Over his more than half-century-long recording career, there are few great American songs of any genre that Willie Nelson hasn’t touched (and few American artists that he hasn’t directly collaborated with). So why wouldn’t he collaborate with a restaurant chain, on one of the biggest British rock hits on the last ten years?
Still, it was sort of a surprise to find among the newly available mp3 downloads on Amazon this new Willie Nelson track, a cover of Coldplay’s 2002 single “The Scientist”, accompanied by very un-Willie-Nelson-ish thumbnail art of animated pink pigs in what looks like a pig penitentiary.
A quick search and I found that the track actually serves as the soundtrack for an animated short – oh, whatever, it’s really just a commercial for the Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant chain – called “Back to the Start”, which demonstrates (rather cutely) how industrial agriculture has led us to despair, and how organic farmers (in partnership with Chipotle Mexican Grill!) can lead us to bright colors and wonderfulness again: Think Farmville meets Koyaanisqatsi, only really short, really adorable, insidiously corporate, and no Phillip Glass. It’s all good until the brand messaging starts to kick in. Luckily, Willie Nelson’s performance not only stands well on its own, you can also enjoy it without having to watch Chipotle pander so shamelessly to your Inner Slow Food Locavore. Go download it now.
Jon Huntsman loves this stuff! And he's a Republican!One of my favorite news items from the 2008 presidential campaign was a story in which bluegrass great Ralph Stanley endorsed then Senator Barack Obama for President. If I remember correctly, Mr. Obama, in thanking Mr. Stanley for his support, mentioned that he had some of Stanley’s music on his iPod, thereby confusing the hell out of the octogenarian banjo-plucker (“What’s an iPod?”). Sadly no one ever followed up with Barack Obama on, say, which of the Stanley Brothers’ songs he liked best, or what initially drew him to bluegrass music in the first place.
That would have been a fun read – it would have been cool to see if the future president was just paying lip service to a national treasure, or if he really had some serious bluegrass cred. We may never know. Thanks be, then, to blogger Dave Weigel. You see, awhile back, Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman tweaked his small-ish Twitter following by professing his love for Captain Beefheart. And this last weekend, while Weigel was covering the Republican campaign in New Hampshire, he took a bit of time to talk Beefheart with Huntsman. The verdict: Jon Huntsman Passes the Beefheart Test!
Now, generally speaking, and I admit to some shameless stereotyping here, when I think of the musical tastes of Republicans – especially those of the Presidential candidate persuasion – I generally think country: Toby Keith’s big ol’ boot up the rest of the world’s collective ass, Miranda Lambert’s hybrid of domestic sentimentality and gun-toting girl-power, Lady Antebellum’s popular (and thereby sacrosanct) blandness, or the Charlie Daniels Band’s aggressively Southern take-no-shit-itude.
There’s also classic rock. Ted Nugent, for instance, had been a walking manifesto for the Tea Party’s wild-eyed, take-no-prisoners brand of pseudo-libertarianism for decades before anyone had ever heard of Glenn Beck. Wisconsin’s own governor Scott Walker has been playing John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” at his recent speaking engagements and Sarah Palin clearly [hearts] Heart although the feeling is emphatically not mutual. (Don Van Vliet, the artist formerly known as Captain Beefheart, died last December, and is thus unable to weigh in on Huntsman.)
To my mind, then, loving Captain Beefheart is the sort of thing that only one of the people Sarah Palin sneeringly dismisses as an elitist would ever cop to so openly. Who’s ever even heard of Captain Beefheart? And among those who have heard of Captain Beefheart, who could say that they love his music? I’ll tell you who: rock critics. And people who wish they were rock critics. Only true music snobs love Captain Beefheart. Captain Beefheart is not the music of the conservative primary voter. Then again, maybe Huntsman isn’t trying to win the hearts and minds of Rick Perry devotees. After all, in that same Twitter feed, he admitted to *gulp* believing in evolution and trusting scientists.
I have to admit. I’m no fan of Captain Beefheart. I am a fan of a lot of artists who cite Captain Beefheart as an influence, and because of that, I have tried on numerous occasions to “get into” Captain Beefheart, and on all such occasions so far, I have failed. I’m also not a fan of the current roster of Republican presidential frontrunners, but Huntsman has given me the tiniest bit of hope. Not only does he say he likes Captain Beefheart. He actually does like Captain Beefheart. Also – and again: not a big fan here – but how awesome would it be to hear Captain Beefheart played at a Republican campaign rally?
I’m not typically the kind of guy who votes into office the candidate I’d most want to have a beer with. After all, the likelihood of my having a beer with the President, while not exactly zero, do lie somewhere between winning the Powerball and lightning striking three times. But Jon Huntsman is a Presidential candidate I would love to talk music with, and I have to say, that may have given me reason enough to vote for him in the primary. It’s not like he’s going to win.
An album I really should like more… right?Okay. It’s been about a year since I first heard Mumford & Sons. I remember seeking out “Little Lion Man” after reading a little blurb about it, and thinking it sounded like a great song. I downloaded it right away, but, to my surprise, it turned a bit stale on repeated listens. Their follow-up “The Cave”, despite its strangely moving video, has only marginally better replay appeal. Despite all that, I did download a copy of the group’s debut full-length Sigh No More when Amazon.com offered it at a steep discount. I have probably played it a couple of times, but… ehh. There’s nothing about the album itself that makes me crave it. What’s worse, when I hear their songs on the radio, they’ve started to grate on my nerves.
I don’t necessarily hate their music. Hate is such a strong term, best reserved for the truly loathsome, and frankly, once I go on record as “hating” an artist – The Dave Matthews Band, for instance – they inevitably release a single (“Funny The Way It Is”), or even a whole album album (Big Whiskey and the Groo Grux King), that makes me have to eat my words. I don’t love the Dave Matthews Band, but I do love that damn album. And I don’t hate Mumford & Sons. I’m just not that into them.
Yet?
I have to admit: this is a band I tried really hard to like. This is a band I feel on some instinctual level I should be in love with. The same way I fell in love with The Avett Brothers a couple years ago. I feel like I may have failed Mumford & Sons as a listener. And the surprised looks on my music-fan-friends’ faces when I express my semi-embarrassing, clearly minority opinion of the band only serves to reinforce that feeling of failure. Where did I go wrong? What am I not hearing in this music that so many of my friends seem to love?
And then I start to think that maybe it’s not a personal failing. Maybe I’m just not convinced by the band’s “authenticity”. Am I the only one who hears a gimmick – or even a small, made-to-be-charming collection of them – in every Mumford & Sons song? All the various anachronisms in their music and presentation, starting, of course, with the band’s very name, intended to evoke the old family business (are they in music, or haberdashery?), and extending to Marcus Mumford’s faux-Appalachian rasp and the music’s sepia-toned arrangements feel like a dusty collection of folksy figurines lined up behind the glass of an antique shop china closet. But closer inspection reveals that they aren’t really dusty – they’ve just been painted to look that way. Listening to Mumford & Sons feels to me like listening to a cassette tape shoved into the back of one of those replica Victrola turntables you get at Sears.
Then again, maybe it’s just that the songs aren’t that great, and don’t hold up well.
This past weekend, while on a family road trip, we stopped for a picnic lunch in a Clinton, Missouri park. There in the park, two Amish teenagers had set up a shelter where they were selling various baked goods. I went over and bought a plate of pecan caramel cinnamon rolls that looked fantastic – it had been so long since I’d had a really fantastic pecan caramel cinnamon roll – and y’know, these particular pecan caramel cinnamon rolls were baked by actual people – Amish people, even. They had to be great, right? But when we actually opened them, they were sort of tough and dry and sad. No question there was a certain level of joy involved in my purchase. But that joy vanished in the actual eating to the point where a QuikTrip donut would have been preferable.
And so it may be with Mumford & Sons. Maybe, with pop music sounding more and more automated and computerized, less melodic and more rhythmic, we crave the sound of actual human fingers plucking the actual strings of actual musical instruments – especially those indigenous to our pioneering forefathers – and we crave the sound of genuine imperfect human voices singing actual verses and choruses so much that we’re willing to pretend that replica Victrola is the real deal, and that the cassette we’re listening to is really an old-timey 78 we dug out of the bins at St. Vinnie’s.
Over his more than half-century-long recording career, there are few great American songs of any genre that Willie Nelson hasn’t touched (and few American artists that he hasn’t directly collaborated with). So why wouldn’t he collaborate with a restaurant chain, on one of the biggest British rock hits on the last ten years? 
