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  • Winter Doesn’t Quite Move On: Morten Harket Feels My Pain


    Here in Wisconsin, we have a sort of love/hate thing about winter. Back in college, I remember walking to work in bitter cold, with icicles forming in my facial hair and the inner workings of my Walkman freezing to a crawl so that my mix tape sounded like a 45 played at 33. Those mornings are too sad to contemplate further, but as miserable as I was, it also gave me an opportunity to feel all stoic and rugged and butch. For us Midwesterners, the quiet endurance of an extreme winter season is both a burden and a source of pride. Suffice to say that even as May heads into June, there have been frost advisories in America’s Dairyland. Wednesday night, I mowed my lawn in a winter coat. So when they start opening the garden centers at the Home Depots and Shopkos and Wal-Marts, we flock to them like mosquitoes to bug zappers, ravenous for the color green – ravenous for color at all.

    Of course, it could be worse. We could be in Norway. (Actually, many of us are Norwegian.) And the Norwegian trio a-ha captured the poetically fleeting nature of a northern summer gloriously in the video for their 2000 reunion single “Summer Moved On” (which they debuted at the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize Concert). The band will always be best known for their 1985 hit “Take On Me” (and its video), but, even though it wasn’t a hit on these shores, “Summer Moved On” successfully re-established the band as an international pop force, and may, in fact, prove to be just as enduring and classic as their first hit. Both lyrically and musically the opposite of their signature hit, “Summer Moved On” is a languorous contemplation of a relationship’s final days which culminates with cascading strings and Morten Harket’s dramatic falsetto plea to “Stay… don’t just walk away” – how does that man hold his notes? – the song is accompanied by a video depicting a rocky ocean beach strewn with light-starved people waiting for the dawn of what proves to be an excruciatingly brief day.

    Since their reunion, and in between the members’ various side projects – primary songwriter Pal Waaktaar and his wife Lauren Savoy record together under the name Savoy and in 2004 Magne “Mags” Furuholmen recorded a solo album with members of Coldplay – a-ha have released four very good albums (available in the U.S. only as imports) including the double-live set How Can I Sleep With Your Voice In My Head, with a new as-yet-untitled record scheduled to come out this fall. In the meantime, Morten Harket has revived his solo career with a brand new studio album called Letter From Egypt, his first full-length, English-language studio album since 1995’s lovely Wild Seed. The album’s advance single is a typically sweeping ballad called “Movies” (a cover of fellow Norskies the Locomotives’ “My Woman”) which was a top 10 hit in Norway earlier this year. Check out Morten (as hunky as ever) performing the song at last year’s Nobel Peace Prize Concert to an audience which included Al Gore. The album’s second single, the slightly more upbeat and far less engrossing “Darkside” was released in Europe in May.

    http://www.myspace.com/harketmorten

    -P. Lorentz

  • Chart Chat 6/1/08: 3 Doors Down, Donna Summer, Coldplay & More!!


    Ah, the month of June. In just a couple of short weeks, it will officially be summer. Let’s see what’s heating up the music charts this week! (as usual, all chart info reprinted courtesy of the good folks at Billboard):

    Top 20 Albums:

    1) “3 Doors Down” 3 Doors Down
    2) “II Trill” Bun B
    3) “Julianne Hough” Julianne Hough
    4) “Nothing But the Best” Frank Sinatra
    5) “Narrow Stairs” Death Cab for Cutie
    6) “Spirit” Leona Lewis
    7) “E=MC2” Mariah Carey
    8) “Rockferry” Duffy
    9) “Hard Candy” Madonna
    10) “Home Before Dark” Neil Diamond
    11) “We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things” Jason Mraz
    12) “Taylor Swift” Taylor Swift
    13) “35 Biggest Hits” Toby Keith
    14) “Departure” Jesse McCartney
    15) “Fight With Tools” Flobots
    16) “Carnival Ride” Carrie Underwood
    17) “Crayons” Donna Summer
    18) “Now That’s What I Call Music 27” Various Artists
    19) “Jordin Sparks” Jordin Sparks
    20) “Daughtry” Daughtry

    Top 20 Singles

    1) “Lollipop” Lil’ Wayne feat. Static Major
    2) “Bleeding Love” Leona Lewis
    3) “The Time of My Life” David Cook
    4) “Take a Bow” Rihanna
    5) “No Air” Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown
    6) “Love in This Club” Usher feat. Young Jeezy
    7) “Sexy Can I” Ray J. feat. Yung Berg
    8) “4 Minutes” Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake
    9) “Pocketful of Sunshine” Natasha Bedingfield
    10) “Viva La Vida” Coldplay
    11) “Damaged” Danity Kane
    12) “Leavin’” Jesse McCartney
    13) “Touch My Body” Mariah Carey
    14) “Bust it Baby Pt. 2” Plies feat. Ne-Yo
    15) “Dream Big” David Cook
    16) “What You Got” Colby O’Donis feat. Akon
    17) “It’s Not My Time” 3 Doors Down
    18) “Apologize” Timbaland feat. OneRepublic
    19) “Last Name” Carrie Underwood
    20) “Love Song” Sara Bareilles

    *This week’s charts are all about two things: “American Idol” and advertising. To wit:

    *Contestants from 4 different seasons of “American Idol” can be found in this week’s Top 20 charts. Aside from David Cook’s two top 20 singles chart debuts (which we discussed a couple days back), 2007’s winner, Jordin Sparks, can be found in the Top 20 of the singles and albums charts, as can 2005’s winner, Carrie Underwood. Meanwhile, 2006 finalist Chris Daughtry is still hanging around, moving up 10 spots to re-enter the Top 20 with his 18-month old debut album.

    *”American Idol” is also to blame for the resurgence of “Apologize”. The Timbaland/OneRepublic song, which has now appeared on the pop, Adult Top 40, Adult Contemporary and R&B charts, re-enters the Top 20 after OneRepublic performed it with “AI” runner-up David Archuleta on the season finale. The resurgence should be short-lived, as I can’t imagine there being too many people out there who aren’t completely sick of this song.

    *”Idol” also juices a major comeback, as Queen of Disco Donna Summer appears in the Top 20 of the pop albums chart for the first time since “She Works Hard for the Money” in 1983!! “Crayons” is actually Summer’s first album of original material since 1991. Toot-toot…hey…beep beep!! Here’s some old school Donna for ya!!

    *Meanwhile, continuing Ameria’s insatiable appetite for extremely generic rock bands, 3 Doors Down enjoys their second straight debut atop the album charts with their self-titled fourth effort. This band’s success may come as something of a surprise because they’ve traveled so far under the radar. However, not only has the band enjoyed a fairly uninterrupted stream of hit singles since their 2000 debut, but they are the third biggest-selling group of the decade so far, behind Nickelback and…crap, I forget who the second band is, but they’ve sold more records!!

    *Apple’s current advertising campaign is juicing Coldplay’s current success. “Viva La Vida”, the song used in the latest ads for Apple/iPod/iTunes, scales back up the charts this week, becoming Coldplay’s second top 10 hit. Lead singer Chris Martin also scores his first charted single as a solo artist, as Kanye West’s “Homecoming” (which features Martin as a guest artist) enters the singles chart at #96.

  • Clay Aiken & His Babymakin’


    For the past day and a half or so, I’ve tried to figure out how to discuss this while a) not being boring and b) not being completely obnoxious.

    Personally, I don’t care if a star is gay or not. It really doesn’t make aifference to anything or anyone. Will your enjoyment of Luther Vandross’s music suffer because of the fact that he was (by most accounts) gay?

    I also don’t like the fact that there often seems to be a witchhunt to out celebrities. We don’t own them. They’re allowed to have private lives, and who they sleep with is none of our business. People like Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who delights in grade-school innuendo and borderline name-calling, strike me as bitter queens who either spent their childhood being bullied for being gay and/or are spending their adulthood being bullied for being gay and want to pull someone else into their misery.

    Truth is, none of us really knows if Clay Aiken is gay. He’s never said as much, simple as that. We all might have an opinion (and I’ll admit that my gaydar goes off whenever I see him), but there are straight dudes who act like sissies the same way there are gay dudes who don’t have stereotypically “gay” mannerisms.

    The fact that Clay (by artificial insemination, apparently) impregnated the 50-year old sister of music producer David Foster (who’s 30+ year career has seen him work with everyone from Earth, Wind & Fire to Whitney Houston to Josh Groban) is…a little strange, and it rings ever-so-slightly of a publicity stunt. However, I (like plenty of other people) am a cynic. If Clay wants a kid and this is the means he chose to have it, then God bless him. If it is indeed a publicity stunt, then boo on Clay and his handlers for bringing an actual live human being into this mess (although what would having a baby by artificial insemination do for his career, considering it would just seem to compound the gay rumors…). It doesn’t matter to me, because I have no interest in Clay Aiken’s music and probably never will (unless he gets hip and walks away from trying to be the 21st century Peter Cetera).

    What happened to the days when the music mattered and people didn’t really care what musicians did in their personal lives?