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Pop Rock Nation

Category: People

all-about-musicians-and-the-people-who-help-them-make-music

  • Old Friends When We Meet: Hubert Kah’s “C’est La Vie” (1996)

    If, like me, you happened to be working for Shopko in the late 1990s, you would have, by default, spent a lot of time with the satellite radio station they have piped into their stores. Lucky for me, the station was, in fact, a lot more interesting than we normally think piped-in retail music would be. It was while auditing the signage for the weekly ads on Sunday mornings that I was first introduced to Beth Orton and songs from Air’s Moon Safari album. And this radio station was just as repetitive as any normal Top 40 station, so, for awhile there, songs like World Party’s “She’s the One” and Del Amitri’s “Not Where It’s At” were as familiar to me as TLC and Britney Spears would have been. The sad thing was that there was no one announcing the songs and no ready way to know really what they were or who was singing them.

    Hubert Kah’s 1996 single ”C’est La Vie”
    Sometimes, I was already familiar with the song – I had that World Party album, for instance – but I was just stunned to be hearing it broadcast in a public place. Sometimes, I would find out what songs were by accident. Like, I’d been admiring Collective Soul’s song “Run” for months without knowing what it was – and then it turned up at the end of Varsity Blues! Huzzah! Other times, I had a guess – that “Oh, How the Days Go By” song certainly sounded like Vanessa Williams – that I could confirm on cdnow. (Remember cdnow?) In some extreme cases, I would try to memorize a few distinctive couplets – for instance “so gather around, see what the day brings, see what makes you laugh, see what makes you sing” – and plug it into whatever pre-Google search engine I happened to be using to discover that, hey, that’s the band Brad, the song’s called “The Day Brings”, and it’s on the album Interiors, which, holy wow, Shopko carries!

    But there was one song that got away. I never figured it out. And I loved it. Urrrrgh. The problem was that it sounded nothing like anybody I knew. Which was not to say that it sounded especially distinctive – in fact, it sounded like it could have been just about anybody. Challenging me further, the verses, at least from the sales floor of a discount retail store during business hours, were indecipherable to me, sung as they were in an accented croon that sounded a little like Bryan Ferry. Moreover, the chorus was mostly sung in French, and the only words I recognized were “C’est la Vie”. Approaching that pre-Google search engine with only a potential title and the sure knowledge that I was not looking for a Robbie Nevil song, I came back empty-handed.

    I stopped by Shopko recently while killing a little time over a lunch hour only to hear the song still being piped in over their speakers. The frustration came crashing back to me. How could it be that I’ve still not figured this song out? I probably looked a little silly as I tried to isolate myself in one of the less trafficked areas of the store to try to listen closely to what was being sung. I did catch the second line of the chorus – something like “rely on the heart” – but I wasn’t sure if was just mis-hearing a French lyric and “translating” it phonetically. But it was something. And as it turns out, it was enough. Typing it into Google, I came back with dozens of results identifying the lyric as an excerpt from the song “C’est la Vie” by the German synth-pop group Hubert Kah. Switching over to YouTube, I found a video for it too! And watching it, it was like meeting a long-time internet buddy in person for the first time: an old friend whose name I was just now learning.

    Hubert Kah “C’est La Vie” (1996)

    Digging a little further, I found that Hubert Kah actually scored their biggest successes with an edgy new wave, New Romantic sound in the early 80s with songs like “Rosemarie” and “Sternenhimmel”. Later in the decade, the group started releasing English language singles and even managed to chart four of them on the U.S. dance charts between 1987 and 1990. Meanwhile, lead singer Hubert Kemmler developed songwriting and producing associations with the likes of Michael Cretu, Camouflage and Peter Schilling before he was sidelined by a struggle with depression. “C’est la Vie”, featuring the vocals of Susanne Kemmler, was the group’s comeback single following a five year hiatus. How the hell the song ever found its way into the aisles of the Monroe, Wisconsin Shopko store remains a sweet, sweet mystery.

  • Three Bands from Three Decades in New Reunion Albums from O.M.D., Tonic, and Azure Ray

    Azure Ray’s ”Drawing Down the Moon”
    Every year brings its share of unlikely reunions, some welcome, some not so much. But this year sees three reunions from acts that few but the most devoted fans were even aware had broken up, or that they’d ever existed all that much outside of a semi-forgotten hit or two. Coincidentally, they each represent one of the last three decades of alternative pop and rock.

    The most recently broken up of the three groups is Azure Ray, the duo of singer-songwriters Maria Taylor and Orenda Fink, who, after releasing their fourth CD Hold On Love in 2003, both embarked on solo careers. Maria Taylor has since released three CDs of increasingly commercial folk-pop, while Orenda Fink, aside from her two solo albums, has also released music as leader of the band Art In Manila, and in O+S, a partnership with dj Scalpelist. Though their solo careers have taken them in diverging directions, neither of them have drifted too far from the haunted, delicately technologized southern gothic sounds they produced in the early ‘00s with songs like “Sleep” (heard pretty prominently on the soundtrack of The Devil Wears Prada) and “New Resolution” which boasted one of the last decade’s most strangely fascinating videos.

    Azure Ray “New Resolution” (1993)

    Their just-released reunion album Drawing Down the Moon sounds less like a “Now, where were we?” follow-up to the duo’s 2003 album than it reads as the proper follow-up to each of the individual singer-songwriters’ previous solo projects, as if the two roads diverging in the wood had merged back together. Produced by longtime associate Eric Bachmann (formerly of Archers of Loaf, currently of Crooked Fingers) who is shown on the back cover holding both women facing inward to his brawny southern bosom (it’s this kind of disturbing/amazing cover photography that makes me endlessly grateful for the endurance of the LP format). To my mind, their latest single is the closest thing to a potential radio hit as they’ve ever released.

    Azure Ray “Don’t Leave My Mind” (2010)

    Representing the 90s is Tonic who released their self-titled reunion album this spring and even scored a minor hit on the adult pop charts with a scrappily appealing acoustic/electric rocker called “Release Me”. Tonic is best known for their forbidding post-grunge classic “If You Could Only See”, a dark, Forensics Files-ready epistle from one man to the husband/boyfriend/lover of the woman he loves: “Maybe you’d understand why I feel this way about our love and what I must do / if could only see how blue her eyes can be when she says – when she says she loves me.” Cue the apocalyptically stabbing guitar hook and the trailer park murder plot.

    Tonic “If You Could Only See” (1996)

    Tonic released three albums in the late 90s, never replicating (or even approaching) the success (or the ubiquity) of that debut single. In the ensuing years lead singer Emerson Hart has pursued a solo career and in 2007 released one of my favorite recent pop ballads “I Wish the Best For You”. The new album largely steers clear of the shadowy intrigue of their biggest hit, opting instead for sunny pop/rock melodies that recall Vertical Horizon. My absolute favorite song from the record is called “Daffodils” and had I first heard it on the radio, I probably would have mistaken it for a Del Amitri reunion single – it’s got great harmonies on the chorus and a sweetly yearning chorus with Hart leaping up into a clear falsetto. You can check out samples of each of the new album’s track at the band’s website, and while there, leave ’em your e-mail and they’ll send you a free download of “Daffodils” for your troubles.

    Finally, there’s the synth-pop duo of Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys collectively known as Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who, in the 80s scored a massive hit with “If You Leave” from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack. Though the group’s fortunes faded in the late 80s, they continued recording, releasing three studio albums in the 90s. Still their latest record, called History of Modern, marks the group’s first new music since since the Clinton Administration. Lead single “If You Want It” is a great big sing-along anthem that, as one YouTube commenter put it “sounds like x-mas”. It’s got a beautiful video as well, featuring a ballet routine as performed for the duo in a darkened theater. Really great stuff.

    Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark “If You Want It” (2010)

  • Tom Bosley’s Singing Career! “The name’s LaGuardia…”

    Tom Bosley in Fiorello! – The Broadway Cast Album
    Yesterday, Tom Bosley passed away at the age of 83. Though Bosley is best known and celebrated as the TV actor who played Mr. Cunningham on the show Happy Days in the 70s and 80s, he was also a celebrated stage actor, and in 1960, he won a Tony Award for his portrayal of the title character of Fiorello!, a musical based on the life and loves of New York governor Fiorello “The Little Flower” LaGuardia.

    Debuting in the same season as Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, Fiorello! managed to tie with that musical for Tony Awards in four categories including Best Musical. Written by the team of composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick (the team who would go on to write Fiddler on the Roof) with a book by Jerome Weidman and George Abbott, the show was also awarded the Pulitzer prize for drama, one of only a handful of Pulitzer Prize winning musicals. It ran for nearly two years, closing in October of 1961, and in those two years, Tom Bosley never missed a single performance (sucked to be his understudy).

    50 years on, the show enjoys more a cult following than actual popularity. It’s rarely produced and it’s been overshadowed by Harnick & Bock’s later successes – Fiddler on the Roof, of course, which, when it closed, was the longest running musical in Broadway history, and later She Loves Me, which actually preceded Fiddler as a Broadway disappointment in 1963, but received a celebrated Broadway revival in the 90s. Despite its relative obscurity, Capitol Records’ cast album of the show has been reissued on CD a couple of times, and it’s well worth seeking out. Not so much for Bosley’s performance: Fiorello doesn’t really sing all that much, and when he does Bosley delivers the part with the kind of gung-ho salesman’s pitch shout-singing Robert Preston brought to the part of Professor Hill in The Music Man. Here he is on the stump as a mayoral candidate with a pitch he delivers in multiple languages and dialects in the song “The Name’s LaGuardia”.

    The Name’s La Guardia snippet

    But the score itself is a lot of fun, translating the colorful goings on of a corrupt political party in peril into the language of musical comedy via songs like the barbershop style waltz “Politics and Poker” and the second act showstopper “Little Tin Box”, both of which featured Howard Da Silva in a role that delivered him and his career out of McCarthy-era blacklist hell. The opening number “On the Side of the Angels” follows LaGuardia’s idealistic campaign team through the trials of working for that rarest of beasts – the upstanding politician. But one my favorite moments is Bosley’s fiery delivery of “Unfair” in which he helps a group of mild-mannered labor ladies on strike get in touch with their outrage.

    Unfair snippet

    Anyone with a thing for classic Broadway who doesn’t already have this cast album should go out and have a look for it. It really is a great score, and it’s especially fun to listen to in the midst of a vicious off-year election cycle, especially this year’s elections which seems to have brought us enough characters to populate several great musical comedies – and that’s just the New York gubernatorial debate. (“The Rent is Too Damn High” would make a great song title.)