Help Me I Think I'm Falling

 

 

A few weeks back on a snowy Saturday afternoon Bill and I had a cocktail or two and listened to Joni Mitchell's Love Has Many Faces, a compilation of her music fashioned into a quartet of CDs.  Each suite of songs, or "acts," as she calls them, is titled and juxtaposes songs from all of the albums she's ever made.  It was a breathtaking experience.  Snow deepening, Joni's voice traveling through time, and a little vodka to wash it into perspective:  Joni from the early 70s, trilling and silvery and triumphant, melodic to the point of otherworldliness, all the way through the late 70s and 80s, when she's getting world-weary and the voice is thickening, turning plush, cigarette-jazzy, to the two albums she did in 2000 and 2002 in which she covers classic pop tunes, along with many of her own, backed up by a lush orchestra, the voice voluptuously what it is, husky, full, ready to dream.  There's no reason to the way she pulls songs side by side, except in her own head, which makes the whole endeavor beautifully random and yet somehow super-concentrated and very, very pleasurable.  You're inside Joni Mitchell's mind, feeling her feelings, and also basking in her glow, a light so warm and brilliant you're kind of in the presence of a god, or goddess, or whatever.  It's the music, though, that sends it all the way over:  subtle and rich and blatant when it needs to be, and the words, chronicling her love of travel and shady men and all the friends and family she leaves behind on many hejiras, only to feel more connected with them once she makes the split.  You need to hear all 4 quartets to really get it, as well.  There's a hardback book housing the CDs, with a long, personal essay by Joni that is self-indulgent and kind of silly, just the way it should be.  She goes through the list of songs one by one, explaining their meaning and polish and joy, but all you really need is the songs, and I think she knows that.  She has to.  Almost 50 years of making music has given Joni a luster and a swagger you can't make up, only earn.  She's the ying to Dylan's yang.  And Love Has Many Faces is a Bible for anybody who yearns to examine what it all means and what it does to you when you realize you can't figure it out.

   

Oceania

Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is one of those albums that defines any space and time it's played in.  It has an atmospheric soul, and a sense of playfulness and seriousness that reminds me of Joni Mitchell's Hissing of Summer Lawns:  long, jazzy, sophisticated pop songs that linger among themselves like people inside a crowded beach-house party, sipping cocktails and relaxing and chatting, but also the whole she-bang layered with a communal understanding that all of it's a big beautiful dream. 

Music like this doesn't come along very often, and Ocean seems to know this rarity instinctively.  Each song has its own distinct sense of itself, as if every note has its own monogrammed towel, every melody its own golden bracelet.  Love songs kick into meditations, meditations turn themselves into flocks of birds.  One of the best songs on Orange is a low-down-gorgeous wake-up call called "Crack Rock."  Its energy comes from inside a glassy intelligence, like sunlight captured in a mirror.  Another great one is called "Sweet Life," a long lush ballad ensconced in a tricky, lacy rap that details the lives of a lost generation while also celebrating the sweet nothingness of it all.  "Pyramids" is a Prince- from-1999 centerpiece that has a heavy heart but a whimsical, ecstatic soul.

But it's not one song that seems to be the point:  it's an accumulation of words, music, atmospheres, tones, all of that providing a plush escape from the way soul and R&B music has been trapped inside itself for so long.

Ocean has discovered a new planet with this album.  Let's call it Oceania.  I want to live there.
 

Ghost of a Chance

Susan Boyle's new album, Someone to Watch over Me, kills me. 

And it's only partially because she won that big contest despite looking like a Neanderthal merged with Little Orphan Annie back in 2009.  The songs she and/or her managers/producers have chosen have a resounding oddness and poetry simply because of her voice, status and charm, a bone-deep mysteriousness both from the musical arrangements and the singular, studied, mystical way Susan sings. 

Susan actually offers up a rendition of "Enjoy the Silence" by Depeche Mode that brings me to tears.  The way it's been produced, the song is no longer a vibrating neo-disco chant, but a sleepy, sophisticated, seductive ballad.  I play it going on home visits, driving through rundown working-class neighborhoods.  The journey kind of goes cinematic and spiritual, Susan's voice turning peeling vinyl siding and wet barking dogs and upside-down toys in the mud into images from a tragic, delicate independent movie in my head.  Some sincere, enchanting documentary about abandoned hopes and dreams, etc.

"Enjoy the Silence" bleeds into Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" and that ethereal treatise on something being lost and something being gained in living everyday bleeds into the late Jeff Buckley's "Lilac Wine," one of those songs that make you feel like you've dropped in on a dream while it's still in progress. 

This is an album that makes you want to succumb to its bittersweet spell so you can officially be invisible. 

Susan's transformation from that creepy kinky-haired She-Devil to Sophisticated Song Stylist is no longer the main story here.  However it happened, Susan has started to create a body of work that feels authentic and has a comforting melancholic gloss.  Like the Carpenters' or Bread's or Gordon Lightfoot's, Susan's oeuvre has a lasting sting to it because of the mix of easy-listening approachability and sorrow, show-biz and serious longing.  Someone to Watch over Me is a slick, rigorous, and slightly off-kilter collection of songs about not getting what you want.  One of the few newly written songs on the album, titled "This Will Be The Year,"  already feels like a classic.  All about lost chances and trying over and over to get things right, Susan sings the song with the depth, hurt and majesty of all people who've not been taken seriously and who stow away doubts and taunts until one day they get the chance to fly out of the ashes of their lives.  Revenge somehow leaks out of every note in "This Will Be the Year."  It feels like Susan is confronting all those people who laughed at her, or considered her a lost cause, or just plain ignored her.  That's the feeling I get:  all those people who never thought she had a ghost of a chance, and now here she is ghostly and powerful, haunting pop culture with a grace and dignity that almost out-shimmers Adele.

Here's to you, Susan:  to who you were but especially to who you are now, and to that lovely, distinct, musical pain and suffering that allows us a brief respite from true sadness.