Songs of the Week 2026: Take 3
- 4 days ago
- 29 min read
Neil Morton
FEATURED SONG OF THE WEEK
Rewarding Melody: Luluc
Zoë Randell and Steve Hassett, who form indie folk duo Luluc, share the gift of creating dreamy soundscapes that resonate long after you’ve first heard them. It was only a matter of time before the Australian-born couple wrote a song called Rewarding Melody, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com. It does exactly what it says on the label.
The single will appear on their forthcoming album, Sweet Thief, due out on July 10, on which they ‘question and examine the shiny surface of modernity alongside the exploitation and existential manipulation that has crept into almost every aspect of our lives’. The album title is borrowed from a Shakespeare sonnet, ‘a metaphor for the world as we find it today; an ever-changing kaleidoscope of love and hate, beauty and bloodshed, underpinned by a constant grapple for our attention’.
The duo have been based in Brooklyn, New York, since 2005. Sweet Thief was tracked in the studio the duo had spent 10 years building in a run-down garage owned by an Australian cousin of Randell’s. The songs were crafted over long periods, Zoë retreating to secluded corners to write. ‘It’s where I feel deeply connected to the people I love, and also to a much broader sense of shared experience that we’ve all got. To me, that’s the most important thing about the work.’
Rewarding Melody seems a simple love song, but something more complex is at play. Randell says of the album’s theme: ‘We’re constantly told that we have to be part of specific groups, that we’re part of movements, but life is an individual experience. What you do with your life is in your hands and no one else’s. Doing harm to others, trying to get one over on other people, is all based on delusions and false promises. Far more important is the individual relationship you have with your life.’
Randell’s voice, the epitome of relaxed warmth, is the most memorable aspect of their luscious yet minimalist sound. Her languorous style has drawn comparisons with Nico, Karen Carpenter and Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins; some have even pointed towards Françoise Hardy and Mariane Faithfull when her delivery is melancholic and half-spoken. Randell has her own kind of hush, referencing Simon & Garfunkel as a major influence. To our ears, Rewarding Melody has echoes of The Beach Boys; Brian Wilson would have approved.
I’ll make for you
A rewarding melody
One you can come to
Anytime you need
I’ll try to make rich and worthy
I’ll try for open and deep
I’ll try for something new
Maybe somehow reminiscent
Fresh as morning
Old as the night
That you may come back
Whenever you might
I’ll make for you
A rewarding melody
One you can come to
Anytime you need
The couple, both from Victoria, actually met at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999 while travelling after leaving their first bands. ‘We sang together and both of us were completely gobsmacked by the harmonic blend,’ she told The Cockatoo podcast. ‘Music’s so fantastic because it can be from anywhere… Growing up in a little place like Upotipotpon on a farm [100 miles north of Melbourne], and listening to Simon and Garfunkel records, and they’re talking about New York, and city streets, and touring around America. Those ideas were completely relatable even though I’d never been there. I think I’ve always felt pretty at ease travelling and being in different countries.’
The decision to try their luck in the States was pivotal. At first they rented an apartment from Matt Berninger of The National. He loved their music and an introduction to his bandmate and producer Aaron Dessner helped their development. Dressner, whose studio was in the same building, co-produced their acclaimed 2014 album Passerby after a deal was struck with Sub Pop Records.
Randell explained: ‘The idea of working with a producer wasn’t something we thought we’d do, but when we connected so well with Aaron and started working in the studio with him, it became pretty apparent that he had something that he could really offer to our sound, and he really enjoyed it.
‘We’d finished all the songs, so it was a different. I think sometimes when producers come on, they’re very involved, even in the creation and writing of the songs, but we’d written and recorded all of my bed tracks, so Aaron came in and layered ideas. It just worked really well, and we were very happy because we were reticent to get anyone else involved.’
Luluc (pronounced Lou-Luke and named after a Brooklyn café they frequented) released their debut album, Dear Hamlyn, in 2008. Its laments, written following the death of Randell’s father, gained a host of influential admirers. In 2011, Nick Drake’s producer Joe Boyd invited Luluc to feature in a Drake tribute tour. They contributed the tracks Things Behind The Sun and Fly to a live album, Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake, in 2013. Luluc sang backing vocals on the Leonard Cohen song Listen To The Hummingbird on Cohen’s final album, Thanks For The Dance. The ghosts of Drake and Cohen inhabit their own songs.
Passerby was followed by Sculptor, Dreamboat and Diamonds, all produced by Randell and multi-instrumentalist Hassett though Dessner did contribute drums along with Jim White on Sculptor. The New Yorker described Randell’s voice on Dreamboat as ‘crystalline and unflappable, with a strange beauty that verges on creepy – the kind of voice that, on a movie soundtrack, portends unspeakable doom’.
Mention of Upotipotpon recalls the wonderful Me And Jasper, from third album Sculptor, a meditation on the conflict between small-town small-mindedness and the boundless dreams of youth. ‘My own experiences as a teen were often fraught,’ she says. ‘The place I grew up in provided a great study in gossip, scandal, character assignation and the willingness of people to go along with it.’
On Diamonds her vivid and often wry observational powers, finding meaning in the seemingly mundane details of life, reached fresh heights. A line from the title track – ‘How gentle is strong’ – could be the duo’s mantra. No One Else’s Pen, our second peek at the latest album, is described by Hassett as ‘a paean to navigating life and love with integrity, gratitude and presence of mind’.
Hassett’s subtle instrumentation, via various guitars, piano and synths, bass and percussion, is so restrained that their lauded gentle strength is never compromised. Sweet Thief promises more gems: lyricism to enrich us, melodies to reward us.
Flying Into Darkness: Laura Veirs
It’s amazing what you can achieve with two chords. Laura Veirs, the indie folk artist based in Portland, Oregon, even took to social media to show us how: capo on the fifth fret, just G and F# with the third string tuned down a half-step. Not to mention a fertile imagination, a gift for melody and a versatile, alluring voice. Were Status Quo ever this minimalist?
She playfully calls Flying Into Darkness, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, the simplest song in the world. Naturally, the subject matter and the depth of her lyrics make it more complicated than that. So do her varied vocal stylings.
The first advance single deals with restlessness and uncertainty. ‘The song comes from a feeling of being existentially unmoored in a dark, uncertain moment,’ she told The Line Of Best Fit. ‘I kept circling the same questions: how do I stay grounded? How do I feel like I’m doing some real good, nudging things – even slightly – in a better direction?’ As she sings in the chorus:
Is there a place I can go where I can be myself?
Is there a song I’ll sing that I’ll nevеr sell?
Every restlеss soul, every one of us
What are we doing?
When can we rest?
When can we rest?
She composed the song on a flight to Alaska en route to a writers’ retreat. ‘I had Once In A Lifetime by Talking Heads on my headphones, and something about that track cracked it open – the song just poured out.’ Veirs filmed the footage for the accompanying video with her phone when on tour in France.
Veirs adds: ‘At its core the song wrestles with restlessness – how hard it is to find true rest when the world keeps us in a constant state of unease. I’m reaching for a world shaped more by freedom and love than by greed and fear, and all the ways those forces show up in daily life: hollow work, vast inequality, systems that feel too big to push against, and the steady backdrop of violence and conflict.’
Turn to love, turn to the Earth
Turn to each other, turn to rebirth
No more masters, no more greed
Planting evil, seed after seed
Every restless soul, every one of us
Is there a place we can go we can trust?
I was flying into darkness in the midnight air
Didn’t know where, but I was going there
Flying Into Darkness is not the only two-chord wonder on her 14th solo album, a do-it-yourself project entitled Temple Songs, due out on August 14. ‘This is the first time I wrote, recorded, arranged, performed and produced an album on my own. I wanted to make something that sounds as organic and human as possible.’ She plays guitars, bass, drums, tambourine, percussion, and sings all the vocals. The only outside contribution is saxophone by an unnamed guest.
The 11 tracks were laid down over three months in late 2025 in the backyard studio she calls Temple Of Bloom, using two microphones and a laptop. Veirs opted not to pitch-correct her vocals or edit out outside intrusions such as birds, neighbours or rain on the skylight. The result is down-home authenticity. ‘I didn’t know if I would write songs again. Turns out that period was a gathering phase. When I made the commitment to recording the LP myself, the muse caught me again and it came together very quickly.’
She must often think back to those spooky nights in a desert in north-west China when she tinkered on a cheap guitar while on a geology field trip as part of her Masters at Carleton College in Minnesota. The Colorado-born Veirs studied Mandarin alongside geology and toyed with a career as a translator. Thankfully, that expedition convinced her that writing songs was a more suitable career path. We don’t know if she was influenced by Chinese music but there are distinct oriental echoes throughout her back catalogue.
She recently posted a hand-written note on Instagram: ‘I’m a 52-year-old artist and I taught myself how to make my own record after a divorce and four years away from writing and recording. What questions do you have about this?’ As usual she was generous with her time in interacting with her fanbase. Veirs often offers songwriting advice by Zoom; she is also a talented painter, has published a book aimed at children about the life of influential folk-blues guitarist Elizabeth Cotten, and presented a podcast on music and parenting.
Veirs’ mention of touring in France reminds us of the captivating live album she made last year with a 32-strong French school choir from Angoulême. Laura Veirs And The Choir Who Couldn’t Say reimagines 14 of her classic tracks, including Make Something Good, former Song of the Week here Freedom Feeling, and I Want To Be Here, co-written with Neko Case and k.d. lang for their eponymous trio album.
The arrangements were in the sensitive hands of choir director, pianist and long-time Veirs fan Patrice Cleyrat. The teenagers from the Collège et Lycée Saint-Paul spent nine months rehearsing her music before performing with her. ‘Hearing their brave and soulful renditions of my songs and performing with them was a career highlight.’
It was a moving experience for all. As is Flying Through Darkness for its stark, intimate majesty; from 33 voices to just one. Veirs has announced an international tour beginning in the UK and Ireland in September. The impressive Karl Blau (we wonder if he is the mystery saxophone guest on the new album) will be supporting her, and Veirs promises a few duets. Two fine players, two chords. We couldn’t ask for more.
Upstairs At ELS: Bleachers
Jack Antonoff and unconfined joy are hardly regular companions. The frontman of US indie rock band Bleachers can normally be heard navigating bleaker themes but on the closing track of their fifth album, Everyone For Ten Minutes, he is in the mood to party. Upstairs At ELS, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, is a celebration of community and camaraderie.
ELS stands for Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village, New York, where Bleachers make their music like so many giants before them. The studio was commissioned by Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and completed two years later, the rock guitarist recording there for only 10 weeks before his death. It has become Bleachers’ creative refuge and up on its roof is where Antonoff and company like to chill out.
The names of bandmates, old friends, collaborators and gurus are rolled out like credits at the end of a movie. Much of his music, even the dark stuff, is cinematic, and this is no exception. ‘It’s an apartment that’s basically become a studio. I slip into a different realm there,’ he told Paste magazine in a wide-ranging interview. ‘The culture of that upstairs is my life. I want to make some kind of documentary live performance up there.’
Hot summer night at ELS
Finish up a track and send the text
‘Party on the roof, everybody get dressed’
I’ve been down, I need a light
I’ve been lost, I need a guide
Me and my friends drinking on a roof
One of those gurus is Vince Clarke, the man behind Eighties bands Depeche Mode, Yazoo, The Assembly and Erasure. Antonoff calls Clarke a genius of the synth. ‘This sound and feeling is the real bedrock of where everything went 10, 20, 30 years later. He does the thing that means the most to me, which is he plays the machine with so much heart and soul that it actually feels more soulful because you hear a human being desperately trying to squeeze themselves through the machine.’ The album title itself is a nod to him too – remember Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s?
Here and elsewhere the multi-instrumentalist name-checks his former bands Outline, Steel Train and Fun, earlier albums such as Gone Now and Hard Feelings, and artists he has produced with his other hat on: Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, St. Vincent, Lorde, Sabrina Carpenter, Florence And The Machine, Pink, Sara Bareilles, The Chicks, Carly Rae Jepsen, The 1975 and Kendrick Lamar.
Significantly, he references the Boss, Bruce Springsteen, his fellow New Jersey native who has championed his music. Springsteen famously joined forces with Bleachers on Chinatown, a track on their 2021 album Take The Sadness Out Of Saturday Night, and belted it out with Antonoff for a live, socially-distanced version on the roof at ELS in late 2020 as the pandemic was raging. Covid is name-checked too.
What you call heaven, I call a fight
You got a dream, I got a night
Me and my friends drinking on a roof
We are, we are, we are, we are what we say
We got word and we got a way
Me and my friends drinking on a roof
When we tracked horns and it sounded like a fight
Boss man, Covid show shit was wild
Hard Feelings days into Gone Now nights
Inside Jack and Carly Rae
Part of the band, Laura, Oli and Ray
Track by track, soundtrack our days
Shit, I met Zem on that roof
Play, baby, play
Echoes of the E Street Band can be heard through the sax appeal of Evan Smith and Zem Audu. Play, baby, play. The Bruce and New Jersey influences abound. ‘His music was the first time that I heard feelings that were very close to home. He is the artist who showed me that the sound of the place I am from has value and that there is a spirit here that needs to be taken all over the world.’
Antonoff is indebted to his hero for this piece of advice: ‘If you spend your life making albums and touring them, that’s more than enough.’ It helped the younger man eschew the distraction of ‘a million side hustles’. ‘It sounds like a very simple statement but it’s actually very deep, because I think he could tell that I needed someone in his shoes to say: That’s all you need.’
Loss and heartbreak are familiar territory for Antonoff – he will never recover from the death of his younger sister to brain cancer when he was 18. ‘When I was there in the depths of grief,’ he told NPR, ‘I had this feeling like, why is no one talking? I went through years obsessing about it. It’s baked into the work I do because I really got going in the years when I was dealing with the most grief. My whole career has been revisiting that through a different lens. Making art is such an exercise in mortality.’
Bleachers began as a one-man project in 2014. Antonoff was the only permanent member of the group until 2023, when long-term touring musicians Mikey Freedom Hart (bass, guitars, banjo and mandolin), drummers Sean Hutchinson and Michael Riddleberger, Smith and Audu (sax and keys) became official members. Their expansive Eighties-soaked sound on Upstairs At ELS was described by one eloquent observer as ‘a late-night drive home after your life’s just changed forever’.
There is a softening of cynicism in the new Antonoff material, if not a lowering of anxiety levels. There is plenty of optimism within the rich imagery of the storytelling, his marriage to actress Margaret Qualley inspiring another standout, You And Forever, as well as the Springsteen-esque Dirty Wedding Dress. A dancing Qualley stars in the video for the exquisite You And Forever as street fighter Antonoff grapples with a turbulent world before finally knocking at her door.
You And Forever moved my colleague Phil Shaw to dig out his favourite songs by Sixties US band The Association: Along Comes Mary, Windy and especially Everything That Touches You. Bleachers have been touched by the harmony gods. The vibe is just as alluring on opening track Sideways and The Van whose key line ‘I just don’t want to be lonely’ is as soulful as anything on Everyone For Ten Minutes.
The last words of Upstairs At ELS offer a solution…
Now I’m walking in the Sunday Park with Lee
Says it’s hard to believe
As we pass New Mom corner
Well, he got married up on that roof
Next to Lana’s plaque and that’s a little proof
That’s a little proof
That you’re not at it alone
Heartwarming and uplifting. Whenever Antonoff is feeling lonely, all he has to do is head upstairs. Hope can raise the roof.
Dusty Roses: Alela Diane
Alela Diane’s fascination with what she calls the fragile balance between beauty and chaos is memorably captured within one standout song of her latest album, Who’s Keeping Time? The aching chorus of Dusty Roses, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, asks: where has our girl gone?
The Portland, Oregon-based folk-roots artist writes about ‘a dear friend of mine whose path took a wrong turn a number of years ago. I think she’s still alive, but no one knows where she ended up’. She dedicates the track to ‘all the lost girls’.
Diane’s empathy and compassion are ingrained in her compelling story-songs and her voice of gritty allure. ‘I believe that we all have the capacity to lose ourselves along the way. I’ve seen it happen again and again, whether through mental health struggles, drug use, addiction, trauma, depression, or grief. So many of us have seen someone we love lose the light in their eyes and become a stranger to themselves. It feels like we’re all just teetering on the edge, and some just don’t have a sturdy enough footing to get back on track.’
Grew up in the valley
Rode horses at dawn
Came home every morning
To the TV on
Big blue eyes
Long straight hair
Some dark secret
Held like a key
Dusty roses
Strung up on the wall
Dusty roses
Where has our girl gone?
Recorded over 10 days in August 2025, her seventh album took shape in the attic of her rambling 1892 Victorian home in Portland, where all the songs were written. She tells the story: ‘The scene felt kindred to a mouse house: a cosy world built of antique quilts, musical instruments, sound baffles, relics, marigolds, great-grandma’s dolls, old photographs, paintings and brightly colored rugs. Sunshine poured through the skylights as Maggie the cat slept atop the pre-amps and inside guitar cases. We played these songs together in one room: no click tracks, no tricks, and no fuss. This is music from the hearts and breathing bodies of human beings, imperfect as we may be. I hope we can all take pause, and remember what is real.’
Dusty Roses is a viscerally real story which may not end well. The key in the song is a device, a tool for escape we assume is never achieved.
Black pants and a crisp white shirt
Table for two
Party of ten, it’s one a.m.
She gets off work
Goes downtown
Whiskey drowned
Find some stranger
To hold like a key
Diane (full name Alela Diane Menig) was raised among the rivers and hills of Nevada City, California. As a girl, she sang bluegrass with her musician parents and in the school choir, learned to play guitar and began writing her own folky songs when she moved to San Francisco at the age of 19. Twenty-plus years later, a return trip to her childhood home inspired the new album’s wistful opener, California: ‘Little sister in the shallows, laughing down the hallways of my mind/ I hear the screen door slam behind her, California treat her kind.’
Dusty Roses was the third and final single before the album’s unveiling. The others were In My Own Time (‘Don’t forget to go outside/ To feel the wind/ To breathe the cold air/ The winter branches in these bones/ Know when to bloom/ Know when to bear’) and the hopeful Spring Is A Fine Time, written in memory of her late friend and mentor, the Portland and Greenwich Village folk veteran Michael Hurley. She took part in a tribute show for Hurley and while grieving found fresh inspiration to set her sights on a follow-up to 2022’s Covid-reflective Looking Glass and the elegance of Cusp four years earlier. Like Gillian Welch, Gretchen Peters and Patty Griffin, she has a gift for poetic narratives.
Hurley’s passing intensified the 43-year-old songwriter’s need to reconnect with her adopted home town’s music fraternity. ‘My daughters had grown a bit. I no longer had babies waking me in the middle of the night. I could hear myself think again. It was an epiphany to realise how much I missed my community. I felt very clear about what I wanted in that moment: I want to be alive. I want to see live music. I want to play it.’
The attic setting offered an intimacy that was lovingly embraced with mid-tempo restraint. Old and new friends were gathered; stairs were climbed. Danny Austin-Manning’s brushed drums, Sebastian Owens’ wonderful upright bass and co-producer Sam Weber’s atmospheric rubber-bridge guitar produce a down-home vibe. The album is dappled with the flourishes of Weber’s piano and Mellotron, Lucius guitarist Peter Lalish, Kati Claborn on clarinet, banjo and dulcimer, Anna Tivel’s violin and Luke Ydstie on high-strung guitar, Wurlitzer and lap steel. ‘It just came really easily… I think that’s a testament to finding the right people.’
Amid the wry ruminations, bucolic imagery and melancholic reflections on the passage of time, Diane can get angry and political. The title of Piss, Coffee, Blood Or Wine, referring to the pool gathering from a man slumped on the pavement, suggests as much as she asks the question: ‘Honey, is this all we’re here to do?’
A crowd is shouting in the street
While others stare down at their screens
In this land, our only home
They line their pockets with our souls
Men holding guns, and hiding money
Always at the church on Sunday
‘I tend to go dark when I write,’ she says. ‘But there was a deliberate intention this time to hold on to the light.’ The love of family despite the imperfections radiates through another beguiling track, Wide Open Spaces:
Money earned
And money borrowed
The math don’t work
No matter how many hours
You clock
Years of drinking
I know it ain’t easy
To give it up and
Peel back the layers
Of time, lost
We both love wide open spaces
We both love wide open spaces
And that’s enough
But we keep returning to Dusty Roses and those lost girls. Diane used her own two girls and a friend of theirs in the home-made video that accompanied the single. She explains on Substack: ‘We found a bunch of my old dresses in the attic, played dress up, and filmed in various corners of our very old property with my phone. There are cameos from both cats, and the dog. When there’s no budget to hire anyone, you just got to make do with what you’ve got.’
Diane has just embarked on a long North American and European tour stretching to the end of the year. ‘I’m excited and also completely terrified to be away from my family so much. My eldest daughter will most certainly be taller than me when I return. I haven’t done this many shows to support an album since 2011 and I guess you could say that I’m giving it another honest shot. Maybe a midlife crisis?
‘I hope to see you out there. We need all the deeply human experiences we can get right now. It’s a dire time, and live music helps!’ It does when the music is this good.
Waiting: Beth Orton
I’ve been waiting on a beautiful dream Forgiving everyone that I’ve ever been
Cracked, damaged, vulnerable. The voice of Beth Orton is an instrument of otherworldly beauty.
Her hypnotic track Waiting, a second appetiser for her ninth studio album The Ground Above, scheduled for release on June 26, is our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, a song about love and self-love, ‘a celebration of moving out of the holding pattern fear keeps us in’.
We are told that The Ground Above will be more grounded than her dream-like, deliciously dark album of 2022, Weather Alive, on which the title track, Friday Night and Fractals (an homage to her old producer Hal Willner) were firm favourites – and still are. The new themes are endurance, survival, integration and renewal so there will be more hope.
At the time of Weather Alive, in an interview with the Guardian, the Norfolk-born, London-based songwriter talked about her battle with Crohn’s disease, her defeat of those predictable twin demons, her identity and financial struggles and the loneliness and joy of motherhood. People have never known what to make of her, least of all genre-obsessed record labels. They should have listened more closely to that voice. It cannot be categorised.
Orton has known fame – remember Trailer Park in 1997, 2000’s Central Reservation and its sequel the chart-breaking Daybreaker, the alliances with Andrew Weatherall, The Chemical Brothers and William Orbit, the Brit awards and Mercury Prize nominations? – but pop celebrity can be ephemeral. The real her would only be revealed away from the fickle glare. At 55 she is thriving, self-producing her art, in charge of her destiny, having discovered ‘a better version of herself’.
On Waiting the sentiments are not as bleak as the soul-baring Lonely on Weather Alive (‘Lonely, lonely, lonely likes my company’) but the poetry is just as striking. As she said in that interview: ‘The spoken part [of me] doesn’t often feel that intelligent, but the writing part is like constellations. It’s multi-dimensional; your brain makes connections, little rivulets, things I couldn’t do in a conversation.’
Waiting begins with her sparse piano before the fragile vocal grips your senses: ‘I’ve been waiting for the hurting to stop/ I’ve been waiting for the punchline to drop/ Anytime I hear the music we played/ I dissolve into a puddle of rain.’ Then the track swells jazzily until it is almost rejoicing with echoes of Laura Nyro and Ricky Lee Jones. The lyricism is playful and full of self-deprecating wit.
I’ve been waiting at the edge of a dream
To jump and fly and find my beautiful wings
Been waiting for the right time to come
To put the best dressed back on
To catch a favourite song
And to find my way home to your love
I’ve been hovering around like a ghost
In all the places gone away, left unspoke
I’ve been playing down them penny arcades
Celebrating what a big win I’ve made
I’ve been following the river back home
I keep finding out I’m accident prone
I was going to write a gratitude list
Just got to work out my resentment to it
She and her band, with American husband Sam Amidon accompanying her Fender Rhodes on acoustic guitar, recorded a stripped-back version of Waiting at Fish Factory Studios in London. The improvisation here suggests this song already has a lived-in, laid-back feel. The other stellar players are: Dave Okumu on electric guitar, Tom Herbert on bass, drummer Chris Vatalaro, Sam Beste on upright piano and trumpeter Christos Stylianides.
Orton was asked about her writing process in a recent Q & A. ‘I could be walking in nature or having a conversation and it’ll spark something in my head and I’ll make notes. Then I’ll go to the piano or guitar and often if I’ve got something percolating, that will find its way into the chords. So, melody, words and chords often come together at once. The easy part is the la la la, here’s the idea, here’s the shape, here’s the form, and then it’s like: this all came unconsciously, how do I write to that standard consciously? That can be really, really challenging. It can make your skin crawl because it’s hard to write a good song.’
Every time we hear Waiting, we know Orton has written a good song.
Crazy About A Jukebox: Taj Mahal & The Phantom Blues Band
To mark American roots legend Taj Mahal’s 84th birthday, we recommend a spin of his fun-filled Crazy About A Jukebox from the latest album of a prolific recording career, Time. Timeless, more like.
Our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com is a delight, full of impish wordplay. Its creator is Johnny ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and the track is described as ‘a mini-classic’ by his nephew, the New Orleans pianist Jon Cleary, guest player in Mahal’s long-serving backing group The Phantom Blues Band.
Cleary, in his entertaining blog The Good The Bad and The Funky, writes: ‘The lyric tells the story of an attempt to win a girl’s affection by getting her the one thing she craves, a jukebox. Having got it, she just spends all her time listening to the records and completely ignores him! Cleverly, every line is a reference to an artist or song title, and at the same time is a compendium of all of his favourite classic tunes from that time.
‘When I first played it to Taj, he flipped. Every single reference meant something personally to him and he insisted that we record it. Given that John was the first person to introduce me to the music of Taj Mahal one Sunday at my grandmother’s house, when I was about nine years old, it seemed to make sense, the perfect way to square the circle.’
Here’s a taste of those playful lines as the band serve up a foot-tapping jazz standard melody:
My baby’s crazy bout a jukebox
She loves an unchained melody
She digs Little Willie John
And lets the good times roll with Jerry Lee
Always in the mood to party
And wang dang doodle all night long
Lawdy lawdy Miss Clawdy
There’s a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on
Koko Taylor, Etta James
Sugar Pie DeSanto too
Miss Molly she sure likes to ball
Long tall Sally, Peggy Sue
Be bop a lula baby blue…
Oh lonesome me
Crazy bout a jukebox and I wish
She was as crazy over me
The title track of Taj’s album, his sixty-something and counting, was a hidden gem until Cleary received a rough demo of an unrecorded song by the late Bill Withers, forwarded by producer Steve Berkowitz with the blessing of the Withers family. The track was given new life in Cleary’s studio, Funk Headquarters, in New Orleans.
‘They asked if I could come up with a completed idea for Taj so I set about putting together an arrangement, playing and recording acoustic guitars, electric guitars, bass, drums, percussion, piano, keyboards and background vocals. I ran off a rough mix sent it back to my compadres in the Phantom Blues Band in Los Angeles who then added some stuff, replaced some stuff and mixed it with Taj’s new vocal. It’s a nice testament to Taj and to Bill Withers too.’ Cleary’s ivories and Johnny Lee Schell’s guitar trade wonderful licks here.
I first heard of Taj Mahal’s music in 1968 on a prized sampler, The Rock Machine Turns You On, used by CBS to promote their roster of artists, from Dylan, Cohen and The Beach Boys to less celebrated talents such as Spirit, Electric Flag and Taj Mahal. The Manhattan-born multi-instrumentalist was represented by his version of Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues with Jesse Ed Davis on slide guitar inspiring The Allman Brothers to match and perhaps surpass the magic. Taj, who also appeared on follow-up samplers with tracks from his early albums, his eponymous debut, Natch’l Blues and Giant Step/De Ole Folks At Home, is still turning us on nearly six decades later.
Born Henry St Claire Fredericks, Taj Mahal has become a landmark, a wonder of so-called world music, for his gift of blending and bending the blues, reshaping it with the Caribbean and African influences of his heritage. He also introduced Latin, Indian, South Pacific and other elements. He has been as influential as Ry Cooder, his old cohort in Rising Sons, and his most recent collaborator Keb’ Mo’.
Recording for the album began in 2010 but for some reason it has taken 16 years to complete the project. Ruthie Foster’s liner notes rightly praise Taj’s ‘fearless, open-hearted spirit’ and ‘deep-groove, grown folk’s music from a band who still play like the night is Young’.
Mahal, who adopted his stage name after reading Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings about social tolerance, remains a bluesman at heart. ‘This is not dead music,’ the five-times Grammy winner told The Independent. ‘You will never chew all the flavour out of the blues. Jazz will give you back your mind, reggae will give you back your body, but the blues? The blues will give you back your soul.’
His soulful rasp and eclectic taste can be heard on Time’s 10 engaging tracks from the reggae lilt of Bob Marley’s Talkin’ Blues (a duet with Bob’s son Ziggy) and the Lovin’ Spoonful favourite Wild About My Lovin’ to Sweet Lorene, where he channels his inner Otis on a co-write by Redding and Isaac Hayes, and Bobby Bland’s Ask Me ’Bout Nothing (But The Blues).
As our elder statesman sings on the horns-adorned opening track written by Berkowitz and Gary Nicholson, Life Of Love: ‘When we all sing together/ There’s no trouble we can’t rise above.’ Even a crazy love affair with a jukebox? Happy birthday, Taj.
Mercy Avenue: Hiss Golden Messenger
No matter how trying times are, there is always hope. And hope in the new collection of songs by Hiss Golden Messenger, the band project of North Carolina-based musician MC Taylor, is life-affirming. Mercy Avenue, our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com, sounds like a place down on its luck but Taylor manages to extract the joy.
Taylor’s honey-dipped vocal brings instant warmth to a track evocative of Van Morrison and Ry Cooder at their most mellow and misty-eyed. It is a standout cut from Hiss Golden Messenger’s 11th album, I’m People. Laurel Canyon meets Muscle Shoals.
The boys on the corner been knowing
Better than them with the PhDs
Sometimes you do right for nothing
On Mercy Avenue, baby
If I’m too high to mess with, I’m alright, Mama
Did you find another man? I’m alright, Mama
You know where I am
I’m alright, Mama
Lucy’s living in her Cadillac
It smells like Slow Hand
Doc says she ain’t coming back
Oh, Mercy Avenue’s savage
When I’m happy as a dog swimming
When I’m lonely as an orphan
There’s nowhere that I’d rather be
Than Mercy Avenue, baby
Mercy Avenue is a nostalgic delight, fragments of disparate memories strung together : ‘Mystery as a beautiful necessity. My grandmother Lucy’s Cadillac, filled with cigarette smoke, Conway Twitty singing Slow Hand… a peaceful mind, rummaging through scrapheaps of the heart, breaking and making and breaking again. To dust. Truth, lies, magic, faith.’
In a Substack essay Taylor declares: ‘I don’t consider myself a fountain of hope. I’ve had many, many days over the last few years that have felt hopeless, so the hope that appears on I’m People is hard won. Hope is an imagining of a future that doesn’t yet exist, a future that may never exist. And yet hope is this radiant guiding light that helps draw us through dark days with a sense of purpose.’
The 50-year-old American is grateful to his friend and collaborator Josh Kaufman, with whom he has worked regularly since 2016’s Heart Like A Levee, for his imprint on the latest record. The producer and multi-instrumentalist ‘treated me and my songs with such love and care and enthusiasm that I think he helped me understand something about creative trust. He’s very sensitive. He’s quick to cry, which is a really beautiful quality. He’s also a mind-blowing guitar player, on a level that very few will ever reach.’
I’m People was recorded at Dreamland, a decommissioned church near Woodstock, New York State, by Taylor and his band of impeccable players: Bonny Light Horseman’s Kaufman on guitar and various string instruments, Cameron Ralston on bass and drummer JT Bates. Guest musicians and singers include Hornsby, whose piano contribution to the gorgeous, gospel-tinged Depends On The River is unmistakable, Sam Beam (Iron & Wine), Marcus King, Sara Watkins, Amy Helm, Matt Douglas, Eric D Johnson, Annie Nero, Sonyia Turner, Rich Hinman, Sam Fribush, Duncan Wickel and Dawes’ Taylor and Griffin Goldsmith.
Much of the writing was crafted in solitary: at a farmhouse beside a bay in Bolinas, California, at his home studio in Piedmont or at a motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico. ‘There was a lot of false starting, self-doubt, writing and re-writing and re-writing again, endless editing to make the chords and words make sense to me. I’m intensely lucky to make music for a living, but in the wake of my last album Jump for Joy, I was so fried that I didn’t even understand how far I had drifted from dry land. So I’ve spent the last few years paddling back, recalibrating, remeasuring.’
He describes I’m People as ‘an album of conversations that I’m currently having with myself… they’re full of questions without answers. This is an intensely human record, something you could touch, sing along to, dance with, know about, recognise, relate. The heartbreak and exhilaration, the absolute black comedy of being a person on this razor’s edge, this lion’s jaw, that is America today. What other choice do we have than to be hopeful?’
In The Middle Of It, the opening track and first single, has an irresistible country-rock feel and it is worth spending time with the anthemic title track, the album’s central message about the need for connection and community in a volatile world. Seneca (Time Is A Mother, Baby) is another standout, inspired by the work of Vietnamese-American poet and novelist Ocean Vuong. ‘He does something with vulnerability that I’ve never seen any other writer do,’ he said.
In song Taylor achieves that quality too. One of the many life skills he needed to navigate Mercy Avenue.
Taking flight: Rodney Crowell (featuring Ashley McBryde)
I don’t need an algorithm to remind me of the enduring quality of Rodney Crowell’s music. My vinyl collection contains a sizeable wedge of his work with admiring sideways glances from Jackson Browne and Bob Dylan. Even at the age of 75 Crowell continues to create memorable songs as his sparkling show at London’s Union Chapel demonstrated.
We were grateful he revisited our old favourites – Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight, Glasgow Girl, It Ain’t Over Yet and especially ’Til I Gain Control Again – but this was billed as The Airline Highway Tour to promote his most recent album. So it was worth the journey to hear Taking Flight, one of its strongest ballads and our Song of the Week at herecomesthesong.com.
The track is a duet featuring Nashville country star Ashley McBryde, who co-wrote it. For the live show, in McBryde’s absence, the vocal response to Crowell’s lead was delivered by his special guest, Derby-born Kezia Gill, and she did a fine job, even helping her partner to remember his own lyrics...
We were twenty feet from stardom
Now you’re staring down post-partum
An unwed mother soon to be that small voice on your phone
Love gone wrong is a favourite theme of Crowell’s. He has had plenty of practice. As he told us: ‘In marriage I’ve over-achieved.’ On Taking Flight he reflects on the distance that has grown between two former lovers. Crowell always grips you with his opening lines, and this is no exception:
We were somewhere east of Hattiesburg
On a lonely stretch of nightmare
The second verse sums up the lovers’ plight:
We’d been ploughing through each day like so much Mississippi red dirt
Burning with no purpose save get out while we still can
Hell-bent past the point of no return and going nowhere
With the best of good intentions, one more line drawn in the sand
The chorus has the aching quality that is the Texas troubadour’s trademark:
Taking flight, forget about tomorrow
Wrong or right, the chips are gonna fall
Taking flight, going nowhere ’til we get there
Next time Hell starts freezing over, we’ll be sure to give a call
Crowell explained how the song evolved for an album, his 20th, sprinkled with collaborations (Lukas Nelson, producer-guitarist Tyler Bryant, Larkin Poe and Charlie Starr): ‘Ashley came over to the house to take a swing at writing a song together. This is a fictional account of a discussion we had about stardom and driving at night in the South. With the exception of the Allman Brothers, I can’t say I was ever a fan of Southern rock. Tyler Bryant’s off-the-cuff riff at the end of the song made me reconsider.’
The album takes its title from a stretch of highway, the southernmost segment of Highway 61, following the Mississippi River, linking Baton Rouge with New Orleans. It was the road Houston-born Crowell, fellow Texan Bryant and their band took to reach the remote studio where the recording sessions were held.
Crowell’s alliance with Bryant inspired him. It made the veteran, almost twice Bryant’s age, re-evaluate the twilight stage of his career. ‘My ambition isn’t to be a household name any more. My ambition is to be satisfied with the work that I do. I’m at a place where it really is all about having fun. That’s one of the great perks of this job – falling in love with the people you’re playing with. And we caught that on tape.
‘Tyler is one of the most impressive young men I’ve met in a long time. He’s full of energy and passionate as all get out. As soon as I met him, I thought, let’s go. We immediately started going back and forth between my home studio and his, making demos and talking about what we wanted to do.’ His backing musicians at the Union Chapel, Catherine Marx on keyboards, and Eamon McLoughlin, London-born house fiddler at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, earned high praise from Crowell.
I have followed Crowell’s career since his days as a sideman alongside Albert Lee, Glen D Hardin, Hank DeVito and Emory Gordy in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band in the Seventies. His highly literate songs have been covered by a host of artists including Emmylou herself, Waylon Jennings, Bob Seger, Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, Rosanne Cash, Crystal Gayle, Alison Krauss, Keith Urban and Willie Nelson who last year devoted an entire album to Crowell compositions, Oh What A Beautiful World.
At the Union Chapel he performed a couple of covers he has helped to make famous over the years: Jennings’ Ain’t Living Long Like This and Townes Van Zandt’s Pancho And Lefty. The typically wry song he wrote with the late Guy Clark, Stuff That Works, was another doff of the Crowell stetson; he is soon to release a ‘lost’ album from the archives he had made but had forgotten about. Then Again, due out on June 26, had been gathering dust for 20 years. We have already heard two advance singles with a political slant, Are You One Of Us?, with a spoken call-and-answer part from Clark, and Go Light A Candle, featuring Emmylou and Lera Lynn.
‘I’ve worked with amazing people in the past, but I was looking too far ahead. I wanted the music we were creating to make a name for me, so I wasn’t completely present with them. My ego was involved. But now my ego seems to have finally evaporated. Now it’s just about the work and what a blessing it is to be able to do it. The work truly feeds me in the moment.’
Crowell told the congregation at the Union Chapel that he felt blessed to be playing at such a beautiful venue. We felt blessed too, still marvelling at the wonderful wordsmithery of Sometime Thang, another gem from Airline Highway...
She’s a wildwood flower in a red Corvette
Tanya Tucker meets Cate Blanchett
Stacked like dishes in the kitchen sink
She doesn’t give a damn what it is you might think
Comments