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

Monday, 12-11-17

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

Why is this post coming days later than expected?: Easy, there is no expectation.

No one is actually reading this, so deadlines don't exist, and life can very easily intervene. It's hard to keep creating when you feel like no one's paying attention... but you have to. You have to if it's what you're supposed to do. And even if just one person pays attention, that's something. If it's two, that's twice as valuable. Three? I mean you have to feel really great about three when you once didn't have one. The reason this is relevant to our heroine is because she seems to have a relatively large and dedicated fanbase that could seems like nothing when you stack it up against what she deserves. This is one of our most talented and worthy artists and she has recorded only two albums in the last 11 years. She is far from a household name but she keeps at it- touring, collaborating, creating. To have Alice Smith's titanic level of talent and to be robbed of a similar level of recognition might feel similar to having modest talent and lacking modest recognition. This is just to say, that listening to this album gives me motivation to make time to write about it, regardless, of what becomes of the result. Back to the good stuff.

Previously in this secretly great concept record, our protagonist, suffered through a difficult breakup (track 1), rebounded with a revitalizing vacation (track 2), took a chance on an ardent suitor named Gary and (to my mind, moved to California with him- track 3), found herself adrift and bored in California and searching for something to believe in (track 4). Now, Alice Smith, according to really basic internet research, appears to have moved to Cali after this album came out. She also appears, based on scheduled concert appearances, to be back on the East Coast. If this is true, then it almost feels like Alice foreshadowed her own geographic path before it happened right her on Lovers. Either that or I'm speculating too hard in a Room 237 kind of way... I enjoyed that movie so let's go ahead and go with it. 

5. Do I

I was in love with a woman several years ago whom I introduced to this album. This track connected with her in a profound way around the time when I no longer did. In it, our heroine speaks eloquently about a desire to focus on the good things in life without being forced to dwell on the bad. The lyrics signal a shift from the optimism of the opening song. This singer is struggling to hold on to optimism at a time when she's far too wizened by heartache to be naively optimistic. Gary is not a positive person. He's not a bad guy, but the man who promised her everything, the biggest things, just to get her into his life, never delivered them. Now, he harps on the smallest things and critiques our Alice for not living up to his every irrational expectation. Gary is not happy and this beautiful, wonderful woman is not able to make him so, and he keeps reminding her of that. Alice, ever the dreamer, ever the lover, just wants to focus on the good and not the bad. Does she have to always be reminded of the bad. Will she always be forced to? I don't have much in common with Gary and I suspect that the connection that my former.... whatever we were... had with this song had a lot more to do with another relationship than with ours. I also believe that being unable to be happy was something she could relate to for herself as much as for the person that she was seeing. If we're honest with ourselves, most of us, could be Alice at times and, at times, Gary. Most of us could actually have this conversation with ourselves, independent of another person. Who hasn't asked themselves, at some point, why they can't simply focus on the good? Our dreams can make us feel most alive, and when they crumble, they can make us feel the most despondent, and that kind of reversal can be especially hard to deal with when you're not even in a place where you feel at home.

6. Fake is the New Real

I don't know Alice Smith's legitimate feelings about California but my Alice, as she exists on this album, and as it exists subjectively in my head, is not a fan. She's stressed, bored, and unhappy with how things are going with Gary and she vents her frustration on the artificiality of her surroundings. Everywhere around her she sees falseness and plastic sheen. In our fake musical, she's passing through LA, dismissing the ridiculousness that she sees all around her. The fake smiles she encounters at every audition, the costumed theatrics she sees on every corner, the cheesy billboards and insta-celebrity strivers. All of it irks her. She is unhappy here. When she found herself unhappy in her beloved New York, she was able to escape to an almost mystically gorgeous Woodstock. How will she escape here?

7. Desert Song

The time has come
For me to start packing in
I'm folding the shores of my life
Into valises
I can't stand
This desert heat no more
I'm going away
I'm going away

Bye Gary. I'd call this a torch song where the torch our heroine carries is for her home state. Damn, she blows on this one and it makes a line like "the sand covers my face" absolutely sellable. This is the point where our protagonist, having spent half of the album lamenting her time in California from a number of different angles, gloriously departs the state and the man who convinced her to move there. She seems to vanquish the state of her relationship, the state of her apathy, the whole damn state through the force of sheer passionate vocal delivery. I gotta take a break after that. I'm shook. We'll come back for part 3 of our obsessive track-by-track Lovers tour, tomorr... well, at the point of our next installment. I expect that this will be quite soon.