“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” Ricky Byrd snarls before throwing his guitar into gear and careening it through “Rock 'N' Roll Boys,” the rabble-rousing opening track on Lifer (Kayos Records), his solo debut. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, nothing more than an impulsive quip, but it nevertheless underscores the time and effort it’s taken Byrd, a veteran on the axe for more than 30 years, to reach this point.
“I always wanted to do my own record,” Byrd insists, “but I wanted to do my own record right. People would say, ‘Why is it taking so long?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I know, but my meter’s not running. I have nothing to do with anything that’s on the radio. So I might as well do the record I want to do.’”
As lead guitarist for Joan Jett and the Blackhearts for over a decade, beginning in 1981, his irascible riffs and licks bolstered such rambunctious anthems as “I Hate Myself For Loving You,” “Talkin’ Bout My Baby,” and, of course, “I Love Rock and Roll.” Byrd left the Blackhearts in 1993 with an itch for new opportunities, touring and recording with the likes of Roger Daltrey, Southside Johnny, and Ian Hunter, among others. Over time, though, he sought to make the sort of music that had inspired him to play rock ‘n’ roll in the first place.
“People now have no clue how neat it was to be lying on the beach in the summer in New York and hearing AM radio,” Byrd reflects, harkening back to the mid-to-late Sixties during the height of his adolescence, “where in one 15-minute time-frame you would hear, like, the Kinks’ new record, and then you would hear the Dave Clark 5 and the Stones and then Dean Martin and then “(Sittin’ On The) Dock of the Bay” and then a Sinatra song and on and on. It was all on one station.”
And it all had a profound effect on Byrd, sealing his fate and ultimately — with a guitar, plenty of practice, and no shortage of his native-Bronx swagger — forging his path each step of the way. “There was a process to getting someplace when you were a teenager at a certain age, in a certain era,” he recalls. “You learned how to work a room. You started out playing church dances or little dive bars, and that’s really where you made your bones.”
Such formative influences and experience no doubt inform Lifer, with moments of riff-thick rockers (“Dream Big,” “Let’s Get Gone”), Stax-like-soul stirrers (“Married Man,” “Ways of a Woman”) and barrelhouse rhythm & blues (“Harlem Rose”) boasting a good-time-is-had-by-all enthusiasm.
“There’s a lot of cool stuff now,” Byrd concedes, “but it’s not like this stuff. It’s got a different feel to it, a different groove. The snare beat is on a different beat. All the stuff I love is below the waist. That’s the kind of feel that I like. Whether it’s Otis Redding doing ‘Shake!’ or the middle part of ‘Midnight Rambler’ when they start doing it slow and sexy, it’s all below-the-waist stuff.”
While he’s most known as a guitarist Byrd has long honed his chops as a songwriter as well, whether on his own or in collaboration with other artists. “I love writing songs,” Byrd explains, adding that on the album, “I didn’t edit myself or put any restraints on how I was going to write. I didn’t try to write a Maroon 5 song; I just wrote the way I write. The only thing I did on purpose was [to] make it so it would be able to be played live — I could play this record top to bottom live with no problem — and I picked certain feels and grooves that I wanted on the record.”
All told Byrd has succeeded in his effort, establishing his own voice as an artist while honoring the many mentors who’ve shown him the way. “My record is like a tip of the hat to the stuff that I grew up on,” says Byrd, adding, “I just wanted to do a record that explained why I’m the way I am.”
For more information on Ricky Byrd, please visit his official website. Lifer is available now on Kayos Records.
In the latter half of his storied career Elton John has made some of the best music of his life. While John hasn’t churned out radio hits of late at the same velocity as in his ‘70s heyday, he nevertheless has demonstrated a sort of creative rejuvenation which has inspired him to compose a consistent run of great albums, including 2006’s The Captain & The Kid and his 2010 collaboration with Leon Russell, The Union, which was produced by T-Bone Burnett. The catalyst for this rejuvenation, peculiar though it may seem, was when John stopped starring in his own music videos.
Such is most recently illustrated by “Home Again,” the moving, mournful first single from John’s forthcoming album, The Diving Board (Capitol/Universal Records), which was also produced by Burnett. John’s absence from the song’s recently released video, along with the visual narrative’s dual yet opaque storyline, lend cinematic gravitas and scope to his vocal performance. The effect, ultimately, is more like he’s scoring a film rather than promoting an album.
When you’re as legendary as Elton John, of course, you don’t need to star in your own music videos lest viewers not recognize who’s singing the tune. In fact he decided as much right around the time of his 2001 LP, Songs From The West Coast. The one-take short film accompanying that album’s lead single, “I Want Love,” which starred Robert Downey, Jr., not only added gripping context to an already compelling song but also set the precedent for Elton John’s future in the post-MTV video era. And in the 12 years since Songs From the West Coast that John has maintained his celluloid celibacy, he has focused on making the best music that he can rather than making music just because he can. “Home Again,” in sound and vision, is a fine example.
The Diving Board will be released September 24.
In anticipation of her sophomore LP, Speak a Little Louder (S-Curve Records), singer/songwriter Diane Birch is offering the album's lead single, “All the Love You Got,” as a free download.
The new music comes four years after her critically-lauded debut, Bible Belt (which featured the retro-flavored “Nothing But a Miracle”), an album as striking for Birch’s songcraft as for her distinctively soulful phrasing and the naked, wrenching vulnerability with which she often imbued those performances.
Birch delivers the scorned-lover-be-damned narrative of “All the Love You Got” with vengeance enough to suggest perhaps some gutsier, rougher edges surround Speak a Little Louder, which is scheduled for release on October 15.
Guy Clark was a revered if not renowned figure long before he got his proper due. That didn’t come until 2011 with This One’s For Him: A Tribute To Guy Clark, for which the likes of Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, and Kris Kristofferson sang his praises by singing his songs. Thanks to the diversity (not to mention the mainstream popularity) of many of its contributing artists, the double-disc set not only celebrated Clark’s distinctive artistry but also illustrated it in arguably more of a universal light.
However, it’d be difficult for anyone who knows little about the 71-year-old singer/songwriter’s life not to feel some underlying sense of loss or unspoken grief when listening to his latest LP, My Favorite Picture of You.
The album cover alone is enough to put a lump in your throat. In a nod to the wistful title track, Clark holds a faded Polaroid of his wife of 40 years, Susanna, who passed away in June of last year following an extended illness. An esteemed and successful songwriter in her own right, she was an indispensable catalyst for her husband’s career, not to mention a muse for who-knows-how-many of his songs.
That’s not to suggest Clark dwells in themes about loss here, but in moments where he sings most evocatively of human suffering, be it of the heart (“Hell Bent on a Heartache”) or of the mind (“Heroes”), his stalwart drawl seems a bit more solemn and maybe a bit more lonesome than it has before. But that’s life, and few artists bring its essence to bear like this Guy.
“Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel things so deeply,” Marissa Nadler confides, soft-spoken yet assured, “but it does make it easier to write from a place of feeling.”
It’s a telling revelation, suggestive not only of uncommon honesty and candor but, as well, of insecurities that often accompany such insight. For the 32-year-old singer/songwriter, who is currently recording her next full-length studio album, the qualities that largely inform her aesthetic are also those which reveal her at her most vulnerable.
Consider her most recent works, Marissa Nadler and The Sister, released in 2011 and 2012, respectively, on Nadler’s own Box of Cedar Records. Containing some of her most inspired and affecting songwriting to date, these companion works—“They were recorded in the same studio,” she notes. “Some songs were recorded in the same session.”—illustrate Nadler broadening the scope of her craft and refining signature distinctions that have underscored her music now for nearly a decade.
Nadler, a native of Massachusetts and alumnus of Rhode Island School of Design, was already a seasoned visual artist in multiple disciplines when her debut, Ballads of Living and Dying, was released in 2004. Evoking folk’s acoustic properties (though not necessarily its most traditional or rigid song structures), the album was enriched by the nimble flow of epic poetry with the sort of narrative sweep found in short fiction. Such isn’t to suggest that Nadler’s subjects are contrived, however. As well she insists, “Pretty much everything is very autobiographical stories about people I know.”
In composing the songs for Marissa Nadler and The Sister, Nadler sought new ways of making her music accessible to as many listeners as possible. For instance, she says, “I kind of only recently have discovered the art of the bridge, of things that happen just once in a song to have this really memorable moment. I don’t think I really understood what a bridge was before because I didn’t go to music school. I was a self-taught singer and guitar player. So I just kind of called a song done when it was done.”
As her skills have improved so too has her confidence. “I know some more about music now,” Nadler explains, “and realize how effective a key change or a bridge can be to give a song a little bit more momentum and a narrative arc. I definitely feel that these songs have more of a build, [in] trying to keep people compelled throughout the song.
“I want my music to affect a lot of people,” she continues, adding that her songwriting during this particular period was often inspired by artists whose music had resonated with her in a similarly universal way. “I’d been listening to a lot of records, like Tammy Wynette records and old-school country. I like the mixes on those records where the vocal is really up front.”
Manifested for the most part on the eponymous album, a song like “The Sun Always Reminds Me of You,” for instance, with its steel guitar lending an air of bittersweet nostalgia, wouldn’t sound out of place in some roadhouse honky-tonk pouring out of a Wurlitzer otherwise stocked with George Jones and Loretta Lynn laments. Likewise, “Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning” conjures an air of earthy, flesh-and-blood eroticism not unlike what Bobbie Gentry was producing in her prime—or even of Kris Kristofferson’s most intimately informed classics.
While the same vocal lucidity is preserved on The Sister, the album is sparser and more ruminative by comparison. In fact except for a few select embellishments—the snare shots that punctuate “Constantine,” the swirling ebb-and-flow effects that surface throughout “In a Little Town”—Nadler sings with scarcely more than her own acoustic guitar as accompaniment.
Regardless of their musical context the songs on both albums evoke a visceral sense of immediacy, of a moment, as if borne out of a burst of inspiration. Nadler infers as much, describing her songwriting process as one that seems prone to distraction. “I won’t write for a couple months,” she explains, “and then I’ll write all the songs in one sitting. I generally wait until I have a lot of emotions built up about something. Then I sit and write a whole collection of songs all at the same time.”
The emotional transparency of her storytelling makes Nadler all the more susceptible to scrutiny, though, especially when she steps before a live audience. “It’s really painful for me to get up in front of crowds,” she concedes, adding that embarking on a full-fledged tour never ceases to be a nerve-wracking experience. “It takes me four or five shows for me to get into the zone where I’m not just petrified or nervous and sick all day, because I’m worried I’m going to fail.”
Nonetheless, she acknowledges, “Something’s still compelling me to keep doing it. I think it’s the desire to be sharing something with somebody else, or connecting with people.”
Even still, whatever sense of empathy or solace her songs offer listeners, they provide to her as well—perhaps even more so. “I’ve always been really sensitive,” Nadler concludes, “and I think art is the way I cope.”
—All photographs by Courtney Brooke Hall
For more information on Marissa Nadler, please visit the artist’s official website and follow her updates on Facebook and Twitter.
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