About five years ago, I bought an album called “If You Were For Me” by Rose Cousins, on the basis of her performance on a CBC Radio 1 show I half-listened to while recovering from a night shift. It didn’t immediately gel with me — though I did love the title track right off the bat — but over the space of the next six months I realized I was listening to it more and more, and caught myself humming bits and pieces of it to myself. When we got married, I had a conversation with the guy we’d hired to do our music, in which he asked what kind of stuff we liked, and it was very difficult for me to not blurt out “Rose Cousins.”

“If You Were For Me” has since become one of my very favorite albums, right up there with Edie Carey’s “Another Kind of Fire,” Gaslight Anthem’s “The ’59 Sound,” and, of course, Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.” I wrote a lengthy mash note to “Another Kind of Fire” back in 2008, where I talked a bit about Rose and the timelessness of her music. Re-reading it today, I’m not sure I did it justice.

This is all preamble to the real reason I’m writing this post: Rose Cousins has a new album out. And it is deeply, deeply good. If you’ve liked her previous stuff, you’ll like this new record a lot more. Listening through it the first time, this morning, I realized that it was pretty much exactly what I had been hoping for out of a new Rose Cousins album: you can clearly see how her work has evolved over the years, and how it has become deeper, more textured, more serious. Which isn’t to denigrate either “If You Were For Me” or “The Send Off” — they’re both excellent albums in their own right. But “We Have Made A Spark” is better. Much, much better.

Thematically, this is a dark album; there are recurrent images of loneliness, isolation, and unhappy relationships. Several tracks (“Go First,” “This Light,” “One Way,” “The Shell”) make for outstanding Sad Bastard music, but it isn’t just the same kind of complaint over and over again. Much like Sarah Harmer’s “Basement Apartment” captured a very specific kind of angst about mid-to-late-20s existence, Rose’s lyrics on some of these tracks are about a particular place and time in one’s life, the sort of desperation and sorrow that comes with a failing relationship, the desire to escape for something better and yet lacking the strength to do so:

I want you to go first
It’s only getting worse
Either way it’s gonna hurt
But I want you to go first
I need you to leave I'm not the one to make you happy
There’s no room to breathe
I need you to leave
I could hold you all night
And it wouldn’t make it right
I have held you all day
It doesn’t go away
And it’s when I hold you close
That’s when it hurts the most

The lyrics capture something meaningful, but the richness of the music (there’s a string quintet that plays through here) is something else entirely. This album was recorded and produced by a group of musicians in Boston, and the competence on display here is shocking. Without drawing too many comparisons to Sarah Harmer here, I was reminded of how “Oh Little Fire” was almost a virtuoso display of a group of musicians who were very good at what they do and enjoy their work immensely — It’s the same sort of thing here. Rose has very clearly found a great bunch of collaborators. Go through the list of people who worked on the album, and names start to pop out: Edie Carey’s here; so is Charlie Rose, Rose Polenzani, and Jennifer Kimball. The collaboration is impressive, but to my mind one of the strongest tracks, “This Light,” is just Rose Cousins and a piano, a format that allows her talent to shine. (I confess that when I heard about the concept behind this album, I was a bit paranoid that the essential “Rose-ness” would be diluted, but while there are a good number of people involved in making this record, it is unquestionably Rose Cousins. Paranoia unfounded.)

There are also a few bonuses: a very nifty cover of Springsteen’s “If I Should Fall Behind,” and two do-overs of tracks from “The Send Off”: “All The Time It Takes to Wait” and “White Daisies.” I’m not a big fan of the latter, but the former is done much more in the style that she has apparently been performing the song live — see this version with Royal Wood as an example — and it is so much better than the original. I admit that the live version has ruined other album versions of that song more or less forever, so it’s nice that “We Have Made A Spark” has something close.

It’s a great album. Go run out and buy a copy, ok?

I have no idea where this came from. It has apparently been in my music collection for quite a long time; it seems to have come from iTunes, but I have no recollection of downloading it, and there isn’t anything else from King of Spain on my hard drive. Nevertheless, I found this last night playing through my library at random, and I discovered that it is awesome and I love it, so hooray for serendipity.

Please don’t judge Katie Herzig’s music by the fact that it has made it into a great many shows that you like making fun of. (“Private Practice,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” etc.) And it’s really OK if that’s where you found her. Personally, I blame the guys at Aurgasm for introducing me to her stuff last year, and I’ve been slowly adding tracks to my library in a piecemeal fashion. I noticed last week that “Lost and Found,” from the new album “The Waking Sleep,” was trending on iTunes and some skillful Googling reveals that it was, in fact, on “Grey’s” recently, so that explains that. Which annoys me, because “Lost and Found” was probably my favorite song off “The Waking Sleep.” And god knows I can’t profile something that just showed up on mass teevee last week. So let’s go back to the last album instead.

This particular track has a live version, from her concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco, which I think is just tremendous — but I can’t find it in on YouTube, so you’re stuck with the version from “Apple Tree.” Which isn’t bad at all!
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/soundcheck-sunday-katie-herzig-wish-you-well/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/soundcheck-sunday-oliver-swain-big-machine/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/10/soundcheck-sunday-oliver-swain-big-machine/#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:39:13 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=885 Continue reading →]]> “Who?”

This guy:

I first encountered Oliver Swain this past summer. Stephen Quinn was talking about CBC Vancouver’s series of lunchtime concerts — at which Swain played sometime in July — and played this track by way of introducing his music. Driving in the car when this came on, I had to sit through the entire thing, even though I ended up in the parking lot at Wal-Mart with no recollection of why I was there or where I’d been going in the first place.

This is the best version of “Big Machine” I can find on YouTube; unfortunately, most of the other copies are home video shot at concerts with less-than-perfect acoustics. Having said that, I strongly encourage you to run out and buy his album on iTunes right now, because it’s the kind of music Mumford & Sons wish they made.

The title track from the latest studio album (2006). One of the things I love dearly about Colvin is that she’s only inclined to record when she actually feels like she has something to say. This can be frustrating sometimes because you’re forever waiting for something new and interesting — Sarah McLachlan, I’m looking at you — but when the results sound like this it’s oh-so-worth the wait.

So it turns out we’re going to do a pair of tracks from “A Few Small Repairs.” This one’s been in my mind since last week, when we went out to Alberta (my first time back in two years) for a day and a bit, and I found myself driving down the arrow-straight highways we never see in this part of the world. And for some reason, this was the song that was playing in my head the entire weekend. It’s not about the prairies, and Kansas is a long way from southern Alberta, but for some reason I think about life in small towns and the yearning for escape and, sometimes, the utter futility of the whole thing.

I wished hard enough to hurt
Drove fast enough to catch the moon
But I must have been dreaming again
’cause there’s nothing around the bend
Except for that flat, fine line
Of the Wichita skyline

It turns out there’s no video for this song. You don’t need one.

I recently stumbled upon a (very small) poem by the Jodo Shinshu poet Asahara Saichi:

84,000 delusions
84,000 lights
84,000 joys abounding

I have no idea if Shawn Colvin knew about this poem when she wrote this song. My understanding is that “84,000″ is a number used in Buddhism — not just Jodo Shinshu teachings — as a shorthand for “a lot”, so it isn’t unreasonable to think the song drew some level of inspiration from either the saying or the poem. In this case, Saichi is talking about the great ecstasy that comes with the enlightenment of a severely deluded mind.

Which makes the context for “84,000 Different Delusions” interesting: “A Few Small Repairs” is sometimes described as a concept album exploring the emotions that come in the wake of a divorce, and if you were to think of the idea of divorce (or the ending of a fundamentally flawed and unhappy relationship) as a kind of enlightenment, well, it’s not much of a stretch to see how one could find abounding joy once one sees the light.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/soundcheck-sunday-shawn-colvin-84000-different-delusions/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/soundcheck-sunday-shawn-colvin-polaroids/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2011/09/soundcheck-sunday-shawn-colvin-polaroids/#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 04:20:29 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=841 Continue reading →]]> If late August was the time of The Northern Pikes, September seems to be the month of Shawn Colvin (and Paula Cole, but that’s a Soundcheck for another week). We’re fast approaching what is easily my favorite time of year around here, with the shortening days, the turning leaves, and the bright afternoon sunshine; Shawn Colvin is, for some reason, inexorably linked with all of this in my mind. So this month, I’m going to show off some of her best work.