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- The Retrographer, Issue 94 (September, 2 0 2 2)
The Retrographer, Issue 94 (September, 2 0 2 2)
Weyes Blood, Alex G, Julian Lage, Beth Orton, Alvvays, Paramore, Vieux Farka Touré, Khruangbin, Roc Marciano, the Alchemist, Ari Lennox, Summer Walker, Sudan Archives, Sheryl Crow, and more!
The Retrographer, Issue 94 (September, 2 0 2 2)
This is a long one so Gmail will probably cut it off!
Bulletins
I’m excited to announce the release of “Big Time Things”, the third album from Office Culture. I love this record and am proud to be in this band. Listen to it here.We started working on this album after finishing touring our last record, “A Life of Crime”, back in 2019. We had spent so much time rehearsing, performing, and recording that music that our band had broken through to a freer, more trusting place than we’d ever been. In the spirit of that evolution, Winston started demoing our rehearsal jams and turning them into compositions on his own time. By early 2020, we were playing new songs like “Timing” which stretched out, grooved harder, and drew from new influences.Although lockdown prevented the continuation of this process, its idea stuck with Winston as he started writing in seclusion. Many of the new demos he sent over the summer sought the funky, loose spirit of those pre-pandemic days, while others were the sound of a man writing alone in his room. Pat, Ian, and I were excited to play again and started remotely demoing parts for new songs like “Rules”.In September we resumed rehearsals, this time masked and spread apart in a larger rehearsal space, a capacious, now-defunct uninsulated converted storage locker in Red Hook called Fort Briscoe. Some days the neighboring garage would leave a truck running so we could barely hear one another. Briscoe had no heat, just some ineffectual space heaters, so as winter fell we rehearsed in our down coats.Perhaps because of our excitement about reuniting, or because of the energy in our playing, or because of the precarity of the moment when lockdowns could so easily be reimposed, we committed to an almost desperate intensity in rehearsal. Every weekend, no matter how cold, we’d play the songs Winston had prepared for four hours straight, molding the compositions into performances. On innumerable rehearsals for “Suddenly”, Ian pushed his lead solos into fusion-y, locrian John McLaughlin territory, while Pat channeled Mike Clark. Around that time I learned “Portrait of Tracy” and started incorporating more harmonics into my playing. Briscoe became a frozen cauldron that pushed us to our limits and solidified what the album would become.In April, we went back to Mason Jar Studios where we made our second album and put all the instrumentals down in one weekend. Chris and Jeremy McDonald had sharp, clear ideas about what they wanted the album to sound like, and contributed indelible ideas like “Suddenly”’s twinkly start. Jeremy handed me his gospel-y five-string bass for “Things Were Bad” and slipped a piece of packing foam under the strings to give it a Pino Palladino thump.While that was the end of “Big Time Things” for the core band, Winston’s work had only begun. I remember on the morning of my wedding in May of that year, Winston made his way alone to the beach to listen to the bounces and get ideas. He was as dialed in as I’d ever seen him be on music. Over the next several months, he set up sessions for horns, strings, keys, backing vocals, electronics and synthesizers, and more than is perhaps possible to list. He folded in a brilliant cast of collaborators including Ryan El-Solh, who later joined the band, as well as Carmen Rothwell, Caitin Pasko, Jess Tambellini, Cole Kamen-Green, Alec Spiegelman, and many others. Many of these are among my favorite artists and performers in their own right, and their respective voices brought the album’s ideas to reality. Starting early this year, it became clear that his efforts to deliver the album to a label were bearing fruit, and we were signed to a three-album deal with Northern Spy. But after nearly three years of focused, concerted effort, change was inevitable. Ian decided to leave the band, and New York entirely, to go to graduate school. He put tremendous effort into this record and it’s a beautiful final statement from him as a member of the group.The album arrives now as the product of many people’s efforts. There were plenty of times when I decided I was too tired and too cold to keep working on it. But there is no way it would have started, proceeded, or been finished without Winston’s dauntless vision and energy. As he sings on “A Word”, “It seems that you and me have been scaling the side of the same dream.” Now, at long last, the dream is here.
“It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody”, (Spotify / YouTube) – Natalie Mering’s beautiful, deep voice brings a beneficence to our global maladies, an empathetic sadness, as she says “To know that every wave might not be the same / But it's all apart of one big thing.”
“Miracles”, Alex G (Spotify / YouTube) – Perhaps the most beautiful song to come out yet this year, rife with profundity yet not weighted down by it. And while it may be sad that “infinite futures become a single past,” it’s also true that “there’s no way up from apathy.”
“Tributary”, Julian Lage (Spotify / YouTube) – Lage takes lead with none other than Bill Frissell in support on rhythm guitar, the elder statesman backing with his beautiful clean looping textures. Lage is among the most fluid players to ever pick up the instrument, lines leaking like the song’s title suggests.
“Friday Night”, Beth Orton (Spotify / YouTube) – Fusing “4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” and “After the Gold Rush”, but tying in the atmospherics of “Saturday Night”, Orton has concocted the most potent brew for epic nostalgia.
“Belinda Says”, Alvvays (Spotify / YouTube) – Molly Rankin’s slack-jawed delivery shouldn’t obscure the power of her voice, the way she takes such a soaring melody and winds it through this song’s many terrains, before lifting it into the sky with the soaring “and we’ll start another life.”
“This Is Why”, Paramore (Spotify / YouTube) – They came from Tennessee and conquered the world, the emissaries of emo who best represent pop’s transformation by the genre from within its city walls. This quarantune is just one of who knows how many will continue to make it out from artists lockdown songbooks over the coming years.
“Tongo Barra”, Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin (Spotify / YouTube) – A perfect combination we didn’t know we needed, the son of the iconic Malian bluesman pairs his reverbed, arid guitar tone with these similarly-’verbed-out minimalist Houston funk soldiers.
“Quantum Leap”, Roc Marciano and the Alchemist (Spotify / YouTube) – Insouciant excellence, Roc and Al combine for a laid-back groove with a bumper crop of memorable lyrics: Thigh muscles, Fonzworth Bentley, quantum leaps, F430s, Masonic ties, the list goes on.
“Queen Space”, Ari Lennox and Summer Walker (Spotify / YouTube) – Two of young R&B’s best voices and personalities link for the closing track on Lennox’s excellent new record. It closes on an empowered note, an acknowledgement of worth from two voices worth trusting.
“Yellow Brick Road”, Sudan Archives (Spotify / YouTube) – Brittney Parks sets out on a journey of self-healing (“forgot my trauma, I washed it behind us”) over a twinkling, swinging groove. Like Dorothy before her, she knows there’s no place like home; “It’s homemade!”
One Album for September, 2 0 2 2
Sheryl Crow would go on to sell tens of millions of albums, tour the world, and dominate your local pop radio station. But first, she taught elementary school students.
Born in Kennett, Missouri to a piano teacher and a lawyer who played the trumpet, Crow was an all-around kid who had great grades, stood out on her track and cheerleading teams, and won beauty contests. She got a degree in music education at the University of Missouri and moved to Fenton, just outside St. Louis and three hours from Kennett, after graduation to teach music at Kellison Elementary School teaching autistic and severely handicapped kids. She was engaged to be married and exiting her 20s; expertly leading a conventional life.
But somewhere in her sterling midwest trajectory glinted the possibility of something different. She had time to sing with bands on weekends away from her job as a schoolteacher, just as she had in college. Through this network she met Jay Oliver, a local producer who enlisted Crow to make advertising jingles in his parents’ basement. Her first break came when she sang a McDonald’s jingle that ran for a year and made her $42,000, more than twice her annual salary. That money changed her life. “I’m going to L.A.,” she remembered. “I’m going to be a famous jingle singer!”
When she got to L.A., she had a car and $10,000 left. She got a waitressing job at Le Cafe and when she had free time used a Thomas Map to go to every studio she could find and drop a demo tape with ad reads, jingles, and some songs. She landed a Toyota commercial, pulled in another $67,000. Commercials could have been it; Again, a path opened up for her, more lucrative than the last one but still basically obscure.
But Crow was a musician to her bones and her work in advertising led her to session work with artists, including a session date with Johnny Mathis which tipped her to auditions for Michael Jackson’s Bad tour which she not only booked, but became Michael’s counterpart and costar for two years on what was then the largest tour in the world.
Nothing was the same. Now there was interest in launching a pop career and despite ups and downs with labels, Sting’s producer Hugh Padgham hunkered down to make a self-titled debut record for Crow. It was slick, clean, and clubby – in Crow’s words, like Lisa Lisa or Paula Abdul. “Listening to that (original) album now, it could be any female singer in the world,” Crow commented in 1993.
Convention beckoned, and again she rejected it. It wasn’t her, and despite the opportunity it presented she went back to waiting tables and waiting to be dropped by her label. She was 30 years old, having glimpsed the highest highs in music and yet back to where she had started when she came west to find her destiny.
So she looked for another new beginning. Two alums of Madonna’s True Blue album, Patrick Leonard and Guy Pratt, had started a band called Toy Matinee with Kevin Gilbert, Brian MacLeod, and Tim Pierce, and made an album. Gilbert had been helping Crow with demos; the two got romantically involved and he invited Crow to join their performing outfit. The pop castoffs of Toy Matinee thought of themselves (despite their insider pedigrees) as outsiders and channeled that disaffection into their work, meeting every Tuesday night to play music, drink, complain about the music business and spin conspiracy theories to explain their own lack of wild success. They were talented and entitled. Crow got swept up in it and soon their producer, Bill Bottrell, whose Toad Hall studio hosted the self-named Tuesday Music Club, soon suggested they cut her an album. Another chance at a first impression.
At this point, the story becomes murky. This debut album, Tuesday Night Music Club, was so named to pay tribute to the energy of the sessions Bottrell pulled Crow from. The members of Toy Matinee appear as cowriters for most of the songs on the album along with Crow and Bottrell. Whatever esprit de corps existed during the sessions dissipated after the album’s third single, “All I Wanna Do”, went to #2 in Billboard and Crow took a different band to tour on the road. Never mind that they had turned her down on that offer before the music had hit; The salon of disaffected collaborators who had helped Crow with the album soon became disgruntled and everyone tried to take ownership over the album. “It should have been euphoric,” she said of this moment. “But at that time, there was so much debate whether I had even written my own songs.”
Despite the birthright claims the men around her made to the album based on its title, this recording had none of the spontaneity of the weeknight sessions it was named for, it was just a tribute. Bottrell, who had previously worked with Michael Jackson, Madonna and the Traveling Wilburys, ran the sessions like a conventional producer, bringing in musicians he needed when he needed them rather than the slapdash avocation implied by the title. But this titling only lent itself to her associates’ self-serving attempts to disconnect Crow from her own work. “The lore was a bunch of guys wrote my first album; by the time that took off, that was already swirling around.”
This is the story that needs correcting. The sessions with the Tuesday Music Club lasted only four sessions, with some contributions – like guitarist David Baerwald’s opening couplet to “Leaving Las Vegas” – feeding the narrative that Crow hadn’t made her own record. But even Bottrell, who would miss few opportunities to denigrate Crow later on (“She’s fucking hopeless. She’s obnoxious.”) admitted, “The rest of it is just sweat and blood from me and Sheryl Crow.”
After such a long, principled journey, Sheryl Crow’s debut work couldn’t be stolen from her by jealous malcontents. Tuesday Night Music Club was the album that started her career in no small part because of its unique, eclectic, charming sound. Track to track, Tuesday Night Music Club jumps between psych, gospel, country, yet has the unifying character of unquenchable curiosity and daring individuality that led Crow to the new threshold that album ultimately represented.
Tuesday Night Music Club’s opening track, "Run Baby Run", was also its first single. It’s a slow, dramatic introduction to an artist whose tireless perseverance led her to the doorway of this album. She wrote it on the day Bill Clinton won the presidency, and describes a restrictive conservative town that produces ineffectual hippie parents, not throwing in her lot with anyone but rather running away from a society of bad options. As a foray into pop music it was toothless and didn’t come close to charting in the country it described, but as an opening to the album it set a high bar for drama and introduced characters and ideas that would recur.
The following triptych of songs widens the album’s scope. The bouncy “Leaving Las Vegas” – taken from John O’Brien’s then-unknown novel – jangles over sampled drums, introducing a down-and-out figure sick of striving to make rent in the land of their dreams. “Strong Enough”, now canonized in Crow’s catalog, looks up from the depths of misery to beg for warm arms. Then “Can’t Cry Anymore” skips town, running like the opening track says.
The next quartet brings Tuesday Night Music Club its true diversity. “Solidify” is some kind of driving funk, “The Na-Na Song” is whirling psychedelia in the mold of the Beatles “It’s All Too Much”, “Nobody Said It’d Be Easy” is a desolate ballad over baritone guitar, harmonics, and tremolo telecaster. “What I Can Do For You” paints the common picture of a powerful man coercing a woman for sex in exchange for access.
Then, “All I Wanna Do”. Crow had a book of poetry, opened it to Wyn Cooper's "Fun", and read them as lyrics over the band’s groove. She wanted to drop the song, but instead it changed her life as the album’s third single. The attention on that song led Crow to the Best New Artist and Record of the Year trophies at the next year’s Grammys. The words were Cooper’s, but the chorus and just as importantly the irreverent, carefree vibe are Crow’s, a song that couldn’t exist without her at the helm.
The album’s last two songs, “We Do What We Can”, which finds “Run Baby Run”’s protagonist in crisis over American cultural decline, and “I Shall Believe”, a closing homily recapitulating “Strong Enough”’s broken desperate narrator, close a varied, explorative, emotionally raw album.
But as far as Tuesday Night Music Club took Crow, its “lore” as she put it seemed to follow her. When Crow told David Letterman on air that “Leaving Las Vegas” was autobiographical, the band revolted. They trashed her (“And his Tuesday night cohorts describe Crow -- who refused to be interviewed for this story -- as a marginally talented singer who exploited his skills and theirs in a ruthless grab for success,” SF Gate reported). Then things got worse. John O’Brien, whose book the song was named for, was still talking about the slight to his literary agent, three weeks after the Letterman appearance, the day he killed himself. Gilbert journaled a song called “Leaving Miss Broadway,” with lyrics “I see you on my TV taking credit for our work / and I knew if I said anything that I would be the jerk / there”s always some ex-boyfriend, some jealous has-been clown / trying to muscle in the spotlight, trying to keep the lady down.” He, too, accidentally killed himself three years later in an attempt at autoerotic asphyxiation. Dispossessed of the fame and success they felt they had earned, the creative society that lifted Crow from her humble origins to stardom crumbled as her feet left the ground.
Crow had lived a whole life before music, and yet the conflagration around Tuesday Night Music Club represented as clean a break as her trip out to L.A. all those years ago. Doing press for her eponymous second album, she said, “I don’t feel like the same person. I don’t feel like that accessible girl in the jeans shirt with a dog and, ‘Hey, come sit down, I’ll tell you everything.’” Perhaps she had trusted the wrong people, or just seen what fame can do. “I don’t feel like that person anymore. I do feel like having a certain amount of space between me and the world around me. I had given it all away. And now I’m trying to get some of it back.”
It hadn’t been so long ago, but it felt like a lifetime. Talent, curiosity, bravery, and initiative led Sheryl Crow out of Fenton, Missouri to riches, stardom, accolades, disdain, disparagement, and death. Now, again, another life would begin.
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#94 September, 2022 | Sheryl Crow, “Tuesday Night Music Club”
#69 August, 2020 | Special Issue
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