My Amazon Reviews: The Decemberists “What a Terrible World, What a Wonderful World”

What a Beautiful World We Live In
4 Out Of 5 Stars

After pounding out an R.E.M. sound-alike in 2011 in the form of "The King Is Dead," The Decemberists back up a bit for the more middle of the road "What A Terrible World, What A Wonderful World." There are some subtle changes, like heavier strings and horn charts, which are good. The band that crafted CD long suites now starts off an album with a song where the band apologizes for making a commercial for Axe Shampoo ("The Singer Addresses His Audience"). They know they aren't the same band that cut the masterful "The Crane Wife," and openly admit such.

What they are for "What a Terrible World..." are a crafter of songs. They've found a sweet spot between the ornate structure of those early albums to a sense of pop melody. It makes a love song like "Philomenia" all the more jaunty and "Lake Song" a hip folkie haunter. The band also sound more integrated this time around, where "The King Is Dead" was a showcase for Chris Funk, here, piano dominates many of the songs. Me. I kind of like when they get into that folk vein, as one of my favorites here - Colin Malloy almost making a sea shanty song out of "Better Not Wake The Baby."

"What a Terrible World..." will probably polarize fans who can't get over the fact that the band hit an early peak and then decided to try other things. As for me, I can respect that The Decemberists are not content to stay in one place for every album. Maybe they still aspire to be R.E.M. or even 10,000 Maniacs (some of the poetic lyrics recall the Maniacs'). What ever direction they travel, I am happy to follow as long as the music is this good.

     

My Amazon Reviews: James Lee Stanley "The Apocaloptimist"

Look on The Bright Side
4 Out Of 5 Stars

As a long time fan of James Lee Stanley, I am always excited when he settles in and records a new CD of original songs. He has also kept himself busy, recording duet albums in the "All Wood And..." series, so far mining The Doors and Rolling Stones for source material, Yet it is his solo CD's that I wait for with the greatest hunger. On the new "The Apocaloptimist," he weaves the magic again.

Combining the word apocalypse with the word optimist, he expects the worst and hopes for the best. The character he introduces in the first song is one who lives and sleeps, rises and falls and falls again while "Living The Party Life." Our up and coming yuppie parties when he wins, parties when he loses, and no matter what the result, is ready to party away. PBR in hand, he's probably the best dressed and most annoying person in the room, but James still sings with some sympathy for the guy. Later he hangs out at a bar and sweetly dreams of being rescued at "Last Call."

The character's not a complete yay-hoo. After all, how could he be if he likes Beatles' songs? Coming from the same respectful background as the "All Wood And..." series, "Drive My Car" gives a folk rock makeover to a classic, complete with a tasty harmonica courtesy of Corky Siegel. Or, for that matter, would such a bad man surround himself with great players like Little Feat's Paul Barrere (on slide guitar for "Gypsies In The Hallway")? James' hero may be searching for the best, and this being a story with a happy ending, lets the lead actor fumble his way to understanding with nothing but the best musicianship lighting the way. He comes to a realization about family on "Here We Have My Father," and figures out that maybe it's time to treat his life as something more precious on the strolling "When You Get Right To It."

Coming to terms with when life deals you a decent hand, James' hero ain't such a bad guy in the end. He finds true love during "Any Other Way" and learns the deepest love when singing a "Lullaby for Chloe." James takes our "Apocaloptimist" guy from annoying chump to adoring father in less than an hour, James Lee Stanley is the kind of storyteller who can do this narrative masterfully, and I love when stories have happy endings. Especially when set to music this good.

One more thing: The album's artwork. "The Apocaloptimist's" cover art is poster worthy. It harkens back to the days when the amount of thought given to the entire album package covered the music and how the artwork related to the songs within.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Passenger "Whispers"

From a Whisper
4 Out Of 5 Stars

Mike Rosenberg (a.k.a. Passenger) hit the jackpot last year when the whispery break-up ballad, "Let Her Go," hit escape velocity (thanks in no small part to being used in an emotional beer advert showing a bond between a dog and a Clydesdale), towing his two year old "All The Little Lights" to stardom along with it. Passenger had already spent a few years before this success playing and writing, so there isn't much worry about a sophomore slump when it comes to "Whispers," his fourth album over all. If success has given him anything, it's a bit more of a kick to his step, as many of the new CD's songs give that whispery voice of his some more uptempo backing to play around.

There's a more percussive bent to the opener, "Coins In The Fountain," with a sinuous beat trundling under happy lyrics that proclaim that "Love is the only song I'll sing." It's a far cry from the heartbreak of "Let Her Go," but by all means there's plenty of sad goodbyes to be found throughout "Whispers." "Heart's On Fire" even addresses it from his role as singer-songwriter; "you know those love songs will always break your heart." All done to a tasteful folk accompaniment, of course. And then there's Rosenberg telling everyone that he doesn't care what you think, because at "27," he feels no need to just churn out songs that will put him on "a video screen."

What has set Passenger apart from most of the singer songwriters popping out of the woodwork of late is that he really can turn out an ace story. No where on "Whispers" is this more evident than the emotionally touching "Riding to New York," allegedly based on a real encounter Rosenberg had on tour. In it, he meets an old man dying of cancer who just wants to get closure.

"I wanna see my grand-daughter one last time,
Wanna hold her close and feel her tiny heartbeat next to mine.
Wanna see my son and the man he's become,
Tell him I'm sorry for the things I've done,"

It's his most moving and poignant song to date, and the best thing about "Whispers." After four albums and a move into the spotlight, Passenger shows that he's got the goods to make his career more than a break-up ballad from a sappy commercial.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Suzanne Vega "Tales From The Realm Of The Queen of Pentangles"

To That Land Uncharted
4 Out Of 5 Stars

After revisiting her career through the four volumes of "Close Up" albums, Suzanne Vega cleaves close to that feel on her "Tales From The Realm Of The Queen of Pentangles." Which, despite its unwieldy title, feels like her earlier titles in that the folkish elements are more forward and her poetry is again enigmatic and enchanting.

"I don't know about happiness but virtue's overrated" she sweetly sings on "Laying On The Hands." To that end, Vega sings about the disparity between the rich and poor ("Fools Complaint"), being careful of what you wish for ("Don't Uncork What You Can't Contain," which samples 50 Cent of all people) and the excellent "Portrait of the Knight Of The Wands." The gentleness of "Portrait," which uses minimal effects under an acoustic guitar, recalls one of Vega's greatest moments, "The Queen and The Soldier." Once again, a soldier wearily ponders his mission all while obeying with a heavy heart. Great stuff.

Given that Vega's brand of Greenwich Village folk is enjoying a kind of vogue (think Mumford and Sons or better still, the Avett Brothers), "Tales From The Realm" could come off as elder stateswoman for those whippersnappers bringing the style back. There may not be anything of a revelation here, but her seven year break has served her well, and Suzanne Vega's "Tales From The Realm" is storytelling music at its best.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Pete Seeger "The Essential Pete Seeger"

An excellent overview of an American Icon
5 Out Of 5 Stars

At 36 tracks across two discs, "The Essential Pete Seeger" pretty much invalidates other, older compilations and sum up his time on Columbia Records. While Seeger was still recording albums into his 80's, this takes the prime period of his recordings and spreads it out.

Pete Seeger was an icon for all the best reasons. Picking up a banjo and guitar to makes statements about the nature of the times took courage then as it does now (quick, name on popular artist who uses his recorded output for challenging statements...could you?) and even got him blacklisted. Songs like "Talking Union" or the anti-Vietnam protest "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy," he not only found himself surrounded by controversy but actively courting it. He was the rare artist to put his beliefs before his career, even as it threatened his livelihood and even though he would ultimately be vindicated.

You'll also find the songs that Pete wrote or adapted that became hits for others, such as "Turn Turn Turn" (The Byrds), "If I Had a Hammer" (Peter, Paul and Mary), and "Guantanamera" (Trini Lopez). With both the adaptations of "Guantanamera" and "Wimoweh," a strong argument can be made the Seeger was one of the earliest purveyors of what everyone now calls "World Music," as he had the forethought to include them in he live concerts (and are both here as live versions).

Even with those convictions, Pete Seeger also approached his music with a wit and sense of humor. "Little Boxes" is a stinging indictment of class conformity, yet it's actually a pretty funny song. Same with "Talking Union." But there's no escaping the anger that underscores "Which Side are You On?" What will remain his lasting legacy encompasses songs like these, but the gentle heart that could deliver a searing protest of war ("Where Have All The Flowers Gone") along side the civil rights anthem of peace in "We Shall Overcome."

I was fortunate enough to see Seeger live at the 50th Anniversary of The Newport Festival. Even at his advanced age, his body may have been frail but his voice was a force of nature. Like all his best work, he was the conduit for the music and the audience, leading call and response verses and choruses till the throngs of people that filled the field sang in unison. Even typing this now brings back chills. Few artists can lay claim to making culture bend in their direction, and Pete Seeger is such a man. While even two discs of music is incomplete (no "Good Night Irene"?) but this set is as easy an instant collection for a man whose greatness will remain an influence not just on artists still taking cues from him today, but those who will come along.

     

My Amazon Reviews: The Anarchist Orchestra "EP"

The Rumbling Undertones of Folk Rock
3 Out Of 5 Stars

Tao Rodriguez Seeger is the grandson (in-law) of the late icon Pete Seeger, and has been serving as his Grandfather's musical director on Pete's latest tours. That was where I first heard Tao play, at Newport Folk Festival in 2009. About a year later, Tao performed a solo-band set at Philadelphia's World cafe, We enjoyed his work at Newport so much that I decided to check him out. As you would likely guess by his affiliations with Pete, Tao is a folk-lefty. What I (and I think, most of the other attendees) did not expect, is that Tao is a LOUD folk lefty. Where Bruce Springsteen's "Seeger Sessions" covered Pete like it was a hootenanny, Tao makes Pete sound like The Clash. While he's not hitting the punk rock stills on "The Anarchist Orchestra," you can feel that he's ready to.

Rodríguez-Seeger and Jake Silver also perform together in The Mammals, here they team up with Laura Cortese and Robin McMillan. This 7 song EP melds folk and bluegrass with some hard rock undertones. "Fascist State Breakdown" sticks to the hootenanny, but don't be fooled. It comes just before a feedback and echo-laden "Roving Gambler." This is a record that likes its guitars as much as it digs those fiddles. It's a good introduction to what these somewhat radical folkies can do, although I'd recommend "Rise and Bloom," billed as the Tao Seeger Band, but is the same band line-up, and is a more enjoyable/focused album.

     

Passings: Folk Legend Pete Seeger

From Billboard Magazine: (The picture is one I took at The Newport Folk Festival's 50th Anniversary.)

Pete Seeger, the banjo-picking troubadour who sang for migrant workers, college students and star-struck presidents in a career that introduced generations of Americans to their folk music heritage, died on Monday at the age of 94.

Seeger's grandson, Kitama Cahill-Jackson said his grandfather died at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he'd been for six days. "He was chopping wood 10 days ago," he said. Seeger - with his a lanky frame, banjo and full white beard - was an iconic figure in folk music. He performed with the great minstrel Woody Guthrie in his younger days and marched with Occupy Wall Street protesters in his 90s, leaning on two canes. He wrote or co-wrote "If I Had a Hammer," "Turn, Turn, Turn," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." He lent his voice against Hitler and nuclear power. A cheerful warrior, he typically delivered his broadsides with an affable air and his banjo strapped on.

"Be wary of great leaders," he told The Associated Press two days after a 2011 Manhattan Occupy march. "Hope that there are many, many small leaders." With The Weavers, a quartet organized in 1948, Seeger helped set the stage for a national folk revival. The group - Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman - churned out hit recordings of "Goodnight Irene," "Tzena, Tzena" and "On Top of Old Smokey."

Seeger also was credited with popularizing "We Shall Overcome," which he printed in his publication "People's Song," in 1948. He later said his only contribution to the anthem of the civil rights movement was changing the second word from "will" to "shall," which he said "opens up the mouth better."

"Every kid who ever sat around a campfire singing an old song is indebted in some way to Pete Seeger," Arlo Guthrie once said.

His musical career was always braided tightly with his political activism, in which he advocated for causes ranging from civil rights to the cleanup of his beloved Hudson River. Seeger said he left the Communist Party around 1950 and later renounced it. But the association dogged him for years.
He was kept off commercial television for more than a decade after tangling with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Repeatedly pressed by the committee to reveal whether he had sung for Communists, Seeger responded sharply: "I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American."

He was charged with contempt of Congress, but the sentence was overturned on appeal.
Seeger called the 1950s, years when he was denied broadcast exposure, the high point of his career. He was on the road touring college campuses, spreading the music he, Guthrie, Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter and others had created or preserved. "The most important job I did was go from college to college to college to college, one after the other, usually small ones," he told The Associated Press in 2006. " ... And I showed the kids there's a lot of great music in this country they never played on the radio."

His scheduled return to commercial network television on the highly rated Smothers Brothers variety show in 1967 was hailed as a nail in the coffin of the blacklist. But CBS cut out his Vietnam protest song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," and Seeger accused the network of censorship. He finally got to sing it five months later in a stirring return appearance, although one station, in Detroit, cut the song's last stanza: "Now every time I read the papers/That old feelin' comes on/We're waist deep in the Big Muddy/And the big fool says to push on."

Seeger's output included dozens of albums and single records for adults and children. He also was the author or co-author of "American Favorite Ballads," "The Bells of Rhymney," "How to Play the Five-String Banjo," "Henscratches and Flyspecks," "The Incompleat Folksinger," "The Foolish Frog" and "Abiyoyo," "Carry It On," "Everybody Says Freedom" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone."
He appeared in the movies "To Hear My Banjo Play" in 1946 and "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in 1970. A reunion concert of the original Weavers in 1980 was filmed as a documentary titled "Wasn't That a Time."

By the 1990s, no longer a party member but still styling himself a communist with a small C, Seeger was heaped with national honors. Official Washington sang along - the audience must sing, was the rule at a Seeger concert - when it lionized him at the Kennedy Center in 1994. President Clinton hailed him as "an inconvenient artist who dared to sing things as he saw them." Seeger was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as an early influence. Ten years later, Bruce Springsteen honored him with "We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions," a rollicking reinterpretation of songs sung by Seeger. While pleased with the album, Seeger said he wished it was "more serious." A 2009 concert at Madison Square Garden to mark Seeger's 90th birthday featured Springsteen, Dave Matthews, Eddie Vedder and Emmylou Harris among the performers.

Seeger was a 2014 Grammy Awards nominee in the Best Spoken Word category, which was won by Stephen Colbert. Seeger's sometimes ambivalent relationship with rock was most famously on display when Dylan "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Witnesses say Seeger became furious backstage as the amped-up band played, though just how furious is debated. Seeger dismissed the legendary tale that he looked for an ax to cut Dylan's sound cable, and said his objection was not to the type of music but only that the guitar mix was so loud you couldn't hear Dylan's words.
Seeger maintained his reedy 6-foot-2 frame into old age, though he wore a hearing aid and conceded that his voice was pretty much shot. He relied on his audiences to make up for his diminished voice, feeding his listeners the lines and letting them sing out.

"I can't sing much," he said. "I used to sing high and low. Now I have a growl somewhere in between." Nonetheless, in 1997 he won a Grammy for best traditional folk album, "Pete."

Seeger was born in New York City on May 3, 1919, into an artistic family whose roots traced to religious dissenters of colonial America. His mother, Constance, played violin and taught; his father, Charles, a musicologist, was a consultant to the Resettlement Administration, which gave artists work during the Depression. His uncle Alan Seeger, the poet, wrote "I Have a Rendezvous With Death."
Pete Seeger said he fell in love with folk music when he was 16, at a music festival in North Carolina in 1935. His half brother, Mike Seeger, and half sister, Peggy Seeger, also became noted performers.
He learned the five-string banjo, an instrument he rescued from obscurity and played the rest of his life in a long-necked version of his own design. On the skin of Seeger's banjo was the phrase, "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" - a nod to his old pal Guthrie, who emblazoned his guitar with "This machine kills fascists."

Dropping out of Harvard in 1938 after two years as a disillusioned sociology major, he hit the road, picking up folk tunes as he hitchhiked or hopped freights. "The sociology professor said, `Don't think that you can change the world. The only thing you can do is study it,'" Seeger said in October 2011.
In 1940, with Guthrie and others, he was part of the Almanac Singers and performed benefits for disaster relief and other causes. He and Guthrie also toured migrant camps and union halls. He sang on overseas radio broadcasts for the Office of War Information early in World War II. In the Army, he spent 3 1/2 years in Special Services, entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific, and made corporal.
Pete and Toshi Seeger were married July 20, 1943. The couple built their cabin in Beacon after World War II and stayed on the high spot of land by the Hudson River for the rest of their lives together. The couple raised three children. Toshi Seeger died in July at age 91.

The Hudson River was a particular concern of Seeger. He took the sloop Clearwater, built by volunteers in 1969, up and down the Hudson, singing to raise money to clean the water and fight polluters.

He also offered his voice in opposition to racism and the death penalty. He got himself jailed for five days for blocking traffic in Albany in 1988 in support of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager whose claim of having been raped by white men was later discredited. He continued to take part in peace protests during the war in Iraq, and he continued to lend his name to causes. "Can't prove a damn thing, but I look upon myself as old grandpa," Seeger told the AP in 2008 when asked to reflect on his legacy. "There's not dozens of people now doing what I try to do, not hundreds, but literally thousands. ... The idea of using music to try to get the world together is now all over the place."

My Amazon Reviews: Cliff Eberhardt "500 Miles: The Blue Rock Sessions"

Every Journey Starts...
4 Out Of 5 Stars

Blessed with a voice as roughly hewn as crushed walnut, Cliff Eberhardt took a journey to Texas to record "500 Miles: The Blue Rock Sessions." He's a singer songwriter in the classic mold, delving into songs of introspection and the trials of live. Whether it's with his definitive originals or covering a chestnut like "500 Miles" (probably most likely remembered as done by Peter, Paul and Mary), he also takes a minimalist's approach to the recording process. In at least one instance, just Cliff and a guitar, in another, Cliff's guitar accompanied by bass, percussion and accordion. It's amazing just how much resonance he can get with just a few slight touches. Although he often appears with a full combo, best heard on "When The Leaves Begin to Fall."

There's also a great cover of John Hiatt's "Back of My Mind," transformed here into a waltz. But the best is saved for last, as Cliff revisits one of his earlier songs, "The Long Road." I have to admit that I am unfamiliar with the original, but this is a wonderful version. As Cliff states in his liner notes after "20 years, it has changed as I have...I decided to take a new look at an old friend." With its questioning look at the people and places that surround your life, it turns from a song about a young man's look at the future to a rumination of how you've lived your life. It's a great song and alone, is worthy of your listening to "500 Miles."