Earn This

Tell me if this sounds familiar: Pop/rock group makes a hit, gets unjustly labeled as a “one-hit wonder,” releases a dark and emotional masterpiece that witnesses the band crumbling, breaks up soon afterwards, disappears for years despite some generous re-appraisals of their later work, finally re-appears.

Trick question! I described (at least) two bands. Weezer famously vanished after Pinkerton. Eve 6, less famously, disappeared after It’s All In Your Head. The differences? First, Weezer disappeared for a mere five years. Eat your heart out, Rivers. Eve 6 is returning nine-plus years after It’s All In Your Head hit. Tomorrow, the lead single for their fourth album will be released. (You can already stream it here.)

Another difference, of course, is Eve 6 never made an impact the way that Weezer did. Eve 6′s fanbase, I’m sure, has remained devoted. But the band never gained traction the way Weezer did before their 2001 comeback.

Perhaps the biggest difference of all between Weezer’s much-talked-about return a decade ago and Eve 6′s imminent return is that Weezer’s comeback was… well… a decade ago. The music scene has changed drastically since then. Rock — especially rock by slick pop-rockers with a number in their band name — is out, way out.

So, why come back? What’s waiting for Eve 6?

Colton and I are waiting for Eve 6.

Of course, Colton — a good friend and fellow Earn This writer — has proven his allegiance to his beloved bands from late nineties and early aughts with his thoughtful consideration of the significance of Third Eye Blind’s Ursa Major. Many critics would have argued a comeback album from a band that many didn’t really miss didn’t even warrant that type of thought.

But comebacks are fascinating. They’re important to fans. They raise important questions about why we love music, and what is loyalty, and how much is it worth. I will have something to say when the day comes and Eve 6′s fourth CD hits shelves. Colton might, too. We did see an Eve 6 concert together, after all.

I had happily ignored all buzz about Eve 6′s return, but some details have leaked the past few weeks. It’s starting to seem like this return was made specifically for me, or at least people like me: we are the people who bought Eve 6 singles and albums long after the band disappeared, people who remembered the tiny band that could. To us, Eve 6 is a team of three men who helped us realize how quickly an unchecked life can sink to depression and emptiness. That’s the cycle of their three albums: guy feels lonley, guy has sex, guy feels lonely again.

And, occasionally, they reminded us that there’s something elusive and something meaningful that can be gleaned from all the toil. What were the last words they said to us before they confusingly disappeared, seemingly forever? “Pick yourself up off the ground.”

That final beat is a clever little wink, but it reminds me of a great line from another band I love, Relient K: “Nourished back to life by life alone.” Eve 6 didn’t really give us a reason to aim for a higher contentment. They just asked us to assume there was a reason, and pointed out what might happen if we didn’t make that assumption. Maybe they could teach us this because they were there themselves, “still here waiting” for that transient happiness.

All signs point to this long-delayed comeback being one for the fans, a follow-up to the career trajectory they rapidly fulfilled (rise-fall) a decade ago. Maybe they’ll crystallize some ideas that have brewing in our minds since they disappeared and give us a broad perspective of our lives. Or maybe they’ll just ask us to remember what we were when they said goodbye, to live in those past moments that Eve 6 has accompanied us.

If the lead single is to be trusted, Eve 6 will ask us to re-discover the complex, hurting aimlessness that they depicted so effectively in the early 2000s. It’s not that they want us to pretend we’re suffering the same ways we did ten years ago — just that they want us relate that suffering to the trials we tackle now. I’m okay with that. I’m excited to hear where Eve 6 takes me, what they make me feel and think. It’ll be an immensely personal journey, one that won’t make a major splash on the pop culture radar the way Weezer once did.

But it’s a comeback for me. It’s almost ten years in the making, and it’s one I’ll gladly share with the readers of this site when the time comes.

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed the past year, regardless of when it was released.

Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75

Album, 2005

In his retrospective of The Arctic Monkeys’ first three albums, Grant cites a theory about artists’ third albums.

It’s not a perfect rule, but it’s interesting to think about bands’ trajectories after their first three albums, especially artists whose legacies we more or less already know.

Grant listed Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen’s third album, as an example of a standout third effort. I’d go one step further and call it the ultimate third album. That’s not to say it’s the best third album of all time — Rolling Stone lists it as the second best behind London Calling – but it epitomizes and perfects everything that’s special about third albums in an artist’s creative trajectory.

Let’s look at Bruce’s first three albums and the career arc they set up:

• Greetings from Asbury Park – Bruce sounds like a Dylan knockoff, but shows off his prodigious aptitude for romantic poetry and profound rock. He concerns himself with adolescent passion.
• The Wild, The Innocent, and The E-Street Shuffle – A magnificent sequel. Suddenly, he’s less of a troubadour and more of a groundbreaking, jazzy bandleader. He sentimentalizes youthful idealism as he bids it adieu. His sonic palette verges on sprawling.
• Born to Run – Bruce leaves behind his youth and its over-optimistic ideals. But instead of abandoning romance, he recaptures it with a “last-chance power drive” — a willful exultation of passion. The music matches the theme, carefully constructed and monumental.

It’s almost too perfect a three-album arc. Where does he go from there? As it turned out, he had plenty left. Maybe that’s the point of third albums; they demonstrate an artist’s proclivity for developing craft and building something meaningful over time.

And so we find Springsteen at this crux for his first trip concert trip to Europe. Springsteen is very likely the most notable and influential American artist of the post-Beatles era, but he was greeted with skepticism in England, the hotbed of rock greatness.

It’s difficult to call this time frame Springsteen’s “best era” as he’s re-peaked many times since. But, for my money, Springsteen was never better than the he was at the release of Born to Run. He would later plumb some mighty dark, mighty American depths. But never truer, purer, better. Never as melodic or romantic or intoxicating.

Hammersmith Odeon, London ‘75 records Bruce’s first ever concert in Europe, if I’m not mistaken. It’s hard to imagine anyone, even the most skeptical listener, leaving that concert hall with any doubt that Bruce Springsteen had earned his hype.

Bruce sounds irrepressible on every track. He captures the spirit of every song and delivers it in an exciting package that sometimes closely resembles the studio version, sometimes doesn’t. Almost every song is improved over its studio original. The complete absence of a lull in quality is very impressive.

There’s music that I like, but that I understand if people don’t get. I think Lady Gaga’s first two albums are genius. I think Be Here Now is damn close to five stars. I think the Grease soundtrack is a masterpiece.

You could present solid reasoning and convince me out of any of those assertions. And I wouldn’t begrudge you for it. All of those claims are disputable. You might not get that music, just like I don’t really get Kashmir by Led Zeppelin or Sympathy for the Devil.

But Hammersmith Odeon, London ‘75, anything less than great? I wouldn’t buy it. I can’t think of anyone I know who would dislike this album. It’s the single most concise, most accessible account to Bruce’s ability to transcend genre and entertainment into art. If you don’t understand Bruce’s hype after this album, chances are you won’t ever.

If nothing else, the live album earns this spot because of the stripped down rendition of “For You.” The new arrangement transforms the song into a heartbreaking climax of love. It’s a top 100 track for me, eight and a half minutes of perfection.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t call the entire album “perfection.” It’s too sprawing and complex to have smooth edges. Thirteen minute jams, like “E-Street Shuffle” here, are, by their very nature, imperfect. But if not perfect, every inch of Hammersmith Odeon, London ‘75 is indispensable and dazzling.

Previously: #10 Adventureland

Up next: An epic conclusion, an end of an era

Need a last-minute Christmas gift for yourself?

Look, Jews et al., any occasion you can come up with is fine — Scientologists have Freedom Day to look forward to on the 30th — just find a reason and make sure you’ve got The Whole Shebang ready to tap on New Year’s Eve.  This is the 2011 release from Audiostrobelight, a bunch of energetic speakerbusters from Virginia Beach, and it is going to stay up all night with you.  Remember fun?  Remember loud, dance, party, and rock-out?  Those guys remember you too, and they want you to buy Audiostrobelight’s album.

If you’re too busy to read this article, just check out the band’s own promo.  (Also, quit your job, you’re wasting your life!)  You’ll hear immediately what you can expect from The Whole Shebang: driving pop-punk that’s stuffed to the liner with hype, and not the empty kind.  Every song has that classic tug-of-war between fast, danceable rock and half-time breakdowns when you get to jump up and down and pump your fist and taste the sweat flying off the girls and guys all around you.  Did you see in the promo when they dropped the balloons on the audience, or the confetti and streamers?  If you aren’t into that, we can’t be friends.

“Okay,” you say, “Mr. O.,” because you and I aren’t on a first-name basis, “but the fast electronic dance-rockcore pop-punkadelia scene came and went, and hasn’t been heard from since 2005!  So why make such a big hubbub about one on-the-rise revivalist band?”  Two reasons off the top of my head.  First, I wasn’t done with that scene yet when it died.  Second, Audiostrobelight fits into the leading edge of that movement, not the middle, and looks set to evolve it into something more expansive.

Just check out their line-up:

• Bass, guitar, guitar/keys, drums.  (Ho-hum.)
• Dual vocalists.  (Okay, standard fare for the genre.)
• Electric violin/mandolin.  (Now we’re talking!)

And, since you mention Yellowcard, that’s an apt comparison.  Some of these songs would’ve fit perfectly on Ocean Avenue, and Audiostrobelight also gives us plenty of Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High, Cartel’s Chroma, and the rowdiest bits of Simple Plan’s No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls.  But we also get rhythms that sample the escapist banner-waving of Less Than Jake’s ska-born Anthem and the alt-metal demolition drive of The Receiving End of Sirens’ Between the Heart and the Synapse.  Variety is packaged in to keep your body parts moving four or five different ways every song, which adds significantly to The Whole Shebang‘s replay value.  Plus, Yellowcard didn’t have a mandolin.

Combine this ability with the kind of live show that the band themselves describe as “ridiculously debaucherous,” and you can see how, on the strength of their State of the Art EP from 2009, these guys have developed a ravenous fan base who gives them a run for their money in passion.  Along with Warped Tour credentials, Audiostrobelight has opened for Cobra Starship, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Anberlin, and the aforementioned Fall Out Boy, to name a few.  While they’re not national headliners yet, take them seriously when they sing, in A Fifth of Feelgood, “This town won’t be the death of me!”  (“This town” being VA Beach, which fits nicely when you remember how Less Than Jake was always repping Gainesville, FL.)

Hey, is that the first lyric I’ve dropped?  Let’s open up these seven tracks.  Because it’s always worth mentioning when a band starts their album with a song called You’re Not Funny, You Stupid Clown.  It’s well positioned: when Audiostrobelight makes it big, you’ll be able to listen back to this one and hear “Give me the chance / Give me the time,” “We ain’t on top but we ain’t bottom,” and “We’re gonna reach for the stars / We’re gonna look past mountains.”  I’d love to see that premonition come true.

A Fifth of Feelgood lays all their cards on the table.  Keys are featured, the violin is used as an effective instrument and never a gimmick, and we get smacked in the face repeatedly by the JE-JUN, JE-JE-JE-JUN, JE-JUN in the bass and drums.  They’re singing the same adolescent dreams that we were crooning along with half a decade ago.  Whether they’re giving a friend a long hard send-off in Anchors Aweigh or begging for another chance with an “old flame” in Argyle, the constant in Audiostrobelight’s pushes and pleas is emotion.  All the bands they learned from used to be called “emo,” didn’t they?

While Drop the Act is the most anthemic shout-along, those last two songs I mentioned might be my favorites.  Argyle gives the band the chance to show that they’re perfectly capable of bringing things down and singing sweetly; they’re just happier when it’s all about “Going pound for pound / I bring the noise like your nightmare sounds.”  And the album closes on a fade-out at the end of Anchors Aweigh with three layered vocal lines carrying three strands of feelings.  Two-man harmonies assure “You’re better off without me” while the lead undercuts the sentiment with “I never want to trace this back / And let the record show I’m happy once again” and the gang vocals chant “Anchors aweigh, my friend!”

Where the f*** are they???

Audiostrobelight caught my attention by throwing back to beloved bands gone by, but what really hooked me was the depth of The Whole Shebang.  Every turn on my iTunes shows new traces of a band I didn’t know they had in them.  Excellent arrangements reward a careful listener, who will find every instrument playing a carefully crafted role to make you answer the call: “Let’s go / Let me see you put ‘em up right now / Tonight we’re gonna have some fun!”

Do yourself a favor this holiday season and pick up a copy for yourself.  The Whole Shebang also makes a great gift for anyone on your list who doesn’t suck.

This is part of my 2011 wrap-up series, A Few of My Favorite Things, in which I discuss what I enjoyed this year, regardless of when it was released.

#13 Larry And His Flask

Self-described “hillbilly band”

I remember reading an article somewhere — maybe it was in the thought-provoking Ripped — that the role of opening acts has greatly diminished in the past forty years.

During the adolescence of rock, people were often just as curious to see the opening act as they were excited to see the headliners — according to the writer. The opening acts of major bands served as a sort of farm system, allowing bands to build buzz as they improved their craft on the road.

Nowadays, the article generalized, people just show up about an hour after the start time listed on the ticket in order to arrive when main act goes up on stage. Opening acts are a largely unnecessary relic of the past. As technology improves and barriers to discovering new bands fall, the necessity of building buzz on the road diminishes.

But the most unexpected, joyful musical discovery of the year for me was the opening act for a concert of one of my all time favorite bands, Streetlight Manifesto.

The show had two opening acts. The first was forgettable. The second one, however, immediately caught my attention when it went up on stage wielding a rather unusual instrumentation: banjo, mandolin, string bass, standing drum kit.

Then they started playing, something like this:

The following progression approximates my reaction.

The Streetlight show afterwards was great, but after the show I went to the Larry and His Flask booth. I bought a T-shirt, met the bass player, and genuinely thanked them for rocking my world that night. When I went home, I downloaded their free EP and found YouTube clips of their shows. I looked up their future show dates and learned more about them.

In short, I lived the “opening act” experience as it was originally conceived.

Larry and His Flask will never rank as a historic favorite of mine, but the band is a gem. They have the trappings of both a bluegrass band (instrumentation, attitude) and a Jersey ska/punk band (composition, scene). It’s a blend that, frankly, seems like such an obvious recipe for success that I’m surprised I didn’t think of it before I heard them. You can buy the first album (since their reinvention; they started life as a straight-ahead punk band) on iTunes, among other platforms. It’s also on Spotify and Grooveshark.

Larry and His Flask earn their spot on this list for filling an inventive musical niche with expert craft and a killer show, but also for reminding me of the joy of the unexpected discovery. I so often find music based off of raving reviews or other positive recommendations. Sometimes it’s more fun to have low expectations surpassed than high expectations matched.

Previously: #14 Portal 2

Up next: Simmons starts a silly site

When was the last time you heard a band credit their breakthrough to PureVolume?  It almost feels as if that site was a phase, something you love in high school and then grow out of.  Nowadays we’ve got oodles of options like Spotify, Pandora, and MoonPlayer to help us  find new music and Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and old man MySpace to help us listen to it.

In 2009, shortly before being absorbed into the same media conglomerate that runs Kim Kardashian’s website, PureVolume gave a big bump to a couple of kids from Tacoma, Washington playing under the moniker He Is We.  Twenty-four hours and tens of thousands of plays later, Rachel Taylor and Trevor Kelly were on someone’s radar.  Because no matter how many indie/emo kids “graduate” and start putting PureVolume in a corner, the leaders of the music industry always save it a dance.  In December of 2010, He Is We’s debut album My Forever was released on Universal Motown.

They go with a modern casual-meets-dirty-hippie look.

For me, it’s tough knowing whether to appraise My Forever as an album or as a collection of songs.  Not that every record needs a unifying concept; but artists are made great in my eyes by their ability to produce a cohesive whole in which it sounds like all the parts grew in the same garden.  He Is We displays a precocious knack for arrangements that bring out the best in every song, with the drawback that the differences between songs are all the more pronounced.

Let’s start with commonalities, to give you a basis.  Lyricist and vocalist Rachel brings a Sara Bareillesque strength and a rock sensibility, like a modern-day Michelle Branch.  (I’m being told that Michelle Branch is still making music.  We’ll see how that pans out for her.)  Tie that in with all the romanticism of a Colbie Caillat or a Taylor Swift and you’ve got… you know, for all the chicks out there on the mic, Rachel might be fitting into her own little slot!  That’s certainly true of her quick poetry: it flows like water, better than anyone else on the pop market.  Rachel’s voice is what defines the sound of He Is We.

The music is based around straightforward, classic song structures featuring whatever instrumentation works on a song-by-song basis.  You’ll hear some songs with a deeper bass than you’d expect, including “And Run”, where the bass is featured and foundational.  Guitars and pianos vie for playing time across the album while multi-tracked vocal harmonies float in the background more often than not.  The use of orchestral strings is effectively tied to the drama of each piece.  Occasional timpanis and concert bass drums give you the impression that there’s actually an orchestra involved, not just a bunch of session violinists.

As much as the diversity of sounds enhances each track, it’s where I start to wonder about the cohesion of My Forever as a whole.  “Love Life”, a slow-and-fast break-up ditty, brings in a brass section for the final minute.  There is exactly one duet, “All About Us”, in which Underoath’s former drummer and “clean vocalist”, Aaron Gillespie, passes verses back and forth with Rachel.  Poor Aaron was replaced when, in August 2011, a new version of the song was released featuring Owl City singing the boy parts.

From the charming lovey-doveyness of “Forever & Ever”, “Everything You Do”, and “Happily Ever After” to the frustrated adolescent stirrings of “Blame It on the Rain” and “Fall”, the overall quality of the writing and production maintains a ready-for-radio standard.  Normally I’d expect track 2 or maybe 3 to be the anchor, ready to hit shelves as the lead single.  Here it’s not so clear.  If anything, I’d expect the sing-along “Happily Ever After”, a manifesto of hopeful love if ever there was one, to be the fan favorite, but it’s all the way back at track 5.  And the bonus acoustic track – which I admit was an eyebrow raiser for me on a debut album – is a reprise of track 4, “And Run”.  It’s hard to grasp the logic behind the sequencing, though I guess it’s a moot point if each song is terrific individually and most iPods are tuned to Shuffle anyway.

So let me get to the one song that is just from a completely different place from the rest.  Right in the middle of the album, before the tunes about being single and after the tunes about being adorable, is a song about a double murder.  “Kiss It Better” tells a story of a vengeance kill after a man’s wife is shot, from the perspective of the surviving subject who is sharing a prison cell with his overwhelming memories.  No reason for the initial action is given.  If we can handle the lyrics, the music itself alternates between sparse acoustics and haunting full-orchestra crescendos.  My impression of the album as a whole would change radically if this emotive elegy were the final track and the final thought we were left with, so different from all that came before.  As it is, the mood it creates so tangibly is difficult to shake when we return to tra la las and oh, oh, ohs.

We can’t know for sure who’s responsible, but I’d like to credit the atmosphere and musical realism of “Kiss It Better” in part to producer Casey Bates, whose work with Pacific Northwest bands like Portugal. The Man and Gatsby’s American Dream I have loved for a long time now.  Casey worked on “Blame It on the Rain” and “Fall” as well.  Aaron Sprinkle, another of Washington’s best producers (see his work with Eisley, Anberlin, Acceptance, etc.), did his magic with “All About Us” and “Prove You Wrong”.

I’m still not sure where Rachel and Trevor were coming from as they pieced together My Forever.  Their artistic focus is something we might get to see develop over time.  But their ability and quality is already ahead of their age.  To find out for yourself, go ahead and stream their whole album for free off MySpace.  Or take a look at their PureVolume, where they’re streaming 40 tracks and giving away eight and where, at the time of this writing, they’re getting ready to ring the bell for their 5,000,000th play.

I was very lucky to be offered a lovely piece of property to build a career on.  I started building a house on it, but it wasn’t necessarily a house I would want to live in.  So I ripped down that house, and I worked with these great lumberjacks to build a really cool cabin – a place I want to drink whiskey in and hang out until the sun rises.

To the founder of our feast: a piano ditty written at age 16.

Forget everything you know about Vanessa Carlton.  Realistically, forget the one thing you ever knew about Vanessa Carlton – the “da-da-da da-da-da dum” song from those five-year-old Zales commercials.  The voice you heard in “A Thousand Miles” belonged to Carlton, as did the melody; but the orchestra, the overproduction, and the publicity that made us love the song all the way to three Grammy nominations were largely handiwork of hitmaker Ron Fair.  Now forget everything you know about Ron Fair.

What would it sound like if Vanessa Carlton made her own album?

Answering that question required a transformation. Carlton spent two years as a recluse, she says, absorbing and moving internally but not creating much of anything.  Then came the instrumental pieces “that probably no one will ever hear.”  Only when a personal reflection chanced to grow into a fully lyrical song did the veil draw back and the possibilities of a return to the album format as an artistic outlet become possible.

She determined to fund this “arts & crafts” project herself to avoid any label’s influence until it was done.  Under the guidance of voices from the 70′s, she sought to record the entire thing to tape to enable a true classic vinyl experience.  All of the songs were written and arranged by Carlton herself explicitly for this album and never drawn from a well of old material.  This was to be the album she had always wanted to make.

The names and places who contributed to the recording are a cabinet full of gems.  The producer is Steve Osborne, who brought to life Doves’ “Catch the Sun”.  Musicians Patrick Hallahan (My Morning Jacket) and Ari Ingber (The Upwelling) appear as players while the legendary Stevie Nicks – Carlton’s friend, mentor, and occasional collaborator – sequenced the tracklist.  Most of the work was done at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios, while the world-famous Capital Children’s Choir worked at Abbey Road to lend their talents to four tracks.

I guess by now you might be wondering what the album actually sounds like.

Art by Jo Ratcliffe.

Rabbits on the Run kicks off with an unassuming piano line and soon echoed, multitracked vocals are layered on top of it.  Track one is the single , “Carousel”, which features hopeful lyrics, plenty of uplift in the chords, the soft heartbeat of a bass drum, and just a little bit of Osborne’s mellotron that is absolutely flute-like.  At the bridge, “Carousel” opens into a grand canon led by the children’s choir with many of the instruments taking up their parts.  It comes off as charming that this song is centered around a hook that is nothing more than an ascending C-Major scale.

Later songs like “Hear the Bells” build an unabashedly creepy atmosphere.  A rich darkness surfaces and resurfaces throughout the ten tracks, always receding again to a more driving melodic sensibility that faces forward with its chin up.  Gone are the childish attachments and dependencies that haunted older material like “Pretty Baby” and “Rinse”, replaced wholesale by stories of acceptance: of wrongs, of destiny, and of the unknowable.

While an ambient spirit claims the early and late tracks, the same lyrical approach is taken to more rocking and romping tunes in the middle, especially the infectious “Dear California” and follow-up “Tall Tales for Spring”.  “Get Good” stands out to me as a campfire song that begs for a country-style cover.  I’d pay good money to hear what Tim McGraw and his missus could do with that sheet music.

Through the album’s progression, Osborne’s mastery of expansive and engrossing soundscapes shines.  His own instrumental contributions match Hallahan’s in their cleanness and frequent subtlety.  Carlton herself has an effortless, almost conversational voice that is however not the most pure.  (She once said she used to smoke and drink whiskey just to make her sound more “leathery.”)  Some listeners may wish they could hear the vocal qualities of a Carole King or a Norah Jones on some verses, myself included.  But her speech, like her songwriting and fingerwork, is not lacking for beauty; and this is, after all, her record.

Stevie Nicks must have had an easy time choosing the closing track, “In the End”.  Musically, it is a slowed-down sample from “Tall Tales for Spring” that glows with an eerie electricity.  What few words there are come out muted, buried ominously beneath the sounds.  The dearth of lyrics is unsettling in itself, as if the songwriter abandons us to groaning emptiness as the album “disintegrates back into nothing.”

The creative process behind the album fed on inspiration from Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and the Tolkienian mysticism of the village of Box, Wiltshire, where Real World Studios is located.  Carlton has had an occasionally uncomfortable time promoting the immensely personal album; making the late-night talk show rounds was visibly less enjoyable for her than conducting one-on-one interviews with people who actually remember who she is, and you can see a back-and-forth between these modes in her brief appearance on Fox’s “Good Day LA”

The experience of making Rabbits on the Run was a gift for Vanessa Carlton.  But the album itself was intended for anyone who likes to be wrapped in a blanket of beautiful music; for anyone who misses the classic approach to analog recording; and, of course, for the fans who have stayed with Carlton through her fall from the spotlight and even through her quietest years.  She has a special name for these last ones:

Dear Phantom Friends,

The album, the collaboration, the arts and crafts project that is Rabbits on the Run, is a vault of melodies, philosophies, and questions that will forever preserve the past three and a half years of my life. A chunk of time that has reshaped who I am and has humbled me. The process of making the record was restorative and prickly and shook me out of a ten year slumber. It was also magical. I made this record with a group of artists that I never thought I’d get to work with. On the eve of this release, as I type in to black buttons, and stare at a glowing screen in my hotel room, I feel grateful that I’m able to create music and send it out into the world like some sort of ship on the sea. It is how I connect. It is how I stay alive. I realize now that this record isn’t mine anymore, it belongs to the hearts and brains of those that connect with it. And I humbly hand it over. I hope that it brings you to life in the way that it brought me to life.

Love

Vanessa

That Matt Nathanson has hips that take no breaks.

And he completely won me over last night. From the broad perspective I’d gained by hearing “Come on Get Higher” on the radio a few times, I was sure he was a pretty boy with a guitar in the vein of, let’s say, Rob Thomas in his solo years. One night in a room with Matt and a sold-out House of Blues full of his best friends has convinced me that he is about as far from that as possible: he’s actually the second coming of Rob Thomas in his Matchbox Twenty years.

Look how sweet he is.

Here’s why I use that comparison. I’ve always felt that the reason Matchbox Twenty enjoyed the enormous success they deserved (with their debut album achieving certified Diamond sales) is because the lead singer and his lyrics were totally swoon-worthy for the chicks, but the band rocked hard and had the respect of men; and with their cross-generational appeal, nobody had any reservations about listening to this band. I believe that Matt Nathanson fits that mold. The female fans aren’t hard to capture when you have such a cute beard and you like to spend your days crooning about love to the tune of your own nylon strings. The boys will sign on for the hard-hitting songs that, to my delight, apparently pervade his body of work, and for his hilarious crowd interaction. Getting the old and the young to come together at table… well, that falls out of a classic pop sensibility in the songwriting.

Matt’s understanding of his diverse musical roots was built into his show. He and his lead guitarist managed a spot-on cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. When playing expandable bridges, he gave nods to past and present influences alike by sampling Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Cee-Lo Green, Demi Lovato, and others, always bringing the crowd along with him. When the whole band was in acoustic mode for a two-song mini-set, Matt decided to scrap whatever was supposed to be the back half in favor of attempting an impromptu rendition of Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” just because he had heard the crowd singing along with it in the set break after the opener. None of his band had rehearsed this song – it’s not in their repertoire – but they played the entire thing, including all lyrics (with full crowd support!), and the lead guitarist was clever enough to put down his instrument, pick up something electric, and completely nail the major solo. It was incredible.

Part of what made that possible, and what makes Matt’s music so much better than I expected, is that he has a band. I have a sort of superstition that I’ve built up overt ime where I avoid artists who play under their own name, because that’s what you do when you “make your own music” and use session players and touring musicians instead of a band who has input into the material. Matt had a bassist, drummer, keyboardist, and guitarist, each of whom played interesting parts. They were not collectively relegated to simple background material designed to put the focus on lyrical melodies and not take too long to write. When the band went into acoustic mode, the bassist went to string bass (which was totally sick on Whitesnake) and the percussionist walked out to the front of the stage and whipped out an everloving djembe.

The inter-song banter was lengthy, made worthwhile by the fact that it was always entertaining and by the full two hours that Matt spent on stage, accounting for only a two-minute turnaround before the encore. He discussed the suggestive nature of a crab singing “Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter”, talked about what it’s like to wake up on Sunday morning next the person you love and realize you’re lying on their devil tail, and dedicated a song to Kim Kardashian’s ass. And I was serious about his hips. The man has a dance-happy lower half, and his legs were wigglin’ and booty was shakin’ through all of his own songs. He even used hip thrusts to help the audience time difficult clapping patterns.

It’s hard for me to remember exactly what I heard, because I was unfamiliar with all of his material before I heard it live last night. (Wikipedia tells me he has seven albums!) But I know that every time I tried to imagine Rob Thomas singing the words, I was pleased. Matt’s voice is a little higher, and in truth his words are less bitter – if he has a “Push”, I’d love to hear it – but his sound is just as edgy and he has the band to back it up. I think he suffers from the fact that there is no “alt” scene anymore, so he gets listed as a pop rock artist and doesn’t get played on as wide a range of stations. But he should.

See, even his former self and bandmates are ashamed to look upon him now.

The bottom line is that this guy is one Santana collaboration away from making me a life-long fan. A song co-written with Mick Jagger à la “Disease” wouldn’t hurt either. He just needs to deny the bright light that will someday call him toward the cozy-as-a-cloud profitability of Adult Contemporary music, try not to ditch his band, and avoid becoming a hollow shell of his former self. Because, you know, I know this one guy who did that.

Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)

There’s a beautiful scene near the end of the 2009 movie Adventureland in which Jesse Eisenberg takes a bus-ride to New York City, peering out of the window. He soaks in the bright lights and city sprawl, and it rejuvenates him after a summer spent cooped up in the dingy theme park he work at.

Turnstiles is a lot like that bus ride: It witnesses Joel’s departure from his brown, sparse west coast life to the dense, colorful comfort of his home state. In turn, he channels equally a Broadway flair and a towering, Born to Run sonic sprawl that leave in the dust his musty James Taylor/Elton John impression of his first three albums.

Four of the eight tracks reference either New York or his departure from California in their titles. He reminisces about his time away (I’ve Loved These Days) and notes that life is still not perfect (Summer, Highland Falls) but makes it clear that New York is where he wants and needs to be (New York State of Mind).

The second reason Turnstiles is a turning point for Joel’s recording career is that he, for the first time, used his touring band in the studio. It makes a world of difference; these tracks are energetic and moving over large stretches in a way that previous albums could achieve for fleeting moments or single tracks.

I’ll go over this a bit more when I discuss his live albums, but Joel has never received enough credit for being an excellent band leader and talent organizer. Joel’s live act never matched the notoriety of legends like Springsteen, but the talent of Joel’s act nearly matches the likes of the E-Street Band. Listen to Songs in the Attic and tell me otherwise. The group’s skill and synergy manifests itself brilliantly on Turnstiles.

There’s not a weak track among the eight here. From the opening Phil Spector impression to the closing piano fade-out, Turnstiles is varied and compelling. Beyond the more diverse inspirations that came from Joel’s change of scenery, this album benefits from Joel reaching a melodic and emotional peak in his writing craft.

A few prominent themes take place during these tracks. One is the idea that life is spent in alternating extremes. “It’s either sadness or euphoria,” notes Summer, Highland Falls, one Joel’s greatest ballads. Say Goodbye to Hollywood observes that “life is a series of ‘hellos’ and ‘goodbyes’ / I’m afraid it’s time for goodbye again.”

As with Joel’s previous albums, maturity is another big topic here. But for the first time, we sense Joel may have done a bit of it himself. All You Wanna Do is Dance — another nearly forgotten gem — gently critiques someone who’s having too much damn innocent fun to grow up. There’s a tone of jealousy in the words.

Joel also straddles the line of maturity in Prelude/Angry Young Man. It works both as a self-skewering and a self-defense. We sense that there’s a bit of self-analysis when he describes the Angry Young Man in the third person, but he also takes the first person as he notes that “I believe I’ve passed the age / Of consciousness and righteous rage,” showing that he’s attempting to move beyond his angriest days (Piano Man).

Another track that considers maturity is James, which sports the most forgettable melody here (though that is not saying much at all). The song a letter to a former friend who gave up his musical career to face the real world. Joel remains skeptical that James made the correct decision: “Do what’s good for you or you’re not good for anybody.” This struggle between practical reality and youthful dreams would come to a head an album later.

The only song which doesn’t really contribute much to the album’s emotional complexity is the closing track, Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway), a bizarre apocalyptic tale of a concert that goes up flames. It’s silly but raucous enough in the right live setting to be an excellent listen..

Still, Turnstiles is Joel’s most lyrically ambitious and successful album thus far. Yet it’s the music, which matches the words point for point in improvement, that really steals the show.

One obvious highlight is Joel’s individual performance work. From the mind melting 128th notes that start Prelude/Angry Young Man (he’s playing them and the accompanying piano notes by himself) to the sweeping beauty of New York State of Mind, Joel’s piano-work would never be better than it is here. His vocal work is excellent, too, covering a variety of tones with accuracy and strength.

But the arrangements and performances are, in general, very strong. The biggest improvement from past albums is the drumming, which Liberty DeVitto, a new addition who would remain a Joel stalwart, uses to bring the tracks to life nearly as much as Joel’s piano does.

To pick a most impressive musical accomplishment, or even a short-list, on this album is challenging. New York State of Mind is one of the most enduring, virtuosic tributes to the Empire State ever recorded. But you can also make a strong case for Summer, Highland Falls as a perfect Joel ballad, Say Goodbye to Hollywood as a spine-tingling Spector (or, rather, Be My Baby) tribute, and Prelude/Angry Young Man as Joel’s manifesto.

Turnstiles rarely sees the love or radio play of Joel’s upcoming stretch of albums, but it marks the beginning of that peak and ranks among Joel’s finest works.

Rating: ★★★ (out of five)

Piano Man is such a satisfying album in part because it’s so obviously a full-hearted, emotionally-draining effort. That makes it less surprising — though no less disappointing — that Streetlife Serenade sounds exhausted and depleted.

Streetlife Serenade crystallizes the faint western hints on Piano Man and ends up with a loose concept album about life on the west coast. But where Elton John’s western album told tales of cowboys and guns and saloons, Joel chronicles the modern frontier: 9-to-5 work life and Los Angeles indulgence and suburban routine. It’s as unromantic as it sounds.

Joel headlines the album with two ill-conceived attempts at profound social observation. The title track (rather, the almost-title track Streetlife Serenader) outlines the theme of everyday encounters that the rest of the album would largely follow. It strives too hard to be profound and fails to redeem itself with a memorable tune.

The second of these is Los Angelenos at least provides a strong melodic background. But it stumbles just as hard as Streetlife Serenader in its attempts at incisive observation. Perhaps a more precise, explicit chronicle of aimless indulgence could have worked along the lines of Captain Jack.

The next track, Great Suburban Showdown, captures a hazy warmth and succeeds slightly more than the opening tracks at chronicling a way of life. It also seems to be a thinly veiled dismissal of his roots on the east coast – “I’m gone with the wind and I won’t be seen again.” It’s a bit ironic then that his homecoming would provide a creative spark two years later.

In all, the opening three tracks feel like a misfire. They foreshadow Joel’s continual failure to be a poet laureate for his age, or really for anyone but himself and Long Island (both of which he’s served well).

Fortunately, the later tracks redeem the package from being a complete disaster. After a brief instrumental detour (more on instrumentals later), Joel unleashes five straight compelling tracks. The best of these is The Entertainer, a song that succeeds on a few levels.

First, it serves a nice complement to Everybody Loves You Now, with Joel now the one “at the center of the stage.” And how does he find it? Just as ungratifying and lonely as he projected. The Entertainer is a brilliant trashing of the music industry: himself, the labels, even the fans.

Particularly memorable is the verse where he reflects on Piano Man’s title track: “It was a beautiful song / But it ran too long / If you’re gonna have a hit / You gotta make it quick / So they cut it down to 3:05.” It recalls the frustrating release of the Piano Man single, summarized here.

The Entertainer is also the most sonically panoramic track Joel had yet recorded. It showcases Joel’s first prominent use of an electric keyboard and features a number of different instruments jamming in the background of each verse.

Its strong melody paired with compelling lyrics and sonic expansion make it the jewel of Streetlife Serenade and one of the better tracks of Joel’s early career.

Another strong track on the album is Roberta, the fifth track on the album. It covers a narrative that’s almost a cliche at this point — falling in love with a prostitute or a stripper — but does so with grace and one great line after another. It’s one of Joel’s few tracks where the lyrics are much more compelling than the song itself.

A few tracks later, Joel really nails the western vibe for the first time in a pair of songs, Last of the Big Time Spenders and Weekend Song. The former is a pretty generic love song and covers a well-trod Joel theme: I’m not rich or fancy, but I can give you my time, music, and love.

The latter, though, is a great example of why it’s worthwhile to go through each of Billy Joel’s albums, not just greatest hits discs. I don’t want to overstate Weekend Song’s greatness, but it’s a track that should have been a single. The song blends a honky-tonk melody and earnest lyrics to a strong effect.

To close out the excellent five-song stretch is the shortest track Joel ever recorded, Souvenir, which clocks in at 1:59. It has a spectacular finality to it: “Every year’s a souvenir that slowly fades away.” In many ways it captures Joel’s struggle for significance that’s defined much of his career. For years, he closed every concert with this song, and I can’t think of a more fitting finale.

Souvenir would have been a perfect album capper, but Joel goes ahead and ruins the close of the album with the inclusion of another instrumental. Here’s my issue with the instrumentals: They’re just taking up space that would have been better used by full songs.

The more defensible of the two instrumentals is Root Beer Rag which seems to echo the ragtime stereotypically played in old west saloons. It matches the western feel of the album. But The Mexican Connection, which closes the album, really makes it sound like Joel just ran out of time to write lyrics. It detracts from an impressive closing stretch on the album and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.

In all, it just feels like there’s less music and fewer ideas on this album than Piano Man — subtract the instrumentals, and you’re left with eight short tracks, one of which runs less than two minutes. And the overall quality of the songs is a grade below the songs on Piano Man in spite of a few gems.

Fortunately, the peak of his career was just on the horizon, and Streetlife Serenade ends up an inconsistent oddity, barely a blip on the radar, rather than a harbinger.

This post is part of The Month of Billy Joel series.

Rating: ★★★★½ (out of 5)

The first minute and a half of Billy Joel’s sophomore album is tremendously revealing, and also a little bit deceiving.

The most obvious development in that opening minute and a half is Joel’s tremendously colorful sound provided by a diverse instrumentation. Where Cold Spring Harbor relied almost entirely on piano and vocals, Piano Man has a vivid soundscape that includes numerous string and wind instruments along with a wider variety of percussion and a distinct bass line.

The next most obvious development in those ninety seconds is a looser, more creative structure; Travelin’ Prayer, the opening track, is a refrain-less beat poem. While Cold Spring Harbor had flirtations with unusual structure (the strange middle verse of Tomorrow Is Today, for example), the songs largely fit a uniform mold that is often absent on Piano Man.

We also learn quickly that Piano Man is a west coast album, not an east coast one. Joel moved to Los Angeles in 1972 after Cold Spring Harbor floundered commercially, and the western influences are obvious. Elton John’s The Tumbleweed Connection is clearly a key inspiration.

From the start of Piano Man, Billy Joel simply sounds more confident, polished, and professional. No longer do these performances feel like rough drafts. He hadn’t yet reached his peak, but every composition and rendition is adequate at worst, which couldn’t be said of Joel’s debut.

While these first impressions all accurately reflect the evolution in Joel’s career found on Piano Man, that first minute and a half also gives one inaccurate impression: That Piano Man is a sentimental and loving album. It definitely isn’t.

That’s not to say Piano Man is entirely cold. In fact, I divide the album thematically into half. Five of the ten tracks here — Travelin’ Prayer, Piano Man, You’re My Home, The Ballad of Billy the Kid, Worse Comes to Worst — showcase Joel’s warm, humane side.

The other half, though, showcases Joel at his darkest. He chronicles all sorts of emotional despair and broken relationships. A recurring theme is the inevitability of solitude and suffering.

The bleakest moment is the seven-minute Captain Jack, which depicts the two-headed beast of addiction and nihilism and how they can lead to a pretty crappy young adulthood. If this sounds grim, it’s because it is; Joel so casually tosses out revelations like “They just found your father [dead] in the swimming pool” and “You can’t understand why your world is so dead,” that the song can be a tough listen.

But in the correct live setting, the song is something of a masterpiece that plumbs and purges the darkest depths of Joel’s soul. It never has a redemptive moment, but its organ-backed chorus is so intensely cathartic that it is somewhat therapeutic.

There are a few other dark moments. For example, Somewhere Along the Line posits that everything nice and enjoyable will eventually go sour, and If I Only Had the Words laments that romance is kind of pointless anyways.

Also on the bleak end of the spectrum are Stop in Nevada and Ain’t No Crime, which cover breakups from two perspectives. Stop In Nevada lambasts a leaving lover even as it can’t really blame her for doing so (“And though she finds it hard to leave him / She knows it would be worse to stay”). Ain’t No Crime, meanwhile, takes pity on the bum who gets left behind even as it smacks him around.

Together, these five tracks paint a pretty dark picture of humans in general, and specifically men: They’re nothing but fleshy bags of impulses. It’s an emotional low-point for Joel, who must have been going through some heavy stuff at the time.

Fortunately, there’s a flip-side of the coin to all this pessimism and desolation. The other half of the album, which is more structurally ambitious and weighted towards the front of the album, takes a slightly more positive light on humanity.

Travelin’ Prayer, whose opening I’ve described, provides a good lens to some of the musical themes on the album. It’s very bluegrass-tinged both in the lyrics and the music, which makes it something oddity in Joel’s oeuvre.

The second notable romantic ballad in Joel’s career (after She’s Got a Way) is You’re My Home, which sports some troublesome wordplay (“instant-pleasure dome” is the notorious phrase here) but makes up for it with some really moving lines — “It always comes as a surprise when I feel my withered roots begin to grow.”

Joel self-mythologizes on The Ballad of Billy the Kid, painting himself (presumably — he claims the song is actually about another Billy, though I doubt that’s entirely true) both a hero and a villain. It seems heavily inspired by Copland’s Hoedown and has some distinct classical elements to it.

And so we come to the elephant that I’ve avoided thus far: Piano Man the album, ultimately, will always be remembered first and foremost for Piano Man the song. Certainly, Piano Man is one of Joel’s finest and most moving works.

It more than overcomes a few bits of clunky writing — “tonic and gin” will never sound quite right, and God only knows what a “real estate novelist” is — with a series of heartbreaking portraits of lives that are sinking as the narrator’s music soars.

It would be a mistake to overstate the prominence of the title track on Piano Man. Though it’s understandably Joel’s trademark song, it never overshadows the magnificent, vivid, aching album around it, one that’s just short of a masterpiece.

This post is part of The Month of Billy Joel series.