31 Songs

by Nick Hornby

  Bachelor No. 2 is Mann’s strongest collection to date: there are at least half a dozen songs here that will wriggle themselves into the part of your brain reserved for tune storage and stay there for many months. Only one, ‘Nothing Is Good Enough’, seems to deal directly with her professional traumas (‘Critics at their worst/could never criticize/the way that you do/No, there’s no one else, I find,/to undermine or dash a hope/quite like you’), but her bleak and bracing cynicism about our ability to connect with fellow-humans remains gratifyingly intact. ‘Satellite’, a beautiful, tired waltz that echoes James Brown’s ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World’, begins with the line ‘Let’s assume you were right,’ and you can almost hear the strain in her voice: in Mann’s world, other people are very much in the wrong. The first lines of ‘The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist’ (‘There’s no charity in you/and that surprises me’) and of ‘It Takes All Kinds’ (‘As we were speaking of the devil/you walked right in/Wearing hubris like a medal’) reinforce the impression that Mann’s arguments are geometrically unique in possessing only one side.

  There are some people who are irritated by Mann’s self-righteous sense of grievance – Greil Marcus recently described her as ‘still whining after all these years’ – but it seems to me that pop music, unlike the music of its elders and betters, is able to provide something for every undignified mood. If Mann’s songs are whiny, well, who doesn’t feel like whining sometimes? (And Heaven knows they’re not the only ones – what is Bob Dylan’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ but one long, glorious unresolved moan?) Granted, if you could have only one album a year, and the musician who made it had to be democratically elected, you’d probably feel obliged to vote for someone with a sunnier, more emotionally generous disposition than Mann’s. But there isn’t only one album a year; there are thousands, and most of them are much less rich and thoughtful than this one.

  What makes listening to Bachelor No. 2 such a treat is Mann’s sinuous, Burt Bacharach-like melodies and her verbal facility. ‘Ghost World’ has the kind of lyrics that people don’t write very often: simple, direct, sweet, resonant – in other words, proper lyrics, instead of tenth-rate poetry. ‘Finals blew, I barely knew my graduation speech/With college out of reach/If I don’t find a job it’s down to Dad and Myrtle Beach,’ runs the first verse; I’ve read entire first novels that cover similar territory less effectively. (The song, an achingly pretty lament for a nothing-happening teenage summer, also offers a respite from all the typical Mann finger-pointing.) ‘Red Vines’, meanwhile, is this year’s great lost radio hit. It has everything: a gorgeous, understated guitar intro, a swooping and memorable chorus, a preposterously cute piano intro. The epic ‘Deathly’, which will be familiar to those who already own the Magnolia soundtrack (there are a couple of cross-overs), is the closest Mann comes to musical grandiosity: Michael Lockwood’s almost hymnal guitar solo is the aural equivalent of Paul Thomas Anderson’s plague of frogs – mighty, savagely beautiful, and somehow redemptive.

  ‘The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist’ was co-written with Elvis Costello, who shares Mann’s interest in the craft of the song, and who has had his own travails with record companies of late. It seems strange that people like Mann and Costello (whose last studio album was a collaboration with Bacharach) should find themselves huddled together for warmth in this way, when all they appear to want is to write classic, essentially mainstream pop. Who would have thought that music like this would become alternative, when it doesn’t have an alternative bone in its body? Bachelor No. 2 is exhilarating proof that there’s lots of life in the old dog yet.

  There is a duct on Steve Earle’s new album, Transcendental Blues, entitled ‘When I Fall’, a simple but rousing paean to a love that has endured hard times, which seems fairly ordinary in its concerns and expression until you realize that the female voice in the song belongs to Earle’s sister Stacey. ‘All these years I’ve watched you trip and stumble,’ she sings in the second verse. ‘There were times when I feared that you were lost.’ Those familiar with Earle’s story will know that his sister’s fears were not baseless, and that watching his every misstep, especially in the first half of the nineties, would have been a full-time job. Earle, who is now forty-five, has already been married and divorced six times (although he has had only five wives, ex-wife No. 4 and ex-wife No. 6 being one and the same), and in 1994 he was convicted and imprisoned for possessing narcotics, a sentence that would ultimately put an end to several years of heroin addiction. During this period, Earle stopped making music altogether. Indeed, such was his plight that he did not even own a guitar. If staying married to Earle is difficult, then staying related to him by blood must have been even harder.

  The jail term was followed by a successful rehab program, and since then Earle has scarcely put a foot wrong, give or take the odd failed marriage. The comeback began in 1995, with the triumphant but noticeably contemplative acoustic album Train a Comin’ (its predecessor, in 1991, was a noisy and noticeably uncontemplative live recording entitled Shut Up and Die like an Aviator, and could have been – indeed, effectively was – made by somebody else altogether); it marked the relaunch of what has become one of the most creatively successful careers in contemporary American music. Who else has recorded five good-to-great albums in six years? Even the weakest of them, the occasionally over-earnest El Corazón (which begins with an acoustic ballad mourning the death of radicalism), contains a handful of great songs, including ‘Telephone Road’, which should walk straight on to anyone’s compilation tape of thrilling nineties moments. This renewed version of Earle gives every impression of wanting to claw back the years he wasted trying to score dope: apart from the constant recording and touring, he has been teaching the art of song-writing in Chicago and campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty; he has started a record label, E-Squared; signed up bands; produced eight records; written poetry; and completed a collection of short stories. Clearly, Earle felt he had some catching up to do. No one should tell him that he’s already caught up – indeed, he probably overtook most of us some time in 1997.

  Earle’s music is a hybrid of Nashville, folk and rock ‘n’ roll which, when played by younger bands – Wilco, the Jayhawks, Son Volt – has come to be described as alt (for alternative) country. Those who have been listening to pop music for a long time might be mystified by the suggestion that there is anything new going on here, because most alt-country music sounds remarkably similar to the music made by the Stones and/or Gram Parsons in the late sixties and early seventies. In fact what it has brought to the party is a renewed interest in the craft of songwriting. There has also been a reawakening of interest, among younger musicians, in the history of American folk music. Wilco, for instance, has been busy contemporizing Woody Guthrie. And Harry Smith’s extraordinary, recently re-released Anthology of American Folk Music, which Earle has been using as a set text in his songwriting course, has provoked the same kind of awestruck admiration that a different generation of musicians held for the Velvet Underground.

  Earle has been playing and listening to music long enough that he has no need to graft on roots for his roots rock; the roots are fully established. And just as his last offering. The Mountain, was an entirely successful attempt to pay tribute to, and extend the life of, the bluegrass he loves, the new album is a celebration of the pop music Earle has listened to since his childhood and young adulthood. Transcendental Blues contains a couple of songs played in the key of Beatles (Earle described recently how a copy of Revolver lay on top of a monitor throughout the recording session, like a coded instruction manual), a couple of quasi-Springsteen rockers, and a couple of Dylanesque folk ballads. ‘Lonelier Than This’ is as pretty as anything Earle has ever written: ‘Maybe this is as good as it’s gonna get/And I’ll always be this way,’ he sings over an impossibly heartsick acoustic-guitar line, and so affecting is the song that you cannot help but wish this kind of ill luck upon him. And the album’s closer, ‘Over Yonder (Jonat
han’s Song)’, is devastating. It was written for a death-row prisoner, Jonathan Nobles, who was executed by lethal injection in 1998. Earle was present, by Nobles’ request, at the execution. Earle’s words – mercifully unpreachy, simple, clear-sighted, humane – show an expertise and tastefulness that may surprise those who lost touch with him round about the time he lost touch with himself.

  There is an enduring confusion in rock ‘n’ roll on the subject of authenticity. Those who have lived the sex-and-drugs life, the argument goes, are somehow more likely to speak to us with the voice of wisdom and self-knowledge, but this is rarely the case. There are plenty of screw-ups whose music is trite and shallow, and, besides, this theory of rock is very selective: it is applied to Kurt Cobain but not to, say, Elton John. If you’re determined to find Earle’s experience audible in his recent music, then, of course, you’ll find a line of a lyric here and a rasp in the voice there (the truth is that the rasp is more likely to have been caused by age and tobacco than by heroin, prison, or ex-wives). In Transcendental Blues you can hear something about Earle’s privations, but authenticists will be disappointed by its obliquity and its lack of luridness. On the sleeve of Feel Alright, the second album since his comeback, Earle tells a little story: ‘When I was locked up, I was getting ready to go off on this boy that stole my radio. My partner Paul asked me where I was going. I said, “To get my radio-and then go to the hole for a little while.” He looked at me like I look at my thirteen-year-old sometimes, and said, “No you ain’t. You’re gonna sit your little white ass down and do your little time and then you’re gonna get out of here and make me a nice record.” so I MADE TWO.’

  In 1941, Preston Sturges made the film of this incident some fifty years before it happened. True, Sturges changed the occupation of the hero from musician to filmmaker and called him Sullivan rather than Earle, but the lessons the two men learn are very much the same: the story of Steve Earle’s post-prison career is of a man who has properly understood the value of music – he remembers how awful it was not to be able to make it (or even listen to it) and everything he has done since has been an attempt to maximize the gift he has for it. In this respect, Transcendental Blues is ‘about’ music much more than it is about heroin addiction or broken marriages. The secret to longevity in the field of popular music, it seems, is to keep listening and to keep learning. Dylan understands this, and Bruce Springsteen does, too; Time Out of Mind and The Ghost of Tom Joad are the products of people who have been doing some homework. Earle has added Irish music to his tangle of roots – he has been spending parts of the year in Ireland, and Transcendental Blues features a song called ‘The Galway Girl’ – and the freshness and punch of this satisfying collection, its breadth and soul and craft, are the unmistakable sign of someone who takes the simple things in music seriously. No one should underestimate the glee underlying those capital letters at the end of the prison story (‘so I MADE TWO’). Well, with Transcendental Blues, HE MADE FIVE.

  The latest band signed to Steve Earle’s record label, E-Squared, was Marah, a young band from South Philadelphia. Despite its youth, the band knows its music, too: at a recent show in New York it slipped into set covers of ‘Come On’, by Chuck Berry, the Who’s ‘Magic Bus’, and the Replacements’ ‘Can’t Hardly Wait’. This is a risky strategy, not only because covers can make original material sound awfully thin by contrast but also because the audience may end up feeling as though it were listening to a bar band with no ambition to be anything but a bar band doing covers. Marah, however, remembers that Springsteen’s E Street Band was as likely to launch into ‘Quarter to Three’ at some shows as ‘Born to Run’, and it never did the group any harm. If you are sufficiently talented (and sufficiently ambitious), then paying tribute to other people’s songs can seem more like a way of picking up the baton than of dropping out of the race.

  Marah’s first album for E-Squared, Kids in Philly, shows no shortage of ambition. Like Transcendental Blues, it is the product of listening to the right sorts of things – the American canon – without being derivative. But Marah is at a different point in its career; Earle, having lived this music for so long, is able to step outside the great tradition, and be ruminative and reflective. Kids in Philly is all urgency, hunger and yearning, and a torrent of words spills all over the tunes with an invigorating disregard for the virtue of economy. (Kids in Philly is so urgent that it is only thirty-seven minutes long, which, given the preposterous length of most post-CD albums, is a recommendation in itself.) Despite its banjos and its harmonicas, Marah is much too raucous to be considered anything but a rock band, but its songs are so assured and so exuberantly tuneful – ‘My Heart is the Bums on the Street’ is just crying out to be covered by Jackie Wilson – that the music turns out to be gloriously inclusive. In the best possible way, Marah sounds as though it wants to be famous. I hadn’t realized how much I missed that kind of ambition (most bands squash it flat in case it should make them appear uncool) until I heard it in the band’s chord changes and its doggedly starry-eyed backing vocals. It is clear why Steve Earle loves the band, but that kind of hope and ache belongs to another and, one suspects, unhappier time of his life: you might not be able to detect naked pain in the songs of Transcendental Blues, but you can spot what that pain has cost him.

  3 The Entertainers: Learning from Los Lobos

  April 2001

  What a piece of work is a boxed set! How infinite(ish) in faculty! In action, how like an angel! This, at least, is what all serious music buyers tell themselves when they have just spent £30 or more on another impeccably packaged and exhaustively annotated four-to-twelve-disc set. You get home, bursting with anticipation, and sit down to listen to the first half-dozen songs of a beloved artist’s recording career, and to read the weighty accompanying essay, and then, somewhere along the line, a vague disappointment kicks in. You become irritated that your favourite song is represented only by a demo or a live recording or an alternative mix that omits the horns. Pretty soon, you find that you’re playing only the last few tracks on the second CD – tracks that you probably already own. A few weeks later, you realize, guiltily, that the fourth CD has not yet been removed from the box, and that it never will be.

  There is a reason that the fourth CD is likely to remain unplayed. Boxed sets tell the same story over and over: the artist hits the ground running, perfects a sound, makes too much money, and starts turning out music that is self-parodying or overblown or desperate to latch on to whichever current musical trend happens to be passing. Enoch Powell once observed something to the effect that all political careers end in failure, but at least no politician – unlike, say, Rod Stewart – has ever attempted to go disco on us.

  I have a very simple, though dismayingly dull, rule governing the purchase of boxed sets: buy only collections by major twentieth-century artists, people whose names you are likely to find in a reputable biographical dictionary. The Dylan Bootleg Series is essential, as are the Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin anthologies on Atlantic – in the last case because the inevitable artistic decline took place at the expense of another record label. The James Brown and Bob Marley boxes describe the invention and sophistication of two hugely important musical genres. As for the rest, however much you tell yourself that you’ve got to come to grips with the post-Fleet wood Mac career of Stevie Nicks, you’d be better off not forking out that £30.

  Nobody would argue that Los Lobos’s relatively straightforward Chicano R&B changed the course of pop-music history. And yet El Cancionero, the band’s four-CD retrospective, covering a recording career that has lasted twenty-three years, is a joy from beginning to (almost) end. So much pleasure is rare in collections by far more influential artists (I defy anyone to listen to the Byrds box in its entirety), but the fact that Los Lobos have never really had their moment – at least, not a moment that the world at large might have noticed – says much about what makes this boxed set so appealing. This is not a band that has ever been able to rest on its rep
utation, much of which has been acquired through the sheer determination to entertain. El Cancionero sounds more like a couple of two-hour sets at a wedding reception than like a bid for posterity, and is all the more refreshing for it. That must have been some wedding.

  Apart from Steve Berlin, who joined the band in the early eighties, the five members of Los Lobos have been playing together since 1973, when they made a local name for themselves by switching between rock ‘n’ roll and traditional Mexican music at every community function in East Los Angeles that would have them. Pop music is all about becoming rich and famous in the shortest possible time, but there is something to be said for playing regular gigs at joints like the Red Onion, as Los Lobos did: by the time they began recording, in the late 1970s, they were proficient in ways that their punk peers never achieved. The second track on El Cancionero, a bolero entitled ‘Sabor a Mi’, features deft supper-club-sweet acoustic-guitar solos from three of the band’s members. This is not an anthology that begs indulgence for the early years. Los Lobos eventually benefited from the energy of the punk ethic – its earliest rock recordings were for Slash, the legendary LA punk label – but their years at the Red Onion had clearly given them a professionalism that would serve them well.

  Los Lobos’s full name is Los Lobos del Este (de Los Angeles), a cheeky homage to an apparently cheesy polka band called Los Lobos del Norte. But, if this suggests a certain cool-dude, second-generation irreverence for parental favourites, there is no trace of cheekiness on the opening track of El Cancionero – a loving and disarmingly pretty version of ‘Guantanamera’. This, though, is the Los Lobos way, and a good number of the eighty-odd songs here are uninflected versions of old cumbias and rancheras and corridas and boleros – even the band’s one proper hit recording, a cover version of Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’, features a refreshingly traditional acoustic exit. Across the Atlantic, and at almost the same time, the young and punk-forged London band the Pogues, who also had an irreverent and culturally specific full name – Pogue Mahone, or ‘Kiss my ass’ – were similarly intent on disinterring old Irish ballads and rebel songs. The Pogues were musically less accomplished than Los Lobos (although they were fronted by a brilliant, if self-destructive, songwriter, Shane MacGowan), so they contented themselves mostly with giving their Irish heritage a ferocious pounding. Nonetheless, this synchronicity was significant. After fifteen or twenty years of listening to straightforward rock ’n’ roll, the pop audience had begun to cast around for new stories, new instrumentation, even new rhythms. In the end, of course, the innovation gets swallowed up by the corporate pop mainstream, which then burps out Ricky Martin, but for a moment it was possible to imagine a polylingual and polyrhythmic future for pop music.