Episode 4: Sail Away (Randy Newman, 1972)

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In the early 1970s, James Taylor introduced his song “Steamroller Blues” by invoking “so-called blues groups making a lot of noise” around Greenwich Village in the late ’60s. “They weren’t very good,” he recalled in one television performance, all the while looking down at his feet but grinning.

“They were mostly white kids in from the suburbs with electric guitars and amplifiers that their parents had bought them for Christmas and birthdays. Their idea of soul was volume… they just crank it up, you know. And they were singing all these heavy songs, like, ‘I’m a Man,’ or ‘I’m a Jackhammer,’ or ‘I’m a Ton o’ Bricks.’”

Taylor would jokingly confess that he’d wanted in on this action, so he’d written “the heaviest blues tune” he knew. Hence: “Steamroller Blues.” A churnin’ urn of burnin’ funk. When he reached the instrumental section, Taylor, who was playing solo, would comically egg himself on, saying, “Pick it, Jim,” And comment on his non-solo with a “mm mm mm, my my my,” and a purposefully stilted, “I don’t know nothing but the blues.”

Randy Newman, too, was a shrewd patter peddler, once shouting “Take it!” to his own non-existent accompanying band during a live solo performance of “Lonely at the Top”—explaining, “I have to do that because it gets kind of lonely up here.” But where Taylor’s performances of “Steamroller Blues” would, over the years, lose their contextualizing intro and slowly ossify into unironic white-boy-with-the-blues rockings-out—the very thing “Steamroller” had sought to take down—played before massive crowds of white suburbanites enjoying a real-live “heavy blues,” Randy Newman’s performances of his songs are as deeply and disconcertingly ironic as ever.

In the end, it’s probably best that Frank Sinatra never recorded “Lonely at the Top”—a song that Newman had written with him in mind to sing it. The song only works, or, at least works best and cuts deepest when sung by someone who is very much not at the top, who doesn’t have throngs professing their love for him. It’s a Randy Newman song, through and through.

After years of writing songs and arrangements for others, Newman was pushed to perform his own songs in part due to the frustration he felt hearing established artists completely miss the point. Of course, it’s always possible that these artists “got” the songs, but simply couldn’t inhabit the proper character, feeling the need to tweak the song’s message to suit their image—be it as a heart-throb, a hero, a winner—thus gutting the song of its resonance and power. For example, on Newman’s 1972 record, Sail Away—this week’s Album of the Week—the track “You Can Leave Your Hat On” trades on the idea that the narrator, a man instructing a woman to disrobe—first coat, then shoes (“Here, I’ll take your shoes”), then dress—is awkward—a self-conscious creep. In Newman’s words: “The guy is not a sexual guy and it’s not a sexy song, really, because what the guy has the girl doing is so lame. It’s really about a bully.” But to hear Tom Jones cover the song, it is twisted into a tale of a suave lover, sure-handedly directing a striptease, removing any internal conflict.

While “You Can Leave Your Hat On” is intentionally harmonically stunted and rhythmically stiff—like an awkward striptease ought to be—there are, throughout Sail Away, some of the more magical and moving arrangements that you’ll ever hear—all done by Newman himself, mind you—most pitted against lyrics that, to some degree or another, undercut the beauty of their accompaniment. His irony is as biting as it is thick.  

One of the songs that hit me the hardest, relistening this past week—given the current state of the 2016 presidential election—is the lead-off on the B side, called “Political Science.” It’s sung from the point of view of a xenophobic American leader whose solution to the world hating America is to “drop the big one” on any country that can be seen as even remotely transgressive against “us”—with a capital “U” and a capital “S.”

Asia’s crowded? Boom. Europe’s too old? Boom. South America stole our name! Boom. In pulverizing them—the “others”—we’ll create a world of born-again American towns the world over. “Oh how peaceful it will be, we’ll set everybody free,” Newman sings, surely not imagining back in the early ’70s that such a voice might actually crop up some day. Or, perhaps, he absolutely thought it was possible.

Turning from xenophobia to racism—heigh ho, heigh ho—let’s get into the title track, written, as Newman has said, “because the slave trade is our main imperialist crime, our insoluble problem.” When asked, in 2003, why he would pair such glorious and sparkling music with such a despicable tale of a slave trader’s sales pitch, Newman replied, “What am I supposed to say, ‘Slavery is bad’? It’s like falling out of an airplane and hitting the ground. It’s just too easy. And it has no effect.” That said, in the same conversation, Newman acknowledged—predictably, via broad sarcasm—that his song in fact had no real practical or lasting effect in itself, saying, “It worked out well. It ended racism in this country. Kids today don’t remember, now that it’s gone away.” The song, which begins the album, sells the idea of America to Africans as some sort of grotesque getaway, where “you get food to eat” and one needn’t run through the jungle and “scuff up your feet.” To listen to "Sail Away” with ears open is tough—the layers of morbidity and absurdity, denial and acceptance: it’s all there—and its strength as commentary relies on its not holding back.

One of Newman’s greatest influences growing up was Ray Charles: “I loved Charles’ music to excess,” he once said. I can certainly hear Charles in Newman’s phrasing and vocal delivery. In an article for the journal Popular Music, writer Peter Winkler notes:

“Many white singers are attracted to black blues and gospel styles because of the impression of authenticity, of heartfelt soulfulness that such styles can convey. Randy Newman seems to be appropriating black styles for precisely the opposite reason: to intensify a sense of alienation, to emphasize the gap between himself and the characters in his songs. He deliberately exploits the absurdity of a white, Jewish intellectual singing like a black from the deep South, mocking the conventions of a ‘white boy with the blues’ even as he appropriates them. He is laughing at his own blackface act.”

Charles would, in turn, cover “Sail Away” on his 1975 record, Renaissance (which also featured covers of Stevie Wonder’s powerful “Living for the City” and the less powerful “It’s Not Easy Being Green”). Despite Charles’ seemingly edge-softening version—even riffing on the “we will cross the mighty ocean” line of the narrator, turning it into a more straight-faced gospel “Lord, won’t you please help us cross this mighty ocean”—I’d like to imagine that at least Charles knew what he was doing and in fact was merely adding his own coat of irony.

Two years earlier, the same year Newman released Sail Away, Charles had released his first “message album,” which began with a kick-ass version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”—often called “The Black National Anthem”—and ended—supposedly as a counterweight to the more controversial tracks on the record—with a take of “America the Beautiful” that is much more beautiful than perhaps the song deserves.

Interestingly—particularly for a musician who for the most part avoided political movements—in the liner notes to Charles’ 50th Anniversary Box Set, called Genius & Soul, he is quoted as saying about “America The Beautiful,” “Some of the verses were just too white for me, so I cut them out and sang the verses about the beauty of the country and the bravery of the soldiers.”

“I take from you your children, and you say, ‘How blessed are we!’”

As an aside, in that same box set, following “America The Beautiful”—which concludes the fourth disc—there is 15 seconds of silence and then a “hidden track” in the form of Charles’ Coca-Cola commercial, which, as it happens, was a gem that James Taylor—another “Rayophile”—loved to cover in live performances in the early 1970s.

Newman’s piano chops are in full effect on the fifth track, called “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear,” a story of a deluded young entertainer, who believes that the well-fed public he performs for actually likes him, rather than just consuming his dancing bear act as a laughable commodity. With lines like, “They’ll love us, won’t they? They feed us, don’t they?” the song is pretty much one big heartbreak.

It was also a breakthrough of sorts for Newman: “It’s the first song I wrote where I wasn’t trying to be Carole King,” he admits. “It was the first song I wrote that sounds like me.” The spare but full piano accompaniment is a great touch for the antique-sounding tune, which thrives on long strings of off-beats, never quite settling down. Newman’s juuuuust-about-making-it vocal performance leading up to that last high note brings the proper element of vulnerability and fragility to the song. “It’s just amazing how fair people can be.”

With an album so full of irony, it’s a welcome breather to have a song like “Old Man” in the program, concluding side A of the record, bringing a solid dose of sincerity. Of course, you won’t get off that easy. This ain’t the theme to Toy Story, after all. “Old Man” tells of a son watching over his dying father when no one else has shown up, comforting him with the near-nihilistic philosophies the father had passed on to him: “Won’t be no god to comfort you, y’taught me not to believe that lie.”

While the strings swell and contract into a slightly dissonant crunch, the son tells the father not to cry. The strings work their way to a resolution, but the bass note refuses to inch up far enough, and an otherwise glistening major triad sits atop its own minor third: a stain. I can almost see the son leaning over the hospice bed, with a tear in one eye and shoulders half-raised in a wry shrug. “Everybody dies.”

And an ironist, perhaps, is born.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 3: Apple O' (Deerhoof, 2003)

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Viewed casually, the musical and lyrical content of Deerhoof’s 2003 record, Apple O’, appears as so many discrete scraps of ideas laid abreast—a couple turns of a musical cell, then on to the next; cloned trees and humans here, exploding bombs and candlelight there. But take time to sit with it, and you might find the seemingly disparate snippets begin to work together and feed off each other—even mutating into one another—creating if not a proper narrative then at least an ideological thread. Sometimes it could be a stretch of what was intended of course, but who’s to tell you that the inkblot you’re looking at isn’t what you say it is? When Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier was asked whether describing the band as “Ambient noise pop with an electric twist” was correct, he assured the interviewer that he could have described it any way he wanted and Saunier would have told him he was right. “Because,” he says, “who am I to tell you that’s not what you heard!”

Musically speaking, a good chunk of this record—the fifth studio release by the band who in 2015 released their fifteenth—uses the technique of shuffling around different modules, or “song bits.” The fifth track, an instrumental called “My Diamond Star Car,” is a great example. Phrases are short, almost gestural, and are repeated at least once before moving on to the next. I like to imagine the band as hitting steady eddies merrily down the stream, cycling around a few times within each before flowing onward. There’s no attempt at covering the seams, and why should there be? Saunier says, “You can hear the moments of discontinuity in the songs, which is part of what makes them good. I hope.” Regardless, there’s much more to Deerhoof’s music than its seams.  

The clear eye in the center of Apple O’’s storm is lead vocalist and bassist Satomi Matzuzaki, whose unadorned, expression-light, and—let’s face it: kiddo-cute voice spreads a whisper-thin layer of sonic and aesthetic varnish atop the otherwise rough-hewn project. Exploding candlelight, to be sure. Her careful but slightly imprecise pronunciation of the English lyrics is actually a tenderly beautiful opportunity to explore lyrical resonances between near homonyms—a tool used to great effect within Apple O’.

Where to begin?

Let’s get into it by way of the album’s sixth song, “Apple Bomb.” This song feels the most directionally assured, compositionally. It’s snagged by no looped modules. Right off the bat, the tune title provides a clue for interpreting the album title’s O'—the added mark functioning as the fuse of a cartoonish representation of a bomb. Within “Apple Bomb,” you hear the lyrics, “With a bone / [God] will try to clone me / Make a mother,” alluding to the story of Adam and Eve, two of history’s most famous apple-eaters. Of course, their apple did cause an ideological explosion, illustrated brilliantly in the lyrics thusly: “Your mom / when the bomb exploded / Eaten fruit / birthday suit, decoded.”

From “Adam’s apple” to “Atom bomb,” meanings of forbidden fruits shift underfoot. The umbrella-like apple core on the record’s cover art begins to morph into an atom bomb mushroom cloud. Cut to song nine, the gorgeous “Dinner for Two,” which name-checks the great portobello, and places the boom-‘shroom in the glow of exploding candlelight.

If the Adam and Eve connection slipped by you, track 12 is the with the assist. Titled, “Adam+Eve Connection,” its ethereal introductory 30 seconds are followed by a sample of the sampled bass line used to introduce track three, “Sealed with a Kiss,” but that bass is abruptly interrupted by a gobsmacking wall of screaming guitars, undergirded temporarily by an organized groove, until what feels like a cloud of pure volume is drawn upward to vertiginous heights—seriously, this thing gets loud for a moment—before being just as abruptly vanishing, leave only a nylon-string guitar, quiet and patient.

Saunier makes a point of saying that Deerhoof’s lyrics should be easily understood, on one level at least. “Simple material,” he says, “but at the same time confusing.”

See, for example the track called “Flower,” which in few words paints an alternate picture of “flower power,” using as its central figure the Kudzu, that invasive and rapidly growing plant that can literally overshadow other plants to death. Matzuzaki sings “I come over, I take over.”

The purple flowers of the Kudzu led me to wonder whether another stretch-of-a-connection might be plausible for the record’s title. My initial guess about Apple O’ was that the apostrophe after the O was doing it’s job of standing in for missing letters or words, perhaps, “Apple of my eye.” The King James Bible used the idiom to translate the hebrew phrase which literally translates to “little man of the eye”—invoking the reflection of oneself visible in the pupils of others. And in this sense of keeping or hiding another person in a part of your body, the “apple of the eye” is to the “rib of Adam” as “making one from two” is to “making two from one.”

Enough. I know. I get it.

But triangulate Apple of the eye with Shakespeare and purple flowers and maybe there’s something there.

In scene Act 3, Scene 2 of Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon squeezes the liquid from a purple flower into Demetrius’ eyes, saying:

“Flower of this purple dye / Hit with Cupid’s archery / Sink in apple of his eye / when his love he doth espy”

Who knows... 

In 2012, when Saunier was asked for the meaning of their new album’s title, “Breakup Song,” he said, “Well… Does it have to be only one? Maybe Deerhoof are very clever and they mean many things.” When the interviewer comes back with “And maybe you mean nothing,” Saunier states with a smile, “We don’t mean nothing. Maybe we mean four things. Ever thing that Deerhoof does, it means four things.”

I guess significance is in the apple of the eye of the beholder.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week. 

Episode 2: Face Value (Phil Collins, 1981)

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Face Value, Phil Collins’ 1981 debut solo album, opens, improbably, with an epic, five minute and thirty-six second “In the Air Tonight.” You wait patiently, to the point where most pop songs would already have ended, for a “drop,” as it were. At three minutes in, you are briefly smacked over the head with “well I remember” to remind you to stick with him here. This thing is gonna pay off. And 40 seconds later, you hear it: that elegantly simple drum fill that left impressions—via number-two pencils cum drum sticks—on the car seats in front of countless kids growing up in the ’80s.

Once the peak is reached, it hangs there for a bit, and then, slowly, the knobs turn toward zero: nearly a full minute of fade-out.

Collins by this time had already toured the world many times over and made a name for himself as the drummer and later lead vocalist of Genesis. By 1979, he was talking publicly about making a stylistically-varied solo record that could contain long stretches of “mood.” But it wasn’t until he experienced a “personal tidal wave,” in the form of a divorce, that he took some time away from Genesis, holed up in his house, and wrote and recorded the tracks that would become the basis of Face Value.

After the coolly restrained, metronomic drum machine accompaniment of the opening song, a well-warranted organicism and punch is introduced, bolstered by Alphonso Johnson on bass, who makes the next two tracks: the gently off-kilter “This Must Be Love,” and the borrowed Genesis gem, “Behind the Lines,” which Collins speeds up 30% from the original and boosts into overdrive with the addition of the EWF Horns.

The pair of tunes that follows, acting more as story and epilogue than two separate songs, introduce the theatrical into Face Value. "The Roof is Leaking" fades in with crickets that remain in the background throughout the song as sonic scenery, supporting the tale of a poor and desperate family battling the cold winter and holding out for spring. The opening musical figure of "The Roof is Leaking," played by Eric Clapton's slide guitar, becomes the basis of "Droned,” the wordless, Indian-influenced tune that follows.

Track 6, “Hand in Hand,” brings the drum machine back into play, at first undergirding the children's choir, bass, drums, and horns, but gives way as the tune becomes an all-stops-pulled showcase for Collins' drum set and the EWF horns, foregrounding what might normally have been supportive rhythmic horn lines.

In a 1981 interview, Collins described “Hand in Hand” as “basically like ‘Who Dat Man?’,” the lively if ultimately problematic Marx Brothers song from their 1937 film, A Day at the Races, which sees Harpo, as Gabriel, skipping through a town and attracting—Pied Piper-like—a crowd of kids that builds behind him as he blows his penny whistle. It's less a musical comparison than a conceptual one: "Innocence and children,” says Collins, bluntly. (Incidentally, his boosterism for the Marx Brothers continued the following year in a much more overt fashion when he released his second album, entitled "Hello, I Must Be Going!")

The album’s most vulnerable and barebones statement is the brief "You Know What I Mean," with Collins on voice and piano accompanied beautifully by strings. The lyrics tell of a brokenhearted man imploring his ex-lover not to re-enter his life, to leave him alone so he can put the pieces of himself back together—a clear allusion to Collins’ divorce. One can hear this song, perhaps, as a prologue and companion to his mega-hit to come, "Against All Odds," which would be released three years later and would present an alternate version of dealing with love lost.

Overall the album covers a ton of ground—which is not totally unexpected for an initial solo release, where an artist wants to show off all sides of themselves—but it is masterfully sequenced, guiding the listener through multi-song arcs, often assisted by cross-fades to further the notion of continuity.

The final track, The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," is the album's only cover (not counting the Genesis tune, of course)—actually, if you want to get technical, the final 30 seconds of the album, as a treat for those who stick around for the ends of fades, has Collins singing the first stanza of Harold Arlen’s "Over the Rainbow" a cappella... But, to the Beatles:—It was not intended as an homage to John Lennon, who was shot dead in front of his apartment building just two months before Face Value's release. The track was recorded, mixed, and in the can over a year before that. So why a Beatles tune? “It’s basically a nudge in the ribs," Collins would explain, "saying, If you think this is nice, go back to the original, listen to that, because, you know, you missed this 20 years ago.”

Well, in case you guys missed Face Value 34 years ago, consider your ribs nudged.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.  

Episode 1: Other Creatures (Gym Deer, 2014)

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Stereotypically awkward, first-drafty, and best-kept-to-oneself, experiments in one's bedroom can, under the right conditions, lead to a kind of magic that mightn't have been achieved under harsher fluorescents or wider confines—a quiet crucible.

Rob Lee, the man behind Gym, Deer, is a case of one whose limited recording set-up helped not only to realize his vision but to shape its aesthetic. His early recordings, released as Other, Ways are lo-fi, layered novellas in which Rob functions as lead and background, bass and percussion, all stacked and coordinated within Garageband. The gentle hiss, ever present due to the layering of room sound with every successive overdub, presents itself more as feature than bug: a testament to the work.

If you want something done right, do it yourself, yeah? Sure, unless, of course, you can get Mallory Glaser, Angelo Spagnolo, and Anthony LaMarca involved. Then you get them.

Which brings us to 2014's Other Creatures, an album leaning heavier on studio than bedroom, retaining that Arthur Russell homemade sensibility and sensitivity, but placing it atop a full-color backdrop that would appeal to any Radiohead fan.

The modern and the ancient mingle in Rob and Mallory's parallel vocal lines, at first seemingly floating, but as the tunes build, the driving make-shift electronic percussion appears, more fully revealing the architecture, and you find yourself whirling under geometric domes.

It blooms and blooms.

I should note that this is a brief EP, clocking in at under 20 minutes, but an epic one in its way over the course of four gorgeous tracks—similar to how a meal of small, well-balanced, high-quality portions can both fill you up and satisfy you in a way that an all-you-can-eat buffet might not. It’s what’s in the story that counts.

In Other Creatures' second track, “Revolutionary,” Lee explores an idea from permaculturist Bill Mollison that revolutions can't succeed without a focus on the creation of food and shelter. The music of Gym, Deer is not “out there” or revolutionary per se, but it does nourish, and it's certainly something to live in for a while.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.