Posts Tagged ‘Annie Lennox’

CD Review: David Gray, “Draw the Line”

The popularity of David Gray’s White Ladder nine or so years ago was a fluke, an accident, a total surprise, never should have happened. The man had been plugging away for seven years at that point, making little leeway in the wider pop consciousness, when something clicked—was it that blend of acoustic instruments and electronic flourishes? Or that reedy voice with the blasting upper register? Or maybe those songs that mined personal depths to find universal truths?

It was quite possibly all of the above, and in spite of the unlikelihood of the bobblehead troubadour as pop hero, he followed up Ladder with two more equally fine records before coming to the inevitable career crossroads—he fired his band, hired a new one, started a family, recharged, and found a new creative energy in all this change.

The first results of this renewal are the 11 songs on Draw the Line, perhaps Gray’s finest work yet. Largely eschewing the electronic counterpoints to his music’s acoustic foundations, Gray for the first time leans on and allows himself to be propelled by a band, to appreciable effect in all aspects of the record.

The change is evident from the first bars of “Fugitive.” Drummer Keith Pryor makes the martial tempo sound unexpectedly loose, and Gray follows through with a loping piano figure and a lyric that extols one to live for the moment (”Hey better realize my friend / Lord in the end now you can’t take it with / Gotta live”). His way with a melody is undiminished, livening even the darkest corners of the album’s title track, which ticks off a list of social and personal ills against which we must defend ourselves (All this talk can hypnotize you and / We can ill afford / To give ourselves to sentiment / When our time is oh so short / … Have to draw the line”). (more…)

The Steel Horse Archives: Damn Yankees, “Where You Goin’ Now?” (1992)

steelhorseheader

631b828fd7a08c190e430110.L[1]Damn Yankees
Title: “Where You Goin’ Now?”
Album: Don’t Tread
Release Date: 1992

Why You Remember Them: For a guy who expends so much effort trying to sustain an image as such a carnivorous, twitchy Amurcan, Ted Nugent is responsible for an unusually high amount of sissypants cotton-candy girl songs, many of which delivered by a band inexplicably named after a vivacious Broadway musical. To call Damn Yankees a “supergroup” would imply a world where that word could include someone from Night Ranger, yet here we are: Aside from Nugent, the group included Styx’s Tommy Shaw, looking like the Eurythmics dude that wasn’t Annie Lennox (what? too soon?), Night Ranger’s Jack Blades and Michael Cartellone, one of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 400 drummers but a guy who had the sense to forge a second career in painting. “Where You Goin’ Now” isn’t even the Damn Yankees song most often played as the soundtrack to trembling hands fumbling their way around bra straps in the early ’90s — that would be the execrable “High Enough” — but thinking that the last two songs anyone gave a damn about were these would probably turn me into a goofball hunter/reality-show cartoon too.

Album Sales To Date: The band’s self-titled debut went double-platinum in 1990; Don’t Tread went platinum? Really? Jesus wept. (more…)

@#$% Preconceptions: Eurythmics, “In the Garden”

Preconceptions can be a bitch.

Lemme give you an example. Back in 1981, I bought an album by a band called The Tourists, whom I knew nothing about, and, upon first listen, promptly became the hugest Tourists fan in southwestern Michigan. Okay, competition wasn’t exactly fierce.

Still, I never read a word about the band in the many rock magazines I devoured, nor did I see them on MTV (their video for “I Only Want To Be With You” may have aired a few times, but since I didn’t have cable, I never knew it) and, thus, they joined the growing list of obscure bands I loved, but knew little about.

A couple years later, former Tourists Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart, having begun recording as Eurythmics, were enjoying worldwide stardom on the heels of their second album, Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This). Even though their music and faces were everywhere, I had not yet made the connection to their past.

Truth be told, by the time I did realize that they had been members of the Tourists, their singles had been played so often on the radio, Friday Night Videos, and the like that I didn’t think actually hearing the rest of the album would reveal any new surprises. I’d heard their music, thought it was decent enough, but just wasn’t compelled to join them for this ride.

Here’s where the preconceptions come in. (more…)