Pages tagged “issue 7”

One week prior to the release of The High Llama’s newest record, Beet, Maize & Corn, head Llama Sean O’Hagan has done the “not-so-eloquent British press” (his words) a favor: written their review for them.

“‘More lounge-inspired, wistful musings from the Beach-Boys-obsessed High Llamas.’ Something like that, that’s what they usually come up with. It’s like they hit F5 on the computer and that’s what comes up. And I’ll tell you: the reason why they do that is because a lot of people who write aren’t actually music fans. They want to write, they want to be involved in celebrity journalism, they want to be involved, they want to be on the scene. But actually having to sit down and listen to the record? ‘Um, I’m not sure about that, there’s a party to go to.’”

O’Hagan has plenty of precedent to justify his disquiet. Reading through the band’s press kit, you quickly get the impression that music journalists, on both sides of the Atlantic, are getting paid, not by the word, but by how many Brian Wilson comparisons they can cram into whatever space has been allotted for their article. And while O’Hagan’s baroque-pop influences are undeniably apparent in his newest batch of tunes—the elaborate arrangements, careful attention to melody, tasteful strings, loose brass and layered harmonies—Beet, Maize & Corn is being irrigated by water from a much deeper well.

“As a songwriter, someone who charts melody—which is what I love doing, finding chords and charting melodies—I wanted to go to the source. And the source is actually—for modern 20th-Century songwriting—Delius and Ravel, British and French impressionism, which even informed American songwriting. … Those people actually did inform all the artists that we sort of feed on.”

From the trotting cadence and fluttering string arrangement of “The Click And The Fizz” to the refreshingly sparse instrumentation—voice, tambourine, lightly plucked nylon-string guitar and occasional string/horn punctuation—of “Rotary Hop,” The High Llamas have taken a sizable leap forward by taking an equally sizable leap backward in terms of the sonic palette implemented. And the most obvious sign of that departure is the new record’s conspicuous lack of electronic seasoning, a fixture of 2000’s Buzzle Bee.

“I’m really worried about making records that don’t challenge what I’ve done before. I don’t think Buzzle Bee was trotted out, but I do feel that if I did another Buzzle Bee, it would be trotted out. … Those sounds no longer make you sit up and listen.” O’Hagan goes on to explain that electronic music in the UK has been assimilated to the point that, in order to hear the most cutting-edge work being done in the genre, all you have to do is turn on your television set and wait for the commercials.

“I don’t want to get into the area of saying, ‘If it’s crowded in the kitchen, get out,’ but I do make records to try and explore slightly different areas … I think there’s far too much consensus in the way people make music. I think [artists] should listen back, or listen widely—or whatever—and really try to find their own voices.” O’Hagan’s spent the last three years since Buzzle Bee trying to take his own advice, immersing himself in the work of such spiritual mentors as Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Alan Copeland, Charles Ives, Carla Bley, Jack Nitzsche, Frankie Avalon, and Stephen Foster.

With Beet, Maize & Corn—as well as the double-disc, Retrospective, Rarities and Instrumentals, released earlier this year on V2—O’Hagan proves he’s capable of penning timeless pop that’ll be remembered by next century’s crop of lettered songwriters.

Complementing her entire career, the title of Cassandra Wilson’s 14th album defies assumptions. At first glance one might think Glamoured is a reference to the trappings of the tired diva stereotype. Instead, it has a more mystical derivation from the Gaelic word meaning “to be swept away.” The word holds deep meaning for Wilson on her latest project. “I read it in a book called Writings on Irish Legends and Folklore by William Butler Yeats,” she says. “The book has these wonderful stories. And the Irish have this incredible love affair with mysticism. I think there’s a direct parallel with life in Mississippi. So I just followed that word and all its connotations.” The result is a disc that continues Wilson’s tradition of uniting varied inspirations.

The record came together, as her work typically does, by intuition. “For the most part, the process is letting the songs find me,” she says. This resulted in an equal balance of covers (Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay” and Muddy Waters’ “Honey Bee”) and some of Wilson’s strongest originals to date. “Once you decide which way you want to go, you just pay attention to whatever pops up. Your experiences become very specific. You say to yourself, ‘OK, you led me here for a reason.’ Sometimes you don’t realize why until years later.”

The new record is her first collaboration with a producer in some time. Wanting to add a new dimension to Glamoured, Wilson chose producer/guitarist Fabrizio Sotti, whom she got to know in New York after the sessions had already begun in Mississippi. “I met him at a club called Sweet Rhythm that’s down in the Village. We had this immediate chemistry and we sat and talked and talked about the record. We got together and hung out and started writing music and the rest is history.”

Wilson and Sotti’s joint effort gives the record a keen focus and a broader textural palette, as heard in the hypnotic rhythm of “I Want More” and in a fresh interpretation of the soul classic “If Loving You Is Wrong.” “My mother played that 45 over and over and over again when I was a kid,” Wilson recalls. “It conjures up a lot of emotions from my childhood. I guess because of experiences I’m having as a grown woman, it made sense to do it now.” Trusting her intuition continues to serve Cassandra Wilson in good stead.

This list represents our staff's favorites from last year. These are albums that rose out from the hundreds upon hundreds of CDs we received in 2003. For one reason or another, they moved us and made us love our jobs even more. We don't pretend these are scientifically the highest quality albums released, they just happen to be our favorites. We hope that you might discover a few of yours from this list. And see the final results from our readers' poll.

1. Rufus Wainwright - Want One

2. Over the Rhine - OHIO

3. Erin McKeown - Grand

4. Drive-By Truckers - Decoration Day

5. Sun Kil Moon - Ghosts of the Great Highway

6. Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

7. The Jayhawks - Rainy Day Music

8. Joe Henry - Tiny Voices

9. Shelby Lynne - Identity Crisis

10. Ed Harcourt - From Every Sphere

11. Elvis Costello - North

12. Steven Delopoulos - Me Died Blue

13. Damien Rice - o

14. Cat Power - You Are Free

15. The White Stripes - Elephant

16. Bruce Cockburn - You've Never Seen Everything

17. Rodney Crowell - Fate's Right Hand

18. Lucinda Williams - World Without Tears

19. Fountains of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers

20. Ryan Adams - Rock N Roll

Honorable Mentions

Aaron Neville’s solo vocal performances take a more tender tone than the fiery funk he cranks out with The Neville Brothers. On his latest release, Nature Boy, a fine album of vocal standards, his fluttering tenor shines. Neville clarifies that his early musical inspiration wasn’t just the street funk that shaped early Neville Brothers hits like 1966’s “Tell It Like It Is.”

“I grew up listening to gospel and jazz vocals,” says Neville, “ Nat King Cole, Clyde McPhatter, ’In the Still of the Night,’ Kay Starr’s ‘The Wheel of Fortune.’ I was into just about any kind of music that caught my ear.”

It was somewhat by chance that Neville came to record standards in a traditional jazz setting. “Me and my brother Charles have been talking about doing standards for a couple of years. Ron Goldstein heard me do ‘These Foolish Things’ and thought it would be a great idea for me to sing some things from the Great American Songbook. It was a no-brainer, something I wanted to do. I guess the cards were just falling into place, you know.”

Nature Boy was recorded swiftly—three days of sessions in New York City with A-list backing. “The guys in the studio were into it like a labor of love” says Neville. “Rob Mounsey (producer/arranger/keyboards) didn’t elaborate with the music; he made it like a cushion for my voice. It was just great—I call Grady Tate and Ron Carter some hard hitters at the bat.” Other guests include Michael Brecker, Anthony Wilson, Ry Cooder, Roy Hargrove and Linda Ronstadt.

The album’s track list reads like a dream jukebox in a cozy jazz lounge—“Cry Me A River”, “The Shadow of Your Smile”, “Come Rain or Come Shine.” Released in September, Nature Boy quickly jumped to #1 on the Billboard traditional jazz chart. For Neville, the news created an amazing feeling. “I love the songs, I love the style,” he says “As a matter of fact, I’m getting songs together for the next one.”

It’s been a fantastic year for documentaries. Box office dollars and critical kudos have piled up for movies such as Bowling for Columbine, Spellbound and Capturing the Friedmans. With the incendiary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and Errol Morris’s masterpiece The Fog of War set for release later this year, many critics’ “top 10” lists could be dominated by non-fiction films. Yet one of the best documentaries of 2003 has been largely overlooked in the commotion. Stevie, directed by Steve James (who also directed the landmark Hoop Dreams), is a brilliant portrait of people most audiences usually ignore.

Steve James started off as a journalism major in college but got turned on to making movies in a film appreciation class. But you could argue that he hasn’t left journalism too far behind.

“The kind of documentaries I’ve always been interested in making are stories, not issue-oriented but more journalistic enterprises,” James explains as we sit at his home in Oak Park, Illinois. “I think there’s something really compelling about following a story, where you don’t know where it’s going.”

Stevie is a perfect example. During his college years, James was a Big Brother to an 11-year-old boy named Stevie but lost touch after he moved to Chicago. When James moved back to southern Illinois 15 years later, he wanted to reconnect with his former “little brother.” He planned to make a “modest” documentary about their reunion, envisioning “an impressionistic portrait about getting back together.” That all changed with a dramatic turn of events in Stevie’s life. He was arrested for molesting his eight-year-old cousin, and the real story began.

“That’s what’s compelling about this kind of film,” James says. “If you, as a director, remain flexible to where the story takes the film, that’s going to yield a much more interesting movie.”

Being flexible proved critical as Stevie’s circumstances changed over the next few years. Though his legal troubles certainly provide a timeline for the movie, the film focuses much more on Stevie’s home life: his relationship with his girlfriend Tonya, his efforts to reconnect with his mother, and his half sister’s attempts to have a baby.

James paints intimate portraits of each person in Stevie’s life. Telling the story of these real-life characters without being exploitive proved challenging.

“The ethical issues are the hardest part about doing this kind of film,” he says. “The thrill and excitement of following a story, about being involved in people’s lives is undeniable. You feel like you’re living in someone else’s life, someone else’s experience. But you also feel like a leech. With Stevie, those concerns about exploitation were so acute that they had to be part of the story.”

So James himself becoming a primary figure in his own film. The documentary shows James trying to get Stevie to do the right thing and trying to bridge the enormous barriers that divide his family. Through it all, we see James wondering not only what’s best for Stevie but whether his own presence is helping or hurting.

“I decided that if I was going to do this film, I had to be as candid as possible about my involvement in the story, in his life,” he says.

This leads to one of the movie’s primary themes: class. It’s rare to see a movie today that touches on this country’s economic divisions, even in the more progressive world of documentaries. But the film clearly illustrates the stark contrast between James’ relative privilege and Stevie’s economic and social dysfunction. Unlike the Jerry Springers of film and television, though, who mock or vilify people in Stevie’s position, James works to help us understand.

“I think we all have a lot more in common than we often think,” he says. “Part of making a film and spending so much time with someone is that you’re looking for commonalities; you’re looking for a common bond with them. It’s easy to vilify people. It’s a lot harder to redeem them without excusing what they’ve done. That was the hardest thing about doing this film—how do we show Stevie honestly yet hopefully?”

That desire to show people with both honesty and dignity extends to all of the story’s characters. Stevie’s mom Bernice, his sister Brenda, his step-grandmother Verna and his girlfriend Tonya are all portrayed with amazing sensitivity. We come to understand these people—what their hopes and dreams are, why they act the way they do, and why they often fail. The film evokes a sense of compassion for them even when they appear to have made bad choices.

One of the most spectacular examples of James’s deep empathy for his characters occurs halfway through the film. Stevie and Tonya have come to Chicago to visit James and his wife, as well as Tonya’s friend Tricia. We first see Tricia confined to her bed, wearing thick, unattractive glasses and talking with a significant speech impediment. What follows in this extraordinary ten-minute scene explodes common stereotypes of disabled people. Tricia emerges as the movie’s wisest soul, calling Stevie out for his own bigotry and self-absorption. But she’s not merely a foil for the audience; she’s a complex character who forces us to confront our own assumptions about people different from us.

James attributes the success of this year’s documentaries to a combination of factors.

“People who are looking to go into film are now thinking about documentaries,” he says. “A few years ago, there was the romance of being the indie director, of being the next Tarantino. That’s given way somewhat to people who want to make documentaries. Not because they don’t have any story ideas of their own but because they want to see the world.”

He also points out that affordable digital video cameras have made it easier to make theater-quality films. But James says he believes another, more fundamental factor has spawned more recent documentaries: a desire for “something real.”

“The further Hollywood gets from the real and even the further a lot of independent films get from the real, the more people hunger for reality.”

When asked about the director who’s influenced him the most, James heads back to that film appreciation class where he first encountered Jean Renoir—”because he was the most humanistic of directors. His films are about life and everything in it.” Though Stevie may focus on one man and his family, it’s also about life and pretty much everything in it. Indeed, it’s one of the most honest and affecting documentaries of the year.

Head shaved clean and sporting a faded Neil Young & Crazy Horse T-shirt, Angie Aparo ambles about the stage at Chattanooga, Tenn., club Rhythm & Brews. He and his band set up their equipment for soundcheck against a backdrop of faded brick and black-cloth tapestries. An American flag hangs haphazardly in the corner and as the drummer taps his snare—slightly muted by what looks like a white bed-sheet—a resounding echo bounces around the club’s vaulted ceiling. After they finish, Angie and I cut through the back door into the noisy, non-descript bar and grill that shares the other half of the building. Fresh off a tour with Squeeze’s Glenn Tillbrook—and in the middle of one with singer-songwriter Teitur Lassen—Aparo isn’t the type of guy you’d expect to have have penned a tune that became a pop-country mega-hit for Faith Hill.

“Faith covering ‘Cry’ didn’t affect me much [as an artist],” Aparo says sipping a sweet tea. “On the business end—a little cash and the shows got more recognition. But I didn’t write the song specifically for her. I kind of keep my songs for me and I don’t mind if they’re covered, but I view my career more as—make my records, document my life and if stuff spills off of it, that’s cool.”

Aparo’s new independent release, For Stars And Moon, is a beautifully arranged album of piano and acoustic guitar-anchored tunes that call to mind the later, more organic Beatles recordings. After his mutually-agreed upon release from Arista, the songwriter says he’s looking for a new label but is in no hurry. “I don’t really care,” Aparo says, his smile accentuating the tiny wrinkles around his eyes. “If you sign a record deal, it’s two to three years of your life. Whether it goes or it doesn’t, you lose that much time.”

What food goes best with rock'n'roll? Today, at The Watershed restaurant in Decatur, Ga., it’s carrot cake, prepared by singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb with a little help from boyfriend Dweezil Zappa, Indigo Girl (and Watershed part-owner) Emily Saliers and Watershed chef Scott Peacock. The dishes are being prepared in front of the camera for The Food Network’s new reality show, Dweezil and Lisa. The restaurant is just one of the busy couple’s stops in Atlanta, which also included taping at the nearby Java Monkey coffee shop and the Sweet Auburn Farmer’s Market. The show, which debuts in January, follows Dweezil and Lisa as they travel around the country playing concerts, playing golf or just playing in the kitchen.

Wearing her signature cat-eye glasses, the pop singer who released an album called Cake and Pie last year sifts, whisks and ices the cake under the watchful eye of Peacock. Both she and Dweezil admit being obsessed with cooking and watching The Food Network. “You have to eat,” says Lisa, who particularly enjoys baking. “Why not elevate it to a higher level?”

Lisa mostly avoids the music analogies on camera, but she’s quick to point out the similarities the two share.

“I really enjoy the process of both. If the ingredients are good—organic fruits and vegetables—you can try to keep it in a very pure form and create different colors, textures and flavors. Music is very personal, but it’s also very practical in a magic way. By just taking different elements that you know you want, you can get the best sounds and get the best songs.”

While Lisa's had radio hits with “Stay” and “I Do,” she quips that most of pop music today is “geared toward a fast-food mentality.”

The singer-songwriter’s begun recording the first songs for her next album to be released sometime in 2004. Dweezil also has a new album in the works, a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks. In the meantime, though, the couple will continue to visit restaurants, cook for the camera and eat, eat, eat.

“Sometimes I’ll weigh myself at the beginning and end of each day,” says Dweezil. “My record is seven pounds in one day—five full meals. That’s a small child.”

For the first nine-tenths of Dogville, director Lars von Trier seems to follow the same pattern he’s used before: a delicate female is destroyed by an odd society that puts her in a moral quandary. The waif this time is Nicole Kidman, as Grace, and the style this time is a stripped-bare fairy tale. Actors move through a single minimal set that represents an American mining town of an era past, but it seems to have been shot in a warehouse or on a sound stage. Buildings consist of a few key interior props surrounded by chalk outlines in place of walls, but unlike the imaginary sets of such minimally staged film-plays as Vanya on 42nd Street, these invisible doors sound like wood when you knock on them, the sky produces real snow, and the chalk drawing of a dog barks. The story is framed by an occasionally sarcastic narrator and peopled by a uniformly good cast. These elements come together to form a movie that is clinically ironic but also unique, inspired and quite sublime.

It’s tempting to see the story as an allegory—von Trier says he used the Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill song “Pirate Jenny” as a starting point—but the movie seems to be open to any number of political, social or religious interpretations. The movie has more god figures than a Greek tragedy, including not only half the characters but also a camera mounted on high that looks down on the town as if it’s a sketch on paper, and a hand-held camera operated by von Trier, that roves among the actors. The waif, too, is dropped messianically from an upper-class into a working-class town.

The character that seems most like a stand-in for von Trier himself is Tom, played by Paul Bettany. Tom is the town writer and philosopher who loves and shelters Grace but also manipulates people and ultimately engineers Grace’s predicament. He’s writing a novel about her, possibly part of a trilogy, just as von Trier has made this movie about her and expects it to be the first in a trilogy. Some of von Trier’s previous movies, particularly Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark, have been criticized for using an almost misogynistic sadism to manipulate the emotions of the audience, and the characterization of Tom in Dogville so closely fits these complaints that it comes across as a self-critique, especially amid the frequent discussions of profiting from the pain of others and treating people as sub-human. Or maybe it’s a self-defense. Whichever, if you keep this in mind during the movie’s surprising final chapter, a dialogue seems to develop between von Trier and his downtrodden creation. He seems to walk through his story and consider its various components.

The climax is a vilification of just about everyone and an argument for (or against) the arrogance of liberal forgiveness. It’s all thought-provoking, but I’m not sure if the ideas are complex or merely muddled by layers of irony. A montage of still photos plays beneath the closing credits—photos of America’s underclass (and Richard Nixon) set to David Bowie’s “Young American”—which gives the movie a certain theatrical finality and anti-American bile, two of von Trier’s specialties, but it does nothing to clarify the movie’s ideas except to underline the theme of condescension toward lower classes. Tom tries to convince Grace that the ending of his “illustration” is unexpectedly “edifying,” an argument that you could imagine von Trier making about Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, or even The Idiots. Tom is right that the illustration seems to aim for unexpected edification, or at least profundity. He’s also right to assume that some viewers may need some convincing before they find it successful.

Less than a month from the scheduled release date, Sarah McLachlan holds a copy of the finished master for her new album, Afterglow. McLachlan and her longtime producer Pierre Marchand signed off on the mixes the previous week, starting the media frenzy over McLachlan’s anticipated follow-up to her multi-platinum 1997 album, Surfacing.

About to answer a question, she catches sight of her 18-month-old daughter, India, returning from a brief day trip. Whatever career-driven, promotion-minded thoughts were floating through McLachlan’s mind a moment ago suddenly melt away in the presence of her daughter. “Hi, sweetheart! Hi, boo-bear,” McLachlan coos at her toddler. “Did you have a nice time at the pool?” She gives her a big kiss.

“I just needed a quick cuddle,” McLachlan says to me. “I might be a little distracted for a few moments, but bear with me.”

Given the demands of new motherhood, it’s amazing that McLachlan has much of an attention span at all. But she takes only a moment to recover from the (admittedly welcome) interruption, which demonstrates her determination to return to the world of pop music, a world from which she withdrew nearly three years ago.

Although Surfacing came out six years ago, McLachlan toured for three years in support of the album. She also did three successive summers of the revolutionary female-focused Lilith Fair, a traveling festival she conceived and spearheaded. Finally, in 1999, she allowed herself a break to enjoy a bit of normal life. After taking time off in 2000 and starting work on new songs, the next year was to be a time for McLachlan to recharge and regroup; instead it turned out to be a year filled with equal measures of joyful anticipation and sorrow.

In the summer of 2001, McLachlan and her husband, drummer Ashwin Sood, celebrated the news that they’d be welcoming a child into the world the following spring. This happy announcement was tempered by the reality that McLachlan’s mother had recently been diagnosed with cancer. There was little hope she would survive until the end of the year, let alone to the end of McLachlan’s pregnancy. McLachlan chose to stay by her mother’s side in her final months.

“I was so thankful for that time off because I got to spend a lot of time with my mother,” says McLachlan. “I took a couple of trips with her in the spring and continued to work. I went to every doctor’s appointment with her and every treatment. I had really bad morning sickness for four months, too; I was pretty much green the whole time. And it was wild because it was when my mother was going through her worst chemotherapy treatments, so she was green all the time, too. In a way it made mine easier to bear, because I was like, ‘This is nothing compared to what my mother’s going through. I’m going through this for something incredibly beautiful and positive, and she’s going through this because she wants to live.’ … It was really hard, but I’m so glad I was able to do that and be there with her for that. And for a lot of the good times as well.”

In December 2001, McLachlan’s mother lost her battle with cancer. Knowing she was only four months away from delivering her child, and perhaps as a method of dealing with her grief, McLachlan returned to the songs she’d begun the previous year.

“Before I had India, I tried to finish as much as I could,” says McLachlan. “[The album] was about three-quarters done. Most of the songs, musically, were quite established. Lyrically, there was a lot to finish. A few were done, but on a lot of them, the focus had yet to be found.”

This focus remained elusive as she continued to work on songs but found them increasingly difficult to complete. With India’s arrival six months after her mother’s death, McLachlan’s work once again halted, and she immersed herself in motherhood. As the demands on her time and attention grew, and as her love of being a mother expanded exponentially, McLachlan began to feel distanced from her music. “Two months after India was born, I tried to force myself to go back to work just to get it done,” McLachlan remembers. “I thought, ‘I have to get this done; it’s just taking too long.’ It was the wrong reason to try and finish it. You don’t finish something because you need to get it done. You finish something because you have something to say. And I didn’t have anything to say. I had no creative juice at all and I was trying to force myself into it. It didn’t work, and I started pushing myself down and down and resenting everything and not liking any of the music I was doing and thinking it was all crap. Which seems to be what I do every time, but this time was particularly bad.”

A trip to Los Angeles earlier this year to continue work proved fruitless; McLachlan hated being away from India for long periods of time. Distraught over the creative impasse, and the lack of fun and spontaneity in the process, she went to her manager. He gave her some advice: Take a break and let it go for awhile. It turned out to be exactly the guidance she needed. “It was the best thing I could have done,” says McLachlan with clear relief. “I walked away from [the album] for about two months and didn’t think about it. I came back to it and listened to all the tracks we had—I think we had about nine done at that point—and I thought, ‘This is actually pretty good. I can see that this might not be an unsurpassable mountain anymore. I think we can actually make a record out of this.’ I had just pushed myself too hard and too early from being a mother. I wanted to just be that for a little longer. And you can’t force creativity.”

With self-imposed artistic pressures subsiding, solutions to old songs and inspiration for new ones bubbled to the surface. “In May it was like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna finish this record.’ It was just nose to the grindstone at that point. India was over a year old; she’s a sturdy little thing, and she was fine with being away from me for a few hours a day. And we ended up doing most of it in my studio in my house, which was great because I was close to her.”

After getting beyond the creative obstacle, the next hurdle was meshing McLachlan’s schedule with that of producer Marchand.

“It was just fits and spurts,” McLachlan says. “I’d find time to work for a month with Pierre where he’d come out. And I went out to Montreal for a month, and we’d just find chunks of time where we could work together. I’d work on my own, and he’d take the songs away and work with some musicians in Montreal when I wasn’t there.”

While most of the music for the album was written during her mother’s illness, McLachlan still felt unable to access the emotions and turmoil of the previous few months to use as lyrics for her new songs. “I wasn’t really ready to address it,” says McLachlan. “I feel like I need a number of years away from things or some time and space to be a little more objective before I can write about things.”

McLachlan did, however, manage to put a fraction of the intensity of her recent experiences into Afterglow. “I began one song actually writing about India and finished writing it about my husband, which was ‘Push,’” she says. “I wrote the beginning of the first verse singing about her but I could never finish it because it sounded too … ‘Oh God, here’s another sappy song about the baby.’ And it just never went anywhere but it ended up being about my husband and what a patient man he is.

“And ‘World on Fire,’ which Pierre and I wrote together—although honestly Pierre wrote most of the lyrics—was post-babies for both of us; he’d had a child with his gal two months before I did. That song was very much thinking about becoming a parent and what the world is, such a scary place that we’re bringing children into, and how you do what you can to make it better for them and just as human beings.”

For all of the external and internal forces that kept McLachlan from finishingAfterglow, quickly, the one thing she didn’t do was overthink the sound of the album and how it fit into her body of work.

“I never set myself up in that way. I never look at the last project or the project before and say, ‘I’m going to purposefully do this different.’ I just go and make the music that comes out. However, if something sounds very much like it did on the last record, then I’ll try and steer away from that and take it in a different direction. But typically, both myself and Pierre, working musically together, we believe in letting the song unfold and it’ll tell us what it needs.”

Although she senses a theme of transition running through Afterglow, McLachlan admits it’s something she discovers about her music after the fact. “When you do these things—interviews and bios—you sort of have to think, ‘Well, what is it about?’ I think about what they’re about in the moment that I’m writing them and while I’m working on them. But once I finish them and let them go, I don’t even really think about it again. Until I maybe sing it or listen to it, and then I get bits of ‘Oh, yeah, I remember what I was going through.’

“The title is about a transitional time. In between when the sun goes down, there’s a sort of a change in the light, which is very beautiful, but also it’s a dangerous time to drive, and shadows appear and things get a little murky. So it has more to do with what’s been happening in my life and the huge transitions in the past couple of years.”

Of course, McLachlan’s whole career has been about transitions: the transition from teenager to bandleader in the mid ’80s when she fronted October Game in her hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia; the transition from college student to solo artist with her 1988 debut Touch; the transition from renowned Canadian singer-songwriter to acclaimed international superstar; the transition from the wildly successful Fumbling Toward Ecstasy to the eight-times platinum megahit, Surfacing. And as a result of that success, the transition to an artist who has a more overt social impact with her organization of Lilith Fair, and her founding of the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach Program, which provides free musical education to inner-city children. And with the birth of India, McLachlan has made the transformative transition from daughterhood to motherhood—something obvious after a 30-second interaction with her daughter. It’s clear when she expresses no expectations forAfterglow’s success in a vastly changed musical marketplace. If commercial success ever mattered to her, the enormity of motherhood—her intense, visible love for India—has overshadowed it.

“It’s made [the work] more difficult in some ways, because I have less time to focus on it,” says McLachlan of India’s effect on her craft. “But I think, by far, [motherhood] has made me a better human being, so that will hopefully seep into the art at some point.” It may be the best transition yet for Sarah McLachlan.

Songwriter Matthew Ryan doesn’t pull up in a limo. He doesn’t ride over in a new sports car. He doesn’t even get dropped off by a cab. In true rock star fashion, Ryan comes sauntering slowly down the street, brown UPS hat, brim slightly rolled, pulled down to shade his squinting eyes from the sun. It’s a beautiful fall day, he notices as he draws closer to The Red Rooster, a new café at the corner of Murphy and 46th in west Nashville. There’s not a cloud in the light-blue sky and a gentle breeze is blowing through the trees, rustling the mostly-green leaves as they show their earliest shade of rust. He’s been at home spending a short five-day break off a national tour with his family. In fact, he’s just finished mowing the lawn.

“You never really get used to it,” the 32-year-old Ryan says of life on the road, as we sit on the patio, cars rolling by intermittently on a lazy Tuesday afternoon. “I miss my family so much it makes me sick sometimes, but this is how I make a living and it’s what I do best. The truth is, for them, it’s better, too because if I wasn’t doing this I’d be miserable. I’m always reminded how much better this life of playing music makes me feel.”

And Ryan has been feeling better these days. He’s happy with his career and his home life and his music. And he’s been touring with friend and lap-steel player, Kevin Teel in support of his new album, Regret Over The Wires. But Ryan wasn’t always so at peace with his life. Over the past few years, he went through the kind of difficult personal journey that makes you question everything. Before recording his previous album, Concussion, Ryan was dropped by his label, Interscope. It wasn’t so much losing the deal that bothered him. It was the uncertainty of his future.

“It wasn’t a jilted lover thing,” Ryan says. “I felt more betrayed by myself in the present. I was trying to make this record called Water To Burn [that originally featured a few of the tracks that ended up on Regret], and it just didn’t feel right at the time. It wasn’t true to where I was at. I felt strongly that I needed to make a record like Concussion. I had these songs sitting around that I had turned my back on, and I wanted it to be as lethargic and as disengaged and disjointed as I felt at the time. I went through a period where I felt more and more outside of myself. Like I was viewing myself in situations and viewing the decisions I was making. And when you make a decision you’re going to do something with your life, and you go after it and throw everything into that car and head down that road—and you find out the road you were on, maybe it’s not a dead end, but it’s trouble … I went down a road that I believed was my future and it turned out to be harder than I could have ever imagined.”

After the quiet, sad Concussion was released, Ryan spent about three months working in a warehouse, trying to put his music in “a cryogenic freeze.” But the more he tried to let go of music, the more it meant to him. He started listening to his Clash and Replacements and Dylan records, and most importantly, music started to move him again.

“I think anybody—particularly in your 20s—you go through this period where you think you have the world by the ass,” he says. “Then you start taking your hits. And what really measures you is what happens after that. You’ve got to try and find the hope and elegance in your struggle. The most important thing about happiness is not measuring your happiness by the outcome, but by the moment. And I had to slowly, not only recognize that, but also believe it.”

With Regret, Ryan started to feel more up to his future. More up to just putting his head down and walking forward with a little bit of the elegance he was talking about. This fresh perspective helped inform the songs on his new album, which is considerably more of a rock record than Concussion.

“It’s a little more raucous, more driven … and hopefully more beautiful in a sublime way. It reflects how I’ve changed and how my worldview changed between those two records. I feel more optimistic now than I ever did. Unfortunately, with me there was a sense of entitlement. Because I believed, growing up in Chester, Pennsylvania, and all the trouble that was, all the crime and all the fights and bad stuff that comes from growing up in an impoverished area—of course the next 50 years will be smooth sailing, you know what I mean? In some ways, that upbringing informs the fact that I lived through all that disillusionment. That doesn’t mean its going to be all tulips and gold records from here on out—what it means is that you’ve got to value the struggle as much as the failures and successes.”

The Dec 03/Jan 04 issue will is now on the newsstand. The magazine features:

Sarah McLachlan Ryan Adams John Mayer The Thrills Paul Westerberg 20 Signs of Life Johnny Cash Warren Zevon Lisa Loeb Cassandra Wilson Travis Mojave 3 Matthew Ryan The Fire Theft Robert Bradley The Raveonettes Delbert McClinton

Plus reviews of Joe Strummer, The Strokes, Al Green and more.

At Rhino’s, an all-ages music club in Bloomington, Ind., the kids are ready to rock. And so are their parents. The headliner, Some Girls, are here for an off-the-radar tour warm-up show. With their new pop-rock album Feel It just released on Koch, there is both freshness and familiarity in the air. With the addition of bassist Heidi Gluck, the post-Blake Babies songwriting partnership of Juliana Hatfield and Freda Love has morphed into a road-ready rock band. Launching into its first song, Some Girls rev up and shift into overdrive. Their time has come and it feels like a surprise party. Calling from the road a week later, Hatfield explains the roots of the new band. “Freda and I were talking about working together in some capacity other than the Blake Babies,” she says of the partner she’s collaborated with since 1986. “We decided to write some songs and came up with some really good stuff. There was a slow natural process of the band idea blooming as the songs came together.” Long-distance songwriting through the mail led to enough material for a touring band. For Love, who considers herself a novice songwriter, it was a new creative scenario. “As the process unfolded and we sent tapes back and forth, she was real encouraging about my ideas. Juliana was able to help bring them to fruition. And I think it takes some pressure off everyone to have a collaborator.” With no intentions of dropping her solo work, Hatfield finds refreshing contrast in her new collaboration with Love. “Her drumming alone affects the way I approach the situation — it makes me play differently, it makes me feel buoyant. In her writing there’s more mystery, more left up to the imagination. It’s changed the final outcome of the songs for me. “After the first writing endeavor it felt natural to work as a group and it felt that way when Heidi came around, too. Not easy, but not a struggle to make the sound come together. We do put a lot of effort into it, especially since we don’t all live in the same town.” Hard work aside, Love sums up the element of surprise that resonates in Some Girls’ music, “I never ever had any kind of preconceived notion of Juliana and I starting a whole new band together. The surprise element is part of the inspiration of this band. We really like this but we don’t necessarily want to go back to what we used to do together. It’s a new thing and we have to prove ourselves as a new band.”

It seduced Kerouac easily enough. All that hot black pavement, stretching out for miles and miles, cooking up all sorts of heady mirages: fame, escape, freedom, possibility. The road. A great way to get the hell out, and eventually carve out a path triumphantly or sheepishly back home. For a number of artists (including members of one of my most-beloved, mid-90s college-rock bands, For Squirrels), the road has occasioned funerals. The road is how your favorite mid-level bands continue to earn a modest living. But, for all its pros and concrete, the road has offered songwriters a valuable gift indeed: the inspirational goldmine of yet another love/hate relationship.

Limbeck, the power-pop-turned-newbie-alt-rock-dabbling quartet from Southern California, has transformed its ambivalent relationship with the open road into Hi, Everything’s Great, a stunning 12-song audio-postcard from God-knows-which-truck-stop in Middle America. This is the kind of record that should be engineered to only work properly in car stereos. On blue sky days, air whipping in through open windows, hair flying manic, one hand on the wheel, the other surfing a breeze outside. The red-faced executive in the Audi parked next to you at some red light, shooting you homicide-ways glances because your stereo is drowning out his beloved Kenny G. This is the kind of record that even self-conscious, tone-deaf people sing along to at the top of their lungs. Because they just can’t help it, bless their hearts.

The opening track, “Honk + Wave,” kicks off unassumingly with front man Robb MacLean lamenting a broken heart over the methodically grooving strum of a cleanly played electric. Most notably, this song lives and breathes as a result of the genius of drummer Matt Stephens. I’m not a drummer, yet I fell in love with the bloody high-hat part, the way it nonchalantly charts off-beats for half of the song’s intro. Then it begins dropping its metallic clap on every beat, causing the song to steadily gain momentum until the 47-second mark when he switches over to toms and all heaven breaks loose. The rest of the song is noisy, amps-to-eleven, pop-rock bliss: imagine for a moment, if you will, a band called Fountains of Wilco. Now you’re getting the idea.

The rest of the album follows a similar template—good song after good song after good song. Tunes so infectious you’ll inevitably show up in the emergency room at some point, begging to have a doctor surgically remove them from your skull. But, thank heaven, there’s actually some real meat to accompany all that scrumptious melody. MacLean manages to subdue nostalgia and make something useful of it, instead of resorting to the typical mélange of wistful ruminations on last week and yesteryear and halcyon whatnot. The emotions here are compelling and honest, not factitiously assembled to merely fill space between measures and float melody lines.

Hi, Everything’s Great feels less like a tidy scrapbook and more like a cigar box overflowing with hastily shot Polaroids—a girl named Julia with a colorful past (“Yeah, Julia is so smart / She used to be a goth kid”), a girl named Emily with colorful arms (“It feels like I got so old last night in Ohio / Emily had tattoos on her arms / I don’t have none on mine / She said she’s from Virginia / But now it’s Ohio”), a musician yawning behind the wheel of a van at some ungodly hour (“So I’ll just keep taking the 15 through / It’s kind of early so I’m swerving / There’s really nothing else to do except sit and keep steering / Thinking, driving”).

This record makes me long for the open road, or at least for a longer commute to work.

Phillip Roth’s novel The Human Stain, compressed into 110 minutes of Oscar bait, might have become an implausible melodrama. But thanks to masterfully delicate direction from Robert Benton (Nobody’s Fool) and arresting performances from Anthony Hopkins, Nicole Kidman and Ed Harris, the result is rich and moving.

When a professor (Hopkins) with a painful secret stumbles over a politically incorrect phrase, and then takes up with a “trailer-trash” temptress (Kidman), he crashes headlong into scandal and disgrace. But where other recent melodramas (Mystic River, 21 Grams) have been humorless, morose, and contrived, Stain is good-humored, warm and glimmering with hope. Roth is honest about the consequences of wrongdoing, yet he coaxes us toward compassion rather than judgment. As the fallen professor, Hopkins gives a performance both gentle and fierce — he gets his career’s first love scene and, in a bold gamble, throws himself into a startling, joyous dance with a most unlikely partner. Benton’s refusal to distill Roth’s prose into platitudes and sap leads to a remarkably resonant conclusion for one of this year’s finest films.

“Our music lives and dies in the sweaty rock club,” says Jon Foreman, frontman for Switchfoot, a San Diego rock band that’s been surfing a wave of popularity recently, occasioned by the swelling popularity of its radio single, “Meant to Live.” With bone-crunching guitar riffs and an all-out lyrical assault on the status-quo, the song has exposed Switchfoot’s music to a mainstream audience for just the second time in the band’s seven-year history, most of which was spent in the often frustratingly insular world of Contemporary Christian Music. The band’s first major exposure came after contributing five songs to the gold-certified soundtrack for the Mandy Moore film A Walk to Remember (“Long story short, Mandy’s a really great fan”), including a duet between Foreman and the pop diva herself. However, it was shortly after this experience that the band realized, “as fun as that was, and as interesting as that was,” touring and playing in front of crowds proved infinitely more satisfying than red carpets and the celebrity zoo. So the guys in Switchfoot made the brave (and/or reckless) decision to do their first headlining tour. The gamble paid off.

“All those years, we’d never headlined a tour, because it’s a big financial risk for a band of our stature. And you never know if you’re going to have anyone show up for the shows. It was amazing, probably 75 percent of the shows sold out, which was a huge surprise for us. From there, that’s when we started planning this tour. We decided to get a couple bigger venues and go out one more time.”

Columbia Records—after becoming aware of Switchfoot due to its involvement in the Mandy Moore project—opted to release the band’s fourth album, The Beautiful Letdown. “The reason we went with Columbia is because we really felt like they understood who we are and they didn’t want to change us in any way. That’s really important, that you can be yourself.” The truth, however, is that Switchfoot didn’t need any changing. The band already had three successful albums to its credit (with combined sales of approximately 400,000 units), a Grammy nomination (“Best Rock Gospel Act”), and boyish good-looks capable of conjuring dollar signs in any record exec’s eyeballs.

But Letdown proves Switchfoot is hardly a collection of pretty-boys propped up with electric guitars and draped in thrift store T-shirts. Foreman’s songwriting talents are significant. In “Gone,” an eminently singable tune that begs Third Eye Blind comparisons, he sings, “Life is more than fame and rock and roll and thrills / All the riches of the kings end up in wills / We’ve got information in the information age / But do we know what life is outside of our convenient Lexus cages?” The record, if occasionally a bit too earnest for its own good, tackles daunting subjects—God, the human condition, moral insolvency, media saturation, time’s transience, the purpose of existence and the danger of being too easily satiated. Perhaps this is what it takes to be truly “alternative” in a genre that’s successfully rendered the word meaningless. “I have a tendency to try and be overly ambitious,” explains Foreman, referring to his songwriting approach. “Maybe I try and fit too much in, but I think that’s why I keep writing music. Once you write the perfect song, what keeps you in music? I’ve got songs left to write and I feel like it’s not the question of whether pop music can change the world because I think a person’s life can change the world.”

R.E.M.’s new “greatest hits” collection is noteworthy for a few reasons. In addition to being the occasion of their first North American tour since 1995, Michael Stipe and Co. provide a glimpse into what’s coming for a band whom many, including Bono, desire to see become more active—to appear to care again.

The real reason to pick up In Time are the two new songs: “Animal” and “Bad Day”—featuring the vocal tempo of “It’s the End of the World” with music that is classic R.E.M. (it was partially written during the making of 1987’s Document). “Animal” is a big-sounding rocker that would have been at home on Monster. “All the Right Friends,” recorded for the Vanilla Sky soundtrack and probably new to most fans, is just as significant—a song with signature Pete Buck Rickenbacker and Stipe vocal style that’s blissful time travel to the early ’80s.

Other inclusions, which were all “hits somewhere in the world” as Stipe notes, are clearly meant to help the wandering flock understand that R.E.M. continued to make great music throughout the ‘90s—and they did. R.E.M. appears ready to take up Bono’s challenge and address the hopes of American fans—to become the R.E.M. we love again. This is without a doubt good news.

The Toronto International Film Festival is one of the biggest film fests in the world. With more than 300 films from all over the globe, its scope is both broad and deep. Even fanatics who try to see five or six movies a day for ten days can hope to see only a fraction of what’s available.

The most impressive movie of this year’s festival was a Japanese film called Shara. An incredibly moving family drama, it concerns a teenage boy, his pregnant mother and artistic father. The boy’s twin brother mysteriously disappeared several years before, but his absence haunts the family to the present. The movie slowly builds in intensity as the teen awaits his new sibling, falls in love and discovers himself in a driving rainstorm. It might sound like Oprah material, but director Naomi Kawase has a sure hand, creating something close to perfection.

Another one to watch for is Michael Haneke’s apocalyptic Time of the Wolf. Set in the aftermath of an unnamed disaster, a mother (played Isabelle Huppert) and her two children struggle to survive in the countryside. The movie is at times incredibly difficult to watch (animals are killed on screen, for instance), but Haneke’s formal rigor and trenchant philosophy are extraordinarily impressive. And the film builds to a climax that’s profound and deeply spiritual.

The most pleasant surprise of the festival was the emergence of Moroccan cinema, with the premieres of A Thousand Months and Dry Eyes. The former recalls a strange mix of Abbas Kiarostami and Emir Kusturica. The cinematography is gorgeous, and the portrait of a Moroccan town during Ramadan is captivating. Dry Eyes also features some glorious images, with amazing interior sequences. The story — about a man trying to save a village of prostitutes — flirts with magic realism but finds a touching conclusion.

Russia reasserted its place on the cinematic map with two striking features: Koktebel, a road trip movie about a preadolescent boy and his father, and The Return, an allegorical tale about two brothers and their father, who returns after many years away. Both movies are beautifully paced, with wonderful landscape photography and sparkling performances.

Other movies worth your time include the delightful animated feature The Triplets of Belleville, the Israeli family drama Broken Wings, and the rapturous Korean feature Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring.

The affable Erik Brandt was surprisingly specific when asked to describe what his group’s name, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, means. “‘Urban’ describes the rock; ‘hillbilly’ is the Americana, folk and country; and ‘quartet’ is jazz, improvisation and our instrumental music, with tinges of eastern European melodies. Some are the Israeli, funky minor melodies that all of us like.”

As it turns out, the Quartet’s versatile music is sui generis: “Our diversity is a blessing and a curse,” says Brandt. “Record stores don’t know where to shelve us, radio stations don’t know where to play us.”

Short of live performance, UHQ’s folky eclecticism and underlying wit can be best experienced on The A List (Fundamental Records). The album includes highly representative selections from the band’s first six years of recording, and its offbeat packaging (designed by Ben Levitz of Studio On Fire) includes a cartoon biography by Andy Devore and a wry “historical” commentary by Noah Riemer of the UHQ-influenced band Ticklepenny Corner.

“We love to mess around with our music,” says Brandt, 30, who is one-fourth of the glue that holds this musical amalgam together, along with the robust fiddling of Sena Thompson, the angular strumming of guitarist Jeremy Szopinski and the versatile work of Sena’s husband, bassist Greg Tippett. The gumbo of UHQ music “just happens,” says Brandt, who’s been teaching high school English since before starting the band. “I’m really into folk and country, Jeremy is into rock and blues, Sena is into classical, jazz and hip hop, and Greg is into prog rock and jam bands.”

Much of the music’s ethnic flavor comes from Brandt’s accordion, which is featured on the lovely “Amy’s Ring Waltz.”

“I was playing in a college band that did R.E.M. covers, and I think Mike Mills played some accordion, so I bought a used one.” Brandt currently studies the instrument under the tutelage of Dan Newton, the “Daddy Squeeze” of Prairie Home Companion.

Having been raised in a Wisconsin town, he spent one year in Australia (where “St. Paul Town” was written) as an exchange student. He has traveled to Canada and Great Britain, and currently teaches in an urban high school at which half of the students are Hmong (and where his wife Hanna teaches Japanese).

“I’m just interested in life,” he says. “I always saw myself as a rural teacher, but my first job was in the city — a wonderful but rough inner-city school. My school is the United Nations all the time!”

Wonderful but rough — also an apt description of the energetic, sophisticated Urban Hillbilly Quartet.

I’ll never forget the first time I laid eyes on the Stooges. They were playing in a long-forgotten Manhattan shithole known as Ungano’s, and Iggy, his booty barely swathed in radically cutoff jeans and nothing else, was literally crawling over the seated audience, screaming into their faces as he rubbed his sweat-, beer- and blood-soaked torso against them. Behind him, the Stooges blazed away in an undifferentiated, eardrum-piercing squall. I prayed he wouldn’t climb into my row, and I knew I wasn’t alone. The Stooges’ performance that night in 1970 was the primal embodiment of confrontation and danger; it sounded like the soundtrack to the apocalypse.

In the three decades since the Stooges broke up, Iggy has conducted a career of digressions, scattering glimpses of his past greatness here-and-there amidst what’s now become a massive scrap heap of ephemera. During the last few years, of course, Iggy/Stooges veneration has reached ridiculous levels as the neo-garage movement and the Motor City renaissance conspired to bring back the Aesthetic of Noise. Clearly, this was not the moment for Iggy to go into the studio with Linda Perry or the Matrix, and the feral old-timer, who’s no dummy, knew it.

Building an album—one he’s consciously conceived as a return to his roots—around four tracks cut with fellow Stooges founders Ron (guitar/bass) and Scott (drums) Asheton, Iggy lets loose with an unrelieved, hour-long torrent of sheet-metal punk rock. It’s obvious within the first few moments of opener “Little Electric Chair,”—when he lets loose with the first “WHOOO!”— that the Iggster’s still unequaled in the unholy realm of barely controlled aggression. Through the course of the record, he’s also capably backed on such gloriously nasty tunes as “Perverts in the Sun,” “Blood on My Cool” and “Whatever” by his longtime sidemen, who’ve dubbed themselves the Trolls. Green Day and Sum 41 also appear (on the single “Little Know It All”), and neither has ever sounded one tenth this rabid. Throw in some sleaze with Lil’ Kim (“Motor Inn”) and a destroyed-sounding solo acoustic ballad (“Till Wrong Feels Right”), and you’ve got yourself one steamin’ slab of unreconstituted, crankshaft sludge. To say the record RAWKS would be redundant, wouldn’t it?

In his 1966 book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer posited that such early German cinema masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, M, Metropolis and Nosferatu, with their themes of totalitarianism, bloodlust and madness, presaged the rise of fascism and the horrors of the Third Reich. On its face, such a thesis suggests these directors possessed psychic powers, but not when one considers the tumultuous German political landscape that informed these works. As the Weimar Republic began to wane and the economy collapsed, a nation grew susceptible to the promise of a new, more powerful republic.

Half a century later Germany was still reeling from the ramifications of World War II. The mixture of guilt, anger and confusion, not surprisingly, led to denial. No