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- The Retrographer, Issue 59 (November, 2 0 1 9)
The Retrographer, Issue 59 (November, 2 0 1 9)
FKA Twigs, Clams Casino, Earl Sweatshirt, Liv.E, Caroline Polachek, Dua Lipa, Davido, The Highwomen, Destroyer, Wiki, 75 Dollar Bill, Frank Sinatra
The Retrographer, Issue 59
Bulletins
I had the pleasure of hearing an incredible group called the Carpenter Ants cover Little Willie Eason’s remembrance of FDR. Here’s the song and its story.
Tim Good shared this video of some of Ry Cooder’s best slide work (there’s a lot to pick from)
Bruce playing “Thunder Road” at the Stony Pony back in Asbury Park
Did you know Jon Brion had a variety show? Here he is accompanying Elliott Smith with the help of Brad Mehldau
“sad day”, FKA Twigs (Spotify / YouTube) – Twigs’ stately, yet unearthly voice refracts at this song’s crescendo: “You're running, ad I tried to make it work before. You're running, I made you sad before.” But her contrition is a wish, just like the wish she hopes her lover makes to bring her back. “It’s a sad day, for sure.”
“Moon Trip Radio”, Clams Casino (Spotify / YouTube) – Clams’ bordering between trap and ambient took on a distinctive hue: Purple. Here, he tips fully into the cloud, barely leaving a ripple of hip-hop in his wake.
“MTOMB” Earl Sweatshirt, Liv.E (Spotify / YouTube) – Thebe, like DOOM, can tell the whole story in less than 90 seconds, over a beat you wish would play forever. And he cuts deep, the dark cloud following him as always: “The socialite reformed, alone every night / Post-performance, dizzy in the corner, boy, it wasn't nice.”
“Pang”, Caroline Polachek (Spotify / YouTube) – Polachek has a powerful instrument in her voice, and over time she has found ways to crack through its porcelain perfection to show the desire and humanity beneath. This song builds over mounting drums and explosive hits: “It's a beautiful knife cutting right where the fear should be.”
“Don’t Start Now”, Dua Lipa (Spotify / YouTube) – A bassline that reminds me of Cerrone’s inimitable remix of HAIM’s “If I Could Change Your Mind”. Except this is it, the primary source material. It’s a brutal fuck-off: “Though it took some time to survive you, I'm better on the other side.”
“Intro”, Davido (Spotify / YouTube) – A simple start to a joyous album, starting out like something that could happen in a rehearsal room: Percussion, a couple guitars, some synth pads. “I am a shooting star, I’m a blockbuster; I am a young stoner, freedom fighter.” Davido is a lot, but he’s a lot to love, too.
“Redesigning Women”, The Highwomen (Spotify / YouTube) – The least-known name among this supergroup – that includes Brandi Carlile, Maren Morris, and Amanda Shires – is Natalie Hemby, one of the great unsung singers country music has to offer. Her voice, the warmest here, rises out among her illustrious peers on this proud, cheeky ode.
“It Just Doesn’t Happen”, Destroyer (Spotify / YouTube) – Maybe it is his weird, pseudo-British diction; or maybe the filmic focus he puts on his subjects; Or maybe the genteel drama of his subjects. Dan Bejar conjures exciting mystery anywhere he brings Destroyer. “I find the silence unbearable. What does that say about the silence?”
“The Routine”, Wiki (Spotify / YouTube) – Patrick Morales has changed a lot since RATKING, or even his 2017 No Mountains in Manhattan. He feels older now: “Old head wanna be a young cat / This the city that we live in / I just wanna kick some wisdom to the kids that's finna run that / Time passed, time that you'll never find back / Trust that, settle for the fun past, fuck that.”
“Every Last Coffee or Tea”, 75 Dollar Bill (Spotify / YouTube) – Droning, like West African blues, Indian raga, San Franciscan psych… yet Sasha Frere-Jones said the music guitarist Che Chen and drummer Rick Brown play is jazz. Their music seems to ask, “What difference does it make?”
One Album for November, 2 0 1 9
Inveterate playboy Frank Sinatra had fallen in love. His wife Ava Gardner was in Spain, in love with a bullfighter. She was leaving him. The Hobokener was in L.A.; Gardner would soon decamp to Nevada to satisfy the conditions of their divorce. Romantic, volatile, gallant, cruel, Sinatra now fell into a state he was familiar with: darkness.
Darkness shadowed his resurgence. For years, Sinatra had fallen out of fashion: He was playing clubs less than half-filled; His records weren’t selling; He was dropped from his label, Columbia. Industry kingmakers declared him unrevivable. Little did they know how much further gone Sinatra was. In November, 1951 he attempted to kill himself in his friend Jimmy Van Heusen’s apartment.
The stuff of legend now is how Frank Sinatra saved himself. His depiction of Private Angelo Maggio in the film adaptation of From Here to Eternity reignited public adoration. Suddenly, he was overwhelmed by offers, in TV, film, and music. But what difference did it make? Gardener was leaving.
“She would be his muse for years after they broke up,” Sinatra’s biographer James Kaplan wrote. “Ava taught him how to sing a torch song.” Time had taught him, too. His voice and face were beginning to wizen. The consummate interpreter of the American songbook, Frank Sinatra was evoking elemental pain and loss from songs, beyond where many able voices had carried them.
Pieces seemed to be falling into place and falling apart at the same time. Sinatra’s working relationship with arranger Nelson Riddle and pianist Bill Miller freed him to work on classic material with minimal orchestration. New technology allowed for the creation of a 12-inch record, which could fit almost an hour of music on a single disc. 16 songs, uninterrupted but by one record flip; There hadn’t been anything like it before.
When he convened sessions for his next album in February, 1955, Frank Sinatra brought a novel idea, literally: A concept album. Preceding album formats didn’t provide for an extended mood like the new 12-inches did. Rarely, too, had an artist entered the studio with such popular momentum. And certainly few brought the interpretive clarity, honed instrument, and sustained pain that Sinatra did to his next album, In The Wee Small Hours.
Sinatra straddled the dichotomy of his career resurgence and his romantic dissolution across the most brilliant material of his career. His albums alternated between these modalities: When high, he made carefree, youthful albums like Songs for Swingin’ Lovers and Come Fly With Me; When low, he became what Kaplan called “the middle-of-the-night Sinatra” on albums like In The Wee Small Hours and Only The Lonely. Both valences held deep truths about romance, whether cast in the light of day or of the moon.
Sinatra opens the album with its namesake, “In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning,” a serenade to himself. It is lean, quiet, and intimate, Sinatra’s voice only rising as its emotion becomes inevitable. Its thought completes: “... that’s the time you miss her most of all”.
The inky blot of an opening song swells and billows throughout the album, slumping rakishly to its next song “Mood Indigo” (“There’s nobody that cares about me”). His inimitable rendition of “When Your Lover Has Gone” describes his parting with Gardner diaristically: “What good is the scheming – the planning and dreaming – that comes with each new love affair? The love that you cherish, so often may perish and leave you with castles in air.” In The Wee Small Hours’ magic is how it stages those lowest moments without seeming sad-sack. Or, maybe more accurately, it finds the integrity and elegance of the miserable and heartbroken. The navel-gazing, the liquor-nursing; It has the comfort of a bartender or a journal. “When you’re alone, who cares for starlit skies?” Sinatra asks. “When you’re alone, magic moonlight dies.”
Sinatra understood the new album format to be a vessel for a mood, a story, a character, in no small part because he had taken to movies as he had. He set scenes: “I dim all the lights and I sink in my chair. The smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air. The walls of my room fade away in the blue and I am deep in a dream of you.” In delivering melody and lyrics from the likes of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Yip Harburg, Sinatra’s music is almost diegetic. If it weren’t sung, it would be easy to imagine it spoken aloud to an empty apartment: “What's in store? Should I phone once more? No, it's best that I stick to my tune.”
One of Sinatra’s greatest tricks was convincing the listeners he wasn’t the dog he really was. Or, rather, framing his philandering and chicanery as something desperate, authentic, even romantic. The revelations of In The Wee Small Hours are that the scoundrel is complex, pained, vulnerable. He’s got his own story.
Sinatra’s mood swings – and they did swing – yielded revelations and truths at both diametrices. Their contradictions make them that much more believable. “At break of dawn, there is no sunrise when your lover has gone,” he sings, as if he hadn’t released an album called Swing Easy! less than a year prior. He was him in both embodiments. If their differences seem irreconcilable, well, that was the story, wasn’t it?
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#59 November, 2019 | Frank Sinatra, “In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning”
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#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
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