So easy it's… actually kind of creepy!

She doesn't say it explicitly, but somewhere in there it's obvious that she knows he likes a challenge.  He doesn't like things easy.  She'll never capture his heart.  But she can't help it.  She's never going to be able to make herself seem credibly harder to get for him.  So she's fucked.  She knows it.  She can't stop loving him anyway.  No one says it better than her.

She starts to talk about this on what I would consider the album's most easy listen, the crowd-pleasing "Good Intentions Paving Company" (god knows I've been an employee for so long I'm vested).

Just consider a few choice quotes from the song:

I regret…I regret…
How I said to you, "Honey, just open your heart!"
When I've got trouble even opening a honey jar

and:

And I saw straight away that the lay was steep
But I fell for you, honey, as easy as falling asleep

and conclusion:

And I know you meant to show the extent
To which you gave a goddang
You ranged real hot and real cold,
But I'm sold.
I am home on the range

And I do hate to fold
Right here at the top of my game
When I've been trying with my whole heart and soul
To stay right here in the right lane

But it can make you feel over and old
Lord, you know it's a shame
When I only want for you to pull over
and hold me, 'Til I can't remember my own name

Listen:

Second to last, as a break from ordinary romantic heartbreak, she tells the story of "Baby Birch", perhaps the story of an abortion?

This song builds slow, but the payoff is worth it.  Someone posted the song with lyrics, which works well:

And finally, the album closer, "Does Not Suffice".  I think that this about sums it up:

It does not suffice for you to say I am a sweet girl
Or to say you hate to see me sad because of you
It does not suffice to merely lie beside each other
As those who love each other do

Listen:

Of course, I'm still digesting.  I hope that some people are won over and take a chance on this amazing album.

In my early 20's, I first got exposed to jazz, and still love most of those crowd pleasers, including one I'm sure everyone's heard of: the so-smooth-as-butter that even the Starbucks generation has it on their iPod: Getz/Gilberto.

Girl From Ipanema has been so played and covered and tastefully coffee shopped that it's hard to remember sometimes that Stan Getz did amazing and different stuff both before and after the Bossa Nova thing. He could have easily ridden that train until the end of his days.

But it's not Getz/Gilberto, or even his later work that I want to turn you on to.

It's his 1961 masterpiece: Focus.

Allow me to set the stage.  Another album I love is Joanna Newsom's 2006 Ys album.  In Ys (pronounced like "ease"), Joanna sat down on pedal harp and recorded 5 long original songs in very few takes.  Once the recording was finished, she worked with composer Van Dyke Parks to create an orchestral score to lay behind her recording.  It's an amazing accomplishment, and I think it's kind of cool that Stan Getz did kind of the reverse on Focus.

Getz commissioned big band composer Eddie Sauter, to make him an album of modern classical pieces for strings, bass and harp, which Sauter delivered.

Now, I don't have the liner notes in front of me anymore, and can't find them on the internet anymore, but as I remember it, Getz laid down his saxophone takes on his first listen of each track!!!

I liked the whole album, but I remember about a minute into Night Rider just having a feeling like all the air was being sucked out of my chest.  Have a listen:

It's well known that the sax is improvised, but if it's true that he improvised the first time he heard the recordings, then it just blows me away, that he was able to create this level of excitement and invention without any planning at all.

Also worth listening to is another exciting track, I'm Late, I'm Late:

And a mellower ballad, I Remember When:

You know, nobody claims to dislike Hendrix.  It's just one of those things.  He's got like, the most fantastic brand goodwill ever.  Not that it does him any good.

But I'm actually one of those rare people: I'm a Hendrix Fan.  I love all of his real albums (only 4), I like most of his posthumous work (almost as much), and I even treasure some of his early recordings with Curtis Knight and other soul dudes.  I do NOT treasure all that much his drunken live recordings with the Doors or whatever.

Anyway, I was pretty excited to hear that they'd somehow dug up even MOAR posthumous recordings and were basically releasing a new album called Valleys of Neptune.

I've been able to give it a few listens and I'm pretty damn happy.  It's a lot of re-recorded versions of songs in the more bluesy style he was starting to get into when he died, and a few unheard originals.

So, I thought I'd do a quick Hendrix tribute post and let you listen to some of my favorites, with a focus on the stuff he never got to release in his lifetime.

First of all, off the new album, I really am liking this great instrumental cover of Sunshine of Your Love:

And a cool song called Mr. Bad Luck:

Then, moving back to songs released after his death in many different forms, but arguably the best on the one closest to what he wanted, a big album called First Rays of the New Rising Sun.  This song is one of my favorite tunes ever, ever, ever, mostly due to it's magnificent and rueful lyrics.  It's called My Friend.  I recommend you listen to it several times.

A choice cut of the lyrics:

Now a lady with a pearl handled necktie
Tied to the driver's fence
Breathes in my face,
Bourbon and coke possessed words
"Haven't I seen you somewhere in hell,
Or was it just an accident?"
You know how I felt then, and so:

Before I could ask "was it the East or West side?"
My feet they howled in pain
The wheels of a bandwagon cut very deep,
But not as deep in my mind as the rain
And as they pulled away I could see her words
Stagger and fall on my muddy tent
Well I picked them up, brushed them off,
To see what they say,
And you wouldn't believe:
"Come around to my room, with the tooth in the middle,
And bring along the bottle and a president"

And sometimes it's not so easy,
Especially when your only friend,
Talks, sees, looks and feels like you,
And you do just the same as him

Also, a little more of a minor work, I also love Belly Button Window, arguably a pro-choicey song?!

Then, I could sit here and lead you down the primrose path of Jimi's genius albums he released on purpose all day… really you can just listen to the whole albums and you're pretty much in good hands, but I'll just make one pick from each album that you may not have heard.

From his last album, a live album recorded with Buddy Miles: there's so many massive songs on this album, but I'm going to do Power to Love.  I knew this kid when he was 5 who loved this song and called it "The Jellyfish Song" because of these lyrics:

It's so groovy to float around, sometimes even
a jellyfish will agree to that.
I said flotation is groovy and easy,
even a jellyfish will agree to that.
Yeah, but old jelly's been floatin' so long
and so slack, lord, ain't no kinda bone in his jelly back.
Floatin' ev'ry day and ev'ry night is a risk, sometimes
the wind ain't right!

From his crazy last double album with The Experience, I present the crazy, jazzy, Rainy Day, Dream Away, which I love for his little ad-libs that start the song, including some perhaps real joint-hitting noises:

From Bold As Love, which truly blew my goddamn mind at age 17, I present Jimi's way-cool story of an alien dropping back to earth to tell people how messed up things are in the future:

And from Jimi's seminal Are You Experienced? which you'd otherwise think was a greatest-hits album, the groovy space-opera with crazy radio noises, Third Stone From the Sun. Let Jimi land his kinky machine a little closer to you, baby:

Ok, I'm glad we had this time together, Jimi.

Something in me needs metal. The seed was planted at 16 when my friend Aaron inexpertly rocked the Metallica "Four Horsemen" riff in his basement, forever melding my young energy to the driving force of its dorky power.

This is the kind of orchestral, explosive metal that makes me want to listen to it over and over and over.

Just take a deep breath and let it wash over you.  Who cares what it's about?  The album is a concept album about like, Rasputin and astral travel and gnarly stuff like that, like metal should be.   

But… wait.  There's more to it than that.  Is that some strange rockabilly lick?  Is he teasing us with some kind of LA hair metal shit?  Why does he sound so much like Ozzy?  Is it wrong to let Heavy Metal caress you?

If you don't find yourself saying "whoa" at sometime in this 13 minutes then pack it in.  You have no metal in you.

Do you know what this album MEANS TO ME?  DO YOU?!  Tears have streamed down my eyes as I listened to this album, high on hallucinogenic mushrooms.  Roommates have nearly killed me for listening to the title track too many times ("That song sounds like Spinal Tap's 'Sex Farm Girl'!").  I have told the (dubious) story of its title track to anyone who I thought would sit through all 9 minutes of it and really listen.

I have real love for long-play albums that can realize their full potential in five or six songs (see Joanna Newsom's Ys (see my word record for parenthetical statements in this review (it's like Lisp))).  Maggot Brain is no exception.

First of all, for the totally clueless, who is Funkadelic, right?  I could answer by referring to the song, "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" which I bet George Clinton would prefer, but I won't.  Oh the venerable George Clinton, he's still touring, doing both songs from his older Funk/Rock band Funkadelic, and his late 70's horn ensemble funk band Parliament.  I just about guarantee you've heard a Parliament song.

The first few Funkadelic albums are amazing rock albums.  These dudes were stoned out of their gourds and clearly taking some amazing shit, because they were fountains of love, excitement and creativity.  They invented their own sonic worlds and terminology.  Rappers have been biting their style and getting Clinton to come do cameos, and probably will be propping up Clinton's old bones on stage 50 years from now for street cred.

Dr. Dre points at his Funkadelic weed leaf t-shirt in his The Chronic videos from the 90's.  En Vogue had a hit in the 90's with "Free Your Mind and The Rest Will Follow", a sad rip-off of Funkadelic's "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow".  Countless hip-hop artists have sampled Funkadelic and chanted, "Think!  Think!  It ain't illegal yet!"  But this album came from back in the days when they weren't so influential.

The album opens with a little bit of machine gun sounds in the distance, and George Clinton's low growling chant, that I still play for people sometimes when they're feeling hopeless about the world:

Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time,
for y’all have knocked her up
I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe.
I was not offended
For I knew I had to rise above it all
or drown in my own shit

And then begins Eddie Hazel's nine-minute guitar solo, the story of which goes like this (cobbled from a biography and interviews I've read over the years and totally unsourced but widely believed):

Eddie Hazel and the rest of the band were total junkies by this point and Clinton is having a hard time even getting a decent recording out of them.  Hazel is totally gone on some Orange Sunshine LSD.  Clinton stands him up and says, "Think about the saddest thing you can think of."  Hazel's like, "My mom dying, man." Clinton says, "Okay, play a solo about that."

So Hazel plays this solo that really has to be heard to be believed (don't worry, I'm embedding it!) where the guitar goes through the 5 stages of grieving or whatever, howling, sobbing, accepting, raging, all that.  Clinton was so amazed he faded out the rest of the band and just let Eddie's amazing solo stand.

But that's not all.  "Can You Get to That", just totally changes the whole game with a simple, joyous funk song that warns, "When you place your love on credit, then when your lovin' days are done, checks you signed with the love and kisses later come back sayin' insufficient funds."  Words to live by, people.

The next three songs are just three unbelievably solid funk songs, and "Back in our Minds" is a reconciliation song that features some kind of strange water glass percussion.  "You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks" in particular moved me so much I always thought it would be the perfect song in a film soundtrack.  When I actually heard it in a film soundtrack I was happy but a little disappointed it wasn't what I had in my head.

Finally, the songs ends with another semi-epic, "Wars of Armageddon".  The whole album is kind of about household and family love and war, and Wars is a cowbell and tom-tom peppered noise poem on the topic.  Babies cry, someone shouts, "Shut up, I gotta go to work!"  Sirens blare.  People chant, "What do we want?  FREEDOM!  When do we want it?  NOW!"  Clinton stonedly intones, "More power to the people, more power to the pussy, more pussy to the people, right on!"

The song and album end with a huge atomic explosion and someone says softly, "Revolution!  It's a fat, funky person."  Right, dude.  Then one last funk lick and a mother's heartbeat bring it to a close.  Now that's a goddamn album.

Gotta do two on this one.  Maggot Brain itself:

and Can You Get to That:

Enjoy!

Peter Bogdonavich, wrote a screenplay from a novel called The Last Picture Show. He was a director with a few stinker movies trying to make his big break. He sees a teenage Cybil Shepherd on the cover of a magazine and says, "Holy Crap, I've got to have that girl as my hot young affai… I mean, leading lady!"

He finds the girl, casts her, has an affair with her, threatens to stop "giving her direction" if she doesn't agree to show her tits on film.  He sequesters the cast from the crew because he wants them to be uncorrupted by the riff raff.

Then he shot the first major motion picture in black and white since the early 60's, in 1971.  He shot it in the actual hometown of the guy who wrote the novel.  He even used one of the local kids who lived there in a speaking role.

Sounds like a recipe for total disaster to me, except the movie is truly a thing of beauty.  The stark, simple setting of a small town on the decline, gives a bunch of young actors who went on to be really big a place to shine, and every still is something you could hang on your wall.

It's not hard to imagine this kind of vulnerability, treachery and love happening in a real small town in the 50's.  Every scene has it's own secret rhythm.

Jeff Bridges' character Sonny walks into a pool hall owned by Sam the Lion.  Sam looks on while Sonny grabs a soda, some little snack, and saunters over to the pool table.  Finally Sam speaks, "You ain't never gonna amount to nothing.  You've already spent a nickel today and you haven't even had a decent breakfast."

It looks like it's going to be a simple, naive tale of a small town, but it's really about taking that small town and showing its little fish bowl of reality.  The town tart shrewdly works every situation for all it's worth.  The gay coach's wife courts a boy just out of high school.  The lady who owns the diner and will "probaby be making hamburgers for your grandchildren" calmly dispenses advice.

You can see it's not easy for someone to make a simple black and white movie with such heat and human warmth.  It's a masterwork, and every scene plays out with perfection and has its own special rhythm.  Each one could be it's own tiny one-act play.  Only one maudlin scene mars its perfection, with one tragic death too many.

I just read this and sadly realized I didn't get across why I love this movie so much.

I had the chance to see Nina twice before she died.  The first time I had just got into this amazing album and I figured she must be washed up and not that great anymore by now.  When my coworker showed up the next day and told me how amazing she was, I kicked myself and vowed I wouldn't miss her again.  The next time she came, it was to Benaroya hall with $60 tickets that I just. could. not. afford.  There wasn't a next time.  She died shortly after that.

Could this be my favorite album of all time?  It's in the top five for sure.

This was Nina's first album after moving to a new record label in 1967, and she just laid down something so raw and beautiful here.  I just don't think there's any album quite like it.  Under any conditions, Nina is a master at work.  This album is just a power-packed collection of songs, some political, some sexual, some dangerous, but all with a similar potency and a direct and clear recorded sound.  These are simple, strong recordings, with Nina on piano, and able players all around.

I wish there were some way to explain the emotional power that she packs into each song.  You can listen to the best music released this year and I don't think you will hear another singer with the same kind of unique punch.   I've played Nina Simone for people for the first time before, and had them say after 5 minutes, "Is this a man or a woman?"

The key to the album is in how she closes it.  The last two songs are the Bob Dylan cover "I Shall Be Released", and the blues standard "Gin House Blues".   Many talented performers have taken the brilliant works of Dylan, and turned them into something much larger with their voice than Dylan ever could (see: All Along the Watchtower), and Nina Simone is up in that league for sure.  It's particularly intense, because it's a song explicitly talking about the world of men and it's accountability and disappointments, and there's Simone, belting it out like Dylan didn't mean "man" or "woman" when he said "man".  Compared to Dylan's version, it's even more heartbreaking.

She could have left it at that, and it would have been a great end to the album, but she turns it up to 11 and ends with Gin House Blues, singing like a belligerent drunk, "I don't care!  Give me my gin!"

Then there's the album opener, and it's companions, the sexy songs: Do I Move You, In The Dark, I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl, Buck (written by her husband at the time), and Turn Me On.  This is the smoldering suite, and these songs are truly pure, raw, uncut sex.  They have taken my breath away so many times I can't believe they still have the ability to do it.  The very first words of the album are from the Simone original:

Do I move you, are you willing
Do I groove you, is it thrilling
Do I soothe you, tell the truth now
Do I move you, are you loose now
The answer better be yes
That pleases me

That's right.  The answer better be yes.  This album shows her at her absolute best, and her best is pretty damn good.

Nina Simone – I Shall Be Released