First, the names. There are more than 500 characters in War and Peace, most of them bearing names like Anya Dmitriovronsky Putinsvetlanaskayaverarovich (who should not be confused with Anya Dmitriovronsky Rasputinsputnikskaya) and, well, the head hurts within a remarkably short period of time.

So I really don’t know why I bothered to pay attention to Steve Winwood’s latest, Nine Lives. I loved those early Spencer Davis singles. I loved those Traffic albums, but everybody loved those Traffic albums, and that was a long, long time ago. The first few solo albums from the early-to-mid ‘80s were decent, but they weren’t Traffic. And then I stopped paying attention. Nine Lives is the first new Winwood material I’ve heard in more than twenty years. And I take it all back. There is at least one ‘60s dinosaur out there who is making music that can stack up just fine with his classic material.

Last time I checked, Winwood’s music was being used as the backdrop for Michelob commercials. It was slick, glitzy, synth-driven pop, and it was the perfect accompaniment to nighttime video shots of the Manhattan skyline. Nine Lives sounds nothing like that. It’s a jamband album, a la the Traffic classics The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys and John Barleycorn Must Die, and, like all jamband albums, its biggest drawback is the absence of discernible hooks and singalong choruses. But look, if you’re going to go in for seven-minute jams, who would you rather listen to, boring young Dave Matthews or the suitably ancient but surprisingly frisky Steve Winwood? And how about if we brought along Eric Clapton – a totally resuscitated Eric Clapton at that – to play guitar? Is this sounding like a better proposition now? Because that’s what Winwood has done. It’s Son of Blind Faith, with some Latin rhythms and occasional sax and flute solos thrown in for good measure.

Winwood’s bluesy, soulful voice has lost none of its power, and the synths have given way to a much more organic sound dominated by Winwood’s Hammond B3 organ. It’s an admittedly calculated return to the past, and it recapitulates everything that was great about The Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, and Blind Faith. Sax/flute player Paul Booth ably fills the Chris Wood role in the band, and Winwood wraps his soulful pipes around, you guesed it, nine tunes that are surprisingly reflective and introspective. Best of all, Clapton shows up on “Dirty City” and unleashes his best guitar solo in at least a decade, a searing and yes, dirty, take on his patented blues playing. There are no hit singles here. Michelob won’t come knocking. But this is a warm, expansive slow burner of an album, and a welcome return to classic form.

Afterwards, a big, hulking mountain of a man came up to me and introduced himself as Hayseed. He was wearing overalls. He looked the part. Underneath the overalls was a t-shirt sporting the logo and name of The Bad Livers, one of the most debauched and funny bluegrass bands most people have never heard. Hayseed wanted me to listen to his music. “Sure,” I said. This isn’t that unusual at these kinds of events. People want me to listen to their music and write about it. And I try my best, although I make no promises. I can’t write about everybody. On the other hand, if I can shine my little light on some deserving musicians, then I’m more than happy to do so. So Hayseed went out to his car and brought back a couple CDs for me. They were called Melic and In Other Words.

Holy hoedown, Batman. Where has this guy been all my life? Let’s start with a quote from Lucinda Williams:

“Hayseed is, in my mind, on the same level as Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Van Morrison. That’s just what I think, that’s my opinion, for what it’s worth. I don’t say that about everybody who comes down the pike.”

Is he that good? Nah, he’s not that good. But maybe Lucinda was exaggerating to make a point, and the point is that Hayseed writes songs that borrow equally from the Bible and T.S. Eliot and P.B. Shelley and his own scuffed soul, and he sings them in a huge, untamed voice that recalls a young George Jones. He’s got that wild Kentucky high lonesome soul that can’t be faked, he’s got a great old-time country band behind him, and he writes some of the most literate and soul-searching music I’ve heard in months.

Instrumentally, these are old-time country albums, with a twist of Delta blues. They are most certainly not bluegrass, although banjos and fiddles are featured prominently. Lyrically, they sound like the work of a philosophy/theology major. And he’s recruited a few fairly decent folks to help him out, among them Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Joy Lynn White, Doug Dillard, and Bruce Cockburn guitarist Colin Linden. Imagine, then, a song called “God-Shaped Hole,” which is a concept borrowed from St. Augustine, and imagine that indispensable Christian concept delivered as a holy hoedown. That’s what you get on these two albums, with a vocalist who understands soul in all its theological and sonic nuances.

These albums are apparently ten and four years old, respectively. God only knows why they didn’t leave more of a mark. No Depression ran a couple flattering reviews, and that was about it. Hayseed grew up the son of a Pentecostal preacher in western Kentucky. His family didn’t own a TV, or listen to the radio. And then the kid struck out on his own and started reading Augustine and Eliot and Shelley. And so what we end up with here is something that literally sounds out of time. It’s perhaps the most unabashedly culturally unaware music I’ve ever heard, it’s crackling with all the big questions about God and love and life and death, and it’s full of the joy of self-discovery. I’m very glad I listened. I think you will be too.

That’s Danny on accordion on Bruce’s wistful valentine to his native New Jersey, “Fourth of July, Asbury Park.” Bruce sings:

Sandy, the waitress I was seein’ lost her desire for me
I spoke with her last night, she said she won’t set herself on fire for me anymore
She worked that joint under the boardwalk
She was always the girl you saw boppin’ down the beach with the radio
Kids say last night she was dressed like a star in one of those cheap little seaside bars,
and I saw her parked with her lover boy out on the Kokomo
Did you hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do?
For me this boardwalk life’s through
You ought to quit this scene too

Then Danny comes in with that sweet, romantic accordion, turning the dives along the Jersey Shore into cafés on the Left Bank of the Seine. He quit the scene yesterday, but I’m hoping there are greasy dives in heaven, and that they hire accordion players.

It’s an approach that is fraught with potential melodrama and saccharine sentimentality, and it shouldn’t work. Nor does it help that Kozelek can’t write a concise song to save his brooding life, and three of the eleven songs on April stretch out to the ten-minute mark. Several more hover in the six-to-eight minute range. Impossibly, though, it works wonderfully. At a long, long 74 minutes, April is both an endurance test and a quietly remarkable example of how to sustain a mood across vast stretches of time. Unlike 2003’s masterful Ghosts of the Great Highway, Kozelek can’t be bothered here to mix it up very much. There are no cathartic rockers to relieve the beautiful drone of his songs. There’s only that drone; insistent, somber, the perfect distillation of sadness and regret.

It’s what he does. He did it for eight years as the leader of the Red House Painters, and for a couple more as a solo artist, and now he’s done it for five years as Sun Kil Moon. And if Kozelek simply writes the same album again and again, let it be noted that he does it better than anyone since Elliott Smith, and that he gives the blessed Nick Drake a pretty good run for his melancholy money. These songs are starkly, ravishingly beautiful.

Kozelek has two tricks:  the acoustic crawl through mazes of memory and longing, and the slightly more sprightly Neil Young Godfather of Grunge electric exploration of memory and longing. The former is on display in lovely, haunted ballads such as “Moorestown” and “Harper Road.” The latter is on display in winding guitar workouts such as “Tonight the Sky” and “The Light,” although the electric guitars are mixed slightly in the background to bring Kozelek’s world-weary voice and lyrics to the forefront. Kozelek has no intentions of being a guitar hero. What makes it work is that his voice and melodies are perfectly, and I mean perfectly, pitched to convey the bittersweet overtones of lost love, but love nevertheless in all its complex glory. Like a musical Proust, Kozelek piles on detail after detail, and magically transforms his specific experiences – right down to character names and geographic locales – into something that sounds universally relevant. He simply captures the sound of sadness and loss. That’s his gift, and he might do it better than anyone since Nick Drake.

“I have all these memories/I don’t know what for,” he sings early on. I do. What for is beauty. What for is the celebration of something fragile, ephemeral, and shimmeringly lovely. It can’t last. It never does. But for a while – for seventy-four minutes, in fact – Mark Kozelek makes it linger.

Moon Martin—Escape from Domination

Okay, I played this one. Back in 1979. But it had, umm, been a while. Moon Martin may be the least likely rock star in the history of sorry rock stars. He looked a lot like Ellen DeGeneres. But his music is just fine; wonderfully catchy, hook-filled power pop about girls named Rolene and heartfelt laments about having no chance with the ladies (apparently Rolene didn’t count, but she was no lady). Moon also penned the one-time omnipresent “Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)”, which was a massive hit for Robert Palmer in the early ‘80s.

Andy White—Rave On

I pulled this one out because I liked the name. :-) I bought the album, I think, more than twenty years ago, part of a big vinyl pile that was never fully processed. My loss. Wow. Imagine the early ‘60s Dylan transplanted to Belfast, given over to local political concerns, and howling and raging for all his poetic worth. Good luck trying to find this one. My guess is that it’s long out of print. But it’s a gem.

American Flyer – American Flyer/Spirit of a Woman

Two albums from the mid’-70s. American Flyer was a country rock band led by ex-Pure Prairie League singer/songwriter Craig Fuller. The band was also a prime example of a “supergroup” (featuring members from PPL, Blues Magoos, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and The Velvet Underground) that fizzled. But given the raw ingredients, it’s hard to understand what went wrong. Primarily this is Fuller’s show, and he writes and sounds a lot like he did when he was writing great tunes like “Amie.” Nothing wrong with that. Maybe there was only room for one big-time band in this slot, and The Eagles had already taken it. Too bad. This band is better than The Eagles.

Batdorf and Rodney – Off the Shelf, Batdorf and Rodney, Life is You

And who said the ‘80s were the Big Hair decade? The recorded oeuvre of folkies/soft rockers John Batdorf and Mark Rodney was a mixed bag (hey, they were around at the time; I used to buy them), but if you cherry pick from these three early-to-mid ‘70s albums, you can end up with one pretty great album that you’d swear was by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. There are great harmonies here, and if you can get past the hippie dippie sentiments, you’ll also find some surprisingly deft fingerpicking.

Brewer and Shipley – Tarkio

Okay, I surely didn’t miss this one. It was a mainstay for a long time. But I probably hadn’t played it in fifteen years or more, and I pulled it out not long ago. It was dated, and it was worth revisiting. With members of The Electric Flag and The Grateful Dead in the backing band (yes, that’s Jerry Garcia on pedal steel), Tarkio is one of the great monuments to the counterculture, featuring paranoid folky anthems about being hounded by The Man (“Fifty States of My Freedom”), dodging the draft (“Don’t Want To Die in Georgia”) and, of course, marijuana, the B&S calling card (“One Toke Over the Line,” which was, incredibly, a Top 40 hit in 1971). As a historical curio it’s both wince-inducing and priceless:

Oh mommy. I ain’t no Commie
Please let me do what I wanna
I just wanna lay around the house and smoke marijuana
Ooooh

It’s also surprisingly passionate and soulful. Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley made a half dozen or more decent albums. This one is still, far and away, their best.

Marco Benevento – Invisible Baby

An impossible, goofy convergence of jazz, post-rock minimalism, classical wankery, and video arcade game sounds, this is the album to put on for all your friends who think that instrumental music is boring.

T Bone Burnett – Tooth of Crime

T Bone moves forward by going backward. 2006’s The True False Identity was underwhelming, the product of too much vitriol and not enough wit (AKA Steve Earle Syndrome). These older songs from the ‘90s, written to support the Sam Shepard play of the title, are dense, witty, and wonderfully offbeat.

Firewater – The Golden Hour

In which a Nick Cave/Tom Waits acolyte travels to Pakistan, hangs out with the locals, and makes Sufi cabaret punk rock music.

The Fleshtones – Take a Good Look

Garage rock in the noble tradition of ? and the Mysterians, The Standells, and The Animals. No guitar solos. Three chords. Twelve tracks. 30 minutes.

Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight

Winner of the prestigious Best Indie Rock Album of the First Quarter of 2008 award, the second effort from the Scots trio is soulful, full of U2-like anthems, and offers creative uses of the work “fuck” on more than half the songs. Who doesn’t love a good midnight organ fight?

Jacob Golden – Revenge Songs

The most conflicted and honest divorce album I’ve heard in years. Golden veers wildly between I wanna kill myself/I wanna kill my baby modes, and his sorrow and anger are tinged with the kind of regret that can only accompany a first-class asshole. “I’ve got no integrity to cling to/I don’t have myself a backup plan,” he sings in an angelic choirboy voice that masks the demons within.

Old 97’s – Blame It On Gravity

After 2004’s subdued Drag It Up, this new one is a fine return to form, and features everything we’ve come to love about the 97’s – Rhett Miller’s smartass, lovelorn songs, and Ken Bethea’s surf guitar king workouts.

Matthew Ryan – Matthew Ryan vs. the Silver State

Matthew Ryan has two moods:  sad and angry. Sometimes you get both in the same song. You get more of the same on this album, but with a sympathetic and sloppy band backing him up. And what you end up with is a Replacements album with a very literate singer/songwriter. Nothing against Paul Westerberg, but he never quoted the great World War I soldier/poet Wilfrid Owen.

Son Lux – At War With Walls and Mazes

Oh boy. A capsule summary just will not do. But anybody who combines classical minimalism, Radiohead, hip-hop, techno, opera, and plainsong chant on the same album is almost certainly going where no man has gone before. Recommended for non-Trekkie fans too.

Sun Kil Moon – April

Mark Kozelek can’t write a short song to save his life. As is customary, he divides his long songs between lovely acoustic ruminations and winding, Neil Young-like rockers. He’s excellent at both, and he may have surpassed ‘70s-era Jackson Browne as the King of Literate Mopery on this latest effort.

Bassist Todd A., one of the principle yelpers, left the police academy twelve years ago to embark on a relentlessly eclectic exploration of world music. His first solo album under the Firewater moniker, 1996’s Get Off the Cross, We Need the Wood, was an immediately breathtaking affair, equal parts Tom Waits seedy cabaret and gypsy wedding party, and predates indie rock’s current obsession with all things Balkan (see Beirut, Gogol Bordello, Balkan Beat Box) by a good decade. Subsequent albums have explored Bollywood, klezmer music, and Big Top circus sounds.

Naturally, Firewater’s new album The Golden Hour (out May 6th on Bloodshot Records) sounds like nothing that has come before it. Newly divorced and disgruntled by George W. Bush’s re-election, Todd left New York in 2005 with a backpack, his laptop, and the clothes on his back. The ensuing three-year hejira/debauch through India, the Punjab, Pakistan, and parts of Afghanistan and Turkey is fully chronicled on the new album. Setting up shop wherever he could find willing musicians, recording at times around tribal campfires, Todd provided the songs and the punk attitude, native musicians provided the accompaniment, and a single microphone and a laptop provided the recording studio. The results are endlessly fascinating and disturbing; a man at the end of his rope, rootless, and without hope, howling at the moon, and leading the locals through a nihilist hoedown. Singing about his divorce and the unraveling of normality, Todd yelps “This is no joke/This is my life.” You tend to believe him. Normal must have been a long time ago. Along the three-year trek he was drugged, beaten, robbed, and almost died of a mysterious intestinal illness “I was forced,” he says, “to end my trip at the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border, due to general ill health and the unnerving likelihood of kidnapping.”

The Golden Hour is not pleasant listening, but it comes close to being essential listening. It’s a superb, disturbing slab of desperation and creativity.

It’s a sound I’ve been seeking out for most of my adult life, ever since I heard Van Morrison sing “Listen to the Lion” for the first time, heard him break free of language altogether and engage in the kind of feral moaning and roaring that was alternately frightening and thrilling. Van has the yarragh, and he can almost always be counted on to let it rip on through once or twice per album. Sadly, his latest album is utterly lacking in anything other than cliches and anemic R&B horn arrangements, so I’ve been forced to do some soul searching in other places.

It should be noted that the stamp of authentic Irishness is not a guarantee of the yarragh. Bono, undoubtedly Irish, doesn’t have the yarragh. Neither do The Chieftains, Ireland’s chief exporter of jigs and reels to the PBS world. Nor should it be all that surprising that the yarragh has occasionally crossed the Irish Sea and taken root in Scotland. In any event, sometimes it can be found in some unlikely places. Here are three artists/bands that have the yarragh. I listened to them all yesterday, nursed my celebratory Guinness, and remembered why St. Patrick was one feisty, soulful missionary.

Damien Dempsey

For my (increasingly inflated) Euros, Damien Dempsey is the best Irish soul singer since Van Morrison, and his last three albums – Seize the Day, Shots, and To Hell or Barbados – have the same vocal voltage as Van at his ‘70s peak. He pushes way over into the red on the yarragh meter. There’s a very Irish thing going on in this music – taking one-syllable words and stretching them out over, say, seventeen notes. That gives the yarragh room to maneuver, and it bursts through in almost every one of Dempsey’s songs. His lyrics and narrative skills alone are enough to recommend this music. But oh, the voice is a force of nature.

Frightened Rabbit

As a poet from the oppressive occupying nation once stated, “What’s in a name?” In the case of Glasgow indie rock band Frightened Rabbit, thankfully not too much. It’s a dreadful moniker for a band, conjuring up images of quivering whiskers and Farmer MacGregor’s garden patch. No matter. The songs on the band’s second album The Midnight Organ Fight (out on Fat Cat Records in mid-April) have the yarragh. “Jesus is a just a Spanish boy’s name,” lead singer Scott Hutchison laments. “How come one man got so much pain?” That’s heading for yarragh territory right there, but Hutchison clinches it with that winsome Scots brogue and an untamed, keening tenor that will make your hair stand on end. Disguised as a typical indie rock band, Frightened Rabbit have more soul than any band I’ve heard recently. I can’t wait to explore their debut album, which I’ve yet to hear.

Sinead O’Connor

Sinead O’Connor’s peripatetic career is a controversial and sometimes sad one, an ongoing chronicle of greatness and missed opportunity. She hasn’t had the yarragh for a while now, and the last sighting was a couple of fleeting glimpses on her massive 1990 hit album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. But oh my God, that debut album The Lion and the Cobra has it in soulful spades. And on songs such as “Mandinka,” “Jerusalem,” and “Troy” she stomps all over her confessional material and does W.B. Yeats proud. It’s an irresisitable combination—those big doe eyes, that big bald head, and that big, howling, beautiful mess of a voice.

I love Van Morrison. But this is a disaster. Throughout his brilliant career Van has periodically phoned it in. And yes, that’s a bad connection you’re hearing. Consider this one then as a workmanlike but uninspired effort, full of predictable, generic rhymes, tepid R&B horn arrangements, and vocals totally lacking in soul and fire. Van, never known to back away from a headscratcher, offers a song called “That’s Entrainment,” which the dictionary defines as “To carry along (a dissimilar substance, as drops of liquid) during a given process such as evaporation or distillation.” Sounds like the blues to me. This is perhaps Van’s laziest and most confounding album ever.

Dub Pistols – Speakers and Tweeters

The Dub Pistols carry on proudly in the 2-Tone tradition of The Specials and The English Beat, mixing in whipsmart rap and house ingredients with the ska and reggae influences. Specials frontman Terry Hall drops by for a few tracks. There’s a mindblowing cover of Blondie’s “Rapture.” Best of all is the seamless fusion of skittering hip-hop beats, blaring trombones, and Cockney rhymes. Alternately playful, spacy, and pissed off, but always relentlessly danceable (you should watch me try), Speakers and Tweeters is one superb album. It’s been out for a while, but it’s new to me, so consider it an idiosyncratic early contender for Album of the Year.

The Acorn – Glory Hope Mountain

Let’s hear it for the oft-maligned concept album. This one, the debut full-length from Ottawa’s The Acorn, is dedicated to mom, perhaps a first in the annals of alienated indie rock. In this case mom is Gloria Esperanza Montoya (the album title is a rough translation of her name), and lead singer/songwriter Rolf Klausener wants you to know about her and the remarkable life she’s led. Employing a quavery folk tenor, indigenous Honduran instruments, and the occasional post-rock crescendo, Klausener and his bandmates offer a suite of songs about a woman who entered the world as a destitute orphan, endured domestic abuse and grinding poverty, and eventually made the long journey north to Canada. There are sentimental pitfalls galore in this approach, but Klausener mostly avoids them, offering impressionistic outlines rather than straightforward narratives, and keeping the syrupy melodrama to a minimum. It’s an understated love letter, and it’s a beauty.

Eddie Clearwater – West Side Strut

Eddie “The Chief” Clearwater recorded his first tracks as an eleven-year-old in Cincinnati in 1961, so to call him a blues veteran is an understatement. But there’s no coasting here. Possessed of a guitar style that is equally indebted to Buddy Guy and Chuck Berry, Clearwater and his guitar slinger cohorts (Ronnie Baker Brooks, Ronnie’s papa Lonnie) rip through a set of blues standards and a half dozen originals that sound like standards. This is Chicago blues (with some rock ‘n roll blurring of the lines) the way it was always meant to be played, full of raw energy, passion, and stinging guitar leads.

Reality has turned out to be a little different. The problem is that the list of the “biggest and best” dried up a long time ago. And so, in a few weeks, we (okay, the shrinking number of people who actually seem to care about these things) will witness the spectacle of Madonna, John Mellencamp, The Ventures, and Leonard Cohen entering the hallowed halls. Let’s see:

Madonna—Possessing dubious musical skills, Madonna flounced her way to the top of the charts via a superb body, provocative panting, and savvy marketing. She also paved the way for artists such as Britney Spears. This is surely worthy of some sort of award. I’m not sure that the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame should be it, though. Maybe a plaque at the Playboy Mansion.

John Mellencamp—Springsteen Lite for the midwest, Mellencamp had a few feel-good anthems. But that little ditty about Jack and Diane was, in fact, a little ditty, and Mellencamp has alternated between throwaway nostalgia and blowhard political diatribes ever since.

The Ventures—Nothing like honoring an instrumental surf band 45 years after the fact. “Theme From Hawaii-5-0” was really cool, though.

Leonard Cohen—Leonard Cohen is most famous for being depressed. He’s articulate in his depression, but he can’t sing worth shit, and his most famous songs—“Suzanne,” “Bird on a Wire,” and “Hallelujah”—have been made popular (and calling Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” take “popular” is really stretching it) by others.

So those are the big stars. Lesser-known producers and songwriters will also be enshrined.

I’m telling you, it’s only a matter of time until REO Speedwagon and Toto have their shining moment in the sun. And when that happens, no one will care. Nor should they. 

Since 1978 is now officially 30 years ago, and since record labels are fond of releasing 30th Anniversary commemorative box sets and expanded special editions and the like, it’s a good time to rediscover some great music you may have missed (potty training was such a drag that year for some of you) the first time around. The recent superb reissues of Nick Lowe’s Jesus of Cool and Elvis Costello’s This Year’s Model would be a great place to start.

But it was a pretty good year for the rock ‘n roll dinosaurs, too. Dennis Wilson is the Beach Boy Wilson brother you probably don’t know much about. Brian wrote and sang most of the great songs, Carl played great Chuck Berry guitar licks and wrote and sang. Dennis? Well, Dennis played the drums. Badly. Although he toured with the band, session drummers usually replaced him in the studio. And since his gruff and ragged voice was closer to Tom Waits than The Four Freshmen, he rarely sang on the Beach Boys albums.

But Dennis, the one Beach Boy who could actually surf, was a complex, gifted, and enormously conflicted human being, and you can hear all that and more on the reissue of his 1978 album Pacific Ocean Blue, which has been paired with a second disc of abortive tracks that were to comprise his followup album Bambu, which was never issued. It’s a quintessential California album of the time (Jackson Browne would have killed for a couple of these tunes), and it’s the sound of a man whose life is falling apart; full of tender ballads and almost jazzlike hymns, and pervaded by a sense of self-doubt and insecurity. It’s the great lost Beach Boys treasure, and it’s coming to a record store (do they still have those?) near you on May 13th. In one of the many ironies surrounding the Wilson brothers, the quiet, introspective Dennis actually released the first Wilson solo album. Alas, it was to be his last. In the crowning irony, the surfer drowned in 1983.