Word: albums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
That sounds a little defensive, as well as prideful, for a past master songwriter who is passing 43. It may be that when Simon embarked on the project that was to become his splendid new album, Graceland, he was, in his own words, "not hot in any way." One-Trick Pony, the 1980 feature film he wrote and starred in, bottomed out at the box office. A 1983 tour with his old partner Art Garfunkel was a nostalgic about-face. Hearts and Bones, in 1983, did not even offer up one high-charting song, a novel situation indeed...
...apartment on Manhattan's Central Park West with six rhythm tracks. He listened to them, chasing through "lots of culs-de-sac. I would think the melodies were in one place, and I'd find them in another." (Five of the tracks were used on the & finished album.) He got passports for his three-man Soweto rhythm section to come to New York City for some additional recording, where "the same culture shock that I had experienced in South Africa, they experienced here. One of them asked me where they had to go to register with the police...
...album's title track, Simon sings, "Losing love/ Is like a window in your heart/ Everybody sees you're blown apart," and, he now recalls, "once that 'losing love' line came out, that was a catharsis. Everything began to flow. That's when the funny songs came out." The rhythms of the album had also expanded. Simon had gone down to Lafayette, La., for the goofy good times of That Was Your Mother and out to California, where he recorded All Around the World or The Myth of Fingerprints with Los Lobos, a terrific Mexican- American band of rockers...
...Gospel Group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The rhythms washing over Graceland are infectious and inflective enough to shame rap silly, from the lovely, funky arc of Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes to the spooky snap of The Boy in the Bubble. African musicians appear on nine of the album's eleven tracks, but Simon has pulled off something much more here than a little groovy ethnomusicology. He has found a new wellspring for his own writing and a pipeline for African music, from inside a country that is effectively closed, straight into the bright center of American rock. Take...
Guitar Town has some of the frantic strength of a last good shot, which it was. Earle is 31,"the tour bus is home," and making it in country music needs a young man's grit after all. But MCA has given him a seven-album contract, and some material for the new record is getting an airing in concert. Those new songs nail a listener right to the spot. Steve Earle is already fulfilling his promise even before he has stopped being promising. No time to waste...