Word: singers
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...becoming New Zealand's biggest-selling female artist. No, we're not talking about Hayley Westenra, the Wellington schoolgirl who took Amazing Grace to Enya-like heights, but the exotic musical hybrid that is Bic Runga. In 2002, a year before Westenra hit her high notes, this Maori-Chinese singer-songwriter took the simple guitar hooks of Drive to a new level with Beautiful Collision, an album in which she exploded genres - from folk to rock to country - with the glassy resonance of her voice. So it's strange to find her latest release, Birds, darker and scuzzier sounding...
...musical minx, dressing up in various guises to reveal snippets of herself (on Beautiful Collision, echoes of Johnny Cash and The Mamas and the Papas are seemingly remixed by Bj?rk). Birds finds her much closer to home. As it transpires, Runga's Chinese mother was a cabaret singer in Malaysia during the '60s, and on the new album the singer seems to channel that era's songbirds, from Fran?oise Hardy (Say After Me) and Dusty Springfield (If I Had You), to Karen Carpenter (Winning Arrow). These are songs of fragile hope, unrequited love and broken hearts. But the emotion...
Until last year, Neil Young's public persona was a lot like his lyrics: alluring but largely opaque. The singer-songwriter didn't traditionally say much to the audience during concerts and rarely gave media interviews. But a potentially lethal brain aneurysm last spring that required delicate surgery, followed by the death of his father, Canadian journalist and writer Scott Young, changed him. Or, perhaps more correctly, opened him up. With mortality grabbing him by the scruff of the neck (and his 60th birthday awaiting him in the fall), Young went into a Nashville studio last March to record Prairie...
...steady as the music and musicianship. Some sequences create such an ambiance of immediacy that you may have to restrain yourself from breaking into applause. There's also great attention to detail. Demme ensures that no one misses Young's knowing glance to his wife Pegi, a backup singer here, during a rendition of the love song Harvest Moon or Young's hokey wave to the rafters after referencing country great Hank Williams. It helps too that Young surrounds himself with a team of accomplished musicians, including longtime collaborator Ben Keith on pedal steel guitar and singer Emmylou Harris...
...That something is not in the songs but in the singer. For years, Young's legion of fans has always loved the music but not necessarily the man. Now the chameleon-like Young--who has alternated among introspective folkie, protest rocker and reverb reveler--has morphed again, this time into something far friendlier. The rendition of the song Heart of Gold ("I want to live/ I want to give ...") feels as if it were written specifically for the film, not for 1972's Harvest. Young, in his new balance of power and gentleness, has rarely looked so comfortable...