The Beatles – “Hey Bulldog” (1968)

Have One On Me review

In anticipation of Tuesday’s gig, here (finally) is my review of Have One On Me:

It’s been over three months of gradual (gradually becoming constant) listening and finally I’m in a position to deliver a full assessment of Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom’s latest album. My initial reactions were not very favourable – I found her newly softened voice somewhat insipid and the exhibitionist sleeve pictures off-putting – but a lot of this negativity is part of any reaction to a new work from an artist I hugely respect. When faced with change in our idols, we tend to stubbornly retrench, refusing to see anything good in the new. I was similarly cool towards Ys at first, before the spell was cast.

And this spell is the secret to Newsom’s talent. She can conceivably be compared to some contemporary singers, writers and composers, and certainly has drawn inspiration from a huge variety of sources, but like all the best artists she creates a world that is entirely unique and that can only be appreciated on its own terms. Throughout her three full-length albums she has maintained certain thematic consistencies, such as immersion in the natural world, a love of wordplay and elaborate language, a kind of timeless musical dreaminess, acute observations on key philosophical questions and an unapologetic celebration of femininity. Despite the different musical styles of the three works – The Milk-Eyed Mender, Ys and the current album – the continuity and development of these themes mark each one out as uniquely Newsomesque. This is her world, and the listener is a guest in that world.

It’s impossible not to be drawn into this world once you take the time to listen closely to her words and harp playing. Like many who inhabit a heightened, mysterious artistic sphere, Newsom seems quite normal and placid in real life. The songs on Have One On Me are more emotionally direct than anything she’s written before, and clearly inspired by real-life events, but it would be simplistic to take them as a straightforward commentary on Joanna Newsom the person. Instead they are a kind of alternative reality, where the songs’ nameless narrator sings of grandiose love, cataclysmic betrayal and the joy of sheer existence, occupying strange liminent spaces between solidity and air, music and silence, dreams and reality.

The songs vary from heavily orchestrated epics to almost silent, harp-driven elegies. There is a huge variety of instrumentation running through the album, to the point where it almost seems distorted and confused, but Newsom knows what she is doing – a complete listen, though time-consuming, reveals that not a note or a line in this work is accidental. (Headphones are also recommended for listening, part of the reason it underwhelmed me at first was the way much of the musical complexity was lost through traditional stereo speakers.)

Newsom has alluded in interviews before to her albums being inspired by a different element, and she returned to that theme in a recent interview with the Times when she said of Have One On Me that it is “earth and dirt, very grounded”. Certainly, themes of home, while strong on all her previous work, are the carrying force of this triple-CD opus. She returns again and again to the theme of pastoral home, whether in the form of an allegory like in ‘81′, or directly, as in “Occident”, where she sings ‘to leave your home and your family/for some delusion of property – well I can’t go…’.

However, home is not a place of unambigiuous peace. ‘In California’ – placed pointedly at the dead centre of the album – presents the narrator fleeing the ‘trouble and sorrow’ of the world by resolutely ‘abandoning the thought of anywhere but home’. This flight is not joyful, rather it is a denial of life’s fullness, emphasised by recurring references to loss and heartbreak and the statement ‘I am no longer afraid of anything – save the life that here awaits’. Even the most stalwart homebirds can’t hide away forever, and must face the confusion and strangeness of the wider world. The narrator loves her home, but comes to understand that: ‘I am native to it, but I’m overgrown’.

An elusive man is the next most important character in this work, after the constantly present narrator. He stars in the opening track, ‘Easy’ where the hazy joy of lying in bed with a lover is tainted by the narrator’s knowledge that her all-consuming love is not fully returned. The beloved’s ambiguity leads the narrator to ever wilder declarations of undying love ‘I was born to love, and I intend to love you’, ‘Pluck every last daisy clean, till only I may love you’ and so on. Themes of self-effacement in the name of love pop up again and again in the album, most notably in that track where she declares ‘you must meet me to see me, I am barely here’. Similarly, the narrator frequently refers to herself as a fragile creature, a ‘little clock that trembles on the hour’ in ‘In Califiornia’ and ‘your little nurse’ or a ‘princess of Kentucky’ with ‘ankles bound in gauze’ in ‘Go Long’. Yet the album as a whole does not reveal a personality that is likely to to be swallowed up by another, and sharp irony and wit, as well as affection, come to the fore in other songs that dissect that unhappy relationship.

Towards the end of the title track, after the section told from the point of view of 19th-century courtesan and dancer Lola Montez (another creative woman trying to find a balance between self-expression and love), the song swings back to the present-day narrator’s point of view, listing moments from the past that have leapt into sudden relief in her memory. She repeatedly maintains that she was ‘helpless as a child’ when her lover held her in his arms. This helpless longing is expressed musically in a gorgeously swooping vocal arrangement, the very power of which reveals to us, more than any lyrics could, that the narrator has mistaken great sex for great love, and is suffering the consequences of that mistake.

But the narrator has not lost her sense of humour to heartbreak, admitting frankly in the wonderfully rollicking ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ that ‘I knew right away that the lay was steep, but I fell for you honey, easy as falling asleep’. She is a winning mix of sardonic and sweet in the line ‘I know you meant to show the extent to which you gave a goddang, you ranged real hot and real cold but I’m sold’. The impermanence of the love that she has banked so much on is revealed when she refers to it as ‘this thing we’ve been playing at, darling’ which will only work when the beloved is wearing his ‘staying hat’.

Later in the album,’Soft As Chalk’ looks at the affair with the wryly detached eye of someone who has realised she spent a great deal of time falling in love by herself, as the narrator frankly admits that back in the heady days when she and her man would ‘talk as soft as chalk till morning came, pale as a pearl’, ‘time was just a line that you fed me when you wanted to stay’. That song ends with her calmly wishing her old love well, but acknowledging that her own life must move on:- ‘I have to catch a cab and my bags are at the carousel – and then, lord knows, time will only tell’.

In all these tracks wonderful tunes, arresting lyrical imagery and intriguing musical arrangements breath new life into what is probably the oldest of poetic themes. The only track that could be considered anything resembling a classic ‘f**k you’, is the spooky ‘Go Long’, where frightening images of broken ankles, rooms made of ‘the gold teeth of the women who loved you’ and a burning river are offset by perhaps the most heartbreakingly direct admonishments of the whole album: ‘Who is going to bear your beautiful children…Who will take care of you when you’re old and dying?’. Musically, that track pays homage to the West African influences of Newsom’s early work with a pitch-perfect collaboration between her harp and the Malian kora.

The main story arc of this album is the tale of this ultimately unrequited love, and it’s fitting that the last track, ‘Does Not Suffice’ closes the book on that story. The narrator catalogues the possessions she packs up as she leaves the home she and her man have shared, the ‘pretty dresses…sparkling rings….coats of boucle, jacquard and cashmere’ – a veritable junk-shop of belongings that remind her lover of how ‘easy I was not’  (a line that ties in nicely with the opening track). She goes on to imagine her newly freed lover ‘stretching out’ on a ‘boundless bed’ and sadly tells him ‘everywhere I tried to love you/is yours again, and only yours.’ Sad, but not despairing – the narrator may have initially wanted to immolate her identity and replace it with that of her beloved’s, but has come to learn that real love is the meeting of two equal individuals, not the absorption of one into another.

The narrator’s sense of self is reaffirmed by her celebrations of home, friendship and her femininity. Newsom celebrates motherhood, both that of others and her potential own – the latter in ‘Baby Birch’ a beautiful hymn to a dreamed baby daughter, and the former in the exquisite ‘Esme’, a celebration of the joy a child brings to everyone. She links themes of motherhood, home and creativity together in a way that seems both ancient and thrillingly new, in a piece of art that is firmly, unselfconsciously female in its aesthetic. Newsom’s artistic world does not and cannot define itself in relation to a male prototype. She sings on Go Long  of ‘the loneliness of you mighty men, with your jaws and fists and guitars and pens, and your sugarlip – but I’ve never been to the firepits with you mighty men’. It’s clear that that the world of the ‘mighty men’ is a different world to hers, with a different aesthetic, and even the narrator’s love for one man does not cause her to turn her back on or lose pride in her femaleness. She does not criticise or denigrate the male world, but simply takes for granted that it is different, and not suitable to her mode of creative expression.

The musical feel of this album is quite different to the medieval-style arrangements of its predecessor or the minimalism of her debut, though it shares the common Newsomian themes of rich instrumentation and experimental tunes. Newsom has said of this album that its sound is supposed to evoke a hedonistic, 1920s atmosphere, but the musical styles are broader than that, taking in 70s Californian rock, 60s folk, avant-garde composition and any number of other influences. Colloborators Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan bring wonderful warmth to the string and percussion arrangements respectively. Francesconi contributes guitar, banjo, mandolin and the beautifully rich-sounding Bulgarian tambura, used to great effect on the title track. Morgan’s clattering drumwork provides the backbone to some of the best tracks, including ‘Have One On Me’, ‘Good Intentions Paving Company’ and ‘Soft as Chalk’, but his percussion is more than just a backdrop – he plays the drums as a fully realised instrument. Combined with Newsom’s harp – more accomplished than ever – her increased use of piano, and the talent of the many other musicians playing on the album, the informally named ‘Ys Street Band’ are the heart and soul of the most soulful of Newsom’s albums to date.

At over two hours long, naturally not all tracks are top-drawer – the recorders on ‘Kingfisher’ are a little too reminiscent of Pentangle for my tastes, and Newsom has always been prone to cringey lyrics – the title of Good Intentions Paving Company being the most obvious example, though the song’s charm more than makes up for that. Newsom needs to be accepted on her own terms or else her music can be difficult to understand, but the extra effort required pays off enormously. This is a magnificent piece of art, encompassing enormous themes of life, death and meaning, but also small celebrations of the joy of everyday existence. ‘Ribbon Bows’ explores the eternal question ‘God – no God?’ without coming down conclusively on one side or the other, but a powerful sense of transcendence and faith in humanity permeates this whole work – even in despair, the narrator is never nihilistic. Perhaps Newsom’s spiritual beliefs can best be summed up in this wish-blessing from ‘Esme’:

‘May kindness, kindness, kindness abound’.

John not into chicks in this January 1966 issue of Fabulous magazine.

Naturally I googled the photoshoot...

The face and sleeves of a man who does not want to be doing this at all 😄❤️🐥🐥

#ep14

On Instagram

currently 70 pages into Derek Taylor's book and I'm absolutely charmed, did everyone else know how funny he was and just not tell me!!?

Welcome to the continent

BBC are having an Africa season of sorts – probably reflecting renewed interest in the continent in the light of the upcoming World Cup. The latest instalment is An African Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby, in which the veteran reporter explores life and culture in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Kenya, Ethiopia, Congo and SA, among others. I caught part of the second instalment, when he visited Ethiopia and Kenya. (On a side note, when will the BBC iPlayer become available in Ireland?? I’d gladly pay! And it seems bizarre that the BBC radio iPlayer is freely available, but not the television one! But that’s another entry).

I was reminded again of my earlier thoughts on Rupert Everett and Hector when witnessing Dimbleby’s complete inability to just act normal around his African interviewees, but he wasn’t the worst example of western awkwardness either. Like in Welcome to Lagos, the people defied stereotypes of unrelenting misery – most people had tough lives but like anyone would, tried to make the best of it. The role of technology was an interesting side note – in a continent where many countries have sporadic communications infrastructure, the mobile phone is an essential item. Cultural purists might balk at the sight of a Masai tribesman leaning against a tree chatting into a Nokia, but, as he explained, the device was an invaluable help to them in maintaining their traditional way of life, advising their fellow tribesman where to bring their animals for water and arranging meeting places to swap information. Like the best forms of technology, the mobile enables the Masai to continue living their traditional lives, only more efficiently than before – it becomes an invaluable, almost invisible part of life.

An overriding theme in any programme about Africa is the almost dizzying level of entrepeneurship displayed by even the most uneducated of people. This is hardly surprising – many African nations have been betrayed by their own leaders so it makes perfect sense that people take their financial matters into their own hands. Some sniffy commentators in the west complain that this displays a sort of ingrained ‘me and mine first’ culture that will forever paralyse Africa until better ways of organisation are imported from abroad, and correlate the obnoxious wealth-grabbing of various presidents to a street seller making enough to buy a mobile phone. This is a manifestly silly idea, since it pre-supposed some kind of inescapable destiny of behaviour that doesn’t stand up to even the most basic scientific analysis, and doesn’t take into account the simple fact that people will always make the best of whatever situation they find themselves in. Many Africans find themselves in situations where their leaders do nothing for them, so they help themselves and their families as much as they can. Anybody would so the same. Strong societies and communities don’t evolve overnight, especially when the conditions are unfavourable, and ordinary human self-interest is not some kind of incurable hamartia.

One enterprise on show was a kind of Western Union service in Kenya called MPusa where people send money to relatives and receive a text to confirm the money has arrived – incredibly simple, incredibily useful. Dimbleby also visited a call-centre and the set of a soap opera promoting unity between Kenya’s tribes. A focus group audience for the soap confirmed that tribal conflict in 2008 was strongest among the uneducated, but the more people were educated, the less conflict there was. Again, the simplest answer is the correct one, rather than the dark mutterings about ingrained African ‘tribalism’ that blight the conservative (and often the notionally liberal) western press. The 2008 violence in Kenya was multifaceted, but it was certainly not simply the inevitable result of bloodthirsty tribes seething at each other.

These recent programmes on Africa have been really cheering. Seeing people just getting on with their lives as society at large gradually evolves around them dispels the negative stereotypes that are pumped into our brains in the west by media, charity organisations and self-styled ‘experts’. I don’t mean that in a patronising way ‘look at them there with their little businesses’, and of course it’s obvious Africa has lots of problems to overcome. It would be naive to assume that a fully modernised African society will exactly mirror the West – there are too many dramatically different cultural features to African life for that to happen – but it looks more and more each day that Africa will eventually become a thoroughly modern continent on its own terms, which is the best news of all.

The Beatles rehearse for the BBC radio show Teenager's Turn (Here We Go) in Manchester, England | 11 June 1962 © Mike McCartney

Songs from the room of life

Back cover of the sleeve of ‘Songs From A Room’.

Leonard Cohen’s career has been incredibly long and varied, covering everything from whispered 60s folk to extravagant 80s hyper-production, but his songwriting themes have remained quite consistent over the decades. Sex, God and the weight of history come up again and again, expressed in ways that are in turn beautiful, shocking, funny and tragic.

His later career has been pretty illustrious and judging by the reception to his recent tours, he is more loved than ever, but in many ways he reached the apogee of his favourite themes early on, in his second album, 1969′s Songs From A Room. This has always been my favourite Cohen album – I never get tired of the way he delicately juxtaposes the longing of love with the search for transcendence and the heavy meaning of history, both personal and universal.

Despite being a Buddhist for some decades now, Cohen’s chief spiritual inspiration has always been his Jewish heritage, and this is revealed time and again in Songs From A Room. In ‘Story of Isaac’, Cohen not only represents the turn of humanity from primitivism to monotheism and text-based religion, as the angel sings to Abraham: ‘”You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it any more”….my father’s hands were trembling, with the beauty of the Word’, he also succintly analyses the mythological schism between the sons of Abraham that led to the separation of Judaism and Islam: ‘And if you call me brother now, forgive me if I enquire, just according to whose plan? When it all comes down to dust, I will kill you if I must, I will help you if I can’ (followed by the qualifier ‘when it all comes down to dust, I will help you if I must, I will kill you if I can’).

In ‘You Know Who I Am’, the jealous God of the Old Testament addresses his people as a lover: ‘I cannot follow you my love, you cannot follow me, and the distance you put between all the moments we will be. You know who I am, you’ve stared at the sun, I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one’ and carries the story forth into the New Testament and Christ: ‘I will give you one broken man, who I will teach you to repair’. God is a darker figure in ‘The Butcher’, ‘slaughtering a lamb’ while the narrator, possibly again the collective voice of humanity, feels he is experiencing the same fate. He cynically reflects on the feebleness of faith in the face of disaster ‘I saw some flowers grow up, where that land fell down, was I supposed to praise my lord, make some kind of joyful sound?’ but concedes that he cannot do without the butcher-father-god: ‘do not leave me now, do not leave me now’, while the butcher repeats ‘listen to me child, I am what I am, and you are my only son.’

History and politics are universalised in ‘The Old Revolution’, when the narrator, perhaps a supporter of the monarchy adjusting to life post-early 20th century-socialist-revolution, thinks about past glories and current disasters: ‘I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing, as they carry the bodies away….To all of my architects, let me be traitor…Now let me say I myself gave the order to sleep and to search and to destroy’, carried through by the extraordinarily moving refrain: ‘Into this furnace, I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray’. ‘The Partisan’ is a reworked version of the WWII French Resistance anthem ‘La complainte du partisan’ by Anna Marly, but stripped of time-specific references (the French line ‘les Allemands l’ont pris’ is sung by Cohen as ‘then the soldiers came’), placing the protagonist as a universal, nameless, hidden figure, found in every war in history.

That same sense of timelessness is found in one of the album’s sadder songs, the exquisite ‘Seems So Long Ago, Nancy’. Written in homage to a good-time girl from Cohen’s youth, who killed herself after her illegitimate child was taken away from her, the story of her fate unfolds sparingly: ‘Nancy wore green stockings, and she slept with everyone. She never said she’d wait for us, although she was alone. I think she fell in love for us, in 1961′. Nancy comes from ‘the house of honesty’, but as Cohen devastatingly puts it ‘none of us would need her in the house of mystery.’ The way he sings ’1961′ makes it sound like some impossibly ancient time, before the founding of Jericho. Haunted by visions of the dead Nancy, the narrator ‘sees her everywhere. many use her body, many comb her hair’. She reappears at the end, a ghostly figure ‘in the hollow of the night’ who comes to you ‘when you are cold and numb’, both a comforting mother and a frightening spectre: ‘you’ll hear her talking freely there, she’s happy that you’ve come’. In death Nancy still seeks love, and the living people still run in fear.

Another ghostly woman appears in ‘Lady Midnight’ but this time she is a representation of despair, perhaps of the will to suicide that Cohen openly says stalked his younger years. After ‘argu[ing] all night, like so many have before’ the lady tersely tells the singer ‘Don’t try to use me, or slyly refuse me, just win me or lose me, it is this that the darkness is for.’ Perhaps she frees him from egotism when she tells him ‘if we cry now…it will just be ignored’, at any rate he awakens to new hope: ‘I walked through the morning, sweet early morning, I could hear my lady calling “you’ve won me, you’ve won me, my lord”.’

It’s a Leonard Cohen album, so there are no overt love songs – Cohen, for all his reputation as a chronicler of the heart, only really writes ‘love’ songs about sex – his real, all-consuming love is for the terrible father-God figure who stalks his entire oeuvre. After all the tenderness and wisdom that comes before, the album ends on a depressing note dressed up in a jaunty tune – ‘Tonight Will Be Fine’ cynically dissects the mutual dishonesty and cowardice that keeps a failing relationship limping unhappily along. Perhaps the album’s ‘message’ if it has one, is that dependence on romantic relationships is just a cover for the real lacunae in our lives – the search for something beyond reality, the struggle to find meaning in the past, the huge questions we must all ask but repeatedly hide from. It’s one of the most human pieces of art ever created, and that’s why it’s so timeless.

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Chapter 3: Rulers make bad lovers

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.