Bob's Soundtrack
2006
Capercaillie - Puirt A Beul
Monday, December 18, 2006
Almost a year ago during the Hard & Easy tour, shortly after the Winnipeg stop, I came down with the worst stomach flu I have ever endured. A tour bus is a poor place for such an affliction, and by the time we got to Saskatoon I was so weak there was some doubt if I could make the show. I do not remember the flow of events very well, but apparently I looked so bad the decision was made to summon a doctor backstage. He thought I was nuts to be doing anything other than lying in a bed, but he was kind enough to stay backstage while I stumbled around in front of the audience, trying to remember what to play through a fog of exhaustion and Gravol (Dramamine for our American fans). We never said anything about it at the time; the show must go on and all that, and it was hardly the first time one of us has gone onstage feeling like a bag of shit. And seeing as how we almost croaked in a bus crash a few days later, it kind of fell off the radar.
Thus it felt a bit ridiculous to find myself onstage in Saskatoon a few weeks ago in even worse shape than the last time. I knew I was sick days before the show, but I was hoping it was a bad cold, and stupidly told everyone I would make the gig. I felt absolutely horrible on the endless flight out west, and a full daily dose of Tylenol & Advil didn’t even make a dent in the incredible headache that developed. Once again I bumbled around the stage in a daze, while medics waited for me to fall over in a stupor. Our fans in Saskatoon are going to assume that I am always eerily pale, exhausted looking and a very sloppy player. At any rate, I went from the plane home to the hospital, where I spent the next week pretty much immobilized with meningitis. I was too sick to read, and watching TV was impossible. Even talking hurt. I just stared at the wall, muted conversation from my family and the tunes in my head the only entertainment I could stand.
I have always had the ability to listen to music in my mind. For years I assumed everyone could do this. It makes playing a bunch of instruments easier – all you have to do is find the way to finger the tune that’s already playing in your brain. While I lay there in the ward waiting for the next nurse to arrive, I replayed the piece ‘Puirt A Beul’ by the Scottish band Capercaillie dozens of times. For one thing, it has many layers, and is well suited to that kind of mathematical/meditation exercise. The title means ‘mouth music’, which refers to short little demi-songs, kind of like ‘Billy Peddle’. There are two of these in the piece, combined with some instrumentals.
Capercaillie specializes in elaborate Scottish Gaelic folk songs, with unusually complex instrumentals. Their sound is anchored around lead singer Cathy Makinson’s crystalline voice, and keyboardist Charlie McKerron’s creative settings. Generally, I am not a huge fan of keyboards and folk music. Something as naff as Enya always seems to lurk around the corner if you are not careful. Capercallie flirt with this sort of thing, but somehow it never gets away from them. Each tune in this set exists in its own perfect little musical world, like the parts of a symphony. Each new turn is a delightful surprise, but one that flows completely logically from what came previously.
While I was researching this, I noticed that the album Crosswinds, on which this piece appeared, has evaporated from their catalogue, and the compilation I first heard it on has also gone into record company aether. It doesn’t really matter to me anymore. I am pretty sure I could pick up a fiddle and play the whole piece from start to finish. Anyway, Capercaillie has a huge catalogue, and it is not hard to find their stuff anywhere. It’s all pretty good.
A lot of the folk music I listen to is about energy, or poignancy. Capercaillie is very different. For lack of a better description, their music is ordered and deliberate, and often quite pretty. As much of it is sung in a language few understand, it demands little other than loose attention. But then unlike so much ‘New Age Celtic’, it stays with you. Years after you have heard it, you find it lurking back there, playing away like an old record left to spin around and around, long after the party finished.
Perfect for hospitals.
Oasis – Rock & Roll Star
Thursday, November 16, 2006
It is not very fashionable to like Oasis, but an awful lot of people do. They have always been popular in Canada, and while they have flirted with the top a few times in the US, I think they just might be too British for American stardom. At the risk of generalizing wildly, as a rule American stars are supposed to be embarrassed and repentant about drinking and drugs. The Gallagher brothers are not really repentant about anything. Their numerous fights, arrests, break-ups and a gleeful use of narcotics do just not fit in very well in a world of 12-step programs and celebrity confessions. Canadian celebrity culture tends to be a little more relaxed; maybe that is why Oasis have done well here.
In Europe, Australia and elsewhere, their long career has been embraced with some fervour. This is the only contemporary UK act, (besides maybe Coldplay), that has really entered the pantheon inhabited by people like U2. Even then, they tend to lack credibility, at least from a critical standpoint. Being in a band where our image has often triumphed over anything of substance we have done, I can almost sympathize.
Rock and Roll Star is one of their earlier songs, written when Noel was still a guitar tech for bigger bands, and you can draw a line between that song and his later more self-conscious work. While he has written a bunch of great songs, and at least two classic ballads, this is one of my personal favourites. The song essentially states his fantasy - a fairly typical teenage one - of getting in the car and driving really fast, escaping from a dull city, getting up onstage and setting a crowd alight. Like a lot of Oasis songs, it is actually fairly slow – it gets its power from the crashing guitars that Noel is so good at creating. It’s just a string of Ds, Cs and Gs, the same chords anyone could play. But he meshes layer after layer of them, distorted guitars piling on top of each other until they turn into a rock wall. He keeps adding hook after hook, each one a killer. I suppose he thought in those days that he would never run out of good ideas.
I saw an interview the other day with Iggy Pop, about what he ‘does’, talking specifically about the ‘band format’. He was trying to explain that while he can write great songs until doomsday, they have no real impact and reality unless he is playing with his band, the Stooges. Iggy was trying to explain the economic problem inherent in touring, but it got me thinking about Oasis. Everyone agrees that most good bands are a collection of individuals who together are greater than the sum of their parts. No band demonstrates this more than Oasis, especially in a song like this.
Noel Gallagher is a decent singer, and an accomplished writer, but if he hadn't recorded this song, I never would have bothered. His brother Liam is far from a great singer, and according to all reports a complete dick, but he is as essential to this song as the melody. Liam’s sneering, swaggering howl somehow makes it real. You know, without ever seeing so much as a picture of him that this guy utterly and completely believes it:
In my mind my dreams are real…
And tonight, I’m a rock and roll star.
Credibility and authenticity are hard things to pin down. They tend to mean a lot in the folk world, but are largely absent these days from pop music. There is no arguing that Liam Gallagher understood something that was never made explicit in the lyrics – that no one else in the world believed in him, or his brother - and was able to put all the anger and bile of the rejected outsider into every note. And that’s what makes a band great – the ability of disparate individuals to find something in each other’s ideas, and then twist and mold them, until together they are something else entirely. Arrogance and obnoxiousness can be assets in the hand of the right front man. Noel wrote the song, but he could never sing it. He is just not crazy enough to project that kind of rage against the world. Liam is indifferent to the nay-sayers and critics; all he cares bout is his own unquenchable anger. Together, the combination is pure magic.
Lucky Man – Grapes of Wrath
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
It is hard to take songs about the music business very seriously. At the end of the day, it is difficult to feel sorry for rock stars. Too many people want to feel the heat of the spotlight for themselves, and would sacrifice an organ or two for a shot at the big-time. Watch the masochistic humilio-fest of Canadian/American Idol sometime if you don’t believe me.
I missed the Grapes of Wrath when they had their late 1980s moment. I was listening to intense guys from London and LA scream at me in those years, (or alternately, geriatrics with out-of-tune fiddles), so I never heard them play in their prime. Peace of Mind was their big hit here in Canada, but Lucky Man, their attempt to put music industry frustration into song, is a bit of a lost gem. I stumbled across it while digging through someone’s CD collection, and it has stayed with me ever since.
Like a lot of their better songs, it is an appealing mix of pure pop melody with the sort of chimey electric 12-string guitars briefly popular in the 1980s. At their best they sound a bit like REM in a non-weird phase. What really made them popular was the two lead singers, who sang together almost constantly, weaving plaintive harmonies around their high, clear voices.
Lucky Man is an attempt at cynicism, but the band is utterly incapable of pulling it off. They try and describe their ‘lucky man’, an evil mogul who easily manipulates “small town boys nowhere going”, but the irony never takes hold. Instead, the bright melody and sweet chorus completely belies their attempt at righteous outrage. They end up instead just sounding a little bewildered, unable to believe that the world does not share their optimism. “And with a knowing tone, the famous dreams unfold…” sings Tom Hooper, but his world weary lyric is implausible. All you hear is hope, hope and excitement. The band was from Kelowna, BC, and in the melody you can hear the fresh faced wonder that town habitually wears, and the excitement everyone feels when they first drive over the mountains, and challenge the world.
If there is any pattern to the songs I have written about, it is about how every song needs a context if it is really going to take hold of you. The song and some bit of your own life need to connect - suddenly you see the world through someone else’s eyes, and the whole picture gets brighter and more interesting.
The Grapes broke up in acrimony a couple of years after Lucky Man. Maybe that is why this song sticks with me, and has acquired an air of potent sadness that was not there in the first place. In the soaring chorus of Lucky Man their hope and optimism defied the indifference of a tough business. In real life they were defeated. And if you listen to the song, you can hear the moment when it could have gone either way.
My Sister Rose – 10,000 Maniacs
Friday, October 20, 2006
For some reason, I have always rather enjoyed weddings. Newfoundland weddings, anyway.
Newfoundland weddings, even the ‘small’ones, tend to feature huge crowds of mismatched people, a surplus of food, booze and tunes, and some really funny speeches. The sort of stupid garter throwing and cake smashing bullshit that happens elsewhere never seems to happen here. Instead, if you are really lucky, it will all finish with a scrap in the parking lot. The music is all over the place, with hip-hop battling it out with two-step waltzes. It is a great pleasure to watch the old people sweep around the floor, but all ages are expected to participate equally, and it is one of the few occasions on which I can be compelled to dance.
I have been to a few memorable ones over the years. One I attended sometime ago featured over a thousand people. Half of them had not even been invited. As the couple were both from small towns, the entire population of both just showed up. Cue much hilarity.
Another one I particularly enjoyed, featured speeches speculating on the groom’s surprising lack of interest in getting married at all, with one ‘friend’ going so far as to suggest (in dead seriousness), to the party’s horror, that the groom was actually gay. I was sad to have missed one buddies’ wedding, which ended with one of his (not particularly young, or shapely) aunts performing an impromptu striptease on the head table. Good times.
More than once I have tried to capture one of these events in a song, but they never seem to get anywhere. Sentiment and realism are tough to get together in one lyric, and harder to get right. In the meantime, I can take solace in this song.
Natalie Merchant has pretty much disavowed her decade in 10,000 Maniacs, but she wrote some great songs in those years, and in my opinion, her solo work has suffered from a lack of the band’s sense of humour. Mind you, it is hard to blame her. Playing in a band with a half dozen older guys must have been weird, but the sometimes jarring juxtaposition between her thoughtful feminism and their rock and roll gusto made the band’s sound compelling.
My Sister Rose is a simple song about Merchant’s sister Rose’s wedding. I absolutely love it. In a sly, vaguely detached tone, Merchant describes her Italian family’s wedding reception. I am not quite sure if she is being sarcastic, or just sort of amazed by it all. The lyrics are simple, but very, very clever. Both sincere and silly, they are like nothing else in her repertoire. The melody slips and slides like a Gypsy Kings out-take. Instead of a real hook, it features the sort of crappy/brilliant mandolin line guys who can’t play mandolin always seem to come up with. Topping it all off is the chorus: the band just kind of barrels over her, five gruff men singing these rather sad ‘ooo’s’ and ‘aahs’, embarrassment dripping off every note.
Everyone admires the bride at weddings, but I always watch the men. They always look painfully awkward in their rented tuxedoes, hair gelled back, frozen smiles, like schoolboys waiting outside the principal's office. Unintentionally, I suspect, the male Maniacs put this moment into music. While Merchant floats up the aisle in a pretty dress, they linger at the back of the church, hands in pockets, shuffling their feet, cringing at her unabashed romanticism. You can almost hear her laughing at them; in light of her mega-fame, and their ultimate slide into obscurity, the song can be seen as a metaphor for their whole musical marriage.
And as one sometimes does at a wedding, when you see some fellow making what appears to be a dreadful decision, you kind of feel sorry for them.
Big, big plans are being made,
For my sister’s wedding day
We’ll have a ball, at the ‘Sons of Roma’ Hall
Family, friends, come one and all
Then they cut the five tier cake,
‘That Colucci, he can bake’,
A frosted tower of sugar & flour,
For the couple of the hour.
My Sister Rose, 10,000 Maniacs
Brimful of Asha - Cornershop
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Brimful of Asha is a classic one hit wonder.
Actually, if it had not been for a remix by Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, chances are very few people would have heard of it al all.
Cornershop come from Wolverhampton, England. The band is a partnership between Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers. They specialize in an unusual fusion of Indian pop music and English dance music. Their name is a satire on the clichéd image of East Indians in the UK, who are thought to run the majority of the countries’ corner stores. Brimful of Asha, which came out in the summer of 1998, is pretty much their high water mark. While they have released music sporadically since, they have never had anything else that even smelled like a hit.
I love this song for a couple of reasons. A huge portion of my own work with GBS has been about taking defiantly local places, words and ideas, and making them interesting to the rest of the world. Our great question as a band has been ‘how do you take something obscure and insular, and place it into a context that everyone else can get’? The whole idea of placing folk songs in a pop context is part and parcel of this equation.
Cornershop is not a folk band, but it is safe to say that in the early 1990s, when they wrote Asha, Singh’s Anglo-Indian culture was as unknown as its Newfoundland equivalents. Nowadays, everyone has heard of Bollywood, but a decade ago, that was not the case. Asha is a tribute to an Indian singer, Asha Bonsle, who specialized in voice-overs for Bollywood musicals. The fact that many famous stars actually lip-synched to her voice was well known, and seemingly not a problem.
Singh lovingly recites a series of images from his youth, his Punjabi culture seen through the lens of life in the grey British Midlands. Better than anyone else I have ever heard, he evokes the fantasy of a more exciting life that can be spun from nothing more than a voice on the radio, or even better, a cheap 45 rpm record player. The groove is absolute killer, a testament to the skill a good remix guy can bring to an otherwise ordinary arrangement. I do not have a clue about Singh’s world, really, but this song tells me everything I want to know, and makes it sound like a wonderful place to be.
There are two other reasons I love this song:
a) Band co-leader Ben Ayers was born in St. John’s, a fact sneeringly included in every UK interview with the band I have ever read. It is always dropped in as if it was some terrible hardship he had to overcome, like growing up in an orphanage or something. I always react the same way - St. John’s? What’s so bad about St. John’s? I have often been tempted to write him a letter.
b) The chorus of the song:
Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow…
I don’t care who you are, that is brilliant.
www.cornershop.com
Altan
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
The first CD I ever bought was by the Irish band Altan, in 1993, just before Great Big Sea started. In those days, I was spending a lot of time at home in Barrie, where I lived at the time, playing around with music, and musical ideas, trying to figure out a way to do something more interesting with the traditional tunes I was learning. Rankin Street was done, and everyone knew it was time to take the next step.
Whenever I went into Toronto I would go down to the big Sam’s store on Yonge St. and buy a bunch of cheap stuff, and then absorb everything. When I got my first CD player, I grabbed a new disc by the band Altan. I had heard of them before, but they were not the sort of thing you were likely to hear on the radio in Barrie. Like a lot of modern Irish bands, they start where the Bothy Band left off. Essentially, they take instrumental music, and rework it in an ensemble fashion. While it is very much part of the tradition, it is heavily inspired by the pub sessions, where speed and virtuosity are valued more than anything else.
They already had a few albums out by then, and they have put out another half-dozen since. Island Angel was the last one they recorded with original flutist and band leader Frankie Kennedy, and it is still a great record.
Altan come from the Irish-speaking part of Donegal, in North-west Ireland, and their repertoire took advantage of unusual tunes and songs. What interested me then was how they had managed to infuse their music with so much energy, without using any significant percussion whatsoever, not even bodhran. A lot of the credit goes to fiddlers Mairead Ni Mhaonigh (Mary Mooney for the linguistically challenged) and Ciaran Tourish, who played so tightly they sounded like one person with four arms. Like every bouzouki player, Ciaran Curran had invented his own style, one that drove the band forward with the kind of speed I could hardly figure out. The set of reels starting with the Fermanagh Highland is a textbook on how to record and arrange tunes to make them interesting, even for people who hate instrumental music.
The song Dulaman (which is about sea-weed, apparently) was another eye-opener. Mairead’s voice floats over a simple groove of lock-stepping guitars and bouzoukis. The thing is as light as a feather, but also iron-hard in its rhythm. The bridge is the melody played by all the instruments, something both simple and complex at the same time. It feels like a lost bed track by the Moody Blues, with a mysterious vocal from Enya drifting in and out. Yet somehow, even though the lyric and the melody are essentially bright, it all sounds desperately sad. The flute takes these strange melancholy turns, and even Mairead, a singer of almost superhuman accuracy, slides in and out of the lyric like a ghost, as if it was recorded late on a misty fall afternoon after a long & tiring hospital visit.
Kennedy was dying of cancer when they recorded this album, and it is infused with the hope and potential grief that must have infected them all. He was Mairead’s husband, and the center of the band. One can only imagine what they were going through. There are a few other songs on this album, and they all feel like this. Jug of Punch, for example, is usually a raucous drinking song, yet here it sounds as melancholy and ethereal as a Lenten hymn. Even the sprightly reels take dark and unexpected turns, as if something dreadful was waiting over their shoulders.
Perhaps I am projecting all this. I do know this for sure, however - having worked on many records, the prevailing mood of the season can affect the music. I cannot hear Sea of No Cares without remembering the dreadful winter we endured while we struggled in the studio. On the other hand, Something Beautiful will always mean more to me than any other GBS music, written as it was, a defiant reaction to the deaths of our friends.
I have several other Altan records. They are all good, but none of them have this same blend of hope and despair.
Janelle Dupuis
Thursday, September 14, 2006
About this time last year, I spent a couple of weeks producing a record for a young New Brunswick fiddler named Janelle Dupuis. When I agreed to do the project, I was anticipating plenty of time to plan the project, and even more time to fine tune it after the fact. I had also hoped to help steer and promote the album when it actually came out. Unfortunately, I ended up squeezing it into the middle of an unexpectedly busy round of promotion for The Hard & the Easy. As a result, I hardly talked about it at all. A few weeks ago I listened to it again when I loaded it onto my Ipod, and it made me think a lot about the whole process.
The first time I ever met a real producer was when we met Danny Greenspoon, at the first pre-production sessions for the Up album. At the time it was an eye-opener, and an unpleasant one. Danny demanded that we dissect and then reconstruct every part, every song, every lyric, and every arrangement, and make sure every idea was as good as it could possibly be before we recorded a single note. And then in the studio he expected that we play and sing to a standard we were barely capable of. It was painful and unpleasant, and the more intuitive players in the band bristled under his demands. Despite all the ego blows, we knew it would be worth it, and that we were learning something important. The half million-plus sales of the album confirm that he knew what he was doing.
Since then we have worked with many producers, and both myself and Alan have sat on the other side of the board quite a few times. It can be a fascinating collaboration. A good producer comes to the table with lots of musical ideas, a realistic vision for the album, a bag of sounds, technical knowledge, and the ability to get great performances out of people. Good producers can also add that unexpected outside element, that extra piece of magic that makes a good track great. A couple of examples from our own past might be Steve Berlin's organ on Jack Hinks, or the elaborate loop Michael Philip came up with for John Barbour. While the arrangements for these songs were already well underway when these ideas were added, they are like icing on the cake. Years later, the songs sound wrong without them.
The Janelle album presented some interesting challenges. Her material consisted of a collection of 50 or so instrume