Silver Moons
The Pop & Jazz blog
Had a fresh listen to this blast of heroic pop today. The songwriter and producer Jim Steinman, best known for his work with Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler, helmed the two songs that bookend the 1984 movie Streets of Fire. Laurie Sergeant (of Face to Face and Twinemen) and Holly Sherwood are, in force, the singing voice of the character Ellen Aim (played by Diane Lane), and Sherwood nails the lead on the film’s climactic song, “Tonight is What it Means to be Young.”
(Note: This song is about the promise of a better future after stormy times, and the video distorts this in its use of every last violent frame of the movie. Please keep that in mind as you listen. Spoiler alert: it also shows pretty much the whole movie.)
Gotta love the nod to Ultravox at the instrumental bridge, about halfway in. The Ultravox album Quartet came out about a year before production would have begun on Streets of Fire, and “Tonight is What it Means to be Young” owes some of its majesty to Ultravox’s “Visions in Blue.”
Steinman brilliantly orchestrates (and the great Bob Clearmountain mixes) what could so easily be a soupy mess, with voice after voice after voice layered atop bass, piano, synthesizer (courtesy of Synergy’s Larry Fast), programmed drums, electronic percussion, and other “assorted keyboards.” That’s the E Street Band’s Roy Bittan pounding the ivory—chase that fade!
A common studio trick for thickening the sound of vocals is to use what’s known as doubling, in which a singer records the same part twice, performing it virtually the same both times. It’s like a micro-choir of one. In his songs for Streets of Fire, Steinman tends to double different singers with voices of similar character, creating something like a new, composite lead voice. (The first four verses are, of course, Sherwood by herself.) Background vocals are another matter entirely, and on this song a separate credit is given to a trio of Sherwood and the Meat Loaf vets Rory Dodd and Eric Troyer for arranging and singing all parts: composite lead, myriad interwoven solo parts, and massed choir. A tour de force of writing, arranging, and performing, by all parties.
17 October 2014
My friend Charlie is a musician. He wrote and sang for a country band, and they were good. More to my liking, though, is his current act, The Ugly Cousin Bros., who describe themselves as “a guitar and fiddle duo from Woodinville, WA performing songs about barkers, burdens, buckets, wagers, wins, wanting, startups and salvation.”
In other words, they’re as Americana as AstroTurf and the Angels, Albuquerque and roaming antelope. You’ll find them somewhere along the possible intersections of Merle Haggard, Leo Kottke, Lou Reed, and Bruce Springsteen.
When I say that their debut, Sideshow Life, is just my speed, I’m not merely talking tempo, though the brothers’ (or is that cousins’) unhurried demeanor is part of their appeal. What spoke to me first and reaches me the deepest is the intimacy of their songs—they impart a delicate, 4 am-and-no-one’s-listening vibe, limber-fingered and emotionally wide open, illusion-free and honest as the day is, well, young.
There’s 8 songs, most of ’em short and all of them acoustic. Charlie sings on most and plays guitar. Nate sings on some and plays violin and guitar. Through the genius of modern technology, you can hear the songs just below. I’ll say a few words about my favorite moments, then I’ll leave you to your listening.
The title song, “Sideshow Life,” paints a portrait of a man perennially beset by romantic ailments beyond his control. It doesn’t come off as whining, though. Hardships are the norm. And in music, as in certain tents at certain circuses, hardships become authentic performance, face and body and soul laid bare: “No, my friends, that’s no disguise.”
“Dollars to Donuts,” a live standard of Charlie’s for some years, gets what feels like the song’s definitive treatment here, its laconic lilt a dead lock with the resignation of a protagonist whose righteous assessment of his failed relationship is undercut by the emptiness on the other side of that assessment.
The manic guitar motif in the impatient “Fast Like My Dog” evokes, of all things, the playing of the Macedonian guitarists Vlatko Stefanovski and Miroslav Tadić on their album Krushevo (M*A Recordings), giving the song an off-kilter feeling of pre-dawn jitters—caffeine kick, not real energy. Maybe there’s another layer to this wish for speed—a spinning wheel, or wheels, other than the circus wheel of “Sideshow Life.”
My favorite song has to be the Cajun-tinged “Fish Soup,” sung by Charlie, who recounts a touch-and-go dinner date at a French restaurant. A sadness tinges the finger picking and fiddling, but the color and playfulness in the words keep us wondering about the outcome, even when the prognosis looks bleak:
The next course was mixed greens with the vinaigrette
I seemed stuck at an impasse, she seemed sour with regret
She picked at the Roquefort and I waded into the brie
I tried to brighten her blues, but she soon darkened me
It’s a gem of a song, all the more potent for its understated demeanor. The bond between the characters is no less real for being tenuous.
The Cousin Bros. lay it on the table: the good, the bad, and—wait for it—the ugly. Life may be tough, but sometimes you can a smile through your tears. And sometimes, when you finally work up the nerve to ask her to dance, she just might say yes.
The Ugly Cousin Bros. play the Soul Food Coffee House in Redmond on October 16 and the Skylark Café in Seattle on November 8, 2014. For more info, have a gander at their Facebook page.
12 October 2014
A prevalent concern of mine for Pop & Jazz is proportion—wanting myself, in some sense, to be rendered proportionally, in musically balanced fashion: my interest in the music of Ozzy Osbourne not overshadowing my regard for Gordon Lightfoot, and my appreciation for Lightfoot seen in light of my enduring love for the music of Rush and David Sylvian.
But I don’t necessarily live my life, or listen, proportionally. What I listen to is what I listen to. What I publish is what I publish. And what my words say is what I think about any of the above at any given point of intersection—in any post or article, whenever it sees the light of day.
4 October 2014
A common studio trick for thickening the sound of vocals is to use what’s known as doubling, in which a singer records the same part twice, performing it virtually the same both times. It’s like a micro-choir of one. In his songs for Streets of Fire, Steinman tends to double different singers with voices of similar character, creating something like a new, composite lead voice. (The first four verses are, of course, Sherwood by herself.) Background vocals are another matter entirely, and on this song a separate credit is given to a trio of Sherwood and the Meat Loaf vets Rory Dodd and Eric Troyer for arranging and singing all parts: composite lead, myriad interwoven solo parts, and massed choir. A tour de force of writing, arranging, and performing, by all parties.