Safe and SoundLast Sunday, The Civil Wars made the most of 2 minutes of network airtime on the Grammy Awards as the “opening act” to Taylor Swift‘s performance of “Mean.” (They’d also been awarded two trophies of their own prior to the broadcast including Best Folk Album.) This week, the duo’s debut album Barton Hollow nearly tripled it sales from the previous week, almost exactly a year after its original release. Huzzah for The Civil Wars!
In addition to playing Taylor Swift’s opening act on the Grammy stage, singer-songwriters John Paul White and Joy Williams, who’d spent much of last year touring with Adele, co-wrote and recorded the song “Safe and Sound” with Swift and producer T-Bone Burnett for inclusion on the soundtrack to the forthcoming movie The Hunger Games. (The Civil Wars are also providing a song called “Kingdom Come”, sans Taylor, for the soundtrack.) This is a nice departure from Taylor Swift’s usual teenage study hall love letters and fairytale stuff. Have a listen:
I Won't Give UpWhen we think of the kind of pop stars that thrive on periodic self-reinvention, we generally think of women. Madonna, of course, is the mother superior reinventer, but it’s basically a fact of life for even a minor female pop star that you don’t wear the same look twice and personae should be changed as often as underwear. You know – to stay fresh and stuff.
We don’t think this way about the guys though, do we? And maybe it’s just because in the last 30 years or so, there have been so few male solo artists who have sustained careers in the pop spotlight past their first or second hit that they either don’t stick around long enough to reinvent themselves – that or their reinventions go completely unnoticed. Let this be a warning, Jason Derulo! This is why “I Won’t Give Up”, the new single by Jason Mraz is so surprising.
It’s not the music so much (although there’s that too): it’s the look. I don’t know if it’s more 1971 hippie or 1991 grunge, but Mraz has made a clean break with the my-life-is-a-sunny-beach, dorky-straw-fedora thing that made him a star. Check out the new video, which got a much-hyped premiere on the E! Network on Thursday:
“I Won’t Give Up” sounds to me a lot like late 70s Poco (I mean that in a really good way), only with a bridge that sounds somewhat plagiarized from the Starland Vocal Band (regretfully, also meant in a really good way). I kinda like this song. It’s not the instant charmer that “I’m Yours” was, nor do I think that it will have that song’s legs (has “I’m Yours” ever really dropped out of heavy rotation on Top 40 radio?).
On the other hand, it’s also missing all the things that made me hate to love “I’m Yours” – the cheesy, white-boy-scatting vocals chief among them. On the other hand (is that three now?), this video feels awfully emotionally manipulative (the electrical poles as crosses in the background – sweet touch there) and it makes me like the song less. I’m not looking forward to hearing this one played behind every inspirational Olympics montage, or American Idol introductory video, or PETA commercial for the next two years.
As we saw on Sunday night at the Grammys, when she did a duet with Alicia Keys in tribute to the late Etta James, Bonnie Raitt‘s just got one of those ageless, unchanging voices – it’s comfort food for the ears: homey, understated, and warm. But it wasn’t just a wonderfully random thing that she showed up to perform on the industry’s biggest night. Bonnie’s got a new album coming out, set for release on April 10 – her first new studio album in seven years. It’s called Slipstream, and the first single from the album was released for downloads last week. The song is a cover of “Right Down the Line”, the 1978 hit by Gerry Rafferty, who passed away last year at the age of 63.
The song’s a personal favorite of mine from Rafferty’s classic album City to City (which also featured his signature solo hit “Baker Street”) – a song expressing steadfast love and appreciation: “I just want to say: this is my way of telling you everything I could never say before. This is my way of telling you that every day I’m loving you so much more.” Raitt’s voice, with its matter-of-fact strength and earthy candor, is uniquely well-suited to such a sentiment, and she gives the song a light ska-flavored rhythm. Listen here:
