Two Albums I Missed

I must have been preoccupied in 2004 and 2005 – something to do with three kids under the age of eight I suppose – because aside from Rufus Wainwright’s Want Two, I can’t recall any new album that I purchased during that timeframe. Flash forward thirteen years or so and I’m filling in a few gaps, and I’ve found two gems from the mid 2000s that I missed the first time around: Paul McCartney’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and William Shatner’s (yes, that William Shatner) Has Been. Both are fantastic, and dare I say, McCartney’s album from 2004 may be among his top five albums of his entire post-Beatles career.

McCartney is one of those artists who I want to like more than I actually do, and therefore often overrate an album in retrospect. People often refer to his 1989 release Flowers in the Dirt as a great ablum, but listen to it again sometime and you may conclude that it’s a pretty good album. Sure, he makes a bold statement with Elvis Costello’s co-written opening track, and the album chugs along nicely for a while, but it falls off the rails completely by the end (and track two – “Rough Ride” – blows). But when compared it to his prior efforts, Press to Play and Pipes of Peace, its high marks are exaggerated.

Chaos is something different. With the help of producer Nigel Godric and a supporting cast of musicians mostly named Paul McCartney, the former Beatle recorded what is undoubtedly his best in the past twenty-five years and probably his best since Back to the Egg. (I had previously considered Tug of War great but realized that I conveniently overlooked ”Dress me up as a Robber” and “Ebony and Ivory.”) Unlike so many McCartney albums, there isn’t one track on Chaos that leads me to reach for the “next track” button, and many of the songs are downright stellar.

McCartney proves he can still deliver a deftly-crafted pop song in “A Fine Line” and can make a gentle nod to his Beatles past with tracks like “Jenny Wren” and “English Tea,” but for me the standouts are songs that offer an unexpected darker side. My favorite albums moments are:

• The 2:05 mark of “How Kind of You” as the drums and electric guitar kick in. The tune is lyrically hopeful but juxtaposed nicely against a rather melancholy harmonic progression that’s only enhanced by the drone of a harmonium.
• The opening of “At the Mercy,” a particularly complex song both melodically and harmonically, deliciously dark by McCartney’s standards with a universal lyric.
• The entire track of “Riding to Vanity Fair.” This gets my vote for the best song on the album, a gem that lifts the veil from Paul’s sunny disposition and wades in the waters of resentment.

While listening to this album for the first time I had assumed that it was about his breakup with Heather Mills, but alas, they didn’t divorce until 2008. Still, Chaos exudes uneasiness, reminding me of Ben Folds’s Songs for Silverman in that it may have captured the beginning of a downfall that didn't come to fruition until a few years later.

All in all, Chaos is a beautifully rich and complex album.  I’ve listened to it more in the past six months than any other album I own.

And now to William Shatner. When I saw him perform “Common People” on The Tonight Show with Ben Folds and Joe Jackson, both of whom are among my favorite musicians, the song peeked my interest back in 2004. And then I awoke the next morning to get the kids ready for school and forgot all about it.

Fast forward eleven years later, when – in an effort to prove to my friend Kevin that 1995 was in fact a terrific year for rock music and not its nadir – I purchased the album Different Class by the band Pulp, and the fantastic third track “Common People” suddenly reminded me of the Shatner performance. I finally took the plunge and purchased Has Been earlier this year on the advice of a musician friend of mine, and lo and behold, the former Captain Kirk – with the help of producer and co-writer Ben Folds – pulls off a brilliant combination of wit, vulnerability, frustration and hilarity.

Shatner can’t sing. He knows he can’t sing, and when I mean he can’t sing, I don’t mean he can’t sing well, I mean he CAN NOT SING. It’s okay. Instead, he executes something close to beat poetry behind a backdrop of Folds musical compositions, and the results are often mesmerizing.  My favorite tracks from the album:

• “It Hasn’t Happened Yet.” After the entertaining cover of “Common People,” Shatner lets the listener know that the album isn’t going to be one big joke, that lyrically he can match the uneasiness and regret of a good Jackson Browne song. Wonderfully evocative.
• “You’ll Have Time.” Sure, it goes on a bit long, but it’s an excellent example of how a performance can raise the ante. Reading the lyrics to this song and one might think, “meh,” but hear the lyrics out of Shatner’s mouth, and it’s comedic perfection.
• Nothing wins me over more than an artist who doesn’t take himself too seriously (and there have been plenty of times in Shatner’s career when he seemed to take himself WAY too seriously), and in “I Can’t Get Behind That” he and Henry Rollins recite a litany of things that make their blood boil. And then Shatner says, “I can’t get behind so-called singers that can’t carry a tune, get paid for talking. How easy is that?”  I’m sold!

So there you are. Two of undoubtedly dozens of great albums I missed in the mid 2000s. If you’ve got a few more suggestions, send them my way. It seems there’s always time to make up for lost time.

Does It Matter How a Record is Made?

Watching Peter Bogdanovich’s extremely thorough yet watchable documentary on Tom Petty, Runnin’ Down a Dream, I was struck by something Petty said about his work in the early 90s, during which he and producer Jeff Lynne began to use the studio as an instrument and recordings became less about a live performance. "I like whatever makes good records," he said. "I don’t care how it’s made. Nobody cares how a record is made. They care if they like it or not.”

I’ve thought about this quote often as I struggle mightily to complete my current album and employ studio tricks that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Yesterday I wanted a cymbal where there wasn’t any recorded during my day-long studio session in late February, so I simply copied a cymbal from one section of the song and pasted it onto another section. On the same song, I noticed that several of the notes I sang were slightly out of tune, so I simply shifted key notes into tune. As for the acoustic guitar I’m currently recording, this I have to do section by section, and sometimes measure by measure, as my playing is so poor that I can’t complete an entire verse or chorus without accidentally deadening a string or striking an unwanted open string. Even my piano tracks – definitely my best instrument – needed a little tweaking, as yesterday I erased an erroneous low note that was clashing with the bass part.

Clearly, I’m not recording a live “performance.” Is this cheating?  Does it matter if it is?  Is Tom Petty correct that nobody cares how a record is made?

In his illuminating book, Here, There and Everywhere, Geoff Emerick writes about late-night sessions during which Paul McCartney would record bass parts over and over until he had the perfect track. Impressive, though I've no doubt that were Emerick recording The Beatles today, he would splice together various bass tracks to create one usable one. Is one technique more pure than the other? Does it matter?

For Tom Petty and The Heartbreaker’s first several albums, they would track everything live at once until they had a perfect take, effectively rehearsing until they got a great performance. This is in stark contrast to the recording of Into the Great Wide Open, during which a musician like Benmont Tench would be asked to play a particular keyboard part during a few measures of a song, and then leave the studio.

On his recent interview on the radio show Sound Opinions, Geddy Lee of the band Rush discussed recording the album Hemispheres. The band initially tried to perform the ambitious side-long title track in its entirety, but ultimately had to record it in sections. Does this fact make the recording any less impressive?

Even Steely Dan, who employed arguably the best musicians on the planet to play on the album Gaucho, used recording tricks to the get the sound they wanted, as producer Roger Nichols created a drum machine called a Wendel to perfect drums parts initially recorded by the likes of Jeff Porcaro! 

Clearly, even getting past today’s largely sterilized recording techniques, we can come up with multiple examples of musicians and producers doing whatever it took to get the sound they wanted.  But is Petty correct when he says nobody cares how a record is made?

I suspect it depends on the listener, on the band, on the era, and on the circumstances. For guys like James Taylor and Jackson Browne, who get to play with the greatest musicians known to Man, I like to think that the albums they record are more performance-based and less studio-trickery, and I would hope that studio guys like Steve Gadd and Michael Landau would insist upon it. And part of the joy of listening to, say, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, is knowing that I’m listening to a live performance. Something would surely be lost if it came to light that “So What” had been recorded track by track. 

It's also kind of sad that our ears have gotten used to hearing perfection, because there was a time when the performance was more important. Keith Richards’s fuzz guitar errors on “Satisfaction” can be heard loud and clear fifty years after the song was recorded. Would the song be any better if it had been recorded in 2015, when no doubt Richards would have rerecorded the guitar part (or, more likely, would have recorded the tune several times and then spliced together various parts for the perfect take)? Do the mistakes take away from the song, or somehow make it more endearing? I don't know.

For now, I continue to plow through what has been a somewhat grueling recording process and attempt to make the best-sounding record I can using the resources available to me. And some of those resources are digital. The Palisades will be complete by summer’s end, and God-willing, it’s going to sound great thanks in large part to modern technology. I’ll take this over a bad-sounding "authentic" record any day.

Maybe Petty has a point.

McCartney Sweats it out in Milwaukee

It’s a little bizarre that a man only four years younger than my father is able to transfix an audience in sweltering heat for just short of three hours.  On Tuesday night at Miller Park in Milwaukee, Paul McCartney, forty-nine years after taking the U.S. by storm with The Beatles, played his heart out, shirt soaked with sweat, and gave a performance that fans are sure to remember for another forty-nine years.  Just as with Springsteen’s recent concerts, last night’s show begged the question: why don’t all performers work as hard and show as much appreciation as this guy does?  If a seventy-one year old McCartney can do it, why not (fill in the blank of some of the lame performances you’ve seen lately)?

After seeing McCartney in 2005, I decided that I wasn’t going to attend any more of his shows.  I’d noticed he’d aged in the two years since I’d seen him last, and I didn’t want to see this iconic singer/songwriter continue to degrade before my eyes.  But allowing my son to see him this time around changed my mind, and eight years later, McCartney almost seems to have become younger, withstanding the blistering heat and deftly managing a set list that didn’t once take him out of the spotlight.

Of particular note last night was the setlist, offering surprises that left many of the die-hard fans elated.  For me, the inclusion of “Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five” was worth the price of admission alone, but he surprised with other songs: “Junior’s Farm,” “Hi, Hi, Hi,” “Listen to What the Man Said,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” and several songs never performed live before this tour, including “Lovely Rita,” “Being For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” “Another Day,” and “Your Mother Should Know.”  One of the most effective songs of the evening was another unexpected song, “Mrs. Vanderbilt” from his largely represented Band on the Run album, as even the unfamiliar in the crowd willingly shouted out the “Ho, Hey Ho” refrain. 

McCartney’s skipping of thirty years of repertoire between Tug of War’s “Here Today” and last year’s “My Valentine” is about the only criticism I could possibly make of the show.  It would have been cool if Paul had at least made a gentle nod to his compositions of the 80s and 90s, substituting a couple of the lesser interesting Beatles tunes for “Stranglehold,” “My Brave Face,” “Off the Ground” or “The World Tonight.”  But this is quibbling.  Backed my his proficient band of the last decade, the performances were uniformly fantastic, almost to a fault at times as keyboardist Paul Wickens recreated nearly note for note the brass and saxophone parts from McCartney’s repertoire, though his strings were a nice addition on songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Yesterday.”  Band members Rusty Anderson, Brian Ray and the particularly entertaining drummer Abe Laboriel Jr., supported McCartney throughout, and their impeccable backing vocals helped to mask McCartney’s weakening upper register.  Paul’s falsetto, however, required no masking, as showcased on songs like “Something” and “Maybe I’m Amazed.”  That he still has such brilliant falsetto at seventy-one is amazing to me, and it’s a skill that, if lost, would perhaps cause him to call it a day on live performing.

Ending the show with “Helter Skelter” and the last of the Abbey Road medley, McCartney completed a sampling of what is likely the most impressive repertoire of a live performer today.  There were audience members in attendance who had seen McCartney play in Milwaukee in 1964 with The Beatles.  I doubt they saw as good a show then as they did last night.