CultureHack, Triangulated

The Sixth Excerpt From a Work-In-Progress

Christ, it’s like an establishment shot: The light raking across the impossible keyboard--eight octaves of ebony and laminate that float in the darkness of a dead-still studio. The only thing that’s really missing is a superimposed time-and-place. You sit here in front of the layers of lacquer, the hand-fitted hardwood and felted hammers, in a moment of zen silence that honors experience, confidence, passion and belief. A Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, better known to you as The Beast, where craft has been taken well beyond even unreasonable expectations.

The nine extra keys, all weirdly black, make this the porn star of pianos. And back in the day, you’d occasionally test them to make certain the dark octave still worked. But that was as far as it ever went; nothing was played down there. This was because you knew of no music that needed these extra notes: you’d been in the business of churning-out pop, with a limited need for repertoire--though you suspected that even in classical music, such pieces were extremely rare.

But here's the thing about that extra octave: it doesn’t actually have to be played. Just its existence down there at the end affects the other 88 keys. Piano strings resonate, they don't need to be struck, and something played in an upper octave inevitably bounces off those nine lurking strings. When the music comes back, it's been transformed by the trip, like a mind broadened by travel.

You know this because even though you played pop, your real love has always been jazz. And there parts of chords are often left out; only the tops of harmonic series are played--3rds and 6ths, 7ths and 9ths, 11ths and sometimes even 13ths. The tonic notes in all of these cases are provided by the listener’s imagination. But on a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, the sympathetic resonance of the extra strings fills those blanks and completes the chords.

As implied by their color, these additional notes are the equivalent of dark matter in astronomy--invisible, but changing whatever is played anywhere on the piano. An attentive audience can sense the extra octave; its proof is in every subliminal tonic. So yes, dark matter: something in the music that can only be explained by something outside of it . . .

Craft that’s been taken well beyond even unreasonable expectations--the thing on which you’re supposed to bash-out a formula that transcends itself. Which is ironic, because among the many things you lack are confidence, passion and belief. But since you know this from long experience, at least you’re assured of that: you’ve seen the block and been around it any number of times, just like the still-alive bomb defuser or, more accurately, a wily, old whore. In this Post-Steinman world, you’re not really sure if one out of four will do, but then again, with nothing else left, it’s the only thing you’ve got to work with.

You sit here in the perpetual studio twilight; finally alone, but not really: the black-lacquered Beast completely fills this corner and causes a tightness in your chest. You’re that guy in Alien, eating his breakfast and ignoring a bad case of heartburn, who seconds later is blown apart by something deep inside him. It’s been years since you’ve seen a Model 290--the past decade, after all, has been carefully designed to detour around this reunion. But all roads, it seems, have still led back here, to the dimly lit, looming Beast. Thus this struggle to stare it down, because you'd really like to look away.

You’re petrified that you can't do this anymore--you haven't written a pop song in 10 fucking years. And thinking back, it seems quite possible that maybe you never knew how. You had stopped writing because you couldn't fully express yourself--pop music had always been too tonic-based. To be crowd-pleasing, the chords always had to be completed, tidy and hummable. Just as each lyric had to be ground-down to the fewest syllables and tightest rhymes. Audiences had wanted nothing left to their imaginations, and in obliging them with skillful craft, you had made a generous living. Back then you had written on another Beast, because you once held hope for all 97 keys. But really, everything could have been composed on a battered, rehearsal-hall upright. Because back then the extra strings had resonated with the tonics that you dutifully provided, taking something that had been utterly obvious and making it even more so. Every blatant chord wound up with its own harmonic reinforcement, something touring had further underscored with a riser of backup singers. Doubled-tonics wrapped in doubled vocals--this had been the essence of your dalliance with Pop: in no way truth, but loudly done twice over for effect. Rhetoric, with massive amps and a truck full of custom lighting . . .

A four-track recorder for iPhone. And, yeah, it's a 1.0 release so, no, it's not going to be flawless--yet. But humor me and try squinting into a near, almost-flawless future sometime in late winter. I  need to say this again: A four-track recorder. In you pocket. You know--the number of first-generation tracks the Beatles had at their disposal when they made Sgt. Pepper. In your pocket. Did I say that already? The George Martin-ish details can be found here.

There's a handful of recording artists who never disappoint--well, almost never--and Lucinda Williams is long-time a member of that exclusive club. Since her self-titled third album, she's never let me down (the count starts there because I've never warmed to her first two releases; I like my blues shouters with more authenticity than she was able to muster in those early days). Even when the roots contingent of her fan base bitched about West, I appreciated what she was doing and admired how she pushed past the genre stances that had endeared her to fans. Given the polarizing affect of West, the country-rock regrouping of Little Honey, Williams latest release, is its least surprising attribute. In a way, it recalls World Without Tears--a similar retreat into the tried and true after the more experimental Essence. But where the homecoming of World Without Tears left Williams' considerable songwriting talents intact, she arrives at Little Honey without the baggage that has provided inspiration for her best work.

Reviews needn't be structured like murder mysteries, so let's cut to the chase: There's a fine EP buried in Little Honey. But unfortunately there's also that other 40 minutes of music. The songs neatly fall into four categories: Lucinda In Love, Lucinda Dispensing Advice To Other Pop Stars, Lucinda Classics Old and New, and, well, a Lucinda/Elvis Costello comedy routine. The problem is that most of the new material is the stuff of B-sides and bonus tracks. And trust me, it almost physically hurts to admit this . . .

The quality of the Lucinda In Love material suggests that Paul McCartney was right all those years ago--it's a world filled with love songs that are indisputably silly. And while I'm pleased Lucinda is personally happy these days, there's good reason why great art rarely (if ever) flows from Being Happy. Happy has few nuances, which is a polite way of saying Happy is one-dimensional, which is also another way of saying that Happy is conflict-free, which is yet another way of saying Happy lacks drama, which is bad news if you're trying to write four-minute lyrical narratives. No conflict, no narrative--and I have no patience with songs that don't evolve across their verses and recontextualized choruses.

The tracks where Lucinda Dispenses Pop-Star Advice are problematic in two ways: First, god bless her, she's not exactly the poster girl for smart music-business moves, and second, apart from silly love songs, is there anything more boring than the echo chamber of rock stardom? "Running On Empty," "Tenth Avenue Freeze Out," "Bitter Fingers," "How Do You Sleep?"--we get it, already. Fame Has A Price, aka It Hasn't Been Easy. Yada-Yada. Blah-Blah-Blah. I'm never sure what to make of this kind of song. I understand the seduction of merely looking around one's palatial rooms for material, but how exactly are listeners supposed to react? If you take away the conceit of metered and rhymed autobiography, what's left? The inspiration of talented-lucky-multi-platinum-singer-songwriters-on-the-other-side-of-nervous-breakdowns-and/or-heroin-habits? Despite the graphic, salacious details, this kind of song is basically a Lifetime Network movie. The brilliance of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" is her undermining of this self-pitying genre--which is why Little Honey won't be displacing Back To Black at the top of my frequent-play stack.

"Jailhouse Tears," the Lucinda And Elvis Standup Routine, amuses on the first two or three listenings, after which the song begins to irritate in the manner of any novelty number (even if you appreciate the implicit Tammy-and-George joke). So no; there's also not a lot of depth in the collection's Celebrity Duet.

Ultimately, however, Little Honey is kept from being a complete disappointment by the remaining songs. They comprise a powerful, lurking EP anchored by the heartbreaking "If Wishes Were Horses." There's also the infectious, radio-ready "Real Love," the somber "Heaven Blues," and "Tears of Joy"--the one silly love song that transcends itself. (William's cover of AC/DC's "It's a Long Way To the Top" might also have been a contender for inclusion on the virtual extended player, but my view of it remains colored by its role as the third panel in the pop-star-pity triptych.)

Another plus is the paradoxical fact that Little Honey is a near-perfect set of recordings: The live-in-studio production is superlative, the band's playing is spectacular and William's vocals are among the best she's done. There's also haunting melodies and impressively austere black-and-white art direction. If only the lyrics consistently rose to the level of their performances, production and packaging.

My final difficulty with Little Honey is its numbing length. I suspect the reasoning was something like "A CD can hold 74 minutes of music and it's priced at $16.99 even if it doesn't contain that much material, so let's give them full value for the money." But here's the thing: Most classic, vinyl-age pop records weighed-in at somewhere between 34 to 42 minutes. And just as the three- to five-minute capacity of the 45 RPM record codified length expectations for singles (even in this digital age), 45 minutes seems "right" for a set of studio pop songs (even in this digital age). Anything longer draws us into the old "double-album" territory, thrusting the 65-minute Little Honeyinto the company of The White Album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,The Wall, and Gone To Earth--where, frankly, it doesn't stand a chance. A version of Little Honey with a less self-indulgent length would have eliminated the water-treading redundancy of "Little Rock Star," "Rarity" and "It's a Long Way To the Top:" At 45 minutes, chances are are good that only one of three would ended up in the collection. See it as Pop Darwinism eliminating the weak. (Similarly, the ratio of love songs would also have benefitted from a little time-predicated pruning.)

Despite all my problems with Williams' latest release, I suspect Little Honey will out-sell the more adventurous and experimental West. Which is a shame, since it will encourage Williams to write more silly love songs, more navel-gazing rock-star ballads and worst of all, more comedy numbers. And me, well, I'd rather have gone farther down the path that produced "Are You Alright?" and "Learning How To Live," instead of having to brace myself for Lu and El doing a twangy cover of "I Got You Babe" while winking broadly. To paraphrase another song from West, 'I don't want to wrap my head around that.'