Word: boomtowns
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Picture this. A small, comfortable apartment in Los Angeles. Three people, all trying to work, trying to write and make music, but not necessarily together. In the living room: David Baerwald and David Ricketts, trying to come up with an appropriate follow-up to Boomtown. Pressure enough right there; not only the normal, friendly collaborative pressure but the burden of trying to equal or even top one of the best albums of the 1980s. In the bedroom: Toni Childs, who was living with Ricketts and laboring over her own lyrics besides...
...away from art -- things started to come around. In 1988 Childs made a smash debut album, co-produced by Ricketts and featuring a beautiful, spooky ballad called Where's the Ocean. And Baerwald finished a solo project, his just released Bedtime Stories, that makes a worthy companion piece to Boomtown. That's what they call a wow finish...
...gardening and porno magazines, worked in a doughnut shop and acquired the close-up view of life along the fault line that shapes and colors his songs. He and Ricketts had been making demos of a few tunes, and one of their tapes landed flukily at A&M Records. Boomtown was born out of that tape...
...facing up, right then, to what was happening." Their personal relationship had ended by the time the album was actually recorded in 1987, but, Childs says, "David and I will be an item for a long time, only it won't be sexual." Harking back to David + David's Boomtown, she laughs and adds, "I think of this as a David + Toni record...
Union took three years to get right. Childs waited out anxious months for Ricketts' continued collaboration, while he worked on Boomtown. Mostly on sheer instinct, she went from Los Angeles to Swaziland and Zambia to search out a choir and found two. The Sibane Semaswati Singers and the New Generation, who show no traces of a Paul Simon-Graceland influence, are on five of the album's tracks, lending rhythmic backbone whenever Childs' writing tends too much toward the brittle. They also summon ironic memories from Childs' past, casting a kind of sanctified shadow across a childhood spent within...