The Retrographer, Issue 80 (July, 2 0 2 1)

August 15, 2021

Amen Dunes, Sleaford Mods, Hovvdy, The War On Drugs, Carmen Q. Rothwell, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, GabrielBernini, Gruff Rhys, Lil Nas X, Jack Harlow, Azealia Banks, Billie Eilish, Allen Toussaint, and more!

The Retrographer, Issue 80

Bulletins

Ten Songs for July, 2 0 2 1 | Listen to these songs on Spotify and YouTube

“Feel Nothing”, Amen Dunes and Sleaford Mods (Spotify / YouTube) – When Damon McMahon sets out to make a track, he lets it track; it traces landscapes and countrysides, coastlines and borderlines, hills and valleys, the “kingdom, kingdom, kingdom” he sings of here.

“True Love”, Hovvdy (Spotify / YouTube) – As with last year’s excellent “Runner”, Charlie Martin and Will Taylor tap into the mysterious span of lost memory with their swaying waves of acoustic guitars, shimmering like wheatfields in the midsummer sunshine of nostalgia.

“Living Proof”, The War on Drugs (Spotify / YouTube) – An arrangement that just barely appears until a minute into the song, and when it arrives it’s so tenuous it seems like it might dissipate if you so much as breathed. A far cry from the turbulent storms of Adam Granduciel’s past, yet with no less sweep.

“Blissful Ignore”, Carmen Q. Rothwell (Spotify / YouTube) – The upright bass is, oddly, a horizontal instrument: Harmonies are articulated note after note, rather than all at once as with a guitar or piano. More like a novel unfolding than a painting hitting your eyes all at once. Rothwell does it justice by telling a story that doesn’t finish, musically or lyrically, until the last word.

“I SING HIGH”, Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes (Spotify / YouTube) – This beautiful, swirling flurry of instruments (one of Gendel’s few eschewments of the pitch pedal) sounds as much like new jazz as it does like the electronic adventures of DJ PayPal or Floating Points circa 2015. Maybe those are the same thing.

“Lifeguard”, Gabriel Bernini (Spotify / YouTube) – What that Jeff Tweedy and Bob Dylan could hear Bernini’s spare ensemble break from roadhouse piano into winding horns. What that Hiss Golden Messenger, Neil Young, Rick Danko, or Graham Parsons could. Alive or dead, someone get this music to them.

“Loan Your Loneliness”, Gruff Rhys (Spotify / YouTube) – A psychedelic jaunt in step with Constant Bop’s recent work, Gruffudd Maredudd Bowen Rhys’s work outside Super Furry Animals and Neon Neon pokes its head through the cloud layer on the album cover to peer far out into the distance. Far out, man.

“INDUSTRY BABY”, Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow (Spotify / YouTube) – Montero Hill never hits for singles; he swings for grand slams every time. Accompanying its brilliantly provocative music video is this clarion call beat from the brilliant Take A Daytrip, the perfect backdrop for this anthem to triumphant defiance.

“Fuck Him All Night”, Azealia Banks (Spotify / YouTube) – AZ will (and should) do whatever the hell she wants, but she never seems more illuminated than over a high BPM club beat, saying the dirtiest shit she can think of.

“Happier Than Ever”, Billie Eilish (Spotify / YouTube) – Her penchant, predilection, and panache for classic jazz singers plays out beautifully, predictably for about 140 seconds before changing dramatically and then, about three minutes in (the classic runtime for a pop song) she explodes into flaming guitars and guttural screams buried deep in the mix, buried alive.

One Album for July, 2 0 2 1  

“Southern Nights”, Allen Toussaint (Reprise, 1975) (Spotify / YouTube) 

Open up the Wikipedia article for “New Orleans rhythm and blues” and find Allen Toussaint’s face, smiling above an ascot and pinstriped suit. Not Fats Domino; not Professor Longhair nor Jellyroll Morton; Not Dr. John, the Meters, nor Irma Thomas. It’s an arbitrary measure, but a telling one, because Toussaint stood behind so many of the fabled city’s artists, molded their records and songs, and formed the sound of the city in the second half of the 20th century.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Richard Williams a year before his sudden death of a heart attack in 2015, Toussaint said, “I never thought of myself as a performer… my comfort zone is behind the scenes.” And indeed, through the 1950s and 1960s, starting as a sideman and ultimately as a songwriter and producer, Toussaint produced regional hits like “Mother-in-Law” and Chris Kenner’s “I Like It Like That”. Major recording artists knew the commercial power of the New Orleans sound going back to Domino and Louis Armstrong, and before long they found Toussaint: The O’Jays, the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, the Who, Bonnie Raitt, the Hollies, Alex Chilton, the Yardbirds, Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, and a queue of other artists lined up to cover Toussaint’s songs, hoping the bubbling potion of blues, latin, and soul music that makes bayou music sound as it does would lend them some of its jubilation. Eventually, Toussaint would perform with, arrange for, and produce artists like Elvis Costello, Paul Simon, The Band, Patti LaBelle, and Paul McCartney.

After 1958’s raucous instrumental debut The Wild Sound of New Orleans, Toussaint receded behind the board for over a decade to mold the sound of the city. His voice was embedded within others until, for a brief three-album stretch at the beginning of the 1970s, he stepped out to make four excellent records of his own solo material before disappearing as a lead artist again for a decade. He set out on his own to make 1971’s Sweet Touch of Love (or alternately From a Whisper to a Scream, or just Toussaint depending on what pressing you got). Toussaint’s brilliance as a songwriter, producer, and arranger blazed out on the sometimes-titular track “From a Whisper to a Scream”, which apparated into space with a ghostly bassline before drums drop in. On tracks like “Poor Folks”, he could transform from Professor Longhair to George Gershwin on the piano in a seamless sequence of movements. He followed Sweet Touch of Love with Life, Love, and Faith in 1973 and continued a trend of statement-making opening tracks, and peaked with the community love of “Soul Sister”. Then, in 1975, he released his pièce de résistance, the psychedelic journey Southern Nights.

Southern Nights never sold big; it would first become widely known by Glen Campbell’s smash cover of the title track. Then it would pick up currency in the 2000s when groups like Outkast began sampling “Last Train” and “You Will Not Lose”. Its stature grew as years passed, yet even after Toussaint’s passing it has gained a fraction of its deserved recognition as one of New Orleans’s best products.

Southern Nights opens with perhaps Toussaint’s best ever song, “Last Train”. With reverberating plinks, he cracks the album open like spider seams growing in a pane of glass, before the Meters’ Ziggy Modeliste’s drums drop in and the song starts “huffing and puffing and chugging” like the “choo-choo train” he sings about. The song draws in equal measure between driving soul, New Orleans blues, and a winding psychedelia that blooms in the second verse as an envelope filter consumes the horn section. It’s followed by “Worldwide”, an unforgettable, creeping groove warning of the end times, and seemingly winking at the irreligiosity of pop music (spot “Eleanor Rigby” in “Look at the man up in the steeple / Screaming out at all the lonely people”).

Part of what makes Southern Nights so wonderful is its conception as a whole piece, rather than as a sequence of songs. The former would be an easy move for an artist whose compositions flung far and wide among artists and records; Toussaint makes Southern Nights cohere by establishing themes that beckon a wayward narrator back, even as his ambitions entice him elsewhere. “Back in Baby’s Arms”, “Basic Lady”, and “Southern Nights'' extol the comfort and profundity of a homeland, sometimes with very 2021 lyrics: “Some hold all the money, others wanna conquer space, but without love it's just a waste.” “What Do You Want The Girl To Do?” (Lowell George’s biggest hit was a Toussaint cover) finds saving love at home: “She waits for you patiently, hoping that someday you'll see that all she really wants to be, is yours and yours alone, eternally” – a song that would deepen in performances as he aged. The protagonist of “Country John'' yearns for nothing more than to “get away” and “see the land”, but Toussaint leaves John’s fate darkly ambiguous: “He would soon find that the lining of his tomb from way back was too hard to divide.”

The songs are served by brief snippets of songs, sometimes presaging their full appearances on the album and sometimes following them, which seem to harken to a gauzy, beloved memory of a place and time. For example, the first instance of the title track comes two songs earlier, a coda to “Country John” rendered in sepia tones like an old lost recording. Then it bubbles up again in the next track, “Basic Lady”. The first time you hear it, the trick is complete: you feel like you’ve heard it before, its breezy melody wafting into your mind like times long gone.

With the backing of the Meters – his house band and one of the funkiest outfits ever put to wax – Southern Nights adopts a variety of intricate riffs and grooves, making them as natural as any blues progression. “You Will Not Lose”’s seemingly endless line slinks under Toussaint’s vocals with impossible ease, a hybrid of the music of the bayou and something else – klezmer? – only this ensemble could achieve.

When Glen Campbell wrought Southern Nights’s title track in honky tonk country complete with a shiny riff from Jerry Reed, he lit it under Friday night lights with gauzy antebellum nostalgia wafting through the air like oleander: Buffed, shining, hard as steel and white as magnolias. Southern nights as recounted by Campbell were quaint and idyllic, and earned him a gold record, a million records sold, a nomination at the 1977 Country Music Awards, and over a hundred million plays on Spotify for that track alone. 

Toussaint’s original sounds like it’s cranking from an old music box, a beautiful memory hobbling to life like old folks making their way up to the porch. “Have you ever noticed southern skies?” He asks. “Its precious beauty lies deep beyond the eye. Goes running through your soul like the stories told of old.” 

In his final years, Toussaint took up in New York, playing the music of New Orleans at the Village Vanguard, Joe’s Pub, and the City Winery. “Southern Nights” got longer and longer, its daydreaming lyrics opening up into spoken remembrances and anecdotes. He was now telling the story that led him there, of his father piling him and his siblings into their little car and driving deep out into the country, “to visit those folks to see where we came from, to know where we were going.” His story of southern nights was the story of poor folks rich in love, who fed you as best they could and that was enough to knock you out; who could barely speak english beyond creole but could suffocate you with a hug. “I got the feeling, sitting on that porch, that everything important in the whole world was there,” he recalled. “I felt all the warmth and love that I would ever need. There seemed to be someone on that porch that could do something about anything that would happen in my life. It was a warm, loving feeling, and very very safe.” 

That ineffable quality, the longing and remembrance in his music, was the gift bestowed to everyone he worked with, the thing present in his music and absent in the renditions that excluded him: “Mysteries like this and many others in the trees blow in the night in the southern skies.”

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