Pages tagged “issue 3”

Damien Rice likes to wander. The young Irishman has lived on a small farm in Tuscany, spent time alone in an abbey in the south of France with a monk who composed Gregorian chants, and busked his way across the rest of Western Europe. So it’s no surprise that the road to his solo debut, o, was circuitous.

His band, Juniper, signed to Polygram in 1997 and received some attention with singles “The World Is Dead” and “Weathermen,” but Rice left the group when upheavals at the label delayed the planned full-length follow-up. The rest of the band reformed as Bell x1, but Rice needed a break. He had seen a movie about an Irishman who’d moved to the hills of Tuscany to paint.

“The landscape and the lifestyle attracted me,” he said during a stopover in New York on his first stint in North America. “Just this idea of living with a big group of people in a big house out in the middle of nowhere. You all have dinner together. No pretension. Nothing but simple living in this beautiful, beautiful landscape.” A naïve idea, but surprisingly he found what he was looking for on the second day in the region. He met a girl on a bus who had a friend in the area, who had a friend, who knew of a woman with a horse and a donkey who needed some help with the animals.

“I moved up there for a while, and it was amazing. But I discovered I was too itchy still. I knew that I wanted to make a record. After a couple of months of living there, I knew ‘I’ve got to go back and make a record.’”

He was still under contract with Polygram, which had just been gobbled up by Universal, and began recording demos for the label. His A&R representative loved the track, “Amie,” but his boss didn’t think it was commercial enough. “I said fine, ‘F--- it. I’m not going to make something you think is commercial.’”

He hit the road again, this time with no destination in mind. He sent the label a fax from Hamburg, Germany, telling them he didn’t want to extend the option, and began busking his way from city to city. With a guitar, a microphone, and a small, battery-powered amplifier, he made his way through England, Scotland, Wales, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Holland. Some days were better than others. “I literally would be sitting on the street hungry. I’d be starving but without quite enough money to buy dinner. But I’d have to wait until later on in the evening to busk because that’s a better time for the songs. That was a little bit scary every once in a while, but once I got used to it, it was fine.”

But what began as a way to pay for meals became something of an epiphany for Rice. To keep it from feeling like an act of desperation, he only played his own songs. “I did it to make money, but by doing it, … I became happy with just the songs and me and no other reason for their existence. Before they had just become tunes to impress other people. And I hated that.”

Revived but still broke, he returned to Ireland and began recording more demos. With the help of film score composer David Arnold (Die Another Day, Zoolander, Independence Day), Rice bought studio equipment and began recording on his own. The independently released o is a far cry from the flashy rock of Juniper, with whom Rice went by the pseudonym Dodi Ma and played loud hard and loud under a rock ’n’ roll light show. Instead, it’s quiet and beautiful, smart and layered. The album debuted at #7 on the Irish charts, and Rice has been selling out theaters in his home country. While o is only available as an import in the U.S., Rice made his first foray into North America last fall, and it certainly won’t be long before his wandering brings him back.

The Paste Guide to Busking

busk•er (n): most commonly a person who sings and/or plays a musical instrument on the street, usually for donations. Probably from Italian buscare—to procure, gain

Best Place in Europe for Busking Damien Rice: Ireland “I have to say the best place of all for busking was Ireland, funnily enough. It just had the best vibe. You’d get the best crowd, the best money. They were the loosest. Maybe it was because I was comfortable with Irish police, as well.”

Toughest Place in Europe for Busking Damien Rice: Germany “In Germany, they were a little bit strict. They were a bit more regulated, but they would be. If the German police come up to you and ask you to move on, you say, ‘OK.’”

Rice might be thankful that Singapore wasn’t on the itinerary. While the National Arts Council of Singapore encourages busking to “enliven the streets of Singapore and to add colour to city life,” busking there requires a Letter of Endorsement from the NAC and is restricted to an official “List of Locations for Busking.” Fines for breaking any of the stated regulations can reach up to $10,000. That’s a lot of loose coinage.

Calexico co-founders Joey Burns and John Convertino hear the world differently than most people. After all, not everyone would have imagined that surf guitar reverb would sound so at home beneath a blast of mariachi trumpet … or that an acoustic Portuguese fado wouldn’t clash with an electric Norteño rave-up … or that the lonesome cry of a pedal steel guitar could flourish with a symphony orchestra’s string section.

Feast of Wire (due out Feb. 18) continues the Tucson, Ariz., band’s tradition of musical alchemy. While their proximity to the Mexican border is still a strong influence, Calexico has raised the ante this time with more song styles, instruments and collaborators. The result further proves that variety—in the hands of the right alchemists—provides just the right musical chemistry.

"[Calexico] is kind of an international clubhouse of instruments and backgrounds," says Burns, the soft-spoken singer and guitarist who founded the group with Convertino in 1996. "We just mix it up and stick it in the blender and push ‘chop.’"

The record that emerged from the blender—their fourth official full-length—is sonically broader. The band added some electronic touches here and there, most noticeably on the Latin Playboys-like "Attack El Robot! Attack!" and augmented their jazz repertoire with a Gil Evans/Charles Mingus-influenced number, "Crumble." The strings from the Tucson Symphony Orchestra contributed to the Ennio Morricone-flavored "Close Behind," and "Not Even Stevie Nicks" sounds like Calexico’s first indie pop song.

Other tunes on Feast of Wire suggest more traditional Calexico fare, both thematically and sonically. "Quattro (World Drifts In)" depicts the seemingly inevitable demise of the Tarahumara, a native Indian tribe of the Sierra Madres Occidental range in Mexico who are losing their unique culture—and often their lives—to exploitative drug traffickers. The song begins with a foreboding guitar riff, augmented by a Native American drum beat and maracas, and a percussive deadened-string strum on an acoustic. Various electric guitars then add layers upon layers of call-and-response lines on the simple five-note repetition; trumpets and pedal steel then join the controlled chaos, bemoaning the unfolding tragedy that Burns recounts in his wistful tone.

The theme of the opening cut, "Sunken Waltz," is urban sprawl and the coming southwestern water crises—a standard topic for a band whose motto is, "Our Soil, Our Strength." Burns suggests that "just growing up in the West and watching the sprawl gradually filter out into the landscape" was practically traumatizing. In many of these songs, a typical protagonist suddenly turns his back on a bleak and corrupt suburban existence (it’s Los Angeles in this song, as Burns alludes to Mike Davis’ brilliant underground history of that town, City of Quartz). Thoreau-like, the Calexican character heads back into nature (typically the desert or mountains) and endures soul-purifying hardships, often while civilization is getting hammered by some cataclysmic event: in "Sunken Waltz," a flood. Sometimes the protagonists emerge alive and fundamentally altered by epiphany; sometimes they don’t emerge at all.

The often brutal lives of illegal immigrants are another topic Calexico has explored before, most notably in their single "Crystal Frontier" (available on the 2001 EP, Even My Sure Things Fall Through). "Across the Wire" was inspired by Luis Urrea’s book of the same title, and musically, by Burns’ immersion in a recorded anthology of Mexican folk music. "It’s a distillation of many different styles that we’ve been playing in Calexico for a while," Burns says of the song. "Part Norteño button accordion, western pedal steel, mariachi trumpets and violins, and twang baritone guitar."

On a lighter note, the banda-flavored "Güero Canelo," celebrates a Tucson eatery’s delectable entrees while a Casio synthesizer, baritone guitar and "low-rider bass thump" capture "what it feels like riding down to South Tucson on a Saturday night," says Burns, who, like a lot of musicians, has an uncanny knack of knowing where the best Mexican food is in any town.

As on all Calexico records, a handful of sultry instrumentals tie everything together, serving as segues, emotional rest stops or picturesque vignettes. "Pepita" suggests more Native American influences, "Dub Latina" combines modern and traditional touches, and the minimalist sketch, "The Book & the Canal," hints at classical pianist Erik Satie (a previous Calexico influence) and jazz giants Art Tatum or Bud Powell—which one, Burns remains undecided. Perhaps both.

Given the somber nature of some of the subject matter, many of the songs on Feast of Wire are unashamedly melancholic. But all are emphatically vibrant and, as is the case with all good art, ultimately uplifting and spiritually fulfilling because of the beauty of their construction and the honesty of their execution. As Burns sees it, "there are moments of light at the end of the tunnel" that always makes the journey worthwhile.

In the past, Burns and Convertino set up camp in the studio with all their instruments and conjured up most of the album alone, bringing in the hired guns in later to put the finishing touches on it. This time, the musicians with whom they had been touring for over a year participated from the start. They included native Germans Martin Wenk (accordion/trumpet/guitar/synthesizers) and Volker Zander (bass/vibes), Mexican-American Jacob Valenzuela (keys/trumpet/vibes) and—on loan from Lambchop—Nashville resident Paul Niehaus (pedal steel/acoustic guitars).

"Having them involved in some of the recording and writing process was a big influence," Burns says. "One of the songs on the album, ‘Black Heart,’ was cut live, the basic tracks were, anyway, and that’s something that’s unique for us. ‘No Doze,’ the last track on the record, was built around a simple three-note theme Paul came up with on his pedal steel."

Burns and Convertino first played together in the early ’90s as the rhythm section for Howe Gelb’s Tucson-based musical cooperative, Giant Sand. They did a brief stint as backup for the pedal steel-driven, all-instrumental Friends of Dean Martinez, then formed Calexico and released Spoke, their debut, in 1996. Since then, they’ve released two full length CDs, one EP and four limited-release albums that they sell on tour or at www.casadecalexico.com.

The variety of different musical forms on those records has meant an amazing variety of instruments, as well. Like many musicians, Burns and Convertino are consummate thrift-store vultures, with discarded or abandoned instruments their preferred quarry. In Calexico, the instruments are revered for their history almost as much as the players’ backgrounds. The pedal steel guitar, for instance, comes with a certain pedigree. So does the trumpet, the vibraphone and the stand-up bass the group prefers.

"It’s what these instruments represent, where they come from," Burns says, citing the German heritage of the accordion in Mexican music as an example. "It’s nice to bring these elements together, and at the same time bring in your own influence. For me it might be that twang element, or it might be that indie rock sensibility of low-fi recording techniques, or electronic samples, or something thrown in there."

Of course it helps if you can actually play all those instruments. Burns studied classical music at UC Irvine and is fluent on a number of stringed instruments, including cello, bass and guitar. Convertino plays accordion and vibes in addition to all manner of percussion. But it’s his drumming that propels Calexico’s music— firmly rooted in jazz styles (Burns likens Convertino’s musicality to Max Roach’s) and executed on a kit so simple you could fit half a dozen of them inside the average rock star’s drum set.

"John’s such a musical drummer," says Burns. "It’s not so much what he’s playing as what he’s not playing a lot of the time. It’s knowing when to come in, giving the vocals or the lyrics space, and then fleshing them out. He’s just got a great ear, and a sensibility of how music fits together. Not just from a technical standpoint, either, but from a real soulful, inner spirit, emotional standpoint."

Burns acknowledges that he and Convertino are both "good listeners." That musical sensitivity makes them very popular with other musicians. Over the last few years, the Calexico core has done session work—usually as a team—for Richard Buckner, Neko Case, Jenny Toomey, Barbara Manning, Victoria Williams, Bill Janowitz, Lisa Germano, the Amor Belhom Duo, Steve Wynn, Shannon Wright, and Jean Louis Marat, among others.

"They’re looking for some kind of bridge from where they’re at, and maybe where they want to go," says Burns. "It’s just about being a good listener and trying to get to the heart of their vision and what they’re trying to say."

That ability and commitment led Buckner to record with Burns and Convertino twice: in 1997 on Devotion & Doubt, his major label debut, and again in 2000 on The Hill, his musical tribute to Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The singer-songwriter recorded the basic tracks for The Hill on his basement 8-track, then brought them to Wavelab with only one stipulation for the bassist and drummer: no bass or drums, please.

"I gave them that kind of a handicap, and I was astounded," Buckner says. Convertino used a variety of percussion instruments—tambourines, maracas, shakers, wood blocks—to reproduce the idea of drums throughout the recording. Burns used a staccato-style of bowing on his cello to imitate a plucked bass—among several other nuances. The results are subtle but help give The Hill its distinct sound.

"They’re a great rhythm section, but they’re more than that," Buckner says. "They play everything and they’re amazing at everything and it’s not just because of technical proficiency; it’s about leaving your mind open enough to just let whatever happens happen."

Quantifying and ranking music is always a dicey game, but we wanted to share with you our 20 favorite CDs of last year. Yours are different, no doubt, and if you think you can do better, start your own magazine. Wait ... I take that back. Instead, vote in our Reader’s Poll. In the meantime we’d like to give mad props both to some celebrated and some overlooked albums that rose through the din and connected with us the way only beautiful music can. Click on each of the 20 artists and albums below to read about the best of 2002:

Vote in our Reader’s Poll

Honorable Mentions:
Doves - The Last Broadcast, Linda Thompson - Fashionably Late, Michelle Shocked - Deep Natural, Chuck Prophet - No Other Love, Sigur Rós - (), Steve Earle - Jerusalem, The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Damien Jurado - I Break Chairs, John Austin - Busted at the Pearly Gates, Mark Olson & the Creekdippers - December's Child, Josh Ritter - The Golden Age of Radio, Bennett & Burch - The Palace at 4 am (Part 1), Tift Merritt - Bramble Rose, Peter Case - Beeline, Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights, Various - 1 Giant Leap, Denison Witmer - Philadelphia Songs, Archer Prewitt - Three, Buddy Miller - Midnight and Lonesome, Joan Osborne - How Sweet It Is, Rhett Miller - The Instigator, Richard Buckner - Impasse, and though we're a little biased because our sister company released them (but c'mon they're great records), Bill Mallonee - Fetal Position and Locket Full of Moonlight.

In 1998 David Gray, victim of the serial label droppers, sat back in his bedroom and tinkered with a few new songs, adding a little sampled ambience to his acoustic guitar folk angst. To his amazement a phenomenon in rock history occurred when, despite a low budget, he sold millions of CDs by word of mouth. So now Gray is on the other side of canyon between failure and superstar, and the critics are sharpening their pens. Will he give them what will sell, sell, sell (as one of his albums that didn’t was called) or will he stay true to his musical vision.

The answer is A New Day At Midnight and he has, as remarkably as his out of the blue success, remained true to the focus of his soul. Gary’s dad has died since his son became famous and so this is melancholic stuff but it is never as stark as a Leonard Cohen. A New Day very naturally succeeds White Ladder and may even be that little side project’s completion. Music critics who always demands reinvention may wail and erase stars from their reviews but it was not for marketability that David Gray picked up a guitar or wrote these 12 songs. This album is the result of a man saturated in sorrow, asking the big questions as to why and against the odds of his agnosticism -- groping in the midnight for the hope of a sunrise. A New Day At Midnight is the most gorgeous slice of sadness.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

When she sings, her smooth and soulful voice sounds like a pile of white goose feathers and satin sheets. You want to curl up atop that voice and find comfort and rest. When the music stops and she begins talking, your comfy bedding evaporates and you find yourself on the floor next to your kid sister -- and she’s grinning from ear to ear. Her speaking voice is … well … a little squeaky and a bit silly and perfectly suited to her stand-up comedy persona, the ever-bumbling Sheila. That one diminutive young woman can evince two such entirely different and extremely potent voices is just one of the mysterious contrasts surrounding Rosie Thomas.

Her debut, When We Were Small, is a quiet, sublime album from a record label that brought the world Nirvana (SubPop). Her simple arrangements of piano and strings receive airplay on college radio next to Sleater-Kinney and Blackalicious. And she loves to make people laugh while sharing her intimate and earnest songs.

"In second grade," Thomas recalls, "when we had indoor recess [because] it was raining outside, I would do stand-up comedy in front of the class. So I would pray for rain: ‘Please let there be rain. I want to impress Matt Borden today.’"

When she performs, she usually takes a break from the music to introduce "Sheila," a character as graceless as Thomas’ music is graceful. Thomas never saw herself as a songwriter, and when she challenged herself to try it, she discovered that she wrote very slow, sincere songs.

"I love comedy because it allows me to give both parts of self," she says. "I don’t always walk around overanalyzing everything. When you know yourself really well -- and I’ve worked really hard to be as honest as I can with myself as possible -- you need a break from those things. So I use craziness in comedy as a sense of relief, because if I thought of these things 24 hours a day, I’d be a wreck."

Thomas’ parents performed in nightclubs around Detroit when she was a child, and she and her two brothers often joined them on stage. She took piano and guitar lessons, and after graduating from high school, she and her father would often perform together. She even toured briefly with Motor City’s Velour 100 in the late ’90s. When Thomas moved to Seattle at the end of the decade, though, it was for theater school. She had no intention of becoming a professional musician and began doing stand-up comedy at local clubs. She became friends with indie rocker Damien Jurado and sang on "Parking Lot," a track from his Ghost of David record for SupPop in 2000. "[Jurado] brought it in for them to review and I remember him telling me, ‘Rosie, they really like your voice. They heard you sing, and I told them that you’re a friend of mine and that you play your own music.’ I thought, ‘SubPop? No way, dude. They can’t be interested.’ And I kind of shrugged it off."

But an executive from label attended one of Thomas’ solo performances and approached her after the show. She recorded a self-titled EP in 2001 before releasing When We Were Small last January.

The album opens with the sweet, shuffling "Two Dollar Shoes," a guardedly optimistic song of lasting love that quickly transitions into the somber lament "Farewell," as Thomas sings, "I was wrong I guess / I was wrong I confess / I miss the way / I miss the way you sing with me," layered over sparse piano. By track three, she’s already building back into a hopeful and carefree contentedness on "Wedding Day," one of the most beautiful songs of the year, both musically and lyrically:

Yea I’ve had enough of love
It’s been good to give up, so good to be good to myself
I’m gonna get on the highway with no destination
But plenty of vision in mind
I’m gonna drive to the ocean
Go skinny dippin’, blow kisses to Venus and Mars
I’m gonna stop at every bar
And flirt with the cowboys in front of their girlfriends. ...
It’s gonna be so great
It’s gonna be just like my wedding day.

The rest of the album is filled with more beautiful sadness -- for losing love in "Lorraine" and "Finish Line," for missing the joys of childhood in "I Run," and for an abused wife in "Charlotte" -- with Thomas’ resolute strength always filtering through. "October" serves as both a guide and a warning for would-be suitors: "Tell her you miss her when you’re close enough to kiss her / And that you’d walk a thousand miles to tell her so / But never, never leave her."

The closing track, "Bicycle Tricycle," is the perfect conclusion to Thomas’ nostalgic, lovelorn offering. She yearns for her tricycle, her strawberry-red flower dress and her roller skates to protect her from "every boy that falls in and out of love with me." The arrangement of piano, cello, guitar and drums builds and fades and builds and fades, as audio clips from her childhood reveal the Thomas family gathered in warm conversation. The piano and a faintly droning Wurlitzer and the voices of children disappear into emptiness.

Her family will play a larger role on her follow-up, which she hopes to release this spring. After a European tour in support of Brian Ferry, she returned to Seattle and began recording the initial tracks, and over the holidays planned to have her parents and brothers add guitar, piano, harmonica and backing harmonies. She says this one will have more piano than guitar and more songs with a pulse to them -- more drums, more bass and more soul in the vocals.

"Lyrically, [the new] record isn’t about having a broken heart; it’s more about the things I’ve been learning about my life, all the pressure we put on ourselves, how to forgive ourselves."

"Sheila," too, has been busy. She spent much of the European tour in front of the camera for an upcoming documentary. Though she’s recovering from an accident involving bulls in Spain, she’s excited about her new band, The Strawberry Jam.

"Mostly cover songs," Thomas said of her alter ego’s newest venture. "I don’t tell her this, but they’re terrible. She thinks they’re beautiful. I think she’ll be doing ‘Solid as a Rock,’ ‘Pump Up the Volume.’ She’s thrilled so we’re all supportive of her decision. She’s got a full band now; she’ll even open for me -- fifteen minutes of jamming to some of the most terrible songs I’ve heard in my life."

Whether through comedy or music, Thomas is happy to have found a way to entertain people, to make them laugh and offer a connection through her songs.

"All I do is -- I’m a completely broken person and a weak person, and I admit those things in my songwriting. I make the choice to get over those fears, to push myself out on stage and just to perform whether I’m scared to death, whether I’m scared what people think. I just make the choice to get beyond that because it really doesn’t matter. When it’s all said and done, I’ll know that I tried to use my life, my brain and my heart for good things, and hopefully things that God would want me to do with my life."

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

If the squeaky wheel gets the grease, Ryan Adams must be one of the slickest characters in music at the moment. His questionable approach to fan relations (kicking folks out of shows) and erratic social behavior (publicly throwing punches and proudly sporting his wounds) doesn’t exactly draw positive notices. Add to that his bloated artistic pride and you have an easy target for disdain. Adams would be completely ignored if his recordings weren’t so consistently excellent.

While his now defunct band Whiskeytown enjoyed critical success, only after Adams went solo did he gain true notoriety (for better and for worse). His two previous discs, Heartbreaker and Gold, displayed a gift for deft lyrics and winning hooks. But the work on Demolition ups the ante, showcasing his impassioned genius for rebranding strains of rootsy rock music. According to Adams, the disc was not meant to follow-up the lauded Gold, but rather represents the "best of" a larger collection of polished demo recordings planned for a box set. While the tale sounds apocryphal (the fully realized production of tracks like "Hallelujah" makes the album’s demo status questionable), the work itself is sublime.

While Demolition boasts a few choice rockers such as "Nuclear" and "Gimme a Sign," Adams’ gifts truly shine on the smoky, soulful tunes. Thanks to tracks like "You Will Always Be The Same," "Tomorrow," and the spare "Dear Chicago," this disc is likely to haunt your dreams for weeks.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

At a time when record companies and radio conglomerates have, for all intents and purposes, conspired to determine what the nation’s listening habits will be, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot emerges as a truly subversive artifact.

The title is no accident. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was a phonetic alphabet used by NATO to transmit coded messages to spies via short-wave radio. Wilco’s message is at once a hopeful benediction and dire warning: good music offers salvation, but ignoring its aesthetic appeal in favor of profits will continue our national slide into soulless mediocrity.

A veritable mini-history of rock informs the record -- the Beatles-like harmonies of "Heavy Metal Drummer," the Stones’ riffs on "I’m the Man Who Love You," the punk-like cacophony of "Poor Places," the country touches of "Jesus, Etc.," and even 80s-style synth pop in "Pot Kettle Black." It’s at once new and familiar, comfortable and disconcerting.

It also recalls the Clash’s 1979 masterpiece, London Calling. That stylistically diverse record was a clarion call of rebellion against punk’s growing conservatism. Like that record, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot suggests that a rebel attitude need not be regimented to any one style. In our current Orwellian era, when "alternative" means precisely the opposite, Wilco’s encyclopedic use of styles has synthesized into a record more ominous than a rock block full of screaming Stainds and Linkin Parks.

Wilco’s leader, Jeff Tweedy, went through this before. As a founding member of the seminal early ’90s country-punk act, Uncle Tupelo, Tweedy said he and co-founder Jay Farrar decided to make their third record -- March 16-20 -- an all-acoustic, traditional one because that music was "scarier than Henry Rollins (of Black Flag) could ever be."

That same ethic informs Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, even if the music has changed. On the record’s most intense track, "Poor Places," Tweedy sings a harrowing note of understated foreboding -- "It’s hot in the poor places tonight / I’m not going outside" -- while a disembodied British woman drones "Yankee … Hotel … Foxtrot" against an increasingly clamorous surge of feedback. It sounds like the orchestrated madness at the end of the Beatles’ "A Day in the Life," updated into today’s global uncertainty. The effect is apocalyptic, a theme repeated even on the record’s upbeat tunes: "No, it's not okay," drones the out-chorus of the bouncy "Kamera."

But Yankee Hotel Foxtrot stands as a parable for what non-formulaic records -- no matter how inspired -- go through just to get a shot at a mass audience. It languished undistributed for several months while Wilco streamed it on the Internet to rave reviews. Reprise got a rare second chance when its subsidiary (Nonesuch) picked it up after a bidding war, in effect paying twice for the same music.

Will this record save the industry? Unlikely. But it does prove that sometimes the music still matters.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

In between the 1995 release of Corey Harris' debut album, Between Midnight and Day and its follow-up, Fish Ain't Bitin', Corey Harris made this observation about interpreting the music of the Delta blues pioneers and writing his own original material to add to that canon: "I think it’s your duty as a musician to know the tradition, and then to know yourself. I know myself through my music, but I’m nothing without the tradition. I keep my hands on both."

Harris is a long way from the sparse Delta blues roots of his early career, but he hasn’t forgotten the tradition. With each successive album, the phenomenal blues guitarist has added new shades to his sonic palette, from the African polyrhythms he studied in his post-graduate college work to the musical gumbo he found in relocating to New Orleans to the reggae, hip-hop and jazz that he naturally absorbed at all points between and beyond.

With Downhome Sophisticate, his debut album for Rounder, Harris continues his amazing exploration of tradition's impact on his unique musical viewpoint, this time by incorporating Latin rhythms into the constantly percolating mix of his previously displayed talents. Corey Harris has once again proven to be a master musicologist–not in the dusty, academic sense, but through his insightful study of musical history and his brilliant application of that knowledge in his living, breathing contributions to the rich vein of contemporary American blues.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

For the second album in a row, Pedro the Lion’s Dave Bazan has given us a story of lies, murder and betrayal wrapped up in wonderful melodies. On Control, adultery and corporate disloyalty replace the moral rationalization of politics on 2000’s Winners Never Quit.

Control feels crunchier in places than its predecessor, with heavy guitars on songs like "Rapture" and "Rehearsal," and beautiful keys on "Indian Summer" and "Magazine." The ironic and lyrically brilliant "Options" sets the tone with its honest and ugly look at selfishness. With help from fellow Seattleite Casey Foubert, Bazan adds more flesh to the album’s narrative this time around, while never letting the bigger picture get in the way of individual songs. He’s also adept at relying on the music as much as the lyrics to deliver the punch of his satirical battering ram. One of Control’s best, "Paramedics," reveals that the spurned wife has shot and killed her husband. A bouncy tune sung with an eerie lack of emotion, it moves from the husband’s last moments to the graveside where a priest has lost his faith: "You’re gonna die / We’re all gonna die / Could be 20 minutes, could be tonight." This "bitter cup" is followed by the dirge-like "Rejoice," in which Bazan sings "Wouldn’t it be so wonderful / If everything were meaningless / But everything is so meaningful / And most everything turns to shit / Rejoice." In 20 words, the young songwriter sums up two albums’ worth of the darkness and despair accompanying the lust for money, power and flesh. Bazan promises to finish the trilogy on a note of redemption, but with Control he’s left us with a beautiful and tragic record to ponder and enjoy.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

An angel who suddenly discovered she could sing, a pianist who puts words in her mouth and two men who know guitars don’t have to play chords and mandolins don’t have to play bluegrass. Together, they form Hem, an Americana band that was only recently discovered by America.

Though its debut, Rabbit Songs, came out in Europe in 2000, Hem had trouble finding an hospitable U.S. label and eventually released the album through New Jersey’s Bar None Records in April.

A variety of guest instrumentalists give Rabbit Songs its warm, rich layers on haunting lullabies and rocking chair folk songs. Orchestral moments like the piano/violin/clarinet combo on "Leave Me Here" add depth, while pedal steel, mandolin and fiddle give the record its timeless feel.

Sally Ellyson’s relaxed soprano lingers in your head long after the songs have ended. Though they live only a few blocks apart, guitarist Dan Messe discovered her by placing an ad in Brooklyn’s Village Voice. She came over to his apartment to copy a tape she made for a friend’s baby shower. After such an odd meeting, Messe didn’t even plan on listening to the tape. But later that week, when he pushed "play" thinking the tape was another, he was taken aback. Voices so perfect are rare.

Ellyson can sing lullabies that leave you weeping, such as on "Sailor." (This tune also boasts the best French horn solo written outside of the classical realm since the Beetle’s "For No One.") With the help of some stellar instrumentalists, she can also handle modern folk tunes like "Night on a River" or traditional songs like "The Cuckoo."

If Messe continues writing beautiful songs for Ellyson to sing, Hem will be permanently sown into the Americana music scene.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

In the voluminous roll call of artists wrung dry by a creatively indifferent and hit-obsessed music industry, no name looms any larger or potentially sadder than Patty Griffin. Two major labels have manipulated Griffin into making albums unsatisfactory to everyone involved, then refused to release them when Griffin wouldn’t compromise further by manufacturing more "hits." It seems an odd tactic to browbeat an artist whose songs have been covered by the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Reba McEntire, Bette Midler and Martina McBride, but to her credit, Griffin kept plugging away at the formulaic songwriting demanded of her by cloth-eared major label suits.

Finally released from her last label contract, Griffin translated that heady freedom into the exquisite and unencumbered basement recordings ultimately forming 1000 Kisses, her third release (but fifth album), of textural folky brilliance. With no label interference disrupting her creative process, Griffin assembled a stellar array of bruised and brooding songs with her guitarist, Doug Lancio, and a sparingly used band, giving the stark yet warm 1000 Kisses a tangible atmosphere as well as a distinct emotional weight.

Griffin’s achingly beautiful vocals, plaintive acoustic guitar and story songs are clearly the album’s heart and soul, but 1000 Kisses becomes transcendent with the sparse and subtle instrumental layers (guitars, accordion, trumpet) she and Lancio carefully place throughout the album. Proof of Griffin’s confidence in the material is her choice for the initial track, the nakedly open "Rain." Few artists would begin a defining album with such an affecting and powerful ballad, but Griffin clearly understands the strength of the subsequent songs and had no apprehension about leading with the gorgeous and subdued break-up ode. Equally bold are Griffin’s vulnerable take on Bruce Springsteen’s "Stolen Car" and the sensuous Latin seduction of "Mil Besos," the English translation of which titles the album.

With her new label, the Dave Matthews-imprint ATO Records, perhaps Patty Griffin has finally found a sympathetic home for her unique yet universal brand of folk-pop. The stunning results of 1000 Kisses demonstrate that leaving Griffin to her own devices is the only logical course from here on out.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

Aimee Mann’s entire career path has been predicated upon being misunderstood. Ever since ’Til Tuesday’s accidental 1985 hit "Voices Carry," labels have been sorely disappointed by Mann’s resolute refusal to replicate that bottled pop lightning in favor of pursuing her personal musical vision. The latest chapter in Mann’s solo career finds her once again in the role of misunderstood artiste. Just as her label rejected Mann’s last solo album, Bachelor #2, as unmarketable, the fluke success of her Magnolia soundtrack allowed Mann to retrieve the album from the industry scrap heap and self-release it to almost universal acclaim.

True to form, Mann followed Bachelor #2’s brilliance with the muted exploration of Lost in Space, an album rife with familiar themes of loss and emotional dysfunction. This time, Mann wraps her tales of heartbreak in a musical atmosphere as melancholy as her downcast lyrics, creating an album that demands repeated listenings for its subtle beauty to reveal itself. And, predictably, critics have responded to Lost in Space with the same confused apprehension characterizing Mann’s major label relationships. . Lost in Space has been unfairly dismissed as inferior to Mann’s previous works. However, patience and time have proven the worth of her work in the past, and Lost in Space will likely find its audience in retrospect. For those who have no need of that distant perspective, Lost in Space is one of the albums of the year–right now.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

Some were willing to chalk up the success of Coldplay’s 1999 debut, Parachutes, to the one-hit wonder status of "Yellow" and the band’s Bends-era Radiohead vibe en vogue at the time. The question was and still is worth asking: Does Coldplay simply tread the well-worn ground of "Thoughtful Rock Band" previously broken by U2 and Radiohead, or do they have something worthwhile to say?

On their sophomore album, Chris Martin and Co. have resisted the temptation to prove that they can rock. Rather than build a bigger sound in the vein of "Yellow"-style pop anthems, they’ve constructed gently cascading soundscapes, and the average track on A Rush of Blood to the Head is more like an epic lullaby than a sing-along hit. The leadoff track "Politik," displays a dynamic contrast rarely found on Parachutes, another sign that Coldplay has honed its craft. The production is both warm and full, and cuts like "In My Place" shimmer with subtle power.

Lyrically, melancholy pervades much of the album, at times conjuring up bleak, almost arctic images of isolation. Any sense of ennui is tempered by a cautious optimism, however; as the ominously swirling strings of "Daylight" build, Martin sings, "I am nothing in the dark / and the clouds burst to show the daylight." For a record that addresses loneliness and world-weariness, there is a light at the end of Coldplay’s tunnel.

The thing that sets Coldplay apart musically from many of its contemporaries (like Travis and Starsailor) is the band’s ability to create space within songs. Even the most epic numbers on A Rush of Blood allow the listener room to breathe, realizing Martin’s articulated goal of being "catchy without being slick." The songs are stripped down to bare-bones elements in all the right places, like the hushed introduction to the title track, beginning with Martin’s vocals and a washed-out acoustic guitar, eventually surging into a reverb-drenched symphony.

Coldplay might have reneged on the pop-anthem promise of "Yellow" in favor of a more intimate sound, perfected in sparse numbers like "The Scientist" and "Amsterdam." Too quiet to be the next U2, and too in love with guitars and melody to be the new Radiohead, the band has instead cemented their identity as the first Coldplay -- not a bad thing at all.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

If ever there was an apparent prototype for one-hit wonderdom, the disheveled 23-year-old Beck Hansen appeared to be it in the spring of 1994, when he rode a roughly thrown-together merger of incessantly catchy acoustic guitar loops, hip-hop beats, and stream of consciousness poetry to the top of the pop charts. An unlikely a candidate for mainstream success, the release of Mellow Gold displayed a previously unthinkable, fearless and revolutionary amalgamation of rock, country, rap, psychedelia, noise and clever junk culture references. Beck almost seemed a crass media stereotype, a surreal symbolic summary of all of the Generation X slacker apathy and cultural estrangement then assumed to be bubbling beneath the surface of the rootless generation’s superficial angst.

Any doubts as to Beck’s artistic legitimacy were obliterated two years later when the definitive Odelay arrived, confirming his genius and providing an unlikely bridge between the pedal steel guitar and the turntable, Willie Nelson and the Wu-Tang Clan, the ghetto and the barn. By decade’s end, he had smashed more boundaries in his body of work than any other artist, leaving entirely unique tracks on the pop music landscape.

Still, despite the presence of the more restrained country and blues found on One Foot in the Grave (1994) and the space-folk of Mutations (1998) in Beck’s catalogue, a certain sense of wide-eyed naiveté has never quite lifted from his music. As much as the sexed-up Midnite Vultures (1999), an album of soul, funk and hip-hop hopelessly set on "vibrate," attempted to shake off his gawky teenager persona, Beck still seemed like an innocent ingénue at the end of the day. No matter his songwriting’s inherent gravity, to imagine any real seriousness in a man who had produced so much satire seemed inconsistent with his persona. With the release of Sea Change, Beck finally appears to have found the maturity that all the shape-changing and genre jumping couldn’t produce. And all it took was a broken heart.

By far Beck’s most dour release, Sea Change documents the end of a long relationship and marks his arrival to the elite of traditional singer-songwriters. Positively reveling in exhaustion and defeat, he strains to usher in a new era with the opening tinkling keyboards and lonely acoustic strums of "The Golden Age," only to slump into an admission that "these days I barely get by/I don’t even try" by the first chorus. With the lonely piano, ghostly pedal steel and sad minor-key changes of "Guess I’m Doing Fine," he tries to brush off his disaffection, but the attempt is only half-hearted, and the listener knows better. Broken and hopeless, these songs are the kinds the pedal steel was made for, perfectly marrying Beck’s long courtship of the root elements of country and blues with his distinctive sense of modernity. Wrapped in Nigel Godrich’s arrangements -- a whirling wind tunnel of laser beams and spiraling strings -- tracks like "Lonesome Tears" and the majestic "Little One" lend drama and depth that accentuates the singularly haunted essence of the album.

Where Beck once formerly flirted with conventions of the American folk tradition, borrowing liberally from the imagery and song structures of artists like the Carter Family and Jimmie Rogers (the folkie equivalent to sampling), songs like the twinkling folk-pop of "Lost Cause" and the solitary chord changes of "It’s All in Your Mind" move past simple emulation and attain a unique resonance all their own. The art of understatement fully mastered, something previously diluted by Beck’s fondness for surreal metaphor, his lyrics now drop with deliberate intensity and unassuming precision. Having long-since dropped a rather infantile obsession with such arcane subjects as satanic tacos and bug infestations, tracks like "Round the Bend" approach a Nick Drake-ish elegance and ultimately make it hard to reconcile this character with the break-dancing hipster persona of the past.

The counterpoint to that considerable accomplishment, however, is that this album features there nothing even remotely genre-bending or revolutionary, aesthetically speaking, nor does it even feature the eclecticism heretofore marking all of Beck’s releases. The unrelenting dark mood gives the album an enormity and focus unattained even by Beck’s previous best work -- timeless and profound. Of course, should this album signal the end of Beck’s more carefree and eclectic recordings, it would be a shame. Few artists have been able to cover as much ground in so short a time, but most impressively, for the boy wonder who seemed unlikely ever to grow up, Sea Change is believable to every word, ultimately revealing Beck’s transformation from cut-and-paste genius to mature auteur -- his most impressive feat yet.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

"Pick-up laundry. Check. Buy bread. Check. Drop dog at vet. Check. Get Joseph Arthur’s latest CD…." Some items seem to stay perpetually on my to-do list. I still haven’t watched the entire Godfather trilogy, and I’m embarrassed to admit my lack of Wes Anderson knowledge. My Townes collection is still woefully small. The personal music and video collections have as many guilty gaps as guilty pleasures. What’s a busy, media-saturated boy to do?

Until recently, Joseph Arthur was on that list. Even after a couple of acclaimed T Bone Burnett-produced recordings, I knew his work by reputation only. Now I can replace "Get latest CD" with "Get back catalog."

On Redemption’s Son, Arthur delivers passionate excavations of the soul in an infectious potpourri of sounds. The comparisons run from Beck and Flaming Lips to Cohen and Jeff Buckley. Trampoline-era Joe Henry is perhaps the best comparison. While not yet possessing Henry’s lyrical craftsmanship, Arthur has infused traditional songwriting and themes that are both intensely personal and much larger-than-self with nicely variegated alt-pop-rock sounds.

What elevates this CD above his more experimental counterparts is his intense introspection. Arthur’s lyrics reflect a person scanning the horizon for any signs of life he can find. "Is there a chance to be redeemed?" he sings in the prayer "Dear Lord." The title song and "Blue Lips" deal with the aftereffects and existential implications of the deaths of loved ones. Bittersweet reflections on romance abound, and usually reverberate clear to the soul.

But Arthur can also revel in the joys, as in "Let’s Embrace:" "Come up to my place / And then let's embrace / And then let's replace / Our fear with our faith … I think the sun is shining on me / I can feel it / God's eyes are looking down on me / I will reveal it."

The album ends with a fitting mixture of despair and hope: "It's always hard to admit / Most days you feel like you don't exist / Temptation sneaks past your fists / Until the devil won't let you resist / Oblivion is what you want …But you've been loved / You’ve been loved."

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

The CMJ Music Marathon is aptly named: four nights of racing from venue to venue to subway to venue to late-night sushi to venue, hoping to discover something special among the hundreds of artists performing throughout lower Manhattan. While the 24-member Polyphonic Spree with their horns, harp and choir robes were a joy to behold, it was on the quiet Thursday afternoon at the Museum of Television and Radio in Midtown where I was most impressed. That’s when I heard Sondre Lerche.

The garage rock of his neighboring Swedes (The Hives, the Hellacopters and the Flaming Sideburns) might be getting the press, but the exquisite melodies of this 20-year-old Norwegian are truly sublime. I spoke with him before his live set for KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic with Nic Harcourt, ignorant of the methodically infectious music that was to follow in the small studio theater.

I had just scoured the Internet for anything that might help me interview the young singer-songwriter. Ten minutes yielded the following: His debut album, Faces Down, had already been certified gold in Norway. He quotes Burt Bacharach as a big influence. And he wrote his first song at age 14.

The impact of Bacharach and Costello quickly became apparent as his vocals playfully countered the clever chord progressions on his acoustic guitar. But Lerche has processed the ’60s pop aesthetic through a Beck-influenced lens, and the result is both adventurous and gaudily accessible. And while English is his second language, his command of it surpasses that of most Americans. His roughly-hewn lyrics offer another counterpoint to the melodies.

"It’s a collection of songs that I wrote when I was in school," he said of Faces Down, which was actually recorded at the end of 2000. "Kind of dark lyrics, but positive melodies and harmonies. And I think that’s a nice contrast."

Already he’s shared stages in Norway with labelmate Beth Orton and the undisputed kings of Nordic pop, a-ha. Faces Down hit #3 on Norway’s radio and sales charts. But on just his second day in the U.S., he seems to be handling the exposure well.

"You see a lot of people who are addicts to their own attention, to the fame," he said. "I’ve gotten quite a lot of attention for my music. You just need to keep focused on what you’re doing -- writing songs and performing them -- and appreciate that people are interested in what you’re doing and just leave it at that."

When Faces Down was released in the U.S. last fall, Lerche was already busy working on the follow-up, which he says will be more personal and a bit clearer lyrically.

"[Faces Down] is very well-organized structurally. On the new stuff, I’ve tried to break it up into more parts and have more variation within the song. Still of course the lyrics then have to be what keeps it together, because you have very different faces within the songs."

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

The dark, cinematic drama of Tom Waits’ double dose of grim art in Alice and Blood Money came as an antidote to the superficial pop music proclamations that we strip down and get "Dirrty," ‘cause it’s "Hot in Herre." War and rumors of war may drive some to drink, dance and be merry, but Waits chooses to howl at the moon. Like circus music in an alternative universe that’s too much like real life, he is the barker shouting out the painful sideshow acts most of us would prefer to miss but somehow find ourselves unable to look away from. And in the artfulness of his songs, written with wife and producer Kathleen Brennan, Waits unearths the beauty that can only be seen in ugly things.

Based loosely on Lewis Carroll’s grand tale, Alice is a journey through a dreary modern wonderland where "everyone’s hiding their tears," and we’re "Lost in the Harbour." The sadder and softer of the two, this disc tames Waits’ growl more often, revealing the tender side in songs of affection amid the anthems of displacement.

Blood Money is angrier, harsher and ultimately more striking. Inspired by Woyzeck, the 19th-century play of murder, mayhem and madness by Georg Buchner, Blood Money sees the dark farce of human existence when "God’s Away on Business" and "Everything Goes to Hell." "Coney Island Baby," a gentle love song, softens expectations with the possibility of love’s redemption, but death is a harsh "Lullaby" when you’re "Starving in the Belly of a Whale."

Literate and filled with black wit stark enough to match Waits’ gruff vocals, these two albums affirm the importance of life and love by giving meaning and purpose to the pain and loss we feel when things go awry.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

When critics began raving about Burke’s comeback album, more than a few fools in the crowd asked "Solomon who?" But without Burke there would be no soul music–he was a preacher and Gospel singer before he crossed over to the secular stage, and his early sides for Atlantic Records were as influential as those of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin in establishing the genre. He was a major influence on Mick Jagger’s vocal style, and The Stones performed and recorded many of his hits including "Cry to Me" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love," which is nothing short of a sexualized Baptist church service. He was also one of the first soul singers to cut country tunes, years before the Ray Charles hit "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music." Some may think soul music obsolete, but it’s remained vital in the south for decades, and as Burke’s return proves, soul music will never sound dated as long as hearts love and break. When producer Joe Henry told people he was working with Burke, songwriters lined up to give the man good material, resulting in this stunning collection. Burke’s vocal power is undiminished, and he still performs with a trademark restraint that takes every emotion to a deeper physical and higher spiritual level. His years in the church give Tom Waits’ "Diamond in Your Mind," Brian Wilson’s "Soul Searchin’," Van Morrison’s "Only A Dream" and Bob Dylan’s "Stepchild" a consecrated power that’s been missing in popular music for a long time.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.

Call it maturity, call it confidence, call it natural progression, but without doubt Neko Case is moving forward as an artist. Case has always had a strong voice and a knack for giving gritty stories an ethereal bent. On Blacklisted, her third album, she is handling more songwriting on her own and putting a finer point on both her narratives and her presence as a performer.

Fans of Case’s first two albums will still recognize the artist on her third. Her persona and her music are still dark, mysterious, and a little distant, her voice wrapped in reverb as if she were calling out from a vast, empty space. If Tom Waits is the drunken dreamer caught in the gutter, Neko Case is the woman who put him there. And unlike some of her contemporaries, Case hasn’t given up on twang as she’s developed her own voice. Hard to argue that songs like "I Missed the Point" and "Runnin’ Out of Fools" aren’t firmly rooted in Patsy Cline country.

Still, Case has added a few refinements to her arrangements–the nod to bluegrass on "Things That Scare Me," the subtle rhythmic shifts in "Deep Red Bells." And at times, her lyrics are nothing short of beautiful. The chorus of "I Wish I Was the Moon" and the imagery of "Deep Red Bells" are as provocative as anything anyone else is writing right now. Blacklisted proves that Neko Case can take something good and make it even better.

See the rest of our 20 Signs of Life in 2002.