Album of the Week (full episodes) - Josh Rutner

Episode 14: Career Moves (Loudon Wainwright III, 1993)

Josh Rutner

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“My songs are written to be performed, mostly,” explains Loudon Wainwright III in a 2014 interview. “I mean, I do make records from time to time, but I'm always thinking about if something is gonna work in a show.”

His catalogue is bursting with great songs and his lyrics come to my mind often. It's easy enough to be reminded of Wainwright's material what with the incredibly wide scope of topics he has written about over his long career. On this collection alone—his 1993 live album called Career Moves—he hits on love, sex, divorce, loneliness; swimming, spelling errors, tipping, drugs; Elvis, privilege, touring; unhappy holidays, unhappy birthdays, unhappy anniversaries. And that barely scratches the surface.

Career Moves, which was released to celebrate, as he puts it, “twenty-five years of earning a damn good living on the periphery of the music business,” begins with a driving, nearly manic song about life on the road. Not about some idyllic fantasy road life, but his experience, specifically his experience as an aging performer with a dedicated but modest following.

“Runnin' through airports at 43's OK for OJ but it's not for me, with a hernia, a bad back, and a bum knee and a guitar out on the road…”

He comically compares his humble travel conditions to the lush accommodations and full support staff of people like Willie Nelson, about whom he sing-speaks sarcastically, “well, Willie deserves it, he's a big ol' star!”

But Wainwright plugs away as ever, playing solo shows—occasionally joined by a friend or two, as he is on this record—relying on his wits, his songwriting chops, and his presence of mind on stage to loop into the show any in-the-moment incidents, rather than ignore or repress them.

About three and a half minutes into “Road Ode,” for example, he notices that his frenzied strumming has caused his low E-string to go flat. No matter. He pauses, quickly brings it up to pitch as the audience laughs, and gets on with it, but not before briefly commenting, “It's folk music, ya know, you can do that.” And remember, this track is the lead-off. There's no shying away or attempting to fold it deep into the album. These chance happenings, which, in a studio session, would surely be scrubbed away in post or simply be avoided by picking another take, are the things that seem to sustain Loudon's life on the road, and, it would seem, have from the very start of his career.

While his studio albums are lovely, replete as they are with backing bands and tidy arrangements, it's the live records—spare, mostly just him and his guitar, and his audience—that get me. There are some musicians that are so effective by themselves that adding a full band—no matter how competent the players—can detract and weigh them down.

Wainwright is one of those rare performers who can be completely and convincingly straight-faced and sincere, and then, often within a single song, land perfectly-placed jokes. Like a good eulogy, sincerity and seriousness doesn't preclude humor. See for example, the song Thanksgiving on this record, which presents all those complicated feelings about family re-gatherings later in life. In the midst of such an auspicious meal, he prays to Lord that if argues with a loved one, “please make me the winner”

For a fine example of the reverse—where you are knocked for a loop by the pealing of a serious bell at the end of a humorous, almost throwaway novelty song, check out “Tanya's Twirls”—about Tanya Harding—from his 2003 live album, So Damn Happy.

Loudon explains his combining of the solemn and the silly in an interview, noting that, “if you get people laughing, they're disarmed to a certain degree and they're listening and really engag[ed]… and you can slip one past them too.”

He mines his life, and particularly his family life, for material, but it's complicated, of course. Clearly the familial dysfunction feeds his work—on this album the big family hits are “Five Years Old,” “Your Mother & I,” and “Unhappy Anniversary”—but, by some sort of negative feedback loop, his work, which had for so long provided cover for him to be away from his kids as they grew up, fed the dysfunction, and how. Martha Wainwright, Loudon's youngest daughter with Kate McGarrigle, and a wonderful singer-songwriter herself, would recall him telling her, in her late teenage years, that letting her and her brother Rufus go was necessary in order to “be Loudon Wainwright.” Of course, Martha is more often quoted as saying that Loudon is a man who wrote songs about his children instead of raising them. So there's that.

The album's final arc is made up of four songs of epic proportions, any of which could itself stand as a testament to Wainwright's songwriting prowess: “April Fool's Day Morn,” dedicated to his mother, who was in the crowd during the recording; “The Man Who Couldn't Cry,” which would eventually be covered by Johnny Cash on his 1994 album, American Recordings; “The Acid Song,” about, well, let's say a “group trip”; and finally “Tip That Waitress,” a gentle and sympathetic look at workers the food service industry—a “plea for gratuity,” as he calls it.

Loudon, now nearly 70, is still out on the road and sounds as good as ever. Go and hear him if you can.

He also still makes records from time to time.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 13: The Way Out (The Books, 2010)

Josh Rutner

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Where we perceive a chain of events, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History sees “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The past may be dead, but it’s far from gone, and from the dusty shelves and cement floors of thrift shops and garage sales, forgotten relics scream to be rediscovered.

Paul De Jong and Nick Zammuto, collectively known as The Books, wade through that incomprehensibly large pile of history, and pull flotsam from the pile in the form of recordings-on-the-margin—and the margins of history are wide indeed—building a library of sounds to-be—or not-to-be—incorporated, as-is or in manipulated form, into the collages they create, in an effort to move the culture forward by shuffling the past.

 "Your being merges with the garbage / and you become one with it."

If the idea of listening to “sample-based music” seems beyond you—that there’s no way you could hang with it—consider for a moment the ease with which you might listen to and enjoy the soundtrack to old Warner Brothers cartoons, with all their swirling tempos and crammed-together genres and ridiculous musical quotations and such. String orchestras mingle with ratchets, kazoos, and whiz-whistles. It’s more avant garde than you think, but so long as we tie it to the visual, it goes down smooth. A spoonful of sugar, and all that. It’s a gentle mental hop from that music to the music on The Way Out, the fourth and final recording by The Books, released in 2010. Call it “a soundtrack for a film that doesn’t exist.”

What differentiates the music of The Books from cartoon music, however (besides the lack of visuals and the preponderance of self-help and meditation samples), is that the layering is horizontal rather than vertical. Whereas the soundtrack of a Bugs Bunny short cuts speedily from genre-to-genre, tempo-to-tempo, and key to shining key, The Books’ tracks tends to be grounded with a pulse—a consistent groove, often laid down by Zammuto—upon and against which the fluttering, unexpected rhythms of spoken word and other recorded b-roll can float or sting.

You may never know what's coming next in the stream of samples, but you can at least file away each moment as having either played along with, played against, or completely ignored, the pulse.

It's appropriate that the 22-second track entitled “A Wonderful Phrase By Gandhi,” which contains an unadorned recording of—you guessed it—a wonderful phrase by Gandhi, references "a living power," underlying the constant change in the world, that "is changeless; that holds all together." Life's powerful pulse.

There's also an element of the uncanny in The Way Out, and a fine line is repeated crossed between the disturbing and the hilarious—the frightening and the invigorating. The two tracks that most clearly bob about that line are “A Cold Freezin' Night,” which uses as its main sampled material recordings taken from Tiger Talkboys—those early 90s handheld variable-speed cassette players-slash-recorders, and “Thirty Incoming,” which samples messages pulled from a single, anonymous answering-machine tape found in a thrift store. Both tracks are eerie and voyeuristic, but they are also endearing and sympathetic.

Unlike today, where social media—that worldwide depository for The Personal—soaks up and sends out our selfles as quickly as we create them, the time of the Talkboy localized creative output to one's house, or neighborhood: you wanna share the cool noises you made? Invite your friends over.

It's amazing how listening with open ears to an album like this, so full of disparate elements that melt into each other and challenge your brain to make everything fit under the rubric of "music," can, in a way, train you to notice, say, the way a honking horn or screaming toddler or construction noise can interact with and even add value to the Music-with-a-capital-M you might be listening to in your headphones, walking down the street. And, in an ideal world, it might even open you up to hearing, for example, how the interaction of your whirring and clacking washing machine with your partner's incessant mindless tapping, too, can be musical, and therefore interesting, rather than boring or bothersome.

Our backs may be turned to the skyward-growing debris pile of history, but albums like The Way Out, which challenge us to dip into that past and use scraps to shape our future: that's some sort of progress worth turning around for.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 12: Takin' My Time (Bonnie Raitt, 1973)

Josh Rutner

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It's true, Bonnie Raitt has written and recorded her own songs, but her strength lies more in the her work as an interpreter and a guitarist. On her third solo record, Takin’ My Time, released in 1973, we are treated to a diverse collection of covers, each included, she says, because they say exactly what she feels.

“Let Me In,” the roisterous third track on the album, and a hit for the Sensations in 1962, begins with sounds of the recording studio, and then rips into its oom-pa two-beat with the residual sounds of laughter and merriment hanging on through the first verse. The sturdy tuba work from bassist Freebo, the contrapuntal horn improvisations, and the overdubbed “wee-oo” backing vocals help to sustain that party-you-want-to-be-a-part-of feel to the end.

“Wah She Go Do,” composed and performed originally by Calypso Rose on her album Splish Splash, is a strong, pro-woman, even feminist Calypso statement that stands in sharp contrast to the male-dominated Calypso scene of her time, in which songs so often objectified, degraded, and denigrated women in their lyrics. In this song, the female narrator sings about wives and their husbands who mistreat them, prescribing the having of an “outside man,” or, hell, two, as a way of getting respect. The song was surely presented to Raitt by Van Dyke Parks, who, in addition to adapting the arrangement, playing piano, and singing backup on her version, is also credited for “inspiration” on the track.

The injunction to women to stand up for themselves found in “Wa She Go Do” is also reflected, if less prescriptively, in the album’s opening track, a cover of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ 1965 hit, “You’ve Been in Love Too Long.” The final verse tells us, “When his wrong looks right, though he always treats you bad / You find little excuses for all the sadness and abuses.”

It’s unfortunate that there’s not more guitar playing from Raitt on the record, but she does show off her solid bottleneck technique on the medley of two tunes by her mentor, Mississippi Fred McDowell, “Write me a Few of Your Lines” and “Kokomo Blues,” which took the place on the record of the duet with McDowell that never came to be.

The album ends gloomily but stunningly with “Guilty,” a song by Randy Newman that Raitt had heard in producer Michael Cuscuna’s apartment before Newman had officially recorded it. It is, as many Newman tunes can be, brutal, yet laid over an almost “You know I just can't stand myself / It takes a whole lot of medicine / For me to pretend to be somebody else.” 

As Raitt would say, introducing this song at a show performed in New York City shortly after the Takin' My Time sessions, “If you don’t think this is the blues, I don’t know why you’re here.” 

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 11 (a very special accidental reprise of Ep. 2!): Face Value (Phil Collins, 1981)

Josh Rutner

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Face Value, Phil Collins’ 1981 debut solo album, opens, improbably, with an epic, five minute and thirty-six second “In the Air Tonight.” You wait patiently, to the point where most pop songs would already have ended, for a “drop,” as it were. At three minutes in, you are briefly smacked over the head with “well I remember” to remind you to stick with him here. This thing is gonna pay off. And 40 seconds later, you hear it: that elegantly simple drum fill that left impressions—via number-two pencils cum drum sticks—on the car seats in front of countless kids growing up in the ’80s.

Once the peak is reached, it hangs there for a bit, and then, slowly, the knobs turn toward zero: nearly a full minute of fade-out.

Collins by this time had already toured the world many times over and made a name for himself as the drummer and later lead vocalist of Genesis. By 1979, he was talking publicly about making a stylistically-varied solo record that could contain long stretches of “mood.” But it wasn’t until he experienced a “personal tidal wave,” in the form of a divorce, that he took some time away from Genesis, holed up in his house, and wrote and recorded the tracks that would become the basis of Face Value.

After the coolly restrained, metronomic drum machine accompaniment of the opening song, a well-warranted organicism and punch is introduced, bolstered by Alphonso Johnson on bass, who makes the next two tracks: the gently off-kilter “This Must Be Love,” and the borrowed Genesis gem, “Behind the Lines,” which Collins speeds up 30% from the original and boosts into overdrive with the addition of the EWF Horns.

The pair of tunes that follows, acting more as story and epilogue than two separate songs, introduce the theatrical into Face Value. "The Roof is Leaking" fades in with crickets that remain in the background throughout the song as sonic scenery, supporting the tale of a poor and desperate family battling the cold winter and holding out for spring. The opening musical figure of "The Roof is Leaking," played by Eric Clapton's slide guitar, becomes the basis of "Droned,” the wordless, Indian-influenced tune that follows.

Track 6, “Hand in Hand,” brings the drum machine back into play, at first undergirding the children's choir, bass, drums, and horns, but gives way as the tune becomes an all-stops-pulled showcase for Collins' drum set and the EWF horns, foregrounding what might normally have been supportive rhythmic horn lines.

In a 1981 interview, Collins described “Hand in Hand” as “basically like ‘Who Dat Man?’,” the lively if ultimately problematic Marx Brothers song from their 1937 film, A Day at the Races, which sees Harpo, as Gabriel, skipping through a town and attracting—Pied Piper-like—a crowd of kids that builds behind him as he blows his penny whistle. It's less a musical comparison than a conceptual one: "Innocence and children,” says Collins, bluntly. (Incidentally, his boosterism for the Marx Brothers continued the following year in a much more overt fashion when he released his second album, entitled "Hello, I Must Be Going!")

The album’s most vulnerable and barebones statement is the brief "You Know What I Mean," with Collins on voice and piano accompanied beautifully by strings. The lyrics tell of a brokenhearted man imploring his ex-lover not to re-enter his life, to leave him alone so he can put the pieces of himself back together—a clear allusion to Collins’ divorce. One can hear this song, perhaps, as a prologue and companion to his mega-hit to come, "Against All Odds," which would be released three years later and would present an alternate version of dealing with love lost.

Overall the album covers a ton of ground—which is not totally unexpected for an initial solo release, where an artist wants to show off all sides of themselves—but it is masterfully sequenced, guiding the listener through multi-song arcs, often assisted by cross-fades to further the notion of continuity.

The final track, The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," is the album's only cover (not counting the Genesis tune, of course)—actually, if you want to get technical, the final 30 seconds of the album, as a treat for those who stick around for the ends of fades, has Collins singing the first stanza of Harold Arlen’s "Over the Rainbow" a cappella... But, to the Beatles:—It was not intended as an homage to John Lennon, who was shot dead in front of his apartment building just two months before Face Value's release. The track was recorded, mixed, and in the can over a year before that. So why a Beatles tune? “It’s basically a nudge in the ribs," Collins would explain, "saying, If you think this is nice, go back to the original, listen to that, because, you know, you missed this 20 years ago.”

Well, in case you guys missed Face Value 34 years ago, consider your ribs nudged.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.  

Episode 10: Thrill of the Arts (Vulfpeck, 2015)

Josh Rutner

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There are moments of resonance that you sense listening to Vulfpeck. Feelings of familiarity that invite you to relax, knowing you're in good hands. To call them cliches might be misleading, yet there’s a reason that cliches are cliches. Sometimes they just sound so damn satisfying, you're best to leave them alone. Vulfpeck places you right smack dab in the middle of head-bobbing territory and sprinkles just enough micro-subversions throughout—not to knock you off balance, but to get your body rocking. 

After a run of five six-track EPs, Vulfpeck's 2015 release, Thrill of the Arts, appears as a glorious full-length offering, both establishing and expanding the group's aesthetic, pulling into the Vulf-fold featured singers who blend seamlessly into the backing-band foundation. This is feel-good funk. Sweet funk. Call it “The Gospel of ‘I Want You Back,’” that Jackson 5 song that holds so many secrets to creating grin-inducing music.

What separates Vulfpeck from other modem funk bands who, like them, who have studied tradition to the point where novelty and preciousness recede into a background of earnestness and joy, is their injection of humor and the absurd. Hilarious post-production overlays duck in and crack you up—and while you might think such “interruptions” would take you out of the groove, nope: the levity only opens you up to more of the good stuff. Basketball net-swooshing, dog-barkings, a chipmonk’d backing choir—bring it on. Even the most outlandishtrack of all—a comically absurdguided meditation—can actually relax you. It’s this marriage of craft with wild irreverence that makes these tracks pop. It’s actually surprising we don’t see this type of thing more often. In the words of Dutch pianist Misha Mengleberg, “People go pissing one moment and have deep philosophical thoughts the next. Or maybe both at the same time.”

The third track, for example, “Funky Duck,” provides a thumbnail sketch of a contemporary on-the-scene uber-hipster. He’s a sort of modern-day Killer Joe, only instead of playing the horses, jingling coinage, and wearing neatly-pressed double-breasted form-fitted pin-striped suits, the Funky Duck is a self-aware, Ovaltine-drinking, and funky—oh so funky—duck. The vocals, by past Vulf-collaborator Antwaun Stanley, are powerful and confident, and includes a hook that is so catchy, but, as Vulfpeck leader and multi-instrumentalist Jack Stratton says, “you can't sing—it's too difficult.” There is the slightest whisper of parody, but it's so well crafted and presented with such sincerity and respect, that it's no joke. It takes a deep seriousness to be this hilarious, and a ton of work to appear so effortless.

Another vocal track, “Game Winner,” featuring Charles Jones, takes seriously the idea of underpinning a love song with a sports metaphor. There is no wink to the microphone, and that's what makes it so wonderful. Clear overtones of groups like the Delfonics can be heard in the arrangement, mingling with melodies plucked from ’80s and early-’90s R&B to create a track that is, well, you know, a slam dunk. 

Without a doubt, there is a relaxed, live vibe to Vulfpeck's tracks, but a clear-headed compositional concision reigns. As a band that functions without a singer most of the time, it's an important skill. The danger of instrumental overindulgence is always lurking. So they get in, kill it, and get the hell outta there. Thank you masked man.

The playing is top-notch, the performances are great, the lyrics are strong; but beyond all that, the music sounds so good. Stratton, who mixes all of Vulfpeck's tracks (in addition to creating and editing their videos, and handling all of the business aspects) brings an understanding of production that puts to shame many of the waveform-gobbling, compressed-to-death pop music you might hear on whatever today's equivalent of radio is. In fact, Stratton even co-created a real-live compressor plugin—called the Vulf Compressor, of course—that sounds as good as any on the market today.

If you’ve ever seen a Vulfpeck video on Youtube, you’ll have heard, in its introductory seconds, a brief harmonic progression that seems to contain within it the whole Vulf universe. It’s hard to explain, but it functions as an audio calling card or logotype. You can hear it evoked in three different places on this album: at the start of the supremely listenable Christmas tune, “Christmas in LA,” during the aforementioned guided meditation track, and at the very end of the album opener, “Welcome to Vulf Records,” which acts, like all great overtures should, to survey the whole plot of land and plant seeds of what's to come. I get excited every time I hear that progression, and I can’t wait to hear it more and more as Vulfpeck progresses.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

 

Episode 9: Love is Overtaking Me (Arthur Russell, 2008)

Josh Rutner

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In May of this year, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts announced it had acquired the archives of Arthur Russell, that shy but insistent and ever-prolific composer-singer-cellist-producer who helped shape the New York downtown scene in the 1970s, in part through his work as the Musical Director of The Kitchen, pulling together into one venue so-called minimalist music, New Wave, folk, and avant garde multi-media performances—along with more unclassifiable things.

Russell himself was a musical polyglot, contributing discretely—and, often, discreetly—to, among others, the avant-garde, new wave, and disco scenes. The Russell archives include, according to the NYTimes’ Ben Ratliff, “a thousand-or-so reels, cassettes, DATs, Beta, and VHS tapes with hundreds of hours of unreleased and probably unreleasable material, representing how Russell made his work.” Such an archive, made public, is a huge boon for fans of Russell, who was process-obsessed and always on the hunt for new sounds. There will be much to wade through.

Since 2004, the record label called Audika Records has been working with Tom Lee, Russell’s long-time partner and the executor of his estate, to lovingly pore over those hundreds of hours of material to curate compilation albums that help bring to light the breadth of Russell’s work. Unlike Franz Kafka or Virgil, who coyly requested of others that their manuscripts be burned upon their death—and, the fact that they didn’t just quietly toss them into a fire themselves speaks to the reluctant wink that might’ve accompanied such requests—Russell did no such thing, reveling as he did in the open and and the unfinished form. In fact, according to Lee, much of the material left behind consists of songs that Russell wanted to release, “but nobody would put ‘em out.”

This week we focus on the 2008 Audika compilation called Love is Overtaking Me, a bringing-together of some of Russell’s more straight-forward song forms recorded in the long stretch between 1974 and 1990, up to two years before his death. It’s a twenty-one-track journey through homemade demos and fully-produced, full-band studio efforts. The stetson that the Iowa-native wears on the cover photograph—arms crossed, three-quarter profile in front of a field—foreshadows the touch of country that seeps into and out of some tunes. The most obvious is the cowboy-campfire waltz that opens the album, “Close My Eyes.” The song that follows, an actual, traditional cowboy song, “Goodbye Old Paint”—Old Paint being the name of a horse—might very well have been too on the nose, but Russell’s arrangement throws one for a proper loop with its Indian tambura drone and trotting tabla, and its clarinet, flute, and strings leaning heavier on raga than lasso.

The accessibility of the grooves and genre-work on this collection has been given the hairy eyeball by some critics who privilege Russell’s more “penetrating and demanding” work, but the privileging itself is antithetical to Russell's flat-and-wide, horizontally-interconnected underground networks approach. Indeed, if anything, it would be accessibility that was to be privileged in Russell’s work. He aimed to liquefy raw material to where concert music and popular song can criss cross. “In bubble-gum music the notion of pure sound is not a philosophy but rather a reality,” he said in a 1977 interview. “In this respect, bubble-gum preceded the avant garde.”

The tenth track, “Eli,” a economical-and-sweet vignette about—on the surface at least—an underappreciated dog, is the only track on the compilation that foregrounds Russell’s cello. Unlike much of his cello-and-voice work, this brief song employs no echo effects. In the 2008 documentary Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, we get to see and hear grainy footage of Russell performing “Eli,” alone with his cello in a modest venue on a wooden chair, drawing with his bowed double-stops the “ee” and “eye” vowel-sounds of the dog’s name as he sings it. It’s really something else.

A favorite of mine on the album is “Janine,” a moebius-strip of a form, half-twisted and eating its tail, in a small-scale way implementing his idea of creating musical structures that would allow listeners to “plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential.” The form cycles around and around but its asymmetry breathes life into each go-round.

Two years before writer Tim Lawrence published his biography of Russell entitled Hold On To Your Dreams, he published a really great monograph in the performance studies journal Liminalitites, called "Connecting with the Cosmic: Arthur Russell, Rhizomatic Musicianship, and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–92." In it, he outlines concept of such rhizomatic musicianship, that is, musicianship that “moves repeatedly toward making lateral, non-hierarchical sounds and connections.” Lawrence quotes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1980 book, A Thousand Plateaus, which establishes a context for his rhizome riffing. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines,” they wrote. “The fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction ‘and… and… and…’”

With the wide-ranging Audika compilations already available and, soon—perhaps in a year, says the NYPL—the freshly-digitized audio from the Russell archives made available for online streaming, we have before us a beautiful opportunity to find our own paths through Russell’s “ever-anding,” and, to be inspired to “and” ourselves, again and again and again.

I’m Josh Rutner, and, that’s your album of the week.

Episode 8: There's No Place Like America Today (Curtis Mayfield, 1975)

Josh Rutner

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Curtis Mayfield's 1975 album, There’s No Place Like America Today, opens with “Billy Jack,” a song depressingly au courant in its subject matter, detailing as it does the almost matter-of-fact gunning down of a black man. "Don't get me wrong, the man is gone," we hear Mayfield sing plaintively, "but it's a wonder he lived this long."

Hard times indeed.

Mayfield details the harsh inequities of American life through funky melancholy. "Seasons Change," which follows "Billy Jack," and begins with nearly 20 seconds of a lone, funereal church bell, bespeaks the arrival of political and social winter that brings with it "scars that scare you to remember" and asks how anyone can survive, so weak and vulnerable, in such conditions. The message he advances here, and throughout the album, is to take strength and comfort in yourself; look inward, "'cause the world is cold and everybody's bold, and there's no one else."

The spare production and understated arrangements, like Mayfield's airy falsetto delivery itself, are deceptive. There are multitudes contained within these album walls and relistens reveal and reward. “I try to choose a lyric that is understood by all," Mayfield said, "but hip enough for those who want to get into something a little deeper.”

The album's cover art depicts, in muted colors, a line of individuals on a city sidewalk, each wearing a heavy coat and most toting bag, basket, or bucket, presumably in line for a handout. All of them are black.

The picture’s resonance is fully felt when one takes in the ironically situated, massive, full-color billboard directly behind the line of people, proclaiming, in an exuberant brush script font, the album’s title, “There’s No Place Like America Today,” accompanied by an image of a smiling and self-satisfied white family riding along in their shiny blue car.

The painted image was adapted from a near identical Margaret Bourke-White photograph taken in 1937 in Kentucky, in the aftermath of the Great Ohio River Flood.

Bourke-White would later say, "Sometimes I come away from what I am photographing sick at heart, with the faces of people in pain etched as sharply in my mind as my negatives. But I go back because I feel it is my place to make such pictures. Utter truth is essential, and that is what stirs me when I look through the camera."

Viewed without its original context, in 1975, this album's cover art told a contemporary tale of two cities that was pithy, clear-eyed and, in the end, one that was just as utterly true as Bourke-White's original photograph, taken nearly four decade earlier. So too is Curtis Mayfield's music eerily current and true 40 years after its release, easily mapped onto America Today.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

Episode 7: Bright Sunny South (Sam Amidon, 2013)

Josh Rutner

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There’s something about the directness of Irish folk songs that appeals to me—not just the straightforward, vibrato-less vocal tone, but the matter-of-fact and deadpan presentation with which you might hear someone sing about, say, a man about to be hanged, or threats to break legs or cut off heads. A mouth of ivy, a heart of holly... and beat not around that green green bush.

While the dark lyrical content on Sam Amidon’s Bright Sunny South stops short of broken limbs and beheadings—well, there is a gallows theme in the song “Streets of Derry,” though, and spoiler alert for “Streets of Derry,” bucking tradition, it actually turns out just fine—anyway, while the lyrics herein don’t overly dark, that spare, unadorned vocal style I love so much is alive and well in Amidon.

You can hear it in the title track, a tale of a young man heading off to war, musket shoulder'd and sword belt'd, bidding farewell to his family and imploring them not to weep. All sentimentality is boiled off and just the sentiment remains. The poetry of the lines, sung well and plain, gives you everything you need and more.

He’s singing with an “inside voice,” so to speak, not just in the sense of quietude and gentleness, but in the sense of an avowed interiority. Where Amidon breaks from this mode most fully on the album—busting out his wailing “outside voice”—is, appropriately enough, on the song “As I Roved Out,” played here in duo with drummer Chris Vatalaro.

Presentation aside, this song too is not without its own share of interiority, telling the story of a brokenhearted man who happens to spy the girl who did the breaking, and then wallows in his sadness, wishing to the Lord that he'd never been born. Sure, the trampled grass will rise and bloom again, he thinks to himself. But love? It’s a killing thing. “Did you ever feel such pain?” The end.

Amidon is serious about tradition, and he has a great handle on digging up and interpreting old tunes, but he is quick to shake off any notion of being a folk purist, peppering the slew of reworked traditional tunes on this album with a pair of what you might gingerly call “modern folk melodies” by Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw.

In the album's notes, Amidon calls Bright Sunny South a sculpture garden of personal relics that he's collected over the years. I encourage you to stroll around the grounds and enjoy. There are, within this record, more gems than you can shake a shillelagh at.

I’m Josh Rutner, and that’s your album of the week.

Episode 6: At Newport (Reverend Gary Davis, 1967)

Josh Rutner

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The 1965 Newport Folk Festival was the site of Bob Dylan’s fabled performance that ruptured the folk scene—so the story goes—with his newfangled electric guitars and such. But there was another performer playing the festival that selfsame summer day who, uncontroversially and drawing no ire—just doing his thing—completely tore the walls down: a fiery-fingered guitarist and singer whom Dylan himself, not four years earlier, had daydreamed was the ideal person to preside over his wedding ceremony should he marry—a nearly seventy year old blind Baptist minister by the name of Reverend Gary Davis.

At the time of this performance, released originally in 1967 as At Newport and re-released with two bonus tracks in 2001, Davis had only recently been introduced to wider American audiences, swept up to record starting in the mid '50s by the waves of folk revivalism after two decades living in virtual obscurity in Harlem, busking on the streets and preaching to storefront congregations; honing his powerful voice and sharpening his prodigious picking style.

At Newport opens with a thunderous, thundering rendition of "Samson and Delilah," one of his best-known songs—one he’d at least partially learned from a 1927 Blind Willie Johnson 78. As with many of Davis’ versions of older songs, though, his joyful guitar arrangements popped with an unmatched bounce and vitality.

The fourth track on the album, "Twelve Sticks," also lengthily known as "The Boy Was Kissing the Girl (And Playing Guitar at the Same Time)," here played on a 12-string, was another staple in Davis’ repertoire, aimed not only at showing off his ridiculous time and harmonic sense, but also his signature move of tapping out tunes with just his left hand while his right beat out rhythms on the body of the guitar, or, as the alternate title suggests, while his right arm wrapped around the body of a girl, as her mother’s head was turned away.

Throughout the album, Davis accompanies himself in a way that is unbelievably fresh and powerful, even 50 years later, commenting on his vocal with buoyant, complementary, and often complex counter-lines, sometimes providing, with thumb and forefinger alone, such a full background that you’d swear—as he did, when he first heard the sound of a guitar as small child—there was a full band by his side.

On the track “I’ve Done All My Singing For My Lord,” Davis accompanies himself masterfully with harmonica and stomping foot, pulling out of thin air a deeper-than-you-can-imagine zydeco groove as he damn-near overpowers the close microphone, shouting through false teeth real truth about dedicating his life to his god.

I leave you with one of my favorite tracks on the record, an instrumental called “Buck Dance” —“a tune he’d play when he wanted soup,” recalled a former student—which leaves *me* grinning like an idiot every time I hear it.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.

 

Episode 5: Emergency Ward! (Nina Simone, 1972)

Josh Rutner

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It’s 1971 at the Fort Dix army base. The impassioned crowd has grown impatient, and who could blame them?  

“We want Nina! We want Nina!,” they chant.

“Nobody has taught us any patience,” Nina Simone laments in song, 6 minutes and 45 seconds into her nearly 19-minute cover version of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord." But of course by this moment, in this room there is nothing but patience: all within earshot hang on her words, and she leads by example, taking her sweet time.

Both the audience and the inhabitants of the crowded stage—packed with members from the Bethany Baptist Church Junior Choir of South Jamaica, New York—are dead silent, thrilling to Simone's sublime piano and improvised interleaving of themes from both "My Sweet Lord" and the David Nelson poem "Today is a Killer” before she brings the band and choir back for another round.

In a lovely bit of text-painting, each time the lyric "but it takes so long" is sung, the groove is suspended, the choir holds, and all wait—longer than you'd think—until, when she’s ready, Simone cues everyone in again with “my lord”—BAM.

Patience, patience, patience.

Simone had been including cover songs on her recordings from the beginning—her first hit being a version of George Gershwin's "I Loves You Porgy" in 1958. On the nine records she made for RCA between 1967 and 1974—with this album, Emergency Ward!, being the penultimate—one finds an astonishing breadth of covers, including many songs by her contemporaries. Along with Bob Dylan—four of whose tunes she'd released between 1969 and 1971—George Harrison was a main wellspring of material for her in the early 1970s. Two of his songs appeared on Emergency Ward! alone, and his Beatles hit "Here Comes the Sun," was the title track on her previous record.  

Harrison's original version of "My Sweet Lord" featured the "Hare Krishna" mantra alongside the gospel-y "hallelujahs." The “Hare” of the chant, according to one interpretation, represents an alternate name of Vishnu, translated as "he who removes illusion."

In Simone's covers of pop songs, on this record and elsewhere, she has a fourth-wall-breaking penchant for disabusing songs of their illusions, often by interjecting allusions to her own feelings about the words. In the third and final track on the original pressing of Emergency Ward!—a quiet but fiery version of Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity"—she approaches Harrison’s lyric "and because of all their tears their eyes can't hope to see the beauty that surrounds them." But Simone turns the "theirs" into "ours" before interrupting herself to sing "though I don't think it's applicable to me." Then she does it again the second time around, adding, "that's not quite true." Hell, even her subconscious can't contain itself, slipping up and redirecting as she sings: "Because we cried so much our eyes can–can't hope to see." 

She also appends Harrison’s “we’re all the same” with “we’re all guilty.”

In "Let It Be Me,” the bonus track that concludes the re-released album Simone and her brother Sam Waymon sing together, "Say that you love me only," after which she comments, "not quite, but almost."

Simone takes the songs she loves and tells her truth with them by folding their lyrics back on themselves, and by considering those lyrics in the moment to ensure that what she is singing is the truth, however much it might complicate or contradict the intended meaning of the song. 

Back at Fort Dix, the second of the three break-downs within the "My Sweet Lord"/”Today is a Killer” medley provides a space for a more substantial reading of the poem, with all its talk of the grimy realities of the day. The combination of these two pieces itself draws back the veil of pop sentimentality. By nesting  the gritty poem within the frame of "My Sweet Lord," written as it was with the gospel gem "Oh Happy Day" as its inspirational foundation, Simone doubles down on the idea that the Lord is refusing to show his face to those in need, and, like it or not, it's gonna be a while before he does.

This idea is played out most clearly in the final moments, which find Simone wailing "WHO ARE YOU LORD? YOU… ARE A KILLER," followed immediately by the choir's full-throated interjection of "Hallelujah!." The tag is powerful and glorious enough as it is, but, as it turns out, they were holding back. Thank patience you held out, because suddenly you're lifted to the heavens when the rest of the choir joins in for a final iteration of the chord.

Do yourself a favor and exercise the patience Simone claimed was so lacking—even back in the 1970s—and go listen to Emergency Ward! in its entirety. Then go on and check out the rest of Nina Simone’s catalog. 

It'd be a pity not to.

I'm Josh Rutner, and that's your album of the week.