Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
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Someday, My Spring Will Come
This will-they/won't-they weather has foiled my musical needs. I want to throw off the headphone earmuffs and throw open the windows and let the bright and bouncy out to battle with neighbors' sounds while I run around humping crocus. Global Weirding says no, here's a snowy morning, your late-April Easter will be colder than Christmas.
The climatory ambivalence ain't helping any inclinations towards the new Willie Nile record, House of a Thousand Guitars (currently available from CD Baby or in a bizarre variety of packages direct from the musician's myspace page). Nile is, depending on your point of view, either an unjustly overlooked blue-collar New York singer-songwriter whose career was derailed by label difficulties - Guitars is only his fifth full-length since his self-titled 1980 debut, a contract dispute caused a decade-long gap between albums two and three - or a second-rate also-ran who perpetually busks at the corner of Dylan & Springsteen Streets.
It's easy to walk by a lot of the new disc without tossing any coin. Even at his best Nile's a straightforward presence, at his worst his words will exhaust you with obviousness. The title track is a miserably dated roll call of axe heroes (Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, John Lennon) which opens, "Jimi Hendrix plays all night long in the house of a thousand guitars, through a purple haze you can hear the song..." Purple Haze! Get it? Wow. It's almost galling when Nile offers, in his usual affected wheeze, "You can hear Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones and there'll be no vultures picking on their bones!" Um, much? Anyone who still has a subscription to Rolling Stone: The Magazine (that still exists, right?) will probably be churning their own butter all over themselves.
A lot of the language is as automatically plugged in. This house is located beneath both "the moon AND the stars," whoa-ho! GPS that, motherfuckers. When Nile sings about a "howling wolf call" in "Give Me Tomorrow" it's tough to know whether it's another nod or just another cliché. The album wraps up with a Big Apple ode; when the lights go out, I hope you took Broadway in the office pool.
All this is done to music that starts off energetic and agreeable (the record does have some nice guitar work, and solos are never overbearing) but soon becomes regular and tiresome. It doesn't help that Nile's lyrically long in the tooth (and given to sledgehammered social-minded stuff; "Now that the War is Over" makes me want to firebomb orphanages), every song could lose at least a minute, simplicity is best kept short. Cropped to a neat three minutes, the twangy insides-out anthem "Run" would have been a go-to head-bobbing sash-opener.
Willie Nile - Asking Annie Out (mp3)(buy)
Like that one. Nile's last record, 2006's Streets of New York, has a few of the same faults but falls way on the other side of the line. Groaners (he sings about rainbows at one point, for fuck's sake... when clothes are "tattered" they are, of course, also "torn"... there is a "gun that shoots kindness"... the streets of New York are "a maze made of iron and stone") and long-winded on-and-on Dylanesque delivery are totally trumped when they actually pay off. "Faded Flower of Broadway," a treacley Pocketful of Miracles thing that contains the line "left her dreams out in the rain" and cites Sgt. Pepper's, delivers a lush fantasy chorus that'll give you involuntary sway. "The Day I Saw Bo Diddley in Washington Square" ignores the obvious chug and becomes a winning wisp of Irish-flavored Village poetry (Bo's performance leaves "much dirty laundry in need of repair").
Streets has an honest exuberance and material of genuine quality. "Best Friends Money Can Buy" is a great stomp, dressed up by a bit of Byrdsy jangle. "Cell Phones Ringing in the Pockets of the Dead" (which sounds quite a lot like "Old Men Sleeping on the Bowery" from Nile's self-titled first record, but, whatever) binds scattershot references and an anarchic enthusiasm into something unsettling. "Lonesome Dark-Eyed Beauty" is the song with the rainbows. It also pairs "riddles" with "rhyme." Mountains are (yawn) climbed and seas are swum, poets weep, yes they do. But as angels wade, Nile asks his girl to "touch me with your midnight," says "the echoes of my fingers cross the borders of your skin." "You don't have to be specific, you don't have to be immense, you don't have to mount or circumvent an NFL defense." By the end of its six minutes, the singer has worked his way in, sucks harp.
And "Annie," oh Annie. Tripping over sunshine on the way to school, giddy with urge, innocent with intention, that song is Spring, the Spring that should be here by now.
(Nile just played the Bowery Ballroom as part of the Conan O'Brien band send-off. Upcoming area appearances include an instore at Vintage Vinyl in NJ on Record Store Day (with Titus Andronicus and others) and shows in Ringwood(?), NJ and Staten Island. Concert listings here.)
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It's taken several seasons, but: Stephanie Mckay's (myspace) very good Tell it Like it Is is finally available on CD from Amazon. You want that.