Singer-songwriter Amy Speace’s new album is one of those projects whose success you’re tempted to attribute to the big names that appear in the credits. In the case of The Killer in Me (available June 30), it’s a stellar list: in addition to James Mastro, her producer and guitarist, who once led the Bongos and the Health & Happiness Show, there’s Brit-rock legend Ian Hunter, who lends backing vocals to two tracks, and recording engineer Mitch Easter, who hosted sessions for the album at his Fidelitorium studio in North Carolina.
Still, it’s Speace’s album, though Speace herself defies easy characterization. She records for Judy Collins’s label, Wildflower, but she’s not a pure folkie. She recorded a bluegrass rave-up of Blondie’s “Dreaming” for her last album, Songs for Bright Street, but nobody will mistake her for Alison Krauss (or Debbie Harry, for that matter). She sounds just as comfortable rocking a fuzz pedal as she does backed by fiddles and banjos.
As a result, The Killer in Me is truly killer — one of the finest Americana albums to come along in years. Recovering from her recent divorce and other personal calamities, Speace holed herself up in a cabin in the Catskills and emerged with songs as caustic as the title track and as bleak as “Haven’t Learned a Thing,” with its opening lyric “I have failed and I have fallen, cried ’til I was bawling / Been down so low my face was on the tiles.” But the album also has room for tracks as radiant as “Better,” which Speace says she couldn’t get just right until she, Mastro, and Easter spent some time “dancing around the control room to the Faces’ ‘Ooh La La.’” Popdose caught up with Speace last week in Cleveland, where she was about to kick off her U.S. tour.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the diversity of styles you engage in your music. So many singer-songwriters get bogged down in a sameness of sounds and tempos, but you just blow right through one genre after another. How do you account for your ability to bring such variety?
I think it’s that I just don’t give a shit. (laughs) I don’t care about genre classifications, and I’m not going to limit what I’m doing to fit into somebody’s little box of who I should be. Maybe it’s because I came into this as a second career [previously an actress and drama teacher, she once toured with the National Shakespeare Company], and never had a chance to spend much time thinking about what kind of artist I want to be. I know that ever since I was a kid, the stuff I’ve liked to listen to went from Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt to the Replacements and X.
So I figure I should just make the music that’s in my head and not pay attention to radio genres, because I’m not gonna get a lot of radio play anyway. You know, people aren’t going into Wal-Mart to buy my record. It’s people like me, who read No Depression and sit around at folk festivals all day and are constantly seeking out new shit to listen to.
She watched him as his taillights disappeared around the bend
The road goes on forever, and the party never ends
— Robert Earl Keen
The story of American music is a tale of travel — of styles and performers whose paths have crossed and connected, forked and intersected. It’s the story of settlers and slaves who brought the songs of their homelands across the ocean, then across the land. And it’s the story of the traveling minstrels of the 19th century who wandered the countryside and played their songs for anyone who would listen.
In the early 1900s it was the story of A.P. Carter, who drove his wife Sara and her cousin Maybelle out of the Appalachian Mountains in a broken-down Ford so they could sing their songs into a microphone and create what we now call country music. It was the story of a mediocre blues musician named Robert Johnson who, legend has it, met the devil at a Mississippi crossroads and sold his soul to become the greatest guitar player who ever lived. And it was the story of hundreds of other blues and jazz musicians who escaped the sharecropping and poverty of the deep South and lit out by train, bus, or thumb for the big cities of the North, where they began brewing the concoction of influences that eventually became R&B, soul, bebop, and rock ‘n’ roll. (more…)
George Harrison was an intensely spiritual man, but the compilation gods have never been kind to him. His first best-of – actually a kiss-off from Apple/Capitol after he signed with Warner Bros. in 1976 – was downright insulting, with one LP side devoted not to his solo work, but to his Beatles songs. The Best of Dark Horse (1976-1989), compiled with Harrison’s participation and released in time to capitalize on the success of the Cloud 9 album and the Traveling Wilburys, was considerably more thorough in covering its timeframe; yet it failed to include the Apple hits. With Harrison now sadly gone, and his musical legacy split between two conglomerates that have not (yet) managed to merge, it long has seemed that newcomers to his music might never find a comprehensive sample of his best work in one package.
But lo, this week brings the new, “career-spanning” EMI comp Let It Roll: Songs by George Harrison … and I’m sorry to say that the wait continues.
Of course, any reduction of a long career to a single, 19-track CD is bound to be full of holes. (Though it must be said, while we’re on the subject of single-disc solo-Beatles comps, that EMI did an excellent job with Lennon Legend and even did right by Ringo with the recent Photograph set.) But Let it Roll’s inclusions (and exclusions) seem so random, its sequencing so thoughtless, that one can only wonder whether the compilers gave any consideration to (or even had much knowledge of) the arc of George’s career. That’s a sweeping accusation, I know, and I’ll be suitably embarrassed if it turns out that George himself wrote the track listing on a napkin while lying on his deathbed, or perhaps put it in his will. (Such information might be in the album credits or in Warren Zanes’ liner notes, neither of which EMI saw fit to include with review copies of the CD.) (more…)
It’s amazing, the things a guy can learn even at my advanced age. The real treat for me, in slapping together this (too)-long-running series – which already has examined hits from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s that ran out of gas just one block short of the Texaco – has been the opportunity to put into context some of the music-geek trivia that’s been crowding out more important information in my head for the last 30 years.
I’m embarrassed to say I was able to sit down at my laptop and reel off the names of about three dozen #2 hits from the grand and glorious ’80s without even cracking open my ever-present Joel Whitburn or Fred Bronson singles bibles. (The fact that I could do that, but can’t tie a Windsor knot, may explain why my career on Wall Street never took off. It also made narrowing down to 10 songs for this list a painful experience.) But it’s one thing to keep song titles and chart placements in your memory; it’s another to marvel at the tricks of fate, poor taste, or record-biz manipulation that launch one single over another on the way to Top 40 glory. Take this first juxtaposition, for example:
11. “Hazy Shade of Winter,” the Bangles. Here’s the hit that slaps some sense into those who mistake the Bangles for a novelty act, or stubbornly cling to the notion that Susanna, Vicki, Debbi and Michael didn’t really rock. They took a 20-year-old, twee-as-all-get-out Simon & Garfunkel tune and turned it into a fuzz-guitar anthem of ’80s excess, the perfect theme for what should have been a much better movie based on Bret Easton Ellis’ Hollywood-druggies novel Less than Zero. (Funny how the movie biz managed to mangle both Ellis’ book and Jay McInerney’s New York equivalent, Bright Lights, Big City. Of course, casting pretty boys Andrew McCarthy and Michael J. Fox as jaded protagonists didn’t help.) Anyway, how were the Bangles rewarded for their maturity and brilliance in transforming “Hazy Shade of Winter”? They were left in the dust by the god-awful ballad “Could’ve Been,” which might have been less terrible had it not been butchered by that caterwauling, flavor-of-the-month, shopping-mall princess Tiffany. A slightly interesting fact about “Could’ve Been”: Its composer, Lois Blaisch, was “discovered” while singing for her supper at a recently-shuttered restaurant a few miles from my house, called the Hungry Hunter. I knew there had to be a reason why I never considered going into that place … besides, of course, the goofiness of its name, particularly considering that it sat in the middle of a SoCal strip mall… (more…)
I must admit, I had thought the days were over when Republicans could scare the bejeezus out of the citizenry (and force acquiescence from lily-livered Democrats) with bullshit tricks like “threat levels” and smoking gun/mushroom cloud demagoguery. But this week a USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose closing the Guantanamo Bay prison by a 2-to-1 margin, and that even more Americans are afraid of Gitmo detainees being moved into prisons in their own states.
This spike in public pants-wetting comes in the wake of the recent 90-6 vote in the Senate forbidding President Obama from spending federal money to close Gitmo until he presents an acceptable plan for relocating the 240 detainees still held there. Democrats, cowed by GOP taunts and ever-fearful of the dreaded 30-second ad painting them as weak on national security, voted for the amendment in droves. And their feckless leader, Harry Reid, went so far as to pronounce that Democrats, like Republicans, would never agree to move the detainees into prisons onto American soil.
Even Obama has begun to backslide from the fortitude he displayed during the campaign, when he demanded that the detention regime (like other unconstitutional elements of Bush’s “war on terror”) be brought under the rule of law. Now Obama suggests that, despite the military’s inability to try and convict these detainees – either because the cases were flimsy to begin with, or because even military judges won’t convict a suspect based on evidence obtained via torture – our inhumane treatment has turned them into such monsters that we can’t afford to release them. After all, if we did they might become involved in the types of terrorist activity we can’t pin on them now! So we’re just going to continue holding them, without trial, until such time as … I don’t have a conclusion to that sentence, and apparently neither does the president. He’s also suggested that he’s willing to perpetuate the Bush Administration’s military commissions, continuing their perfect record: They’ve never secured a major conviction, nor have they once withstood a court challenge.
Simply put, Americans (and their elected representatives) have allowed their balls to retract so far into their pelvises that what was once convex is now concave. Eight years of the Bush Administration’s relentless fear-mongering has succeeded in turning us into a nation of pussies. (more…)
Welcome to the third installment of a continuing series exploring some of the best – and some of the most egregiously wronged – hits of the rock era. A whole lot of hits that only reached pop’s runner-up slot have been largely forgotten; for example, oldies radio seems to have little use for the Poppy Family’s “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” or BT Express’ “Do It Til You’re Satisfied.” But at least, as I looked back at the 1950s and ’60s, it seemed a healthy proportion of the #2 hits were terrific, or truly important songs that were justifiably blocked by other great singles … or at least got the shaft from idiotic trifles whose momentary appeal was understandable.
But then there was the ’70s – when, as it turned out, most of the hits that broke down during the 199th lap were just as silly and insubstantial as the ones that took the checkered flag. (See how the euphemisms keep on comin’? It remains to be seen whether I can maintain this level of cleverness straight through the Oughts, or whether I’ll pull up lame in the final stretch. See – another one!) Anyway, here we go with 10 good ones from the Me Decade. As always, I’ll list some more #2s at the end, and we can debate their merits in the comments.
10. “YMCA,” the Village People. Be honest: Who would you rather have coming after your children – the innocuous, mustachioed and very gay Village People, or “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”-era Rod Stewart? Well, if you answered Rod, you got your wish in the winter of ’79, as he pulled a Kris Allen on everyone’s favorite bunch of costumed Adam Lamberts and bogarted #1 for four weeks. As for the other 99.9 percent of us, we can take delight in the fact that the last time we heard “Do Ya Think,” we were able to fast-forward through it on the TiVo during the American Idol finale – while you get to dance along to “YMCA” (though not this remix) during every single professional baseball game ever. So there.
9. “Live and Let Die,” Wings. Why did Paul McCartney’s Bond theme fail to reach the pinnacle? Maybe because it’s mostly an instrumental? Nah… (Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” had topped the chart just a couple months earlier.) Perhaps because nobody cared much about its host film? As if! (Live and Let Die topped the box office through much of June and July 1973, and was the 10th-biggest film of the year.) Perchance were there simply better songs out at the time? Well, the three (three!) songs that leaped over Roger Moore’s speedboat were Maureen McGovern’s “The Morning After,” fresh off its Poseidon Adventure Oscar victory; Diana Ross’ diva anthem “Touch Me in the Morning”; and Stories’ cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Brother Louie.” So I’d argue, no, that wasn’t it either. (Here’s the original version of the last song, which far less obviously references the Kingsmen.) Personally, I’d like to think that radio still had Macca in the penalty box for turning out so much crap over the past two years, up to and including his previous single “My Love” – one of the Worst #1 Songs of the ’70s. (more…)
If you’ve ever ventured into that thicket of sweetness and stress known as Planning A Wedding, you’ve probably at least considered buying one (or five) of those awful compilations of “wedding music.” They come in all sorts of flavors – classical, country, Contemporary Christian, pop standards, classic R&B – and they’ve got icky titles like A Day to Remember, or Songs That Say “I Love You.” They tend to feature a lot of the same songs, like “Always and Forever,” and “Three Times a Lady,” and “Wonderful Tonight,” and Pachelbel’s Canon, and “The Way You Look Tonight,” and that horrible Boyz II Men song “On Bended Knee.” And, just like the Book of Common Prayer, they’re all diabolically designed to make your nuptials sound just like everybody else’s.
My wife Gwen and I wed 15 years ago today, and to celebrate that occasion – along with the onset of the June wedding season – I thought I’d give Popdose’s loyal readers an anniversary present: a mixtape of wedding songs and stories from some of our columnists, and an opportunity to share your own remembrances and ideas in the comments. These songs aren’t your garden-variety bridal standards; in fact, a few of them are downright bizarre. But even if you don’t find them suitable for your own purposes the next time you get hitched, hopefully they’ll inspire you and your betrothed to follow your own muse, and not some music conglomerate’s. Click here for a compressed file of all the tracks featured here, and read on! (more…)
Welcome to the second installment of an ongoing series celebrating songs that fell excruciatingly short of ascending to the top of Billboard’s pop singles chart. In the course of compiling and monitoring responses to the series’ first column a couple weeks ago, I learned a number of things, the most important of which were:
1. Unbeknownst to me as I wrote about the #2 hits of the ’50s – and in the process wrote the snappy sentence, “You don’t see Fred Bronson compiling five editions of The Billboard Book of #2 Hits, do you?” – it turns out that a Billboard Book of Number 2 Hits was indeed published in 2000. I have chosen to invoke the Pelosi defense: I was misled by the book’s obscurity into thinking it didn’t exist. My case is bolstered by the facts that Bronson had nothing to do with it (some fella named Christopher Feldman wrote it), and that the book went out of print without ever reaching a second edition. So, ha! You may read much of it on Google Books or buy a copy at Amazon Marketplace, or you may purchase a digital copy for the Amazon Kindle. (Don’t everybody run out all at once to blow $359 on a Kindle.) Needless to say, I didn’t use Feldman’s book as a reference in the first column; I make no such promises from here on out.
2. As I slog through six decades’ worth of fodder for future editions of this column, I’m going to have to dig deep for euphemisms that put some pizzazz behind the idea of a song being kept out of the #1 slot by another song. I believe that my low point in the last column came in the teaser for this one, when I left the distinct impression that Smokey Robinson might once have been “cock-blocked” by Lawrence Welk (see #4 below). Whoever the object of Smokey’s thwarted affections might have been in such a scenario, I am now convinced that at no time was Welk ever involved in blocking Smokey’s cock, and I apologize for the inference.
As a reminder, we’re giving extra weight to hits by artists who never reached #1, to songs that were far superior to the rivals that overtook them on the charts, and to plain old great songs that deserved the extra glory that the top of the Hot 100 brings. I’ll follow my choices with a list of other #2 hits of the decade, and we can debate their merits in the comments section. Now, on with the countdown!
11. “She’s Not There,” the Zombies. Keyboardist/songwriter Rod Argent made the Top 10 four times between 1964 and ’72 – three as leader of the Zombies, before he got greedy and named his next band after himself. Colin Blumstone sang lead for the Zombies, and just as his vocals offered more nuance than most of his early-British Invasion counterparts, “She’s Not There” was an awfully sophisticated single for an era when even the Beatles were still cranking out “I Feel Fine” and “Eight Days a Week.” Sadly, “She’s Not There” was left knocking on #1’s door while Bobby Vinton came through the window with “Mr. Lonely.” Even more annoying, Vinton’s hit version used the exact same backing track as Buddy Greco’s #64 smash of two years before! That’s just not right. (more…)
When the long-awaited, religiously incendiary sequel to The Da Vinci Code arrives in theaters and the anticipated uproar is reduced to a low roar, you know it’s gotta be a rough week for the Catholic Church.
The church’s most dedicated followers of dogma have bigger post-Lenten fish to fry at the moment than the debut of a film – even if that film is Angels & Demons, an anticipated blockbuster that features a poisoned pope, kidnapped cardinals, a threat to annihilate the Vatican, and a secret Catholic sect as the presumed bad guys. No, the threat posed to the church by another Dan Brown-Tom Hanks-Richie Cunningham collaboration is nothing next to the menace of abortion-rights infidel Barack Obama receiving an honorary doctorate from Catholicism’s most prominent academic outpost this weekend.
Venerable South Bend, Indiana, had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere nearly a week before Obama addresses Notre Dame graduates on Sunday. It’s entirely likely that the number of antiabortion protesters on hand this weekend will dwarf the 2,600 graduates in attendance – and the demonstrators already include such revered figures as never-elected-to-anything Alan Keyes and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry.
Randall Terry!!! Who exhumed that guy? Anyway, if Terry’s in the house you know the show is going to be classy – and true to form, throughout the week somebody’s been paying for a plane to be flown over South Bend, trailing a banner that depicts an aborted fetus. After all, why stop at holding up yucky posters at a rally that people can avoid, when you can put fetal remains up in the sky where everyone can see them? (more…)
Almost three decades ago, a new pop station transformed the radio market around my hometown in southwestern Virginia. It quickly dominated the ratings and began leaving its imprint all over the landscape, in the form of personality-fueled DJs, wildly popular remote broadcasts and a regionally focused mix of music combining national hits with Southern rock and a smattering of local artists. A lot of people loved it, just as many loathed it, but no one could deny its impact on a fast-growing region that, for the first time, had a state-of-the-art pop station that nonetheless sounded little like its counterparts to the north or west.
The station was WXLK-FM in Roanoke – K-92 to you – and its rise to dominance was a phenomenon the likes of which we’ll probably never see again … not since Congress conspired with Clear Channel, Cumulus and other budding radio conglomerates to practically destroy local radio 15 years ago. I’ve been thinking a lot in recent weeks about K-92 and the lost radio culture it represented, thanks to a confluence of events that has left an unlikely earworm chewing up my gray matter. I know it’s not exactly cutting-edge to bemoan the consolidation of radio, but it’s worth looking back occasionally to remember the regional focus that has been obliterated as music programming has become homogenized nationally and local disc jockeys have lost their status as tastemakers.
But first, about that confluence of events: About a month ago my wife and I finally got serious about the need to replace her leased car, and she decided that she wanted the replacement to be a girlish red convertible – a real midlife-crisis car, female division. At about the same time, my Popdose colleague Jason Hare posted a typically delightful Chart Attack column, during which he betrayed his obliviousness to the car-color references in Lou Gramm’s awesome 1987 hit “Midnight Blue.” As I lamely attempted to school him in the many shades of rural/suburban car culture – while trying to track down the perfect bright-red vehicle for the wife, a process that eventually led to a dealer 200 miles away – the earworm struck. (more…)
Singer-songwriter Amy Speace’s new album is one of those projects whose success you’re tempted to attribute to the big names that appear in the credits. In the case of The Killer in Me (available June 30), it’s a stellar list: in addition to James Mastro, her producer and guitarist, who once led the Bongos and the Health & Happiness Show, there’s Brit-rock legend Ian Hunter, who lends backing vocals to two tracks, and recording engineer Mitch Easter, who hosted sessions for the album at his Fidelitorium studio in North Carolina.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the diversity of styles you engage in your music. So many singer-songwriters get bogged down in a sameness of sounds and tempos, but you just blow right through one genre after another. How do you account for your ability to bring such variety?
Purchase this CD (Amazon)
It’s amazing, the things a guy can learn even at my advanced age. The real treat for me, in slapping together this (too)-long-running series – which already has examined hits from the 
Even Obama has begun to backslide from the fortitude he displayed during the campaign, when he demanded that the detention regime (like other unconstitutional elements of Bush’s “war on terror”) be brought under the rule of law. Now Obama suggests that, despite the military’s inability to try and convict these detainees – either because the cases were flimsy to begin with, or because even military judges won’t convict a suspect based on evidence obtained via torture – our inhumane treatment has turned them into such monsters that we can’t afford to release them. After all, if we did they might become involved in the types of terrorist activity we can’t pin on them now! So we’re just going to continue holding them, without trial, until such time as … I don’t have a conclusion to that sentence, and apparently neither does the president. He’s also suggested that he’s willing to perpetuate the Bush Administration’s military commissions, continuing their perfect record: They’ve never secured a major conviction, nor have they once withstood a court challenge.
11. 
Venerable South Bend, Indiana, had taken on a carnival-like atmosphere nearly a week before Obama addresses Notre Dame graduates on Sunday. It’s entirely likely that the number of antiabortion protesters on hand this weekend will dwarf the 2,600 graduates in attendance – and the demonstrators already include such revered figures as never-elected-to-anything Alan Keyes and Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry.
