For a Song Christmas Eve Special: Chelsea Boys

Spottiswoode and His Enemies: Chelsea Boys

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Christmas is often referred to as the season of love. Jonathan Spottiswoode takes that to heart in Chelsea Boys. In a wonderful role reversal, he places a straight couple in the minority amidst a group of gay men. It’s not a problem at all. “They won’t care that you’re a girl”, he sings. In this season at least, love is love, and they all join in the celebration with singing and dancing.

As a bonus, this one has a beautiful video. It’s an animated short, with art by the Brazilian illustrator Maria Eugenia. Eugenia has more of her work available for viewing on her blog here. She has done wonderful work for books both for grownups and children. Just make sure you have plenty of time when you follow the link, because you will want to stay a while.

Spottiswoode & His Enemies - Wild Goosechase Expedition

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When I wrote about Spottiswoode in my post on Rosler‘s Recording Booth, I said I wanted to know more about his work. It’s great in this business when you get your wish, but it’s even better when your first impression is correct. Wild Goosechase Expedition is a generous helping of Spottiswoode & His Enemies, with seventeen songs and just over an hour of music. The rich musical imagination that was on display in his Rosler performance is here in abundance. This is also my first encounter with Spottiswoode as a writer. He serves up a wonderfully varied but highly coherent program of songs here. His band must be conversant in a variety of musical styles and moods, and they show themselves here to be very fine musicians. I particularly want to single out the work of drummer Konrad Meissner. Spottiswoode’s regular drummer Tim Vaill was not available for the recording sessions, so Meissner was called on to sub for him. Meissner had to be versatile, and pick up on the variety of moods that Spottiswoode wanted in these songs, and he did a great job. Vaill is now back with the band, but they would do well to stay in touch with Meissner in case they ever need him again.

The line-up of Spottiswoode & His Enemies starts off normally enough, with drums, bass, and Spottiswoode on guitar. Then things start to get interesting. A second guitarist also plays mandolin and glockenspiel. The keyboard player plays piano, organ, accordion, and maybe something else that I missed. And there are two horn players, who can contribute R&B riffs or Miles Davis-like harmonies on trumpet and sax. The horn players also contribute background vocals. The album opens with Beautiful Monday. This is a sunny pop-rock tune with a British invasion feel, and some horn work of the sort Burt Bacharach used to favor. This establishes a tone of comfort and normalcy that is soon to be disrupted. Purple River, Yellow Sun opens with chanted vocals over chiming piano notes, and the song has bursts of tumult, with anthemic rock vying for supremacy with the poppier sound of the opener. The sense of comfort fades, and the music becomes unsettled. Odd harmonies begin to move in. Just a Word I Use has verses with a French cabaret feel, and bursts of almost hard rock on the choruses. Elsewhere, there are Bo Diddley beats, chiming guitars, jazzy excursions, even some things that border on world music from an unknown tribe. Spottiswoode ties all of this together with his vocals. He sings in a slightly scratchy baritone, and he is one of the most passionate singers I know of. There are plenty of opportunities for him to cross a line, and make the songs bombastic, but that never happens. That said, this album overall has a theatrical quality, and it’s a show I would gladly see.

The title Wild Goosechase Expedition suggests aimlessness, but this album tells a story. I mentioned the sense of normalcy that opens the album. Beautiful Monday is a celebration of normalcy, with only the vaguest hint that this will soon be disrupted. It opens the first section of the album, entitled Setting Out. The setting out actually occurs in Purple River, Yellow Sun, and the previous normalcy becomes either an illusion or a fading memory. The next section is called The Kingdom of the Dead. Here, Spottiswoode’s narrators try with out success to hold on to memories of love. I’d Even Follow You to Philadelphia shows that Spottiswoode can tell his tale with droll humor. The longest section is titled Massacre in the Desert. Here, the narrators have reached the point of despair. Loved ones try to send lifelines, but their messages fall on deaf ears. The album’s title track comes in this section, and it uses black humor to express a sense that whatever motivated this journey was wasted. The final section, Starvation and Surrender, has the narrators returning home, but something has been irretrievably lost, at least as of the end of the album. You Won’t Forget Your Dream closes the album with the suggestion that recovery may be possible, but it can also suggest that the reason for the departure in the first place is regaining its strength as the narrator rests. So this may be a somewhat happy ending, or just the resumption of a cycle. There is ambiguity here, and that is intentional. Taken as a whole, the album may be about a breakup and reconciliation. Or it may be about a spiritual journey, in which a character learns that fulfillment lay in what he already had. Or, the album may be about a band going on and returning from a tour, an idea that is most clearly suggested by the song Wake Me Up When It’s Over. Personally, I think the album is about all of these, and probably a few other things I haven’t mentioned. These songs reach out to the listener, and invite us to imagine. It’s an invitation I was glad to accept.

Spottiswoode & His Enemies: Purple River, Yellow Sun

Spottiswoode & His Enemies: Wild Goosechase Expedition

Special Projects

When I was younger, artists used to make albums to have something to sell, and to make money. Labels signed them for the same reason. Beyond that, there was and still is the desire to get the music out to as many people as possible. Nowadays, most artists probably don’t make much from album sales. But someone who buys a CD at a gig might play it for a friend, and the friend might be at the next gig as a result. I hope that sending a CD to me means that someone might hire an artist for a gig who they wouldn’t even have heard otherwise.

But sometimes, there are other reasons for making a CD, reasons that transcend business considerations. Someone gets an idea that demands their attention, and nothing else can happen until the album gets made. Often, these ideas become themes around which the albums are organized. The music is often a passionate reflection of this. These kinds of albums are the special projects in my title. Let’s check some of them out.

Darryl Purpose: Life, Based on a True Story

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Kevin Faherty is an extreme example of a songwriter’s songwriter. By this, I mean that his songs are known and admired by other songwriters, but almost unknown to everyone else. Faherty seems to have decided that he does not want to sacrifice the purity of his art by making albums, and I’m not even sure that he performs in a formal setting very often. But a large number of other songwriters have gotten to know Faherty’s songs from his appearances at campfires at the Kerrville Folk Festival. One of these is Darryl Purpose. Purpose put together the album Singer-Songwriter Heaven as a sort of musical surprise party for Kevin Faherty, who apparently knew nothing about it until the album was close to completion. Purpose has gathered eighteen other artists who know Faherty and admire his work, and gotten each one to record a different Faherty Song. Each artist was apparently left to determine how they wanted to treat the song. So some of the artists here have done simple arrangements with just guitar and voice. Others, like Purpose, have chosen to do full arrangements with a band. All have respected the reason they are here, the song. Faherty emerges as a writer with humor, warmth, and sympathy for his characters, not prone to cliché, and fine at his craft. Given that Faherty has shown no desire to make his own album, Singer-Songwriter Heaven can be taken as his debut, or as a tribute. Either way, it’s a fine introduction.

Spottiswoode: Where Do I Come In?

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Rosler’s Recording Booth is also a multi-artist compilation, but of a very different sort. New York City used to have recording booths in key locations that attract tourists, notably Coney Island and the Empire State Building. A person or group would put a quarter in the slot, enter the booth, and record a spoken, (or sometimes sung), message. When they were done, a vinyl record would pop out, which could then be sent to a friend or loved one. Don Rosler was able to obtain at least 16 of these records, probably more, and these old messages became the inspiration for the songs heard on this album. Rosler decided that he didn’t want to perform all of the songs himself, so he brought in some help. In all, ten artists or groups perform these songs, and each brings a different sensibility to the table. But the inspiration for these songs means that there is a common theme, that of separation and longing. Rosler has interesting ideas about orchestration, which all of the artists here follow to a greater or lesser degree. So there are surprising combinations of instruments and tonalities, but it all works beautifully. Spottiswoode’s take on Where Do I Come In? brings it all together for me. The arrangement here is startling, with sudden shifts in mood and tonality. Don’t judge this one until you’ve heard it all the way through. But all of these changes are not simply for show. The emotion of the song comes through loud and clear. There are many other fine performances on this album. I want to know more about Spottiswoode, and also about Terry Radigan, who contributes four wonderfully varied performances here. Other listeners will find other gems as well.

Danny Darst: No Responsibility

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Exit 10 marks the debut of Danny Darst, not only as a musician but also as a playwright. And this one has been brewing for a long time. One of the songs here is a cowrite with the film director Robert Altman, who died five years ago, and to whom this album is dedicated. Darst has been an actor on stage and screen, and he has written songs that other people have made into country hits. He performed some of his own songs in the films Something Wild and Melvin and Howard. But it took becoming a playwright himself for Darst to release a full length album of his own songs. Darst proves to be a wonderful storyteller, with a weathered voice that is perfect for his tales of the open road, and of the connections and disconnections that are made there. Is No Responsibilty an example of a connection or a disconnection? I will leave that question to each individual listener.

Thomas Fox: Hopalong Peter

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Look at a map of Miineapolis, MN, and you will see what you see in most maps of cities. The streets are close together, but as you zoom out, you find a borderland where the space between streets starts to grow. As you move northwest from Minneapolis, that borderland is a place called Osseo, and there you will find the Yellowtree Theatre. The Yelllowtree bills itself as an integral part of the community, and that means that they like to put something special into their productions. For a recent production of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, that meant the folk music performances of Blake Thomas and Mary Fox, collectively known as Thomas Fox. The album Our Town is simply a collection of those performances. Most of the songs are traditional, with one original and two covers. The music is entirely acoustic, and this is folk music as I first heard it. It is the sound of two people celebrating the beauty of some great old songs with honest and heartfelt performances. I believe there are some overdubbed instruments, but it sounds like a gathering on somebody’s back porch. Hopalong Peter has a jug band feel that I thoroughly enjoyed. A straight ahead folk sound is more typical of songs here, such as the standards Wildwood Flower and Banks of the Ohio. Other songs are less well known, but just as beautifully rendered.

Liz Queler & Seth Farber: The Betrothal

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My last example of a special project grew out of a birthday present that was set aside. Liz Queler’s mother-in-law gave her a book of poems by Edna St Vincent Millay. Queler says she was “never much of a poetry reader”. She only picked up the book at all to try to cure a case of writer’s block by setting one of the poems to music. What was supposed to be just an exercise soon became an obsession. First Queler, and soon her husband Seth Farber as well, began to research Millay’s life and work, even visiting the house the poet once lived in, and going to sites where she wrote some of her poems. Ultimately, Queler and Farber created an album of 21 of Millay’s poems set to music, and given beautiful performances. There is a lyric sheet, and it’s hard to believe that these words weren’t written as songs in the first place. You would hope that such an obsession would result in heartfelt performances, and it does. Some songs are set for just guitar or piano and voice, while others, like The Betrothal, feature a full band. So the album presents a wonderfully varied listening experience as well.