John Wesley Harding's New Album: ''The Sound of His Own Voice''Back when I was in high school, British folk-rocker John Wesley Harding first wooed me with an earnest acoustic guitar cover of Madonna’s (then quite recent hit) “Like a Prayer” (from an EP he called God Made Me Do It), and then with a great big horn-backed celebration (?) of the dark side of mankind called “The Devil In Me”. Although he’s been a most prolific artist for the past two decades, I lost touch with him somewhere between high school diploma and college degree. But with his latest video, he takes me all the way back to middle school, with some help from his comedian pal Eugene Mirman (better known perhaps as “The Fertility Clown”). The song is called “Sing Your Own Song”, from the album The Sound of His Own Voice, and as much as the video borrows from a Paul Simon classic, the song itself is a virtual re-write of Mama Cass by way of Sesame Street.
Oh, and did I mention you can download the song for free from Amazon? You’re welcome.
Lady Antebellum's ''Own the Night''Take a look at recent adult contemporary charts and you’ll find that some of the format’s biggest hits of the last few years have been by youngsters: Miley Cyrus. Adele. Taylor Swift. As a contemporary adult, I find the implications of that fact a little embarrassing, and a little sad. Then there’s Lady Antebellum, who landed the mother of all adult contemporary hits in the form of last year’s “Need You Now”. The Nashville country pop trio recently released their third album, called Own the Night, and it occurs to me about three songs into this new record: these are the songs Taylor Swift would be singing if she were 15 or 20 years older.
There’s really very little difference between the average Taylor Swift song and the songs of Lady Antebellum. They both play melodic, radio-friendly pop love songs that, for little more than geographic origin, the occasional flourish of mandolin and fiddle and a general lack of Autotune, somehow qualifies as country. (What? No cowboy hats? No songs about tractors?) You could easily imagine that it was the same hit-for-hire team supplying material to both acts. Lady Antebellum singer Hillary Scott even sounds a little like Swift, especially on a big, heart-wrenching, string-laden, piano ballad like “As You Turn Away”, one of the highlights of Own the Night.
What most distinguishes Scott and her bandmates, singer Charles Kelley and multi-instrumentalist Dave Haywood, from Taylor Swift (well, aside from the fact that most of Lady Antebellum’s songs are vocal duets) are the stories their songs tell. These aren’t the chronicles and confessions of high school girls and boys, but the backstories and subtexts of those girls’ and boys’ high school reunions.
Never mind that they’re only a few years older than Swift, Lady Antebellum’s songs are the probable middle-aged ever-afters of Swift’s “Love Story”, where the googly eyed crushes of high school are distant memories, and every first kiss is informed by the consequences of how many other first kisses. In “Just a Kiss”, the album’s lead single, Scott and Kelley arrive at a moonlit doorstep at the end of a date and move cautiously to a good-night kiss, singing “I don’t want to mess this thing up.” These are people with pasts.
Two old classmates reminisce separately about a single high school slow dance they’d shared years earlier, before having gone their separate ways in life – “for me you’ll always be 18 and beautiful” – in the lovely and heartbreaking “Dancing Away With My Heart”. Meanwhile, in “Somewhere Love Remains”, a couple who’ve shared a life together find themselves at the edge of splitting up – again. Sure, “Friday Night” is an upbeat, 80s-style rocker (no way this wasn’t written for the soundtrack of the remade Footloose). But it’s still basically Scott and Kelley assuring each other, in playful strings of opposing metaphors – “chore to check off on your list” vs. “lemonade in the shade” – that they don’t want to ever get into a rut.
There are a few moments of sheer giddy pleasure. “Love I’ve Found In You” is a portrait of unqualified domestic bliss, while “Singing Me Home” is all carnal lust on the open road. But these are intermittent escapes from the album’s general sense of tastefully-rendered, elegantly-packaged, thirty-something, romantic melancholy.
Is it dead enough yet? It is still enough yet?“Will it replicate inside our bodies now?” That’s the question at the center of a new song from the British quintet called Fanfarlo, and every time I hear that line, it makes me want to go back and listen to the verses to try to discern just exactly what “it” is. And I still haven’t quite got it.
Fanfarlo’s debut album Reservoir was one of the more charming records of the last couple of years – a collection of lyrical indie-folk songs, delivered in Simon Balthazar’s lilting troubadour tenor over all manner of acoustic strings, horns, piano and percussion, roughly splitting the difference between (the band) James’s most bombastic moments and the The Decemberists’ most modest, with a loving nod to the singer-songwriter pop of the 70s. Not only are they an effortlessly charismatic live act, they’ve also put out some great videos, as evidenced by last year’s Twilight Zone-ish “Fire Escape”.
Following some extensive touring behind that first record, the band retreated to a “remote slate quarrying town in Northern Wales” to record its follow-up, and are previewing the album with a video (and free mp3 download) of “Replicate”. The song is a surreal and suspenseful compendium of unanswered questions, sung over tense strings, diabolically playful little organ doodles and haunted house woodblock percussion. Its verses feel like an update on a Bernard Herrmann film score, and after asking one last time – Will it replicate inside our bodies now? – the song comes to an abrupt end without reaching any kind of catharsis or resolution. Just: over.
