what i've been listening to

By Robbie on December 9, 2009

The Chicago Reader asked me what I thought was the best music of 2009. No idea, since of course I didn't hear most of it. But I have been neck-deep in great recordings lately -- there's more and more of them as time goes by -- and so it got me thinking of a few definite possibilities. Not that most of what I've got on my changer was put out in the last 12 months. As always, I'm on a mixed diet of styles and eras.

1.  Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie. I've only heard this once so far, but the beautiful, clever, and spare arrangements were very striking. This is a collection of songs popularized by Doris Day, than whom hardly anyone could be more out of step with our drag-me-to-hell times. What a nice (and characteristically audacious) move by Nellie, to take her catalog out for a joyride. There's nothing here your grandma wouldn't be thrilled for, nothing that alludes much to the standard of adventure of today's jazz, so what makes this float so much higher than a record by any gifted Broadway singer doing standards with solid players? Slightly hard to say. The secret, maybe, is in effecting a delicate balance of austerity and passion, and reining in the "personality" just enough. The soloists here tell engaging and relaxed stories; everyone sounds as though he or she fully understands and supports the general concept; each song has a setting that is consistent with the others yet fresh. But enough gauze and prattle -- if you like both Doris and Nellie, as I do, get this at once, and otherwise buy an itune and see if you aren't captivated.

2.  LaWanda Page, Pipe Layin' Dan and Watch It Sucka!  If her Aunt Esther character is all you know of LaWanda, check out these remarkably sordid documents of her nightclub act. It's not even comedy, not in the way we expect, with pacing and polish and character likeability and love of language. It's sort of a big-city version of a downhome whorehouse act, and it takes you back to the lost land of black L.A. in the 1960s, with a whiff of 1940s Mississippi. It throws a little light on the lineage of Richard Pryor too. When you hear this you want to know a lot more about the life of LaWanda, and how she did this in public while evading the police attention that white comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin attracted.

3.  Mel Street, At His Best. "Memory Train" is in fact not nearly "his best," but that's more some cracker entrepreneur's fault than Mel's. The 1970s are sometimes underrated by C&W enthusiasts (those tony $300 Bear Family boxes attend predominantly to pre-Seventies music), and this singer in particular, who specialized in steamy carnality and marriage trouble and who killed himself in 1978, doesn't get his due. A good way to separate the sheep from the goats is to ask a roomful of countryphiles who sang best: Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, or Mel Street? The answer is, all of them.

4.  Imogen Heap, Ellipse. The singing and writing are fine, but the programming and production are the star of this show, to my ears. Imagine a hybrid of Madonna (melody and vocal authority), Radiohead (keyboardy ambience), and whatever is playing at Starbucks right now, and, if you are still reading this sentence, this may be for you. Personally, I am about halfway into those, and I can't honestly say that Imogen's latest record avoids what I find boring or offensive in the the strip-mall coffeehouse brand of pop music; but some of the melodic writing is gorgeous, and the care and polish with which the beats and tones have been constructed reward many plays.

5. David Grier, I've Got The House To Myself. I haven't listened to any flatpick guitar record so much since...maybe ever, I can't remember. Not because it's the best flatpick guitar record (it's up there though), but because it's solo playing on mostly standards, and therefore easy to play with. A lot of mornings when I wake up I sit down with this to get my hands warmed and my brain firing -- there's a great combination of simplicity and sophistication. Except for the recording's unresponsiveness, it's like having a master in the room playing with you; just keeping time and backing it up is a first-class experience. Anyway, this guy's playing really moves and inspires me, and I like this record of his the best.

6.  Yo La Tengo, Popular Songs. I have a not-too-thorough acquaintance with this band's records. This one tells me I've been missing a lot. At one listen you can sense that they are lavishing care and thought on all the necessaries: words, harmonic shapes, orchestration, timbre, aggression, subtlety, song-to-song flow, hooks, and so on. Yo La Tengo would seem to be a one-stop music shop. Like Velvet Underground before them, they offer so much variety and density that, theoretically, you don't need to purchase records by anyone else.

7. Wayne Horvitz, Film Music, 1998-2001. I put this on one dark rainy night while driving through rural Pennsylvania last month. I say "dark" to hint that I didn't know what I was feeding the CD player, which ignorance is a rare and mostly positive state in which to appreciate self-programmed music. Because of their shortness and original purpose, these pieces have a fragmentary lightness; but the unmissable inventiveness and depth of Wayne's melody writing, along with a hyperalert puckishness in the performances, makes the listener wonder whether this could possibly have glided by in the half-noticeable way that functional movie music typically must. But there are so many moods and methods on this forty-some-track-long disc that you can't fit it in an exact slot on the spectrum between filmic wallpaper and arresting standalone music, and I think that slipperiness works in its favor, making for engaging and even enchanting listening. I put it on again, a week after my drive, at an at-home social gathering, and found that it took about eight minutes, or six songs, to provoke comment, distraction, and puzzlement.

8.  Tim Sparks, Sidewalk Blues. This guy can totally fuckin' pick the guitar, and I'm always up for hearing fingerboard noise and stray grunts.