Pages tagged “issue 38”

I’ve spent 35 years as a reader and literary critic, and still, to this day, I have never found a more stunning, courageous and powerful work of fiction than Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin’s millennial New York epic.

On my first read, I stayed up through an entire night, finished the whole 768-page novel and wept for a full 15 minutes, then turned back to page one and started again. I personally bought, oh, maybe 50 copies of the book and gave them away to friends, pressing it upon them with the fervor of a mad evangelist. I try to read the book once a year, as a reality check and a spiritual bracer. I made two trips from California to interview Helprin in his New York home, trying my damnedest to understand the mind where this colossal, towering work of the imagination originated.

Until now, though, I’ve never written about Winter’s Tale, out of abject fear. I was unsure that I could do the book justice, as was critic Benjamin DeMott in the New York Times Book Review, who wrote, “I find myself nervous, to a degree I don’t recall in my past as a reviewer, about failing the work, inadequately displaying its brilliance.”

Winter’s Tale spans the latter half of the 19th century and all of the 20th, and probably best fits into the very wide confines of Magical Realism, although any genre categorization inadequately and unfairly represents its scope and breadth.

A deeply consequential, wonder-filled, grand quest for truth, the book revels in beauty, honor and the silent grace of winter. It has a flying white horse; overpoweringly tender love; breathtaking vistas; swoon-inducing language worthy of Blake, Whitman and, yes, Shakespeare; hard-souled villains; bridges that span time as well as rivers; the most profound and passionate city-as-character construct ever put to paper; hilarity and courage and illumination and memory conjoined; great tragedy and messianic fire and impassible storms and a white cloud wall prophesied to turn pure gold.

It contains no postmodern angst; existential irony; dissolute deconstructionism or tortured interior monologue. Helprin told me he didn’t really consider himself a 20th-century writer, but that he more properly belonged to the 12th century, when artists paid homage to the Creator by imitating His universe and serving as a clear channel of inspiration and revelation.

“Every day,” he told me, “I would go down to my study at 9 a.m., finish writing by five, and then repeat the pattern the next day. But always that next morning I would read over the previous day’s work, and ask myself, ‘Who wrote this?!’ It came to me unbidden, almost like automatic writing, as if I pulled it from a mysterious place I couldn’t name.”

So Winter’s Tale is Harry Potter for grown-ups, C.S. Lewis for agnostics, Tolkien for the fully matriculated, García Márquez for everyone. Equally a man’s book and a woman’s book, a towering achievement most writers would cut off an arm to write, easily the age’s most optimistic serious work, it has the gravitas and the heft of a hydroelectric turbine, rumbling deep in your fundament and shooting magnetized electrons into your ether.

If our civilization survives, we will venerate this beautiful, ringing masterpiece of a novel hundreds of years from now. I dare you, whoever and whatever you are, to read it and not be moved.

In the late 1990s, when Steven Spielberg began working on World War II shooter Medal Of Honor, he and the game’s developer, Dreamworks Interactive, contracted veteran Marine captain Dale Dye—who’d also consulted on Saving Private Ryan—to make sure the game was historically accurate. But while finding someone so knowledgeable about World War II is relatively easy (Tom Brokaw probably has a couple of Greatest Generation vets chilling in his living room this very second), locating someone well versed in the Third Crusade—which occurred from 1189 to 1192 A.D.—is somewhat trickier.

Fortunately, the staff at Ubisoft Montreal—the developers of new stealth/action game Assassin’s Creed (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC), in which you play Altair, a white-robed assassin who must knock off slimy war profiteers during the Crusades and then vanish into the crowd without being caught—were lucky enough to find their man by simply kicking back and watching a movie.

“We actually found Dr. Cobb on the DVD for [Ridley Scott’s 2005 Crusades-era epic] Kingdom Of Heaven,” admits Assassin producer Jade Raymond. “We wanted an academic expert to look at the game’s script, game-play footage and artwork to ensure that it was historically accurate, and Dr. Cobb provided great input on the script and helped us make sure the historical elements were authentic.”

The good doctor to whom she is referring is Dr. Paul M. Cobb, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Notre Dame, and Fellow of the school’s Medieval Institute. Cobb’s expertise concerning the Islamic perspective on the Crusades led him to be interviewed for the historical documentary included with the Kingdom Of Heaven DVD. Even he admits that finding accurate info on the historical period isn’t as easy as renting a movie. “Like all pre-modern events,” he explains, “we rely mostly on what we would call ‘literary sources’—chronicles, narratives or accounts written by either participants or people who heard about these events and wrote about them in their own style. The Crusades have a kind of mythical quality to them because the sources are literary, and thus there’s room for storytelling.”

DUSTING OFF THE DETAILS

According to Cobb, there weren’t any gross historical inaccuracies in Assassin’s Creed when he began consulting; Altair wasn’t found fleeing the Jerusalem guard in New Balance running shoes. “I was actually quite impressed [with the original script]. They had obviously done their research. Clearly there were people on the team who had put their noses into books. It wasn’t just Googled and thrown together.”

“Dr. Cobb helped us on many different levels,” Raymond explains. “When reviewing the script, he suggested names of places and people we could include for more historical accuracy. And when reviewing the art of the cities, he pointed out details in the construction of particular buildings or the layout of the city that would’ve been different during the pre-Ottoman period.”

“The level of criticism I had was one of detail and nuance,” Cobb says, “making sure they weren’t using hodge-podges of different periods. But then, I’m also not one of these people who goes to a historical movie and gets upset because the sandals aren’t the right style.”

“I think where he helped us the most,” Raymond adds, “was his enthusiasm about our game and his willingness to answer all of our silly questions. For example, one day we were planning our casting session and there was a disagreement on the team about whether Richard The Lionheart had an English or French accent. All we had to do was call Dr. Cobb to get the answer and the argument was settled: Even though Richard was the king of England, his first language was French.”

CONVINCING THE EXPERT

Cobb may have ended up enthusiastic about Assassin’s Creed, but his first reaction to the idea was horror. When Ubisoft Montreal initially explained the game’s historical setting, he was miffed. “Frankly, when I first heard about it, I thought it was an appalling idea,” he admits with a slight chuckle. “I had visions of people playing a game that taught them how to, uh…religiously persecute people. But I was immediately relieved after seeing the script that the people behind the game are a very sophisticated crowd and have a bigger perspective on history.”

“Dr. Cobb understood that we weren’t making an interactive documentary,” says Raymond. “We were making a game where fun always rules.” “I think this period is a cool one to set a game in,” Cobb adds, “because, as I said earlier, there are so many question marks about this period of history that it has the flexibility you need for a game. In certain historical settings, you’re kind of locked into a narrative. That’s a problem I’ve noticed with some games—you already know what’s going to happen.”

So the truth finally comes out. Dr. Cobb isn’t just an academic, but a closet gamer. “I’m more of an empire-creating/strategy kind of guy. Rome: Total War kind of stuff.” Which is more than he can say for his fellow history professors. When asked if anyone in his life was impressed that he was working on one of the most anticipated games of the year, Cobb laughs, “My students are incredibly impressed with me. My colleagues—less so.”

His students’ impression does beg one final question: Will Dr. Cobb be using Assassin’s Creed as a study guide for Intro To The Crusades 101? “Absolutely not,” he says with a laugh. “But not because it’s historically inaccurate. I just happen to be one of these people who believes that nothing will ruin a game faster than making it educational. There’s nothing like a historian to ruin a good video game.”

The last time I saw a crab crossing the road was in the Caribbean, and I accidentally killed it with my car. I was shocked when it happened, because until then I did not think it would ever be possible for a person to kill a sea creature with her car. Ever since then I’ve considered myself hardened to any such surprises, so when I reached a little beach town—on the Pacific side of Costa Rica—called Montezuma, where the roofs are thatched and the roads are dirt, I thought I was prepared. I was walking back to the bungalow I’d rented for 10 bucks, set in a mango grove with an ocean view, when, “Oh, look, a crab,” I said, pointing to an apple-green creature skittering across the road. It was sizable, bigger than the hand of a chubby adolescent.

“I don’t think that’s a crab,” said my friend Jen, who was already in the distance. I peered down at it, and upon closer examination, I noticed it behaved oddly for a crab. For example, don’t crabs walk sideways? And where was its shell? Do crabs shed shells? And it had the hugest ass of any crab I’ve ever seen…

“JESUS GOD! THAT’S A SPIDER!” I screamed. “THAT’S THE BIGGEST, GODDAMMINEST, HUGEST-ASSED SPIDER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD! OH, MY GOD! DID YOU SEE THAT SPIDER?!?!”

It took me exactly one-half nanosecond to reach Jen. “DID YOU SEE THE ASS ON THAT THING? I asked (I talked in capitals about the spider for the rest of the trip), “IT HAD A BUTT THE SIZE OF A COCONUT!” “I told you it wasn’t a crab,” said Jen. She acted amazingly calm for someone who’d just encountered a neon-green arachnid big enough to hump her leg. She walked serenely on, in complete contrast to me, her travel companion, who every third step would break into a fit of flailing arms and head slaps, as it was just a matter of time, I thought, before we encountered the giant spider’s giant web.

“I can’t believe how unfreaked you are,” I told her, flailing. “THAT THING WAS PRACTICALLY A PLANET WITH LEGS!”
“We’re in Costa Rica,” she answered. “What did you expect?”

CURSE OF THE DAY-GLO ROAD SPIDERS

Her question gave me pause (not actual physical pause) because, the truth is, I came here not expecting anything. I needed a Latin American locale to study Spanish before taking the test that would qualify me as an interpreter, and I picked Costa Rica because it had newly established non-stop jet service via Delta Airlines. Plus, my friend Tanner had e-mailed me some information about a school located in the capitol city of San Jose that specialized in total-immersion courses—ones that, more importantly, I could afford.

Jen was a fellow student at the school, and she and I were part of a group excursion to the beach that included Tanner and his girlfriend, Laurie, who had both been to Montezuma before and who were also unimpressed with a spider big enough to win a fight with an alley cat.

“It’s a jungle,” said Tanner. “Things grow in jungles. They grow big.”
Tanner and Laurie planned to put bananas on the balcony of their bungalow to attract howler monkeys. We had heard a few in the trees earlier that day, and Jen had warned us not to stand under their branches because they like to urinate on tourists. I wondered how the monkeys could distinguish the tourists from the locals. “It can’t be too hard,” Jen said.

Before I left Atlanta to come here, a neighbor had given me a guidebook to Costa Rica with a rainbow-colored tree frog on the cover. I never bothered opening it until I got to Montezuma, hoping to find something in there about the curse of the giant-butted, day-glo road spiders. All it said, though, essentially, was that if you were hoping for an out-of-the-way, remote little coastal village to get away from other travelers, Montezuma was not the place for you.

So there it was again, another big surprise, because to me Montezuma was hellaciously out-of-the-way. It was hardly bigger than three neighborhood blocks, and it took four hours of travel over unpaved (or poorly paved) roads, plus a two-hour ferry ride to get there from San Jose. It seemed rustic, serene—the very depiction of remote to me. But then again, I’m a city chick who is only now becoming accustomed to day-glo tarantulas. Maybe after more time in the jungle, Montezuma will seem like a big city to me, and I will be found further in the wild, fully acclimated, truly hardened to any more big surprises, breeding those spiders to make purses out of their pretty, huge-assed, lime-green hides.

In-ground heated pools and outdoor tennis courts. Entertainment rooms with pinball machines and vintage coin-operated video games. On-staff chefs and breakfasts served at suitably late “rock ’n’ roll hours.” Jacuzzi baths, wi-fi access and horseback-riding lessons. With all of these distractions, who could be bothered with making a record?

For all the live-off-the-land attitude of the indie era, a surprising number of recording studios are doing a booming business by emphasizing the residential side of the equation. Whether an ocean view or pastoral country vibe is the primary attraction [see sidebar], studios the world over have pumped up the amenities in order to attract top-level musicians to their facilities. “We’ve been booked full-time for seven straight years, with some of the biggest-name artists in the industry,” says Albert Stern, manager of Morning View Studios, a southern California facility with on-call massage therapists and a $50,000 monthly rate. “I guess you could say that business is good.”

Power-pop trio Nada Surf recently recorded its new album, Lucky, at Robert Lang Studios, a plush studio/home arrangement located in the Seattle suburb of Shoreline. The facility has some local history: Alice in Chains and Death Cab for Cutie have worked there, and Nirvana’s final studio recording—the posthumously released “You Know You’re Right”—was tracked there. During the downtime for these last sessions, then-drummer Dave Grohl recorded the demos that became “Big Me” and “Exhausted,” thus laying the groundwork for his next project, Foo Fighters.

With its stunning views of the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains, the five-bedroom/six-bathroom brick domicile would probably serve as a top-dollar holiday rental property for well-to-do families if not for the fully functional recording studio occupying its street-level floor. (When Dave Matthews last recorded there, he purportedly grew so tired of climbing the staircase every time he needed to relieve himself that he installed a small downstairs bathroom, now affectionately christened “The Dave.”) The studio complements its state-of-the-art 48-track recording console and ProTools setup (and its wood-paneled control room and multiple vocal isolation booths) with an indoor basketball court, a surround-sound movie-viewing room, a full gourmet kitchen and two panoramic decks complete with barbecues.

The last day of Nada Surf’s recording more closely resembled a Mediterranean vacation than a grind-it-out session to put the finishing touches on what Frank Zappa once called a “studio tan.” “It’s hard to imagine writing something sad when you have this to wake up to every day; it feels like home base,” says singer and songwriter Matthew Caws, waving at the ocean below as seabirds hover above. “The band is flying back home tonight, but I’m staying on another week to mix the record,” he says. “I’m not ready to leave yet!”

THE PROS AND CONS OF STUDIO DECADENCE

Comfortable studio surroundings are hardly a new development in rock history. The Rolling Stones recorded their classic double-album Exile On Main Street while billeted at Villa Nellcôte, a 16-room retreat on the waterfront of the Côte d’Azur region in southern France, while Led Zeppelin routinely fled London for the country confines of Headley Grange when it was time to record.

“I get terrible studio nerves,” guitarist Jimmy Page told biographer Ritchie Yorke in 1976. “You really need the sort of facilities where you can take a break for a cup of tea, wander around the garden, then go back and do whatever you have to do. Instead of the feeling [you get] walking into a studio, down a flight of steps and into fluorescent lights, opening up the big soundproof door. To work like that, you’ve got to program yourself. You’re walking down those stairs telling yourself that you’re going to play the solo of your life. But you so rarely do in those sort of conditions.”

That said, for all the residential studios investing in the bells and whistles that, seemingly, are so in demand right now, there’s an opposing school of thought still alive in the indie community, its leading lights operating under the belief that grandeur is a distraction from the task at hand. Spoon recorded its latest LP, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, in drummer Jim Eno’s home studio in Austin, Texas, a bare-bones affair he built himself in between tours. “It’s basically a small house behind my house called Public Hi-Fi,” he explains. Frontman Britt Daniel recalls that he spent most of his downtime “sleeping on the futon; I was the only one who didn’t have a home in Austin, so I was basically living in the studio.”

And while producer Steve Albini indicates a certain fondness for London’s legendary Abbey Road Studios, his own facility—Chicago’s no-frills Electrical Audio—is much more in keeping with his DIY philosophy. “Most of the bands I work with don’t have any money to waste, so every minute they’re in the studio, they expect to be working,” he says. “I’m much more concerned with productivity than leisure activities. If you’re gonna be in the studio long enough to make use of a basketball court, you’ve already blown it as far as I’m concerned.”

A generation ago, long before blogs and MP3s made discovering music an instantaneous act, a young Massachusetts musician named Bobb Trimble issued two obscure psychedelic pop opuses—1980’s deeply troubled Iron Curtain Innocence and 1982’s fantastical Harvest of Dreams—then promptly disappeared into years of odd jobs and isolation.

Now, after 25 years, the cryptic tunesmith with the otherworldly tenor is getting a deluxe reissue treatment and, at last, a chance to reach an audience beyond the cult of loyal listeners who have paid thousands of dollars for the few hundred copies of his self-financed LPs.

“It started out that I was almost begging people to take my albums,” Trimble recalls. “I wasn’t even asking them for any money. I was trying to give them away, hoping that people would listen to them. There were some people that wouldn’t even take them off my hands.”

Though he received some local radio play and received a few positive reviews, Trimble was plagued by bad luck. His single “Killed by the Hands of an Unknown Rock Starr” came back from the record company with a loud popping sound. The cover for Harvest of Dreams—a photo of Trimble kneeling beside a unicorn-goat—returned from the printing press with a black inkblot over his face. He had trouble keeping bands together, and it was impossible to do justice to his complex arrangements with nothing more than an acoustic guitar. He eventually started a band with pre-teen players and another called the Crippled Dog Band, but by the late ’80s, he seemed destined for little more than local-curiosity status.

And yet, just as he drifted out of music, the albums he’d passed out started falling into the right hands. His songs found their way to internet radio, where they were discovered by Chris Welz of Secretly Canadian, the indie label that is now releasing both of Trimble’s seminal albums on CD with their original artwork and bonus tracks. “We couldn’t place it,” Welz says. “We couldn’t figure out where it was from or if it was real— like, ‘Is this just some guy saying it was put out in 1980 when it was really put out last week?’”

Completely out of his original LPs and having lived without any instruments until recently, Trimble seems both humbled and baffled by his cult audience. Even with fans from Japan to Norway clamoring for him to perform his lost classics once again, he seems in no hurry to make up for lost time. “My personal life is very private to me, but I don’t want to get isolated, either. I’m not ready for the transition,” he says somberly before admitting that at least his listeners will no longer have to comb online auctions to find his albums. “This might solve that once and for all.”

Youssou N’Dour wears his mantle as Afropop superstar and international music icon lightly, but throughout his career the 48-year-old Senegalese singer with the soaring voice has proven a bellwether of global pop tendencies.

He broke out in the 1980s behind mbalax—a pop sound built from his country’s intricate vocal and instrumental traditions—at a time that also saw the rise of soukous, makossa, Afrobeat and other styles born of similar ferment. He worked with mavens like Peter Gabriel, who helped launch world-music studios and labels, and he was present for the descent into overproduced global fusion; his 1994 duet “7 Seconds” with Neneh Cherry remains one of that era’s more listenable vestiges.

But post-9/11 global tension has proven a creative spur for N’Dour, a devout Muslim and an activist for causes including girls’ education and the fight against malaria. He threw out the playbook with 2004’s Egypt, an astonishing album that bridged devotional and pop sensibilities while exploring Senegal’s Islamic legacy. On his latest, Rokku Mi Rokka, he reverts to a standard song-driven format, but continues his cultural investigation.

“Egypt was a parenthesis, something exceptional,” N’Dour says on the phone from Dakar. “But you know, when you go somewhere, it ends up taking you someplace else.”

Rokku Mi Rokka—which translates to “Give and Take”—draws on Senegal’s arid North, where N’Dour detects the deep roots of reggae and the blues. “The music resembles the villages going toward the desert,” he says. “It’s a beautiful region, but also harsh. There is something difficult and powerful about it that becomes reflected in the music.”

Working with local and Malian musicians in addition to his Super Etoile band, N’Dour plays an open, acoustic style that gives his voice ample room to roam. The songs contain social commentary and cultural homage, from the joyous “4-4-44,” which honors Senegalese independence to “Baay Faal,” which celebrates a sect of dreadlocked mystics in whose ideas N’Dour says he recognizes himself.

Amid this fare, the final track, “Wake Up (It’s Africa Calling)” seems an odd note, with earnest French and English lyrics and a perfunctory rap from Cherry. But N’Dour says the song aims to counter enduring stereotypes. “It’s the message of young Africans who are active and aware,” he says. “It’s not just forests and poverty and AIDS. Africa is present, Africa is online.”

He’s never had a blockbuster. Then again, he’s never needed one. Over his quarter-century career as a producer, engineer and mixer, Los Angeles-based Boston native Joe Chiccarelli has followed his tastes rather than the dollar sign, contributing to memorable recordings from the likes of Frank Zappa, Oingo Boingo, The Bangles, Lone Justice, Tori Amos, American Music Club, Beck, U2, Rufus Wainwright, Elton John, Pink Martini and Morrissey.

Chiccarelli’s career crescendoed in 2007, as he produced The Shins’ Wincing the Night Away, engineered and mixed The White Stripes’ Icky Thump and recorded the first half of The Raconteurs’ much-anticipated second album. He also produced jazz singer Kurt Elling’s Nightmoves, which topped the Billboard jazz chart.

“I never had the big hit with the band of the day,” Chiccarelli says. “When everybody was making all these ’80s hair-band records and selling millions, I had no interest in that. So there were times when it was hard to get a gig. It’s taken me a while to realize that if you just associate yourself with good music and stick to stuff that you really believe in, hopefully in the end it’ll triumph—even if does take 25 years.”

Shins leader James Mercer had never worked with a producer, but after spending nearly two years on the follow-up to Chutes Too Narrow in his Portland, Ore., bedroom, he realized he could use the expertise of a studio artisan to bring some of his ideas to life. So he called on his friend Chiccarelli, whose brain he’d picked intermittently throughout the process. After the producer had given his feedback on the material and determined what was usable from the home recordings, he and Mercer began overdubbing the lead vocals in a local studio.

“I just threw out some ideas: how to sing this section, or trying a harmony here, trying a different voice, moving the melody, that kind of stuff,” Chiccarelli says. “And I think, all of a sudden, he went, ‘Oh, so that’s what a producer does. This isn’t so bad. It’s not like he’s telling me to be somebody I’m not; he’s just giving me some choices.’”

Riding a newfound momentum, Mercer and Chiccarelli brought in the rest of the band to further develop the tracks. “It was a pretty natural process,” Chiccarelli says. “James tries to involve the band in everything, but he’s also kinda shy about stuff in that he won’t play songs for them until he thinks they’re really good. From that point, whoever had an idea, or whoever was best qualified to play a particular thing, did the part.”

After pointing out that Wincing has sold nearly 500,000 albums Stateside, Chiccarelli acknowledges that “a lot of the cool kids really dissed this record—they thought it was too much of a departure. But artists have to change. As their careers progress, they want to try different things and experiment. You can’t expect that they’re gonna make the same painting every time. As a kid, I never expected Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin to keep coming up with the same album every time. It was, ‘What are they gonna do now?’”

Jack White tapped Chiccarelli for the new White Stripes album after hearing Wincing. “We did the album all 16-track analog, because Jack loves all that old stuff,” Chiccarelli says. The album was cut live off the floor, and a lot of it took shape in the studio. “We might get the body of the song,” Chiccarelli recalls, “and then Jack would come up with some new riff, and he’d say, ‘I got this idea. It’s in the same key as this other track—let’s just put it down on tape.’ And then we’d turn it into the bridge for another song. Jack really trusts his instincts; he never labors over stuff. He knows what a good performance is, and he’s fearless about it—he’s willing to try anything.

And then there’s Meg, whose simplicity Chiccarelli adores. “She’s really underrated, and I feel so bad for the shit that she gets,” he says, “She may not be Jack DeJohnette or Neil Peart, but there’s something that she does that is perfect for him and for that band. There is no White Stripes without Meg. Something magical happens when they play together.”

Both the Shins and White Stripes records sound like they could’ve come out at any point in the last 35 or 40 years, and if Chiccarelli can be said to have a particular signature, it’s locking down that sense of timelessness. “It’s pretty basic,” he says of his approach. “Jimmy Iovine was a mentor of mine, and his thing was, you work with great artists and you make great records. You just hope that you’re allowed to be in the room with these people.”

The producer is spending the home stretch of 2007 in the room with Sub Pop discovery Daniel Moore, Aussie band Augie March and the widely adored My Morning Jacket. In January, he’ll go to Nashville to finish the Raconteurs album. Nice work if you can get it. “The best part of the job,” Chiccarelli says, “is when the artist comes up to you and says, ‘Man, I love this record. You really got something here—this is exactly what I heard in my head.’”

Joe Strummer crammed a lifetime of greatness into a brief 42 months. The debut album from The Clash wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1979, more than two years after the English kids went bonkers for it. And for those of us in the Midwest who’d been reading about The Clash and anxiously awaiting the recorded results, this meant we had to absorb a dizzying five releases and eight albums’ worth of material in a short three-and-a-half years. By 1982 it was all but over, although the band limped on with a new and inferior lineup for a while. The Sex Pistols had imploded even earlier, and The Clash disbanded amidst bitter recriminations and rumors of drug abuse that were euphemistically passed off as “artistic differences.” Punk—or at least the marvelous first U.K. wave of a genre that has proven remarkably resilient—was dead almost before it began. But there was life—raw, vital life—in the unwieldy brat while it lasted.

There’s no great mystery here. Detonating amongst the flaccid pop-and-disco doldrums, The Clash’s sonic bombardment was the best thing to happen to music in the late 1970s. To put it in context, Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” topped the pop charts in 1977, the same year Joe Strummer and his contentious mates recorded “White Riot” and “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” Around the same time, John Travolta and Olivia Newton John were putting a disco sheen on ’50s nostalgia, and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack was well on its way to shipping 25 million units. Joe Strummer could’ve cared less about shipping units. He had more important things on his mind, like changing the world.

Critics have called The Clash a political band and Strummer a political songwriter, but in reality he was simply a humanist songwriter who cared more about individuals than ideologies. He was a resident of Planet Earth first and foremost, deeply suspicious of class and race and national distinctions. And he was a howling zealot who championed the downtrodden, the little guy, the working stiff who just wanted to be left in peace and to come home to his comfy chair and his pint. It’s why he explored not only punk but reggae and Celtic music and rockabilly and New Orleans R&B during his restless and eclectic career. It was all music for the people and about the people as far he was concerned. Joe Strummer started out as a punk, but the label and the genre couldn’t hold him. More than anything, he was a citizen soldier, one of the shock troops who ripped down the façades of decorum and respectability to expose what really matters. The clothing changed every year, and so did the hairstyles. And Joe Strummer knew that what didn’t change couldn’t be circumscribed by an image. “Know your rights!” he spat out. “You have the right to food and money / Providing of course you don’t mind a little investigation, humiliation / And if you cross your fingers, rehabilitation.” In this era of government wiretaps and piously sanctioned torture, those words sound more prescient than ever.

I’m not a punker; couldn’t play one if you tied me down, costumed me in a Mohawk and a ripped T-shirt, stuck safety pins in my ears and gave me pogo lessons. I’m a middle-aged suburbanite who has spent most of his life in corporate America. But you don’t have to wear the fashions to understand the outrage that fueled Joe Strummer’s greatest music, or to grasp that the best of this music extended a middle finger to the studied indifference that allows human beings to disenfranchise and marginalize one another. Joe Strummer understood that the best manifestos have a beating heart. I listen to songs like “Clampdown” or “London’s Burning” and the urgency and desperation still cuts through the complacency, and still makes me want to change the world. You had yours, Joe, and a rowdy, enlightening insurrection it was. Now I want a riot of my own.

Joe Strummer keeled over of a heart attack five years ago this month. He was doing his best work in 20 years at the time of his demise, and his last album Streetcore rivals anything The Clash recorded. It’s raw, angry, smart, compassionate and replete with Clash-like guitar blasts that push the meter way into the red. Punks are supposed to burn out; they don’t fade away. That’s the way the mythology works. But screw the mythology. Joe Strummer died way too soon, and I miss what he would have to say about the decorous, respectable and desperate times in which we live.

Whether called “Intro,” “Overture” or “Prelude,” you know the song. It doesn’t behave like the others on the album. It’s usually instrumental. And iTunes’ singles chart laughs in its general direction.

“The intro song might be traced back to the overture in Western classical music—a preliminary instrumental piece often preceeding an opera which sets the tone for the drama to follow,” explains Conrad Keely, frontman for Austin rock band …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. “Since records are essentially dramas, an intro song is similar to the rolling of credits at the beginning of a movie when everyone grabs their popcorn and settles down into their seat to await anxiously for what is to come.”

In pop music, the concept was once relegated to live recordings and deluxe packages of marquee albums. (“Hear the alternate intro to your favorite song!”) If used on studio albums, it was usually by theatrical nerds (Rush, Spock’s Beard, ELO) or metal heads. Rappers proliferated the intro in the ’80s, and it now seems a prerequisite for hip-hop. The intro largely disappeared from rock music in the ’90s, as pomp and circumstance became enemies number one and two. But in recent years it’s come storming back on albums by everyone from Gorillaz and Hot Hot Heat to Michelle Branch and Dave Matthews.

Producer/DJ Mark Ronson included an intro song on his 2003 record Here Comes The Fuzz, but even he thinks intros are often superfluous. “I think an intro song is usually a rubbish idea, and often a byproduct of hip-hop’s excessive nature,” he says. “Unless you have a brilliant sense of humor like De La Soul on their first few records, or are as entertaining as Ghostface, leave it alone.”

In recent years, intro songs even opened albums by Panic! At the Disco, New Found Glory and Hanson—bands expected to fill album slots with hits. Especially now that albums are usually stripped and sold for parts, intros seem a little nostalgic. Which may be the point—the intro is retro.

“I love downloading individual tracks, but albums that are just collections of singles seem kind of depressing to me,” says Moby, who included an intro on his latest album, Hotel. “Intro songs are there for the dwindling percentage of people who continue to listen to albums in their entirety.”

More than three decades ago, British folksinger Nick Drake gulped down a fatal handful of prescription antidepressants, overwhelming his tender, 26-year-old heart and prematurely concluding his career, which hadn’t been going well. Drake’s first three LPs were commercially insignificant and largely ignored by critics; it didn’t help that Drake despised touring and interviews. But since his death in 1974, his reputation has swelled to absurd proportions. Plenty of artists have garnered posthumous fame, but Drake’s second act— a 30-year renaissance that includes tribute albums, scads of celebrity endorsements, an acclaimed car commercial, two biographies, loads of reissues and compilations, placement in films and television shows, a handful of documentaries, an endless ring of websites, and constant, unmitigated canonization by the press—is remarkable by any standard.

In response to the continuing interest, Drake’s estate—run by his sister, Gabrielle, and a man named Cally Calloman—has not only reissued his entire discography on more than one occasion, but also unleashed a steady stream of hodge-podge anthologies (some more vital than others), satiating fan demand and ensuring that Drake remains an essential artist for anyone even remotely compelled by acoustic music.

It’s impossible to discern to what degree Drake’s death—an end that plenty consider poetic—has colored or guided his success; likewise, there’s no way of knowing whether Drake’s music would have been discovered and celebrated were his life not so easily mythologized. Earlier in 2007, the Drake estate released Family Tree, a 28-track collection of scratchy home recordings, including a duet with Gabrielle and two swooning piano songs written and performed by Drake’s mother, Molly. (It’s hard to listen to Molly purr the lyrics to “Poor Mum”— “Poor Mum / Nothing worked out in the way that you planned”—and not wince a bit at their prescience.)

Family Tree was preceded by five other posthumous releases: two collections of outtakes and rarities and three introductory greatest-hits compilations. And then there are Drake’s official albums, the ones he made while still alive. On Five Leaves Left (1969), recorded while he was a student at Cambridge University, Drake was backed by members of Fairport Convention. The album introduced listeners to his peculiar, impossible-to-replicate vocal style and open-tuned guitar. Its follow-up, 1970’s Bryter Layter, is Drake’s most lavish: Once again using members of Fairport Convention (and adding the Velvet Underground’s John Cale), Bryter Layter is packed with swooning strings and rapturous arrangements. Drake’s final record, 1972’s stark, stunning Pink Moon, features only the singer and his finger-picked guitar. (The record’s lone overdub—a short string of piano notes—appears on the title track.) Pink Moon is 28 minutes of bare, disconsolate folksongs; it’s Drake’s bleakest work, and also his most beloved.

This is an awfully complicated trail of plastic for an artist who only officially recorded 31 original songs in his short lifetime. So the question sticks: Why is Nick Drake so intensely adored now, three decades after his death? Why not in his lifetime? What changed for Drake, and when? Is there a crueler success story in all of pop-music history?

Repackaging An Icon

Legendary producer Joe Boyd—who signed and managed Drake and produced his first two records for Island— believes that Drake’s posthumous success is not an especially mysterious phenomenon. “The music is great and it took a while for people to get it,” Boyd says. “I think the back story is a very small part of [his] posthumous success. It’s all down to the music.”

Boyd is equally skeptical about the ways in which Island’s initial marketing of Drake’s records may have impacted their sales. “There might have been more imaginative ways of handling [the marketing], but fundamentally the lack of a live career meant it was terribly difficult [for Island to sell Drake’s music],” Boyd explains. Those precious few studio recordings have had to suffice.

In the late ’70s, former rock critic Rob Partridge took a gig as press officer for Island; one of the first things Partridge did was suggest that the label release a comprehensive collection of Nick Drake’s studio work— the resulting release, 1979’s Fruit Tree box set, contained all three of Drake’s LPs and a collection of outtakes. Fruit Tree has been out of print since 2000 (although all three of Drake’s records have been steadily available for individual purchase), and this fall, the Drake estate opted to reissue the box: The new version again includes Drake’s three studio albums, plus the DVD documentary A Skin Too Few: The Last Days of Nick Drake and a 108-page book featuring song analysis and commentary from a bevy of Drake insiders. The original Fruit Tree box included a fourth, untitled LP of outtakes and rarities that was released on its own in 1986 as Time of No Reply, but it’s absent from the latest version.

“We remade [Time of No Reply] as a new title, Made to Love Magic. It came out some three years ago and is still a very strong seller,” Calloman explains. “It seemed mean to include Made to Love Magic in the boxed set as so many ‘new’ fans—[at] whom the box is aimed—may have only just bought it, plus, it would have made the cost of the box far too high to remain reasonable,” he continues. “The idea is: Discover Nick through the Treasury compilation, buy all three albums—in the Fruit Tree box or singularly—and if you are a really big fan, there are two extra releases, Made to Love Magic and Family Tree, and that’s it. We are trying hard not to do a Jeff Buckley,” Calloman promises, alluding to the long stream of releases that followed the singer/songwriter’s 1997 death (which, like Drake’s, remains shrouded in mystery).

Still, even the most ardent Drake disciples still have to wonder why it didn’t all stop with those three perfect LPs. Earlier this year, in the liner notes to Family Tree, Gabrielle included a letter addressed posthumously to Nick, expressing her reservations about the glut of elective releases and questioning whether her brother would have ever wanted to be this exposed, this aggressively sold. “Up ’til now, every decision I have taken— I have been allowed to take—on your behalf about your music has been guided by what I believe might have met with your approval,” she wrote.

Drake’s catalog has aged improbably well—but folksinging was hardly an unusual pursuit in England in the 1970s, and it’s still perplexing that Drake’s music was so universally underappreciated in his lifetime, and that it’s so universally celebrated now. Certainly, Drake’s legend is—however wrongly—bolstered by his presumed suicide: For whatever reason, the notion of the artist as a tragic figure remains a perversely satisfying way to process art. But even if Drake’s death inadvertently spawned his posthumous rebirth, it’s hard not to be thankful for these records—in whatever package you finally find them.

Obscure ’60s Canadian free-folk duo—of course—is rediscovered in this new century

Earlier this year, a hushed cover of “The Waltze of the Tennis Players” appeared on Philly folk singer Meg Baird’s debut (helping land her a Paste “4 to Watch” slot). Written by the obscure Canadian duo of Allan Fraser & Daisy DeBolt, it brought attention to the neglected act’s self-titled major-label debut, which saw release in 1971 and disappeared soon after. Reissued on CD by a dubious imprint (and taken from a vinyl copy), it reveals not just what Canadian country music might sound like, but that the couple’s singing voices are painfully artless. Fraser’s is a plank-thick drawl, DeBolt’s prone to yelps. And then there’s the wheezing fiddle work of Ian Guenther, which, on numbers like “Armstrong Tourest Rest Home,” is teeth-gnashing. The off-kilter combination works well on the woozy “Waltze,” but their cover of “Don’t Let Me Down” is particularly ragged.

Once Upon a Time...
A lavish, but mostly superfluous Greatest Songs set

This new Bob Dylan retrospective makes landfall during the same hurricane season as Todd Haynes’ much-discussed film I’m Not There, and the contrast is devastating. A visionary matching of artistic approach to subject, Haynes’s film dazzlingly fractures (then reassembles) as many as six distinct “Dylans” across a sly concatenation of musical and visual styles; here’s an irresistible opportunity for anyone—perhaps even Dylan himself—to rediscover afresh his songs and life, and to refocus the challenges for sustaining art, politics and private integrity amid war (whether Vietnam or Iraq) and overwhelming media jabberwocky. Next to the Dylanesque reinventions of I’m Not There, this Dylan collection arrives like a lumbering white elephant—the 51-song selections uninspired, lazy and rote, although the red- and black-embossed cloth 3-CD box is really classy, the rock ’n’ roll analog to a coffee-table book.

That Dylan is the exemplary artist of our moment is now past argument. To speak personally—and Dylan always commands a personal response—I feel lucky to have coincided however briefly on the planet with Beckett, Nabokov, Borges, Balanchine, Callas, Welles and Fellini. I got to meet Robert Lowell, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Bishop, Sam Fuller, and in his last years was a friend of James Merrill. Giants walked the earth, and I wouldn’t barter those experiences for everything south of Heaven. Yet Dylan’s achievement over the past five decades looms so singular, so audacious, large and various that 100 years from now it’s his recordings and live performances that will advance the signature narrative of what it was like to live and create during his lifetime.

Dylan’s importance isn’t the pressing mystery of Dylan (only his fourth “greatest hits” package over a recording career that started in 1961), but rather how feebly and trivially the set responds to his importance. Since the mid 1990s, when Dylan suddenly reconnected his familiar restlessness to mastery, he’s consecutively released three of his strongest, most ambitious recordings, Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft” and Modern Times; written a surprising, likely classic American memoir, Chronicles Vol. I; co-scripted a fascinating political film, Masked & Anonymous; and toured the world vigorously, playing upward of 100 shows each year. His management and record company, perhaps freed by Dylan’s own contemporary resurgence, launched a smart succession of vivid looks back under the designation The Bootleg Series—not a superfluous repackaging of his old standards, but stunning unreleased songs, illuminating alternate versions and legendary concert performances.

Out of all this activity and product, only Dylan, by my reckoning, adds nothing fresh or necessary to the vista. If you’ve just risen from a mid 20th century coma, then you could twig the first disc (“Song to Woody” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “All Along the Watchtower”) a revelation. On the second CD (The Basement Tapes through Empire Burlesque), only “The Groom’s Still Waiting At the Altar” (originally a 1981 B-side), “Changing of the Guards” and “Dark Eyes” might lift an eyebrow, as the otherwise automatic Blood on the Tracks, Desire and Slow Train Coming choices unroll.

Still, the third disc, spanning the early 1980s to the present, will startle listeners who checked out on Dylan once his picture proved too blurry or too weird, mostly by sequencing one gorgeous song after another, all since he supposedly stopped writing such songs. “Brownsville Girl,” a 1986 collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard, contributes the major frisson here, a lost masterpiece like no other in his catalog. Yet this final CD also underscores the arbitrariness of the Dylan project. Sure, “Ring Them Bells” and “Everything Is Broken” from Oh Mercy are included, but why not “Most of the Time,” “What Was It You Wanted” or “Shooting Star”? Yes, of course, “Not Dark Yet” from Time Out of Mind, but why “Make You Feel My Love” over “Standing in the Doorway” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” or (especially) the epic “Highlands?”

Fortunately Dylan isn’t the sole “new” Dylan release scheduled for this fall. Besides the brilliant Haynes film, there’s Murray Lerner’s The Other Side of the Mirror, which collects footage from Dylan’s storied appearances at the 1963, ’64 and ’65 Newport Folk Festivals. Over three summers, Dylan ages in reverse—ancient traditional musician; folk God; rock ’n’ roll rake. If there were still lingering controversy about the audience or Dylan at the infamous ’65 electric show, Lerner’s film should dispel it. Between songs you hear real boos from the agitated crowd, and when Dylan returns with an acoustic guitar for ferocious performances of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” those are real tears sliding down his face.

Story of French Elle editor underwhelms

Director: Julian Schnabel
Writers: Ronald Harwood (based on the book by Jean-Dominique Bauby)
Cinematographer: Janusz Kaminski
Starring: Mathieu Amalric, Emmanuelle Seigner, Marie-Josée Croze, Anne Consigny
Studio/Run Time: Miramax Films, 112 mins.

In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby—the 43-year-old editor-in-chief of the French Elle—endured a catastrophic stroke that left his brainstem wholly inactive and rendered his entire body (save his left eyelid) paralyzed. Suffering from a rare and terrifying condition known as Locked-In Syndrome, Bauby managed—miraculously—to blink out, letter by letter, a memoir of his ordeal. The book was published in March 1997. Two days after it landed in stores, Bauby died of heart failure.

Long renowned for his neo-expressionist oil paintings, director Julian Schnabel (Basquiat, Before Night Falls) responded to Ronald Harwood’s adaptation of Bauby’s book by positioning the camera so that it shoots from behind Bauby’s one blinking eye, struggling to offer viewers a limited, claustrophobic sense of Bauby’s experience. Ultimately, Schnabel seems less concerned with narrative than composition: Schnabel’s shots are stunning, but ultimately feel self-indulgent and excessive, too grotesque and distorted to really work. Bauby’s story is humbling, and The Diving Bell is remarkably well acted, but the film ultimately feels more like an overwrought art piece than an homage to human tenacity.

War documentary shines light on horrifying, under-told story

Directors: Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman
Writers: Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman, Elisabeth Bentley
Cinematographer: Buddy Squires
Starring: Woody Harrelson, Mariel Hemingway, John Getz, Jürgen Prochnow
Studio/Run Time: THINKFilm, 88 mins.

Despite The Ken Burns Effect on WWII, the story of what occurred in China’s then-capital city of Nanking won’t be familiar to most Westerners, in that it took place during the winter of 1937, two years before the invasion of Poland and four years before Pearl Harbor brought the war home. By the late ’30s though, Japan—in alliance with Nazi Germany—was already on its megalomaniac march, invading and toppling Shanghai before turning its bloodlust toward Nanking. This documentary (featuring Stephen Dorff, Mariel Hemingway and Woody Harrelson reading old letters and diaries) details how an all-out slaughter of the country’s poorest was averted by an unlikely alliance of Christian missionaries and Nazi businessmen, who set up a neutral zone to stem the bloodshed and protect the innocent. Nanking chillingly captures the ultimate futility of this effort (200,000 were murdered, in addition to some 20,000 reported rapes in the first month alone) with recent interviews and rare 16mm footage that won’t soon be forgotten.

Former Pulp guitarist turns sour heartache into nostalgic sweets

Hawley—former Longpigs frontman and Pulp/Jarvis Cocker sideman—makes classic pop of such sumptuous substance that anyone with a romantic bone in their body should be helpless to resist. Opener “Valentine” sounds classic on first listen. It’s an end-of-the-road heartbreaker that swells with strings until it blossoms into a massive, irresistible chorus. The memorable melodies never let up, as cushy beds of piano and acoustic guitar underpin hooks that hang on chiming glockenspiels and vibes. On the surface, it’s simply an update of ’60s orchestral pop blended with dollops of Nashville countrypolitan and, on the snappy Everly Brothers-like “Serious,” a touch of rockabilly. The dramatic strains of Jimmy Webb, Scott Walker and Ray Price are smuggled into the new millennium on Hawley’s rollercoaster ride through the vagaries of love. It’s an E ticket ride.

A patchy panacea

Self-help guide. Anarchist diatribe. Existential argument for playing the ukulele.

British author Tom Hodgkinson’s cheeky polemic doesn’t perfectly whack every mole that pops up, but it’s a bracing read from a self-styled “idler” that will appeal to punks, Libertarians, freegans and its true beneficiaries: middle-class cubicle slaves who think there must be more to life than buying plastic with plastic.

Our malaise is both personal and societal, says Hodgkinson. For today’s Western urban worker, government and guilt work in tandem to keep you in debt and anxious: “The consumer age offers many comforts but few freedoms.” His point is well taken, although the history he uses to bolster it is selective. On medieval life: “Everyday life back then was about being creative and doing lots of different things.” For the lucky troubador, maybe. For the illiterate swineherd, not so much.

Hodgkinson’s prescription pad for these ails overfloweth: Want less, bake bread, stop voting, fling open your doors, throw away your TV. It’s a cri de coeur for those who long to hit the barricades, but only if they can stop for a beer first.

For Earth’s sake, we’re better off dead

Pursuing a simple question to myriad and meticulously researched answers, Weisman reports: What happens to our terrestrial home after humanity makes an exit?

The fate of cities, farms, landfills and wild places is laid bare, with surprising speculations. It is humbling and also hopeful that in this post-human world, as now, Nature will likely manage to heal the injuries sustained at our hands. These pages brim with the evidence of our arrogance and foolishness; human existence seems silly and small in comparison. Weisman believes the memory of humanity eventually will be erased: our art, architecture and clumsy attempts to improve the world. Seeing this future is like running into an old flame and realizing the time you’ve been apart made your ex happier, more beautiful. You walk away, knowing you blew it.

Earth was the one that got away.

Legendary comic looks back on his slow big break

Before Steve Martin was a movie star, playwright and art collector, he was one of the biggest standup comedians in the world, and this modest, straightforward, winning book explains how that happened.

Martin started as a teenage magician and all-around performer in southern California, and he furnishes a clear-eyed account of his early career, including a moving account of how he almost quit the business but was saved by a good review in Miami. When the rewards (both critical and commercial) weren’t forthcoming, he propped himself up with grand thoughts about how his madcap abstract comedy might one day change everything. “No harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration,” he writes.

Martin’s offstage life—or at least his recollection of it—is as ordinary as his comedy is defiantly unordinary. He struggles with his family, especially a distant father who harbored theatrical dreams of his own. He works hard to overcome what he perceives as a lack of talent. He gets girls, sometimes. He stays decent.

As his early career skips along like a Wright Brothers experiment—haltingly, and with only the faintest hope of taking off—he crosses paths with performers who would be forgotten were Martin’s memories not so fond and vivid. Magicians, monologists, high-kicking actors in regional musicals, backup dancers from TV variety shows, folk-music diehards: they, as much as the author, humanize the idea of the working entertainer and form the book’s sweet core.

Party Like It's 1992
For better or worse, Arrested Development hasn't changed with the times

In a tiny dorm room with a beer-sticky floor, crammed with university-issued modular furniture, we did the Running Man and the Kid-n-Play to almost every song on Arrested Development’s debut album, 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in The Life of... It was 1992, and dressed in our oversized button-downs, cuffed sweatpants, scrunch socks and black loafers, we were addicted to the scratching, the sampling and the speechifying on songs like “Fishin’ 4 Religion,” “Tennessee” and “Mr. Wendal,” from a record that was at once accessible, impossibly fresh and deeply political.

But as our dance moves and questionable fashion choices eventually disappeared from view, so too did Arrested Development. The group turned out a less-than-stellar follow-up with Zingalamaduni in 1994, and then faded into foreign markets. Now, 13 years later, Atlanta-based conscience-rapper Speech and his modified band of merry men and women have returned with Since the Last Time.

A few of the tracks feature the kind of funky layering and message-heavy rapping that make me want to Roger Rabbit like a freshman fool. The others? They play like discards from that first, groundbreaking album.

Gone is longtime collaborator Headliner and guesting soul-singer Dionne Farris, though the album isn’t really weaker for it. Speech was always the draw, along with the slap-bass, hiphop beats, loaded lyrics and samples of old-timey harmonica, piano and gospel that adorned his songs. What’s missing here is the inventiveness of that first record. Arrested Development blazed a trail with 3 Years that was followed, in part, by fellow Atlantans Outkast. But now Arrested Development sounds like it’s imitating the artists it has influenced. “Inner City” is essentially a knockoff of the spitfire raps on OutKast’s “B.O.B.,” and “Down & Dirty” sounds a lot like the bouncy bop of “Hey Ya!”

Some would say it’s a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum; if Arrested Development pioneered this kind of music in 1992, maybe it still belongs to the band now. Supporting this argument are the new songs that take Speech’s original style and elevate it: “Miracles” amps up the creativity of 1992 track “Mama’s Always on Stage,” and there’s genius in the thumping drum intro of “Nobody Believes Me Anyway,” which gives way to a vocal hook that sounds like it came from an old soul LP. And “Sao Paulo”—with its intermittent whining guitars and a samba-meets-pop flavor—proves Arrested Development isn’t sleeping.

But other songs tread familiar territory without stacking up—particularly those where Speech’s preach-rap vocals overpower the light layers of instrumentation. There’s nothing particularly unique about the discussion of ethnic relations in “Sunshine,” where the narrator worries he’s betraying his race by being attracted to a white girl (all while a distracting hype-woman punctuates each line and calls out “uhoh” and “won’t you raise your hands”). “How Far Is Heaven?” borrows from, but doesn’t improve upon, the Los Lonely Boys tune. And on the album’s title track, Speech says his band is “a little slower, like Muhammad Ali.” Sadly, with Arrested Development lacking the charisma and charm of an Ali, such an admission is harder to swallow.

“It’s better to write for ourselves and have no public than to write for the public and have no self,” Speech lectures in “Stand.” Arrested Development seemed to achieve a happy medium with 3 Years. Not as much with Since the Last Time. Maybe next time?

With a yawn and a wink, the queen returns

Trisha Yearwood’s latest album is an exercise in practiced restraint. Never much of a rule-breaker, Yearwood has managed to sell gazillions of records and ascend to the heights of the country music industry by relying on her down-home charisma, her powerful alto and not much else. This formula infuses nearly every aspect of Heaven, her indie-label debut and reunion with producer Garth Fundis. Despite claims about “new energy” and “buzz” in publicity materials, the album relies heavily on many familiar Yearwood themes: the “aw-shucks, what the hell” take on living life (title track), protracted breakups (“This Is Me You’re Talking To”) and misunderstood love (“Nothin’ ’Bout Memphis”). This is not necessarily a bad thing; Yearwood is one of the most gifted female country balladeers to emerge in the last 30 years, and her voice—robust and more self-assured than ever—somehow manages to cut through the morass of sleep-inducing Nashville arrangements and lyrical clichés. Heaven is a respectable effort by Yearwood’s previous standards, but its conservative nature makes one wonder what the singer might be capable of if ever encouraged to apply her impressive instrument to material truly worthy of it.