Pages tagged “issue 12”

Buddy Miller is humble as the Wandre guitar (made by a long-defunct Italian company) that’s been his main axe for more than a quarter century, thanks in large part to the generous application of super glue. “It’s always falling apart, but it’s just kinda what feels right to me,” he says with typical simplicity. While Miller would much prefer playing music to talking about it, he puts up with the inconvenience whenever he’s got something new to put out, as he does now with The Universal United House of Prayer, his sixth album (counting the one he cut with his wife, Julie Miller). As the title suggests, the sounds are rooted in gospel, but it’s not the formalist gospel of Ollabelle or the whimsical gospel of The Carpenter Ants; actually, Buddy doesn’t put any tags whatsoever on the music he makes — he just makes it.

It seems odd at first that a guy who was born in Ohio and grew up in Princeton, N.J., would develop into the only “thoroughgoing auteur” in country music, as fellow artist Robbie Fulks describes him in the new album’s accompanying bio, but Miller is a natural talent and a natural sponge. Princeton had a bluegrass scene during Buddy’s high school years, freeform FM radio reigned at the same time, New York soul station WBLS had a good signal, and Buddy had a friend who ran sound at the Fillmore East, so he was exposed early on to all the forms he would later combine. “Things were mixed up a lot more then than they are now,” he says. “I don’t think about genre-jumping or whatever it is. It’s just music to me. That’s what I love about music—taking all that stuff and turning it into something new, hopefully. That’s the fun part.”

Miller is perhaps the least celebrated member of the close-knit cabal of Music City outsiders—some would call them Keepers of the True Flame—whose membership includes Emmylou Harris (for whom Miller has played guitar for eight years—“I love my gig,” he says), Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, Patty Griffin and Jim Lauderdale, but he holds his own with his better-known pals. As this is written, in fact, Miller is rehearsing with Harris, Welch and Griffin for a revue-style summer tour. Lauderdale and Harris contributed to House of Prayer, as did Julie, of course. But Buddy’s secret weapons on his latest outing are Regina and Ann McCrary, daughters of Fairfield Four founder Sam McCrary.

“I knew I wanted to make a different record, sort of a theme record—I hesitate to call it a gospel record, but that runs through it somewhat; that, and what’s goin’ on in the world,” he explains. “I wanted to make a record partially with Ann and Regina, who I’d heard singing one time. So I tracked them down, and when I got them over, it was just so much fun, and I fell in love with them and the sound, that they ended up being on pretty much everything. So the record took a different turn, but I think it says what I wanted to say … and I don’t know particularly what that is”—he says this with a self-deprecating laugh—“but I get a feeling from it that I’m pretty happy with.”

Miller was determined to make a statement about the way the country is going—“You’ve got a conscience for a reason,” he says—but he was equally determined to avoid any hint of didacticism, despite his personal beliefs. “I don’t think this record gets too specific,” he says. “I was at Woodstock, so I’m definitely old enough to remember the ’60s. It’s the ’60s again, except it’s not as much fun. Even in politics, it seems like there’s so much hate; I just don’t dig that. I understand the horrible mess we’re in, but I don’t get what’s going on.”

The album opens bracingly with “Worry Too Much,” a protest song in modern dress written by Mark Heard, a friend of Miller’s who died in 1992. It’s followed by the hard-core gospel of The Louvin Brothers’ “There’s a Higher Power,” and its centerpiece is Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” a song every bit as relevant in 2004 as it was in 1964. “As soon as the war started, that Dylan song kept going through my mind,” Buddy says. “So I started playing it live, and I didn’t realize it was nine minutes long until I recorded it. To me, ‘Worry Too Much’ says a lot of the same things. And then The Louvin Brothers—you can’t go wrong with them.”

He made the new record just as he’s made each of his previous albums: at home, with Julie always nearby to offer candid critiques of the work in progress. “We’re pretty brutally honest with each other,” he says, “and I think that’s good and saves time when you’re working. For my records, she’s great. I don’t know that I could work with anybody any better, who knows what I’m after. And I think she’s a really incredible songwriter. And who else would give me half a house to work in and make a mess of? People come over and make a lot of noise.”

That noise has resulted in some fine records. Miller’s been recording in the living room since he first moved to Nashville in 1993. Soon after he arrived, he sold his buzzing Studer two-track and went digital. Like so many others, he’s using a Pro Tools rig, and he says it sounds fine, but he’s still in love with vintage gear. “I’ve got a lot of old mics and preamps, really old stuff,” he points out. “But as much as anything else, I just like how it looks. I don’t like looking at a computer screen when I’m working on music. The thing I miss most about my Studer is the smell of the tape—I think somebody should put that in a spray can.”

There’s a bit of self-deception in his recording technique, he admits. “I have to fool myself into not knowing I’m making a record. There’s always friends that come over; the gear and mics are always set up, so it’s just a matter of flipping some switches. We know we’re playing, but it’s so relaxed and messy that that we’re not really conscious of the fact that we’re tracking. So we’re working through the song, and it turns out usually that the really early takes, when you’re just learning it, have something that the later ones don’t.”

Presently, Buddy’s producing Julie’s third solo album, which will follow Universal United House of Prayer under their current deal with New West following nine years with Hightone. He’s cutting his wife’s record all over the house in an attempt to capture the songs at their very conception. “I have room mics in a few rooms mounted in the ceiling, so I can turn ’em on wherever I need to, because I love that sound of the room,” he says. “I run them all the time when we’re working on demos—when we’re actually just writing the songs—and there’s a feel there that you can’t get back to sometimes when you’re trying to play it. So a lot of Julie’s record that we’ve been working on is sort of built around those room-mic demos, and trying to use what we can and put the song on top of it. It just sounds like you’re right there with us when the germ of the song is born.”

Though they live just a few blocks from Music Row, the Millers have nothing to do with that world; fortunately for them, mainstream Nashville has paid enough attention to them, in the form of covers by the likes of the Dixie Chicks and Lee Anne Womack, to pay the bills at Chez Miller, allowing the couple to continue consorting with their muses without undue interruption. “We can’t believe how wonderful that end’s been,” Buddy says. “But that’s all been none of our doing. It would be fine if it had been, but we just sort of made our little records at home and found out later on that people had recorded the songs. A lot of them have been great versions, and it’s been wonderful. I can’t believe I get to play music, y’know? It’s a great thing. It’s such a gift to be able to do this. I love what I do—the writing, the playing, the producing, playing with Emmylou. It’s incredible that I can do any of it.”

Buddy’s cell phone rings, or rather yaps — he recently switched his cat’s meow ringtone for a dog’s bark after Julie told him she couldn’t take anymore of it (and she’s a cat person). It’s Harris, who wants to talk about the overnight trip they’ll be taking the next morning to Vermont, where the two of them will play a fundraiser for Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy. He’ll bring the Wandre and the Super Glue, his iPod and laptop, a DVD of the Tony Joe White documentary Searching for Tony Joe and his yapping cell phone—the essential items for a working musician in a changing world.

Such is the preemptive genius of Jonathan Richman. Just when you want to write a nice tidy piece about his new album Not So Much to be Loved as to Love, he manages to include a song like “He Gave Us the Wine to Taste,” in which he—in lyrics reprised on the surface of the disc itself—admonishes would-be wine snobs and critics with the disarming aphorism, “he gave us the wine to taste, not to talk about it!” Wine being like music, I realize this damning truism can apply to music criticism and I’m back to dancing about architecture and feeling like I’ve been outsmarted before I even have the chance to draw. I point out the parallel and he chuckles. I sulk and think of an angle.

Richman’s disarming good cheer and simple wisdom makes him in some ways a tough interview. Asking about song selection for his records, he casually opines, “It never turns out with the songs we think it’s going to. We just play a bunch of stuff and see what happens.”

Hmm … OK. So on this album there’s a song called “Salvador Dali,” a song called “Vincent Van Gogh,” and lots of Richman’s own artwork in the liner notes. A theme perhaps? “I didn’t even notice it until you mentioned it. There’s only two songs about painters, aren’t there?” Well, yeah, but what about Richman’s art, maybe it relates? “Naw, it wasn’t supposed to. Someone wanted me to put paintings on it so I did.”

New angle: the song “Abu Jamal,” a rare political, rather than personal subject. “That’s personal, too. I personally felt it, so it’s just like the others,” he deadpans.

This is where it’s time to give up on the interview for a paragraph and talk about the album. It’s warm and sweet and simple and thoughtful in the way Jonathan Richman’s music always is—casually mixing languages, images and musings with a directness that’s almost childlike in its candor and subtly self-effacing in its unabashed delivery. It’s so pure and singerly at moments that you almost want to hunt out some irony, but it’s hard for a song like the title track to be much else than a stack of daisies in a brownstone window. While his early work with the Modern Lovers gestured vaguely toward roots in The Velvet Underground, Richman’s latter day solo work seems more thoroughly self-generated, the sketches of an iconoclastic skygazer, much like the painters he so casually name-checks.

Back to the interview. So here’s a good question… if Richman could hear any artist do any of the songs on this album, who would be the artist and what would the song be? Paydirt. Sam Cooke doing any of them, particularly “Behold the Lilies of the Field,” and damn if I wouldn’t like to hear that, too.

Favorite place to play? “They’re all good.” The songs in French, Spanish and Italian? “Some stuff you just can’t say in English. Some stuff you can just say in French that you can’t say in Spanish. Just whatever comes to me. I’m not totally fluent in any of these languages, but I can carry on a conversation.” Music, the universal language, and I’m splitting hairs. Anything else Richman would want a fan to know? “That we don’t play too loud when we play live.”

With a few arrestingly genuine-sounding pleasantries, Jonathan Richman takes his leave of me, again un-bested in his ability to convey an unflaggingly self-sustained, simple love of life despite the outside world’s best attempts to overthink it.

Between rain showers on a hot summer night in Atlanta, The Polyphonic Spree overwhelms the 99X Upstart Fest crowd with its aural and visual onslaught. Co-sponsored by Paste, the event also featured Sahara Hotnights, Five-Eight, Jem and Auf Der Mar. The Spree—fresh off a tour with David Bowie (during which it performed the song “Slip Away” with art/glam rock legend)—was busy signing autographs for fans before its performance. The 20-plus-member ensemble also just returned from London, where it finished scoring the new film Thumbsucker (featuring Vince Vaughn and Keanu Reaves). So how does a band this size stay on the road? “It’s been tough,” says, frontman Tim Delaughter (pictured center, in the green robe). “We’ve all made compromises and been frugal. It’s always been a struggle, but we seem to make it happen.”

Sophomore albums can prove career land mines for even the most promising young artists; as the saying goes, you’ve got a lifetime to compile your first album, and then about a year to figure out what to do next. The Thrills’ striking 2003 debut, So Much For The City, came with an equally striking backstory. After forming in their native Dublin while in secondary school (our “high school”) in the late ’90s, they found their collective muse while soaking up the sun-drenched vibes of California over two inspirational summer stopovers in ’99 and 2000, and by the time they returned to the U.S. to record City in L.A. a few years later, The Thrills were already channeling the ’60s/’70s Golden State-grounded pop/country-rock sounds they’d so clearly idealized. Given the critical acclaim surrounding that release (and count this critic among those who raved), one awaited the second Thrills offering with equal parts anticipation, wariness and—in these days of all-too-ephemeral pop pleasures—finger-crossing.

Fortunately, Let’s Bottle Bohemia is a triumph, as much for what it’s not as for what it is. On one hand, it will certainly confirm that The Thrills are not revivalists (something they’ve maintained all along)—at least not the sort for which they’ve been mistaken. As noted above, The Thrills’ debut invoked the spirit of American pop and country rock past, but it really was more kindred than concrete, reflecting an acquired aspiration to create music built around a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of its-parts group dynamic. That philosophy also guides this new work—just listen to the opening of “Our Wasted Lives,” wherein every member of the band makes his own distinct entrance before lead vocalist Conor Deasy sings a single note—and, to The Thrills’ credit, this vision remains central to what they’re about. But this is a far more difficult album to pin down stylistically, as it ambitiously leaps from driving rockers (“Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” “Found My Rosebud”) to haunting ballads (“Not For All the Love In The World”), and from jaunty pop (“Faded Beauty Queens”) to faux-Motown soul (“Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?”).

While Deasy’s invitingly affected vocals (“New York Cit-ay,” rhyming with “committ-ay”) and intriguingly impressionistic lyrics (“Pipe dreams fade / And all the underdogs got laid / Left your heart in the hands of a juggling clown”) certainly command attention, it remains keyboardist Kevin Horan who anchors The Thrills’ music. From the clavinet on “Corey Haim” and the electric piano on “Faded Beauty Queens” to the swirling organ of “Found My Rosebud,” Horan informs virtually every song with well-nuanced, thoughtful touches. “It’s not like I got time on my side,” Deasy sings breathlessly on “Our Wasted Lives,” as if there’s not an instant to spare. It’s that intensity and seriousness of purpose that continues to define The Thrills’ electrifying music.

Let’s start with the obvious: James Wood is probably the finest book critic now working—an ambitious, accessible literary essayist in the mold of Lionel Trilling or Virginia Woolf. Other critics introduce, synopsize, quibble, judge and move on; Wood sifts a novel as finely as his favorite writers—Woolf, Henry James, George Eliot—sift their characters, finding in a single sentence or subtle narrative choice the kind of revealing detail James found in an article of clothing. As a collection of essays with which to wile away an afternoon, this book is a joy. Whether he’s trying to make sense of Coleridge, attacking the “hysterical realism” of Zadie Smith and Don DeLillo, or issuing Tom Wolfe a well- deserved beatdown, Wood is one of the richest, most entertaining writers we have.

But as its subtitle indicates, Wood’s book aspires to be more than a haphazard stringing together of essays that are terrific in themselves; he has arranged and, in places, partially rewritten them in order to make an argument about the history of humor and the novel. He wants to sketch the development of what he calls the “comedy of forgiveness,” which “can be distinguished—if a little roughly—from the comedy of correction.” Laughing with, in other words, versus laughing at. Wood believes that the gentler, more sympathetic kind of comedy arose during the Renaissance, at first in the writings of Erasmus, then in Shakespeare, whose compassionate habit of allowing his characters to ramble helped give birth to “the novelistic idea we have bottomless interiors that may only be partially disclosed to us.”

It’s an interesting argument not cohesively developed by the book’s latter sections, and problematic besides. In trying to show that the comedy of laughing with is a development of modern Enlightenment liberalism, superior to the more astringent, satirical, corrective kind of comedy he associates with religious belief, Wood gives short shrift to the latter, and reveals again his tortured relationship with Christianity (also seen in his first novel, last year’s The Book Against God). Why, for example, does he ignore Chaucer when The Canterbury Tales provides a fine instance of a text that veers between the two modes of humor? As for “comedy of correction,” Chesterton among others has pointed out that good satire requires an affection for its targets. Wood’s failure to more sufficiently defend his categories is odd—as if he’s simply setting up dichotomies for further examination at some point.

Still, one can only do so much complaining about such an intelligent, witty and bafflingly learned collection. The story of Wood’s engagement with books is, in its way, as engaging as the plot of any novel; it’s one we’re lucky to be able to follow.

Director Claude Chabrol is often referred to as the French Hitchcock, but a film like the unsettling La Ceremonie (1995) reveals the distinct difference between the two filmmakers. Though Chabrol, like many French New Wave directors, is an admitted devotee of the suspense master (having authored a study of Hitchcock’s work with Eric Rohmer), he went on to develop his own, more understated style. While La Ceremonie is a tale of suspense and psychological drama, it also functions as a portrait of class warfare and a subtle character study. Catherine (Jacqueline Bisset) hires Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) as a maid to her family’s estate outside a small French village. The family is initially pleased with Sophie’s hard work until her increasing isolation and clandestine illiteracy create a widening gap with her employers. When a nosy postal worker (Isabelle Huppert) befriends her, the tension begins to slowly rise, leading to a shocking climax. However, anyone seeking Hitchcockian thrills will likely be disappointed. Where Hitchcock built his suspense through mounting stakes in an inherently suspenseful situation (mistaken identity, the early introduction of a sociopath, etc.), Chabrol lets a languid pace and socially awkward interactions establish an unsettling tone. It’s the offhanded nature of the final violence that makes the film so effective. This DVD edition transfers nicely, and includes an interesting making-of featurette.

North Carolina trio The Avett Brothers have always had one foot planted firmly in the world of traditional folk and bluegrass. But Mignonette is a slight departure from that tradition, in that its breathtakingly beautiful ballads are inspired by late-19th-century cannibalism on the high seas. Yes, a first in any genre. (Well, there was that Buoys ditty, “Timothy,” but that was about cannibalism when you’re trapped in a mine shaft—and that’s just completely different.)

The true story anchoring this inspiring, heartbreaking album is one of a British crew whose yacht, the Mignonette, was lost in a storm off the coast of Africa in 1884. Four survivors escaped in a tiny boat with no food or water and—after being stranded for 19 days—ate the weakest member of their party. Upon being rescued, one guilt-wracked crew member confessed to the group’s desperate act, revealing the truth even when it meant they’d all be executed. So—long story short—the Avetts wanted to capture not only the tragedy of this twisted tale, but the unshakeable honesty of its protagonist. And with one of the best Americana records this year, they do just that. Hitting passionate, rough-edged Band-style harmonies, and grooving, at times, with James Brown precision (in a bluegrass context of course), Mignonette is 74 minutes of joy, sorrow, regret and optimism.

The usual acoustic instruments are applied here (banjo, git-fiddle, string bass, cello, etc.) but they’re used to their maximum effectiveness beneath unforgettable melodies and a raw, energetic production the best rock records would envy (the amplification of the vocals alone can make your hair stand on end). Some considered Nirvana an angst-laden, punk/metal-filtered reincarnation of The Beatles and, in a similar way, The Avett Brothers bring an impressive pop sensibility and intensity to the American Folk Tradition.

It’s 3 a.m., a candle is flickering on the table in the corner and last call has come and gone. Suddenly a woman’s voice, this rich, deep, sad- but-defiant voice comes out of nowhere: “Take your love / I’m not for loving / Take your needs / I’m not for needing / Take your tears / I’m not for crying / I belong to the wind.” Rich as the darkest Godiva chocolate, the voice gets into your bones until you can barely sleep at night and can’t get through the day without it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dayna Kurtz’s Beautiful Yesterday, an album not so much nostalgic for times gone by, as it is furious at time’s very passing.

And time is clearly on Kurtz’s mind—from the first song, in which she calls it a bastard, to the title cut, which closes the CD. The rest of the disc, both covers and original material, keeps the theme going, although not to the point that Beautiful Yesterday risks turning into a dreaded concept album. Still, if late October—when what leaves are left on the trees have faded and winter is no longer a far-off notion—begged a soundtrack, this would be it. Kurtz sounds at times like her musical DNA contains traces of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, not to mention the world’s great cabaret singers. Once in a while, her reach exceeds her grasp. But isn’t that an artist’s job?

At 2:00 a.m. on Aug. 30, 1970, The Who took the stage in front of 600,000 revelers at the Isle of Wight Festival off the southern coast of England. The three hours of ensuing nocturnal brilliance and mayhem were partially captured for posterity by filmmaker Murray Lerner, whose documentary Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 has just been re-issued in glorious Surround Sound with a new 40-minute reminiscence from guitarist Pete Townshend.

The “partially captured” caveat is the key. The Who played for three hours, but the concert footage captures less than an hour and a half of the performance. Needless to say, plenty of film was relegated to the cutting room floor, and this fact becomes most apparent in the long medley from Tommy, which features only half the songs actually played. Even more problematic, the songs that are here have been truncated and spliced to bits, and fans of the first (and arguably best) rock opera will surely notice the ham-fisted editing and jarring transitions.

Otherwise, this is what you’d expect: an absolutely essential document of what may have been the era’s best rock ’n’ roll band performing at the peak of its powers. The band reprises several of the early Mod classics (“I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation,” “Magic Bus”), tosses in a few mostly forgettable songs from an aborted project that failed to see release between Tommy and Who’s Next, blazes through a couple live favorites (“Summertime Blues,” “Young Man Blues”) and offers the truncated Tom version of Tommy. Roger Daltrey, bare-chested and sporting a buckskin jacket, does an exemplary job of playing the strutting, swaggering frontman. Townshend breaks into his patented windmill power-chord strums, gyrates wildly and is the main contributor to the smashing (literally) finale. Keith Moon pummels his drum kit into oblivion. And John Entwistle stands stock still and plays his bass, but at least he’s wearing a cool skeleton shirt. It’s all marvelous rock ’n’ roll theatre.

The re-mastered sound is a delight, and Townshend is at his typically articulate, prickly, opinionated best in the interview. It’s unfortunate that the concert itself was put through the musical equivalent of a Cuisinart.

For three days, Paste's Jay Sweet traveled with the ground breaking hip hop group throughout the Northeast on its pair of tour buses. Most of that time was spent shadowing de facto bandleader ?uestlove. Here's a glimpse behind the scenes into the wild and thoughtful world of The Roots:

”Yankees suck! Yankees suck!” chant a few thousand people on a muggy July afternoon in a concrete concert shed, amid the fluorescent jet-ski dealers, homemade firework stands, T-shirt shops, Harley detailers and endless lawn ornaments of New Hampshire’s Live Free or Die lake region. The crowd is almost entirely made up of white, male 311 fans, sun-burnt and pickled. And by the sea of red-letter capital B’s on shirts and backward baseball caps, not to mention the rising volume of their beer-soaked sentiments, they are also 100 percent Boston Red Sox Nation. This doesn’t bode well for the man onstage wearing a black-on-black New York Yankees hat. As anyone aware of baseball’s greatest rivalry knows, this could turn ugly fast, but the lidded offender deftly defuses the situation, proclaiming, “I don’t like ’em, I just like the color; hell, I’m from Philly!”

The crowd is assuaged because the Phillies—like the Red Sox—are a big-hearted bunch who play with underdog attitude and heated passion. Even though every year they end up bowing to their big-city rivals, faith is restored each season until whispers of “Could this be our year?” reach fever pitch. The same can also be said for fans of the band onstage, for they, too, carry the weight of expectations and potential only to repeatedly fall just shy of the brass ring. Yet we still believe, for this really could be the year for The Roots.

Onstage, the man at the mic, MC Black Thought (a.k.a. Tariq Trotter), turns to the band—bassist Leonard “Hub” Hubbard, keyboardist Kamal Gray, guitarist “Captain” Kirk Douglas, percussionist Frankie “Knuckles” Walker, and drummer and de facto ringleader, ?uestlove (a.k.a. Ahmir Thompson)—and lets out a sly smile. He’s a player, and he’s not going to lose this game so easily. Hub, gnawing on his omnipresent licorice root, calmly lays down a tooth-rattling bass line as Black Thought starts the sing-along with pieces of the Sugar Hill Gang classic “Rapper’s Delight.” The hip-hop flashpoint even inspires the hackey-sacking crowd in the corner to join the fold, arms raised, throwing “whassup” signs to the beat. Once captured, Thought conjures up his best Christopher Walken, and mutters, “More cowbell,” mimicking the absurdly funny SNL/Will Ferrell send-up of VH1’s Behind the Music. Like a charging rhino on methamphetamines, ?uestlove bangs out the intro to Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” This is classic-rock country, and the New England audience eats it up. Although not exactly in a hotbed of hip-hop, The Roots are still here to spread the word, so they furtively bleed Blue Oyster Cult into “The Seed 2.0”—a Roots/Cody Chesnutt collaboration and a dedication to the group’s mistress, rock ’n’ roll, behind the back of its old lady, hip-hop. A little infidelity and, just like that, the crowd is theirs.

Without short-changing their integrity, their quest is simple and ambitious. The Roots are trying to change the cultural mindset of hip-hop with nothing more than a bass, a keyboard, a guitar, a voice and a big pair of sticks. For the rest of the set, the band continues to bookend its tunes with old-school, hip-jazz backbeats and imaginatively camouflaged rock standards. Thought injects Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” into the chorus of The Roots’ “Break You Off.” During his solo, Captain Kirk gels a John Coltrane/Stanley Jordan-infused rip of “My Favorite Things” with a Peter Frampton-laced version of Marley’s “Stir It Up”—complete with Pete Townsend-style windmills, scat singing and crowd-surfing fans. Kamal spices his solo with a little “Shake, Rattle and Roll” into Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” while his four-year-old son, Kamal Jr., huddles underneath the keyboard slapping his legs in time.

The familial environment onstage is nothing new for ?uestlove, who literally grew up touring with his father, famed doo-wop singer, Lee Andrews. He began playing drums around Kamal Jr.’s age and once ran onstage at a Madison Square Garden show when he was two. So it seems fitting that when ?uest and Knuckles’ tribal drum solo flowers into a choreographed dance where they snake in and around each other’s sets like some maniacal, multi-armed Hindu deity, Kamal Jr. adds to the cacophony by sneaking onto the drum riser and beating the life out of a defenseless crash cymbal. From a rising crescendo, the place erupts as the little drummer boy flashes a wide smile when triumphantly hoisted onto ?uestlove’s shoulders. This inherited showmanship, musicianship and ability to win over a seemingly stolid crowd should come as no surprise; the band has been on the road 250 days a year since 1993. Its constantly spinning odometer draws comparisons to other road stalwarts like the Grateful Dead and Phish, as much as to other hip-hop groups.

Looking closer, it’s not simply the miles that have generated these comparisons. It’s also the ability to tap into every aspect of America’s musical landscape and to draw in those searching for an evolving musical community. The Dead, Phish and even the current headliner on The Roots tour, 311, have all made a career of redefining the premise of musical genres without fear of failure, and tonight’s set list is ample proof that The Roots have the very same roadmap. While critically this may be admirable, to find oneself in the unclassified section is both a boon and a burden; without a reference point the music can be tough to sell. All you can do is be sincere in your convictions and hope people find you along the way.

“We are simply the Larry Davids of music,” offers ?uestlove, as I step onto the tour bus for the first time. Wearing a bright yellow T-shirt that demands the freedom of Tommy Chong, he paces the bus while picking his trademark Afro. He smiles as Captain Kirk plays a note-perfect, slide-guitar version of the Stones’ “Loving Cup.”

After Kirk sings the chorus, ?uest continues, “We get the acclaim, just not always the appeal. Phrenology was supposedly an anti-Roots album because it had some rock and funk influences. Vibe even called it ‘an identity crisis.’ I guess to some, Tipping Point would then be a more pure Roots album. I say they’re all Roots albums. Although we are considered a rap group, I continually see our progression and presence in Led Zeppelin terms. They could blow the doors off live and still maintain that vitality on vinyl. I’ve been researching the production notes of some of the best albums of the past few decades, as well as the best of today, to crosscheck for commonalities, because I feel we can make the hip-hop version of [Springsteen’s] Nebraska or [Beck’s] Sea Change. What I came to realize was the best records aren’t crammed. …[Rich Nichols], our manager and fifth Beatle, said, ‘It’s too easy to construct an album with everything including the kitchen sink.’ And he’s right. Making Phrenology was a breeze. He was the one who threw down the challenge on Tipping Point; construct a 10-song record, no tricks, no super-special guest stars, just 10 bare-bones, great songs. That’s obviously trickier than it sounds, because it’s simply hard to make a basic hip-hop album—especially when no one has a consensus on what that means anymore.”

?uest is right. Although The Tipping Point’s title came from the Malcolm Gladwell book of the same name, it’s not just a nod to a possible paradigm shift where the group’s labors finally come to fruition with epidemic success; it has more to do with coming into their own. The cover captures this sentiment with a picture of then street thug Malcolm Little, shortly before he became Malcolm X. Although no one needs another dead hero who takes it in the heart for speaking the truth ahead of his or her time, it must be problematic being a black band in today’s hip-hop world, seeing the fading shadows of A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers and De La Soul and wondering how this came to pass. With no present reference points, The Roots stand alone, faced with the near impossible task of remaining relevant in an increasingly gentrified music industry. For them it’s a continuous dance of moving beyond the margins while keeping an eye on permanence and legacy. As ?uestlove says, “there’s no black Mars Volta or Radiohead, or at least none that can stay critically acclaimed for pushing boundaries while staying commercially viable; it’s rarefied space, and we aim to fill it.”

I delve into the new album on the two-hour ride to Boston, where the band is staying before its next gig. Opening with a “virtual” duet of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everybody Is a Star,” the band invites you with an embrace, but suddenly Black Thought shuts the door, sits you down and slaps you to make sure you’re attuned to what he’s laying down. Although dangerously dexterous with his slack-jawed delivery, the lyrical message is downright lethal. As always, Thought holds up the mirror to today’s society and demands that we all atone for past—and potential—mistakes, including the mediocrity that now counts as star power:

Hip-hop is not pop like Kylie Minouge …
Cause it’s a lot of bullshit flooding the scene
Where everybody’s a star and hot shit is far and few between
You lose a grip on what garbage mean
Shorties wanna be themselves I know it’s hard to be
Don’t wanna do the Ruben Studdard and come off less threatening.

It occurs to me that his political and provocative sentiments may indeed be the biggest reason why The Roots, with all their adulation and chops, have yet to find the mega record sales they seem to be craving. The Roots do not create better worlds with their words. The big sellers in their delegated genre sing about Benzes, Benjamins and bravado, showcasing a richer world than the street life a lot of people buying their albums endure. If they do speak about hardships, it’s always in the past tense and with a light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t an oncoming E Train. On the flip side, the rock ’n’ roll road warriors with whom The Roots are often lumped create parallel universes, idyllic landscapes and third-person narratives where people can tune in, tune out, rise above, find love or simply escape. Like a Venn Diagram of musical expression, The Roots land in the cross-hatched overlay, where the joy and spiritual release of musical exploration meets the lyrical triage needed to confront the problems surrounding us. While these truths may set us free, everybody knows what happens to the messenger. Just look at the guy on the album cover.

Later, with Dave Matthews’ lyrics, “I love you oh so well, like a kid loves candy and fresh snow …” piping in over a store’s PA, ?uest addresses the dichotomy. “When Dave wants to play his credibility card and pull in the anti-DMB act, he grabs us, which is way cool. I enjoy the opportunity since the associations help in finding new fans, but in the meantime, it hasn’t translated into getting their same dollars. I think bands like DMB and Phish offer the same bang for the buck live that we do, but we aren’t really in their generalized fan base. Hell, we’re black, and who wants to see a black band sing a love song? I see The Roots as a one-person baseball team, like when Bugs Bunny would pitch the ball and then run around home plate, switch hats, and swing away. That’s how we are. It’s hard being all things to all people, because Tariq and me are the exact opposite—socially and musically—which is good ’cause he won’t let me go too far left into the field and I won’t let him go too far right into the street. The tension in the middle of the rope, when we pull in different directions, is where the answer and the music lies.”

The next day is a day off, and thankfully ?uestlove passes on sky diving with some of the crew and band so he can spend his day trolling the aisles of Boston’s everything-hip store, Newbury Comics. Entering a record store with ?uestlove is like walking into a shark tank wearing a seal suit. One by one managers and customers circle closer trying to make eye contact. Those who come in for the kill are greeted warmly and graciously, and once fed, swim off with toothy grins. When the chum settles, ?uest heads to the book section and quickly grabs Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, Lester Bangs’ Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste and Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, Andrew Emery’s The Book of Hip-hop Cover Art, and 33 1/3’s pocket series on The Velvet Underground & Nico and Prince’s Sign of the Times. If I hadn’t heard his convincing arguments on why a pre-Springsteen Jon Landau is a better writer than Lester Bangs, or why he’s moving to Canada when the G.O.P. announces bin Laden’s been found sometime in late September, I might’ve thought he was trying to impress or unnerve a journalist. What’s more impressive, though, is when he puts the books on the counter and heads back to the vinyl section. An hour later, with a stack higher than his hair, the checkout receipt reads not as a mere laundry list of prime record-bin nuggets, but as a treatise on what makes people shake their ass after a few drinks on a Friday night. He should know, as the stack of postcards and posters by the cashier announce ?uestlove will be playing a special DJ set tonight at one of the hippest clubs in town.

When asked why he’d consider working on his precious days off, he replies, “I’m a control freak, plain and simple, and it’s the only time I am the master of the music, which is quite a release after playing in the band. Basically, I play drums in order to buy records. … I try and set gigs up in every town even before or after a Roots show. I actually charge the promoter more if he gives me less than three hours. You want to give me all night, you can get me cheap; you want me for an hour and it’ll cost you. I don’t take requests; I am there to educate. The high comes from playing the one or two songs at 1:00 a.m. that makes everyone on the floor feel like they are back at their first sleepover wearing pajamas with feet—or even better, their first co-ed dance. That’s when all the cool moves and attitude wash away and you’re left with happy feet. Plus, buying and organizing records is a Zen thing for me; it’s my only real form of relaxation.”

How many records does he have? “Last count was 40,000. I like to relax a lot.”

After taking some pictures and signing autographs for the people who’ve been following him around the Puma store, ?uest ducks into a Dunkin’ Donuts for a calming glass of milk. Suddenly I hear an old Devo tune. It’s his cell phone. The call concerns The Roots’ new record label, Interscope. After being signed to Geffen, which Black Thought compared to “sharecroppin’,” the band was passed off to MCA right before the label’s implosion, which landed them on hip-hop’s biggest label. Unsurprisingly, The Roots are finding it hard to fit in. Although the band’s numbers, by any other standard, are strong coming out of the gate, the talk is tense and centers around every artist’s common cry, ‘back us up or let us go.’ It’s an all or nothing statement, and ?uest hangs up to await an answer. He drinks some more milk and looks at his new vinyl.

Suddenly the phone rings again, but the ring tone is different. He doesn’t answer it. “It’s Spike Lee,” he says. “He’s got his own ring on my phone. We have some knots to untangle, and it’s gonna be a long talk. I have to mentally prepare for it and I’m not ready.” I press him on it. “Spike and me go way back. Ironically, I played a minstrel in Bamboozled, but I’m guessing this is probably about me saying stuff online about his new flick—stuff he probably wasn’t too psyched about.”

Before he discloses anymore, Devo rings. ?uest quickly looks at the number and answers it by asking if the label has dropped them. After a long pause, he hunches his shoulders and says, “OK” before hanging up. It’s good for now, and with that settled he stops to buy some high-end record needles for his set tonight before returning to the hotel. The DNC is in town, and the hotel lobby is a three-ringed circus, crawling with politicos, suits and celebs. At one point, Democratic mouthpiece James Carville—sweating from a run—steps into the elevator as Little Richard steps out wearing a cape and more eyeliner than Eartha Kitt. In town for a three-game series with the Red Sox, the New York Yankees swarm the elevators like well-tailored locusts. Surrounded by Bernie Williams, Jorge Posada, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez, Bostonians are simultaneously star struck and contemplating assault and battery with a nearby umbrella stand. Passing in the lobby, ?uestlove is introduced to A-Rod, and another potential Yankee confrontation slips by without incident.

Over dinner with The Roots, 311 and both bands’ crews at The Barking Crab, a rough seafood joint on the Boston waterfront, ?uestlove waxes poetic about the past, about playing everywhere and anywhere, and about the moments that have defined his group. “Our proving ground, our CBGB, our woodshed was The Wetlands. We were lucky because now there is no venue structure to incubate talent. Where is a black band going to get their chops? There’s not one club in the entire world dedicated to showcasing young black talent. That’s why we give young players time in our rehearsal space and our records. It’s about creating a community. Back in the day, every Sunday night we’d do like six-hour jam sessions where Mos Def, Jill Scott, Talib Kweli and India.arie would come down and hone their skills. We were the torchbearers of the underground movement, and we knew we had something when Puffy and Biggie started showing up on the dingy backstage couch. The whole experience of The Roots is that we were so underestimated—because we did everything live, without a net—that once we surpassed your expectations, it made us seem that much greater. But when you live this way, the bar just keeps getting higher. Like orchestrating Jay-Z’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden and his MTV Unplugged special, being the first hip-hop act to play Lincoln Center and, of course, backing Prince. We were so lost in the moment we were yelling out chord changes in the middle of the tune.”

In fact, ?uestlove has played with all the people he dreamed about playing with as a kid—except one. “I won’t play with Stevie Wonder,” he says “The expectations are too high and you don’t want your image of what it would be like to change, because it can never be as good as in your imagination. He’s even asked me to build him some beats, but I graciously declined; some things are just too sacred.”

Later, towering over the DJ booth like an ear-muffed marionette, the control freak effortlessly wields the sharpened talons of the turntables, digging deep grooves of hot, buttered beats and fortified funk. While he spins, gyrating, loose-limbed hipsters writhe blissfully under the stalactites of sweat hanging from the low-slung ceiling. Revelers lounge like sated cats on vinyl lipstick couches for a better view of those dancing on tabletops. High heels be damned; there’s no fear of gravity here tonight. The DJ is relaxed and in control of his craft. At 1:00 a.m. exactly, the woofers bleed a medley of lost innocence with cuts from the Grease soundtrack and Human League before launching “The Theme from Cheers.” Happy feet indeed. Suddenly this den of iniquity becomes an eighth-grade gym cloaked in tissue streamers and Christmas lights. Even the spiked punch tastes great.

The next day starts at 2:00 p.m. with an endless stream of interviews for radio, print and film. Listening to ?uestlove answer countless questions about the frustrating lack of record sales and radio play that The Roots deserve is maddening. However, he calmly articulates his answer to each one: “It’s not as frustrating as it is about patience; I know we’re going to get there. Our story is the tortoise and the hare; we’re going to get there soon, but it might take people awhile to catch up with us.”

Ironically, media perception of unfulfilled potential seems to ignore the numbers. The Roots have been together for 12 years, sold more than three million records and won a Grammy. Labelmates The Hives, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Loretta Lynn combined don’t sell as many records, but by anyone’s yardstick have achieved success. The explanation may not lie solely in the folded arms of Interscope, a label built on the giants of the genre—Snoop, 50 cent, Tupac and Eminem—but in the genre itself. The narcissistic ethos of hip-hop can be traced back to the contrived realm of disco, when image was king. But, in the ’80s, the audiences became disaffected and Booker T’s rallying cry of ‘pick yourself up by your bootstraps’ married President Reagan’s trickle-down economics, and hip-hop’s winner-take-all attitude was born. As it grew mainstream, the suits took over, the cash landed and soon the genre quickly evolved into neo-minstrelsy. It’s easy to see why The Roots, who’ve ignored the happenstance nature of popular culture are having a hard time fitting into any kind of mold.

On the ride to the show, ?uest tries to keep it light. All topics are fair game and he’s firing away. Politics—“Would you be at all surprised if the Republican Party invented Michael Moore? He’s taught me to question everything, and I think he would be proud of me if I started questioning him, because he’s too good to be true.” Sampling—“It would make my universe if we could come up with a pay-rate system for samples, for it’s killing the careers of the some of the most exciting artists out there.” Movies—“Bottle Rocket, Rushmore and The Royal Tenebaums is the best trilogy of all time. Every time we play Austin, Wes and Owen [Wilson] are in the house.” Venues—“We’ve been on the road so long it’s rare for us to play somewhere new. Like tonight, we’ve probably been here 10 times. Unlike Spinal Tap, I can easily show you the way out of the boiler room.”

It shouldn’t be hard. The Tweeter Center is a larger replica of the New Hampshire venue, including the audience and their baseball caps. The only exception is that instead of wearing them backwards, they’re straight-brimmed and cocked to the side. The dressing room is also a tad bigger, so ?uest hides out in an alcove and eats a quick dinner. As Medeski, Martin & Wood open the show with their kinetically funk-fueled jazz, ?uest can’t help but tap along to the music seeping under the stage door. I ask him why The Roots are digestible to a white audience and vice versa. “Because the audiences we play for are usually open to new musical experiences as much as we are. The irony is a white Flaming Lips fan is more apt to go and see a hip-hop show just for the experience than a black Usher fan is to go see a jamming rock show. For all the sampling, hip-hop can be musically isolating. I mean I can’t pry Wilco’s new album out of my CD player. Hell, the best song of the year is Loretta Lynn’s “My Little Red Shoes” off Van Lear Rose, which Jack White produced. I mean how inspiring and spooky is that shit? I dug it so much I called Jack, who I know after a month of touring with [The White Stripes in] Australia in a single tour bus, just to ask him how it all went down. To be honest, in a way I’m more comfortable playing the likes of Lollapalooza or Bonnaroo, where we may have something to prove but we can also let it all hang out, than playing in Harlem, where I know what kind of show they want. And if we don’t give it to them, it can get ugly. In the end, it’s not really the venue, it’s the people in the seats. So to finally answer your question, I can find something redeeming in all music, and I think you can hear that in how we play.”

To prove his point, The Roots pull off singing Prince’s “When Doves Cry” while playing The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army,” before naturally segueing once again into “The Seed.” Case closed. Game over. Roots win.

The bus ride back to Boston is spent in silence watching the emotional masochism of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours DVD. When it’s over, ?uest muses on why hip-hop has no sense of its own historical significance like rock ’n’ roll, “It’s probably because there are no real unbiased elders to continually articulate its artistic importance. Where are all the great thinkers to teach the importance of the low-end theory or how to respect the One? For example, on one hand, I hear people telling us we use old-school as a crutch, but these are the same people who are telling me that Outkast is being progressive, which is ludicrous. The problem with most people’s excitement for The Love Below was that they honestly believe this is the first go around for this type of music. Why? Because they have no sense of music history, they have no reference of Maggot Brain in the past or TV On the Radio in the now. You get enough PR behind something and you can make people believe anything. There is no guardian at the gate to protect hip-hop from revisionist history, which scares the crap out of me. Music news to black culture is that Erykah Badu doesn’t have dreads; it’s a weave. Full-on scandal. If Pink changed her hair color would you give a shit? Hell no. We need someone responsible at the gate.”

Which begs the question, why doesn’t ?uestlove become the gatekeeper?

“It’s a conflict of interest, no one’s going to respect my unbiased view. Plus I am too tired. I don’t want to be yelling at some kid out of frustration for not knowing who Jam Master J or even Run-D.M.C. is, or for pointing his finger at me for the umpteenth time saying, ‘Hey, it’s the drummer from the Nappy Roots.’”

He does acknowledge he’s become hip-hop and alternative music’s credible mouthpiece and quote source for the white Anglo-centric media, even if it reeks of tokenism.

“I try to brush it off my shoulders, because I don’t want that. Perhaps I’m too giving of my opinions. I don’t have anything to hide, and I have the patience to try and answer their questions.”

By the time we arrive, it’s late, but ?uest never sleeps; he’s always afraid he’ll miss something. So we walk down Newbury Street, Boston’s Puritan version of Rodeo Drive, in search of nothing. We weave through the straggling remnants of DNC revelers, drunk on democracy and searching for another 12 ounces of cheer until a black uniformed cop pulls up next to us and waves us over. Instinctively we both freeze and our guts tighten until he smiles and says, “Forget all these politicians, I should be protecting you out here. You are the real thing, and people just don’t know how good you are for music. Please keep doing what you’re doing, brother.”

He holds out his hand to ?uest, who graciously accepts. With this simple gesture all the frustrations seem to slip away for a moment. “That’s the first time I ever shook a cop’s hand. Gotta love it.”

We reach the corner of Newbury Street and Mass Avenue only to see a massive placard of Tipping Point all lit up in the display window of the monolithic Virgin Megastore. Directly under the cold, piercing stare of Malcolm Little, a gaggle of dreadlocked hippie kids combine five-gallon bucket drums with bongos and a guitar to make a strangely familiar beat. ?uest smiles at the irony.

“I never thought I’d see Malcolm X looking over Newbury Street, although that was us just 12 years ago.” Nudged to join in, he only replies, “They’d just tell me to get lost, I’m too old-school for what they’re playing. Plus, the store is still open and I could do some relaxing.”

An hour later, carrying several bags of music, we see a throng of gloating Red Sox fans gleefully waiting outside the hotel to heckle Alex Rodriguez. Earlier tonight, the most acclaimed, most paid, most hyped player in baseball took exception to being hit by a pitch from a young up-and-coming Red Sox player. Instead of quietly taking his base, A-Rod mouthed off and wound up getting punched in the face by the Sox catcher. A bench-clearing brawl ensued and, when the dust settled, A-Rod was ejected and the Sox came back to win the game.

“It was wicked awesome, he got a shiner and everything.”

Clearly, being the underdog is simultaneously exhilarating and emotionally draining. The only way to become the top dog is to confidently keep the faith, knowing—like with David and Goliath—that it only takes one stone to push something past the tipping point. And while the adage is simple, it belies the truth, because once you’re on top there’s always someone gunning for you. Maybe just being the little guy trying to make a difference is what makes someone great in the first place. With this in mind, I say goodnight to ?uestlove, and wait with the other Fenway faithful to bid A-Rod sweet dreams with our favorite lullaby.

“Yankees suck! Yankees suck!”

Interested in reading more about ?uestlove and The Roots? Check out Paste's ? & A and get the straight talk from Ahmir Thompson.

Talk about calling in a few favors. For his first set in over six years, Jamaican reggae legend Jimmy Cliff wound up being backed by such stellar sidefolk as Sting, Annie Lennox, Wyclef Jean, Bounty Killer, Kool & The Gang, even Joe Strummer on a song the late Clash leader penned especially for his longtime idol. The sessions were produced by no less than Dave ‘Eurythmics’ Stewart, in the Caribbean and his home studio in London. “And that’s why the album’s called Black Magic,” says Cliff, who wrote and recorded his first song for Leslie “King” Kong in Kingston way back in 1962. “Because everybody came together just like magic. Not that I set out to make an album featuring all these folks—I really just wanted to make a new Jimmy Cliff album. But I met Dave in Jamaica. We wrote one song together, then we said, ‘Hey—let’s continue. This is good.’ Then word went out and all these people gravitated toward us. Just like that.”

Lyrically, the record is decidedly uplifting, with Cliff crooning—in one of modern music’s all-time greatest voices—self-affirming statements like “Love Comes,” “I Want I Do I Get” and “The World Is Yours (Positive Mind).” Musically, it’s all over the reggae-permutation map and quite intentionally, Cliff clarifies. “You see, reggae—as it’s accepted to be called reggae now—is a great music form, as opposed to most other musical forms, like jazz, country or rock ’n’ roll. And the reason is, it keeps evolving. Reggae evolved from ska to rock steady to blue beat to rub-a-dub reggae, then to ragga reggae and ragamuffin reggae and now to dancehall. And I stayed with it all the way—I refused to live in the past. And I’m happy to say that what I’ve achieved on this album is a combination of all of those forms, all on one recording. Plus, I think I’m still staying one step ahead.”

Ian Moore has been a bit of a mystery ever since he shunned his early-’90s success as a blues guitar-shredder, which he was more or less branded by Capricorn Records like Texas cattle. He left the hot licks and long blond locks behind to reveal a wonderfully cerebral (and often estranged) gothic songwriter—a transformation many just couldn’t swallow. Blues die-hards felt wronged and others just didn’t give him a shot. He continued to churn out soaring, passionate songs so epic in their composition and performance that he almost adopted the appearance of a rock ’n’ roll Phantom figure: a talented but misunderstood artist. An outcast.

The 36-year-old’s latest album, Luminaria, is not only preponderantly acoustic but surprisingly Southern—from the aching, mournful simplicity of “What I’ve Done” to the whining steel and garbled guitars of “Abilene.” Luminaria is the kind of eerie, wrought-iron, slithering-kudzu, peeling-paint and wicker-rocking-chair kind of music that’s easy on the ears and soul. Which, of course, begs the question: why now, after the Texas native has moved to Seattle?

“It was refreshing to be in a new place where there’s a new perspective,” he says. “But it made me connect more with my Southern identity. I mean, how many writers left the South to write their best works about the South?”

His last studio record, 2000’s highly praised And All the Colors, is a dark, exotic, swirling storm of an album full of ominous, layered guitars and lyrics swollen with angst. So, Luminaria is the most significant plot turn in the story of Ian Moore since he turned in his pentatonic blues chops. The death-intrigued Moore of Colors is now a more relaxed, contented artist who recorded the entire album on the road—bits and pieces in San Francisco; Santa Cruz, N.M.; Austin, Texas; Washington, D.C.; and even at a radio station in Arizona. Moore used whatever was at his fingertips, even incorporating a Sony Walkman as a microphone on a few songs.

“My first record was this really fancy studio in Nashville,” he says. “In Colors, we ended up mixing in these high-end studios in Hollywood that were $2,000 a day. That’s part of the inspiration [for Luminaria]. Recording is not so precious. Also, some of the best records are from people who were doing the best with what they had. I kind of employed [that mentality].”

When Moore recorded “Caroline” in a friend’s San Francisco apartment, he sang softly into a computer ear microphone—a near whisper because he didn’t want to wake his snoozing friends in the next room. “It’s amazing to me,” he says. “It wasn’t like, ‘let’s get a funky mic and sound cheap.’ It just was what it was. I had to sing quiet, and I think the mic just translated that emotion.”

Unfold your beat-up road atlas, draw a line from Elvis Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Miss., to his grave in Memphis, Tenn., and you’ll find that the hamlet of Oxford—located in the heart of the North Mississippi hill country—provides the vertex necessary to complete an isosceles triangle. Elvis Costello might’ve done his geometry homework before he traveled to Oxford’s Sweet Tea recording studio, nestled between two points of Presleyana—but, evidently, the English songsmith had more than the Pythagorean Theorem on his mind when he headed south to cut The Delivery Man.

When Declan McManus christened himself Elvis Costello, there was nothing arbitrary about how he settled on the name. From that day on, the Elvis myths—Costello and Presley—have remained hopelessly intertwined. EP left the building for good in mid-1977, just as EC was enjoying the success of his first album, My Aim Is True. Never mind that a few generations separate them: each man is an icon—and an iconoclast—who reinvented himself for the stage, sparking a cultural rebellion in the process.

And, in Costello’s case, changed his musical persona again and again. Over the last 27 years, he’s been a New Waver, a rocker, a classicist, a Tin Pan Alley songwriter and a purveyor of soul, pop and country music. On his last three releases—capping off a catalog now 21 records strong—he’s sampled Broadway (with Burt Bacharach on Painted From Memory), returned to art rock (for the pretentiously acerbic When I Was Cruel) and delved into torch-song territory (last year’s North, a song cycle dedicated to paramour Diana Krall). It’s enough to cause a person with Multiple Personality Disorder to break into a sweat—but The Delivery Man marks yet another departure, as Costello impulsively dives back into rock ’n’ roll.

“Don’t wanna talk about the government / Don’t wanna talk about some incident,” Costello elucidates on “Button My Lip,” the album’s jazzy, disjointed opener. His point here—and throughout the album—is perfectly clear: This is a vacation, and I’m gonna do what I damn well please. Listening to the track, it’s easy to imagine a recalcitrant Costello sitting before a panel of record executives as they try to decipher the cacophony. His sheer obstinance appears to have won out.

On “Country Darkness,” a pedal-steel-driven ballad harkening back to his 1981 effort, Almost Blue, Costello fares better, combining artistic integrity with a polished Nashville sound. He revisits “The Judgment,” a song he penned for R&B singer Solomon Burke, then joins Emmylou Harris for a faux Gram Parsons tune called “Heart Shaped Bruise” and an Appalachian-style tune called “The Scarlet Tide.” Staggered between full-on rockers like “Needle Time,” “There’s A Story In Your Voice” (featuring Lucinda Williams on accompanying vocals), and “Bedlam,” the softer material sounds excessively genteel—especially when keyboardist Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas drop out of the mix.

Halfway through the album, listeners hit pay dirt with the boozy, bluesy title track. Costello sounds fittingly raw on the song, which unwinds like a southern gothic nightmare, complete with smoking guns and kudzu vines. “In a certain light, he looked like Elvis / In a certain way, he seemed like Jesus,” Costello muses over Thomas’ stattaco drumbeat, mesmerizing himself with the quandary. The Delivery Man is a worthwhile endeavor, for that stolen moment alone.

When Pressure Chief begins unloading—in anxious tones—lyrics about jets flying against a “darkening sky,” it may give you pause: since Cake has accumulated a three-year backlog of material since their last album (2001’s Comfort Eagle), could it be they’re just now treating us to their 9/11 remembrances? Not exactly. As it turns out, “Wheels” has more to say about the aftermath of a break-up than the state of the world, but it introduces the worries haunting much of this album, representing the only detour by a band that still sounds unmistakably like Cake.

Fans of this long-lived California pop staple already know what to expect. Cake’s sound is as reliable as a toaster: frontman John McCrea mechanically steps syllable by syllable through his lyrics while synths and guitars follow lock-step, and Vine DiFiore’s signature trumpet interjections—like McCrea’s voice—only rely on humor and sorrow for the slightest nuances.

The imagery is as clever and the jokes as dead-pan as on previous albums, like when McCrea self-disparagingly compares himself to a dime: “You won’t even pick me up because I’m not enough / For a local phone call.” But this time, the tone is more worried. Instead of the customary mid-record anthem like “Sheep Go To Heaven” or “Short Skirt / Long Jacket,” we get “Carbon Monoxide,” a more complicated song McCrea sings as though he’s recovering from a coughing fit, especially on the sloppy but fervent sing-along “Where’s the Air?”

Pressure Chief lightens up halfway through, however, and “She’ll Hang the Baskets” and “Tougher Than It Is” are well-crafted pop songs in the tradition of Cake’s previous four records. And that’s the problem: aside from the band’s uncharacteristically heated hit single, “The Distance,” Cake has honed its style and refuses to budge. For a fun party game, try shuffling the last three albums together and see if anyone can hear the band age. It’s a given that to maintain his voice, McCrea mustn’t smoke or drink, but is it possible he also found a way to apply the wonders of Botox to his voice?

Credit Pressure Chief for consistency and quality control—only a couple of throwaway tracks here, namely “End of the Movie”—but it’s hard to get revved about an album that incubated for three years, only to trot out the same proven formula. Cake doesn’t seem like the kind of band that would overreact to world events, but let’s hope the fears and frustrations shadowing this album push them into uncharted musical territory.

Every town has its poorly kept secrets—bands that have obtained such local musical celebrity that a growing circle of die-hard fans tear their hair out wondering why they aren’t a national smash hit … until they become one. Like Austin’s Los Lonely Boys or Boston’s Guster before them, Nashville’s Bees (not to be confused with the Brits of the same name) are on the short list for the pop launch pad. Comprised of an eclectic group of musicians whose workaday projects have ranged from production and sidemen engagements with everyone from Erasure to Nickel Creek, The Bees have decided to make good on their local legend. The band’s forthcoming platter Starry Gazey Pie (a name that brilliantly describes the album’s contents) will undoubtedly only help matters—drenched as it is in sartorial harmonies and finely wrought heaps of hooks, hooks and more breezy hooks. Featuring Jason Lehning’s sensitive but unobtrusive production, the disc is a slice of classic pop flavored with the acoustic sensibilities only Nashville’s best can muster.