Albums for Living and Living for Albums #2- part 1

Thursday, 12-7-17

Alice Smith- For Lovers, Dreamers & Me (2006)

Why this album?: Warmth.

We experienced a sudden onslaught of freezing temperature today. Nature in Oklahoma doesn’t so much change its seasons as change its mood. Today it felt like being frosty. Tomorrow it might be toasty just to keep us on our toes. I left for work at 4:30 and only fully awoke upon cracking open the door and taking a caffeinated, arctic blast to the face. Not so terrible, all considered things, I could even call it refreshing. I won’t, but I could though. So, I needed a thick coat and didn’t feel like digging for one. Thankfully, jacket + Alice Smith is all the warmth one needs to brave anything winter could ever throw at one. One can be sure of that. One surely can. One. One.

# of plays today: 8 so far.

A premature battery death has kept that number much lower than it would have been.

Standout tracks: All of them.

Every single one. One. One… one. Seriously, let’s go through them all.

1. Dream

In which our heroine is blissfully, nay triumphantly, in love. Her immense and soaring voice shouts her passion and commitment to the heavens. Trumpets blare. A violin croons softly in the background. Alas, something is not quite right. The bridge hints at something just a little bit discordant. The horns could be a warning. Alice’s stridency sounds a little bit forced, as if she’s trying to will something into being, or at least to will it into being better than it is. This reminds me of a passage from The Bridge of San Luis Rey that talks about how people cannot love precisely equally. It can be close sometimes but there’s always going to be a little bit of an imbalance and sometimes more than a little bit of one. So, the person who loves more is always going to be at somewhat of a disadvantage. It’s like the Senate. 51-49 yields the majority of the power to the side with slightly more votes. 70-30 means the weaker side has virtually no power at all. This song makes me feel like our heroine is a little bit out of power and desperately trying to hold things together despite this. It may be 51-49, 55-45, 60-40… but not in her favor and things are trending in the wrong direction. When she was in power, things were great because she is Alice Smith and she is generous and decent and wonderful, but over the course of this relationship, things began to shift and, once the wonderful lost their majority, things began to go in a bad direction. Alice is trying to hold things together, regardless, because there is so much good worth preserving but… that bridge… once the cracks begin to form, they tend to spread and Alice is projecting some of her wonderful into a void that will only selfishly gulp it down. I could be overthinking this but, once again, nah. That’s what’s happening. Around the fourth time I listened to Lovers today, I begin to envision it as a musical. And this is the opening number that precedes a traumatic breakup. They awaken together and Alice sings her gorgeous song. Alice really is happy but not as much as she used to be. She’s overcompensating a little and trouble is coming. The fadeout confirms this. It leaves a tension in the air that carries over into a dramatic and painful conversation. This is the end as much as it is the beginning.

2. Woodstock

Now this is genuine, if only temporary, joy. Alice wakes up again “in NYC/ with a bunch of anxiety/ Rent’s due in a couple of weeks/ Yo, I had this really fucked up Dream”. She decides to head to the country to clear her mind and to seize some goodness back for her life:

Spent ten days in Woodstock taking it easy/
So would you please excuse me/
'Cause I'm feeling quite sad and I'm happy again

That last line seems contradictory, unless you’ve been there (and this album, upon close inspection really puts you there) and then it seems like one of the most perfectly worded line that you’ve ever heard.

I bought this album for Woodstock and I probably listened to it a half dozen times in a row before I managed to break off and start back at track 1. It’s one of those songs that feels like an album unto itself (Stevie Wonder’s “As” is another, if not the best example of this). Woodstock begins with a swelling organ, a guitar, sweet choral voices and the general feeling that One is ascending. It then drops us down into NYC takes us on vacation, shifts through multiple different genres of music (up to, and including the rarely-used ‘Singing Fish’ category) and leaves One with the feeling that they could not possibly ever ascend higher.

The best thing that I can say about Lovers, as a whole, is that it is so consistently great that I can listen to it all the way through without pausing to rewind Woodstock over and over again. This is one of my all-time favorite songs and the pivotal moment where our heroine resets her life and gets over the trauma of her ‘fucked up dream’.

So, we’re two tracks in and we’ve covered much more visceral ground than most albums could deign to dream of.

Told you this was good.

3. Gary’s Song

Our heroine walks down the street now with the type of swagger that superheroes feel only on the inside. She’s that bad. Men stop and sigh and make their pitch to her. They plead with her just to stop and let them give her whatever she wants, or you know, at least a movie or a ride. The music is funky enough to make a young Curtis Mayfield smile. It’s funky enough to make a young John Travolta take to the streets. She struts. Jaws drop. Men embarrass themselves and then, suddenly, the funk drops and sidesteps for lush strings:

But if we/
Start this ball to rollin’/
Will it stop or keep goin’/

To the point I don’t know when/

I’m gon stop

And just like that- a seamless shift from braggadocio to introspection (and back and back), an echo of the opening dream, and a great summation of the crude yet complex dance of courtship. This is a great chance for a man who’s less familiar with the other side of this dance to contemplate what it must be like on the other side. It’s also a great chance for a woman to nod along knowingly to the absurd yet constant reality of this dance. This is also our introduction to Gary, who might be the villain in a way, who’s never mentioned aside from the title of this song. If you’re playing along at home with the album, you can feel free to mentally cast Gary however you would like.

4. New Religion

Early in Woodstock, our heroine mentions ‘hocking a trinity’ that she intends to buy back when she has more money. I still don’t know what this is (and trying to google ‘what is a trinity’ reminds me of Steven Hyden’s observation about how difficult It is to do internet research on the band Live) but I can’t help but jump back to that lyric once we’ve arrived here. When her life was thrown fully out of sync, was her faith shaken as well? And is this album really as impeccably crafted as it’s starting to seem?

This is the 3rd of 4 songs to start with the morning and we’ve gone from love and loss to rebirth to sex and courtship to, now, a search for faith. Seems pretty damn well-crafted to me:

Well it struck me just this morning/

I haven't got a single thing to do/
And you know that got me thinking/
Even though I never thank it through/
Uh huh, make it real/
Uh huh

Gimme some new religion/
Something that I can feel/
Gimme some new tomorrow/
Bring it on and make it real/
I'm drowning in sweet forgiveness/
Come on baby turn my life, yeah

It’s also here that we’re very strongly reminded that we are listening to a truly incredible voice. The most remarkable thing about Alice’s singing is how un-showy it feels while it’s performing virtuosic feats. Here is a vocalist so organically in tune with the lyrics that you’re left thinking, and feeling, far more about what she’s saying than how she’s saying it. But damn is she saying, singing, it exceptionally well. Hers is the type of multi-octave, effortlessly, operatically powerful, deep-and-textured-at-every-turn, voice that can send chills through One’s body with a single bend of note. More so for the fact that those instants sneak up on you, while you’re lulled into comfort by her easy conversational tone. Alice Smith is absolutely something that you can feel. This is also, in our made-up musical, the scene right after our character has moved to California with Gary. There's some real 'Midnight Train to Georgia stuff' going on here and it feels like this album may be as much about a retaining a sense of place as finding true love but that will play out more on the other side.

 We’re 4 songs and 3 pages in and we’re gonna roll this over until tomorrow for a part 2. I realize now that I have a lot more to say and I’m going to need a few more pages just to deal with all this amazing-ness right here. There's tons more that could be said just about these first tracks. The little details are the things that jump out at you the more and more you re-visit them, the artful nuances that are so often also playful, like the tinny vocal fadeout on New Religion as Alice's voice fades to barely audible and reminds this One of an old gramophone record. This album is stuffed with stuff like that and I feel compelled to write a few pages about it because I can't find a few pages about it. It's a complete masterpiece that's been robbed of the vast majority of it's legacy. Tomorrow, the back 6 of Lovers. I’m looking forward to listening to, and contemplating, this some more. See some of you then.