Give Me a Second Face

For all the instantly memorable scenes in The Royal Tenenbaums (and there are many), the one everyone remembers is Luke Wilson walking into a bathroom and breaking the movie apart. The shaving cream, the sunglasses removed, "I'm going to kill myself tomorrow", and then the razor.

And, of course, the song strumming in parallel: "Needle in the Hay," by Elliott Smith. Music is the emotional Rosetta Stone of the The Royal Tenenbaums, and the purpose of Smith's presence is clear. He cues us in to the bottom falling out of a touching family story, leaving us with pure, stark tragedy.

It's a stunning scene, but I kind of wish it didn't exist. Or that Wes Anderson had chosen a different song. Six years after his suicide, Smith's legacy is choked by tragedy, by the aura of artistic depression that clung throughout his modest commercial rise to the top in the late 90s. The obvious parallel is Kurt Cobain, but the critical mass of Cobain retrospectives has allowed some light to be shed on his other, equal sides: his humor and goofiness, his craftsmanship. Smith, for the most part, lives on only as a cultural cue, a functional tag of sadness, even when there's so much to him that would fit better with Daniel Glover proposing to Anjelica Huston, or Gene Hackman showing his grandsons how to live.

I've got no problem with categorizing musicians by sound. Of course it's reductive, when treated as an end in and of itself. But as a tool, it can help educate ourselves, see patterns, make connections, write history, and understand why we like what we like--the unexamined taste is not worth having. It's the ultimate refutation of anyone who treats pop music as inherently shallow and non-intellectual.

Emotional compartmentalization, however, is different. It gives music absolutely no opportunity to surprise us, confront us. It's goal-oriented, rather than allowing the sound to define itself as it goes along. Ultimately, it means choosing the representation, rather than the presentation, of an emotion, and it tends to favor only the extremes. Music becomes a key to a lock we pick out beforehand, rather than something that leaves us different before and after.

Smith's legacy has suffered more than most, isolated and frozen in retrospect. But we can build bridges, and thaw it out. For those who don't know, Continuum International Publishing runs a book series called 33 1/3, composed of short works about records. They're amazingly varied: pure, adulatory tributes, meat-and-potatoes narratives on the recording process, even some excellent fiction. This past April, superb music writer (and musician in his own right) Matthew LeMay published a volume on Elliott Smith's XO, his major label debut, made on the crest of his half-stardom. LeMay pulls off the most powerful possible use of the 33 1/3 platform: he tears the album's, and the artist's, assumed legacy down, and reveals it as a veil. XO is the crux of Smith's one-sided postmortem image, and LeMay shows it for what it is: a multifaceted, ambiguous, and wholeheartedly lovely record, treating depression honestly as a battle to be fought rather than a crippling anchor, and always touching on humor and hope. XO, both the album and the book, are stirring examples of playing against emotional reduction and allowing artists to breathe and fill up a life with their personality, rather than a corner.

So Luke Wilson recovers from his suicide attempt, and takes the bus home. Again, he is accompanied: "Fly", by Nick Drake. Unlike Smith, Drake never even hovered on the edge of the spotlight in his 1960s and 70s, but lived and died too quickly in obscurity. In the mid-90s, Drake's name began to reappear in articles on the Black Crowes, Belle & Sebastian, and Elliott Smith. He soon became viewed as a godfather, a frontiersman of polite acoustic pain and withdrawn, suffering talent. In 2000, Volkswagen ran an ad featuring his song "Pink Moon". Nick Drake, who by then had been dead nearly as long as he'd been alive, proceeded to sell more records in the next thirty days than he had in the last thirty years.

Since then, even those who should know better (e.g., Nick Hornby) have filed Drake away under "Sad Boy," and left him there, an unenviable king.

It's not as if there's no evidence. Pink Moon rightfully became his most well-known album, and even after dozens of listens, it's a shockingly spare work: the simple piano motif on the title track sounds all the more elegant and beautiful given that it's the only sound on the album that isn't Drake or his acoustic guitar. Songs like "Place to Be" and "Things Behind the Sun" ache with exhaustion and all the wrong kinds of experience, and "Parasite" does not flinch from quiet loathing, directed outwardly and inwardly. And, of course, it was the last album he made, before dying of an overdose of antidepressants at the age of 26. But that should be an opportunity to celebrate and explore his life, rather than stall on his death. Even worse, it's one easy mental hop from Sad Album to Sad Artist, and suddenly three albums, endless stray material, and years of devoted craft are reduced to being bummed because it's raining after work.

It's insulting to Drake's legacy, but probably more importantly, it's insulting to ourselves. It plays into the bullshit notion that pop music has to be about images both larger than life and smaller than reality, rather than the very real notion that even the most depressed of people laugh and fart sometimes, and that art can crystallize that diversity into a beautiful and liveable work. It's presumptuous to assume that we can know the artist from their art, but we can come closer to seeing a full, recognizeable person amongst the sound, rather than a Halloween mask good only for supplementing our own ups and downs. I'm not saying vast emotional range is necessary for great, memorable music--check "Ignition (Remix)", and then again, and then several dozen more times. Because that's real, too, as every freakin' weekend (baby) will attest. It's a tragic irony, however, when we praise the likes of Nick Drake and Elliott Smith for the "authentic" sadness supposedly driving their music when that monochrome despair is the most unreal of projections.

The first sound on Bryter Layter, Drake's second album, is exactly what you'd expect: Drake's acoustic guitar, picking out a languid mood. The second sound is strings. Strings? Strings! A whole swooping forest of strings, sounding of slow streams and postcard-perfect sunrises. The third sound is a drumbeat, light and trebly, beating out a quick-retreat pattern under the strings. You may forget about the guitar--it's not the base of the song, and it doesn't even try to fight its way out from under the orchestral instrumentation. It all takes a little over a minute, and then the instruments fade out as a team.

That's Drake on the guitar, of course, yet he seems curiously absent. He doesn't sing a word, and that means more than just his anchoring voice: it means no easy lyrical themes, no orienting line to hang the sad-hat on. The focus is purely on sound, purely on music.

It's an implicit part of the tragic, suffering artiste model plastered on Drake, Smith et al. that music is the medium for their art, rather than truly being the art itself. "Through" is the eternally recurring word in those conversations--the songs are conduits, through which the actual point is conveyed. The songs are "simple," "unadorned," and "natural." These artists are always retrospectively placed in little, isolated bedrooms, never working studios. They're amateurs struggling to get something across, never professional, never skilled.

Bryter Layter puts the lie to it all, right from the beginning. It's music, both of the musician and divisible from them. The emotions reached are conclusions, not polemics--most instrumentals, after all, sound like the product of jam sessions rather than personal pain. Paradoxically, Drake's presence grows through his absence--he's working and playing and conveying probably uninentional images, rather than delivering a straight coke-line of unambiguous despair. All this is called "Introduction," with clear promises made.

And they are redeemed, instantly, on "Hazey Jane II." Those are horns you hear, and breezy guitar, and a rhythm that can only be described as "strutting." Drake's voice arrives in a rush, slicing in to join the instruments like a parallel bullet train, rather than hover lonely above or below them. And what's he saying? It comes too quickly, something about windows and cities and the morning. I get the impression he's rambling on purpose, to keep us from lingering too long on any one word. Instead, he draws us along, skipping across the surface of the song, reveling in the sentiments that come through unspoken: the kind of groove-smile that comes from a fine, empty day, walking for miles without feeling the least bit tired. And the forest and the weasel's teeth don't matter nearly as much as the fact that Nick Drake is not telling us a story: every one of those first few lines ends with a question mark.

The Drake & Co. legacy is one of isolation, shutting out the world to live alone in your, again, little room. But that's not the Nick Drake of "Hazey Jane II." He's out and about, moving through the city and wondering about its future. He's focused, observant, and involved. The moaning singer-songwriter trope is supposedly all about confusion and being lost, but its shallowest practictioners sound like they have it all figured out (even if it's all hopelessly bad), and like they're damn proud of their seclusion. Nick Drake, their patron saint, is above all curious.

Of course, he doesn't answer his questions. How can he? The future is yet to come. So he shrugs. Chill, he says, take your time. Go be with your brother and your sister, get involved in small moments and share in their youth. The song takes him at his word--the music is propulsive and endlessly hummable, providing ecstatic punctuation and matching his meditations with grooves as wide-open as the future. You don't have to pay attention to a single word to love this song and understand it, and if you do anyway, it only grows.

At first, "At the Chime of a City Clock" sounds like a more traditional, blinders-on reading. Drake's guitar takes center stage with a simple, looking-out-the-window vibe, and his lyrics dwell on urban misery, particularly our impure longing for "green paper." But there's still that drum stumping on below, and Drake ends the first verse reaching back a song: "Turn around and come back again." A split second later, the song is supposed to drop out and leave only his voice with barely audible guitar, murmuring a coup to elevate gray-rain depression to something chilling. Instead: the return of the strings, and some jazzy horn, slicing a ray of aged sunlight. The song expands, and Drake steps back to remind us that a big city is more than just an impetus for numbness and fear. There's unfriendly faces and rainfall, sure, but there's treasure to be found, in whatever form. The rest of the song continues in this vein: the verses detail the city's pain, but through distinct, brief characters and rough poetry in the Dylan tradition. Then, the chorus shows you how to survive it all: friends, chaotic fun, and the one fair face among the blank ones. It's not pure optimism, by any means. What it is, is a strong belief in taking control of life, and squeezing beauty out of every situation, and paying attention to the bad and the good of your surroundings. It's a positively inspirational message, one that is resurrected in the chorus of XO's first single: "I'm never gonna know you now, but I'm gonna love you anyhow."

The murmuring guitar pattern of "One of These Things First" is perfectly mirrored by sprightly, upbeat piano. The two merge into one jammy rhythm; the message is unmistakeable. Oh, but then, the first words: "I could've been a sailor, could've been a cook." We have hit the shoals of useless regret! The next words: "A real live lover, [aha!] could've been a book." [wait, what?] "I could've been a signpost, could've been a clock." Uh...huh.

These could just be sleepy nature-boy ramblings, but the juxtaposition of tangible regrets with seeming nonsense means something. As in "Hazey Jane II," Drake is still able to shrug off the weight of the world that hangs so heavily throughout Pink Moon. Sure, he could've chosen different paths in life. And for all that that matters, he could also have been a book, a whistle, or a flute. Fuck regret. Things might have been better as a sailor, or if you'd spent a "whole long lifetime" with her, but the present matters most, and the future matters next. Drake knows it: he could've been one of those things first, before he nevertheless reached a present he's satisfied with. It's worth noting the few instances he replaces "could" with "should": none are in the past tense, and what he knows he has to be is "even here," "here and now."

If "Hazey Jane II" blew apart the amateur-sufferer model with instrumental interplay, "Hazey Jane I" features Drake doing the same job the old-fashioned way: playing the shit out of his instrument. Pitchfork has compared the song to Ennio Morricone soundtracks, and they got it right: the dancing riff has that same virtuosic, yet meditative feel, and Drake the guitar hero would be more at home in a spaghetti western than in any more tragic drama. Indeed, stand-alone soundtracks make a better reference point for Bryter Layter than the Muzak label slapped on by so many (including, sadly, Pitchfork). Yes, the album is laden with strings, but they're not there to lull you to sleep. The themes aren't blandly inoffensive, they're contemplative and unfold deliberately. The album is best when used to accompany its own subject matter: long city walks, coming to understand the swarms of people around you, reconciling your grand fears with the small, daily pleasures that truly make up life. Listened to on its own, Bryter Layter doesn't feel divorced: Drake calls up those streets, that steady experience, with the touch of a master.

Drake is in control of this music, and this life. His words aren't those of someone utterly lost to pain trying to let some of it out. He relies on the second-person perspective throughout the album, but it's rarely accusatory, and it never feels as if he's just muttering to himself. He's genuinely talking to someone else (named Jane, perhaps), and is trying to give them a hand ("Do you like what you're doing?"), as they both search for a content equilibrium. The narrators on Pink Moon address others, but only in bitter, hopeless desperation--listen to "Which Will," "Place to Be," "Parasite." Compare them to "Hazey Jane I," in which Drake affirms mutual dependence: "Do it for you, sure that you would do the same for me one day."

I can't help but attach significance to title tracks. They're not necessarily overarcing manifestos, but they almost always seem to contain the purest distillation of the album's spirit. The weary, barely-existing beauty of "Pink Moon" certainly works perfectly in that regard. So, too, does "Bryter Layter."

It's another instrumental, and it may make you gag on first listen. The strings sound like they should be accompanying Mr. Raccoon on his morning jaunt through the woods, and Drake's voice is tagged out for a flute. Like most of Bryter Layter, "Bryter Layter" isn't foremost a deliberate emotional polemic. It impresses technically: the jazz sophistication of the arrangement, the way the guitar and flute melodies collide and step back from each other. But you don't have to forget it's Nick Drake to love it, and after a few listens, its position at the center of the album becomes perfectly appropriate. The tempo is designed for deliberate walking, the mood perfectly content but never apathetic or the least bit lazy, the lines between city and forest that seem so stark on Pink Moon are magnificently blurred. If it sounds too old-timey, you may be confusing age with maturity. Bryter Layter is quintessentially mature.

Wes Anderson chose "Fly" well; to Pink Moon fans, or anyone else who buys wholeheartedly into the posterboard image of Drake, et al., it's the most familiar sounding track on Bryter Layter. The strings are at their most impressionistic, hovering nearly immobile in the background, leaving the acoustic guitar to dominate a traditional, descending melody. John Cale shows up on harpsichord, but acts as little more than a partner to Drake's guitar. Drake's lyrics foreshadow virtually all of Pink Moon: "Now I sit on the ground in your way." The song's first word is "Please."

But actually, I love this song. Allow me to clarify: I love Pink Moon. I love sad, desperate songs. What I don't love is artists with work as mature and emotionally diverse as Nick Drake's reduced to one skimpy pallette, and I especially don't love that pallette being treated as the all-superior endgame of emotional music. Broken-down intensity is but one color to paint with. There are many others, and using the full set doesn't devalue any individual one--it lifts them up and makes them whole. "Fly" is the most naked and tragic song on Bryter Layter, and it certainly doesn't ask observational questions or linger much on contemplation. And it is essential for all that, and indeed fits and improves the album for all that. For the first six songs, Drake is an older brother, cautioning us to slow down in life, learn our surroundings, and let regrets fall away with the rain. But older brothers have problems, too: to quote Charlie Brown, "Who reassures the reassurer?" That kernel of self-doubt, which flowered black on Pink Moon, was always a key element of Drake's music, and on "Fly," he makes my heart stutter. I can think of few lines as perfect and piercing as "I just need your star for a day."

So how does he follow that up? (You're going to love this.) "Poor Boy" makes "Hazey Jane II" and "Bryter Layter" look starker than winter trees. It doesn't start with guitar. It doesn't have guitar. It has rutting lounge piano, and alto sax, and more skittering drums, and backup soul singers. This sounds like! This sounds like...

Well, it sounds a lot like 1970. Which is when it was made.

Yet another annoying constancy of the sorrowful singer-songwriter mode is that most American of music adjectives: "timeless." It's the omnipresent ideal of stateside acoustic music, to find that melody and those lyrics that can outrace age itself, to find a song that hits the same target forty years down the line.

I've never really understood the urge to preserve music in amber; I'm sure most of my favorite songs from the 1960s don't mean the same to me as they did to listeners at the time, but that doesn't mean the new aura is any lesser. But there's a more disturbing aspect to the timelessness paradigm. It values music that sheds its own era, trying to lift itself out of the present flow of humanity and reach some vaguely defined infinity. Again, children's stories get it right: Toy Story 2, in which the hero rejects a pristine eternity to embrace his own messy, beautiful time.

Ironic, considering how many of the roots-loving "timeless" hounds emphasize authenticity; music always sounds more real to me when it is of its time, even if that time is foreign to me. It's what hip-hop can do better than anything else--talk about that street on that day, where those things happened to real people, who're making records too. That seems to me to be the real source of Americana fans' discomfort with rap, more than any sonic barrier or weaksauce concerns about violent lyrics. Rap, from the parties to the revolutions, embraces the present era above all else, and that throws a lot of folkies off.

Even Drake isn't diverse enough to have helped father rap, but a similar celebration of the ideas of the age is at work in "Poor Boy." The cracked-apart, psychedelic identity of 60s pop hit reboot in the 70s, becoming smoother, shinier, and professionally busy, full of slick instrumentation and tangibly big choruses. Folk did it first: James Taylor somehow became Dylan's heir, as every watery Californian got signed to a major label and began tightening things up and adding string sections. Motown had yet to fall, and commercial R&B was built on these kinds of solid grooves and almost-too-classy instrumentation. Unsurprisingly, crossover attempts were common.

Again, Drake was not some wunderkind, out-of-nowhere amateur. He was a professional British folk singer--that's Richard Thompson on guitar in "Hazey Jane II." British folk singers cottoned on quickly to what was selling in America--members of the Beach Boys show up on "At the Chime of a City Clock" and "One of These Things First" (Mike Kowalski and Ed Carter, respectively). So when Nick Drake recorded a six-minute, finger-snappable soul ballad, it wasn't an insular joke. It was a sign of the times.

And "Poor Boy" has aged much better than most of its contemporaries, because Drake had the range to handle it. The music is gorgeous, but never ostentatious. Drake doesn't miss a step, his voice melding perfectly to the rounded tones and half-steps of classic lounge music. His backup singers, Doris Troy and P.P. Arnold, sound fantastic, and bring the chorus up to a heavenly grace. If there's humor, it's at the sake of the theme, not the music. Drake sighs "I'm a poor boy," but the usual poor-boy image doesn't include a gorgeous-sounding Greek chorus to help them along. If it hadn't been clear before that Drake was aware of how the sensitive types are played, it's clear in "Poor Boy," and he playfully mocks it while surrounding himself with beauty.

Indeed, by the time "Poor Boy" eventually ends, you'd be forgiven for forgetting that this was a folk album.
The next song starts with guitar.

"Fly" got the soundtrack seal of approval, but "Northern Sky" is the most universally beloved track on Bryter Layter. It's the one that NME and Entertainment Weekly stepped out to praise, the one that appears on every mixtape and tribute, the one that most reviews of Bryter Layter end by discussing (except those, like this one, that plod dinosaur-like through each sucessive track). Even those who ignore Bryter Layter, or dismiss it as dated, or automatically humble it in Pink Moon's shadow, take a moment to praise "Northern Sky." Indeed, it works as the best stand-alone track off the album, but it's something more.

"Northern Sky" is Nick Drake in a parallel universe. It's recognizeable as a love song, but the lyrics are impressionistic, describing not a person or an event, but a scene: holding "emotion in the palm of my hand," feeling "sweet breezes in the top of a tree." He ends by repeating the first verse, a trick Cobain would use to sledgehammer his point home; Drake doesn't need a reason beyond the loveliness of the words, and the perfection of the emotions captured. It's not a story, it's a moment, presented with all the past leading up to it ("It's been long time that I'm waiting") and all the rich future trailing off from it ("Would you love me 'til I'm dead?")

That, there, is the balance of Bryter Layter. Drake knows a hard past, and an uncertain future, and faces both with honesty and perspective, then leaves them both behind. He's got the present, and why shouldn't the present be beautiful, with quivering touches of cymbal? Who's to say that wandering piano and layers of woodwinds can't do as good a job of cutting to the heart as solo guitar? Who's to say they can't do a better job, allowing for ambiguity and level passages, and getting toes to tap along the way? These lessons have been learned by Belle & Sebastian, who exploded their early gentle folk into Technicolor millennial soul, by Sufjan Stevens, who used gargantuan orchestras to discuss Michigan and Illinois and made people cry and cheer, and by Elliott Smith, who used major label money as an artistic stepping stone, adding layers of instrumentation not to cloud his vision, but to spread it and let it grow. The most beautiful, intimate moment of "Northern Sky" has nothing to do with Drake's voice. After the second chorus, the gentle rhythm steps aside, and piano notes cascade upward, straining for the sky for a brief moment; then they duck back down, and you can almost sense Drake grinning, knowing that he can't reach the infinite, but that he's found something better below.

Bryter Layter comes to a close on another instrumental. "Sunday" continues much in the same vein of the title track: there is a flute, tapping percussion, and echoing strings. Drake's guitar sounds more restless than before, occasionally stabbing out from the pace set by the other instruments. The strings float up, to hang on an eerie, distant pitch, and fate hangs there too. Then the flute returns, and the rhythm, and Drake turns away from the dark cave by the riverside, promising to remember it. The song is perfectly titled: by the end, I can picture Drake returning home from his Sunday stroll, laden with ideas for the busy, heartbreaking, buoyant, funny, hope-filled week to come.

Let the Bells Ring

By Emmett Booth

If I ever meet someone, anyone, whose instinctive response to the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is "Nick Cave", I will marry them. Hopefully, Mr. Cave can play the part of the priest, as he does so well on record.

This will be so for several reasons. One, the boring one, is that I fiercely adore Nick Cave. I will probably insist on playing his music at my wedding regardless of which lovely, hopefully patient soul I'm marrying. It will be "Red Right Hand" as the guests file in, to unsettle them and make them think they made a mistake on the road, and have ended up at some horrifying cult ceremony. I would be tempted to bribe the organist to play either "Do You Love Me?" or "There She Goes, My Beautiful World", for sheer humor, but my nerve would probably fail me. Instead, "O'Malley's Bar", because it takes such a ghastly long time (14:28) and my dearest will probably need it to compose herself, and remind herself of the many good reasons she's marrying this overeager fan. From the minute she begins her walk until the second we hit the dancefloor, I'll surrender control. But once we're at the dancefloor, I will play "Nick the Stripper," and do everything it tells me to. Anybody who stays through that will be the type to cheer for "No Pussy Blues," and after I've driven them away with "Where the Wild Roses Grow", the two of us will mosh alone to "Bring it On." She will either be laughing with utter delight by this point, sealing our marital bliss for eternity, or she'll divorce me on the spot, a situation for which I can easily conjure up a Cave playlist twice as long. Either way, I win.

The second reason is that anyone who thinks of themselves as a serious Nick Cave fan has already earned my respect and a little bit of my heart. The man's discography is fucking impenetrable, full of multiple bizarre bands and waves in and out of quality and consciousness, with no clear masterpiece or even a centerpiece. Easy entry points are few and far between, and those rare Cave songs that have touched on the wider public include a fantastic but non-representative duet with Kylie Minogue ("Where the Wild Roses Grow"), a cluttery and weird "standard" done with more clarity but less ravaged power by Johnny Cash ("Mercy Seat"), and the scariest, most tornadic thing ever to touch mortal ground ("Tupelo"). And he's Australian, which makes the whole thing even weirder and less approachable. All of which Cave, with his smirk and now his mustache, knows and enjoys. Damn the man.

But being a devoted Nick Cave fan is also impressive because of his bizarre half-presence in music criticism and popular media. You won't find a knowledgeable music critic on Earth who won't profess respect for Cave, even if they don't listen to him for all the reasons I just described. Yet his name will often vanish from pages for years at a time, as if he's finally retired to some monastery rather than continuing to make great records worthy of discussion. When his name does reappear, he's (rightfully) deified and gossiped about as if he's an unavoidable celebrity we're all intimately familiar with. This strange existence, revered, half-forgotten and increasingly productive all at once, makes it difficult to find one's way into Cave's dark, hilarious corner of the world.
So if you have, well done! The chapel's over there, by the sinister-looking barn and the poster of Jesus setting a trainyard on fire.

The third reason has to do with the specific question that would prompt the perfect knee-bending answer. That question again is: "What kind of music do you like?" Much as I love talking about music (who knew?), I don't like being asked that particular question. I know I'm supposed to answer with a few names, carefully chosen to either spark or end conversation, depending on the situation. But that wording always gets me thinking about types of music, genres and scenes and eras, and that kind of answer is either too geeky for most contexts or isn't up to the job of conveying my musical taste. So I'm always on the hunt for the perfect artist to answer that question with, one whose work represents and explains what I like in music, whether it's sound or style.
By now, I can roll out a few of these--Beck, Blur, Brainiac, Boredoms. But the truest answer, the marriage-cementing answer, and evidently the only answer of mine that doesn't begin with a 'B', is Nick Cave.

Why is that? Even given his thirty years to tinker, Cave's musical range is astonishing, yet he's managed to summon a cohesive (complicated, fascinating) persona and style out of it. I like this, whenever I can find it.

That identity, broadly speaking, is about viewing the classic themes of rock music as subjects to be studied, distorted, exaggerated, and blown to slavering pieces. Sex can be a weapon, a refuge of last resort, a bloody-minded obsession, and a trivial afterthought. Death is feared hysterically and met bravely, understood and then cheerfully ignored. Unsurprisingly, Cave sings many songs about self-definition, but they never drag or whine; aware of potential egotism, Cave plays it up rather than avoid it. It's meta, but not cringeworthy, because Cave is not asking for our sympathy nor attempting to sing from our shoes. Instead, he's stepping out just enough to stretch the elastic of his characters while still being them. He's aware of the listener, but only in the sense that one is occasionally aware of God. And speaking of God: to borrow from Disco Inferno, Cave makes me want to believe, though I don't know what in. Jesus, Satan, and Lazarus are treated as mysterious forces, omnipotent healers/butchers, or simply characters useful to telling a good story. He hacks at religious figures with the same warped narrative ax he uses on his mortal narrators; Cave is unmistakeably a preacher, but a fundamentally humanist one.

Of course, sometimes he just plays all the tropes straight. This isn't to say that the above are affectations--they're equally valid angles on issues granted one or (begrudgingly) two sides by most other rock musicians. So when Cave runs close to tradition, it's earth-shaking. Straightforward love songs and lust-filled stomps, no longer tired conceits, sound lonely amidst all of Cave's weirdness, and all their power comes rushing back.

Will Oldham does all this, as do Isaac Brock and arguably Prince. I love them all, almost as much as I love Nick Cave.

Lyrically, Cave is a gem on a long, rich thread. He has influences (Cash, Leonard Cohen), peers (Tom Waits, Mark E. Smith), and students (Brock, Stephen Merritt), but none can match his weight, his humor, his dizzying emotional range. Cave has made me mock, guiltless, the victims of serial killers, and weep over strands of rough, sandy prose that would simply pass right through me if delivered by anybody else. Partly, it's that unshakeable voice, spending so much of its time in that hypnotizing half-laugh, half-growl sing-speak that when he actually opens up and sings, it sticks in my gut for days afterward. But mostly it's because, no matter which character Cave ends up playing in a given song (and it's often unclear), he puts you into the eyes and sweat of every drunkard, every unhinged Lothario, every farmer with a secret to keep. And he does it so easily because, as he's often proven directly, he's more actor than singer.

Musically, of course, he's a chaotic grab bag, nailing the blues and cutthroat rockabilly, putting a warped, diseased face on folk, kicking endless amounts of ass, soothing ears (fragment by fragment), and writing damn hummable melodies when he feels like it. Again, he's Australian; I'm sure Australian musicians have cliches and avenues to follow or flagrantly avoid like American and British musicians do, but I don't know what they are, and so everything sounds fresh and novel in Cave's hands. Of course, it isn't just Cave's hands at work. The Birthday Party, his free-wailing din of a post-punk outfit, still sounds more cutting and wild than almost all of their peers. And the Bad Seeds, his loyal, motely crew for the last 26 years? Nothing less than the greatest backing band of all time, handling every turn with grace, be it a skeletal stomp, a hyper-distorted crunch, or a delicate, nearly invisible touch. Few musicians could coordinate on music so much more dependent on repetition and timbre than traditional songwriting chops; the Seeds make it seem like the only way to play. One of my fondest dreams is to start a Bad Seeds cover band (we will, of course, be called the Decent Seeds), and we would play at my wedding, except that that would cause several obvious problems.

That kind of approach to music, even the specific sounds Cave has come up with, can be found elsewhere, in jaw-dropping (and equally overlooked) works by Tindersticks, Scott Walker, Clinic, and Bark Psychosis, among many others. But...they're all awesome, and they all pale in comparison. Cave just sounds like the original document, like a force waiting under the planetary crust for centuries to explode and immediately absorb the characteristics of the era it finds itself in, like Stephen King's It, or the titular protagonist of Cave's own Dig, Lazarus, Dig! It would seem odd to use an adjective like "timeless" to describe a decidedly non-populist sound, but in this case, it applies.

I bring up time, and so the fourth, final, and as I grow older and my own mustache, most crucial reason. Nick Cave, once a young, impeccably dressed, out-of-time Satanic dandy, has grown old with grace better than any other musician of the pop era. Cave's identity was never inextricably linked to youth, so the possibility of artistic survival was always relatively strong. But he's impressed beyond all hopeful expectations. He was on the crest of 40 when he released the final Bad Seeds album of the 20th century, The Boatman's Call, a far softer and lovelier album than its predecessors. Throw in the cumulative weight of two decades of heroin abuse, and he seemed doomed for retirement or purgatory. Cave rejected the former, choosing to sober up and get married instead, and continued to willfully use the latter for lyrical inspiration. The first Bad Seeds albums of the 21st century, No More Shall We Part and Nocturama, were widely panned, but part of that was the assumption that Cave had fallen like logic dictated. In retrospect, those records ain't bad, and when they fail, it's out of simple inconsistency rather than any overarching problem.

And then, several unusual things happened: anchoring Bad Seeds guitarist Blixa Bargeld left the band, and their next album was released as a double, featuring prominently in Bargeld's place...a choir, appearing on nearly every track. It's difficult to imagine a table set more openly for disaster, and one of the most tragic kinds of musical disaster: an old musician, a legendary career behind him, reaches feebly and desperately down an ill-chosen side road for revitalization, goes too far with it, and has to watch his beloved crew fall apart around him. It's a classic story, and as such, Cave has probably told it a couple of times, with strangeness and vigor. But he didn't live it.

Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus is my favorite Nick Cave record, all the more so because it could easily have been the worst. Cave only seems like an amusing but limited character-artist on first approach. He throws himself wildly into his personas, but he's still one human being, and that human being is a goddamned professional, and is very, very good at his job. AB/LOO (a very Cave-looking acronym, if I've ever seen one) is Cave transcending expectations to do the best job he's ever done. It starts with a brilliant idea: a double album composed of two totally distinguishable records, each capable of standing on their own, each worthy of its own fitting title. To put it simply and mostly-accurately, Abattoir Blues is the loud one, all lectern-bluster and slabs of guitar and drum, while The Lyre of Orpheus is the quiet one, focusing on acoustic melodies and love songs filled with detail. But this isn't a gimmick, and the records belong together. They bring out, into clear, separated focus, the musical (and perhaps personal) identity of Nick Cave. He is a very loud man, and also an almost inaudibly quiet one, and he understands the pure primal force of the electric guitar, and how very unnecessary its presence can be. These are not contradictions, because for all his self-invested tales, Nick Cave is a person, and by 2004, a very mature one. Part of being a mature person is understanding that opposites are not always at war, that one person naturally can contain both of two extremes, and that--most importantly of all--one extreme need not be the shameful exception to the other's assumed rule. Abattoir Blues is not the definitive Nick Cave, and The Lyre of Orpheus is not an indulgence of the occasional folky tangle. Both sides of this one, this one, album, make up this man, and for all his outward oddness, he is human, and that can mean absolutely anything and everything.

I'm happy enough when a favorite musician manages to keep their head above water as they age (Stephen Malkmus), or falls back on a simpler, steadier but still enjoyable sound (Sonic Youth). Sadly, neither is common. It's 2009, almost the future, and your first band started in 1978, and touring is harder, and home stops being an obligation and becomes something to long for, and the adventure has died away, and you can't write new songs anymore, and you start up in a flurry and make a big record that sounds gilded, and you panic because this can't be the last page of your legacy, and when, exactly, did you start worrying about your legacy?

And I can't blame anybody, because as an outsider looking in, being a musician seems like an astonishingly difficult, frustrating, and draining job, and being a musician for decades seems unimaginable. But then, hell, I'm 19, and I can make glib jokes about getting married to hilariously inappropriate songs because it all seems so distant. Following any career for twenty, thirty, fifty years is beyond my comprehension. And even if I never get married, or come up with a steady job, there's one thing I'll never stop doing, and all I can do is hope I age well. I hope I don't get sick too often, or injured, or embarrassed. I hope I don't feel trapped, or like I've wasted my life. I hope I treat younger people with respect and even more, with curiosity, to find out about a growing world that will one day leave me behind. I hope I don't become too morbid, stagnant, or afraid. I hope I love being 50, and not just a little less than being 40, but for being 50, and all that I am and can still do and can do better than ever before.

I hope I age as well as Nick Cave has. But if I don't, it's because few can: he's still fiery and gripping, and as multi-faceted as everyone else, and only finer with each year distant from the scruffy, limitless young man in the "Mercy Seat" video. Even if I don't end up marrying because of him, I'll never give up what he's given me. And after Dig, Lazarus, Dig! and his badass side project Grinderman, I know he's got more to give. It's there in the last and best words to the last and best song on The Lyre of Orpheus:

Hey little train! We're jumping on
The train that goes to the kingdom
We're happy, Ma, we're havin' fun
And the train ain't even left the station

Top Ten CDs I Pulled Off My Parents' Shelf (Part Two )

Wilco--Being There

In case the existence of this list doesn't make it clear: I get along well with my parents. The worst arguments I've ever had with my mom have been about homework, and I can't remember ever fighting with my dad. I never hit a rebellious patch, or even a mildly dysfunctional one, and so I never felt the inclination to break away from their tastes. Indeed, by the age of twelve, I'd more or less adopted a microcosm of their own preferences. This wasn't conscious imitation so much as an assumption that their predilections were correct. They did know everything, after all.

My mom largely taught me books and some basic politics; I learned music from my dad, a Deadhead.

My father likes roughed-up, rambling folk/country with emphasis on live performance and exemplary turns of phrase. And so did I.

Yet in the face of overwhelming logic, my father did not like Wilco. And so neither did I. (Naturally, I had never listened to them.)

But there it was, on the bottom shelf, far to the right: a frayed cardboard case with two CDs tucked in wherever there was room. I assume my dad bought Being There after hearing the band's name mentioned for the 1000th time in his corner of the world; he probably gave it a couple of tries and filed it away. So I don't know how our copy got so beat up. Maybe he bought it used. Maybe I'm giving him too little credit, and he rode around with it for weeks before giving up with iron certainty. Or maybe, as I now half believe, Being There is one of those records that is always beat up, never pristine, never new, old as roadside dust the day it first shuffled and moaned its way into the world.

As with PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, I don't remember actually listening to Being There for the first time. I put it on only to confirm what I already knew, that my father was right to reject this band. So I couldn't have given it much of a chance. And Wilco, true to form, doesn't make it easy for the listener expecting easy-listening Americana. It opens with a swarm of creaking, distorted drums that even now, with the weirder parts of A Ghost Is Born long under my belt, crawl and stumble and tingle their way through my ears. It must've scared the shit out of me back then, even as it validated my inherited opinion.

And that was it, for a while--nothing shuts a door like having a negative perception upheld.

But I did listen to it again. I did so at the end of a period of musical soul-searching, a reappraisal of works I'd dismissed on first listen. The culmination came with Television's Marquee Moon, which I'd initially shrugged off (don't ask me how) as overrated tripe, only to timidly return a month or so later to be flabbergasted by what remains one of the most inventive and rewarding guitar albums ever made. So my ego was quite firmly in check by the time I came back to Being There, but this was different. This wasn't a case of me being wrong, it was my father being wrong, and while our tastes had certainly begun to diverge by then, I don't recall that we'd yet expressed wildly differing opinions on a given piece of music.

But we did this time. My dad has said that it's Wilco's use of distortion that leaves him cold, but that opening blast on Being There struck me at the perfect angle the second time around. I'd given lip service to noise before, not wanting to seem narrow-minded, but I never really understood it until "Misunderstood", Being There's first and greatest track. And then, just as I was following along with the primal groove buried in that crackling thrump, it flipped itself inside out. It became a piano note, an acoustic guitar chord played underneath it, and a voice recognizeable as belonging to a man at the end of his twenties, yet cracked and sore with age. The lyrics Jeff Tweedy sung with that voice seem so trite on paper, but he was not yet reaching for the impressionistic poetry found on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. At this early stage in Wilco's career, still shaky in the shadow of Uncle Tupelo, all Tweedy dared reach for were quiet, solitary, sorry moments, captured and starkly defined. The word and title 'misunderstood': a hopeless cliche that nevertheless composes so many of those moments. All the pretense needed to worry about cliche is stripped away: when Tweedy asks us "Do you still love rock and roll?", it's not a generational comment on the state of music in 1996. It's an honest question. And then two minutes later, the band explodes, removing all doubt as to the answer.

As with its cousin Great American Albums, Modest Mouse's The Lonesome Crowded West and the Silver Jews' American Water, Being There's opening track is so transportive that takes forever to listen past it. When I finally did, I found a treasure trove of unshakeable grooves, beautiful, rough instrumentation, and yet more perfect-crash sounds.

The first night I spent at Oberlin College, I spent in the lobby of African Heritage House, with my backpack as a pillow. Out of my pillow, I slipped my iPod. I listened to "Misunderstood", put it away, and went to sleep.

So, Dad, I love this album. Consider it my adolescent defiance, this...roughed-up, rambling, folk/country record.

I was never any good at rebelling.


Led Zeppelin--III

1, the Beatles single compilation, came out when I was eleven and knew little music. My parents have never been the biggest Beatles fans, but like millions of others, they bought 1 to give to their kids. And I, of course, devoured it whole.

My savvy parents knew a springboard when they heard one, and as I began to understand the songs on 1 as an era's ambassadors as well as fantastic slices of pop, they began to introduce me to the other classic rock monoliths scattered throughout their collection. You have your own version of the next part of the story: the hours spent inside Dark Side of the Moon, the first listen to "Baba O'Reilly" with heart rising and muscles clenched, the endless poring over the lyrics of "Tangled Up in Blue", long after the song had ended.

But my parents were and are devoted folkies, and their collection was largely devoid of the crunchier, proto-metal members of the Boomer canon: no Cream, no Stones, no Hendrix, certainly no Black Sabbath.

And no Led Zeppelin. Well, almost none.
They had this one, and my parents handed it to me with a glimpse into themselves: this was the first CD they had ever purchased. It sounds like an absurd exaggeration, but I look upon it as a peer; like me, it's a tangible part of the marriage they've built. Driven, I put it on.

At first, I just hit repeat on "Immigrant Song". Can you blame me? It's still all I ever wanted out of the hoary old Spinal Tap era: an endless slashing riff, rollicking drums, lyrics sung drunk on their own epic-ness, and those goddamned kickass Viking shrieks. Best of all, it's under three minutes--I can never get bored nor tired of it.
That last quality is what separates and raises "Immigrant Song" above most other established Zep classics, but sonically and thematically, it's still exactly what a newcomer to the band would expect. They had stayed in their corner, as far as I was concerned.

Then I flipped the case around, to stare intently at its faded back cover. The other song titles were a mix of what I already knew was standard Zep-speak ("Since I've Been Loving You", come on) and more intriguing vagueries ("That's the Way"...?) My eyes fell and hit track seven. "Tangerine." Some ghost stirred itself in the rear of my memory. I skipped ahead to it.

An opening couple of notes, a false start. For all the supposed roughness and looseness of bloozy old blues bands, the biggest of them sound depressingly professional and smoothed out in retrospect. Led Zeppelin III was released in 1970, at the dawn of an decade that would see most of rock's creases smoothed out, resulting in the clean-burning machine that made punk and DIY indie as necessary as they were inevitable. Zeppelin was certainly one of the largest cogs in that stagnant, edgeless behemoth, even if their collective muscle was often enough to outweigh their increasingly flatline identity. But on III, they were still peaks and valleys, young and human and bursting with talent, with some of the world still to conquer. A ghost in the machine, if you will.

That's there in the bum notes and whispered count-off that starts "Tangerine", and then the song starts. Its acoustic melody would be heartbreaking if played through a hulking Marshall stack, but its true loveliness is in its fragility, the sense that Jimmy Page, the most relentlessly skilled guitarist of his generation, is barely able to pull it off. The same goes for Robert Plant, who sings like his eternally beautiful voice is but a cruel mockery of success, adding insult to the injury that throbs throughout the song. The chorus is both astonishingly soft and ready to collapse into tearful chaos at any second. It ends with an electric guitar solo, but it's unexpected rather than awkward, and its circling, impressionist tones fits the song perfectly. I listened to all of this, spellbound and with a growing certainty that I'd heard it before. There is no sensation quite like that of listening to what you think is a new song only to find that you know it, that a brittle hook is still clinging to your mind from a chance listen years before. As it turns out, my mom cherishes "Tangerine" like few other songs, and played it frequently throughout my childhood. Any other Zeppelin album would have bludgeoned its way into my memory, leaving an unambiguous footprint behind. To continue the theme, III and "Tangerine" left a ghost.

The rest of the album follows different but equally fantastic and strange veins of sound. The creepy, cathartic blur of "Gallows Pole" and its opposite cousin, the gleeful, thoughtful "Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp", got me closer to the ravaged, frantic but numbed heart of the blues more than anything before or since. Even better is "That's the Way", gorgeous guitar and the band's most introspective, searching lyrics; it's perhaps the most subtle Zeppelin song, and while I love their straight ahead shit-kickers as much as anyone, it's worth listening to them sketch out a message rather than stamp it into you.

III is a scattered, decentralized record and is all the better for it, but there is a mission statement, and it's "Friends". Another beautifully shaky beginning, and then Page steps in, both keeping and taking time, his guitar none the less cutting and gripping for being acoustic. Plant comes from out of nowhere, his Olympus wail never further from self-parody, singing words that sound like "Stairway to Heaven"'s pagan poetry taken apart and fed through a genuine, freaked out exile. The horizon-spanning strings are content to linger in the background, filling in the spaces and growing steadily instead of bursting awkwardly, until by the end, they are simply all that is left.

Of course, even the most atypical songs here are recognizeably Zeppelin--Robert Plant's vocal range is wider than ever, but he is still unmistakeable, and John Bonham still torrents up whirlwinds when given the chance. And there's still "Since I've Been Loving You", the album's unavoidable tribute to slow-burning, jam-oriented blues epics. But "Since" is easily the freshest and most fascinating of those monoliths, and stands on its own rather than trying to overwhelm and dominate the rest of the album. Rather than hinge all on a tortuously slow build, or bring focus to bear on technically impressive but uninteresting virtuosity, Zeppelin takes the opportunity of a broad canvas to explore and linger on the elements of their unmatchable interplay. I remember the song for a particular shade of guitar or isolated skitter of snare, not for any bloated whole. It's a careful, skillful, and utterly fantastic balance that the band would rarely find again, and they eventually stopped trying.

It's been nearly forty years, and III is the one pedestal of the Led Zeppelin legacy whose reputation has yet to be permanently shackled down. Even its adherents struggle to describe it, because its strange, hushed pockets of blues and folk could have been made by no other band, yet it sounds like nothing else in their mercilessly exposed discography. Unlike virtually all of its more canonized peers, it hasn't aged a day, and even though it carries for me the golden-hued image of my young parents huddling close to listen to it, I listen to it nostalgia-free.