Making It – Stew And The Negro Problem
Singer/songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart and bassist/vocalist Heidi Rodewald put out some of my favourite albums of the late 90s and early 2000s, both with their band The Negro Problem (a baroque-pop group whose ex-members have gone on to be, among other things, in Candypants, Cosmo Topper, the Wondermints and the solo artist Carolyn Edwards, all of whom have made wonderful music as well) and under the name of Stew – used for more acoustic, singer-songwriter type records. (This album uses both names, but doesn’t feature many of the musicians on previous Negro Problem albums, and has more of a ‘Stew’ sound than a ‘Negro Problem’ one).
But until today, they hadn’t released a proper album of new material since 2003′s Stew album Something Deeper Than These Changes. To put that in perspective, not only was I single, unemployed and in my twenties when Stew’s last album came out, but I actually went into a shop and bought the CD. An actual shop. Like people in the olden times used to do. So you can imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this.
This is not to say that they’ve not been busy. A number of ‘official bootlegs’ have come out over the years (and been deleted too quickly for me to buy copies). Stew’s worked as a jobbing songwriter, doing everything from a song for Spongebob Squarepants (Gary Come Home) to one for my wedding (he used to take commissions for songs by email. The song he wrote for our wedding, Now’s Eternity, is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard even without the special context for me). Stew and Heidi wrote a piece for The Asphalt Orchestra, and Stew’s put out a CD of music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Various tracks have been made downloadable over the internet.
But mostly, they’ve been doing theatre work – in particular, the wonderful Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Passing Strange, for which Stew wrote the book and lyrics and starred in, which Stew and Heidi wrote the music for, and for which Rodewald was musical director. The soundtrack album for this is a de facto Stew album, and one of the very strongest, and a film of the play, directed by Spike Lee, is now available on DVD.
But this has meant that those of us outside the US – or even, for the most part, outside New York, have been deprived of much from them for the best part of a decade now. Until Making It, which is their break-up record.
During the theatre run of Passing Strange, Stew and Heidi’s personal relationship broke up, and they had to keep performing on stage together while their private life was falling apart. Making It is the album that came out of that, and it sounds like the kind of album you expect from a couple who split up before making it.
(In fact, Making It is another album of songs from a theatre show, like Passing Strange, but where that was a full-cast recording, this only features Stew and Heidi on vocals.)
Thus, while the album is as good as anything they’ve done, there’s little of the joy of some of their earlier albums, only concerns. There’s nothing as light or laugh-out-loud funny here as Ken or Man In A Dress or Into Me, and in some ways that’s a shame, as those songs are always the best ‘in’ to a Stew album. Stew is a very subtle lyricist, and for someone like myself who’s more musically oriented it often takes many listens for me to really get what he’s doing in his more serious songs.
Which is not to say there’s no wit in this album – very far from it. But lines like “When did you first realise there was a problem with your relationship?” “When she left me” are a far cry from the playfulness of some of Stew’s earlier work.
At times, in fact, this can almost sound like the Beautiful South, with very pleasant melodies but utterly bitter, nasty lyrics sung as male/female duets – on possibly the best song, The Curse, Stew and Heidi both sing the exact same words, but just the different inflections, from two singers on opposite sides of the event, give very different impressions of what went on. But the music has far more bite than that, and also features things like some of the best saxophone skronking in rock music since the first two Roxy Music albums (on Speed, a song about methamphetamine).
Some of this material will be familiar to fans – Black Men Ski has been circulating on the internet for nearly six years now, and is utterly brilliant (I actually used it as one of the through-lines in my chapter on Mister Miracle in An Incomprehensible Condition, it has so many good lines in it about race and society), while Tomorrow Gone is a remake of a song from the last Stew album, Something Deeper Than These Changes.
I’m not doing a very good job of selling this album, I know – it only came out today, and it takes at least a year for me to get enough of a sense of perspective on a Stew album before I can talk intelligently about it. What I will say is that Stew is one of the great songwriters of all time – up there with Jimmy Webb or Ray Davies or Paul McCartney or Jake Thackray or Arthur Lee. (I’m referring to Stew as the songwriter here, but Heidi may well have contributed – she is an excellent songwriter herself, and has often collaborated with Stew. I don’t have access to the songwriting credits, and don’t want to underrate her contribution. The fact that Stew and Heidi still work together after their split shows that they are better as collaborators than either would be alone).
I have absolutely no doubt that this will be one of my two or three favourite albums of the year, and it’s almost certain to be the very best, once it’s had more chance to grow on me. It’s not the best introduction to Stew’s music – that would still be either Joys And Concerns or Guest Host, both of which are far more immediate, but it’s a subtle, heartbreaking album, but with an underlying touch of hope.
Stew and Heidi are currently working on a musical adaptation of the great graphic novel Stagger Lee, and I can’t imagine a better match for them. I hope a soundtrack or DVD of that will be forthcoming very soon, but I also hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for the next album like this.
But it’s worth the wait.
New 8tracks Playlist – The Best Pop Music Of The Last 15 Years
A little break from politics – some music.
Those of you who follow my musical interests will know that my tastes run in two seemingly contradictory directions. Half the time I like extremely harsh, visceral music – squonking jazz like Ornette Coleman, aleatory compositions like John Cage, Frank Zappa’s orchestral music, Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Edgard Varese, Boulez, Howlin’ Wolf, Sun Ra and all that good stuff.
But the other half of the time I like extremely melodic stuff, in very conventional song structures, with interesting chord changes and vocal harmonies and witty lyrics – the Beach Boys, the Zombies, the Move, Elvis Costello, the Kinks, the Beatles, ELO and so on.
For much of the last decade or more, music in that second category has been pretty much absent from the pop charts, at least as far as I’ve been able to tell, but that doesn’t mean it’s not been being made. I’ve listened to far more ‘new music’ from the last decade or so than I did in the 90s, but almost none of it has made any impact outside a very small group of people. So I’ve put together this playlist of some of my favourite Californian music (a lot of this stuff comes from California, for some reason).
Unlike many of my other playlists, this is on 8tracks.com , which means my foreign friends will be able to listen to it. This is because 8tracks allows you to upload MP3s to create your playlists, and a lot of this music isn’t on Spotify. It also means you won’t need any special software (other than a web browser with a Flash plugin) to listen.
Devil May Care by Kristian Hoffman & Russel Mael is from Hoffman’s &, an extraordinary album of duets with everyone from Van Dyke Parks to Pee Wee Herman by way of Lydia Lunch and El Vez (the Mexican Elvis) along with many of the other people in this playlist. Here he reworks the Give Me Some Loving riff with the lead singer of Sparks, with an extraordinarily witty and literate lyric, the two singers one-upping each other for who can do the silliest falsetto while singing lines like “Gonna put the ‘ooh’ in the human condition”. Not many lyricists would dare to write a glam-pop song with lines like “Some postulate reward if you should mortify the flesh”. The lyric is almost Cole Porter good…
Clever Things by Blake Jones & The Trike Shop is by a friend of mine (Blake guested on the most recent National Pep EP on vocals, theremin and melodica) but it’s also a favourite of mine anyway. I was privileged to see Blake live a couple of years ago in Bradford, doing a fifty-minute set to an audience of ten people (only two of whom were paying customers – I know, Tilt and I promoted the gig), but it was still one of the best gigs I’ve ever seen. I am frankly in awe of Blake’s talent, and he’s a lovely bloke as well. Buy his records and make him rich.
Tracy Hide by the Wondermints is from their first album, which was essentially just a release of their four-track demos. How come *MY* four-track demos never sounded this good? Oh yes, because I’m not a group of incredibly talented musicians who can all play about a dozen instruments as well as singing wonderfully. The Wondermints have since become the core of Brian Wilson’s backing band, and while I’m eternally grateful for the music that’s brought us, they haven’t recorded a new album as themselves in eight years, which is *MUCH* too long.
Ken by The Negro Problem is a touching song about the difficulties of being a gay Ken doll. Stew, the lead singer/songwriter of TNP, is also here as a solo artist, and to my mind is the greatest songwriter of the last twenty years. (He also wrote the song for my wedding, which I also think is one of his best songs). This is hilarious and heartbreaking – “Some day soon I’ll be in your child’s room/I’ll be forced to kiss Barbie’s plastic tits/And I will hate myself but what’s more I’ll hate you/For not allowing me to love as I wish to”.
Hey Ann Margaret by Cosmo Topper is just perfect pop – “Hey Ann Margaret do you wanna dance?/Elvis has left the building, maybe I got a chance”, with one of the best piano parts I’ve ever heard.
Silly Place by Chewy Marble was originally a track Brian Kassan, Chewy Marble’s leader, wrote as the B-side to the Wondermints’ single Proto-Pretty, before he left to form his own band. Chewy Marble are by far the most commercial-sounding of the bands on this playlist, and I’m astonished that they’ve never had a hit.
Man In A Dress by Stew is one of two songs here from his first solo album, Guest Host, which for some reason is not on Spotify yet. This one has some of the best backing vocal lines ever – “I hated Titanic, you see”, “I don’t even like chicken soup” and especially “some cake and ice cream by the way”, which made me laugh out loud the first time I heard it.
Proto-Pretty by the Wondermints is what early Elvis Costello records would sound like if he sang more about trilobites and DNA.
Rehab by Stew manages to be both hilarious and sad, and to use the word ‘very’ ninety-six times in four minutes and forty-three seconds and have that be a good thing.
Virginia Woolf by Blake Jones & The Trike Shop is the emotional centrepiece of Pop Songs & Kyries, their most consistent album. It loses something out of context, not getting the repeated themes of that album, but it’s still an astonishing song.
Shrink by Carolyn Edwards is a soft-pop Bacharach-esque song about being uncomfortable with someone coming on to you far too strongly.
Cross-Hatched World by Chewy Marble is a melodic, staccato song along the lines of some of the best Beach Boys or Kinks songs.
MacArthur Park by The Negro Problem is an absolutely straight cover of the first part of MacArthur Park, except for one crucial word change…
And Scarecrow by Kristian Hoffman & Rufus Wainwright is one of the most beautiful, upsetting songs I’ve ever heard, about the homophobic murder of Mathew Shephard in Wyoming:
What penalty must we perform
for craving someone warm, somewhere upon this chilly planet?
A rifle butt against the head,
because we’d heard it said
that only God can make a man. It’s true.
But only man can make a scarecrow out of you.
And only man can make a God who might approve.
OK, so it’s not *all* completely apolitical…
Belated Michael Jackson Tribute – Covers Problem MP3s.
I was meant to be doing Lib Dem campaigning today, but a family emergency kept me from being able to (had to sit by the phone waiting for news of a hospitalised relative – nothing too serious, don’t worry), so while I was sat round twiddling my thumbs, I decided to digitise a CD I’d found the other day.
The CD was one an online friend had sent me about six or seven years ago – a live recording by The Covers Problem, one of several more-or-less interchangeable ‘bands’ (others being The Negro Problem, The Broadway Problem and Stew) formed around singer-songwriter Mark ‘Stew’ Stewart and bassist/vocalist/arranger Heidi Rodewald. In their Covers Problem guise, they used to perform occasional shows where they’d perform cover versions of entire albums – they did, among others Dark Side Of The Moon and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. This one is them doing Thriller (apart from two songs they didn’t get round to learning).
They’re not straight covers though – PYT is done as a fast No New York style punk track, while The Girl Is Mine is done in the style of Here, There And Everywhere by the Beatles, and so on.
For those who don’t know their work, Stew & Heidi have released three Stew ‘solo’ albums of singer-songwritery stuff (all on eMusic if you want them) plus three (sadly out of print, though you can buy two of them as MP3s on Amazon) albums of psych-pop as The Negro Problem and the soundtrack to their Tony award-winning musical Passing Strange (which has been filmed by Spike Lee and is apparently in regular rotation on PBS), but as Stew says on their website, he’ll probably be best known for writing Gary Come Home for Spongebob Squarepants.
(Stew and Heidi also wrote and recorded a song for my wedding, on commission, and it’s one of the best songs I’ve ever heard – Stew is one of the great songwriters of the last decade).
I don’t know the full line-up of the band here, but I do know that it includes Stew (guitar/vocals), Heidi (bass/vocals), Carolyn Edwards (herself a great singer-songwriter – buy her eponymous solo album) (keyboards/vocals), the wonderful Probyn Gregory (various instruments including trumpet and presumably banjo), and Steve Stanley of The Now People as Vincent Price.
My CD of this was made straight from an audience tape, all as one track. I’ve tried to split it sensibly, and the tracklisting I’ve got now is:
Wanna Be Startin’ Something
Here, There, Everywhere/The Girl Is Mine
Beat It
Billie Jean
Human Nature
Between Songs Chat
PYT
Between Songs Chat (nose widening/’I love your tits’)
Thriller
Audience Noise
Between Songs Chat (audience requests)
Bad Mama Jamma/Rocky Racoon
This is a copy of an audience recording, and has never been available commercially, and I suspect never will be. That said, if you believe you own the copyright in this and object to it being posted, please contact me on andrew at thenationalpep dot co dot uk and I will take it down immediately.
Download here (rapidshare link).
New Spotify Playlist – Pure Pop For Never People!
Sorry I’ve been a bit crap at updating recently. Between computer problems at home, pressure at work, and the general blandness of most of the comics recently, I’ve not really had any momentum for posting. Hopefully that’ll be back again soon and I’ll be back to the level of productivity from last month within a few days.
Anyway, the nights are drawing in, so we all need some cheerful pop music to pick us all up, and here is a playlist of just that.
Come On In by The Association is as good an opener for anything as you could hope for. The one time I DJ’d I started this up as soon as the doors opened (unfortunately, of course, no-one heard it as they hadn’t arrived yet. This is the kind of thing you don’t think of if you’ve never DJ’d before).
Mayor Of Simpleton by XTC is one of those list songs like What A Wonderful World, to which it bears a huge lyrical resemblance – “Never been near a university/Never took a paper or a learned degree… And I may be the mayor of Simpleton, but I know one thing and that’s I love you”. The music is insanely catchy, though, and I’m amazed this was never a hit. Everything here’s perfect and thought through – listen to that bassline from Colin Moulding, going all over the place, commenting on the main melody – but at the same time it’s *immediate* in a way much of XTC’s stuff isn’t… I actually considered just doing an XTC playlist today, they’re so great.
Broadway by Stew is one of his few cover versions, a radical reworking of the Clash song, turning it into a disco track backed by drum machine, analogue synth sounds and fast-picked banjo (presumably played by Probyn Gregory?), this gives some idea of what the Negro Problem’s side project The Covers Problem sounded like (at some point I must post an MP3 of their live cover of the full Thriller album).
I’ve posted Nerdy Boys by Candypants in more than one playlist before, but who cares? It’s the best pop single of the last decade.
7 And 7 Is by Love is the song that invented punk, back in 1966 when the rest of California was busy inventing hippysim, and it’s still one of the most ferocious records ever (fantastic song to play live, too, especially since the rhythm section has to do all the work while the guitarists just have to slash out chords). Drumming by the great Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer (I’ve told Holly that if we ever have a kid I’m going to name it Alban “Snoopy” Pfisterer in tribute, which has ensured we shall remain child-free).
September Gurls by Big Star is the track that invented powerpop. Unfortunately, Spotify removed the three proper Big Star albums recently, so this is what sounds like a full-band demo – every element of the track is there, but not *quite* as tight as the finished version. For those who don’t know the original, though, it’ll more than suffice.
More Important Things by The Mockers is another catchy-as-hell harmony-based spiky jangly guitar song. Sometimes I like those.
Baby It’s Real by The Millennium is a track I’ve adored for ten years even though it breaks the cardinal rule of lyric-writing , Harry Nilsson’s “Never use the word baby unless you’re talking about a little person”.
Friends Of Mine by The Zombies is almost unique in that it’s a song about being happy about other people being in love, although rather sadly almost all the (real) people named in the backing vocals have either split up or died (Jean and Jim are still together forty-one years later though, if that’s any consolation).
This Whole World by The Beach Boys is an astonishing tour de force. Stupid lyrics, but in one minute fifty-seven this manages to cycle through something like five different keys, never settling on one for more than a couple of bars, in a completely unusual structure.
Thankful/It’s Over Now by Linus Of Hollywood is another example of LoH’s rather odd attitude to women (which I can only hope is a Randy Newman-esque ‘writing in character’ thing) – “If you would just leave and take all of your things I’d be grateful… don’t forget to take your mood swings/don’t forget to take your nasty attitude” over one of the most upbeat, bouncy pop tunes I’ve ever heard. Again, a cleverly-structured, complex piece.
And Jaded by The National Pep is my attempt at doing a pop song as clever and complex as the last couple, or even more so. And if you listen to it through spotify, I’ll get a whole shiny penny to share with my collaborators…
Albums You Should Own : The Naked Dutch Painter
Mark ‘Stew’ Stewart has become a Broadway sensation over the last year – the musical Passing Strange, for which he wrote the book and lyrics, and the music for which he co-wrote with longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, has won him a Tony award for best book, and it’s going to be filmed soon by Spike Lee. He’s famous among other constituencies, as well – my eleven-year-old niece loves Gary Come Home, the song he wrote for SpongeBob Squarepants.
But even as recently as three years ago he was unknown enough that he would every so often write songs on commission – he’d put an offer up on his website and then write and record custom songs for anyone who wanted them, as birthday or Christmas presents or whatever. I had one written for my wife for our wedding, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best things he’s ever written.
And while Stew is now fairly well-known, his earlier work is still unknown. The three albums he did with his band The Negro Problem (Joys And Concerns, Welcome Black and Post-Minstrel Syndrome) are all out of print and command prices of £50+ on Amazon – a shame as TNP are a *great* band, also featuring Probyn Gregory of the Wondermints and Lisa Jenio of Candypants. Their material ranged from Ken (a song about the problems of being a gay Ken doll (“the people at Mattel/the home that I call hell/are somewhat baffled by my queer proclivities”) ) to beautiful ballads like Come Down Now, to a note-perfect cover of MacArthur Park, but one in which the crack rather than the cake has been left out in the rain.
However, it was as a solo artist I first became aware of him – as the support act to Arthur Lee and Love (at the time Lee’s touring ‘Love’ were Baby Lemonade, another band from the same LA powerpop scene as the Wondermints and TNP). At what would have already been an astonishing gig (the first time I saw Lee live, and he was simply superb – I also saw Brian Wilson that same week, doing a fifty song set, and got a backstage pass to that one. Best week for gigs of my life), for possibly the only time an unknown-to-me support act overshadowed the headline. Stew and Heidi performed songs from TNP and Stew’s first two solo albums, and were just extraordinary.
Thankfully, Stew’s three solo albums (Guest Host, The Naked Dutch Painter and Something Deeper Than These Changes) are all still in print (and available from eMusic – a site which I will keep plugging until every reader of this blog is a member, because it’s fantastic), and with luck those albums will get increased exposure now that Passing Strange is a hit – several of the highlights of the musical are reworked versions of older songs. There’s not a bad song on any of them, but probably the best album – both as an album and as an introduction to Stew’s music – is The Naked Dutch Painter.
I feel rather anxious about writing a review of Stew’s music, partly because I know there’s a lot going on in his lyrics that I’m not getting (a lot of his lyrics are very culturally-specific, and he can also be quite an oblique writer), and also because he’s both more articulate than I am and very caustic about reviewers – even positive ones – who don’t get it. I just hope that either he never sees this or I *do* get it.
The Naked Dutch Painter is a more-or-less live album, including some of Stew’s great between-song chatter (“I’ve been wondering… why is there only one photo of Che Guevara? Why isn’t there a photo of him, like at some kid’s birthday party, snorting milk out of his nose?”). The live-ish nature means that it has neither the college-rock production of the other two Stew solo albums, nor the baroque pop complexities of the Negro Problem music, but rather a loose-but-sophisticated sound that makes me think of piano bars (there’s a lot of piano on the album) or people like Stephen Sondheim.
Every song is good, but to my mind the two highlights are The Drug Suite and the title track.
The Drug Suite, as the name might suggest, is actually three songs linked by the common theme of drugs. The first song, I Must Have Been High is a gorgeous ballad with minimal instrumentation – mostly just piano and what sounds like a melodica:
Wasn’t that me in the electric chair?
And isn’t it true I spent two days there?
See my friend’s folks they were out of town,
So we bought a sheet and we all got down
And every song sounded like an angel’s choir
My edges were rounded, I had wings of fire
Soaring through the sky, I must have been high
Sitting on the balcony watching the rail rust
Slipping through my fingers like angel dust
The lyrics are both hilarious (“Didn’t we vow to live in a tree while staring at static on the TV?/And when she said ‘I am a bird’ I hung on tight and drank every word”) and at times beautiful – the line about angel dust is one of those “I wish *I’d* thought of that” lines.
I’m Not On A Drug, the second song in the suite, is one of my very favourite of Stew’s songs, as it describes a situation I’ve been in all too often – being the only person at a party who is completely sober and straight. “I know this is a happening party and I don’t want to make you yawn my darling, but I’m not on a drug.I didn’t want to tell ‘cos you might tease me – I really wish I was right now believe me”. With its staccato piano chords and skittering violin, this sounds like something Noel Coward might have performed were he feeling rather daring.
Arlington Hill, the last part of the drug suite, is apparently a description of Stew’s first acid trip, and it sounds musically very like a gentler version of Strawberry Fields (in fact, what it sounds *exactly* like is Darian Sahanaja’s reworking of Wonderful in the style of Strawberry Fields for the soundtrack of David Leaf’s documentary about Smile, Beautiful Dreamer). This points to another thing about Stew – while I’ve been talking mostly about his lyrics (and they are some of the wittiest, cleverest lyrics I’ve heard from any songwriter active in my lifetime), he apparently writes music-first, which I personally find astonishing. His music is always both interesting and catchy (while firmly rooted in traditional song structures – Stew very much regards himself as a craftsman rather than some tortured artist racked by the muse) and perfectly fitted to the lyrics – given the relative complexity of his lyrics and the simplicity of the music (not a criticism in any way of it – as three-minute pop songs go Stew’s are among the best) I would have thought that writing the lyrics first would be much easier.
The album finishes (apart from two hidden tracks) with the title track, which combines one of the best melodies of the album (accompanied by Stew’s own guitar, prominent for almost the first time on the album) with a great story that deserves to be posted in full:
The naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck you
She’s got seventeen boyfriends and an eight o’clock class to get to
She’s smoking hash all night with some coffee amaretto
She’s asking stupid questions ’bout my groovy black ghetto
And the naked Dutch painter in the kitchen does not want to fuck youThe naked Dutch painter in your bed does not want to sleep with you
She just feels like being naked you don’t think that you can take with her next to you
She says “Gandhi used to sleep between two naked women”
But you’re not the Mahatma that’s a whole ‘nother religion
And the naked Dutch painter in the bed does not want to sleep with youThe naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need you
She missed her eight o’clock class ’cause she couldn’t get her ass up off of you
So you walk along the Rhine and jump back in the sack
If this is how they do it then you’re never going back
And the naked Dutch painter in the morning does not want to need youThe naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love you
She’s throwing fluoresecent paint accompanied by a Mingus tape that she stole from you
It’s performance art porno under trippy black light
She left with her professor, he can stretch her canvas tight
And the naked Dutch painter in the gallery does not want to love youThe naked Dutch painter in his arms does not want to see you
You are drunk and you are sore, you busted down professor’s door yet he feels for you
So a wicked joint is rolled and it mellows out your head
But you’re not feeling too bold when he invites you into bed
While the naked dutch painter in his arms does not want to see youSo now you’re on your own in a freezing pay phone around daybreak
You’re feeling so shitty that you’re calling Culver City just to bellyache
But there’s nobody home except your answering machine
So you write a stupid poem about the freaky shit you’ve seen
Like the naked Dutch painter in the morning sky who hovers above youThe naked Dutch painter at your door says she finally loves you
But she said “I’ll see you later” when she saw another naked painter sitting in the kitchen with you
Well she seemed a little shattered then she got a little pissed
When she saw that you were flattered by the fact that you’d be missed
While the naked Dutch painter at your door says…
(ha ha)
All Stew’s albums deserve a much wider audience, and after The Naked Dutch Painter I recommend Joys & Concerns, the second (and to my mind best) Negro Problem album. Unfortunately, on Amazon a ‘new’ copy goes for $299 , but you can probably pick up a second hand copy significantly cheaper (or torrent it, given that it’s been out of print for many years – but if you do, make sure you buy it if it goes back into print. This is music worth paying for…)
Albums You Should Own – “&” by Kristian Hoffman
Sorry for the lack of posts recently – I’ve had a touch of post-viral depression. I *will* spend all next week posting about Batman along with my usual posts though. (The couple of weeks after will be light again though as I’ll be visiting the in-laws in the land of dial-up). So expect two posts tomorrow – Batman and Big Finish.
& by Kristian Hoffman is one of those albums that everyone who hears it loves, but which flies under the radar. On the very few occasions I’ve spoken about it to anyone who’s heard it, they’ve always said “Wow, I love that album, but I don’t know anyone else who’s heard it!”
Hoffman is someone who’s been on the fringes of success for decades – he was in the obscure art-punk band the Mumps in the 70s, and since then has worked with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to Carolyn Edwards – and &, his third ‘solo’ album, is actually an album of duets that pulls collaborators from throughout the world of interesting music. Hoffman’s style is closest to the glam-punk of 70s Sparks, but he also has elements of powerpop, prog-pop of the ELO/Wings variety and a healthy helping of pre-rock pop. Possibly the easiest way to describe his music is to imagine Sondheim or Cole Porter as produced by Jeff Lynne, and while & is his third album it feels in many ways like a first album – it’s a collection of songs written over several decades, Anyone But You, for one, dating back to the 1970s.
The list of collaborators on the album could easily double as a list of the most interesting still-working musicians alive in 2002 (when the album was released) – Stew, Darian Sahanaja of the Wondermints, Russel Mael of Sparks, Van Dyke Parks, Rufus Wainwright – combined with some choices that one could see as being chosen for camp value ( Maria McKee, El Vez (“The Mexican Elvis”), Paul ‘Pee Wee Herman’ Rubens) but who actually all turn in performances every bit as good as the more critically acclaimed performers.
From the opening “Gimme Some Lovin’” riff of Devil May Care, with Hoffman affecting an almost Dylanesque nasal voice (very different from the rest of the album) doubled by Russel Mael’s vibrato falsetto and backed by crunchy Big Star guitars, it’s obvious that this is going to be a musically interesting album, but it’s when that song gets to the middle eight that Hofmann’s real songwriting strengths start to show, with the line “Some postulate reward if you should mortify the flesh”.
Hoffman is one of the most articulate lyricists I’ve heard in years, with a huge working vocabulary and a wicked sense of humour. The album is just full of quotable lines – “Devil may care but I am disinclined to lend belief/to any square who spends his time bemoaning just how brief it is”, “It’s like a hideous chorus by the post-Mary Wilson Supremes”, “We sensed by scent that this brief sentiment was overripe”, “No sex in heaven – where do I sign?”, “This passion play was engineered, but when the mutant sheep appeared,”.
I’m more of a music person than a lyric person, so when even *I* am quoting huge chunks of the lyrics you know they’re special, but the music more than matches them. Get It RIght This Time, for example, has a first verse that could come from one of Noel Coward’s better musicals, all sparse strings and elegance, before going into a big musical-theatre chorus. The second verse then duplicates the arrangement of the first, but with Abba-esque piano, before we have two instrumental variations of the melody, one a perfect baroque pastiche, all piccolo trumpet and harpsichord, the other shredding 80s hair-metal guitar, before a return to the chorus and a final “Little Help From My Friends” tag. But none of this is in quotes, it just feels like the natural place for the music to go.
The album’s full of things like that, and even the less musically ambitious material is still well worth a listen. Anyone But You, with Stew and Heidi of the Negro Problem, for example, is one of only four or five guitar-based pop songs recorded in the last decade to be worth a damn.
And while the album is nothing so gauche as a ‘concept album’ (except in the sense that every song is a collaboration) there are themes that recur over and over again. Religion comes up in almost every song – obviously in song titles like God If Any Only Knows, No Sex In Heaven and Devil May Care, but also in lines like “Scarecrow, those who seek metaphor compare/Scarecrow, that other man left hanging there/But it seems to me/That comes too easily” and the whole of Anyone But You. There’s also a carnality to the lyrics, and an examination of sexuality and what sexuality means in modern life, and especially what it means to be gay – Scarecrow, the song just quoted, is about the murder of Mathew Shephard, a gay man murdered in Wyoming by homophobic fuckwits ten years ago, and is a haunting counterbalance to the more upbeat lines like “gonna put the ‘oo’ in the human condition” that predominate.
The best song by far is the ballad Sex In Heaven, one of the best ballads I’ve heard in years, whose lyrics deserve quoting in full:
It’s heaven sent, this miracle soprano you employ
That makes an angel of a boy, earthbound.
My soul took wing upon the sound.
I guess I still can’t face the implications of this gift.
There’s something pagan in the lift — airborne.
And why should soul from flesh be torn?That’s what it costs to buy a note so pure and high
and so divine: no sex in heaven.
The bottom line: no sex in heaven. Where do I sign?Then came the man whose eyes professed the love that we had sought;
a love that’s never to be caught or held.
Some ancient pact can’t be dispelled. What’s the surprise?
The storied sacrifice is often told: that this perfection must be cold,
and hard — where once we joined by scalpel scarred.What gimpy God aflame with jealous rage decreed that you
Like him must be unwhole; allowed to yearn?
But if the need that you profess is once returned,
You slap it down! (If I should ask, and I always ask.)I guess I still can’t help the sickened impulse to admire
the score that this castrati choir translates
that soothes as it emasculates.
What amazes me about this album is that it’s one of the *very* few albums I’ve heard in recent years where *everything* is well-crafted. The songs are absolutely superb – they remind me of Elvis Costello at his best or a less grating Randy Newman, oblique and intelligent with lines echoing and commenting on each other (for example in Revert To Type there’s a line about “the island of Dr Morose”, which is quite a good pun in itself, but is also an echo of the ‘mutant sheep’ earlier in the song), the arrangements are imaginative, ranging over almost every form of popular music from Sparks to Cole Porter to the Beach Boys, and the performances are stunning (my favourite is Stew’s full-throated roar on Anyone But You, but there’s not a bad performance on there).
& can be bought on CD and MP3 from CDBaby, or downloaded from eMusic. His first two solo albums, and a compilation of the Mumps’ 70s recordings, are also available from the same sources and well worth getting, but this is his masterpiece. He’s apparently also working on an album produced by Nick Walusko from the Wondermints, which I can’t wait to hear…
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