Album of the Week (full episodes) - Josh Rutner

Subscribe via iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-rutners-album-week-josh/id1138853153?mt=2],PlayerFM [https://player.fm/series/josh-rutners-album-of-the-week-josh-rutner],Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/rutneraotw/],Twitter [https://twitter.com/rutneraotw] [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1478830980694-I05S4IMMJ0KB41WXH7X8/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] [https://sleepgunner.bandcamp.com/album/plays-the-louvin-brothers-songbook-vol-1] There’s a wordless documentary film about august Dutch drummer and visual artist Han Bennink and one scene [https://youtu.be/6RRB6WR4R-k?t=14s] from it has stuck in my mind since I first saw it: we see a close-up of a needle dropped on a record, and as the well-worn grooves play Tommy Flanagan’s introduction to the Charlie Parker song “Relaxing at Camarillo,” the camera slowly pans—past a floorful of items including the record jacket (Flanagan’s 1957 debut as a leader, called Overseas), a pair of heavy cowbells, and what appears to be a rubber ear resting on a ping-pong paddle—to Bennink, playing along—truly swinging his ass off—with brushes upon a cardboard box. What’s so striking to my rubber ear is not the brilliance of the playing—though brilliant playing it is, both Flanagan’s pre-recorded and Bennink’s card-boarded—nor the humor of the box under the brushes played by a grown man sitting on the floor, but rather the resonance between the two. Neither, it should be noted, is faked—Bennink is well-studied in the ways of straight-ahead jazz and a practiced absurdist—and that’s important. His sincerity and clear respect and love for the style bolsters and boosts any sense of irony with which he may deploy such stylistic considerations in different contexts. Dutch jazz has for decades embodied this tendency toward conceptual amalgamating. The cover of Kevin Whitehead’s invaluable book on the subject, New Dutch Swing—which, appropriately, features an image of Bennink at his drum set, smoke clouds rising up from his hi-hat in which he’d started a newspaper fire—contains the equation: “Jazz + Classical Music + Absurdism = New Dutch Swing.” [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1478831316712-G1KDHL2BXXHWZTFHTS74/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] [https://www.amazon.com/New-Dutch-Swing-Kevin-Whitehead/dp/0823083489] This week we look at a 2014 release by the Amsterdam-based guitar duo known as Sleep Gunner, called Plays the Louvin Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1, in which they swap out some elements of the New Dutch Swing equation but retain its logic. As the title suggest, the material they’ve chosen to home in on is that of the Louvin Brothers—a prolific country and gospel, guitar/mandolin close-harmony duo of the ’50s and ’60s—and laid atop and woven throughout that base are strains and strands of noise rock, conceptualist humor, “out jazz,” and more. Like Bennink, the guitarists of Sleep Gunner—Jeroen Kimman and Mark Morse—have nothing but honest-to-goodness affection for the music that they take pride in being able to both pull off as such as well as deconstruct as wanted. (Or as needed: Kimman confesses that they were “trying to learn to play country and making up for our flaws by throwing in the noise-making weirdness we were doing anyway.” Morse echoes the sentiment when he says, “If there’s ever a comedic or ironic element, it usually comes from not being able to take our own guitar playing seriously—the comedy’s not directed at the songs, the genre, or the Louvins.”) To be sure, these guys are no golden-leafed Nudie suit-wearing country stars, but that doesn’t stop them from playing the crap out of this music. One of the things I love most about this project is that they don’t simply play the lead-sheet versions of the songs in a so-called modern jazz style, but rather have taken the time to go deep into the bends, twists, and turns of the Louvins—to capture a feeling, rather than obscure it with a thick coat of cool, or bleach it away with abstraction. Fittingly, the pair describes their Louvin Brothers project as a “playful and plaintive attempt to break their own modern conceptualist hearts.” That said, they have clearly worked hard to get the style right. About the song “Gonna Lay Down my Old Guitar”—the lyrics of which tell of a sick, bedridden man, alone and on the edge of death, wishing he could take his guitar with him when he goes—Kimman would say, “the arrangement had some fun ‘bending concept’ which made the skin come off my fingers. The finger-picking, which was new to us, made Mark have some serious shoulder issues.” It’s a great arrangement, theirs, featuring a final chorus that is slowed down so severely as to make one think that the first line of it is the song’s big finish, but the two lumber onward at that tempo, as if refusing to give up their old guitars, crawling all the way to the end. The album begins a with a few seconds of string scratching, whining feedback, and fuzzy distortion—like some-sort of fucked-up transistor radio trying to tune into a station—out of which blooms a slowly strolling version of “Put Me on the Trail to Carolina,” a song by the Delmore Brothers, an early influence on the Louvins. It’s a smart tune to open the album with, particularly handling it as Sleep Gunner does, giving each verse and chorus its own feel, through orchestration and guitar effects. It might even be abstractly referred to as an overture, dipping as it does into so many sonic themes that appear through the rest of the album. The song itself is gorgeous, with a harmony line that, like harmonies on much of the Louvin Brothers’ output, is boldly inventive. One of the Louvins’ more well-known songs, “You’re Running Wild,” is a favorite for Kimman and Morse, and was the first song they recorded under the auspices of Sleep Gunner. On this album, they kick it off with some tame, tail-chasing noodling before diving headlong into the deep boom-chick two-beat groove that underpins the off-kilter song. The two relish the harmonies and smartly just play the form once, for maximum punch. Their take ends with understated humor. Ira and Charlie Louvin [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1478831481233-8BRL5Y2274BOYXYH6A8P/Louvins.jpg?format=1000w] Ira and Charlie Louvin Ira and Charlie Louvin grew up in Alabama, working in the field, picking cotton for a taskmaster father who didn’t hesitate to whip the boys—Ira, the elder troublemaker, in particular—with a hickory stick or, as Charlie remembered, if their father wasn’t calm at the time, “with whatever was at hand. A chunk of firewood, a piece of furniture, whatever.” They learned songs from their Mother, and she didn’t hold back. One of their favorites, taught to them before they were old enough to go out in the fields, was the exceptionally tragic “Mary of the Wild Moor,” which tells of a young, unmarried girl returning home with child to seek shelter from the biting winds on the moor. Her father turns her away, only to find her the next morning dead on his doorstep, grandchild still alive, “closely grasping his dead mother’s arm.” The man realizes what he has done and tears out his grey hair in grief. The child dies soon after, the door is overgrown with willows, and the property becomes a local legend: “there Mary died, once the gay village bride / From the wind that below across the wild moor.” The Louvins’ mother also taught them the murder ballad called “Knoxville Girl,” a morbid song about a man who beats his girlfriend to death for her roving eye. They would record both songs on their 1956 debut full-length for Capital Records, the appropriately titled Tragic Songs of Life. Two other songs on that album, “Alabama” and “Kentucky”—substantially less tragic, being rather sweet odes to states the singers long to return to—appear on Sleep Gunner’s collection. Of course, given that this is an instrumental record, there is no extra resonance or tension that can occur when one hears the lyrics. This is not a new thing: jazz musicians have forever been playing instrumental versions of songs. But there is something to be said for knowing what the song “says,” particularly when it is at odds with the music. I think, for example, of what a bonus it is to know that the wildly leaping melody that begins the bridge of Duke Ellington’s song “Prelude to a Kiss” is sung with the lyrics, “Though it’s just a simple melody / With nothing fancy, nothing much.” Or, more apt here, how a song like “But Not For Me” by George Gershwin, set in a major key with no sign of pressure, is set with lyrics by his brother—another older brother named Ira—that detail a depressing litany of heartache. All this to say that while listening to Sleep Gunner’s versions of Louvin Brother songs will hit you hard and satisfy you, getting into the original recordings to hear the lyrics will only add to the experience. Actually, I should mention here, there is one instance where we get to hear the lyrics and that’s in the song “New Partner Waltz,” when Sleep Gunner strapped into vocoders to tell the quaint tale of emotional betrayal at a dance. One of my favorites on the record, and a good place to end, is the song, “Hoping that You’re Hoping,” the lyrics of which contain the R. D. Laingianly knotted phrase, “Every breath I take I’m hoping that you’re hoping that I’m hoping you’ll return to me.” It’s on this track that Morse and Kimman let loose most fully, lengthily devolving from a bouncy and bendy overdriven romp into what as well be a haywire truck engine revving in front of your ears. The extended breakdown here is to me reminiscent of the musical “viruses” employed by the ICP Orchestra (a near fifty-year-old institution of “New Dutch Swing” co-founded by pianist and composer Misha Mengelberg and the aforementioned Han Bennink), which, as Kevin Whitehead puts it, are “booby-traps designed to mess up any piece’s structure from within.” With Sleep Gunner, though, it may be much simpler than that. In a post from 2012, introducing what they refer to as “the latest Louvin craze,” they explain that “Our goal here is to go really uptempo for a change, maintain all the romance, and try to sound like an 8-bit old computer game, since we’re modernist conceptualists, and we found ourselves with newly bought fuzzboxes so there.” Head over to Sleep Gunner’s Bandcamp page [https://sleepgunner.bandcamp.com/album/plays-the-louvin-brothers-songbook-vol-1] to get yourself a copy of Plays the Loving Brothers Songbook, Vol. 1, and while you’re there, check out their two live recordings, which show off some more stretching than you hear on Vol. 1 and also introduce a few additional Louvin tunes to their book, which, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to hear on Vol. 2 some day soon. I’m Josh Rutner and that’s your album of the week.

Subscribe via iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-rutners-album-week-josh/id1138853153?mt=2], PlayerFM [https://player.fm/series/josh-rutners-album-of-the-week-josh-rutner], Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/rutneraotw/], Twitter [https://twitter.com/rutneraotw] [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1478197627473-VFXM2CTC57VK4PNMJ8GI/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] Within his autobiography, called Take Me to the River, published in 2000, Al Green reminisced about one cold morning in a rural Michigan hotel room while on tour, approaching the window, which looked out “across the empty highway to the frozen fields on the other side”: “As I watched while the sun slowly seeped into the dark sky, like milk being poured into a bowl, I felt myself standing in the middle of some great empty place, as if the universe and everything in it had been cleared away in a circle from all around me. It was a lonely, solitary sensation, but the strange thing was, I didn’t feel the ache of a man left to himself. It was more a peaceful feeling, a kind of soothing sensation, as if I was far away from every human sorrow and strife.” Call Me, Green’s sixth album, released in the spring of 1973, was “supposed to be about nothing more than flirtation and romance and the hot passions that spring up between a man and a woman.” In truth, Call Me is much less about hot and heavy romance per se and more about the emptiness, the solitude, the loneliness of a pining lover. Unlike “Let’s Stay Together,” his big hit from the year before, which is about an extant couple whom the narrator is lovingly suggesting stay together forever, the songs on this album circle around unrequited love, undone love, unbegun love. We hear a man who is crying out for lovers, sometimes nostalgically engaging with exes in stiff and stilted colloquialisms (as in “Have You Been Making Out O.K.,” and the cover of Willie Nelson’s song “Funny How Time Slips Away”) and sometimes pushing, pleading, praying (as in the title track and “You Ought to Be with Me”). The following line from “Here I Am (Come and Take Me),” is indicative of the feelings expressed in this album: “It always ends up this way / Me begging you every day / A love that I cannot have / You broke my heart into half.” The love he can’t have in “Here I Am” is powerful, and even explosive—“All this love inside of me / I believe there’s going to be an explosion,” he sings—and therein, in that potential energy, lies the dramatic strength of these songs. In Take Me to the River, Green wrote about what it took for him to shift—pressed by producer Willie Mitchell, with whom he had worked since their meeting in 1969—from his harder-edged, more “mannish,” Otis Redding-type vocal style into his signature floating falsetto, “like a little boy crying for his mama,” as Green put it, “or a grown man weak for the love of a woman. To sing like that,” he explains, “you’ve got to let something inside of you loose, give up your pride and power, and let that surrendering feeling well up inside until it overwhelms you and uses your voice to cry out with a need that can’t be filled.” In a late-1970s interview with Lynn Norment of Ebony magazine, Green acknowledged that satisfaction is not his aim and even something he avoids: “I’m afraid to become satisfied, like being afraid to fall in love; it frightens me to death. When you are satisfied, you let yourself relax, and you don’t do your best.” With this in mind, we might view the lack of fulfillment within the songs on Call Me as at least unconsciously self-inflicted—a sort of productive self-sabotage. The lyrics in “Here I Am” go on to say, “Keeping you and loving you means / Laying all my troubles down,” and when rubbed up against his statements above, we might conjecture that Green—the persona if not the person—is strategically unwilling to accept any such state of happiness, despite his entreaties for the addressee to “come and take me.” In an earlier, 1976 article in Ebony, also penned by Ms. Norment, Green said of his millionaire lifestyle—his “money, jewelry, cars, houses”—that “none of that stuff means anything unless you are happy. I am not really happy.” After pausing, and staring out across the lake that his eight-bedroom Memphis ranch house overlooked, he continued, “What is happiness? To understand the reasons of life itself… things beyond my control. I have been in an arena with 40,000 people, but I was the loneliest man in there.” Which brings us to another significant theme of Call Me: that of loneliness. The fourth track, one of my favorites on the album, is Green’s cover of Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” The song was originally released by Williams 1949 as the flip-side to the danceable but lyrically lacking “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.” “I’m So Lonesome” was never the hit that Williams knew it could be when he was alive, but it did eventually get its due. The start of the fourth verse alone—“The silence of a falling star / Lights up a purple sky”—is bursting with such bold poeticism as to make the tune a classic in my book. Lyrically, it’s not a narrative so much as a set of discrete metaphorical images of nature—falling stars, dying leaves, weeping robins, and so on—which is very much in line with Green’s outlook on the outdoors. He cites his earliest influences as “the rain on the window, the wind in the corn crop, or the water lapping on the banks of the river. That,” he says, “is music to my ears… I can still remember childhood days when I’d wake up early to the birds singing in the trees and throw open the window just to catch their whistles and chirps.” He even tweaks Williams’ lyrics in the first verse, so strong is his love for such sounds, turning the lonesome whippoorwill who “sounds too blue to fly” into a lonesome whippoorwill who “sounds too good to fly.” Loneliness is a complex thing. Production-wise, this album is quintessential Willie Mitchell, with Green’s lighter-than-air velvet funk afloat high above the rhythm section’s nastily tight foundation. The horn arrangements are strong and the Memphis Strings are used effectively, and for the most part are not laid on too thickly or haphazardly. Green had, by this time—along with Stevie Wonder and others—joined Marvin Gaye’s multi-layered lead vocal trend, which Gaye had pioneered (at first quite by accident) on his 1971 album, What’s Going On. The hard-left panning and boosted levels of Green’s secondary lead voice can, admittedly, sneak up on you, particularly listening in headphones. He seems on this record to still be working out the kinks of the technique for himself, often providing I-just-sang-what-you-sang redundancies rather than complementary support. That said, there are moments where that second voice shines, either musically, as in the harmonies on the choruses of the ultra-gentle, salivatiously close-mic’d “Have You Been Making Out O.K.,” or textually, as in the commentary on the lyric in “Funny How Time Slips Away,” in which “Never know when I’ll be back in town” is flat-footedly answered with an at-first seemingly innocuous, “maybe tomorrow.” Of course, the lyrics in the latter continue with, “Remember what I told you / That in time you’re gonna pay,” so, “maybe tomorrow” suddenly doesn’t feel as downright neighborly as it did a few seconds back. In “Funny How Time Slips Away,” as the title suggests, time speeds by, such that so long ago seems like only yesterday; and, by contrast, in the other country cover, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” nights are so long, and “time goes crawling by.” Splitting the difference is the album’s centerpiece, “Your Love is Like the Morning Sun,” wherein the warm sun shining down is ultimately in the present of the narrator’s mind. As if bolstering this idea, the drums provide a reassuringly constant tick-tock cross-stick groove as Green—as ever the ex-lover—compares his love to a summer’s day. Her lease, too, it seems, had all too short a date: love faded to gray. It’s enough to imagine Green alone, again, in a hotel room, facing the morning sun seeping into the dark sky, whispering to himself, “I'm tired of being alone / Still in love with you / Let's stay together, together.” I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Subscribe via iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-rutners-album-week-josh/id1138853153?mt=2],PlayerFM [https://player.fm/series/josh-rutners-album-of-the-week-josh-rutner],Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/rutneraotw/],Twitter [https://twitter.com/rutneraotw] [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1477619897237-N0CVPBFKO85KG6P38Z05/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] The first judge to be recalled and replaced in the state of Wisconsin was Archie Simonson of Dane County. It was 1977, but the circumstances surrounding his recall remain all too familiar today: faced with three teenaged boys who had pleaded no-contest to the gang rape of a girl in a high school stairwell, he added to the injustice of his paltry sentences the stunning insult of blaming the victim for dressing “inappropriately.” “Are we supposed to take an impressionable person 15 or 16 years of age,” he said of the teenaged rapists, “and punish that person severely because they react to it normally?” He went off on a tear and rattled off a handful more gems, complaining that he can’t go around exposing his genitals “like [women] can the mammary glands,” pointing out the existence of women in court rooms who have the gall to not wear a bra, and that women in court and in schools wear “dresses up over the cheeks of their butts.” Rolling Stone later quoted him as saying “Whether we like it or not, women are sex objects.” Needless to say, the story made national news, and a petition to hold a recall election was successful, with over 36,000 signatures. One person in particular who took note was Malvina Reynolds, who, by 1977, nearing her 80s, was a well-established singer-songwriter. She took it upon herself to help the cause in the way she knew best: she wrote a song, called in favors to get it produced quickly as a single, and distributed them like handbills. The sleeve of the 45 had a two-paragraph detailing of the situation (with an all-caps headline, “THE JUDGE WHO SANCTIONED RAPE”) along with the lyrics of her freshly penned song, “The Judge Said.” If you’ll indulge me, these two verses of the song will give you a pretty good idea of the cut of her jib: The judge said, Screw ’em! Boys, you’re only human, They brought it on themselves By being born a woman. Like a mountain’s there to climb And food’s there to be eaten, Woman’s there to rape To be shoved around and beaten Now if you beat a horse or dog Or violate a bank, Simonson will haul you in And throw you in the clink. But violate a woman, Your equal and your peer, The judge will slap you on the wrist And lay the blame on her. Simonson was recalled in that special election, and, in his stead, the people of Dane County voted in Moria Mackert Krueger, Madison’s first female judge. TheJudgeSaid45 [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1477619487339-RM6YPGL35671Z2ADG52L/TheJudgeSaid45?format=1000w] Reynolds was a late-comer to the world of music. Born in 1900, she was approaching fifty when she first met Pete Seeger—nearly twenty years her junior—at a California hootenanny and hit him up for advice about how she might begin to do what he was doing. In Seeger’s words, “I remember thinking, ‘Gee, she’s kinda old to get started.’ I had a lot to learn. Pretty soon she was turning out song after song after song!” Her voice was distinctively untrained. Contemporary reviews of her albums pointed out this fact with adjectives like “primitive,” “childlike,” “unsophisticated,” and just plain “not beautiful.” She herself acknowledged the lack of polish in her voice, but of course that was no matter. She saw her music as providing a function beyond the aesthetic: she wanted to effect real change. About the song “The Judge Said,” mentioned above, Reynolds would say, “We got out this great statement, this great song. And I say it’s great because it worked.” Reynolds, above all, was interested in singing the truth. In her song, “What’s Going On Down There,” which appears on her second release, 1967’s fittingly titled Malvina Reynolds…Sings the Truth—this week’s Album of the Week—she speaks to the American political and legal system that looks to hold tightly to its power with white-knuckled fists against any sense of justice. The fix is in, she claims, with lyrics like: “They throw you in a jail / all covered with blood. / The higher-up man / won’t do you any good. / He also wears the hood.” Her airy, low-larynx’d notes—one of my favorite aspects of her voice—which appear here and there throughout this record, in this song act as a nice bit of text painting when she sings “down there.” The final verse issues marching orders to the listener: “We sing you this song / so you know what’s true / and you’ve gotta take it with you everywhere you go / because it’s up to you.” The truth ain’t always easy to hear and Reynolds wasn’t known for being a softie. She is, after all, a singer of songs of discontent. In the thirteen songs on Sings the Truth, there are blatant or subtle references to slavery, nuclear testing, income inequality, racism, the KKK, middle-class conformism, and oh so much more. That said, sometimes even her toughest tunes are tempered with witty, gentle imagery and some are even downright funny. The lead-off track, for example, “The New Restaurant,” is an acerbic mocking of the misplaced standards of modern era, by way of a comparison to a brand new restaurant, where all the superficial aspects—from gleaming fixtures and delightful crockery to masterfully laid-out menus and linen napkins and mats—are impeccable, but the food is terrible. The final verse contains the stinger: that in another generation—that’s us—the clientele would altogether forget the taste of food; that so long as waitresses are charming and the décor is “symphonic,” the people will happily eat plastic. There’s a video of Reynolds performing the song on Seeger’s short-lived, mid-’60s television series called Rainbow Quest, and at its conclusion we see a shot of her in profile, breaking character and shooting Seeger a smile-eyed, toothy grin, after which Seeger lays down his guitar and lets out an “Oh, that’s too sad!” Reynolds was born Malvina Midler in San Francisco to immigrant parents who had joined the socialist party shortly after Reynolds’ birth. In later interviews, she referred to herself in her school years as “quiet, shy me.” That aspect of her personality is brilliantly laid bare in the hilarious song, “Quiet.” “I don’t know much about much,” she sings, “And what I don’t know I don’t say / And when I have nothing to say / I’m quiet.” But she was also a vocal activist at heart, leading protests and petitions even in high school. Note that the chorus of “Quiet” begins with the line, “When there’s occasion to holler, I’ll buy it / I can make noise with the best.” Due to her parents’ opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I, her high school refused her her diploma. Nonetheless, she eventually found a way to enroll in UC Berkeley, and to receive, as she put it,  “all the degrees possible,” culminating in a PhD in English in 1939.  She graduated with honors straight into the tail end of the depression, and that, combined with the fact that she was slightly older than her classmates, a woman, and a Jew, contributed to her difficulty in landing a teaching job. She thus found herself tossed back in the thick of the working class movement, a movement whose message at the time she viewed as not being particularly well expressed for its intended audience to hear. Her work as a singer-songwriter would be her effort to smooth that seam between the radical movement and the People with a capital p. If anyone is familiar with Reynolds’ work these days, it’s likely by way of her 1962 song “Little Boxes,” which was used as the theme song for the popular Showtime show Weeds. The song was written quickly, in a moving car while driving by the hills of Daly City, California on the way to a gig. If the OED is to be believed, the song stands as the earliest usage of the term “ticky-tacky,” a term meaning both the description of cheaply constructed buildings and the cheap or inferior construction material itself. It’s a great song, with a punch in its message that architectural mundanity and social mundanity go hand in hand: it’s not just the little houses that are made of ticky-tacky, but also the people who went to universities and came out all the same. They too are ticky-tacky. Seeger would cover the tune in 1963 and it resonated, even reaching number 70 on the Billboard Hot 100. Reynolds wouldn’t release her own version until Sings the Truth, four years later. The album’s powerful black and white cover photograph was taken by the prolific Jim Marshall at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. The lines upon her face, and her at once serious and sympathetic expression, bespeaks a hard-fighting life, already well-lived. The coat she wore that day, which was bright white, as we can see in other photos, was smartly subdued in the album cover version, helping her contrasting, cotton-candy wisps of white hair to stand out. Reynolds throughout her career shook cages with her music, and used it like a plow to turn soil for seeds to grow, or like a saw to cut to the core. Always at the root of her sword-crossing with those she disagreed, though, with was a central tenet of love and care for a flawed world. She loved it like a fool, this world. But if there’s one takeaway from Reynolds’ life and work, let it be that each person has great power to effect change. In the fifth track, “God Bless the Grass,” she paints truth as blades of grass: tender, easily bent, and yet able to burst forth through the cement that aims to keep it down. After a while the grass lifts up its head, “for the grass is living and the stone is dead.” One of my favorite examples of this idea comes in Reynolds’ song “The Little Mouse,” which was written in 1976, just two years before her death, and released posthumously on the album Mama Lion. That summer, she’d noticed a report in the San Francisco Chronicle that told of a mouse, loose in the Central Clearing House of Buenos Aires, that had chewed up a computer cable, thus disabling check-clearing operations for both banks and the stock exchange within the city. Reynolds, in her late 70s, sang the following: “Hooray for the little mouse / that fucked up the clearinghouse / and set the stock exchange in a spin / and made the bankers cry! / So much for the electronic brains that run the world of banks and airplanes. / And if one little mouse can set them all awry, / why not you and I?” I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Subscribe via iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-rutners-album-week-josh/id1138853153?mt=2],PlayerFM [https://player.fm/series/josh-rutners-album-of-the-week-josh-rutner],Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/rutneraotw/],Twitter [https://twitter.com/rutneraotw] [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1477012881252-GAST1BXE16F217KE215U/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] It was early spring of 2012 and two friends and I were winding through Williamsburg toward the East River, working our way toward the apartment of a stranger. The building was one of those swanky, newly constructed shiny high-rises that had been and continue to pop up and penetrate the Brooklyn skyline, stalagmite-like. We entered, nodded to the doorman like we belonged there, got into the elevator, pushed the button labeled “PH,” and up and up we went. The sun was setting over Manhattan as we entered the apartment, and in the far corner, beyond the forty or so mingling attendees, tucked into the semicircular crush of couches and chairs—there, setting up a floor lamp that he had seemingly brought with him, was David Bazan. Bazan is a curious character in the world of indie rock, mainly given his past as a so-called Christian rock musician, and his present as an apostate. While his faith was true and steady and the music and lyrics were certainly not put-on, “Christian rock” was a badge that, if he wore at all, he wore partially obscured. He formed Pedro the Lion—less a band than a process, he says—in 1995 while attending a Pentecostal liberal arts college just outside of his hometown of Seattle. It’s not hard to find write-ups of Pedro the Lion’s music that are completely oblivious to the fact that the band had any ties to the Christian rock scene at all, so subtle the songs were. Heavy-handedness was never the way. At school, where this son of a Pentecostal music pastor spent a couple years studying religion and philosophy before dropping out to focus on touring, he began to shed, as he puts it, “the first, most absurd layers of his cultural belief system—namely the Pentecostal layers.” What started turning him was a growing awareness that the Christianity he had practiced was in fact blocking the kind of ethical behavior he wanted to engage in. Over the years, to the dismay of many family, friends, and fans, that shedding would become more and more complete. For a while, it seemed that the space his jettisoned religious baggage left was being filled with alcohol. By mid-2004, Bazan’s drinking was becoming a serious problem. He ditched the Pedro the Lion moniker the following year—ending a ten-year run—and took it upon himself to cut out on his own, to “go solo,” culminating in the 2006 self-release of his debut EP under his own name—and this week’s Album of the Week—Fewer Moving Parts. Eyeing the track list, the first things you notice about the album is that it is comprised of five songs performed in electric, full-band arrangement, and then those same five songs are performed again, in order, with just acoustic guitar and voice. In the hands of a lesser artist, this move—particularly on an album of essentially brand new songs—might fall totally flat, but Bazan has a way about his acoustic arrangements that both breathe new life into the tunes—a new perspective, not least for most via a new key—and somehow radiate with the glowing remainder of the full-band sound with minimal tools: the second iteration is haunted by the specter of the first. In this sense it’s anything but redundant. Looking at the first song, “Selling Advertising,” as an example, the initial, full-band instance is bold and nearly fanfare-ish with its wild drum fills and pew-pewing synths, underpinning the lyrics which lay sardonically into music reviewers, saying, “You're so creative with your reviews / of what other people do / How satisfying that must be for you,” comparing the artist/critic relationship to an ancient holy war. In the B-section, the drums chill out and the guitars accompany the voice with a counter-line that is crisp and logical—something you might hear in a Beatles song. The full band version ends with another, more overt Beatles shout-out: as Bazan sings, “And if you get tired of making taste for free / you can always start a band with me / or anybody,” there is final swelling crescendo with backing-vocal “ah”s channeling the lovable Liverpudlians. Compare this to the much more relaxed acoustic version that almost slips into existential sadness while listing the ways a click-hungry online music reviewer makes their living: “selling advertising / tracking trends / corralling demographics / and maximizing traffic,” ending in a whisper. Throughout the acoustic version—and indeed, through almost all the acoustic tracks—Bazan’s voice and guitar are doubled, making for a really full sound, but also affording him the opportunity to pare down even more, as in the ending of “Selling Advertising,” where on the final line of the song (“or anybody”), one of the voices drops, leaving just one, sounding more vulnerable than it ever might have if it were a single voice the whole time. The third (and eighth) track, “Fewer Broken Pieces,” is an semi-ironic take on Bazan’s going solo. “I had to let some go,” he sings, “don’t think I don’t regret it / ’cause I do and I don’t / think I’m better off alone.” A compellingly mixed message occurs in that line due to the enjambed phrase “’cause I do and I don’t,” which could conceivably tie to either the phrase before or after it—either “don’t think I don’t regret it, ’cause I do and I don’t” or “’cause I do and I don’t think I’m better off alone.” The cover art, by graphic artist Zak Sally, shows Bazan, Onceler-like, with an ax shouldered, staring straight-faced, straight ahead, leaving behind him a field of mere stumps. Yes, fewer moving parts mean fewer broken pieces, but it gets complicated when you have to break off pieces to get there. The song ends, “Man we could have had a big sound / but I love to let my good friends down.” Something I love about Bazan songs, particularly ones on this EP, is how little they rely on traditional verses, choruses, bridges, and so on. They move as the stories move, creating their own unique forms. In addition, long stretches of lyrics, often meted out in short bursts, cover tons of ground. These lengthy sentences force you to listen to the whole of it to get the payoff. In “Cold Beer and Cigarettes,” for example, the song builds to a peak in which the narrator, a wayward husband and father on a three-day bender, bellows at the senseless cruelness of God after witnessing a multi-car fire. To get to that moment, we hear, above a steadily building arrangement, “A car’s on fire in the parking lot / and nobody wants it to rain / but God isn’t listening / so all of the windshields glisten / The water and oil mix / causing the fire to spread / to five or six / innocent automobiles / waiting in their nearby spots / What a cruel God we’ve got!” In Bazan’s post-Christian mode, there seems to remain in him a Job-like fist-shaking interaction with a God that likely isn’t there. But more than that, there is a pragmatism that guides his thinking. In a lovely interview with the journal Image, Bazan said the following, which really struck me, and is as good a place as any to end: “I used to believe that justice was coming in the future, at the hand of a creator who was an advocate for the poor and downtrodden. I no longer believe that. I think that justice is the responsibility of us all, now. That other view is, on the one hand, understandable as a comfort to the people who will never get justice in this life, but for those of us who have the opportunity to create justice, it’s a cop-out… It’s not just my own efforts, though it relies heavily on them; it’s how evolution continues to push forward through the offspring of people who give a shit and are taking justice seriously.” Take a listen to Fewer Moving Parts and go hear Bazan perform when you can. He’s still out there, doing the work. I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Subscribe via iTunes [https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/josh-rutners-album-week-josh/id1138853153?mt=2],PlayerFM [https://player.fm/series/josh-rutners-album-of-the-week-josh-rutner],Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/rutneraotw/],Twitter [https://twitter.com/rutneraotw] [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54e35397e4b043f1c9a4b2d1/1476319425216-XCZA0B5WXJB68P831WDG/image-asset.jpeg?format=1000w] [https://nonameraps.bandcamp.com/releases] By late September of this year, the number of homicides in the city of Chicago was already climbing beyond 500, which, as the New York Times reported, is “more than in Los Angeles and New York combined.” August alone saw the killing of 90 people there, making it the deadliest month the city has seen in about twenty years. Distrust of the police has only escalated as news of unarmed black life after unarmed black life being shot dead streams in. Growing up, Chicagoan poet-turned-rapper Noname (née Fatimah Warner) turned to poetry to cope with the world around her. In 2010, as a junior in high school, she entered the Louder Than a Bomb teen poetry slam. Founded by Kevin Coval, a powerful poet himself who has appeared several times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, the competition is intended as an outlet for diverse teenage poets in the Chicago area to express themselves, break stereotypes, speak truth, and, importantly, to witness those voices they might not otherwise get to hear up close and unfiltered. To come together, to cope, to thrive. Noname’s poem, “When Dreams Come True,” is a tale of a choked-off, misplaced American Dream—about a fallen woman who is prostituting herself to support her crack addiction. The high is the dream, or the dream substitute, or the path to the substitute dream. A piece of the poem: “I remember when her beauty was more captivating than the sunrise when it sets in the moonlight. She was more beautiful than the sunrise when it sets in the moonlight, but the moon’s light don’t shine on her anymore. For it doesn’t want to reveal the blisters and burns on her lips where the crack pipe sits.” Noname placed third. Over the ensuing years, she would shift from poetry to rap—going on to provide a smattering of laudable guest verses here and there, most notably for fellow Chicago native Chance the Rapper on his 2013 mixtape, Acid Rap—and further develop her cool flow, her lyricism, her biting insight, the melody of her voice. And on her long-awaited and recently released debut mixtape, Telefone—this week’s Album of the Week—we hear her in full force. For an album that was so long in the making—three years between announcement and release—Telefone is surprisingly open and airy. The production is smooth as hell but somehow it retains a homemade quality—handclaps and finger-snaps right up in your ear. Striking, off the bat, is that these tracks don’t wait for choruses to give you hooks—though those choruses hook you plenty—there are sharp and barbed melodies throughout, even within Noname’s verses. Harmonically speaking, the ten songs of Telefone lean for the most part on sturdy and solid staples of the jazz and gospel language, orchestrated thoughtfully and slickly. This reliance on “feel-good” harmonic movement that makes sense (this follows that), peppered occasionally to great effect with an unexpected twist, puts listeners at ease, heads deeply nodding and wide opening ears to what Noname has to say. She needn’t shout. In fact, a marker of Noname’s style is her laid-backness. Don’t, however, mistake it for weakness or weariness: think Billie Holiday. She says of the album that she hoped to capture the feeling of being on the phone with someone for the first time—“all its little intricate idiosyncrasies.” That intimacy and lightness stands out. But the telephone isn’t just the facilitator of innocent awkwardness and laughter, as Noname details in the seventh track, “Casket Pretty”—its ring can be a portent of death. The sampled giggles and coos of a baby belie the tale of widespread death of young men and women in the streets her “happy city,” Chicago. “I’m afraid of the dark / Blue and the white / Badges and pistols rejoice in the night,” she says, indicting the police for an all-too-common crime. “I hope to God that my tele’ don’t ring.” We’re given a moment to let the idea sink in when she says, “Too many babies in suits.” It echoes. In the cover artwork, a stunning painting by Nikko Washington, we see death in the form of a small skull looming above a young girl—unseen by her but ever felt—and blooming flowers crowding her right side. She stares forward with wide eyes unblinking but very much alive. I got lost in those eyes today and in so doing, I eventually realized that she is not looking straight ahead, back into the viewer’s eyes, but just above, presumably checking out the skulls atop the heads of others. And yet somehow, despite the darkness, a hope shines through Telefone. A month before the tape dropped, Noname tweeted, “Everything is Everything (my new religion).” The phrase itself—everything is everything—makes an appearance on three difference tracks. The reference, I have to imagine, is not to Donny Hathaway’s debut album of the same name from 1970, but rather to the song of the same name on Lauryn Hill’s debut album from 1989. Hill’s song is an embodiment of hope in darkness, or at very least the idea that in time, eventually, change comes—winter becomes spring. In the summer of 2007 on the blog for the Poetry Foundation, called Harriet, another poet from Chicago, Patricia Smith, wrote a post about what Robert Frost might be able to teach “performance poets.” What she was railing against in “about 75% of the poets I’ve heard lately, well-intentioned bellowers who are masters of pretty pictures strung together or rants laced with vitriol,” is, well, enthusiasm. A certain kind of enthusiasm, which Frost, quoted from his 1930 talk, “Education by Poetry,” describes as “sunset raving. You look westward toward the sunset, or if you get up early enough, eastward toward the sunrise, and you rave. It is ohs and ahs with you and no more.” Noname is in the clear here. Smith goes on, in solidarity with Frost, “The idea is paramount; the idea should be the result of the poet’s eye and his intellect. The idea will guide you toward softer ways to say hard things; it will teach you the benefits of quiet, of knowing when a scream is warranted. Enthusiasm, when filtered through this solid beginning, is no longer of the ‘sunset raving’ variety. It’s not ohs and ahs at the mere appearance of the sizzling gold, the persistent heat. It’s whispering quiet thanks that the sun has chosen to rise at all, again.” In Noname’s debut, we get just such lush talk about the hardest of things. Everything is everything. America Are you listening? Be the receiver and let the drop of Telefone lift you up. I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.