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Pop Rock Nation

Category: People

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

  • Travellers in Space and Time: New Videos by Broken Bells, The Apples in stereo, and Robbie Williams

    Comic Con may be over for this year, but that doesn’t mean the geek joy needs to end. Witness these three new videos, all dealing with space and time travel. One’s a bit of science fiction in the classic “allegory for the world we live in” sense featuring a performance by the kind of uber-hottie actress that could inspire a veritable library of fan fiction. There’s a nerdy goof on parallel realities (err- “alternate space-time continua”) starring a former child star (who also happens to be the band’s label boss). And finally, a mournful ballad that reads like an elegy for the decline of the U.S. space program (or maybe the decline of the singer’s solo career).

    First up is the latest by Broken Bells, “The Ghost Inside”. It’s the second single from the self-titled debut of this partnership between producer Danger Mouse (fresh off his success with Cee-Lo in Gnarls Barkley) and The Shins’ James Mercer. The video features Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks in a genuinely wonderful performance as a woman who, quite literally, sells her body in her desperate pursuit of interplanetary luxury.

    “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells

    Elijah Wood was 12 years old and on the verge of indie-film stardom when the Colorado band The Apples In stereo, an eccentric indie-pop sextet centered around singer-songwriter (and fervent Brian Wilson acolyte) Robert Schneider, released their debut seven-inch “Tidal Wave”. Now the 29-year-old actor has his own record label (Simian Records), and the first act he signed was The Apples In stereo. Both actor and band have come a long way in the last two decades. This latest video finds the band, which started out making wildly colorful, but overly precious psychedelic pop (think Harpers Bizarre), embracing an impossibly cheesy retro synth-pop sound on their latest album Travellers in Space and Time. To promote the record, the band teamed up with Greg Kilpatrick to produce the album’s first video “Dance Floor” along with an adorable 5 minute companion short film starring Wood (as a middle school science-and-gym teacher and host of “Exploring the Universe”) and Schneider (as a scientist who can turn a cucumber into a drum machine). You can watch it at stepthroughtheportal.com. It’s true that Schneider’s baby-voiced delivery is utterly at odds with his bald-bearded-bellied appearance. The incongruities are off-putting at first, but the song is an absolute winner that should endear itself to anyone who ever loved DEVO. Even better: The band is offering the song for free download. Click below to get your own copy!

    “Dance Floor” by The Apples In Stereo

    Finally, we have “Morning Sun”, the latest from 36-year-old British boy band veteran Robbie Williams, whose impressive latest album Reality Killed the Video Star finds the singer contemplating celebrity culture and his own role in it with thoughtfulness, uncharacteristic humility, and a mordant sense of humor. The video is a simple and elegantly photographed depiction of Williams’s astronautical journey from the earth’s outer atmosphere to the outer reaches of the solar system and the Milky Way galaxy, flirting with his own spectacular destruction, before parachuting back down to earth. All as if to say that like space travel, like celebrity itself, is journey as fascinating as it is isolating. And what does one even do with oneself after space?

    Though in the ten years since his song “Millennium” became his first U.S. hit, Williams has been ignored by American audiences and radio programmers, he’s enjoyed continued success overseas. But lately, even British and European audiences are feeling underwhelmed by Williams, which is sad since his latest record may actually be his best yet. And it may be his last solo record for a while. Following the release of a greatest hits set, he’s just recently re-united with Take That, the boy band he left in 1994. The other four members of Take That reunited after a 10 year hiatus in 2005 and have enjoyed even greater success in their second incarnation than they acheived during their early 90s heyday (which culminated in their 1995 U.S. Top 10 hit “Back for Good”).

    “Morning Sun” by Robbie Williams

    Robbie Williams – Morning Sun
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  • Paisley, Brown, and Church: Country Songs That Rawk!

    Every couple of weeks, I make a couple of new mix CDs to listen to on my 40-or-so-minute each way commute to work, basically culling my current favorite tracks to create my very own Lorentz-centric Top 40 radio station. Just like any other Top 40 radio station, it’s all about the hits (hits with me, anyway): the playlist is necessarily limited (I can rarely fit more than 20 songs on a CD) and repetitive (the CD ends, it starts over). I love it. It drives my kids nuts. Just the other day, when the latest a-ha single “Butterfly, Butterfly” came on, my oldest (who invariably gravitates to “Take On Me” whenever there’s a karaoke machine nearby) begged me to skip it. I didn’t then, but eventually, I will. And that will be when I know it’s time for a new mix CD.

    Lately, my morning commute mix CDs have been filling up with a surprising number of country songs. Now, while I’m certainly not one to dismiss country as a genre – I grew up with Kenny Rogers and the Oak Ridge Boys, and thanks to my Dad, I have a very deep love and respect for Willie Nelson – I’m no aficionado either. And as much as I’d like to say I keep an open mind, I have to admit that I’m more open-minded when we’re talking about Scandinavian dance pop than when we’re talking about guys named Garth and Randy who like to wear cowboy hats. I don’t know if it’s the music that’s changing or if it’s just me, but there’s just a lot of country music out there right now that’s, y’know, really good. And I’m not just talking about hipster-approved alternative country. That’s all fine too, but I’m talking about actual country hits. You know, country songs that are genuinely popular with country audiences, and increasingly with pop-crossover audiences as well.

    For instance, Brad Paisley‘s “Water”, the fourth single from his 2009 album American Saturday Night which recently enjoyed a stay at the top of the country charts

    Brad Paisley “Water”

    What I love about this song – and all of Brad Paisley‘s songs really – is how he never wastes a verse. There’s nothing throwaway about how he builds a story, or in this case, builds a monument to something as almost cheesily simple, common, and universal as water. I mean, how dorky does this idea seem on paper? Hey guys, let’s do a song about how great water is. (While we’re at it, why not a song about how cool it is to see stuff?) But verse by verse, he details his ongoing “love affair with water” with images from snapshots that could be sitting in just about anybody’s photo album – the “inflatable pool full of Dad’s hot air” – until you realize that while he might be stating the obvious, sometimes the obvious thing is the easiest to take for granted, and it needs to be stated. Moreover, the song’s joyous invitation to hop into the car and “drive until the map turns blue” has taken on an unintentional and tragic urgency with news of the BP oil spill and its disgusting political and environmental implications casting a depressing pall over this summer season.

    Like Brad Paisley, Georgia’s Zac Brown Band is currently riding on an album that’s destined to be regarded not just as one of the great country albums, but just one of the great albums of its time, period. Although they’ve been sending hits up the country charts and the Billboard Hot 100 since their major label debut The Foundation was released two years ago, it was their amazing 2010 Grammy Awards ceremony performance of their signature hit “Chicken Fried” done as a medley with “America the Beautiful” all dressed up in defiantly ragged harmonies, that established once and for all the force of nature this band is. Although their previous hits have had something of a novelty factor to them, this year they’ve sent two gorgeous ballads up the charts: “Highway 20 Ride”, a heartbreaking post-divorce father-to-son confessional, and “Free”, a song about being young, broke, and in love, and living out on the road – a song feels as big and endless as the road itself, and even gives a musical nod to Van Morrison’s classic “Into the Mystic.” Even as “Free” is still making its way up the Hot 100 (where it entered the Top 40 a couple weeks ago), the album’s sixth single “Different Kind of Fine” – a light-hearted romp celebrating a fine specimen of true country womanhood – has just landed on the country charts. I double-dog dare you not to dig it.

    Zac Brown Band “Different Kind of Fine”

    With his full beard and trademark knit caps, Zac Brown is one of those guys that’s made country radio playlists safe for guys who don’t wear cowboy hats. North Carolina native singer-songwriter Eric Church is a baseball hat kinda guy with a great voice – a boyish, impish, and immediately lovable tenor that he uses to fine effect on songs about love and how nice it is to be naughty. But for its decidedly un-PC celebration of liquor and death sticks, Church’s latest single “Smoke a Little Smoke” barely even qualifies as country, sounding like cross between a Ry Cooder electric blues and a Collective Soul arena rock anthem circa 1993, with all the requisite post-grunge quiet-loud-quiet dynamics. Country as a genre has proven itself relatively slow to evolve. But with the ongoing popular success of Eric Church (and Zac Brown and Brad Paisley), the fish may, in fact, be growing a small set of legs.

    Eric Church “Smoke a Little Smoke”

  • Harvey Fuqua 1929-2010, Last of the Moonglows

    I’d never heard of Harvey Fuqua when I picked up that Moonglows 45 from the Goodwill store where I worked when I was in college. I’d never even heard of The Moonglows really, although, by then, they’d already been inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. The reason I bought the single: the label, of course. It was on Chess Records. It looked like it was in good, playable shape, and even if it wasn’t, it was only going to cost me the price of a soda. If nothing else, with that elegant blue and silver label and its stately chess piece logo, it would look cool hanging on a wall, or from the ceiling of my dorm room. Of course, that 45 never had a chance to become such an ornament. I fell too hard in love with both sides of it. I didn’t know which was the “plug” side and which was the “b”. Frankly, I still don’t. They’re both just that great. On one side was “Over and Over Again”, an almost comical recounting of one man’s woeful inability to learn from his romantic miscalculations, delivered with full-throated devotion by Bobby Lester, Harvey’s singing partner since their high school days; on the other side was the quirky love-at-first-sight doo-wop testimonial “I Knew From the Start”.

    “Over and Over Again”

    “I Knew From the Start”

    As it turns out, neither side was much of a hit, although they were both featured in a 1956 movie put together by a rising-star DJ named Alan Freed who had been the Moonglows’ manager and earliest champion, a movie called Rock, Rock, Rock, starring Tuesday Weld which also featured performances by The Flamingoes, Chuck Berry, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. I’d never heard of it either. But when the soundtrack album was re-mastered and reissued on CD a couple of years ago in conjunction with the 50th Anniversary of rock ‘n’ roll’s ascendance, I was very quick to snatch up a copy. Of course, I didn’t wait that long to expand my Moonglows collection. Shortly after I picked up that 45, I was eager to hear more of the group, and special-ordered a 2-CD anthology of the group that had, at the time, just been released via MCA.

    It was from that collection that I learned who Harvey Fuqua was, and learned not just the pivotal role the Moonglows played in bridging the gaps between rock ‘n’ roll, the dramatic vocal pop of their forebears the Ink Spots (Harvey’s Uncle Charlie was a member), and their contemporaries The Platters, and what would soon be called soul music (Marvin Gaye’s first recorded lead vocal was on a Moonglows single); but also the role Fuqua would play in the formative success of the Motown label as a songwriter, producer and A&R man working with the Spinners and Shorty Long (both of whom migrated with Fuqua to Motown after recording for Fuqua’s own Harvey and Tri-Phi labels), along with Marvin Gaye and Tami Terrell on songs like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. (He also married Berry Gordy’s sister.) Even after leaving Motown in the early 70s, Fuqua went on to some of his greatest successes, producing one of the most iconic singles of the disco era in the form of Sylvester’s “(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real”; and in 1982, closing a 25-year career circle by collaborating with Marvin Gaye on his final album Midnight Love. Few people know his name, but there’s no question that Harvey Fuqua had a direct hand in some of the most enduring music of the last 60 years. He was the last remaining Moonglow when he passed away on July 6, 2010, just a couple weeks shy of his 81st birthday.

    Here’s the song that put The Moonglows on the map, the Fuqua-penned 1954 hit “Sincerely” (which, yes, appeared in Goodfellas – what an awesome soundtrack that is!).