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.
Back around maybe the second or third season of American Idol, when the show was becoming the established pop cultural phenomenon it is today, we started hearing about similar shows being developed by Lord of the Idols Simon Fuller and 19 Entertainment in other countries like Sweden and Poland and Indo(friggin)nesia. To date, there have been approximately 30 various Idol-esque franchises created around the world. I remember reading around that time about Kurt Nilsen, the first-season winner of Idols Norway – just how cool he seemed. He was a guitar player and unlike earlier seasons of American Idol, he could actually accompany himself on the show. I don’t remember that I ever heard him sing until he did a duet with Willie Nelson on the song “Lost Highway” in 2008 (at which point I was duly impressed), but I remember thinking that he sounded like – well, like an artist. Specifically, the kind of singing-songwriting-guitar-playing artist that our own American Idol showed seemed to hold in contempt.
It’s easy to trash the pop we Americans produce because we’re fairly buried in it. And just like any landfill, you can bet that there are a few treasures in that giant mound of refuse (future ski-hill?), but the smell from the rest of it is way too powerful – even if we thought the Hope Diamond were buried in it, would that be enough for us to throw on the haz-mat suits and go digging? Instead, we see from a distance pretty flowers growing on what looks like a majestic purple mountain shrouded in the soft fog of an early spring morning, and we think: All those international Idol competitions are actually producing, real, good, legitimate stuff. Or at least better than that awful Kelly Clarkson that we’re stuck with. She’s never gonna last. (Editorial Note: This is my 2003-4 self speaking. In gross ignorance. I didn’t watch any of Season 1, and Clarkson hadn’t put out Breakaway yet, which I contend is one of the best start-to-finish pop records of the last decade. Carry on.)
But maybe that majestic purple mountain is really just another gigantic, disgusting, depressing landfill, and maybe its shroud of early morning spring fog is really just a cloud toxic fumes rising out of it.
Maybe it’s just my deeply ingrained musical Europhilia, but I think it’s always easy to fall into thinking that Europeans are just naturally more artsy than we are; that they’re more willing to hear songs in languages other than their first, more open to genuine weirdness in the name of art; and thus, easier to romanticize their Idols – Kurt Nilsen, for instance – as more talented, more legitimate, more worthy. But in 2010, American Idol‘s metamorphosis from mere singing competition to artist farm team is complete, a metamorphosis that probably began around the time of Taylor Hicks‘s win in Season 5 (the show’s peak ratings season, by the way) and has culminated with the coronation of an Idol, Lee DeWyze, not so very dissimilar from that chunky (for a Scandinavian) blonde troubadour from Norge; and this against Crystal Bowersox, a very white girl from Ohio, with white-girl dreadlocks, a serious Janis Joplin jones, a long-standing residency at one of her local pubs, and really bad teeth, who not only writes her own songs, but writes them well enough that one of them was actually featured in an Idol video package last week. American Idol has become the very epitome of the Idols I’d always imagined all those Euro Idols to be. (And yet, this season, I couldn’t have been less interested in watching it.)
Meanwhile, the most recent winner of the German Idol equivalent Deutschland sucht den Superstar , 29-year-old Iranian-born singer Mehrzad Marashi has just released the follow-up to his debut, show finale single “Don’t Believe”, which is still charting in Germany’s Top 10 this week. The song, “Sweat (The A La La La La Long Song)” is a pop-reggae duet with openly gay former Superstar winner Mark Medlock, the German franchise’s most successful winner to date. If you are still harboring any romantic notions about the presumed artistic superiority of the artists developed by international (read: non-American) Idol franchises, let the video you’re about to see be your reality check.
BTW: Marashi’s the one whose ridiculous, Guido-er-than-thou facial hair doesn’t form the weird trident points on his chin. And did I mention Medlock’s gayness? Also: Andy Samberg should sue.
I don’t do much on Sundays. So says my better half. Actually, I do a lot of laundry on Sundays, which involves a lot of waiting. Which involves a little bit of reading, a little bit of napping, a little bit of bumming around on the internet, and a lot of just sitting around listening to music. Needless to say, Sunday afternoon is, like, the greatest thing ever as far as I’m concerned. So here I am sharing a little bit of the Paul Lorentz Sunday Afternoon experience with you, Dear Sonic Clash Readers, with a weekly (hopefully) mix of seven songs I just happen to be listening to. This is not me just shuffling up my iPod and puking up the results (although that’s always fun!), but, I hope, a semi-free-associative weekly musical adventure. I call it a buffet because Sunday brunch buffets rock and the best ones have a little bit of everything. And though I, of course, have certain favorite artists and genres and musical eras that I tend to gravitate towards a little more heavily, with this playlist, I hope to achieve NPR’s Bob Boilen’s stated (but mostly flagrantly flouted) goal of at least considering all songs. (Dear Bob Boilen, I hate you. But I’ll never unsubscribe from your podcast. Can I be a guest on it sometime? Love, Paul.)
Okay, so that out of the way… This week, I picked up the latest CD by Willie Nelson, who just turned 77 two weeks ago (Happy Birthday, Willie!). Despite his age, Willie remains one of the most prolific artists still alive, putting out two or three new studio albums each year, and collaborating on music with basically everyone. (All Collaborators Considered!) There’s a reason there’s no game called Six Degrees of Willie Nelson: you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone anywhere with more than two or three degrees of separation from him. Though Willie Nelson is still active as a songwriter, the last few years have found him performing a necessary musicological service – reviving and interpreting songs of the early-to-mid 20th Century for 21st Century listeners. He recorded an album of standards in a Dixieland style with Wynton Marsalis, and last year, teamed up with Asleep at the Wheel for a tribute to the classic western swing bands of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s.
His latest album, produced by T-Bone Burnett, is called, simply, Country Music, and features reverent, yet relevant, takes on fifteen songs, most of which predate the Eisenhower Administration. (Eisenhower was a President. That was before the Beatles.) Songs like Al Dexter’s massive 1943 hit “Pistol Packin’ Mama” (which, in Willie’s current interpretation, sounds like a “tribute” to Sarah Palin), and Merle Travis’s grim miner’s ballad “Dark as a Dungeon”, which, given recent events, really needs to be heard in 2010. Here’s Willie in a live performance from March, doing one of the “newest” songs on this collection. It’s also the one song on the album he wrote. Nelson’s most recent albums have been dealing pretty frankly with mortality, and I loved that he included one of his own earliest songs on this collection. It dates back to the end of the musical era he’s covering, and like the rest of the songs here, Nelson delivers the song with a knowing sense of how “endangered” these songs are at a time when our collective sense of history (and specifically music history) seems to be getting shallower.
One of my favorite tracks on Country Music is the album-closing “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”, a fire-and-brimstone blues given a chillingly spare, alone-on-my-death-bed arrangement. Most folks my age know the song better from Led Zeppelin’s Presence album, but the song is actually much older, dating back (at least) to a recording, circa 1927, by Blind Willie Johnson. The precise origins of the song are unknown, but then a song like this probably has no precise origin – it may very well be a generation or two older than Johnson’s recording.
Here’s another song I first experienced via a contemporary cover version. In 1987, the white-boy soul band Breakfast Club, who earned pop music history footnote status when one of the band’s early members (Madonna Ciccone) became a really big star, scored a really big hit with a song called “Right On Track”. Not for lack of trying, Breakfast Club was never really able to follow that song up and their self-titled debut album became their swan song. But one of the group’s last gasps was the song “Expressway To Your Heart”. I loved it – mainly for it’s big stairstepping bass groove. Later on, I worked in a pizza kitchen where we listened to the oldies station all day, and that’s where I heard the awesome Gamble & Huff-produced original by the Soul Survivors. Last night, I was out running an errand and the song came on the radio. The traffic sound effects, that insistent bassline, the urgency of the vocals – “too crowded! too crowded!” The whole thing makes the idea of being stuck in summer traffic sound really awesome.
Incidentally, the Soul Survivors’ “Expressway” was their first big hit, charting almost exactly 20 years (exactly 19 and a half) ahead of “Right On Track”, and after several failed attempts to follow the song up, the Soul Survivors split up and are today regarded as one of the great one hit wonders of the 60s. Brothers Chuck and Richie Ingui reconvened the band in the early 70s and still perform under the Soul Survivors name. To my knowledge though, “Right On Track” is not part of their setlist.
Like “Expressway to Your Heart”, Edwin Starr‘s 1969 single “25 Miles” is a great driving song – despite the “I’ve got to walk on” lyrics. It’s one of those songs where the backing music is so incredibly hot that it’s pretty much impossible for any vocal performance to really top it. Only Edwin Starr’s performance did. And as this clip from much later on demonstrates, Starr (who died in 2003 at the age of 61) never lost the vocal ferocity he brought to songs like this and his biggest hit “War” in the late 60s and early 70s.
Both Edwin Starr and the Soul Survivors were all about getting back to their baby as fast as their cars (or feet) could take them. Last week, the 20-year-old Haitian-American pop singer-songwriter-Kara-DioGuardi-protege Jason Derulo premiered the video for “Ridin’ Solo”, the third single from his self-titled debut, following his number one debut single “Whatcha Say” and “In My Head”, which hit the Top 10 earlier this year. The song was initially based on a sample of the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony”, although the sample couldn’t be cleared (probably because “Bittersweet Symphony” – whose video famously followed singer Richard Ashcroft as he “walked on” – was itself based on an uncleared sample and landed The Verve is all sorts of expensive legal hot water when it became their biggest hit). You can still hear a bit of that familiar chord progression in the finished project sans sample – Derulo and his songwriting-producing partner J.R. Rotem have demonstrated a knack for musical pick-pocketing – in Derulo’s celebration of freshly emancipated playboyhood.
Finally, we travel from the clubs to the junkyard with the British indie pop group Fanfarlo. Earlier this year, the band found themselves a graveyard full of former modes of transportation now resting in peace. These included an airplane, which inspired this adorable acoustic guitar-xylophone-and-bowed-saw rendition of “I’m a Pilot”, the gorgeous opening track of their 2009 debut album Reservoir. Enjoy!
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?