I'd Love to Turn You On #207 - Cat Power – You Are Free

After living outside of the United States for three years, I went back home to upstate South Carolina in 2003 and worked at the independent record store I shopped at growing up. Following that lengthy break from U.S. pop culture, I spent a lot of the summer catching up on recent developments in pop and independent music. Although I may have had a passing awareness of Cat Power (the stage name of Chan Marshall) in the late 1990s, I felt like she became an unavoidable entity in indie rock in the summer of 2003. I kept drifting into conversations with coworkers and customers about a recent Cat Power show in the region characterized by an exhilarating, yet unpredictable performance. Earlier in the year, Cat Power released You Are Free, an album that provides an excellent entry point for the work of this exceptional, vital artist.

 You Are Free opens with “I Don’t Blame You,” as a stately piano figure structures Marshall’s sensitive and direct address to a musician who struggled with the cost of success. The song highlights Marshall’s skill at evocative songwriting as it blends equal parts elegy for a kindred spirit and personal declaration of defiance. “I Don’t Blame You” introduces the album’s theme of Marshall reflecting on the notion of success, the life of an artist, and her choice to pursue this life. At this pivotal stage of Cat Power’s career, Marshall draws out this conflict between wanting to be a rock star and dealing with the consequences of the attendant success. This conflict has defined Marshall’s work and has often played out in real time in front of audiences all over the world. In this context, “I Don’t Blame You” feels like an act of bravery and a commitment to go forward despite the risks. The second song, “Free,” continues with the topic of songs about music, but breaks away from the thoughtful character study of the first song and jumps into a hypnotic guitar rhythm that sets the stage for lyrics that feel like free association about the unfettered joy music can bring into our lives. Up next, “Good Woman” offers the point of view from one side of a love that has begun to fall apart. Although the speaker states her resolve to leave, the song echoes with her confession, “I will miss your heart so tender.” The song begins with a sober guitar line that Warren Ellis soon accents with an aching and beautiful violin performance. As Marshall’s voice grows from fragile to confident, “Good Woman” blossoms into one of the album’s finest moments complete with a children’s chorus and backing vocals from Eddie Vedder. “Evolution,” the album’s final song, features a piano part reminiscent enough of “I Don’t Blame You” to provide the album with bookends of a sort, but this song delivers something far more elusive than the straightforward narrative of the first song. This haunting, enigmatic final note confounds as much as the first song invites and it ensures that the listener will soon return to this collection of songs.

A year and a half after the release of You Are Free, Chan Marshall worked with Handsome Boy Modeling School on their sophomore album, White People, and contributed the album’s most enchanting and surprising collaboration in the form of the sultry R&B workout, “I’ve Been Thinking.” The song’s polished production and nonchalant sex appeal hint at the kind of territory Marshall would explore in greater depth a couple years later on her next studio album and career breakout, The Greatest. In 2012, Marshall finally released a proper follow-up to The Greatest with Sun, a restless and adventurous studio album of original material that finds her embracing both her rock star charisma and her weirder inclinations with confidence and joy. You Are Free strikes an excellent balance between Cat Power’s spartan and engrossing early recordings and the richer, more nuanced sounds Marshall would delve into in the second half of her career.

-         John Parsell

I'd Love to Turn You On #157 - Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender

Since Joanna Newsom released her debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender in the spring of 2004, she has become a highly divisive figure in popular music. Just as Newsom began to find a following of devoted fans appreciative of her unique artistic contributions, she simultaneously amassed a legion of detractors eager to dismiss her because of what they perceived as indulgent eccentricities. One bright Sunday morning in the fall of 2004, a couple of friends played The Milk-Eyed Mender for me for the first time over brunch at their apartment. The allure and warmth of these songs have merged with the rest of my memories of that pleasant autumn morning. This introduction to Joanna Newsom’s music sheltered me from the debate over her significance in contemporary music and allowed me to behold the lyrical depth, musical complexity, and singular appeal of this extraordinary album.

The idea that anyone has established a critically acclaimed career in modern indie rock as a highly literate, classically trained harpist still blows my mind and I’ve been watching her career for over a decade. One thing most of Newsom’s critics miss is her remarkable sense of humor, which runs through her entire catalog and figures prominently in the best songs on The Milk-Eyed Mender. “Bridges and Balloons” opens Newsom’s debut album with two lines on the harp gently fading in for twenty seconds before she begins to share a highly detailed account of an incredible journey. Upon closing the narrative, Newsom allows the two lines of the harp to dance together hypnotically for over a minute before the songs fades out like it faded in. A couple songs later, “The Book of Right-on” exhibits Newsom’s flair for absurd humor against a showcase of her musical prowess while she interlaces a prominent bassline with highly rhythmic high end figures on the harp. The first time I heard the lyric, “I killed my dinner with karate,” I was convinced that I’d misheard it, but I came to better understand the scope of her humor. Oddly enough, The Roots sampled this song’s chorus and bassline to create the surprisingly successful throwback jam, “Right On” on their 2010 album, How I Got Over. As I became more familiar with The Milk-Eyed Mender, I liked many of the songs, but “Inflammatory Writ” was the first one I loved. Upon my first close listen, I thought I was hearing a talent show performance by a secret love child of Bob Dylan and Dolly Parton. Whirling by in just under three minutes and guided by the stiffly paced ramble of piano accompaniment, Newsom delivers an eviscerating satire of songwriters’ self-absorption. By mocking herself, her peers, and her role models with such zeal and style, Newsom acknowledges to her audience that she isn’t taking herself too seriously.

Since The Milk-Eyed Mender, Newsom has released three albums and each one has deepened her artistic vision, heightened the quality of her storytelling, and expanded her musical palette. In the fall of 2007, I saw Newsom perform with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in support of Ys, her ambitious breakthrough sophomore album. Just a few months ago, I attended her show at the Boulder Theater on the tour for her most recent album, Divers. Both times, Newsom highlighted her newest material, but revisited several songs from her first album. I was already familiar with these songs, but watching them unfold first hand instilled within me a sense of awe, admiration, and wonder. In fewer than fifteen years, Newsom has built an impressive, innovative, and unprecedented career in popular music and it all started with The Milk-Eyed Mender.

-          John Parsell

What Are You Listening to Lately (part 6)?

Sorry I've slacked folks. Holidays, film festival, and other stuff (including laziness) conspired to keep me down. I promise I'll get back on track. I swear it.

Franco – African Classics
First disc is a chronological mess, while the second runs more or less in order (with a couple jumps). But the music makes it across the board, and it’s nice for me to pick up my third Franco “Best of” collection with minimal overlap with the other two. And what’s that? Liner notes that not only tell you a little about each piece, but tell you which CD the track is on, should you choose to follow through on some favorites? The amateur ethnomusicologist/collector nerd in me is in heaven! Only drawback for me is that not every track is as killer as on competing best ofs – the great-but-out-of-print The Very Best of Franco or the equally great and still in print The Rough Guide to Franco (or the brand-new Francophonic, just released last week to right the wrong Stern's made when they took Very Best of out of print). But for two in-print, domestically available discs studded with greatness and always delivering joy at a single disc price, it seems foolish if not downright stupid of me to even mention that it’s less consistent. It’s pretty great throughout, and if my taste favors the dancy, guitar-heavy 70’s and 80’s material while this even-handedly represents the rumba-leaning 50’s and 60’s, that’s my problem. Get it if you have the slightest inkling that you’d enjoy it.

Run DMC – Raising Hell
More consistent than the debut, though nothing here is as startlingly brilliant as “Rock Box” or “Sucker MC’s.” Even so, it’s brimming with a confidence and verve their sophomore effort lacks and from first beat to last they rarely step wrong. As a crossover move, “Walk This Way” was (and still is) a stroke of genius – or at least it was a stroke to get Tyler and Perry on board for the ride. The song slays – great original turned into great cover, and Tyler sounds as comfortable in this setting as the guys from Hollis (a great shot in the arm for his commercial potential of the day, too). What used to be the A-side is a great sequence – perfect opener in “Peter Piper” to the back-to-back anthems of "It’s Tricky” and “My Adidas” to the aforementioned “Walk This Way” to a slight cooldown with the short, funky hit of “Is It Live” and the totally live-in-the-studio feel of “Perfection.” The former B kicks almost as hard, dipping in quality only on “Dumb Girl” (it’s still funky tho) and letting up the intensity only for the jokey humor of “You Be Illin’,” but making up for any flaws with one of the best and most out-there pieces of music they ever essayed – “Proud to Be Black.” In a way, that song is the statement of purpose of both album and career for these guys, summing up in a few succinct phrases and wild scratches what the braggadocio of not even just their own career, but all of this era of rap had as its unspoken subtext – unspoken until now, of course. Shoulda been a single, though songs with “motherfucker” in them don’t get on the radio often. And the singles here signified plenty on their own. Backed by the deeper album cuts, it makes for a damn near flawless listening experience and what may in the long run prove to be their finest album.

Stereolab – Mars Audiac Quintet
My second most favorite by Stereolab though I’d point out that I’m not really to be trusted since A) I pretty much stopped picking up new albums by them somewhere around the turn of the millennium and B) I think that all their albums except the divine Emperor Tomato Ketchup are of more or less equal quality (high). But some – this one, for example – are slightly more equal and find their way into my listening more regularly than others. This fact is helped along by little strokes like the terrific lyrics of “Wow and Flutter,” the Krautrock influence that puts a fine, artsy, electro-acoustic sheen on things, and the brilliance of “Des Etoiles Electroniques,” a little slice of heaven which just floats above and beyond the rest of the record. A shame it comes in so early – would’ve made a nice linchpin in the middle of the record. But it’s pretty great throughout – more rock-heavy than later albums would prove to be, yet infused with the breathy melodiousness that makes it seem lighter than air, a fact punctured by the seriousness of the lyrics: usually political, always leftist, often in French. It’s one of the best spoonfuls of sugar they’ve created to make their socialist medicine go down.