(Above [L-R]: Outkast's Antwan Patton [Big Boi] and Andre Benjamin [Andre 3000])
100>>T BONE BURNETT
“It’s a funny thing about humility / As soon as you know you’re being humble / You’re no longer humble”
While the successful soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? put the spotlight on T Bone Burnett’s formidable production skills, he deserves equal recognition for his brilliant songwriting. It’s tough to find common ground between a porn king and an amusement park pioneer, but in “Hefner and Disney” Burnett successfully links the two while making a viciously barbed social critique. He also summarizes the human heart’s deceptiveness with “Trap Door,” then turns around and paints a beautifully honest picture of love’s eternal thread via “River Of Love.” This Texas-born moral troubadour is like St. Augustine with twang. Dan Macintosh
Get>> “Power Of Love” (1980), “Madison Avenue” (1980), “Trap Door” (1982)
99>>OUTKAST (Andre Benjamin, Antwan Patton)
“Niggas elope wit ski slopes and fall like avalanches / Tootin’ like it’s cool, being fooled and I can’t just / Sit around and watch those snow membranes flame”
“Ya’ll don’t want to hear me, you just wanna dance.” Many performing songwriters express similar woes, but few embrace the paradox with the skill and panache of OutKast. Over the course of six albums, Andre and Big Boi have consistently concocted a crisp blend of hip-hop, old-school soul and mind-bending production that belies their troubadour hearts. But closer listens reveal strict attention paid to the time-tested details of songcraft: A keen sense of melody and visionary phrasing skills that often have more in common with Cole Porter than Grandmaster Flash. David Mead
Get>> “Da Art of Storytellin’ Part 1” (with David Sheats, 1998), “Gasoline Dreams” (with David Sheats and Willie Knighton, 2000)
98>>JAY FARRAR (Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo)
“Some say a land of paradise / Some say a land of pain / Well, which side are you looking from? / Some people have it all / Some, all to gain”
Even in his early 20s, Jay Farrar was an old soul. With Uncle Tupelo and later with Son Volt, he made his mark shunning alt-rock’s lyrical staples of young love and dorm-room alienation, focusing instead on the lives of small-town Americans coping with soul-sucking jobs while fighting addiction (“Whiskey Bottle”) and hopelessness (“Looking for A Way Out”), and occasionally finding salvation in simple things like music (“Windfall”). Farrar’s genius was to marry age-old themes and musical styles to the youthful energy of punk and hard rock, resurrecting a vision of country-rock that seemed to have died with Gram Parsons, and paving the way for the ’90s alt.country resurgence. Hal Bienstock
Get>> “Anodyne” (1993), “Windfall” (1995)
97>>JOSH RITTER
“All the other girls here are stars / You are the Northern Lights”
Josh Ritter is so poetic and attuned to his senses as a songwriter that listening to him is like falling into a dream and coming awake in the present moment—all at the same time. His way with a rhyme and his acute sensitivity to phrasing, metaphor and irony draws me right into him—and that irony is without attitude or pretension, which is a hard trick to pull off. Oh, if I were younger—but as I’m not, Josh is simply my favorite new young songwriter. Rosanne Cash
Get>> “Harrisburg” (2002), “Kathleen” (2003)
96>>JIMMY CLIFF
“Well, the oppressors are trying to keep me down / Trying to drive me underground / And they think that they have got the battle won / I say forgive them Lord, they know not what they’ve done”
It’s no accident that Jimmy Cliff’s close-up moment in reggae history came portraying reluctant gangster Ivanhoe Martin in the 1972 film The Harder They Come. The line between Jamaica’s early music biz and underworld was hardly delineable, and Cliff—as much as any Jamaican singer or songwriter—was a man driven to succeed by any means necessary. As the anthem he wrote for Desmond Dekker proclaims, “you can get it if you really want.”
When cocky 14-year-old musician James Chambers strolled into Leslie Kong’s office in 1961 seeking a studio financier, it was with more than a pure tenor and a head full of confidence. The soon-to-be-dubbed Jimmy Cliff knew that to be noticed in Jamaica’s cutthroat scene, a singer needed his own sound and his own songs. Cliff convinced Kong to enter the record business, and with a handful of self-penned ska-pop tunes—from the playful “Miss Jamaica” to the proto-Rasta anthem “King of Kings” and Dekker’s hit—he immediately solidified a reputation and helped define the ska sound.
Less than a decade later, with The Harder They Come and its soundtrack, Cliff established his legend. Bob Marley may have brought reggae to the world’s attention, but it’s undoubtedly Jimmy Cliff who brought reggae into the pop vernacular. Songs like “The Harder They Come” and the neo-gospel “Many Rivers to Cross” injected reggae’s determined spirit into pop music and taught Britain’s nascent punk scene the rudeboy’s melodic gangsterism, acting as musical talismans to the likes of The Clash and Sex Pistols. Cliff’s unwillingness to either compromise or be ghettoized within the reggae genre later produced pop hits (“Waterfall”) and political damnations (“Vietnam”) alike—the latter of which none less than Bob Dylan called the best protest song he’d ever heard. One of the only active musicians to span Jamaica’s entire pop history, Jimmy Cliff remains the vital link between the sound’s youthful rebelliousness and pop-structure maturity. Justin Hopper
Get>> “Vietnam” (1969), “Many Rivers To Cross” (1972), “Struggling Man” (1973)
95>>PATTI SMITH
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins / But not mine”
I think of Patti Smith on Saturday Night Live, lying prostrate on the stage with mic stand in hand, working it frenetically like some sort of androgynous pixie, screaming out, “Gloriaaaaa,” caressing the syllables as much as twisting the melody. I think of the days before that, when she was one of those bookstore girls, working part-time in New York, stocking shelves, scribbling poetry and dreaming of Dylan and Rimbaud. I think of her and the band working on tunes in a loft somewhere on the Lower East Side, cutting tracks that would ignite her quiet vision and send it to a place completely new, a firestorm of musical and poetic energy that—like a shooting star—was firmly in the moment, and yet somehow, because of the wishes it inspired, lingered much longer. I also think of her married with children in the suburbs of Detroit, taking a break to shop for groceries and live for simple pleasures, a romantic vision that may or may not be true. Finally, I think of her in Austin, Texas, when I saw her last, playing to a crowd of families and music-biz types in an outdoor park, doing a repertoire of tunes that have become hits of a sort; it’s strange how those ahead of the game often have to wait for folks to catch up, like small children who run ahead of their parents, adding to the debate of who’s really teaching whom. The crowd members nodded their heads absent-mindedly and swayed to a tight rhythm section and Patti—by this point in time, with husband gone and children grown—led them with a persona that was a cross between Earth mother and consummate rock ’n’ roll show person. Then, she played a track from Gung Ho, and those who were still tuned in among this distracted Frisbee-throwing crowd, got it instantly, and remembered this is a voice that stands for something more than American Idol or a 99-cent download, a voice that’s of the people and for the people, which is more than you can say for most politicians, writers or musicians cluttering the landscape today. Doug Hoekstra
Get>> “Redondo Beach” (with Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl, 1975), “Free Money” (1975), “Peaceable Kingdom” (2004)
94>>SAM PHILLIPS
“Famous is fast / You don’t have to be talented or do good work or be smart / It’s perfect for me / But every time I go after it / My ideals run off with my heart”
Sam Phillips isn’t one to mask her unflinchingly penetrating gaze. Since dissolving her uneasy partnership with contemporary Christian music in 1987 (and with it, her life as “Leslie Phillips”), she’s freely aired expressions of impulse, doubt, desire and hard-won hope through piquant, often surreal pop songs that are as richly provocative as short films. Her writing is seductive, immediate and incisive, intimate though not confessional. If the house is tumbling down around her, she does not flinch. With the help of now-ex-husband T Bone Burnett, she makes use of an eccentric sonic palette, sometimes baroque, sometimes reminiscent of ’60s British Invasion pop, and sometimes stripping away everything but the barest necessities. Jewly Hight
Get>> “I Don’t Want To Fall In Love” (1988), “I Need Love” (1994)
93>>JOSEPH ARTHUR
“Don’t know why I’m still afraid / If you weren’t real, I would make you up”
In his melodies and lyrics, Joseph Arthur stands at the intersection of light and darkness. There are times when he’s clearly feeling great, almost smitten and giddy. In other moments he’s buried in grief, but never so deep he can’t pull himself out with a lyric that shoots a ray of beauty into a song of heartbreak. His striking writing occupies the same mystic netherworld as Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel. Delivered over layers of sound, his words can be carefully vague, vivid and—unusually often—cathartic. Wes Orshoski
Get>> “Honey and the Moon” (2002), “Even Tho” (2004)
92>>ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO
“Feel the fire burning from the other side / Flames scream, hear the children cry / You see the wicked prowl along the border / They say death’s the only peace the poor understand”
Escovedo is known for his raw, straight-from-the-heart lyrics and a musical palette that includes Mexican folk, Texas-outlaw introspection and the entire history of rock ’n’ roll. In 1999 he created the songs for The Hand of the Father, a play about Mexican-American immigrants that earned rave reviews. Three years ago, Hepatitis C landed him in the hospital and he had to quit touring for a year. Almost broke, Escovedo was aided by a team of musicians who deeply respected his work. A tribute album featuring covers of his tunes by everyone from John Cale to The Minus 5 got him over the hump. As he once sang in “Five Hearts Breaking,” “Believe, believe and everything will be fine.” j. poet
Get>> “The Last to Know” (1992), “Rosalie” (2001)
91>>DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS (Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Jason Isbell)
“It gets so hard to keep between the ditches / When the roads wind the way they do”
Like regulars at an AA meeting, the songwriters comprising DBT’s triple threat know there’s healing in admitting life is often twisted and unmanageable. The three share an American obsession with decay, specifically the breakdown of families and relationships, but manage to claim dignity in admitting failure. Their songs don’t promise hope, but it’s close—they survey the condemned and, through will or obstinacy or simply the lack of an alternative, patch the brokenness and keep moving. April Moore
Get>> “The Living Bubba” (1998) “Sounds Better in the Song” (2003), “Heathens” (2003), “Danko/Manuel” (2004)
To read #81-90 from Paste's 100 Best Living Songwriter's list, click here
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