Author: paulobrian Page 4 of 28

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in the golden age of solo Don Henley, and this 1989 album is certainly a part of that arc. After eight years of Reagan and the subsequent election of Bush the Elder, Henley was fed up. Never exactly a mellow customer to begin with, he’d seen years of greed, sanctimony, predation, warmongering, and inequality, and he was pissed. (Though being pissed about Reagan and Bush-1 seems kind of quaint nowadays, but how could he have known what was coming?)

Song after song on this album picks off Henley’s targets. “Gimme What You Got” — boom, materialism, avarice, and consumer culture. “Little Tin God” — boom, sham religion and demagoguery. “Shangri-La” — boom, envy and complacency. But the one that cuts the deepest is also the one that plays the gentlest: the title track. Over a gorgeous piano riff by Bruce Hornsby, Henley’s world-weary voice elegantly braids together the failures of a relationship with the failures of a social fabric.

Lawyers keep popping up in this song, and the genius of Henley’s lyric is that you can’t tell whether they’re divorce lawyers for a shattered couple or defense lawyers for a disgraced politician. The song combines the macro and micro levels of our eroding societal bonds, and shows us how we’ve been poisoned by fairy tales at each level, tales of true love and true patriotism, all too often a masquerade for acquisitiveness and venality. But Henley’s tone is wistful, not angry — he still believes in that place “still untouched by men”, at least for the duration of this song, even knowing that it’s only a temporary sanctuary from the truth behind our destroyed illusions. That tonal contrast is what makes the song so powerful, such a high-water mark of his career.

Hornsby also helps a lot. This album came out before the days of “featuring” credits for songs, or else there would be a whole lot of them on here. Hornsby’s piano defines the sound of “The End Of The Innocence,” and he’s just the beginning of the cavalcade of late-80’s stars. Check out Axl Rose screaming along with “I Will Not Go Quietly.” Hey, there’s Patty Smyth backing up “How Bad Do You Want It?” Ooh, both Melissa Etheridge and Edie Brickell (an odd combination for sure) are over there getting behind “Gimme What You Got.” Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Stan Lynch are all over this thing. Oh, and I guess Sheryl Crow too, though that doesn’t really count since she wouldn’t get famous for another 5 years or so.

Crow’s presence isn’t the only bit of prescience on the album. “New York Minute”, one of Henley’s all-time best, has imagery that was likely inspired by the grimness of late-80’s New York City, the danger and dread on display in books like The Bonfire Of The Vanities, but it sure does sound like a 9/11 song now. “In a New York minute, everything can change… You’d better take a fool’s advice and take care of your own / One day they’re here, next day they’re gone.” Similarly, in “Gimme What You Got” he sings, “All these trumped up towers / They’re just golden showers.” Henley had Donald Trump’s number (and the letter “P”) way back then, though nobody knew what kind of golden showers Trump would be raining down on all of us 30 years later. On the other hand, time hasn’t been kind to everything on this album. Henley’s shots at mentally ill homeless people and testifying women in “If Dirt Were Dollars” haven’t aged so well.

More timeless are the relationship songs on The End Of The Innocence. Like I said about the title track, there’s an extent to which many of the political songs are also relationship songs — “I Will Not Go Quietly” wants to wrap its loving arms around the small of your back, and “New York Minute” knows the days were so much brighter in the time when she was here. And “How Bad Do You Want It” dresses down an immature guy who mishandles a relationship, but Henley’s narrator stays at arm’s length from the story.

There are two pure relationship songs, though, both of which were deservedly popular (each just barely missed the Top 20 by peaking at #21): “The Last Worthless Evening” and “The Heart Of The Matter.” For as bitter and jaded as Henley is throughout the rest of the record, these two both display a wonderful romanticism and tenderness. In the former, he’s making himself vulnerable to someone else who’s in similar post-breakup pain, suggesting that if she gives him a chance, he’ll show her love again. “The Heart Of The Matter” also looks back on a breakup, though rather than looking for new love he’s just seeking forgiveness. Both of these songs strike at deep truths of the heart — the need for closure and the power of hope.

That’s where redemption lives on The End Of The Innocence. Yeah, it’s clear throughout the album that “if dirt were dollars / we’d all be in the black”, but there’s a place where we can go to wash that blackness away. That place is our own heart, and the hearts of others, and the path there requires forgiveness, emotional risk, and just a little bit of preserved innocence.

Art Garfunkel’s name has become a bit of a punchline. “Garfunkel” is now pretty much synonymous with “second banana”. And fair enough, Paul Simon wrote almost all the original songs, played the guitar, and arranged a lot of the music (with the critical exception of the vocal harmonies.) There’s no question that Paul Simon was the dominant force in the duo.

But to listen to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme is to be reminded of the irreplaceable magic that Garfunkel brought to the table. Really, we need look no further than the opening track, “Scarborough Fair / Canticle”. Garfunkel’s voice over Simon’s guitar fingerpicking immediately takes us into the mystic, a spooky intimacy with its shroud over both the present and the distant past, as he sings the centuries-old ballad words. There’s a huge amount of space around his voice, like he’s singing in a cathedral, and his perfect and breathy tone provides the appropriate spiritual hush. Simon comes in later, initially harmonizing but quickly diving into “Canticle”, weaving its anti-war theme around the ancient words. Meanwhile, Garfunkel’s voice gets multi-tracked into a heavenly choir, as well as floating over the top with pieces of “Canticle.” There is simply no way this glorious song could have been anywhere near as beautiful without Garfunkel’s haunting voice.

That goes double for his peak on the album, “For Emily, Whenever I May Find Her.” It’s everything “Scarborough Fair” would be if Simon were removed, leaving just the mystical, exquisite innocence. “What a dream I had,” the song begins, and Garfunkel’s voice makes it feel like a dream, in a way that is just not in Paul Simon’s vocal capabilities. It’s the kind of dream where you struggle to express what it felt like, falling onto sensory metaphors like “crinoline of smoky burgundy” and “cathedral bells tripping down the alleyways”, but what you know is that in the dream, there is someone with whom you share a pure and perfect love. When she arrives, just walking with her and holding her hand is the greatest emotional elevation you’ve ever felt. And then you wake up, your real-life love is there by your side, and the rush of gratitude you feel moves you to tears.

Art Garfunkel singing, “Oh, I love you” at the end of this song was, for years, the nearest expression I’d ever heard of what love feels like. With the benefit of time, I now know that it is in fact a near-perfect expression of what young, new love feels like, but when I listen to “For Emily,” that feeling returns to add both depth and sparkle to a longstanding romantic partnership, even if just for two minutes. That is a pretty wonderful musical achievement, and I don’t believe Simon could have pulled it off so successfully without Garfunkel.

Now, I don’t mean this to be a hit piece on Paul Simon, who I absolutely adore. I was just struck this time by just how valuable Garfunkel’s presence on this record truly is, and how easy it’s become to dismiss him as some kind of backup singer, in the light of the two men’s post-1970 careers. Garfunkel is in fact a crucial part of why this duo is so beloved, on a level surpassing even Simon’s extraordinary solo accomplishments. His ability to bring Simon’s music to gorgeous life is unparalleled. Take, for example, “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)”. It’s a fun little ditty, kinda giddy and almost exuberant, but when Garfunkel comes in to harmonize on the last thirty seconds of “ba da da da” vocalizations, we move from a light sense of fun to a profound feeling of joy, or at least I do.

“Feelin’ Groovy” is also a shining example of another aspect of this 1966 album, which is that some of it feels really 1966 at this point. Like, “The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine” is a sendup of advertising and consumerism, which is still plenty relevant, but dilemmas like “all the hippies seem to get the jump on you” and your boss telling you to “find a more productive bag”… not so much. Similarly, “A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)” has about as much currency as the Jared Kushner joke in Deadpool 2 will have in 50 years. On the other hand, as a satirical document of its time, Paul Simon doing his Dylan impression and muttering “folk rock!” (then fumbling his harmonica) at the end is still worth a giggle. Also, the swipe at hip ignorance (“He’s so unhip, when you say Dylan he thinks you’re talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was”) still has bite.

However, though some of the album’s references feel quite dated by now, its final track, “7 O’Clock News/Silent Night”, has become even more devastating with the passage of time. There’s of course the contrast of one of the world’s sweetest harmonies singing a quiet and hallowed Christmas carol, slowly being drowned out by the grim news of the day, and that contrast still lands, but now it is itself drowned out by how much worse the current news feels, pretty much systematically on all points. Just a quick tour:

• President Johnson proposes an outright ban on all housing discrimination in the open housing section of the Civil Rights Bill, but these noble sentiments are hobbled when “a compromise was painfully worked out in the House Judiciary Committee”: Ha! Remember when congressional committees would work out painful compromises in aid of getting legislation passed? How about the notion of a president who is an activist on behalf of social justice?
• Lenny Bruce dies from an overdose of narcotics: Prince. Tom Petty. But not just celebrities — an ongoing national emergency of opioid addiction and death.
• MLK refuses to cancel his plans for an open housing march in a Chicago suburb: Hey, how about that, a moral leader whose activism captures tons of media attention and prompts massive social upheaval! Today’s moral leaders are… people who express indignation on Twitter, I guess? This can be very effective, witness #metoo, but the 24-hour news cycle makes it also rather evanescent. For that matter, the very idea of impartial journalistic authority suggested by the sober 7 O’Clock News anchor was so thoroughly replaced by news-as-personality, news-as-entertainment, and news-as-meme that Russian trolls were able to undermine a democratic election through propaganda pieces disguised as news.
• Richard Speck stabs and strangles nine student nurses: Oh, a mass murder. Yeah, we get a lot of that now too, so much so that they really don’t seem so shocking anymore. I have a friend who in 2014 started contacting his congressional representative every time there was a mass shooting. He’s now done so 67 times.
• Congress investigates anti-Vietnam War protests. Nixon warns there could be five more years of war. (There were actually nine.) He calls opposition to the war “the greatest single weapon working against the U.S.”: We’ve been at war for seventeen years. Opposition and protests are… I’m gonna say nonexistent at this point? And the greatest single weapon working against the U.S. is sitting in the Oval Office.

It’s a deeply depressing litany, when you really think about it. (Especially since I didn’t even mention the whole “climate change catastrophes have begun and we’re doing very little to stop them from continuing to escalate” part.) One of the few cures is the type of spiritual renewal you get from listening to something truly sacred, so it’s a damn good idea to listen to this album on repeat.

When my Dad was my age, jazz was not respectable. It played in whorehouses not Carnegie Hall. These classics of jump, jive, and swing are all from the 1940’s. “Jumpin’ Jive,” “We The Cats,” and “San Francisco Fan” from Cab Caolloway; “Symphony Sid,” a Lester Young tune with words by King Pleasure; “Tuxedo Junction,” our tribute to Glenn Miller; and the rest, all performed at one time or other by our main inspiration, Louis Jordan, the king of juke boxes, who influenced so many but is acknowledged by so few. Like us he didn’t aim at purists, or even jazz fans — just anyone who wanted to listen and enjoy, reap this righteous riff. –JJ

That’s Joe Jackson’s full “statement of purpose” from the liner notes of his 1981 album Jumpin’ Jive. Now check out the statement from his previous album, Beat Crazy:

This album represents a desperate attempt to make some sense of Rock and Roll. Deep in our hearts, we knew it was doomed to failure. The question remains: Why did we try?

By 1981, Joe Jackson had released three successful (though decreasingly so) albums of spiky, melodic pop with the Joe Jackson Band, music which was labeled “New Wave” and “Angry Young Man”. He’d had an international hit with “Is She Really Going Out With Him?”, and a UK Top 5 hit with “It’s Different For Girls.” So a full album of 1940s swing covers was quite the unexpected move, but looking at these quotes, the choice starts to make a little more sense.

Beat Crazy was the third Joe Jackson Band album, and for all its freneticism, it does have an exhausted quality about it, a sense that the tank is running dry. According to Joe’s longtime bassist Graham Maby, drummer Dave Houghton left the band after that album, giving Jackson the opportunity to choose a new way forward for the Joe Jackson Band.

He decided instead to dissolve that band entirely, dismissing guitarist Gary Sanford and instead hiring three horn players, a piano player (!), and drummer Larry Tolfree. Maby was the only one who stayed. This dissolution became Jackson’s first opportunity to reinvigorate his music by going in a new direction, a trend that would continue throughout his career with departures like salsa music, a symphony, a film score, a concept album, and various points in between. As I’ve written before, Jackson hates to be pigeonholed, and refuses to sit still — audiences had already seen some variety from the jazz, ska, and punk influences of his first three albums, but Jumpin’ Jive threw down a much bigger gauntlet.

Which is not to say that the album comes off like a stiff-necked exercise. On the contrary, it’s incredibly fun! Jackson sounds like he’s having the time of his life in his vocals, and he jumps all the way in on weird character work (like the beginning of “What’s The Use Of Getting Sober (When You’re Gonna Get Drunk Again)” and the entirety of “You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business”) and period slang. Every song is alive with exhilaration, the sound of a loving tribute that comes close to a full resurrection.

In fact, some have argued that this album kicked off the swing revival that hit its peak around 1998, when suddenly bands like Squirrel Nut Zippers, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, and the Brian Setzer Orchestra were having hits with songs that came from (or might as well have come from) the 1940s. I don’t see much of a through line there, though. I wouldn’t even say that Jumpin’ Jive predicted the trend, because it’s pretty clear that Jackson doesn’t give a damn about trends. But I will say that this album makes those songs sound better, crisper, and more fun than any of those late 90’s bands ever managed to do. Which is no slam on those bands, just a recognition of Jumpin’ Jive‘s musical achievement.

The key here is that the musicianship on this album is just impeccable. Check out Nick Weldon’s smooth piano intro on “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby”. (So strange to me that Jackson stayed off the keys, limiting himself to “voice and vibes”, but I can’t argue with the results.) Check out Tolfree’s crrrrazy drum breaks in “How Long Must I Wait For You”. Check out the perfectly locked-in and interplaying horns at the beginning of “You’re My Meat”. (Also, everywhere else.)

Most of all, check out the staggering skill of Mr. Graham Maby. Jackson has used Maby at every possible opportunity throughout his career, the only player to whom he’s stayed so faithful, and this album makes the reasons for that loyalty crystal clear. Pretty much every song contains jaw-dropping examples of Maby’s bass virtuosity. In “You’re My Meat” he’s bouncing all over the scales. In “San Francsico Fan” he’s mournfully underlining the melodrama of Fannie’s tragic tale, marching in her funeral parade. The beginning of “We The Cats (Shall Hep Ya)” finds him nimbly soloing before settling into a vivacious walking groove.

It’s pretty impossible for me to pick a favorite Maby moment on this album, but I would put in a word for the iconic beginning of “Tuxedo Junction”, which perfectly sets the stage for the song. He revisits the theme throughout the song, adding flourishes and filigree as the spirit moves him, and makes the entire thing sound so great. Maby had never played this style of music before Jackson invited him to this album, and he rises to the occasion with such incredible aplomb that Jackson pretty much never lets him go from that point forward. I wouldn’t either.

One more note — Jackson gives a shout-out to vintage vocalist King Pleasure in the liner notes I quoted above, but he’d circle back in a much more substantial way much later. “King Pleasure Time”, from his excellent 2008 album Rain, turns the name into the personification of pleasure itself, who “rules the world, but not everybody knows it.” The song extols the idea of pure pleasure as the driving force in life, and if that’s true, Jumpin’ Jive is a pretty good path to get you there.

The Go-Go’s hit the peak of their career with the very first track on their very first album, Beauty and the Beat. That’s not to say that the rest of their work is a disappointment — far from it — but “Our Lips Are Sealed” is simply a perfect pop record. Instruments build in in classic layers as the song begins — first drums, then rhythm guitar, then lead guitar, then bass, and finally Belinda Carlisle’s voice, smooth and sparkling as crystal. Every layer is excellent. Gina Schock sets an ebullient beat, a springboard for the guitars of Jane Wiedlin and Charlotte Caffey, while Kathy Valentine’s melodic bass dances through the rhythm section like Carlisle through the fountain in the song’s video.

I’ve heard this song hundreds of times since 1981, and it still makes my hair stand on end, every single time. It captures a feeling both carefree and defiant, with lyrics that make a lovers’ conspiracy against the world seem like the most ecstatic expression of young romance. At least, that’s the mood set by the initial verse-chorus-verse, but then there’s a shift as the bridge comes. The bass slides into minor key territory as Wiedlin takes over the vocal duties with an angelic and maternal tone: “Hush my darling / Don’t you cry / Quiet, angel / Forget their lies.”

As Wiedlin finishes her last word, Schock hits the pinnacle of the song, a two-second drum break that feels exactly like an explosion of joy. Valentine buoys the last stroke as the verse comes back in, but this time supported by that Wiedlin angel from the bridge, echoing questions and reassurances: Can you hear them? See right through them. The band reprises the first verse but enriches it with higher harmonies, ending on a thrilling, jubilant vocal chord.

How do you match that? They didn’t, but some tracks on this album come pretty close. Top among the candidates is the iconic “We Got The Beat,” a manifesto of Go-Go attitude, youth, and musical exuberance. “Our Lips Are Sealed” was the band’s introduction, but “We Got The Beat” was when America really fell in love with them, catapulting the single to #2 and the album to #1 for six consecutive weeks. Astoundingly, they are still the only all-female band who writes their own songs and plays their own instruments ever to top the album charts.

Not only that, it’s not as if they rely on the talent of a single great songwriter. Take a look at the songwriting credits on their 5 Top 40 hits:

• “Our Lips Are Sealed”: Wiedlin, Terry Hall
• “We Got The Beat”: Caffey
• “Vacation”: Caffey, Valentine, Wiedlin
• “Head Over Heels”: Caffey, Valentine
• “Turn To You”: Caffey, Wiedlin

Wiedlin, Caffey, and Valentine form the core of the Go-Go’s songwriting team, bringing people from outside the band every so often, writing songs solo or in various combinations, occasionally including Carlisle (who has co-writing credit on one song each from Beauty And The Beat and Vacation) and Schock (who co-wrote one Vacation song and two from Talk Show.) Despite the varied personnel, the songs share a consistent musical and lyrical identity: fun, bouncy, affirming, with a swagger that carries just a hint of darkness.

Take Caffey & Wiedlin’s “This Town”, which sounds like surf rock in deep shade, a ticking rhythm guitar part and a stalking bass line underneath bright harmonies. The first verse and chorus sets the tone for a “Yay Los Angeles” lyrical picture: “Life’s a kick in this town… This town is so glamorous / Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us.” But then here comes the second verse: “Change the lines that were said before / We’re all dreamers, we’re all whores / Discarded stars, like worn out cars / Litter the streets of this town.” Not exactly pretty postcard fare.

Similarly, “Automatic” has few words, but what it has isn’t reassuring (e.g. “Angles sharp / Crash together”), and its overall mood is slow and spooky. Unfortunately, it’s not one of the album’s brighter moments. I got the sense that Wiedlin was trying for something hypnotic, along the lines of The Motels’ “Total Control”, but it comes out just kinda plodding. It starts a bit of a lackluster slide in the album, a few songs from side 2 that are just okay, as opposed to the fireworks show that is side 1 plus “We Got The Beat”.

I assigned Beauty and the Beat to Robby because I’d been listening to and loving Talk Show recently. I considered assigning Talk Show instead, but decided it was unlikely I’d be assigning another Go-Go’s album anytime soon, so I’d better pick the acknowledged classic. Funny thing, though — after listening to them both extensively, I actually think Talk Show is overall the stronger album. Though it lacks any single moment that reaches the heights of “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got The Beat”, even its lesser songs feel like classics (look no further than the deeply underrated “Capture The Light.”) The Go-Go’s had a brief and brilliant career (setting aside for a moment their 2001 comeback record), and over the short course of it they became stronger and stronger songwriters, if not hitmakers.

Even so, they absolutely bring the goods for most tracks on Beauty And The Beat. It’s inexplicable to me that IRS Records chose “Automatic” for the third single from the album when there are a raft of stronger contenders. From the rocking and vital “How Much More”, to the whirlwind of “Lust To Love”, and the defiant, hopeful “Can’t Stop The World”, this album is stuffed with shoulda-been hits. “We Got The Beat” is clearly the thesis statement, but Valentine delivers the perfect sendoff in the final track: “Can’t stop the world / Why let it stop you?”

Exactly.

British singer-songwriter Frank Turner has a trick. He didn’t invent it, and he doesn’t use it all the time, but he employs it to great effect on his fifth album, Tape Deck Heart. Here’s what it is: he sings a song long enough to make you think you know it, then changes it completely, putting a whole new context around it and bringing new and surprising levels of meaning to the very same words and tune.

The most pronounced version of this happens on “Four Simple Words.” The song starts out folky, and gently opens up into a swaying, strumming chorus:

I want to dance, I want to dance
I want lust and love and a smattering of romance
But I’m no good and dancing, and yet I have to do something
Tonight I’m gonna play it straight, I’m gonna take my chance
I want to dance

It’s a sweet and catchy, setting the stage for a warm and happy singalong, but as soon as it ends, furious drums upend the song and suddenly Turner charges in behind a frantic tattoo of electric guitars, spitting rapid lyrics about “heading out to the punk rock show” in a style that makes him as likely to be on the stage of that show as in the audience. When the chorus comes back it’s in that punk style, and now instead of feeling winsome and wistful, it’s a fierce declaration of independence from cultural strictures.

But the song’s not done yet. After a few pogoing verse-chorus-verse fusillades (with the occasional solo, profanity, or Rocky Horror Picture Show reference), it slows way down to deliver the chorus again, this time cabaret style, with tinkling piano and a subtle choir, and then switches to rollicking music hall on “But I’m no good at dancing”, and then ramps back into punk for a final verse and an abrupt ending.

The overall effect feels like taking the same sentiment to different phases of life, different internal and external communities, bringing them together with an insistence on joy and risk. The trick happens elsewhere too, though. “Broken Piano” finds him at first accompanied by a spooky drone, but otherwise a capella, lapsing occasionally into a grief-stricken Chris Martin falsetto. As the chorus arrives for the first time, the piano begins to assert itself, and the ominous drone increases in volume and coarseness. When the chorus comes back, it’s suddenly backed by huge, echoing drums, and a thick band of harmonizing Turners, leading up to sweeping, emotional power chords and an powerful climax.

“Plain Sailing Weather,” too, starts with its chorus in its simplest form, sung by Turner over basic acoustic guitar. Then the verse that follows it builds intensity so that when the chorus comes back, the band kicks in behind it and everything feels like it was meant to happen. “Tell Tale Signs” does a similar kind of build, albeit far more subtly.

Here’s the real trick, though. Those shifts don’t just happen within a song — they happen across the terrain of the album, too. Turner has described Tape Deck Heart as a “break-up album”, and that’s certainly apparent in songs like “Broken Piano”, “Plain Sailing Weather”, and “Tell Tale Signs”. Probably the most heartbreaking of them all is “Anymore.” No stylistic head-fakes in this one — it’s just pure acoustic guitar and mournful folk delivery of lines like “Darling, I can’t look you in the eyes now / And tell you if I’m sure that I love you anymore.” Turner frames “the romance and the running down of disconnected hearts” in stark terms that will surely resonate with anyone who’s ever been witness to the slow suffocating death of a love affair. It doesn’t get any bleaker than a repeated “I don’t love you anymore.”

But that’s not all there is to Tape Deck Heart. Amid the wreckage, there are brilliantly shining glimmers of hope. There’s “Oh Brother”, which beautifully encapsulates a close friendship on top of a deeply satisfying rock and roll riff. “The Way I Tend To Be” portrays a different kind of closeness, one that disrupts the singer’s self-destructive patterns with prompts to growth like “love is about all the changes you make and not just three small words.”

Best of all is the album’s opening track, “Recovery”. The song is unflinching in its depiction of a narrator “swallowed by the pain”, but every time the chorus comes in, the exultation of it is just undeniable, blowing through heartache even as it declares “It’s a long way up to recovery from here.” Turner’s band and his jubilant vocal recall the best moments of The Waterboys’ Big Music, with a similarly redemptive quality. At the other end of the album, the uplift that happens at the end of “Broken Piano” is similar to the breakthrough that happens in Coldplay’s “Amsterdam.” In each case, the pain gets surrounded by music so powerful that it lifts the singer into the skies, putting his earthbound heartache into a grander perspective. That’s how healing happens, and we’re lucky that Frank Turner has shared some of his with us.

Sometimes, when writing these album reviews, my first reaction has to do with the lyrics, or the performances, or the composition, or the production. And then there are those times when it’s just all about me. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy falls into the latter camp. I put this album on and I’m instantly transported to the mid-90’s, a time when one-word song titles ruled the world, and it still felt like a clever trick to leave a bunch of silence at the end of the last song on your CD, only to be followed by a “hidden track”. I’m just starting to work in CU’s Financial Aid office, after a couple of years in graduate school. It’s just a temporary thing, because I’m on my way to an academic career, just as soon as Laura finishes her Ph.D. Many of my friends are newly married, or on their way to it.

I listened to this album a lot during those years. I mean, a lot. But from 2018, time-traveling back to 1994 feels strange. So many things have changed since then. Some of those marriages have dissolved, some of those career paths have derailed, or I guess switched rails. There was so much coming that I didn’t foresee. I think that’s why Fumbling Towards Ecstasy felt really worn-out to me the first couple of times I listened to it for this assignment. Sometimes I feel a smooth, unbroken connection to the me I once was, but listening to Sarah McLachlan’s deep, cool emoting on this album, he felt quite distant indeed.

A few more listens, though, helped scrape off the overfamiliarity. I started to get past my own memories and just connect with the music on its own terms. It makes sense to me that this was McLachlan’s breakout album. It feels like the first mature expression of her artistic voice, not just her singing voice. She’d already established herself as an exceptional singer, and put that forward as her primary selling point — the debut single from her debut album was none-too-subtly called “Vox.” Her first couple of albums were very good, but still felt like an artist emerging from her influences, working to get past the Kate Bush-isms into her own unique idiom.

“Possession” is the song that stakes her claim on this new territory. A sterling member of the “Every Breath You Take” school of songs that sound sweet but are actually super-creepy, it puts McLachlan’s vocal gifts into a new context. This time, she’s not just here to earnestly express her struggles with lovers and/or parents, but rather to inhabit a pretty unsavory character, an obsessed fan projecting romantic attachment onto his favorite singer, with a sinister undertone of violence: “And I would be the one to hold you down / Kiss you so hard I’ll take your breath away.” It’d be a few more years before McLachlan would reach the US Top 40, but this song made a big impression in the “adult alternative” radio world, and consequently had a big impact on my area, as local station KBCO was a pioneer in that format, and I was still working as an intern there. Rightly so — it’s an excellent song, well-produced and performed with enough restraint that its eeriness can shine through.

Most of this album sticks pretty close to the “Possession” template musically. In fact, I’d say that the entire thing stays within a fairly limited range. If Fumbling Towards Ecstasy were a color palette, it would be whites, blue-whites, light blues, and dark blues. Even her imagery favors chilly controlling metaphors like “Ice” and “Ice Cream”. Piano, organ, subdued drums, and guitars that stay mostly in the background with the exception of occasional stabs outward, are the order of the day. The star of the show is McLachlan’s voice, but for many songs (case in point: “Wait”) she hangs out mostly in her lower register, or at least the Sarah in front does that. She tends to enrich her songs by layering herself singing a variety of parts, like a vocal harmony group made of all Sarah McLachlans. Then when the lead reaches a little higher, it feels more dramatic for how contained everything else has been.

Tempo-wise, also, most songs aren’t out to set your pulse racing, in fact so much so that some stretches of the album felt downright somnolent. I really appreciated “Circle” this time around for the way it kicks up the energy, especially on the chorus. “Ice Cream” is another welcome exception, with a little bit of swing to its drumbeat and a hi-hat that isn’t shoved to the back of the mix for once. And conversely, sleepwalkers like “Mary” and “Fear” started to feel longer and longer with every listen. McLachlan would learn this lesson well for later songs like “Building a Mystery” and “Sweet Surrender”, but on Fumbling she still stays mostly in a pretty small box.

Ultimately, it’s McLachlan’s songs that prove the most satisfying element of this album. Even though there’s a samey quality to the album as a whole, many songs have a refreshing directness that’s missing from her earlier work. “Hold On” is a plea to the fates that anybody who’s ever had a seriously ill loved one can instantly relate to. “Plenty” and “Circle” set out relationship dysfunction in a way that makes perfect sense, especially if you’ve been there. And “Good Enough” is still a very strong portrayal of somebody tired of hearing about a friend’s abusive love affair, knowing that they could fix it if only they were allowed to. At the time, it was even a little more intriguing for its hints of same-sex eroticism.

It’s those songs, and McLachlan’s endlessly compelling voice, that finally lift this album out of the mid-90’s amber in which it nearly gets preserved. Once I pry it loose from the context that sticks to it, I’m ready to love it again.