Archives : all posts by Jordan

Ruby Johnson - "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)"
Ruby Johnson - "I'll Run Your Hurt Away"

In the the late sixties Ruby Johnson recorded twenty-seven sides for Stax/Volt. From those, Stax could have made four cubes and a triangle, but they could not make a hit, and Johnson was thus dropped from the label. Too bad. Her voice has that proper congestedness for a soul singer - one of the few jobs in which inarticulate displays of emotion are encouraged. Whether through a hoarseness of voice or a reticence in the rhythm of phrasing or simply through the use of grunts and moans where most normal, stable people use words, a soul singer should show us how she feels, in part, by not being able to explain it.

Johnson's soulfulness quotient (her SQ, like Gauss' IQ or Oprah's EQ) is not only benefitted by her employment of all of the above techniques, but also by the Stax house band (note the drumming, in particular, which is powerfully minimal in approach and so perfectly strikes that elusive balance between crispness and resonance in tone) and the Stax house songwriters, who showered Johnson with catching hooks and deep grooves despite her utter inability to overcome her inexplicable public unpopularity.

[Buy]

John Fahey - "Sligo River Blues" (1959)
John Fahey - "Sligo River Blues" (1964)

If you're listening to a version of John Fahey's "Sligo River Blues" right now, I can only assume that you don't understand the most basic fact of the here and now: Today we slip into the august August of The Summer of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. Don't do anything else: don't go to work, don't clean the house, don't check the post, don't eat a meal; just listen to "Second Hand News" and don't stop listening until you've heard the last notes of "Gold Dust Woman," at which point, if you have any interest in maintaining a modicum of happiness in your life, I recommend starting the process anew.

John Fahey had his summer, but this is not it, so keep on scrolling, there's nothing to hear here.

Do you remember The Summer of The Milk-Eyed Mender? Since The Summer of Rumours = The Ultimate Summer, this was our preantepenultimate summer, and, it just so happens, it was the last summer that Sean, Dan and I lived in the same city. That city: Ottawa. Pretty much every night Sean and I would go to a bar and play Scrabble. (Sean is a fine Scrabbler, but an incorrigible cheat.) I'm not sure why we went to bars so often, since we rarely got drunk (Sean is also more or less a teetotaller (i.e. BORING)), but there we were: me embarrassed, Sean ordering a hot chocolate. It was, with the exception of Sean, The Milk-Eyed Mender, and a few other saving graces, a truly awful time.

I don't know what Dan was doing - dictating a novel to his secretary through a megaphone? - but we rarely saw him.

I also wrote four songs that summer. The first, fourth, fifth, and last on the album that my band will release in the next few weeks.

There is a tension in art between inspiration and technique that comes into stark relief for me as I prepare to release upon the expectant masses these songs I've been working on for three years. Even as the songs have been, in some sense, vastly improved through the stages of creation - arranging, practicing, recording, mixing, mastering - they have also, to some extent, become alienated from the ideas that inspired them. The me who continues to edit is necessarily different from the me who wrote - I haven't seen or spoken to Sean in over a year, and all of the turmoil of that time has subsided and faded away - and as I revise and redact, how can I be sure of which me to trust. Surely some artists must continue to believe that their work is interesting and vital beyond the point when it ceases to be so. It's a sad fact that, with few exceptions, mathematicians do all their important work before the age of forty. Sad, too, the unlikelihood that they are able to perceive that anything has changed in themselves. Scary!

Undoubtedly, Lindsey Buckingham has listened to Rumours and thought to himself Oh man, I wish I'd done x or y differently. But do we trust Now Lindsey Buckingham - so removed from the album's emotional inspiration, his aesthetic re-shaped by the intervening years - to make a change to Then Lindsey Buckingham's masterpiece?

Even John Fahey, the great purveyor of the Beautiful Mistake, was prone to re-recording his songs years after the original with better equipment and improved technique. And, almost always, the second versions are worse than the first, even when they were recorded at a time when he was doing other, more interesting original work. Yes, "Sligo River Blues" (1964) is played more precisely, more densely and recorded more perspicuously than the original. And yes, the marshaling rhythm is tighter and the verses more achingly syncopated in Fahey's second attempt, but there's something essential to the original that Later Fahey couldn't recapture. Specifically, the moment between 2:55 and 2:59, when, maybe by mistake, maybe not, Fahey gets stuck in the first half of the riff he's been repeating throughout the song, and what is played is a small circle of sound, a snake eating its tail, a tautology, something necessary in the song that only its inspired, unrefined author could perceive.

[Buy]

Sleeping States - "I Wonder" [Removed at label request]

The Hyperbolic Aphorist: Markland Starkie is a jack of all trades, master of one.
Said the Gramophone: I'm afraid I don't follow.
THA: Shall I ruin the enigma by spelling it out?
StG: Please.
THA: Very well. As you may know, Sleeping States is the bandonym of Markland Starkie, a player of several instruments, all without virtuosity, and a recording engineer with clear limitations...
StG: (interrupting) Well, you're sort of editoriali...
THA: (clears throat) There is no difference between an interruption and a volcano's eruption, except that in the latter case it's burning lava that turns the bystander to ash, as opposed to the scorching proximity to rudeness in the former. If you'll allow me to continue, my point is just that the one area in which Markie is an indubitable master is that of composition.
StG: Well, we agree that Starkie is a master composer. His vocal melodies are as elegant and as easy as Catherine Deneuve in Belle de jour, and his occasional forays into simple dissonant instrumental harmonies are always doled out judiciously and are integral to the song.
THA: Blah, blah, blah.
StG: But I would argue that he's also a master vocalist, rangy and capable of subtly meaningful phrasing, and that though his guitar playing is often simple and imprecise and his drumming tends to be brutally minimalistic, his lyrical noodling on strings and his rhythmic guiding on skins both serve his songs maximally.
THA: God, you talk like a fucking essay. This is why I don't read your site.
StG: Anyway, in that sense he's a master of at least two or three metaphorical trades. Thus, The Hyperbolic Aphorist, I must dismiss your aphorism as hyberbolic.
THA: The only thing more obvious than the Obvious is the Obvious itself.

***

Sleeping States - "The Next Step"

Whereas "I Wonder" is an active, dreaming sleep taken in a restless prone position, "The Next Step" is a blissful, dreamless sleep slept in a graceful supine. Everything is built around one interval, one glorious step up, one of the shortest choruses you will ever hear. At 1:03, several Starkies sing "Please" in unison and then, begging, they sing, "C'mon, please" - a little bit higher, a little bit longer, a little bit strained. When the Starkies do it again, at the end of the song, they sing it in such an unexpectedly lush harmony that you don't have time to catch your breath before the song ends and another overcast musical reverie begins.

[Buy the album in September from Misra (North America) or Tome (Europe). Highly recommended!]

Windy and Carl - "You"

One should always absolutely call a spade "a spade". After all, when one calls a spade something other than "a spade" one runs the considerable risk of being misunderstood - potentially dire in an emergency gardening or gambling situation. Thus must I point out that of the titular two behind Windy and Carl, Windy is the more strangely named. 'Carl' is a totally normal forename and one that I'd be proud to give to at least one of my sons. Whether Windy's parents meant that 'i' to be an 'e' or that 'd' to be an 'n' or that 'w' to be some other consonant, I can't be sure, but I do know that they did at least one thing right: they raised their child to be like Moses. Carl's parents, my heroes, raised a little god. Their son, out of wood and string, electricity and circuit boards, builds seas of sound, which his friend Windy then parts, humbly, with her voice. Her vocals, straight up and down, will guide you for as long as it takes, for forty days and forty nights, until you reach the other side of Carl's creation, too wide to navigate around and too deep to wade through. [Buy]

***

The Spiritualaires - "I've Done What You Told Me"

Besides simple, beautiful songs, the best gospel groups have this in common: a propensity for apparently accidental unruliness, for downright uncleanliness. What's a gospel jam without a bass losing his place, a baritone singing a falsetto beyond his means? If you told me that some of the singers here woke up the next day embarrassed, and sought, to no avail, the destruction of this recording, then I'd reprimand you for stating the obvious.

Q: How lovely is it when, at 0:42, the fine lead vocalist steps into an aching ascending solo?
A: Not quite as lovely as when, amid coughs and throat clearings, the rest of the group comes back in, too early, too many, ecstatically. [Buy]

Al Green - "Jesus is Waiting"

The first eight songs on Al Green's Call Me are about women. The ninth and last is about Jesus. This divergence in subject matter is not matched by a divergence in sound; the song is as salacious as Stephen Dedalus. Tension between godliness and horniness is a favourite theme among soul singers - Sam Cooke sang it, as did Marvin Gaye, just as James Joyce wrote it, or even St. Augustine. St. A was a hedonistic young man with a predilection for petty theft and pretty ladies, but he found god in his twenties and later wrote a big book chronicling his conversion and everything else that ever happened to him ( c.f. The Confessions). "Jesus is Waiting" is Al Green's Confessions, except that one gets the sense that the sins being confessed (i.e. the subject matter of the previous eight songs) are so fresh that there's something, not disingenuous, but conflicted about his position. Green sings "Jesus is waiting" as if he's lying in bed with a naked woman saying, "Baby, I wish I could stay, but Jesus is waiting over at the diner, so I really gotta go." The song is a thank you to the son of god for being so patient in waiting through, not only Green's bawdy dalliances in life, but in song as well. The Reverend Al Green is a man of genuine religious faith, of course, but he only knows how to love in one, very sexy, way; what goes for women goes for Jesus, too. Hence, the track's undeniable seductiveness: just as Green repeatedly incants "Call me" on the album's first track in an attempt to assume himself into a carnal rendezvous, here he sings "Help me Help me Help me Help me," trying to assume himself into eternal light and god's good graces. Of course, the whole effort is pointless: either god doesn't exist, or he loves Al Green already, at least enough to give him a voice so sublime and a mind so musically refined.

At 3:26 he requests that the band "bring it", after which, confusingly, the music gets much quieter. Then he sings, "way, way, way, way down." The band knew, before Green could tell them, that he had something very important and very quiet to say: namely, it turns out, a wordless prayer in seven notes: a favourite child's perfect apology to a patient parent.

[Buy]

The Red River - "The Birds and the Boats"
The Red River - "The Birthday Song"

Canada turned 140 on Sunday and I, like most Quebecers, celebrated by moving house. What began as a humanitarian effort to save tenants from the inconvenience and indignity of being evicted and left without a place to go during the winter, has persisted in the quaint form of Quebec's Moving Day. Every July 1, while the rest of the country drinks Molson beer and oohs at firework displays, Quebecers pack up and move out, en masse. The sight of streets shut down by tens of behemoth moving vans, hundreds of sweat soaked men and women dragging dollies overloaded with cardboard boxes - themselves filled mostly with junk - underscores the surreality that is the interswitching of dwelling places we call Déménagement.

I write this from my new writing place. I used to write on a big white desk, facing a wall and bulletin board with important numbers I never called and menus for pizza restaurants I often did. Now I write on a small red table, facing an open window through which I currently see a woman on a bench on the street a storey below. She's wiping what is either blood or ice cream from her knee with a napkin. Beyond, I can see two trees of equal height, separated by about ten feet - one is full and forest green, the other sparse and the colour of iceberg lettuce. They're swaying in the wind, always, unfailingly in time with The Red River's new ep, On Your Birthday. This is weird, I know; I've listened to the ep three times through now to make sure.

Past the trees, my sightline extends forever. I can see rolling green hills tens of miles away, and Maine beyond them. With a good pair of binoculars and a strategically placed mirror, I could probably see all the way to California, where The Red River's Bill Roberts would be ever so carefully recording an acoustic guitar with a four track.

Roberts, like his clear inspiration Phil Elvrum, writes songs about people and about nature and songs about people disguised as songs about nature, and in so doing necessarily confronts our relative and absolute impermanence. People change, people falter, people die; the sea keeps flowing, the mountains keep standing, the sky keeps watch overhead.

But then, as Roberts knows, the distinctions are not always so easily delineated. As much as people change, they don't; as much as they falter, they are redeemed; as much as they die, they live on.

Moving is like a birthday in that it confronts one simultaneously with an end and a beginning. All that we bring from the old to the new - our books, our records, our friends and family - is a tether, tying us to ourselves; but at the same time, our new stomping ground promises a new us, the us who will have lived here in this as of yet unexplored place.

The Red River's new work is less joyful than his previous one, last year's Some Songs About a Flood. Roberts's ep is sadder and more contemplative than his earlier effort, though not without hope. If he were a sea, he would be slightly drained, but still flowing; if he were a mountain, he'd be eroded, but still standing. After all, to paraphrase the philosopher, you can't step in the same Red River twice.

[MySpace]

The Starlight Gospel Singers - "Say a Word for Me"
Minus Story - "In Line"

Two songs separated by almost a century, yet not so dissimilar as one might first expect. The two compositions share one subject: a frightened march, by starlight, into an unknown world. And both achieve their power through density (acquired in the first case through enthusiasm and number, and in the second through technology not available at the time of the first song's making). Hear at 1:56 the accompanying voice, like a woodwind, of one of the Starlight Gospel Singers, harmonizing with his band mates, rising above in a most otherworldly way. Then listen at 1:00, 1:01, and 1:02 to the only three bass notes in "In Line," lending structure to that nebulous musical sketch and fortifying its underlying sadness. Two songs separated by almost a century, causing the same hairs to rise on this listener's arms, sending the same shivers up my spine.

[Buy Starlight Gospel Singers at emusic, Minus Story]