Posts tagged ‘country’
My theory about Nickelback
Posted on | March 8, 2010 | No Comments
Now that the kind folks from the Vancouver Olympic committee have once again forced them down our collective throats during the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, I was reminded to share my theory about Nickelback. Does Nickelback warrant a theory? You bet. Since they are one of Canada’s biggest entertainment industry exports, I think we deserve all the attempts at an explanation we can get.
Let me start off by stating my theory: I think Nickelback is a country band. There. It’s a simple theory – I’m basically positing that we’ve all been herded down the wooden path of believing they’re hard rock, post-grunge, whatever; but really, they’re a country band from Hanna, Alberta, a hamlet of 2,800 inhabitants deep in the Canadian prairies. Two and a half hours from Calgary, three hours from Red Deer and about 5 hours from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Hanna is literally in the middle of nowhere. The Canadian heartland.
Now, since Nickelback is already apparently the most hated band ever, I’m not going to spend a tremendous amount of time trying to prove that I’m right. But I will suggest you watch some of these Youtube clips (most of which can – conveniently – not be embedded in other websites at the request of EMI Canada, Nickelback’s record label – because, you know, why would you encourage free online marketing for your band?).
In each case, try to notice and imagine the following (apart from Chad Kroeger’s Albrecht Dürer hair, of course, which you’ll notice whether you want to or not):
Cowboy hats and boots are in evidence, however fleetingly, everywhere. Band members other than Chad Kroeger have very neat, heartland cowboy hair styles. There are a lot of pickup trucks and Jeeps. The choruses all sound like modern country music (which, as we all know, sounds like 70s/80s mainstream rock). Every time a chorus comes on, try to imagine away the crunchy distorted guitar chords, and instead think about how it would sound if it were played with acoustically strummed guitars and fiddles and/or pedal steel guitars. Notice the really skilled close harmony singing in many of the choruses. It sounds just like Big & Rich or Rascal Flatts.
So here are the video links:
- Photograph (A party on the back of a pickup truck: ’nuff said.)
- Far Away (What’s with the sleeveless shirt? More pickup trucks here. And what possessed 17 million people to watch this on Youtube?)
- Someday (She drives a giant SUV with New York plates, and the streets of New York are totally empty; it’s a kind of hick town fantasy of what the big city’s like.)
- Never Again (Cowboy hat at 0:07.)
- Never Gonna Be Alone (Close harmony singing in the chorus, sounds just like Rascal Flatts.)
- If Today Was Your Last Day (see above)
Now please excuse me while I go and find something light to listen to, something that’s not depressing and where the lead singer doesn’t sound terminally constipated. If I have to watch one more depressing video about breakups, deaths or accidents I’ll throw myself in front of a bus. Do people actually like this kind of music?
For some much-needed lightness, you might want to watch this version of Photograph, which made me laugh out loud. It’s a bit long, but it’s definitely the right idea.
Today’s Desert Island Disc: Dwight Yoakam, This Time
Posted on | January 22, 2009 | No Comments
A review of Dwight Yoakam’s This Time (1993)
Even though I had Hillbilly Deluxe and Cadillacs, Guitars Etc. Etc. on vinyl in the 80s and liked them (really, they provided my first ‘country music’ experiences that weren’t related to the radio and didn’t result in fierce episodes of doubt and self-loathing), This Time occupies a special place in my heart. I believe it to be the pinnacle of Dwight’s output in the 90s, accessible hard Bakersfield honky tonk mixed in with fabulous, credible, truly sad weepers. I think “Two Doors Down” and “Home For Sale” are two of the loveliest country ballads ever recorded. All material here was written either by Yoakam alone or together with Kostas. The playing is top-notch throughout, and the Hammond B3 on some of the slower numbers is downright inspired – Hammonds this intense haven’t been heard since Jon Lord played Bach in Deep Purple. It’s a crime Amazon is currently selling this for $6.99. There should be an option to pay more, voluntarily.
Listening to: Joey + Rory; Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Posted on | January 9, 2009 | No Comments
Reviews of Joey + Rory’s The Life of a Song and Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson’s Rattlin’ Bones
“Turn it up loud so we all can sing along,” sings Joey Martin Feek at the beginning of The Life of a Song, Joey + Rory’s debut album. “Let the people decide if the music is right or it’s wrong. Man it’s a shame, instead of playing the game, play the song.”
Joey + Rory may at first glance look like an overnight success story: they won third place on Can You Duet, CMT‘s American Idol-alike for country duos. Then, they got signed to Vanguard/Sugar Hill Records, and their debut entered the country charts at number 10. Like any successful Nashville act, of course, their sudden success is really the result of years of toiling in country music – in bands, solo, as professional songwriters and producers. Joey’s husband, Rory Lee Feek, has spent more than 10 years writing songs on music row and has several chart toppers for a variety of big-name country singers to his name.
Despite all their insider status, photogenic appearance and polished skills, Joey + Rory make a strong case for traditional country music – both on their website and in their music. Theirs is a highly evolved, focused, beautifully executed set of songs that deserves being heard; actually, I think it’s so good it deserves being loved. Joey has an exceptional, unsentimental country voice – she avoids r&b’s vocal pyrotechnics which are increasingly finding their way into modern country in favour of singing it straight up. Rory seems to have saved his best songs for this commercial debut. The material sounds very ‘finished’ – a songbook that could be sung by other performers and might even work outside the country genre.
Joey + Rory, if they are Nashville’s new beacons of traditional country (together, surely, with people like Patty Loveless), are reformers from inside the system: the musical-industrial complex is their vehicle, and it is within its confines that their music blossoms fully. Not really a duo in the traditional sense (Rory essentially sings background harmonies, like Kristian Bush to Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles), their collaboration is a songwriter’s with his ideal performer. Youtube has J+R’s Can You Duet audition video, and in it, Rory says that Joey is his singer and he’s her song. Their honest, beautiful, simple and heartfelt songs make that ring true.
Kasey Chambers is an incredibly talented and accomplished country singer-songwriter from Australia. Hers is also a long story of musical apprenticeship and hard work: born in 1976 into a musical family with strong Australian country roots (you may not know this, but Australia has a vivid country music tradition and industry), she was on stage at an early age to perform with her parents and brother Nash in the Dead Ringer Band, who released several very good albums in the 90s and were extremely successful in Australia. Starting in 1999, Chambers released several increasingly acclaimed solo albums and spent considerable time living, recording and touring in the US. With each solo album, though, she departed a little more from traditional country music, typically in an “alt country” or “Americana” direction. Her sound on these records was not unlike Lucinda Williams’, though Chambers’ music is nimbler, smarter, sexier and (quite a lot) funnier.
In 2008, she released an excellent duet album with her husband, singer-songwriter Shane Nicholson. Their voices are a surprisingly good match: Chambers’ slightly cracked, nasal, twangy child-woman tone meshes well with Nicholson’s ever-so-slightly bland but certainly assured straight-up singing.
In contrast to Joey + Rory, Chambers’ and Nicholson’s songs are mostly dark laments of love found and lost, death, the autumn of relationships and the dark places in our psyches. Rattin’ Bones contains a sort of gothic, Nick Cave world of country music, beautiful but autumnal music filled with intelligent, cryptic and darkly funny words. The tone of the album is a little like the Cold Mountain soundtrack – music meant to evoke another period; music that’s ancient and true. This is very traditional country music, although there are tracks where the deliberate roughness of the production takes it in a dirty garage rock direction and makes them sound like the White Stripes.
What unites the Joey + Rory and Chambers/Nicholson projects is their high quality and unwavering dedication to creating traditional country music. Even though they operate from very different perspectives, points of origin and stages of their careers, their souls – as Chambers puts it on the title track, are “not for sale.”
Kasey Chambers
Posted on | December 21, 2008 | No Comments
Here are two videos from the great Kasey Chambers, an Australian country singer/songwriter. I think hers is one of the most unique voices in music today – both her actual voice, and her songwriting.
[Sadly, this is another case where the label has removed most of her videos from YouTube, or disabled embedding. Will labels ever get it?]
Today’s Desert Island Disc: Michelle Shocked, Short Sharp Shocked
Posted on | December 18, 2008 | No Comments
A review of Michelle Shocked’s Short Sharp Shocked (1988)
Some of the most memorable music from the 1980s, for me at least, stems from this album (and that’s perhaps because none of it sounds like the 80s at all). Michelle Shocked appeared, pretty much out of nowhere, in the mid-80s after she was “field recorded” at a folk festival on a Sony Walkman (the recording was eventually released as her first album, The Texas Campfire Tapes). Michelle had a beautiful, blues/country voice, big Dr. Martens boots, skinny jeans, a short haircut and all that mystique of having lived on a houseboat in Holland and as a squatter. She was generally both politically to the far left of the spectrum and very musical at the same time, something I remember finding quite irresistible back in the day.
Short Sharp Shocked, her second record, was a polished affair, as country as it was folk or rock. The opener, “When I Grow Up,” has served as my preferred track to test new stereos for years – the rumbling double bass has to be heard to be believed. What makes Michelle Shocked special, though, are her songwriting abilities – and her voice. Pitched slightly deeper than your average country singer from Texas, she had more of the blues (and, perhaps, less of the victim) in her voice. She also sounded much, much wiser and more experienced than her 26 years when Short Sharp Shocked appeared in 1988. The story goes that Michelle Shocked had seen both the inside of a mental institution and traveled the world – both things that come out in the lyrics here.
In a way, Michelle is the fore-runner from “my” generation (who came of age in the 1980s) to prioneer the so-called alt-country movement. Where Dwight Yoakam revolutionized country music by staying firmly in a country idiom, Michelle Shocked re-rooted folk and rock as Americana. Of course, this isn’t surprising: Short Sharp Shocked was produced by Pete Anderson, Yoakam’s long-time guitar cohort and producer. Listen to “(Making The Run To) Gladewater,” where she’s a perfect female ringer for Yoakam’s California honky tonk. Her country timing is impeccable, and listening to her you know that she’s spent countless hours making beer runs on the bumpy backs of pickup trucks across rugged Texas terrain.
Above all, though, Michelle Shocked is about her activism – even her introspection on tracks like the radio single “Anchorage” is essentially commentary on the state of the world. The “Leroy says…” sequence in its lyrics is both an indictment of certain life choices and a passionate feminist statement. “Fogtown,” the hidden track at the end, establishes her punk cred by virtue of having been recorded with punk band MDC. The original “Fogtown” appeared on Texas Campfire and is a lot gentler, but its re-make here shows Michelle as versatile in the way of a troubadour, a bard for whom the message is what’s important, not any false notion of stylistic integrity. (Plus, she always looked more punk than country, anyway.)
Shocked’s long journey out of record label ‘slavery’ is well-documented on Wikipedia and elsewhere. She now owns her complete catalogue and continues to evolve as a musician, regularly releasing the kinds of records she reportedly wanted to make when she was still with a major label – like a gospel CD.
For me, it’s a toss-up whether her magnum opus is Short Sharp Shocked or Arkansas Traveler, which features cameos from such luminaries as Uncle Tupelo, Taj Mahal and Clarence Gatemouth Brown. If Shocked is her early work of countrified political activism, Arkansas showcases a more fully-formed Americana renaissance woman who easily collaborates with the previous generation while simultaneously forging a new genre (it’s key to remember that Arkansas Traveler came out in 1992 – well before alt country became a genre people talked about).
Listening to: Lambchop, OH (Ohio)
Posted on | October 8, 2008 | No Comments
A review of Lambchop’s OH (Ohio) (2008)
Despite the recording industry’s continuing contraction (not unlike the financial system’s), the world is full of beautiful music that’s worth hearing. One result of the long tail economy has been that there’s so much more music being released independently but not necessarily distributed or marketed. It’s a lot of work reading all the relevant magazines and sites to get ideas and stay on top of things. All of this as a preamble to establish some sort of reasonable way for me to say that I hadn’t ever heard Lambchop before today. I had read about them and they were on my must-check-them-out radar for a while. Now, though, there’s a new album, and New Release Tuesday put it in front of me so that I couldn’t ignore it any longer. In a handy listening post, no less.
This is spectacularly beautiful music. It’s immediately engaging and fits right into the Americana-country-folk-jazz gumbo I’ve been listening to lately. It’s a sort of downtempo alt-country (but alt-country not in a twangy way – more in a “what if Elvis had lived and regressed back to his glam country roots” kind of way), sung by singer-songwriter Kurt Wagner in a dispassionate, minimalist, low voice while an eleven-piece band plays some of the biggest quiet music you can imagine.
Some of it sounds a little like a loungy, countrified, downtempo, ever-so-slightly electronic version of Marvin Gaye’s late period slow burners. Then, there are pieces that somehow marry Neil Diamond and REM (if that makes any sense). Despite being very different vocalists, Kurt Wagner also has something of Bryan Ferry’s theatricality.
This is a very ‘technicolor’ record – incredibly big and very focused and economical at the same time. The quality of the recorded sound is beautiful throughout: a ramarkably sparse ‘widescreen’ experience where power comes from practicing restraint. This is quite a different band from, say, the Arcade Fire – there, more musicians means more sound, more space of the spectrum taken up by noise. Here, it’s the opposite: it’s a fun guessing game to see if you can spot what instrument/musician might have produced the barely audible murmur in the background.
Another good game would be to come up with theories as to why Kurt Wagner needs eleven musicians at all. Not that I’m complaining. I would highly recommend this, and I’ll be exploring more Lambchop.
Today’s Desert Island Disc: Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez, The Trouble With Humans
Posted on | September 13, 2008 | No Comments
Staying with the theme of how country music could be, here’s a favourite record by Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez. Taylor is a singer-songwriter who emerged as a writer of hit songs in the 60s (‘Angel of the Morning’ and ‘Wild Thing,’ for example). Although he was born and grew up in New York, he had a strong predilection for country music from an early age, and that’s where he has now returned. Taylor met Carrie Rodriguez, an Oberlin and Berklee College of Music trained singer/songwriter/fiddler, during an in-store performance she gave at the South by Southwest Music Festival in 2001. The two now perform as a duo. Four albums and an EP into their journey together, their music is a low-key, intelligent kind of country/folk – not entirely dissimilar to, say, the Texas singer/songwriter Townes van Zandt. Anchored by Taylor’s strong rhythm guitar and harmonica and Rodriguez’ fiddle, the songs feature insightful lyrics and a kind of “old time country” feel. They also couldn’t be further removed from the Carrie Underwoods and Jessica Simpsons that seem to pass for country music today. Taylor and Rodriguez have perfectly matching voices – hers a strong cowgirl soprano with a Texas drawl, his a refined baritone with occasional carelessly slurred syllables and frequent moments where he speaks more than he sings. The lyrics are precise and emotionally spot-on throughout – this is material that’s carefully thought out, written to be performed by these two performers, meant to showcase their unique abilities. The Trouble With Humans is a beautiful record about grown-up relationships whose words often manage to encapsulate a core truth in the simplest way possible, yet in a way that we’ve never heard before. ‘Curves and Things’ and the title track should be prescribed material in English class, they’re so good.
keep looking »
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
- HelTweetica for iPad July 20, 2010
- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
