Pages tagged “issue 2”

On Friday, August 16, 2002, some 35,000 fans from across the world gathered in Memphis, Tenn., to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis Aaron Presley. The following night, Pierce Pettis reminded a much smaller crowd at Eddie’s Attic in Decatur, Ga. (some 390 miles southeast) that Friday was also the 10th anniversary of singer-songwriter Mark Heard’s death. “Mark would have loved that he died on the same day as Elvis,” he added with a chuckle.

Outside of Pettis’ covers, most of the crowd knew of neither the prolific and stellar work of Heard nor his perverse sense of humor. The obscurity of Mark’s legacy persists despite the best efforts of Pettis, who has vowed to include a Mark Heard cover on every one of his albums, and a handful of other supporters. World Café contributed to the cause with an hour devoted to Heard on the fifth anniversary of his passing. Critic Chris Willman selected a Mark Heard song for Entertainment Weekly’s post-9/11 “Songs of Solace.” Also included was Emmylou Harris’ cover of Julie Miller’s “All My Tears,” written as a tribute to Heard. Acclaimed songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who penned his own tribute in “Closer to the Light,” has gone on record as calling Heard America’s best songwriter.

In 1996, the two-disc Orphans of God sought to further recognition (and to raise money for Heard’s widow, Janet) with covers from Pettis, Cockburn, Buddy & Julie Miller, Michael Been (of The Call), Vigilantes of Love, Victoria Williams (with Mark Olson, Tammy Rogers, and the Millers), Tom Prasada-Rao, Olivia Newton John, The Williams Brothers, Chagall Guevara, John Austin, Tonio K., Colin Linden, Marvin Etzioni, Brooks Williams, Kate Taylor and many others. (Strong Hand of Love, the 1994 single-disc precursor to this expanded compilation, was nominated for a Grammy.)

‘The mouths of the best poets’
Mark Heard left behind 16 albums and more than 90 unreleased songs. His earliest work suffered from unevenness in the lyrics and derivative (and consequently dated) music. However, he did display signs of lyrical acumen, and over the course of 20 years, Heard’s songcraft steadily improved. The release of a trilogy of records in the early ‘90s on Fingerprint Records, a tiny label created specifically for Heard, heralded the arrival of an artist at his peak—a challenger for the title of poet laureate of American music—joining the pantheon that includes Dylan, Cohen, Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt. Arguably, no artist has crafted three consecutive albums with both the lyrical radiance and the musical vibrancy to rival Dry Bones Dance, Second Hand, and Satellite Sky.

Sadly, the Fingerprint trilogy was to be Heard’s last original work. While performing onstage with Pettis at the Cornerstone Festival in Illinois, Mark suffered a heart attack. Undaunted, he finished his set. Elated at having seen my new musical hero, I went back to my campsite unaware of the unfolding drama. The crowd on hand to talk with him afterwards suspected Heard was being moody in refusing to come out—until the ambulance arrived. Heard recovered enough over the next two weeks to leave the Springfield hospital in order to fly back to his hometown of Montrose, Calif., for further procedures. He was in his hotel room with his wife, waiting for a flight the next day, when he suffered a second heart attack and entered into a coma. Six weeks after that ill-fated performance, Mark Heard breathed his last. His words from Second Hand (“I Just Wanna Get Warm”) gained new meaning:

The mouths of the best poets / Speak but a few words
And then lay down / Stone cold in forgotten fields
Life goes on in this ant farm town / Cold to the lifeblood underfoot.

‘Just a heart on a tether with a vagabond mind’
In his later work, Heard became a master of language, of imagery and meaning. He could fashion effortless stanzas of beauty and precision: “You see me like a prism sees a candle,” “Penniless at the wishing-well,” “Paper fills the cracks of the Wailing Wall,” “You smear the blame on me like cheap cosmetics.” He could also assault with fervor and density: “Grey dawn filters through steel stalagmites,” “Like the wind-burst of birdwings taking flight in a hard rain / Or like a mad dog on the far side of Dante's Door,” “Ribbon of road hazy ahead in taillight red / Radio on weaving a memory with musical thread.”

However, Heard’s magic was much more than facility with words. It encompassed an unrelenting introspection, an uncompromising social criticism, and an unmasked vulnerability that did more than speak from deep wells of universal experience—it encapsulated that experience and gave it a fresh, vital and prescient voice. His work recalls the experience of a previous generation in its first encounter with the early lyrics of Dylan—that of someone who captured how everyone was feeling but couldn’t articulate.

Further, the consistent intensity of these qualities distinguishes Heard’s work. Cockburn asserts, “That vulnerability really set him apart from listening to a whole bunch of Bob Dylan records, for instance, where you get flashes of brilliance but you don’t get the sense that you’re being invited into a person’s intimate thoughts and feelings.”

On World Café, David Dye described Heard as “an unassuming man whose unflinching songs illuminated the beauty in our day to day lives.” His power to unearth from the mundane that beauty along with bittersweet longing and sorrow elevates his music to landmark status. Pettis attributes such timelessness to his emulation of the Platonic model of art: beauty, truth and goodness. As his friend and manager, Dan Russell, told me, “There’s something very special when you discover an artist like Mark that touches you deeply because pop culture seldom gives you that opportunity.”

‘The friction born of living’
Pettis once asked Heard what made him write. He dryly responded, “The phone bill, the gas bill ….” The struggle to make a living, to be true to his art and to avoid the numbness that can result from being caught “in the way as the big wheels roll” occupied much of Mark’s music. As he writes in the liner notes to Second Hand, “Most usual are the days you wish you could feel anything. You wish that you could care more than you seem to be able to, or could focus on something beyond the mundane little dance steps involved in the busywork of subsistence.”

His journal adds, “I wish sometimes that I just didn't have to think about any of this, and could drone away my life. It would be easier. I have worked in a factory, and one becomes a bit hypnotized after some time to the point where all one can think about is going home, watching TV, having a beer and going to bed—so the cycle may be repeated …. But when you are able to catch a glimpse of your true self, of the beauty you have felt and the despair you have been burdened with, that is something that transcends the antiseptic responsibility of making the daily ends meet.”

This struggle surfaced eloquently in his songs:

I could swear that we're swimming in the workweek
Deep divers to treasureless wrecks
… Let's go to the movies or something
Before time gets the best of us both
And we resemble those bitter old souls
We swore we'd never become
-“Talking in Circles” (Second Hand)

There are things I should remember
But I have forgotten how
I'm all tied up with no time
Trying do too much
And the thoughts that I've avoided
Are the ones I need right now
Like a warm wind and love's hand
And I just want to be touched
-“I Just Wanna Get Warm” (Second Hand)

Sun comes up
Like a yellow bus
Tracking over oceans of dust
One day's miracle is another day's rut
But day keeps breaking like it always does
-“A Broken Man” (Satellite Sky)

Oh to find love’s hiding place
We are beggars and bootleggers
Fading embers caught out in the rain
Wondering what’s it take to burst into flames
And meanwhile hammers fall on anvils of grief
Molten souls in madmen’s cauldrons
-“Fire” (Dry Bones Dance)

Part of this friction stemmed from his failure to find commercial success or even a record label (outside of Fingerprint) that would allow him to create unmolested. To open a vein and simultaneously elevate your craft to something truly exceptional, only to have your work go unappreciated by all but a small cadre, can’t help but to take a toll. "I could tell he was really frustrated at how kept down he had been by the business, every aspect of the business,” Tonio K. recounts. “And I didn't know what to tell him. 'Cause it's a bitch, the business.”

‘Damn the cool-headed and the setters of goals’
Mark responded to the aesthetic-assaulting commercialization in the industry and the consumerism of society in general with great integrity and more than a little bit of righteous anger. “He was one guy who could not be bought,” Pettis declares. This rejection of industry and the vaunted “American dream” approached vitriol in the words of one of his characters:

“He says ‘Damn the cool-headed and the setters of goals
who can feel no evil, no heat, no cold
And who wouldn't know passion if it swallowed them whole
To whom true love is a left-brain risk
For whom the giving of life is a needless myth
Who cover their graves with monoliths
Cool heads prevail, and we'll become extinct
Mutants too unfit to wish’”
-“Big Wheels Roll” (Satellite Sky)

Such sentiments were not always well-received. “Great art, on some level, offends us,” Been says. “It holds a mirror up to what we really are …. He didn’t mince words and that was very frightening, very threatening for most people.”

‘A profane saint’
Much of Heard’s frustration and anger stemmed from his reluctant involvement in the ghetto (his term) of the marketing monstrosity known as “Contemporary Christian Music.” While a passionate believer who wrote about his faith, Mark jealously guarded the integrity of his art (and life), openly explored doubt and was not afraid to question anything.

Just as notable, his lyrics reflected an integrated, holistic approach to life that avoids the agendas and compartmentalization of concerns so common in America. As Tonio K. reflected, “It was just kind of regular stuff, with his viewpoint and observations and faith all mixed in, which is what it should be.”

Heard’s approach was unique in pop music. Noticeably absent were intricate, self-contained stories that most good songwriters rely on (and need). He addressed universal “big ideas” head-on without cliché or triteness. While both Leonard Cohen and Heard marvelously combine and subvert both the profane and the sacred, Mark does so without relying on the borrowed power of the archetypes and symbols used by Cohen. He expresses the earnestness longing and sweeping concern evident in some of Bono’s best lyrics but does so in a manner more consistently artful.

Such an approach was welcome by few in the CCM industry. “Mark was a man more concerned with telling the truth than selling the truth,” Pettis says. In that market’s leading publication, CCM, Bruce Brown gives this honest accounting for his lack of success there: “Heard’s songs are everything that many Christian pop songs are not. They’re emotional, direct, confrontational, cynical, honest.”

In the masterful “Orphans of God” off Satellite Sky, Mark offers this scathing critique of a consumer-based society that cheapens everything it touches, aimed especially at CCM and America’s picket-fence version of Christianity:

“They have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants 'til our pockets are clean
‘Til our hopes fall 'round our feet like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe
We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God.”

Those who knew Mark later in his life must have wondered how he was ever involved in that industry. A chain smoker with a love of dirty jokes, Mark avoided church attendance, presumably in a Kierkegaardian protest of what the church had become. He was known to freely use obscenities, especially around uptight industry types who placed misguided emphasis on trivialities. Prior to one concert appearance, a promoter gathered the musicians in a circle for a group prayer. When Mark’s turn to utter a prayer came, he simply whistled the theme to the Andy Griffith Show.

‘You will weather well in a climate of love’
Mark was more than a bundle of caustic cynicism. His passionate criticism stemmed from an equally passionate love of family, friends and community— “what matters in the four-walled spaces.” At a memorial in L.A., after fellow artists spoke eloquent eulogies, his genuineness became evident as his neighbors, his mailman and a number of others who came in “incidental” contact with Mark expressed the profound impact he made on their lives through his openness and friendship.

“There was no pretense—such humility,” Pettis remembers over post-show beers with John Austin at Eddie’s. “What struck me most was his generosity," Austin echoed. “He was the only person who respected me like an artist.” Pettis added, “Yeah, he was the first producer to say the words, ‘What do you want to do?’ to me.”

In his own songs, family and friendship were recurring themes. “Satellite Sky,” “Another Good Lie,” “Worry Too Much,” and others express anxiety for the future that awaits his daughter. But he could also convey the simply joys of romance:

“Let's go up on the roof beneath the neon
Pretend we're foreigners and drink the city in
Somewhere between the stairwell and the starlight
I find myself holding your hand
Half-cousins to the angels and the demons
Half-brother to the fatherless sons
I lay awake and wonder at the reasons
One kiss and I am lost in your charms"
- “Love Is Not the Only Thing” (Second Hand)

When Cockburn picked a song to cover, he chose one that brought him to tears, one that captures the tension of beauty, pain, hope, and despair that characterizes Mark’s work:

“Down peppers the rain from a clear blue sky
Down trickles a tear on a youthful face
Feeling in haste and wondering why
Up struggles the sun from a wounded night
Out venture our hearts from their silent shrouds
Trying to ignite but wondering how
We can laugh and we can cry
And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows
We can dance and we can sigh
And never see the strong hand of love hidden in the shadows
Young dreamers explode like popped balloons
Some kind of emotional rodeo
Learning too slow and acting too soon
Time marches away like a lost platoon
We gracefully age as we feel the weight
Of loving too late and leaving too soon”
-“Strong Hand of Love” (Dry Bones Dance)

‘The blind ones see and the dry bones dance’
The brilliance and intensity of Heard’s lyrics sometimes obscures the magnificence of the music. Whether playing and producing his own work or others, he had a knack for knowing the exact variety of sounds called for by a song. “He could play just about anything that moved and ran that studio just like flying a plane,” says Tonio K.

Mark loved instrumental variety and old recording equipment that captured human warmth over technical exactness. He recorded vocals with WWII-era tube mikes and preferred to use complete takes (of which he’d allow no more than four) in the final mix. The centerpiece of Satellite Sky was the distinctive sound of a 1939 National Steel mandolin with the resonator replaced by National’s Silvo pick-up and played like an electric guitar. Always placed in service of his own modern pop-folk-rock sound, instruments used included a variety of mandolins and guitars, accordion, hammered and mountain dulcimers, Hammond organ, harmonica, Chapman stick, fiddle, kalimba, dobro, standup bass and others.

From the Cajun/Appalachian stomp of “Rise From the Ruins” to the doleful strumming of “Look Over Your Shoulder” to the blistering rock of “Tip of My Tongue,” Mark mingled many influences—from Gram Parsons, Ralph Stanley and Graceland-era Paul Simon to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Peter Gabriel—into a sound all his own. As Paste editor Josh Jackson has written, “Handling his guitar, accordion and electric mandolin like they were his last hope for redemption, he developed a sound that matched his frenetic lyrics.”

‘Outcast on the outskirts of the promised land’
Part of tragedy of Heard’s death—beyond the personal impact on family and friends—is that he appeared poised to finally break through into wider recognition. After playing with Sam Phillips on tour with the Cowboy Junkies, Heard was set to open for Bruce Cockburn (and play in Cockburn’s band) on his 1991 tour. When Mark’s father died just before the tour began, the slot fell to Phillips. In 1992, High Street / Windham Hill placed “Look Over Your Shoulder” on its Legacy II: A Collection of Singer-Songwriters that included Greg Brown, Patty Griffin, Patty Larkin, Ellis Paul, and Jonatha Brooke. Fingerprint was close to finalizing a contract with either High Street / Windham Hill, True North / Columbia, or Epic when Heard gave his all on that stage in Illinois.

‘If you'll remember my name’
Ten years after his death, Mark’s faithful continue to discuss his life and music. Lyrical phrases and meanings continue to surprise, and the music sounds as vital as ever. Next year will see the publication of a book on Heard (Hammers & Nails, Cornerstone Press Chicago) and the simultaneous release of a CD of previously unreleased songs. I fervently hope that 50 years from now, new fans will continue the dialogue, just as new fans of Woody Guthrie are doing today. Maybe it will take a 21st-century musicologist or a Coen/Burnett-like collaboration for a wider audience to rediscover Heard’s genius, but surely quality of this magnitude will not continue unnoticed forever.

My friends laugh in derision. “No, really, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the most subtly complex show on television.” Eyes roll, someone snidely remarks that the real assets of the show are tight sweaters, and we move on.

I can hardly blame them. The special effects often come across as cheesy afterthoughts. The plots can be campy and the tone flippant. And then there’s the name.

“It’s pretty hard to take seriously a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Marti Noxon empathizes. The Executive Producer of the series knows that first hand. Before joining the writing staff in Season Two as a story editor, she turned down the job. “I had already accepted an offer on another show,” she explains. “And even though I liked Buffy better, I just thought it was a wiser career decision.” Fortunately for her (the other show only lasted one season) Joss Whedon, the creator and primary creative force behind Buffy, called her up and convinced her that if she wanted to be a better writer, she should come work for him. “I did a little homework and found out from some people who knew him that they thought that was true.”

What her friends knew, and mine fail to understand, is that Buffy, now entering its seventh season, is more than the standard teen drama so en vogue since Kevin Williamson rekindled and updated the devices of John Hughes in Scream. This show rises above the Party of Dawson’s Smallville, 90210 ilk. Indeed, under its sometimes-campy horror-genre surface, the show more closely resembles an amalgam of Twin Peaks, X-Files, Picket Fences, NYPD Blue, and The Simpsons in its intricacies of plot, theme, character development, and wit.

“I think what a lot of the general public who hasn’t watched the show would be surprised by,” Noxon explains, “is that we really do put a lot of thought into what we’re trying to say and sometimes the show can be really textured and nuanced.”

‘There will be no Thomas Aquinas at this table.’

In some circles, the comparisons extend considerably beyond television, to the works of J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, Anton Chekhov, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Homer, and the Brothers Grimm. Such comparisons are subtly cultivated by the show itself. Its references range from Nero to Mozart’s Don Giovanni to Star Trek: Enterprise. When Whedon wanted to subtly foreshadow the sacrificial death and resurrection of the lead character, he had one of the characters reading from C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a dadaist episode of dream sequences a year before the fateful event. Look carefully in another episode, and you may notice the character of Angel reading Jean Paul Sartre's La Nause as part of his continual search for meaning. “Beer Bad” contains the, um, unexpected frat-boy rejoinder, “There will be no Thomas Aquinas at this table.”

More than clever allusions, it’s the mythic sweep of the show told in carefully crafted narrative with emotionally realistic characters that has excited critics and academics worldwide. These highbrow fans contribute to “Buffyology” mailing lists and e-journals of “Buffy studies” and have published several collections of critical essays. The show surfaces at symposiums at Harvard Divinity School. This fall, academics will meet at a British university for a two-day conference devoted to the series. “Who would’ve thought you could deliver an entire liberal arts curriculum by talking about nothing but Buffy?” effuses a professor at Syracuse University in Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“It’s funny, because sometimes it definitely falls into the world of taking things a little too seriously,” Noxon reflects on the academic interest. “You know, we’ll get analysis of a specific episode, and they’ll be like, ‘Buffy and overtones and clearly you were … this psychological paradigm and this void and blah, blah, blah.’ And we’ll be like, ‘Really? We just thought it was funny.’”

‘The hero’s journey’

Nonetheless, the attention doesn’t come as a surprise. “[Whedon] has lots of layers that he’s working from,” she says. “He’s definitely working from some major archetypes, and he’s definitely trying to tell a myth in the same way that some of the great storytellers have. So I can understand why people would want to dissect it.”

The show is intentional in its mythic sweep. “There’s a very strong mythological feel to it,” Noxon explains. “ I mean, it is trying to tell the basic stories of existence. As high-falutin’ as that sounds, we really do try to tackle ‘What’s our purpose?” and ‘Why are we here?’ The hero’s journey is an ongoing thing we talk about here…. Most of what [Whedon] thinks of has a purpose and isn’t just to entertain.”

The show repeatedly answers those questions strongly: love, responsibility, sacrifice, community–these are where we find our purpose. Early in the show’s history we learn that Buffy’s support system distinguishes her from pervious slayers and allows her to surpass the expected lifespan of a slayer. “A slayer with family and friends. That sure as hell wasn’t in the brochure,” the vampire Spike says on his entrance to Sunnydale, Buffy’s hometown. When Willow’s rage turns her into seemingly the most powerful force in the universe at the end of last season, we find that Xander’s philial love trumps her evil:

WILLOW: Is this the master plan? You're going to stop me by telling me you love me?

XANDER: Well, I was gonna walk you off a cliff and hand you an anvil but it seemed kinda cartoony. …I know you're about to do something apocalyptically evil and stupid and hey, I still wanna hang. …The first day of kindergarten you cried because you broke the yellow crayon and you were too afraid to tell anyone. You've come pretty far—ending the world, not a terrific notion—but the thing is, yeah, I love you. I love crayon-breaky Willow, and I love scary-veiny Willow. So if I'm going out, it's here. If you want to kill the world... well, then start with me.

“I think that one of the recurring themes is that you can sort of create your own family and that your relationships with other people are kind of what makes life worth living,” Noxon articulates. “We keep reaffirming that as a purpose, that our community is really what we make it and that it can be reason enough to keep going even in the face of lots of adversaries and lots of difficulties.”

The concept for the show was born as a twist of the horror-movie cliché of the female victim, and it has continued to focus on female empowerment. Noxon elaborates, “Another recurring theme is the idea that you can be both feminine and concerned with romance and boys and at the same time continue to struggle to find out who you are and that your primary purpose is kind of that, to be true to yourself and to kind of reaffirm your own power as opposed to getting totally caught up in, you know, boys.”

(The rest of this article is available in Paste Magazine Issue #2.)

Buddy Miller's not one for big talk. Take Dogtown Studio, which occupies the downstairs of the Nashville home he shares with his writer-musician wife Julie: "I wouldn't call it a studio. I fool people -- they call it a studio, and I guess when I have to be around professionals, I call it a studio so I can hold my head up high." So, just between us? "Really, it's a house full of junk. Good junk. A lot of really good gear that I’ve collected. But I wouldn’t call this house a studio. It's a house, and I like keeping it that way."

An expert axeman, Miller comes across as a genial homebody who would probably prefer playing with his toys to chatting about his work — unless the topic of conversation is one of those toys, like the instrument he plays on the peppily retro "When It Comes To You" on the upcoming HighTone release Midnight and Lonesome.

"It's the coolest thing," he says of the Optigan, Mattel’s '70s forerunner of today’s sampling technology. "They look like a real cheesy console organ that would sit in the corner of a room ….You stick something in there, like a 12-inch record, only it’s not vinyl, it’s whatever you make floppy disks out of. And you can see through it, and when you hold it up to the light there’s concentric circles on it. And there’s probably 40 or 50 different disks you can put in there." The discs play "what today you’d call grooves, in every different key. You use the chord buttons on the left-hand side, and it has a speed thumbwheel, so you get the tempo you want, and then you change the chords. I wanted to do my whole record with it!"

Miller has employed his hi- and lo-tech gizmos as a sideman to Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Midnight Oil and Kinky Friedman, among others. As a singer and performer, he’s released three solo albums and contributed to all of Julie’s solo albums. The duo’s Buddy and Julie Miller earned a Grammy nomination for best contemporary folk album of 2001, so clearly he knows what he’s doing. Music isn’t something he intellectualizes. "I don’t put a whole lot of -- how would you say? -- I don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to figure out what the record’s gonna be before I make it. I just want to go in and see where I’m at. And you know, sometimes that’s not a good idea!" He laughs. "But I still kind of look at [my albums] as more like snapshots than creating some big thing."

Miller’s focused but instinctive approach allows him to work quickly; Midnight and Lonesome, a stylistic potluck supper of originals, co-writes and covers, took three weeks. Yes, it was a little late, but that’s because the Millers spent the last day of mixing watching CNN’s coverage of the rescue of the nine trapped miners in Quecreek, Penn. "Julie was really moved. I woke up the next morning, and there was a song on my desk. So I thought,

I gotta record this." Julie Miller’s "Quecreek," a spare blend of the Millers’ harmony vocals, acoustic guitar and Tammy Rogers’ fiddle, has the flavor of a broadside ballad and an unforced testimony of faith: "The miners were buried three nights and three days / But like Jesus Sunday morning all nine men were raised."

"It was a series of miracles that had them rescued," muses Miller. "When that bit broke and they thought, well that’s it — if they’d kept drilling with it they’d have hit water and they’d have all drowned. It was pretty moving, and just a piece of something good in this year."

Miller says that his Christian faith wasn’t shaken by the events of September 11th, but "it kind of just woke something up, maybe a little bit more. I think it did for the whole country, at least for a little while. We were pretty much just floating along."

While Midnight and Lonesome has the inevitable 9/11 song, "Water When the Well Is Dry," penned by Miller and Bill Mallonee (Vigilantes of Love), is far less pointed than other Ground Zero-based efforts. "I didn’t want it that specific," says Miller. "Whenever it would get specific, I’d kind of pull it back."

Buddy and Julie Miller came out a week after the towers came down. "We had an in-store we were supposed to do, and some dates we were supposed to do, and gosh, it just felt so…" Adjectives won’t work; Miller is a man of action. "You need to keep going, keep doing things, but you just feel like this isn’t anything that we need to be doing right now. It’s not important, and it just seems so foolish. But there was good that came out of doing them." About "Water," he says: "I just wanted to have something [so] that, at least for myself, I remembered it in a certain way."

Even so, Miller prefers to look forward, rather than back. He squirms at questions about a time when he and Julie gave up music because of their then-interpretation of Christianity, saying that it’s something he tries not to keep in the "memory bank" anymore. "It’s had an effect in a bunch of different ways, some of them good, some of them not good. And I guess thinking about it, I guess there’s a reason for it. You don’t know how you get to the place you’re at, but I’m really happy with where we’re at right now, and how things are, and how I feel about life. So it’s all good, as they say down here."

Told that fellow self-effacing guitarist Richard Thompson once also quit the biz for spiritual reasons, living in a Muslim commune and trying to ply the antique trade, Miller brightens: "I didn’t know that! He sold antiques? Well, you know, that’s kinda cool. He probably got some pretty cool things -- got to keep all the guitars…."

Between 1987 and 1995, Sinead O’Connor was a prominent and controversial presence in the music industry. Her unmistakable voice, shaved head and penchant for making brash statements about politics and religion made her a household name worldwide. Since that time, she has remained strangely silent, releasing only one project, the critically acclaimed Faith and Courage in 2000.

Now, among a number of side projects with notables such as Moby and Massive Attack, Sinead makes her debut on Vanguard Records with Sean Nos Nua. "Sean Nos" translates to "old style," the traditional Irish songs that are passed down a cappella. "Nua" is simply new. Old style made new.

"This is the record I’ve been trying to make for about 12 years," said O’Connor. "When I was on major labels they never really got it and never let me do it. Now that I’m not with a major label, I was able to make it happen. I think that I would like to make many more of them."

O’Connor encountered "Paddy’s Lament," an antiwar song, while living in Los Angeles during the Gulf War. Originally recorded by the Bothy Band, it tells of an Irishman who fled to America to escape the "murderin’ cannons" of his homeland only to be drafted into the civil war. "I like it," she said, "because the character who is singing the song doesn’t make any judgement against anyone who wanted to go to war but just expresses concern for their safety. It expressed the futility of war without actually judging it."

Two songs on the album are Irish language songs taught to Irish schoolchildren. They’re considered "willy-nilly little songs," O’Connor said, "but actually they are hardcore war songs." One of them, "Oro Se do Bheatha Bhaile," is superficially about the 16th-century pirate Grace O’Malley who battled the French and Spanish fleet. "Part of what I like about it is the narrator is a man, and the man is celebrating the return of this warrior woman back into her ferocity and her power. Really, it’s a celebration of females throughout our history."

More than a call to keep the culture alive, Sean Nos Nua strives to inspire. By adding a bit of rock and roll and illuminating the inherent sexuality in the songs of their forefathers, O’Connor hopes to challenge young Irish musicians. "Up until now there are so many Irish bands that just exist for material reasons. Nowadays, people make records just because they want to make money. I want to show [the youth in Ireland] the caliber of songwriting that has existed in Ireland so that they might have something to set their standards by."

"Something I wanted to achieve in this record is to bring back sensuality into Irish music," she stated in reference to the sexy traditional ballad "My Lagan Love." "The church in Ireland has really washed a lot of the sexuality from the song. Normally when people do it, they do it quite unreal and wishy-washy and you can’t hear the words, and so you’d never really know what it’s about. I think the songs are very powerful."

About half a minute into the loose-limbed slide guitar figure of "Window," a track on Doug Martsch’s excellent new solo album, Now You Know, a child’s voice asks, "How long do I have to do it?" The story behind this curious moment reveals much about how the album came to life and the essential humanity of the music on it.

"It’s my kid, Ben," the Built To Spill frontman admits, a bit sheepishly. "I recorded the album at home, and one morning he wanted to do something on it. So he was kind of shaking this stick and I started recording, and he got tired of doing it right away, so he asked if he could stop." Rather than sounding like someone’s precious answering machine message, the quick snatch of voice blends into the overall organic, unguarded quality of the album.

What may be surprising to many BTS fans is the album’s elemental aesthetic, which is in contrast to the rich, complex sound of most Built To Spill records. "Yeah, I think that’s a real strength of Built To Spill, that layering of sound and overdubbing," Martsch notes. "This new record is all based on my sitting around learning how to play a slide. I was listening to a lot of acoustic blues music. Then I set up a studio at home, and it just happened."

Martsch originally thought the songs would be used for the Halo Benders, an ongoing joint side-project with Beat Happenings’ Calvin Johnson. "Calvin and I got together, both bringing new songs. But very soon I felt like I didn’t have anything to add to his songs, and I felt like I was happy with mine. It was a gradual process."

Once recording began at his Boise, Idaho home, Martsch took an experimental approach to the actual recording. "I just tried different things," he recalls. "To get the right guitar sound I lined up all the microphones I had, which was about eight, and then listened to each one to see which was best. I ended up using them all."

Another, more subtle difference to the new record is the lyrics. While his lyrics in the past have often been impressionistic and esoteric, Now You Know finds him taking a more direct approach. "I wanted the songs to have important lyrics. Like the blues songs I was listening to, full of simple wisdom. But I couldn’t get myself to do it so I relied on my wife Karena for help."

The result is a literate mix of songs, like the insightful central metaphor of "Sleeve" and the haunting "Dream." "That’s about that lucid moment when you’re first going to sleep.…Those dreams that drive home our mortality."

Longtime fans can rest assured that Martsch plans to regroup with Built To Spill in early 2003 to start working on a new album. Until then, a rare solo tour will support the new disc.

On Tuesday nights in Decatur, Ga., patrons in the upscale Watershed restaurant tend to order only one thing -- the fried chicken. Chef Scott Peacock begins preparing the birds three days in advance, soaking them in buttermilk and frying each one individually in lard. The result is both familiar and much richer than you expect. His boss, restaurant co-owner and Indigo Girl Emily Saliers, has put out an album that strikes you in much the same manner.

On Become You, Saliers and her songwriting partner, Amy Ray, have gone back to the folk-rock roots of their Grammy-winning self-titled debut and away from the slickly electrified sound of 1999’s Come On Now Social. For all of us who wore out our cassette tape copies of Indigo Girls years ago, their latest has the familiar harmonies, hooks and hummability from a band that has spent the last 17 years developing their craft.

Since Saliers has generally provided the softer edges of each Indigo Girls album, Paste was a little surprised to hear the new restaurateur say that Ray was the one pushing for a rootsier album, and Saliers, the master of dreamy folk ballads, was the one who took a little convincing.

"Amy had been wanting to make an acoustic record for a while," said Saliers. "In fact, she wanted to make it even when we were recording Come On Now Social, but I just wasn’t in the place to do that exactly, so Come On Now Social is a lot more electric and produced. And then we knew the next record we would make would be very acoustic."

The duo recorded with Peter Collins, along with drummer Brady Blade, Clare Kenny on bass and Carol Isaacs on keyboard. Much of the album was captured live. "There’s a sonic cohesion and a vibe to the record that I think you can only achieve by stripping it down and playing it all together," Saliers said.

Become You was the first Indigo Girls record in a while to be recorded in their hometown, and with only one more release on their contract with Epic, the budget was much smaller. "I think, at this point," Saliers said, "we wanted to just go home and sleep in our own beds at night. There was a point earlier in our career where recording in Atlanta would have been too distracting for me. But we have a pretty good balance of the whole picture, being the veterans that we are. ...I like that I can come home, and -- even though Amy doesn’t do this -- I’d play the rough-cuts for my friends -- ‘Do you like this? Do you like this?’ If I were recording far away, I couldn’t do that."

The title track, written by Ray, deals with coming to terms with her Southern heritage. She’s a fourth-generation Southerner and proud to live in the birthplace of the civil rights movement. But there’s much about the South that is harder to take, according to Saliers.

"She wrote that song because she lives out in the woods, and she’s got a neighbor who’s always draped in different Confederate flags, things like a hat or a shirt or a bandana. She wrote it a lot about how they get along -- they’re neighbors. She’s gay, and she’s liberal and anti-flag. But here they are, having to live together, and the dialogue they have is an important thing -- the interaction between people who have different belief systems but don’t end up killing each other like the way a lot of the world operates."

Saliers, who wasn’t born in the South but moved there very young, has her own perspective. "There’s a mystique that’s probably best captured by the great Southern writers like [William] Faulkner and [Flannery] O’Connor. It’s hot and swampy, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. And there are secrets, and there’s the tie to the land."

What hasn’t changed with this album is the political activism that bluntly makes its way into many of the songs. The Indigo Girls have tackled injustice where they’ve encountered it. At every Indigo Girls concert, tables are filled with literature on a number of issues from gun safety to the death penalty to nuclear weapons to environmental issues. The record sleeve lists ways for individuals to get involved in any of these areas. And they make a habit of playing benefit shows and speaking out from the stage.

"We want to bring justice," Saliers said. "Even if we weren’t musicians, we’d be activists in whatever walks of life. We feel so strongly about these issues that they wind up a lot of times in the songs....Music is a very powerful catalyst for change in ways that can’t be exactly articulated. But I know when you come to a show -- especially a show that’s been designed to talk about an issue -- we’re playing music, and everyone’s together. We’re singing and thinking about these things, and they’re shown images of some of the problems related to the issues. And then they find access out in the lobbies on how they can make a change. It’s just a very powerful, well-rounded tool for getting involved."

The songs that aren’t issue-oriented deal deftly with relationships. Saliers confessed that these come much easier, though both types can be equally satisfying.

"If you’re in the space to write a socially conscious anthem, and you write a song that you feel sort of captures what you’re going after, it’s gratifying. In the same way, it’s gratifying if you’re feeling reflective and you can capture what you’re going after. And sometimes, during the course of an evening, playing a socially conscious song is exactly the right thing to play for your heart and for the people who are there. You don’t feel like playing a ballad. I don’t feel like singing ‘Power of Two.’ I feel like singing ‘Become You.’ Thankfully we have both in the roster, and we can go back and forth."

One of the most stirring songs on the album is the Saliers-penned "Our Deliverance." She began writing the song as a reflection on basic images of faith and struggle and perseverance. But after September 11th, it turned into an anti-war song.

"I was so saddened and horrified by those events and then horrified by our response as a government. And the intensity of conflict all around the world just got to me, and so the second half of the song became a response to that. It’s really about putting a human face on conflict because in order to commit atrocity, human beings have to dehumanize each other. And it’s about saying, ‘Look at all the blood that’s been spilled, and it’s come to nothing.’ So it’s a rally cry for peace, actually."

She sings, "There is no nation / by God exempted / lay down your weapons / and love your neighbor as yourself" and "we may be looking for our deliverance / but it has already been sent."

"The love exists within us," she explained. "The power to change exists within all of us. If we work hard toward justice and goodness and not killing each other and not responding with warfare and violence, the deliverance is already here. We just have to tap into it. And tapping into it means overcoming your fear, including, from a militant Islamic point of view, fear of Western influence and degradation of their faith. And in terms of us and our government’s response, fear of these fanatics who will kill innocent people for nothing. Valid fears, but fears have to be overcome in order for change to be made. It’s idealistic and hopeful, but I can’t help myself. There’s got to be a better way."

Her idealism and the support of strong friendships, including that of Ray, promise to keep the Girls going for many more years. Their writing and playing styles have proved to perfectly complement each other since they began strumming their guitars in tiny clubs a decade and a half ago. Now they have their side projects -- a restaurant for Saliers, a record label for Ray -- but it’s the passionate hooks and harmonies that will continue to keep an extremely loyal fanbase singing along.

As music enthusiasts debate what exactly makes country music truly "country," Kelly Willis continues to bridge the gap between diehard country fans and those who won’t let even their ten-foot poles touch most twangy Nashville-related stuff. Willis, an Austin-based singer-songwriter with strong traditional music roots, is as at home with a folksy Paul Westerberg or Nick Drake ballad as she is with a George Jones-inspired country weeper. On her second Rykodisc album, Easy, the high quality of its songs and performances are beyond all debate.

Rykodisc’s marketing of Willis’ music hearkens back to a time when good music and its audience united much more naturally. She’s more than a little disturbed by the overtly artificial atmosphere of today’s music scene. "Everything feels like it’s something somebody’s trying to sell you," Wills complains. "Before, it used to feel like the music somehow found its way to you; now it’s just sort of being force-fed with some girl that could be a model, in clothes that you could never find off a rack anywhere. It’s weird now."

Willis initially intended for Easy to be a no-holds-barred, straight country album, but her undeniably eclectic streak once again took hold.

"I really felt like I hadn’t done that yet, and I wanted to," Willis explains. "But it didn’t happen this time around. But I think it was still a good place to start from. It probably would have had more of a honky-tonk feel to it, with more shuffles and more twangy guitar, probably." The album instead leans toward Shawn Colvin territory, except with slightly more of a Southern accent driving it.

Oddly enough, she never made such a wholly traditional-sounding album back during her days spent on the MCA Nashville label. And while Willis’s independent nature stood out distinctly from the cookie cutter line-up of the so-called country music town, it would still be hard to imagine albums like her new one, or its predecessor, What I Deserve, coming out of Music City.

"I got to do a lot of stuff at MCA that I think a lot of people didn’t get to do," Willis says of her Nashville phase. "I was also discouraged from a lot of stuff, so I’m not so sure what would have happened. They might have let me do that [non-country material] for album filler. I know, however, that I wouldn’t have made the entire album that I wanted to make."

After trying unsuccessfully to fit into a limiting Nashville definition of country music, Willis needed a kind of artistic free will more than anything else.

"I think that I needed to be in the trenches like that. I needed to not have any really strong- minded opinions in there. Like originally, I was on A&M Records, and I was gonna be making this record [What I Deserve] with a lot of the same songs, and T Bone Burnett was gonna produce it. And I’m really glad that didn’t happen, because I would have just given way to somebody else’s vision. Obviously, the man’s brilliant. But I think I would have made his record, and not mine. And I really needed to make mine."

If What I Deserve was her declaration of independence, Easy is her vote of self-confidence, since she took sole writing credit for about half its songs.

"A lot of the songs that I wrote for the last album, I co-wrote," Willis recalls. "Part of me wasn’t going to let anyone hear those songs until Gary Louris [of The Jayhawks] or somebody was willing to put their name on them. This time I thought, ‘Well, hell, it sounds good, so I think I’ll go ahead and let somebody hear it.’ I just felt better about my abilities this time."

Willis may have begun her career as a singer with an ear for great songs, but she’s quickly adapting to the earned title of singer-songwriter. The oddly gentle nature of the breakup song, "If I Left You," and the undeniable hopefulness of "Reason to Believe," back up her decision to stick to her guns as a lone songwriter. These are highlights on an already strong album.

And with the ability to consistently fill her albums with top quality songs, Kelly Willis is oh, so Easy for both hillbillies and city folk to love.

When Denison Witmer wanted piano for a track on his latest CD, Philadelphia Songs, he did what any musician who might have watched Fletch too many times would do: carry bags filled with musical equipment into the ballroom of Philadelphia’s downtown Ritz Carlton and ask the bartender to turn off the house music so he and a conspirator could inspect the grand piano. Witmer spent the next 25 minutes secretly recording to mini-disc and hoping not to raise suspicion among the swanky patrons.

The two finally announced the piano to be in fine form. With a hearty thank you, the bartender turned the dinner music back on, and they quietly walked out the door.

"You can hear bus people dropping silverware and dishes and people talking and stuff," he laughs, recounting the adventure. "So yeah, the Ritz Carlton Hotel piano is featured on my CD. I don’t know if they know that, but I’ll go down and give them a copy so they can hear it."

While often witty, the quiet, unassuming Witmer is not someone you’d expect to march confidently into an upscale hotel and take over. His music is beautiful and personal, finding inspiration in life’s difficulties. The melodies springing from his struggles have found loyal fans in those who see their life stories told by someone else -- people who have seen life move, grow, and disappoint but who still know hope and joy.

The current chapter, captured on the aptly titled new release Philadelphia Songs, began a few years ago with Witmer moving to the city after growing up in a small Pennsylvania town and working in his parents’ greenhouse, spending days thinking and writing songs. The transition was a bit different than he expected, with an office job taking all his time and draining him of inspiration.

"I felt like a fish out of water when I was first here," he says. "I was holed up in my apartment and didn’t go out too much and do too much. I liked the city, I had always liked visiting it, and then after moving here it took me a while to adjust. I probably said a lot of things I shouldn’t have said in the time I was adjusting," he half-laughs. "One of my personality problems is I say things as I think them, so then I have to retract them later."

Turning quite serious, Witmer admits that the problem was not the town, but himself. "I moved here because I romanticized it to begin with," he states. "I needed to get to a place where it was more fast-paced, more music going on, more art, a more diverse culture, and Philadelphia was the best option because my older brother lived here. It was easy."

But living in the City of Brotherly Love was more difficult than expected -- something he had to come to terms with. After touring the country and finding that he really missed the city, he realized what was there all along. "I went through a phase where I didn’t really like it ... but that was just an emotional phase that I needed to go through until things clicked in place and it started to feel more like home."

With a new perspective, Witmer’s experiences in Philly now span an entire record that evidences the circle of sorts he has completed.

"I definitely am in love with the city," he says. "I think it’s a city with just a very real population, very real people in the sense that a lot of people feel it’s rough around the edges. And in some ways it is, but it also is full of people who are trying to make something happen in a place where somehow it seems like it’s hard to. For me there’s just a positive energy here, and it’s down to earth, and it’s not pretentious."

Wanting to grasp this feeling, Witmer recorded guitar tracks to a mini-disc player he took to the apartments of several friends, often writing lyrics later at local parks and coffee shops, watching people stroll by as his home recordings played through a laptop. He makes sure to add that it is not, however, a walking tour of the town.

"I needed to be careful in calling the record Philadelphia Songs because I know that my Philadelphia is so different than a lot of other people’s Philadelphia. I know that my life is so different than so many lives that are here." He starts to laugh again and adds, "I wanted to call the record ‘My Philadelphia’ at first, but it just sounded too much like ‘My McDonald’s,’ and that’s never going to work."

Musically, this new album also curves back around, falling between Witmer’s debut, the guitar and vocal-only Safe Away, and its more orchestrated follow-up Of Joy and Sorrow. Driven by his home recordings, the album brings to mind the intimacy of the former and uses the arranging lessons learned on the latter.

"I love the sound of hearing a guitar when someone else is playing it a couple rooms away, and so I definitely tried to capture some of that," Witmer says. "I think there’s something to be said for home recordings because you just hear a little bit more the intricacies of what’s happening in the rooms, the white noise or whatever. That’s something that I’m conscious of."

But Philadelphia Songs is not a return to the minimalist Safe Away. After the basic ideas were down, Witmer brought in Cleveland-based The Six Part Seven to flesh out songs in the studio. Taking control with production for the first time, Witmer thought an instrumental band he enjoyed touring with would be perfect for adding the right touches to his home sounds without making them overdone.

"I never want to make the same record twice," he states. "I knew that with Of Joy and Sorrow I alienated some people with some of the production style. And maybe some of the songs are too produced, but I just felt like it would be such a cop out to make the same record over again with the same exact sound."

He continues the line of thought, "I need to stretch myself as a person; I need to push myself to try new things, and sometimes they go well and sometimes they don’t. In retrospect there’s some things I would change on Of Joy and Sorrow, and so this time around, being able to take the reins a bit more, I feel like this is right the way I want it."

He says it landed between his two previous records and almost seems like a missing step between the two. "I just feel like I accomplished something that I’ve been trying to accomplish for a while."

Witmer’s albums are known for sounding as though he’s next door, and his goal was to make that feeling the backbone of this project, to have people play his record and at some point think that somebody could be playing guitar in the room where the speakers are. "But of course, it’s just the speakers," Witmer adds, amused at the idea. "I knew it worked when I was recording in my brother’s apartment, and I had just finished a guitar part, and I was listening back to it through his speakers. He came back down the stairs and was like, ‘Oh. That’s the stereo?’ I was like, ‘Perfect’." But stories keep being written, and just as this album marks part of Witmer’s life, he can’t help but feel things are always changing. "I’ve been in so many cities now ... and so some of the writing comes down to actually leaving, feeling like there’s a certain chapter that’s over -- though, I don’t know. The last couple of days I’m starting to feel like it’s just beginning. ... Philadelphia was something that I did for a while and stayed in place, and now my music is something I’m doing consistently, but it’s taking me from place to place."

He mentions maybe needing to settle down somewhere, and then laughs. "But not for a little while." For now, there is simply life to live.

Aimee Mann is not the sort of person who dwells on the past with self-defeating bitterness or crippling regret. Whether it’s the natural resilience of her psyche or merely the emotional callous accumulated after years of being used as a corporate speed bag by the music industry, she’s managed to let go of her past battles.

Mann’s well-documented battles with labels both major and minor could very easily have left her with an intense spirit of recrimination and malice, but she has wisely chosen to take the higher road by beating the system at its own game with the creation of her own label, Super-Ego Records, and the self-releases of Bachelor #2 in 2000 -- an album Interscope rejected as commercially unworthy -- as well as her latest studio foray, the evocative and brilliant Lost in Space.

Unfortunately, even as Mann forgives her trespassers and moves ahead, there are days when the business pulls her unwillingly back in, like a pop music version of Michael Corleone. Today, for instance; Mann has just spent the morning in court for the depositions in her pending lawsuit against the Universal Music Group over the release of The Aimee Mann Collection, a greatest-hits compilation that Mann contends was completely unauthorized and rife with sub-par bonus tracks that she would never have okayed given the opportunity. The case is an unpleasant reminder of skirmishes fought long ago and a preview of events yet to unfold; the wounds Mann has suffered at the hands of the music industry’s corporate vampires are still healing and lie just below the surface of her cool, willowy exterior.

"They are horrible, horrible people," says Mann, with a pause for composure. "Horrible. But the bitterness passes."

After the emotional roller coaster of her experiences with Interscope over the non-release of Bachelor #2, it could have been tempting for Mann to do a highly personal album on the perils of being swallowed by the voracious maw of the music industry. Instead, Mann opted for more universal subjects with which she is most familiar: alienation, heartbreak, loss, obsession, addiction.

"I seemed to be writing songs in a certain vein," says Mann of her latest release. "Then I realized there were songs that weren’t in that vein, so I thought, ‘I’d really like to have a consistent tone,’ so I gradually wrote more songs that went along with the theme and threw out the ones that didn’t go with it."

As Mann began assembling the pieces of her next recorded work, it came with the blissful knowledge that there was no one to answer to, although that scenario could have been just as intimidating for a songwriter who has been looking over her shoulder for most of her career. Mann was more than equal to the challenge.

"It’s a subtle thing; it’s the feeling of freedom to make Whatever decisions I needed to make in service of the record," says Mann. "Whatever I felt was going to make a better record. Not necessarily a more commercial record or a record I thought they would like, but a record that I felt was good, according to what I think is good. That’s the most you can ask for. If you at least think you’ve done your best, that’s a pretty good standard to shoot for."

Mann stops just short of labeling Lost in Space as a concept album. Although it features a string of songs loosely threaded together by a theme, Mann makes it clear that no more should be read into that than necessary.

"It seemed to me that after I gathered the songs together there were themes that kept cropping up," she says. "I just got the feeling that these songs belonged together. I don’t think it could be more thematic than it is. For instance, there are several songs that, to me, seem to be about addiction. I don’t know if I have that much to say about addiction. An entire record about addiction might get a little old; maybe two or three songs, but not 11. Obsession, compulsion, loneliness and despair, those I could stretch out over a whole record."

Lost in Space is another marvelous collection of Mann’s intimate portraits of lost love and broken people, all set to a wry pop soundtrack that often lilts at the precise moment that one would expect dour melancholy. It is the ecstatic tension Mann creates between her often downbeat lyrics and her sprightly pop melodicism that is unique and has thus far made her impossible for major labels to classify and market.

"My goals were never to be particularly outlandish or left of center or avant-garde," Mann says with a dry laugh. "My tastes harmonically really run to classic ’70s chord progressions and melodies, and my ideas are pretty simple. None of that is crazy or experimental. From a record company viewpoint, everybody’s so worried about ‘Can this be turned into a million-selling record?’ and what’s required to turn it into a million-selling record is usually to remove everything that’s interesting. Their idea of commercial is so much more bland than mine. My music is not going to sell outside a certain audience, so why not leave it alone so you don’t alienate the people who actually like it?"

That’s a slightly more than rhetorical question Mann must certainly have asked all her labels along the troubled arc of her career. After the windfall success of ‘Til Tuesday’s debut Voices Carry in 1985, Epic Records tried tinkering with the band’s dynamic on its two subsequent albums in hopes of revisiting that initial commercial accomplishment. When the label couldn’t "fix" Mann’s unbroken musical creation and reached an impasse on the next ’Til Tuesday album, they stonewalled the band, tangentially causing its demise and ultimately making it legally impossible for Mann to record for nearly five years.

Once freed from the major label yoke, Mann had learned a valuable lesson and signed with independent Imago for her astonishing 1993 solo debut, Whatever. The album’s title was a double-edged sword that revealed the indifference she felt for the machinery of the music industry as well as determination to make music by any available means. Although the album garnered glowing reviews and exposure, Mann’s solo comeback was undermined by the collapse of Imago, who in turn blocked Mann’s move to Reprise and also enjoined her from recording for the better part of two years. After settling that mess, Mann perhaps rashly signed with Geffen, tossing her squarely back into the major label lion’s den.

Geffen released Mann’s sophomore solo disc, I’m With Stupid, in 1995, but only after a titanic tug-of-war over every detail. Again the album generated great notices, and the single, "That’s Just What You Are," wound up on the soundtrack to TV’s highly successful Melrose Place, but Geffen remained unconvinced that Mann had achieved her potential on the album. From Mann’s perspective, she was always doing more with less on Geffen’s stringent budget.

"Geffen had a policy of not having more than a little slip of paper and not even a booklet in the CD," says Mann. "‘No 8-page booklet for you, that would break the bank.’ Or, ‘Only black and white printing, no color. That’s too crazy for you.’ That was super cheapo and just not good value for money."

Before Mann’s next album could even be imagined, Geffen was itself absorbed in the Seagram/Universal deal; when Geffen was dissolved as a label, Mann was reassigned to Interscope Records. In 1998, Mann delivered Bachelor #2 to Interscope and was promptly told that some changes would have to be implemented to make the album release-ready. Mann insisted that the album was done, and the label insisted that Bachelor #2 would never come out in the form that Mann had delivered it.

Interscope’s refusal to release Bachelor #2 coincided nicely with Mann’s unexpected (and Academy Award-nominated) success with her songs for the Paul Thomas Anderson movie Magnolia in 1999. Flush with the royalties generated by the Magnolia soundtrack, Mann was able to buy back the album from the label and made the momentous decision to release it herself. Although not considered among the best of her career, Bachelor #2 was a rousing success for an independently released and promoted album. More important, it was her vindication, a success achieved without label support or interference. Freedom from label restraint can itself be a poorly navigated two-way street if the unshackled artist doesn’t impose some appropriate boundaries on his or her own work. If there is a positive side to label meddling, it is that a critical and creatively removed viewpoint can sometimes correct the trajectory of a project spinning dangerously toward self-indulgent twaddle. Mann has yet to fall victim to that particular pitfall in the recording process; while she may load up on the emotion of the moment, she works with an economy of sound as the perfect counterpoint. In the recording of both Bachelor #2 and Lost in Space, Mann encountered no significant obstacles that could have caused her to rethink her label-less journey.

"I’ve been making records long enough that it’s not a big surprise," says Mann. "I produced a lot of the last record myself. It wasn’t a big surprise that, at the end of the day, I found it to be a little more work than I wanted to take on. I was going to co-produce [Lost in Space] with Michael Lockwood, who’s played guitar with me for a long time, but he turned out to be this great producer, this great hidden gem. He was so good, I was like, ‘Dude, you’re the producer, take over.’ He did a great job. I would definitely work on the next record with him."

With Lost in Space just barely out of the box, it seems odd to think in terms of the next record, but Mann’s new freedom from label timetables makes it easier to entertain such thoughts. And the new home studio she shares with husband Michael Penn makes it easier to facilitate the songwriting process.

"The way I like to work is if I have a song, I like to go in and record it while it’s fresh and interesting, rather than waiting for two years and recording everything at once, which is not really an optimum way to work," says Mann. "You have no time to listen to things and get a perspective, where if you need to rerecord something, you can. If you record it all in one lump, you’re sort of stuck with it."

The artwork accompanying Lost in Space is just as important to Mann as the music that it houses, and she has spared no expense in creating a fabulous package for the music. Renowned illustrator/graphic novelist Seth drew the cover art and the accompanying illustrations for each lyric page in the CD booklet, as well as a wry and melancholy panel cartoon that tells an oblique story every bit as compelling as Mann’s own songs. The way the booklet unfolds from the interior and the mechanics of the digipak’s gatefold come as close to vinyl album cover design as we’re likely to experience in the CD era. All of that additional planning and decision-making, usually the jurisdiction of a label’s art department, falls on Mann’s shoulders. It’s a responsibility she relishes -- particularly the ability to spend more and give her audience a nicer product without worrying solely about the bottom line. "The package is a very heavily thought-out thing that really goes with the music well, and so I’m very concerned with making sure it looks good," Mann says. "I usually come up with a design, and I have an art director that I’ve worked with for the past three records or so (Gail Marowitz), and she’s a really good friend of mine and she helps out tremendously." This is an expensive and time-consuming element of Lost in Space’s presentation, and one that a major label would never have considered for a "mid-level" artist like Mann. That may well be the reason she has so adamantly pursued more elaborate and aesthetic settings for her gem-like albums, even when that luxury has come at considerable expense. It may also represent the only real expectation that she harbors for the actual release.

"I think most of my work is done, and Whatever expectations I have are pretty much satisfied at the point where the record comes out," explains Mann. "I’m anxious to see it manufactured and make sure it looks good and make sure that the artwork came out well. I hope that some people appreciate that. I appreciate good art direction."

This mantle of extra responsibility is the natural by-product of launching a label. Most of SuperEgo’s details are handled by Mann’s manager Michael Hausman (who was also her drummer in ‘Til Tuesday) and his assistant, but Mann doesn’t envision a time when SuperEgo becomes a real functioning label.

"Any income is just from the sales of my record, and I don’t know if my record can sell enough to both finance another record of mine and somebody else’s," says Mann honestly. "There is one smaller project that I want to do -- we’ve started it but now I don’t know when we’ll be able to finish it -- which is an acoustic record by Scott Miller of the Loud Family. I think he’s really great and he’s been a huge influence on me. But that comes out of my own pocket, and we’re trying to do it as cheaply as possible. I’m just not such a huge seller that I can finance a lot of other records. I’m not setting up to be a business maven." Instead, Mann has helped to set up United Musicians (UM), a collective of artists who network to share methods of distribution and promotion as an alternative to the indentured servitude of the major label system. The other members of UM at this point are former Hüsker Dü/Sugar guitarist Bob Mould, singer-songwriter Pete Droge, and Michael Penn.

Mould’s recent Modulate was the first UM release; the album came out on his own Granary label and was disseminated through the collective’s distribution arrangement with RED. Mould already has two more complete albums in the can awaiting release in the coming months, making three separate Bob Mould albums in the space of a year -- something that no major label would attempt in the best of times. The fact that UM endorses this kind of expansive thinking is indicative of their belief that the labels have mismanaged themselves into a precarious position, and that music itself is in no danger of falling out of fashion. It’s merely changing its paradigm in a dramatic manner, and UM stands at the cusp of that change with a new way for artists to think about their work and how to expose it. Even so, Mann has no illusions about the challenge that looms ahead of her and the other artists in the UM co-op.

"It’s hard to market a record, it’s hard to get people’s attention when there’s so much other stuff out there, not just music but TV, computers, video games," says Mann. "Even people who want to buy the record or sometimes it’s hard to get the word out to them that there’s a record available, should they be interested. And that was the experience I had on major labels, too."

With her label experience standing as the anvil on which the United Musicians mission statement was forged, Mann has become something of a reluctant activist in the cause of artist’s rights. This reluctance doesn’t spring from a hesitation to get involved, but merely from the standpoint that she and many others are fighting for rights that shouldn’t require so much effort to retrieve; they should have been inherent in the system from the very start. Although Mann understands the need for substantive change in the label/artist relationship, she’s content to leave that particular fight to Don Henley and his Recording Artists Coalition and use United Musicians to show artists a way to avoid the major label debacle altogether.

"It’s basically a conduit to distribution for other people like us who want to put out their own records," says Mann of UM’s role in the artist’s process. "And Whatever other marketing and promotion help we can offer, but that is generated by Michael [Hausman], and it’s on a very small scale."

When it comes to the issue of artists’ rights, Mann has very definite opinions about the things that need to be addressed first and foremost. "The main thing that Henley is involved in is the repeal of the seven-year law exemption; there’s a law where you can’t have a personal service contract for more than seven years because it becomes more like indentured servitude," Mann explains. "But the music business had lobbied for an exemption to that, which they successfully acquired. So musicians are not afforded rights like any other worker in California.

"The other one that is really appalling is the idea that [though] a musician may pay back the money owed from an advance to make his record, at no point will he ever own it. I think that has to be addressed. If you pay off a mortgage, you own the house. When you pay off this mortgage, you don’t own the record."

Thankfully, Mann has shed the constricting corporate coils that threatened suffocation. While realizing that she will likely never own the rights to her first two solo albums for the very reasons detailed above, she has gotten past that and remains content in the knowledge that, from here on out, she can finally create from a position of pure creative control.

Of course, as the head of her own label, Mann has to start thinking about the bottom line, but all her experiences have taught her the positive way to consider her options.

"I was very happy that I was able to finance another record, but I should probably learn to make records that are less expensive because I did spend some money on this one; thank God for Pro Tools," says Mann with a laugh. "Live and learn." Live and learn -- two things that Aimee Mann has always done pretty darn well.

Although reviews of the new Oasis album, Heathen Chemistry, have been generally positive, a number of pundits have inferred (or outright shouted) that the album’s biggest fault lies in the band’s decision to include nearly a half-dozen songs not carrying a Noel Gallagher songwriting credit. With songs from brother Liam and the newest Oasis members (bassist Andy Bell and guitarist Gem Archer), Heathen Chemistry is the first Oasis album with so many non-Noel compositions, a direction the guitarist neither endorses nor disavows for the future.

“There are no ground rules within the band,” says Noel without a trace of irony. “Nobody gets a set quota of minutes on the record. I will say that all their good songs have got to be better than my shitty ones.”

Perhaps the biggest story on Heathen Chemistry is the fact that the Gallaghers made the album without having to rope off the studio and call in a referee. Noel says that his evolving relationship with his brother is less troubled for a very common reason.

“I’d love to be able to reel off a story of redemption and all that shit, but it’s all about getting older. The little things become less important. When you’re young, the shoes you wear are extremely important. When you get to my age, you don’t give a f--- about anything. If we’d never made a record, I’d still be in a band with Liam, because he’s great, and it’s always exciting.”

In certain critical circles, it has been suggested that Noel should consider his solo options. Although his battles with Liam have been the stuff of rock legend, Noel has absolutely no interest in leaving Oasis for loner pastures.

“It’s completely irrelevant; I’m in a band, and that’s the end of that,” he says adamantly. “I have no designs on being the next Richard Ashcroft [lead singer of the disbanded Verve], believe you me. I don’t mind trying to take the Beatles’ crown as the best band in the world, but do not f--- with the King: there will not be another Elvis Presley. There’s no point in going solo if you can’t be bigger than Elvis and you won’t be. So there.”

The Palace at 4 AM (Part 1), the debut collaboration between former Wilco second-banana Jay Bennett and Chicago roots fixture Edward Burch, is like the pop music version of An Affair to Remember. Bennett and Burch met years ago while both were kingpins in the Champaign, Ill., pop scene and, after some tentative jams yielded actual songs, vowed to work together as soon as humanly possible. Bennett’s eventual Wilco membership and voluminous session work and Burch’s manic multiple band affiliations (the Kennett Brothers, the Handsome Family, Viper & His Famous Orchestra, among others) all conspired against the pair’s desire to hook up in the studio.

With the end of Bennett’s Wilco run and a slight lessening of Burch’s band duties, the time seemed right to finally record some of the dozens of songs the pair had written together in every moment they could squeeze from their itineraries. The song archive was impressive; Bennett and Burch originally planned to make The Palace at 4 AM (Part 1) and compiled them into one of the best pop releases of the year.

It has been smirkingly suggested that Reprise would not have dropped Wilco if they had delivered an album with half the pop chops of Bennett and Burch’s album. From the George Harrison guitar homage on The Palace’s opener “Puzzle Heart” to the Beatles reference at the top of “Drinking on Your Dime,” it’s clear that B&B have created a work that may be less sonically challenging than its Tweedy counterpart but is no less engaging. Bennett and Burch’s genre mastery is further cemented with the Americana pop luster of “Talk to Me,” the jangly folk of “Whispers and Screams” and the anthemic lope of “No Church Tonite.”

The Palace at 4 AM was originally envisioned by the pair as a spare acoustic work, but their ambitions got the better of them. They wound up incorporating a who’s who of pop royalty on the album, including Wilco’s John Stirratt, original Wilco member Max Johnston, former Elvis Bros. drummers Brad Elvis and John Richardson, and pop genius Adam Schmitt. While Bennett and Burch hew closely to their avowed influences (early Bee Gees, John Cale’s Paris 1919, Badfinger, George Harrison, mid-period Elvis Costello), the pair has made a fascinating album that stands with the gorgeous power of Wilco’s Summerteeth and the best of the Pernice Brothers or Beulah. The incredible baroque pop accomplishment of The Palace at 4 AM may well be Bennett and Burch’s last hotel-alpha-hotel-alpha in the whole Wilco affair.

Linda Thompson recorded seven brilliant Celtic-tinged albums in the ’70s and early ’80s with then-husband Richard, culminating in Shoot Out the Lights, one of the most devastating divorce albums ever recorded and a hallmark of British folk-rock music. An overly slick solo debut followed in 1985, and she promptly disappeared from sight, the victim of a stage fright so oppressive that she literally lost her voice.

Accordingly, Fashionably Late, her first album in a very long 17 years, may be the most ironic album title of the year. Then again, it may simply be the best album of the year. It would be hard to find another album from 2002 that is as well written and as beautifully sung as this one. Replace the lights, and shine them on this reclusive star. Late or not, Linda Thompson deserves to be in the spotlight, all by herself.

Those familiar with the old Richard and Linda albums already know that she is a marvelous singer. Seventeen years have only deepened her richly textured alto. On a showcase piece like the harrowing traditional- her voice is a gloriously supple instrument capable of summoning up a world of anger, bitterness, world-weariness, pathos, and resignation. Quite simply, Linda Thompson has the kind of miles-deep soulfulness that few have had before her. Those looking for a reprise of the traditional English folk sound of "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" will be delighted with vengeance-filled murder ballads such as "Nine Stone Rig," and then might be astonished to note that the song was written by Linda and son Teddy. Indeed, mother and son wrote nine of the album’s 10 tracks, and Teddy’s guitar and vocals are featured prominently throughout the album. Linda only strays from the folk template once, on the eerily lovely "Paint and Powder Beauty," which sounds like a ’30s Cole Porter or Jerome Kern show tune, complete with lush string arrangements. But sorrow and death in the grand English folk song tradition dominate these songs. The words may be fresh and new, but they sound as ancient as the pastoral Yorkshire countryside. And although there’s a dark edge to much of this music, there’s humor too, as in the lament "Weary Life," where the long-married narrator wishes that she had taken the sports car and he had taken the kids, and which contains the classic couplet: "You want a young girl to carry you off to bed/But you still need me to scratch your wooden leg." There’s not a weak song on the album.

Along the way, a veritable who’s who of Celtic music shows up to lend a hand: Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, and Pentangle alumni come out to play and sing, while next-generation luminaries such as Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy, Kathryn Tickell, and Rufus Wainwright all lend their considerable talents. Best of all, the entire dysfunctional Thompson family—ma, pa, and kids Teddy and Kamila—shows up on the melodic opener "Dear Mary," including ex-husband Richard, who turns in harmony vocals and some trademark swirling guitar licks. It’s not the full-album Richard and Linda Thompson reunion for which many of us had hoped, but the song is glorious in its own right. Those harmony vocals are enough to remind even the most jaded listener of what might have been and of what has been lost.

But Fashionably Late is rightly viewed as a celebration of what has been found. Linda Thompson is back, and back with a superb album. By mining the mother lode of traditional folk music, she’s created a masterpiece for the new millennium.