In 1993, my friend J.B. Shayne was visiting in my home, and as I was preparing a bit of lunch, he scanned my vast (at the time, anyway) CD collection — about 10 minutes into his investigative process, J.B. turned to me and said, “Do you realize that 80% of your music collection features female vocalists?” At the time, the thought had never occurred to me that J.B.’s statement might be true. Somehow, I’d just never realized it.
Over the coming months, then, as you might well expect, VanRamblings’ readers may reasonably project that the vast majority of music I’ll be writing about will feature women vocalists, from my country and Americana favourites Kasey Chambers, Allison Moorer, Iris DeMent, Kacey Musgraves, Lady Antebellum, Lori McKenna, Miranda Lambert, Nickel Creek, The Secret Sisters, Julia Stone and Lucinda Williams, to my fave urban contemporary artists like Chrisette Michelle, Teedra Moses, Nicki Flores, Rihanna, Mary J. Blige, Amel Larriuex, and Krys Ivory, to the following cross-genre artists …
Cat Power, Emiliana Torrini, Julien Baker, Laura Nyro, Lianne Le Havas, Rickie Lee Jones, Stina Nordenstam, Tracey Thorne, Gemma Hayes, Eva Cassidy, Feist, Imogen Heap, Robyn, Missy Higgins, Sharon van Etten, Laura Jansen, Lily Allen, Fiona Apple, Bic Runga, Beth Orton, Adaline, Coeur de Pirate, Emil Sande, Jem and Lykke Li, to female fronted groups like …
Apples in Stereo, Azure Ray, CocoRosie, The Roches, Rumer, and more.
The above artists only scratch the surface of my musical itch for discovery.
Sometimes, there are songs that I just keep returning to, music with harmonies featuring women’s voices, songs that pick me up, brighten my mood and give me hope. That’s the music I’m presenting today. The Rescues were formed in Los Angeles in 2008, a female fronted indie supergroup, featuring acclaimed singer / songwriter and multi instrumentalist Kyler England, composer, video director and artist Adrianne Gonzalez, who were joined by conductor and film score composer Gabriel Mann, and a rotating fourth vocalist, The Rescues together creating a free form amalgam of cross-genre musical styles ranging from acoustic, folk and Americana to progressive dance, electronica, hip-hop and rap.
Although Katy Perry did a cover of The Rescues’ Teenage Dream, Kyler England, Adrianne Gonzalez, Gabriel Mann and Rob Giles created the captivatingly gorgeous four-part harmonies that you’ll hear in their definitive version of Teenage Dream. Listen for yourself & enjoy …
Dating back to the late 1960s, through until today, I have often found employment as a music critic.
One of the great delights of my young life was to walk onto the property of Warner Bros. or Capitol Records, and be taken into the warehouse in behind the offices, leaving the premises with one hundred or more new albums, all ready to return to the home Cathy and I shared at Simon Fraser University.
From those days til today, my love for music, for discovering new music has known no bounds, as will remain the case through the end of my days.
Of course, I was very, very lucky, as were all members of the boom generation, to grow up in the era of The Beatles, and the rush of new music coming out of the UK, and down south out of Los Angeles. These were halcyon days of discovery, more often than not enhanced by the intake of cannabis (there is hardly any greater joy than listening to music stoned).
One of my early, great discoveries was Todd Rundgren, whose music career began in 1967 at the age of 19 with the Philadephia-based garage rock band, Nazz. Over the next four years, Nazz released three albums, all to little acclaim, prompting Rundgren to leave the group, move to New York, and educate himself in the fine arts of audio engineering and production.
Upon arriving in New York, Rundgren was signed by Ampex Records, where he began work producing for various rock groups of the day.
1972 proved to be a halcyon year for Todd Rundgren. After signing with Bearsville Records — a recording studio started in 1969 by legendary music impresario Albert Grossman, manager of Bob Dylan, The Band, and Janis Joplin — Rundgren’s musical career took off into the stratosphere.
A few years back, a friend asked me, “So, what kind of music do you like?” Today’s post is the first in a series of columns I’ll write on the music that has both changed and informed my life, my love of almost all musical genres also knowing almost no bounds. I love life. I love music.
Today’s VanRamblings’ music insight column tracks the work of Todd Rundgren, and his multi-platinum solo début, Something/Anything?
Early in 1972, soon after signing on with Albert Grossman, one Friday afternoon early in the year, Todd Rundgren was in the Bearsville Studio offices for a pre-production meeting for the upcoming album the studio intended to record. All went well at the meeting, and at the 5 o’ clock hour, as the cleaning crew arrived, Grossman prepared to close the studio for the weekend. Rundgren said, “I’ll have the cleaners let me out. I’m heading to the washroom.” Everyone bid their adieu, going home to their families.
But not Todd Rundgren. Instead, Rundgren hid out in a closet and slept for four hours, readying himself for the marathon production weekend ahead.
The cleaners left shortly before 9pm, when a sleepy Todd Rundgren emerged from his closet home. What occurred over the next fifty-seven and a half hours is part of rock and roll history.
From 9pm on that Friday night, until 6:30am Monday morning, Todd Rundgren wrote, produced, mixed, sang and played guitars, keyboards and all other instruments to produce the groundbreaking multi-platinum, multi-Grammy award winning hit machine, Something/Anything? — every voice Rundgren’s, every instrument played by the nascent songwriter-singer-producer, Rundgren over the weekend innovating on the recently acquired 8-track production studio equipment in ways previously unheard of and unimagined, writing a new chapter in the ongoing history of rock ‘n roll.
Twenty-five songs on a two disc album, recorded at a rate of under one fully produced song every three hours. When Bearsville Studio staff and executives arrived at their offices on Monday morning, they found Rundgren passed out, a master tape, track list and album cover art work on the console. Over the next three weeks, working with Rundgren, studio engineers fine-tuned the 23 songs, the double Something/Anything? album released to critical acclaim in April, out-selling every other album that year.
Something/Anything? spawned a half dozen chart topping hits, including I Saw the Light, and a remake of the Nazz near-hit Hello It’s Me, which shot to No. 5 in the week it was released. As a reminder: both songs featured Todd Rundgren producing, as well as on all vocals and instruments. It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference was the third smash hit off Something / Anything? to top the Billboard charts in the early autumn that year.
A dozen years later my children and I lived together at SFU with a woman, a younger doppelganger for my now ex-wife, dubbed by my friends, and referred to by my children as Cathy 2 — as my friends said, “the sane Cathy,” and so she was. One day when I was off teaching class, Cathy 2 put on the Rundgren album. When I arrived home to our two-bedroom apartment at Louis Riel House, Cathy 2 greeted me, smothering me in kisses, excitedly exclaiming, “Raymond, Raymond, I’ve spent the entire afternoon listening to Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything? It’s gorgeous, it’s groundbreaking, I’ve never heard anything like it. I think I’m in love with Todd Rundgren!” And so she was, and so should we all be.
On a closing note, and to provide a bit more background on Todd Rundgren.
In 1972, Rundgren began a relationship with model Bebe Buell. During a break in their relationship, Buell had a brief relationship with Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, which resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. On July 1, 1977, Buell gave birth to Liv Tyler, the future model and actress. To protect the child from Tyler’s drug addiction, Buell claimed that Todd Rundgren was the biological father, and named the child Liv Rundgren, Todd Rundgren raising her as his daughter. At age fifteen, Liv learned that Steven Tyler was her biological father. Even so, Liv Tyler still calls Todd Rundgren her father, and still maintains a very close relationship with the now 70-year-old musician.
Throughout the years that my son, Jude (who prefers to be called Nathan) and my lovely and tough-as-nails (but not entirely sane) daughter, Megan — hey, it runs in the family, on both her mother’s and my side — through their younger years and their teens music was ever-present in their lives.
On the long Sunday afternoon drives, the monthly excursions to Seattle, the quarterly sojourns to the west coast of Vancouver Island, visits with friends on the far side of Port Coquitlam, nearly in Pitt Meadows, more often than not the music loud enough that we would all sing the lyrics together, or sometimes we would just lie back (although, I am always hyper-alert when driving) and listen to one or more of our favourite Todd Rundgren songs, or music by The Boss, The Bangles, Bob Dylan, The Ronettes, Elvis Costello, Tears for Fears, or whatever pop song was playing on hit radio — and later on, for my son, angry, profanity-laden hip hop songs — for Jude and Megan and I, music was throughout the course of every day of our lives a central feature of lives full of love, and well-lived.
In the 1970s, I was the go-to guy if you wanted to purchase new stereo equipment, or anything tech related. As you might well imagine, then, in the Tomlin household you would find the best, high-end stereo equipment, a perfectly calibrated turntable and stylus, amp, tuner and speakers, the best money could buy (I wasn’t always a pauper). My love of great stereo equipment, or lovingly created mix tapes, encompassing the broadest cross-section of music you could imagine — for most of my life, I’ve been an arts critics, the record companies only too willing to give me any vinyl record or, later, CD that I wanted, creating a vast library of music at home, played to optimum effect on the very best audio equipment available on the market — providing access to the best sound and broadest array of music you’d find outside of Business in Vancouver editor, Kirk LaPointe’s home.
My love of music, and love of tech and stereo equipment, is a feature of my life, and now my children’s lives, a gift that has been bequeathed to them.
My son is a recording engineer, putting out his own music under the name DJ Nameless. At home he has recording equipment stacked floor to ceiling, mixing equipment, turntables, all of the music both played and recorded on vinyl, or other legacy media. Jude has taken my rudimentary mixing skills (of which, I am sure he would say I have none) and developed his skill set in music & recording into an art. Listen above to one of his house records.
Every now and then — a gift from my son I very much look forward to — Jude will have found a rare recording, and contrary to the best interests of his nature, and love and commitment to the warmer sounds of legacy media, will digitize a song he’s run across in his travels, loading the mp3 into my iTunes, forever after to be a part of my 6000+ song mp3 library of lovingly crafted music of the new millennium, providing access for me both at home, and on my latest model iPhone — the soundtrack of my life.
On June 28th, 1999, Jude came over to my home for a visit (we were to go to dinner later in the afternoon), just sort of hanging out in my place, repairing for awhile to the magnificent rooftop paradise created by two of my housing co-op’s landscape visionaries, and then as it came time to go, Jude turned to me, gave me a hug (note: Jude gives the warmest and most loving hugs), Jude sitting down on my comfy office chair, leaning into my state-of-the-art computer’s CD drive, loading the song below, the first release by The Art of Noise from their concept album (vinyl, of course), The Holy Egoism of Genius, the song The Seduction of Claude Debussy.
Before he pressed play on the now loaded iTunes song, Jude turned to me and said, “You know that I think mp3s represent a corruption of sound, and I’ll never own an mp3 player, no matter how easy and available they become — but when I heard this song, I thought of you, and thought that maybe, probably, that you’d like it. You’ve always liked narrative in the music you listen to, and on occasion, a particularly compelling and well-wrought foreground narrative — which is an element of the song I am about to play for you.”
“John Hurt, who I know you like — because you’ve taken Megan and I to almost every film in which John Hurt has ever starred, or we’ve watched them at home late on a weekend night, for Megan and I, The Elephant Man and 1984 two of John Hurt’s more memorable films that we have watched with you at home, or when we were younger, at the cinema.”
Here’s the song Jude gave to me that late afternoon, early summer’s day …
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was head over heels in love with the music of Joni Mitchell — so much in love, in fact, that I turned around and married a woman (Cathy) who looked just like Joni Mitchell.
By the time the late 1970s rolled around, my woman singer-songwriter allegiance had switched definitively to Rickie Lee Jones — whose music became the soundtrack of my life through the late 1970s and 1980s, so much so, that Rickie Lee Jones also became the soundtrack of my children’s lives — that’d be Jude and Megan — as well. In the times to come, I will write about my love for Rickie Lee Jones, which has not abated to this day.
Being a callow fellow, as time rolled on my allegiance to a woman singer-songwriter of melancholy countenance switched to Iris DeMent in the early 1990s — for me, there is no better, more reflective and more melancholy album that has ever been recorded than Ms. DeMent’s 1993 release, My Life. Please find the entire album directly below. Have a listen …
As I say, though, I am a callow fellow, and by the late 1990s I had found a new love — a Boston-suburb-based housewife, mother to five children, wife of a Boston firefighter and, by far, the best roots songwriter this century. On another day, I’ll write about Lori McKenna at greater length. Today, you’ll find four of her songs at the top of the column — four of my favourite songs written by and sung by Lori McKenna … well worth a listen.
Recently, my friends and next door neighbours, Shirley Ross and Bill Tieleman celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary — I looked all over for Lori McKenna’s Stealing Kisses somewhere online, but until a couple of days ago, I couldn’t find it (and, truth to tell, I bet the video below won’t last long online — you’ll want to listen to Stealing Kisses while the opportunity is provided to you). Here is one of my favourite Lori McKenna songs.
Dedicated to Bill Tieleman and Shirley Ross, Happy 25th Anniversary …
