Not so Dreamy

To paraphrase a bit from Evita, it is my sad duty to inform you that, while I like Stevie Nicks' new album, In Your Dreams, I don't love it. As a long time Stevie fan, this is hard to admit but it really is true. And because I don't love it, it is ultimately disappointing because it has been 10 years since her last solo album, Trouble In Shangri-La. It doesn't seem like In Your Dreams was worth the wait.

That said, it's about 65% a good album, 25% so-so and 10% pure awful. I really love "Secret Love" and it's gotten a lot of plays on my iPod. The fact that it's from the vault helps its cause. This was back when Stevie could write down practically anything and turn it into a song. I'm not so sure that happens like it used to. I can see the wheels turning on some of the newer songs. The bloom seems to be off the songwriting rose. Still, newer songs like "For What It's Worth" (not written by Stevie), "New Orleans" and the title track really do appeal to the Stevie fan in me. "Annabel Lee" may not be "Planets of the Universe", but it's still a very strong song. Even the song inspired by the Twilight series is pretty strong - you just have to forget the fact that it's inspired by the Twilight series. In fact, the first 7 songs are so strong, I think if Stevie had stopped there and called it an EP, she would have had something at least as good as The Wild Heart. (Sorry, nothing touches Bella Donna.)

But then there's track 8 - "Soldier's Angel" - which is so amazingly bad I am still trying to figure out what went wrong. Lindsey Buckingham is on guitar and background vocals, but the lyrics are so bad and the production so sparse that it grates from the first note to the last. How could the combination that cranked out some of the most memorable pop hits of the 70s produce something so dreary and unlistenable? The world may never know. What makes its substandardness even harder to swallow is that Stevie is apparently in love with it.

"It’s very Buckingham Nicks and I think that it’s going to be a very serious and important song to the world and I think it’s a very serious and important song for Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks because it sounds like Buckingham Nicks. Because it is."

Even the worst track on BuckinghamNicks is better than this song.

The album has a few more high points - "Ghosts Are Gone" gets points for recycling "ghost through a fog" which is one of my favorite recurring Stevie-isms and "Italian Summer" is worthy as well, even though it took a while to grow on me. The rest is not bad, it's just not very memorable which I think, is really bad if you're a Stevie Nicks song.

I think the biggest culprit for this album's lack of spark and life lies solely with the production. As my friend and fellow Stevie-phile Steve Sears says, Dave Stewart and Glen Ballard produced a version of Stevie that will appeal to a wide and older audience, and in so doing, they lost the craziness that makes Nicks so appealing to long term fans. I miss the quirks that have made even bad Stevie albums endearing. For as much as I can barely stomach Street Angel, it still contains the eccentricities that make Stevie Stevie. It's almost as if Stewart and Ballard took sandpaper to Stevie's rough edges and smoothed them over for mass consumption that I don't think is likely to happen anyway.

I think that ultimately, it's hard when your producing any piece of art. It's hard to predict what people want - will they want something new or will they want the same old thing all wrapped up in a new package? Waiting 10 years between releasing new material ups the ante significantly. I also think that part of it is me - the music is good but it's not really where my mood is right now. Perhaps I will warm to it when the leaves change color and the temperatures turn cooler, versus now when summer is just getting underway and we're 10 days away from seeing Kylie Minogue.

It is still new music from Stevie Nicks who was one of my original music loves and for that, I will be grateful, even if it's not quite what I wanted.

Thanks to Steve for providing a lot of the most intelligent things said in this post.

LDS (Latter Day Stevie): Street Angel

Last week at work, I was on a huge Stevie Nicks kick. I listened to her pretty much non-stop all day long, catapulting her up over a hundred plays this week on my last.fm page. I listened to almost everything of hers I had on my iPod, listening to 5 of her 6 solo albums, even playing Rock A Little twice. The only album I didn't manage to listen to was 1994's mess of an album, Street Angel.

When writing about Street Angel, I'm reminded of that scene in Straight Talk where Dolly Parton is talking to James Woods about the book he's writing. She asks him what his book is going to be about and he lists off this litany of awful things - corruption, greed, etc. She says to him "Why don't you write about something you love rather than something you hate?" That's kind of how I feel about this post, although "hate" really is too strong of a word for how I feel about Street Angel. Rather than hate it, I mostly feel sorry for it because contained therein are glimpses of what might have been. And really, if we don't look at our favorite artists honestly and recognize them as human, capable of making missteps, we're not doing them (or ourselves) any favors.

Five years had passed between The Other Side of the Mirror and Street Angel, and Stevie's life seemed to be a mess, although we didn't know the half of it at the time. There was a Fleetwood Mac album-of-sorts (Behind the Mask), her hasty departure from Fleetwood Mac in a fit of rage, a best-of album that had her singing songs written by Jon Bon Jovi and Bret Michaels and a few one-off soundtrack cuts from things like "Party of Five" and Boys on the Side. So to say it was a dry period for Stevie Nicks fans is putting it mildly.

I first heard of Street Angel through a fellow Stevie Nicks fan I met on the ISCABBS back in the spring of 1994. He lived in Boston and went by the online handle TheWildHeart. After talking online for several weeks, he offered to share with me a bunch of rare Stevie tracks with me. So I sent him a cassette tape and a couple weeks later, I got not one cassette tape full of Stevie rarities, but TWO. I still have those around here somewhere, although I managed to find most of those tracks on Napster & Audiogalaxy during the Wild West days of music on the internet. He had offered to send me tracks from the new album, but I chose not to have him send them. Rather, I decided to wait for the album. Those cassette tapes, along with Basia's The Sweetest Illusion, really define the last few weeks of that school year and as the semester wrapped up, I prepared to go back to my folks' house to work over the summer break.

A week or so after I arrived back home, I got a postcard in the mail (how, I'll never know!) that was a promo for Street Angel. It had this image of Stevie and I was horrified.

What happened? Where was the wonderfully curvaceous Stevie that I had come to know and love? She looked like death warmed over in this photo. I thought, surely her health must not be great. Stevie's weight had always yo-yo'd around a lot, but this was ridiculous! Still, I eagerly awaited the album, which came out the first week of June 1994 - right around my birthday.

Much like I did with The Other Side of the Mirror, I tried to talk myself into liking it. It's not hard to do when it's a long-awaited release by a what amounts to a core artist in your listening habits, but there was something niggling at the back of my brain. "This isn't that good..." it seemed to say. "Stevie really doesn't sound like she's even there." And as it turns out, it was true. When the album was in production, Stevie was back in rehab, AGAIN, this time trying to kick the Klonopin habit that had started with her finally and completely kicking of the cocaine habit in the late 80s. Stevie's songs and voice are pretty much the only thing authentically Stevie on the album. The production, the album art, everything else has the feel of something cobbled together by committee. I swear that given the opportunity, even with the limited technology of the day, I could have come up with a better album cover than what the record company did! What's contained in the album is nearly as amateur. There's an ill-advised cover of Bob Dylan's "Just Like A Woman" and an obtuse song about Jane Goodall. The production is very generic and blah - living up to neither the acoustic greatness of Bella Donna or the synthy-goodness of Rock A Little. As an album, it fails, completely and utterly.

But all is not lost. I've been listening to this album while I write this post and there are several good songs. Not surprisingly, many of them are songs written by Stevie for the first three albums and ultimately rejected for whatever reason. The first time I listened to the song "Greta" I had what basically was a deja vu moment - it sounded just like classic Stevie, complete with the spoken "Oooh, she's got a movie star view..." moment. Well, "Greta" was originally recorded for The Wild Heart - no wonder it sounds like 80s Stevie! The "Greta" demo from that time period is circulating on the internet and is astounding for both its similarities and differences to the version that eventually ended up on Street Angel. Lyrically, it's pretty much identical, but the 80s version is faster and has an 80s groove that is notably absent on the Street Angel version.

Another standout is one of my favorite Stevie tracks, "Blue Denim." (embedding disabled? Seriously!?) A classic Stevie rocker co-written with Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, it kicks the album off in fine form and was even released as the second single. Even though Stevie does sound a bit bored through parts of it, singing the "blue grey eyes they change with the color" chorus in practically a monotone, there's a urgency in the song that even Stevie's Klonopin use couldn't douse. By the time we hit the last minute of the song and she wails "Yes I'm going away for a little while to remember how to feel!/And if I find the answer, I promise you/I'll come back and get you," you can just see Stevie on a concert stage, her chiffon dress billowing out as she twirls as only Stevie can. She hit the talk show circuit to promote "Blue Denim", appearing on David Letterman with a crimped hairdo and very overweight - so much so that upon viewing it, she vowed to retire unless she could lose weight.

An aside - Stevie has been criticized for her weight for the better part of 30 years, but the biggest problem for her is that ANY extra weight on her 5'2" frame is going to be noticeable. Someone like me that has the benefit of a 6'2" body has A LOT more places to put the extra weight, but Stevie's just not that lucky. And I never thought she looked bad during the Street Angel years, weight-wise. She certainly looked better than she did during the first Clinton inaugural. Combine that with seeing that shocking picture of her on that promo postcard, I was glad to see that she wasn't at death's door after all, although there's no doubt her weight at the time was not particularly healthy for her. During high school, I was always so worried about Stevie, that she would suffer a premature death from a drug overdose and I would be teased mercilessly by kids at school because I made no secret of my Stevie fandom. Fortunately, I never had to endure that and won't because the chances of her ODing are pretty much at zero these days.

But back to the music. Even lesser songs like "Maybe Love Will Change Your Mind" and the title track have aged better than they should have. But most of the rest of it is a forgettable train wreck. It's a train wreck like only Stevie can do it and because it's Stevie, it's still moderately listenable for me. As I said earlier, I have been listening to it while I write this post and at several points, I've had to stop and ask myself if I'm being too hard on it. Well, as a friend of mine said to me once, "Don't kid yourself, Dan. That album is ASS!" And yeah, for the most part it is. It is on par with The Other Side of the Mirror and doesn't hold up even remotely when compared to Bella Donna, The Wild Heart and Rock A Little. Clearly, when given a choice between the two, the cocaine was a better muse for Stevie than the Klonopin, although I'd prefer she had neither.

It wouldn't be until 2001 - seven years later - that we'd get another solo album from Stevie Nicks. Finally free of the grips of Klonopin and reinvigorated by a reunion with the classic Fleetwood Mac lineup, she produced an album that deserves a spot in the Stevie Nicks canon next to the triumphant first three albums, something Street Angel can't even come close to claiming. In fact, after listening to so much Street Angel this morning, let's all cleanse our palates with "Blue Lamp."



(part 2 in a three part series)

Hurts, scars, wounds, mars

A couple weeks back, I managed to get myself on quite a Cher kick. Part of it was because I wanted to boost her past Kylie Minogue on my overall last.fm charts, making her my 4th most listened to artist and also because I had listened to quite a few covers that Cher did in preparation for the covers CD project that I was working on with Matt and Bess back in February.

It is so easy for me to get on a Cher kick, it's not even funny. Pretty much all you have to do is mention the woman's name and I'm all "Oh, I have to go listen to Cher!" I think the reason for this is because Cher's back catalog is just so gargantuan and covers virtually every genre that there is literally a Cher for every mood. Whether it is the "jingle-jangle" music (as Heidi refers to it) of "Gyspies, Tramps & Thieves," the 70s disco of Take Me Home and Prisoner, the new wave of I Paralyze or the dance diva of Believe and Living Proof, Cher's music can find its way in just about any time.

But my favorite of all of Cher's phases is, without a doubt, the faux-metal leather Cher of the late 80s/early 90s. And it is to this era that I most frequently return to. For me, it is the one that feels most like home. It kind of stands to reason because it was during this time that I really got into Cher. My mom had always liked Cher, and I grew up watching Sonny & Cher, but when Cher made an attempt at a music comeback on Geffen Records in the late 80s, I scoffed. Surely this would not work. Cher was an actress now. But then I heard "I Found Someone" and I was hooked. (Years later, my then-3-year-old daughter would have the same reaction. Stop the paternity test.)

Cher recorded three albums for Geffen between 1987 and 1991 - Cher, Heart of Stone, and Love Hurts. Heart of Stone is frequently cited as the best of the three, but for my money, it's Cher and its we-can-talk-it-over-baby-woman-to-man, givin'-our-love-a-fightin-chance Bon Jovi/Desmond Child/Michael Bolton mishmash that gives me the most bang for my buck. There is just something so damn fun about the cheesiness of that album. Plus I love how Cher's then boyfriend Rob Camilleti (the Bagel Boy of tabloid lore) is in all the videos from that album.

If Heart of Stone is the Hero, then Love Hurts is widely regarded as the Goat. Surprisingly, when I was on my Cher kick, I really got into Love Hurts. My friend Jeff famously despises this album. Although he did like the song "Love & Understanding" (which we dubbed "Time, Love, Tenderness & Understanding" because we had initially confused the title with the Michael Bolton song of a similar name), he just couldn't handle the rest of the album. I still have vivid memories of him reading the track list off of the CD at my house that summer of 1991 -"'I'll Never Stop Loving You?' - gag! 'Could've Been You?' - could've been a better song, Cher." He always would say that Love Hurts hurts.

While I will agree that the caliber of the songs on Love Hurts doesn't even come close to the ones on Heart of Stone, it was still a pretty good Cher CD from that time period. She tackles Nazareth on the title track, covers a Kiss song, and there is no Michael Bolton penned song to be found on the entire thing! It does, however, contain Diane Warren schlock, but somehow, Cher legitimizes it. "Save Up All Your Tears" is still one of my favorite Cher songs - and the video is...well, I'll let it speak for itself.



So in the final analysis, the well had kind of run dry for Cher by the time Love Hurts came out, but I still think that the album is unfairly maligned. It was the last of the leather Cher albums, and because of that, it will always look upon it with favor. It was also the last Cher album for something like 5 years - with It's A Man's World bridging the divide to dance diva Cher and the ubersuccess of Believe.

The appeal of Cher is so simple. As Charlotte's not-gay boyfriend said in an episode of Sex & The City - "She's a survivor!" She has been counted out more times than anyone and come back just as many times. I do wish I had the chance to see her in concert out in Vegas this summer, but the timing is all off. I also wish there were plans for a new album. At 62, she's not getting any younger. Since she hasn't recorded anything new since Anna's birth, I'd say it's time. She's one of those artists (along with Madonna and Stevie Nicks) whose passing I will truly mourn.

But in the meantime, what a body of work to enjoy!

Bittersweetness follows

For years, my favorite form of nostalgia was 80s nostalgia. This has always made sense to me because I grew up in the 80s, went to high school in the 80s and pretty much lapped up everything the pop culture that surrounded me had to offer. As the 80s morphed into the 90s and grunge took over, I felt more and more lost on the pop cultural landscape. The pop music that provided so much of the background music of my teenage years was drowned out by stuff that I just couldn't assimilate into my tastes or listening habits.

So it came as quite a surprise to me when recently I came down with a serious case of 90s nostalgia. However , it shouldn't really surprise me that much because as much as our teenage years are formative, I really think that our college years provide most of the direction that we take as young adults. And while I think what catalyzed my 90s nostalgia was the recent recommendation of Everything But The Girl's Amplified Heart (an album I swear I had not heard until I ordered it for dirt cheap off Amazon Sellers after the recommendation was made), what set it into high gear was my serendipitous rediscovery of R.E.M.'s Automatic For The People.

I have never been what I would classify as an R.E.M. fan, but Automatic For The People is an undisputed masterpiece and probably in my top 10 favorite albums. It came out in the autumn of 1992, which musically was one of the most important and vivid times of my life, although the release of a new R.E.M. record did not even make a blip on my radar at that point in time. Prior to this release, I had always chalked up Michael Stipe as a big whiner, a precursor to the emo boys that seem to emerge and disappear on a daily basis now. I remember my brother singing a parody of "Losing My Religion" - something like "that's me in the spotlight / human life is worthless." So I always kind of avoided R.E.M.

A friend of mine in college (and my eventual roommate) was a huge R.E.M. fan. We met because he was living with a friend of mine from my hometown and she introduced us because we were both in pharmacy school and would be in a lot of the same classes. I remember saying to Sam (name changed) when I first found out that he liked R.E.M. that he was the type of person that I would expect to like R.E.M. Yeah, I was kind of a dick sometimes, but it was true. Despite my initial insensitivity, we became quite good friends. And he was pretty much the one that introduced me to Automatic For The People, although at first, it was mostly by osmosis. He would play it in the car when we went places or if he was driving me back to the dorms (since I was without vehicle) or whatever and I would listen to it and for the first time, I decided that Michael Stipe might actually have something to say that I could relate to.

I can't listen to Automatic For The People and not be reminded of Sam and those years I spent in pharmacy school. The singles stand out for me so strongly. They are also the ones that many would complain have worn out their welcome due to overplay or overexposure. It pisses me off when someone says "oh, that can't be art, it's too popular." That is bullshit because just because something is popular does not mean that it can't be brilliant. Songs like "Man on the Moon" and "Everybody Hurts" (I always wanted that hat Stipe wore in the video) still ring as true today as they did back then. And even something as completely unintelligible as "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" has aged gracefully and is still highly listenable.

It's not surprising that what I love most about Automatic for the People is its huge thread of melancholy that runs through the majority of the album. One thing about music and me - I can use it to modulate my moods quite effectively. And if, for whatever reason, I am in the mood for introspection, I know just where to go. Usually it's Mary Chapin Carpenter, but this R.E.M. album is exceptional for that as well. One need look no further than songs like "Try Not To Breathe"and "Sweetness Follows" to find songs that make you look inward and turn down the noise in the world around us. Both deal with the end of life, the former taking the run-up to death, the latter with the reactions afterward ("oh, oh, but sweetness follows.")

And then there's "Nightswimming" which is probably my favorite of all of R.E.M.'s songs, even though that's a bit of a cliche since it seems like it is so many people's favorite R.E.M. song. I did not know that it was a single until just recently, and that there was a video for it as well.

R.E.M. |MTV Music

Stipe's cracking voice over mournful piano and strings is an odd companion to 10,000 Maniacs' "These Are Days" and honestly, I prefer Stipe's take on remembering what many refer to as "the good old days." (and not just because so many of my college friends became self-described 10,000 Maniacs "fans" based on their fondness for that one song.) "Nightswimming" paints a vivid picture of youth and a time before life's responsibilities overtook us. I can literally listen to this song on a loop over and over again. It's like looking at a watercolor painting and seeing something new in it every time and watching what you saw the last time disappear into the whole. In short, it's a masterpiece and one of my all time favorite songs. The sad thing is, though, that I frequently forget about it, but rediscovering it is like finding an old friend.

I always wanted to have a better friendship with Sam than I think I ever had. Ultimately, the competition that frames so many male friendships proved too hard to avoid. We were, as I said previously, in all the same classes so the temptation to compete on tests and for the attention of women was a death knell. My then-undiagnosed depression didn't help me on any level so I'm sure that I was a very high-maintenance friend from time to time. But there are a lot of good memories in there - staying up all night playing the original version of Sid Meier's Civilization, running to Taco Bell at 11:30 at night, Cricket hair, and nights of playing hide and seek with our friend Ellen at the Bowen Science Building when taking breaks from studying.

Still, it's hard to listen to Automatic For The People and not have a little bit of bittersweetness follow. But it's the kind of bittersweet I can deal with and actually kind of like.

If you don't have this album, you really need it. It is available for one lousy penny on Amazon Sellers. Sadly, you cannot download the whole album on iTunes (or anywhere else for that matter.)

Best of 2008: Time warp

(I'm doing a full system restore on my PC and trying desperately not to watch its every move, so this is what I'm doing instead.)

The year is nearly over, and it's time to start looking back at the year that was. Part of the reason I blog is because I just feel so passionately about music (although a music blogger I decidedly am not! Too many stories about Anna and zombies and such.) I consume it in ways that many people really don't understand, and the year-end recaps are some of my favorite posts to write. No one else but me may give a shit about my opinions, but that will not stop me from giving them!

2008 was not the best year for music - it certainly had nothing on 2007. Last year I did a post on my favorite albums of the year that were not released in that year. It was so much fun to write and a great way to highlight the music that made up the soundtrack of the year, even though some of it was not released in 2008. So here we go - the list last year was 5 albums. This year, the list is down to four.

Mary Chapin Carpenter - The Calling
This album was actually released in 2007 and if I had bothered to do a year-end album list last year, it would have made the list. Honestly, it probably would have topped the list. It is simply that good. In fact, it is so good, I am almost willing to go on record as saying it's my favorite album of 2007 AND 2008 put together. It has been in particularly heavy rotation as the year has come to a close. The thing that I love about it is how it is simultaneously a throwback to Chapin's mid-90s peak-of-popularity stuff and a bold look forward. Having been a fan of hers for 15 years now, I am fond of saying that I have grown along with her, although she nearly lost me in the late 90s with a couple of very sub-par albums. And The Calling is perhaps the most mature, most fully realized version of her gift of songwriting and storytelling. Although I'm not sure how "On With The Song" will play in the post-Bush era, it is still the best example of a scathing political indictment wrapped in a killer country-pop hook. This is without a doubt an album I'll keep coming back to. (stream the album here.)

October Project - October Project
My biggest regret about my discovery of October Project this year was that it came during the hot summer months and not during the crisp autumn months. But as it turns out, I heard "Bury My Lovely" sometime in late June/early July and it led me to search out their debut album on iTunes. A few song samples later, I had purchased the entire album. See!? Sharing does lead to purchases! Anyway, this album is so solid and Mary Fahl's voice so soaring that I just can't get enough of it. As I mused back when I first wrote about October Project, this album was released in 1993 and how well it would have fit in with my 21 year old self back then. The most pleasant surprise of the year. (stream the album here.)

Vanessa Daou - Zipless
It shouldn't work - an album full of songs using the erotic poetry of Erica Jong - but somehow or another, it does! This album is kind of the opposite of October Project in that you can feel the humidity dripping off of it. In many ways, this album is very Erotica-ish, and not just because it was released in the same general time period. The use of spoken word vocals seems to predominate and there is a tinkling piano reminiscent of "Secret Garden." How can one resist songs such as "The Long Tunnel of Wanting You," "Becoming A Nun," and my candidate for least subtle double entendre (after Madonna's "Candy Shop") "Near The Black Forest." Zipless is not an album I pulled out every day of the year, but it was always there in a pinch. (stream the album here.)

Joni Mitchell - Court & Spark
2008 will be the year that I truly discovered Joni Mitchell. She always existed on my periphery, but this summer, I was sent the song "Stay In Touch" from the latter-day Joni Mitchell album Taming The Tiger. The song was just perfect at that particular point in my life, and it encouraged me to seek out more of Joni's work. There is a plethora of it, and really, the starting point for everyone should be Court & Spark. It is pure poetry, from start to finish. It has songs that everyone knows ("Free Man In Paris" and "Help Me") but even the lesser known songs are worthwhile. One of my personal favorites is "People's Parties" which to me describes the introvert's experience at most parties. As I've said before, people with songwriting ability, especially the kind of songwriting ability Joni Mitchell has, just amaze me. And this is one amazing album that everyone should hear. (alas, it is not streamable anywhere!)

That's it folks. Next time will be the stuff that was actually released this year.

A ghost through the fog

As Sophia Petrillo might say: Picture it. Des Moines, IA. 1988. A 15 year old Dan, recently immersed in Fleetwood Mac is busily buying up all the albums from the Stevie-Lindsey-Christine line up. On this particular day, the purchase was Tusk, the sprawling double album that was the follow-up to Rumours. It is also the last of that set of albums that he had yet to acquire. A stop at Merle Hay Mall left him with exactly what he needed and he held the cassette tape proudly in his hands. Once back at the car, he climbed in the back seat and his folks popped the tape into the car. Christine McVie's "Over & Over" started things off on a nice note. Then "The Ledge" came on and his WTF reaction commenced.

I have been listening to a lot of Tusk these days. As is the case with most of these kinds of things, I can't really put my finger on what brought it on. Tusk is certainly not my favorite Fleetwood Mac album. Because of this, I don't really feel qualified to talk about it -- I don't know that I've ever given it a fair shake. But I have been listening to Fleetwood Mac for 20 years now, so I figured, what the hell? In many ways, I feel like Tusk is a Lindsey Buckingham solo album that the rest of the band was invited to do guest spots on. It's not like Lindsey does the lead vocal on every song and yes, Christine and Stevie get a fair amount of the spotlight, but for some reason, it has always felt like Lindsey's record. Tusk is not a bad album. However, it is chronically misunderstood and also ultimately collapses under its own weight. Very few double albums avoid this fate.

My favorite story surrounding the Tusk album is about how the head honchos at Warner Bros. "saw their Christmas bonuses flying out the window" when they heard Tusk. Certainly, if they were expecting Rumours II, they did not get it. It is big and bold and experimental and self indulgent and only periodically commercial. That has always been my problem with it - it doesn't really sound like Fleetwood Mac. Oh, it does in places, but I think with this record, we saw what Lindsey truly wanted to do in the studio, and he has continued in this vein for most of his solo work.

It is easy to fault Lindsey for Tusk being a big behemoth of an album, but really, he is also key to its success. Lest Matt stop speaking to me, I will say that he does contribute a lot of strong songs, even if the production seems a bit batshit crazy in a lot of places. I have always been fond of "Not That Funny" and I have vivid memories of riding on a charter bus through the night on the way to the Ozarks for a school trip listening to "I Know I'm Not Wrong." Even though I initially reacted very negatively to it, I have come to really appreciate "The Ledge" despite the fact that I couldn't understand a single word of it for the longest time. And although I think the production on his own songs is insane, his production of Stevie is stellar, reminding us that he is without a doubt the producer she needs the most.

It is no secret that I have always had a very Stevie-centric view of Fleetwood Mac, and her five contributions to Tusk are among her best work, in or out of Fleetwood Mac. I will never forget that day in the spring of 88, listening to "Sara" for the very first time. I can't get my head around the fact that there was ever a time in my life that I did not know "Sara." Years later when I was in college, I had a mix tape that collected those five songs from Tusk so that I could listen to them one after another. "Beautiful Child" is arguably her best contribution to Fleetwood Mac, and "Storms" with its key line "never have I been a blue calm sea/I have always been a storm" was one of those songs that I kept coming back to during my adolescence and college years as I grew into who I am today.

Tusk is chock full of memories for me, even though as an album it never got nearly the rotation that Rumours, Mirage or Tango in the Night got. The spring of 1988 was a real watershed time for me, and the music associated with it is indelibly stamped into my brain. I will always be able to summon those feelings and images while listening to Tusk. Perhaps that's why I dug it out after all this time. As I get older, those times become much like Stevie's famous ghost through the fog. The music reminds me of where I've been and helps me figure out where I'm headed.

For all its foibles and indulgences, Tusk sounds better today than the first time I heard it nearly 20 years ago. Time has vindicated it to some extent. It will never be Rumours, but I don't think that was ever the intention.



They are all infants in that video!

Gimme what'cha got, ready or not

Before Madonna, there was Olivia. ONJ was my very first celebrity crush, the first in a long line of crushes. I don't know what it was that initally drew me to her. It was probably the ubiquitousness of Grease during my formative years. I was powerless to resist the story of Sandy transforming from goody-two-shoes to sexpot in tight pants (that zipped up the back no less!) "Physical" was the first 45rpm single that I ever purchased, and as I've detailed in a previous post, Olivia's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 was the first album I ever bought with my own money.

The greatest hits albums are the safest bet with Olivia. Her studio albums are all a bit hit and miss, usually a couple of hits surrounded by massive amounts of album filler. This is especially true of her early albums, back when she was a "country" artist. I have quite a few of these albums but they rarely get listened to because I just cannot abide by those breathy vocals. But there is one album that stands out amongst the rest. For my money, her best studio album is and will always be Totally Hot.

Let's just get the obvious out of the way. She is, well, totally hot on the album cover. I remember being a kid and getting this album for my birthday (probably my 11th or 12th) and just sitting on my bed and staring at that picture of ONJ. It didn't hurt that the hormones were probably just starting to kick in then, but she is just fantastically gorgeous on that album cover. In fact, the entire photo shoot is very subway chic with a dose of roller disco thrown in for good measure (minus the actual roller skates.) I remember wondering whether or not those were the same pants she wore in Grease, as if the wardrobe budget was suddenly short and they had to recycle.

But enough about Olivia's tight pants, let's get to the music. This is such a strong set from Livvy, there really isn't a dud in the bunch. This is truly amazing, given what I said about her studio albums and the sheer volume of filler she is capable of. Musically, this is the first time that she took a chance and tried something different, which was a good thing as her white-bread country girl image had about run it's course by this time. The album opens with one of my all time favorite ONJ album tracks - "Please Don't Keep Me Waiting." Swirling synths and a solid vocal performance by Olivia nearly cancel out the hilarity of the final two minutes, in which Olivia screeches like a bat. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Notice that I said nearly cancel it out. I still can't listen to this song without cracking up - and that's a compliment, believe it or not.

Another strong track is the overplayed but still fantastic "A Little More Love." A plea to a lover for just a little more committment, I remember as a kid never really knowing whether or not she was singing "Will a little more love make you start depending?" or "Will a little more love make you stop depending?" Well, I guess since ONJ is trying to keep her lover, it's "start." I also really love the song "Talk To Me" which has a funky electric guitar riff in the beginning before settling down into a late 70's pop groove. It contains probably the only reference to "psychiatry" in any song I can think of in the chorus: "You don't need no psychiatry/Come on, baby, you can talk to me/Cuddle up on the couch with me/We can talk all night for free." The best part is how "psychiatry" comes out as "skyiatry."

But the best song on the entire album is the title track. I have probably listened to in hundreds of times in my life and it seriously never gets old. Another funky guitar, another great chorus, and more growled vocals by Livvy. It seriously doesn't get better than this, folks.



A lot of people count the Physical album as the point at which Olivia really left her country audience behind and embraced the pop crossover. While that may be true in some respects (there's still a healthy dose of adult-contemporary/pseudo-country on Totally Hot), this album is really when Livvy broke out of the white-bread image and got down and dirty. Well, as dirty as she could at the time. Plus she didn't have the unfortunate hair cut of the Physical years or the sweatband.

She rode that wave pretty adeptly for several years. It wasn't until 1985 that she really went too far with the whole sexpot thing. The Soul Kiss album can probably be interpreted as her trying to keep up with Madonna, and it ended with People magazine exhorting her to "put her shirt back on." But with Totally Hot, it was kind of like the girl-next-door showing her wild side. And that is sexy.

Goodbye to Sandra Dee, indeed.

(thanks to Lucas for providing the inspiration for this post!)

The limit of our sight

A bit of a new look tonight. Not really new, but it is blue and chilly and very winterlike, no? I also updated the blogroll and alphabetized everybody so no one can accuse me of playing favorites. Of course, Heidi is still at the top of the list because, well, that's just how it is.

Tonight, I had this huge hankering to listen to an album that I have not pulled off the shelf in probably 10 years. It's so strange when things like that happen, and it happens very frequently to me. Perhaps I should think about therapy. Or perhaps it's just an attractive little quirk. I prefer to think that it's the latter.

Anyway, the album in question was Carly Simon's Have You Seen Me Lately? It's from 1990, my first year of college and it was her pop/adult contemporary/soft rock follow-up to Coming Around Again, an album that is widely regarded as her comeback. I run very hot and cold on Carly Simon. She has an aggravatingly uneven track record when it comes to her music. Her albums are either completely aces or complete duds. There really is no in between for me. Coming Around Again falls in the former category, as does Letters Never Sent and Have You Seen Me Lately? Carly Simon albums in the latter category include My Romance, The Bedroom Tapes, and Spoiled Girl (double yuck to that last one.) So I'm hardly a dyed-in-the-wool Carly Simon fan. Mostly, I appreciate her.

But Have You Seen Me Lately? crept back into my consciousness for reasons I can't fully elucidate. I think, for whatever reason, I was thinking of one of my favorite lines in the last song on the album, "We Just Got Here." In the song, Carly writes that "Hugo is twisting his way up the coast." I've always liked the picture that lyric gives me. It calms Hurricane Hugo, which at the time was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Instead of the fury of a category 5 hurricane, I get this image of a slow, almost lazy rotation. Kind of a strange thing to think about when thinking of an album, but what can I say?

Listening to the album now, I really had forgotten how good it was, even though I distinctly recall not liking it as much as I had Coming Around Again when I first got it. I remember my friend Kelly mocking the album cover, teasing me about how Carly had definitely hired a personal trainer (probably true.) It has a very "midlife" vibe to it and considering she was 45 at the time of its release, there is probably some validity to that theory.

There are some really good songs on here, notably "Waiting At The Gate" and "Holding Me Tonight." But the song that really got me tonight was "Life Is Eternal." I remember this being one of those songs that I didn't really get at age 18, but now, at age 35, I am starting to see it. The chorus sums it up.

Life is eternal, love is immortal
And death is only the horizon.
And the horizon is nothing
Save the limit of our sight.

This is something that's important for me to bear in mind, especially in light of the events of the last few days. Not that there have been earthquakes here or anything, but let's just say that I had a figurative wake-up call from the universe today - a few of you know what I'm speaking of. Many would accuse me of reading too much into it, but the universe has odd ways of getting your attention when the conventional ways fail. I'm very fond of wiping the slate clean and starting fresh with a reboot, only to descend back into old patterns 35 years in the making. So tonight is another of those points of reboot. I'm prepared to be back here in a day or a week or a month saying exactly the same thing, but the thing is to keep on getting back on the horse.

This 18 year old Carly Simon album was a perfect companion for this. What an unexpected pleasure.