Album Review: Priscilla Ahn - This is Where We Are

Priscilla Ahn sings with such gorgeous, unaffected grace that any extravagant or otherwise cluttered production would only undermine one of the loveliest voices to emerge in the past decade. That said, with her third and latest album, This is Where We Are (SQE Music), the winsome singer/songwriter builds upon the acoustic-rich distinctions of her prior LPs, A Good Day (2008) and When You Grow Up (2011), to incorporate judicious amounts of electronica. 

In moments like “Diana” and “In a Closet in the Middle of the Night,” for instance, Ahn conjures intoxicating, spectral soundscapes that actually reinforce her voice as well as her often contemplative lyrics. She doesn’t abandon her acoustic tendencies completely, as ballads “Remember When I Broke Your Heart” and “I Can't Fall Asleep” illustrate in enchanting, tender ways. Even on the most sonically progressive songs, the experimental embellishments are neither distracting nor obtrusive.

On the whole, Ahn has stepped forward as an artist with this work, forging rich new musical perspectives with her talent and imagination.

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An Interview with Nathan East

Lately it seems like everything is going Nathan East’s way. Already this year the renowned and ever-in-demand bassist has picked up five GRAMMY® awards for holding down the groove on Daft Punk’s smash hit single, “Get Lucky,” resumed his long-held station in Eric Clapton’s touring band, and just this week released his long-awaited self-titled solo debut. 

Then again, such touchstones also seem like par for the course for a musician whose credentials include studio sessions with myriad legends and A-listers—George Harrison, Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, B.B. King, Anita Baker, and Lionel Richie, just to name a handful—as well as performances at some of popular music’s most storied events and stages, from mammoth all-star benefits like Live Aid and Knebworth to such fabled venues as the Budokan and the Royal Albert Hall. 

For the new album, East assembled an eclectic roster including Clapton, singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles, and fellow co-founder of jazz supergroup Fourplay, keyboardist Bob James. “It was pretty seamless,” says East, adding that the musicians sought to reflect the spirit of a live performance. The camaraderie among them no doubt facilitated that pursuit and, in doing so, all the more enlivened moments like the retro, coyly titled first single, “Daft Funk,” and a solemn rendition of The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” the latter featuring his 13-year-old son, Noah East, on piano.  

Considering you work from such a broad palette—playing jazz, rock, R&B, soul—did you have any sort of guiding objective about how you wanted this album to sound? Did you want it to reflect you in any certain way especially since it’s your first statement as a solo artist?

Yeah, I was careful about making sure that although it wouldn’t be too much of a diverse statement that it would reflect a celebration of my musical tastes and friends. 

Are there many improvisational moments on the album?

Absolutely. A lot of what happens in the studio is pretty much intuitive and instinctive of what happens on the day whether it’s before or after the record button’s pressed, but the bottom line is by having a band and doing everything live you definitely have more room for improvisation and just whatever spontaneous magic that’s going to take place. 

You’ve got two Stevie Wonder songs on the album [“Sir Duke” and “Overjoyed”]. Beyond just being a fan, what is it about his music or his songwriting that attracts you to his work? 

Honestly I’ve probably been a fan of Stevie’s music for 40 years where it’s always had a special place in my heart. His compositions and his music in general is just a fertile garden of just everything … The soil is good. The fruit is good. Everything’s good about it! 

The amazing thing about Stevie is every song that he writes is different. Like, it sounds like Stevie, but it’s not like the same chord changes or sound. Some writers have a particular key or a particular set of chord changes that they use, but Stevie’s just a fountain. 

That’s him playing harmonica on your version of “Overjoyed,” right? 

Yes it is. We were doing that at a soundcheck at Carnegie Hall one day and I was kind of working that arrangement out and he jumped in there and started playing harmonica. When we finished he said, “If you ever record that let me know. I’d love to play on it.” 

A lot of the people you’ve worked with—Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Quincy Jones, Phil Collins—are known for having strong creative instincts. It must take a certain kind of discipline on your part to be able to work with those different types of people.

I’ve definitely learned a lot from working with these kinds of artists. People like Quincy and Phil Collins, these are some work ethics like you’ve never seen before, literally where you can put 14, 16, 18 hours a day into being in a studio and just working hard. I’ve learned that there are no shortcuts and people that are successful in general are hard workers.

Your disposition and personality must factor in as well, knowing when you can contribute something and knowing also when it’s not a good time to do so. Does that just take experience to learn?

Well, those are things that you hopefully learn early on. Music is one of those situations where nobody’s forcing you to be there, so if you can get along with folks and if you come with an attitude of contribution and an uplifting spirit people generally like being around that rather than the opposite. The more I work and the longer I’m in this business the more I realize that that’s a big part of everything as well.

Have you found it useful to have learned to read music when you were a college student?A lot of musicians don’t know how to read music, and I just wonder if it’s been beneficial in your career.

Absolutely. I couldn’t be more grateful for having pursued an education in music and learning how to read music. In those situations where you’re relying strictly on your sight-reading chops for an orchestral date when you’re doing a movie session and 60 pieces are in there and the notes are flying by it feels good to know that you can kind of hang tough with the rest of the gang. 

Does the bass still challenge you?

Very much so. On a daily basis I’m challenged to come up with something that’s interesting and not boring but not overbearing. For me it’s like every song is a chance to say, “Okay, I have another chance to really get it right,” and, “What is the best thing to play for this song?” It’s a constant challenge. 

Do you have any sort of philosophy for playing the bass? Like, Clapton has said he approaches playing the guitar much like a samurai. He steps into the spotlight only when necessary, he uses discretion about when to take a solo, and he tries generally not to overdo anything. Do you have any comparable approach to how you play?

That similar philosophy is one that I approach music with as well. I look at it as a big picture, and not just me. So lots of time I’ll take myself out of the equation and see what the big picture is trying to say and then try to determine what it is that I’m going to bring that’s going to complete that picture. 

You’re serving the song.

Absolutely. That’s the number-one priority is serve the song, and serve the dialog and the communication and the camaraderie.

After all these years how do you maintain your enthusiasm for playing music? You’ve always radiated such warmth and such love for what you do, and I just wonder how you manage to keep that going for all these years and through so many different incarnations of your career.

That’s a great question. The first very obvious answer is that I’ve just been blessed with a very enjoyable cross-section of music that I have the privilege and opportunity to play. There’s not a day that I don’t wake up that I’m not thankful for the privilege of playing music. At the same time, none of the gigs that I’ve had have been gigs where I’m thinking, “I’m just doing this for the money.” Most of them I just absolutely loved the music, the people. I mean, what’s not to love? What’s not to be enthusiastic about?

Nathan East is available now from Yamaha Entertainment Group. For more information, visit NathanEast.com. 

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Interview: Barb Jungr on Interpreting Songs of Dylan and Cohen

Barb Jungr is no stranger to the music of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, having performed their works to both critical and popular acclaim throughout her near-forty-year career. Yet with her latest album, Hard Rain (The Songs of Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen), on which the British vocalist collaborated with pianist and album producer Simon Wallace in arranging eleven songs that share some thread of timeless political or social import, her familiarity with the material didn’t make the task of interpreting it any easier or less daunting.

Of the title track in particular, Jungr recounts, “We recorded that over a period of about four months because we had at least five versions that we didn’t use. I went back and back and back to it and then I’d listen to it a week later and I’d go, ‘I’m not getting this right. This isn’t right. This isn’t right.’ It was a feel, an intuitive thing. You go, ‘This isn’t right. This song’s not right. I’m not singing this song right.’”  

Such dogged determination ultimately served the album well overall as Jungr’s performances, which through moments of jazz sophistication and cabaret panache are strikingly prescient. In their own way, as well, they yield illuminating perspectives on the canons of two of popular music’s most iconic and mythologized singer/songwriters. 

How difficult was it to marry the works of Dylan and Cohen as you’ve done with this album?

It was really easy. It was remarkably easy. The choices of the songs were effortless. They fell in at their own accord. I’m familiar with both sets of repertoire, but picking the songs really wasn’t difficult in any way. What was extraordinary for me was how very married the themes were but from a very different point of view. That was interesting.

Dylan’s known for having written many of his early songs very quickly—“Blowin’ in the Wind” took him twenty minutes, he’s acknowledged—while Cohen has a reputation for having taken years writing much of his work, yet it’s striking how well they complement each other.

Absolutely, and I think you can hear the difference. For example, “Chimes of Freedom” to me is just a mammoth, extraordinary song and, for me, it shows Dylan at his most humane. There’s a humanity about that song that’s startling for me. It’s a wonderful song to sing for that reason, but it’s a sort-of torrent of imagery. You can almost feel it emerging as you sing it; the song emerges itself. Then you take a song like “A Thousand Kisses Deep,” and what I love about Cohen is the way he’ll use words again, he’ll use phrases again, but their repeated use is utterly deliberate. I don’t mean because they’re choruses; that’s not what I mean. He’s playing with threads all the time. It’s a very fine, fine work he does; it’s finely honed and it’s very different to the way Dylan works. I love that about both of them. 

***

Dylan has said, especially about early songs like “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Chimes of Freedom,” that he was not the prime force behind those songs, that they were instead channeled through him.

I love that he says that. I love that in his autobiography—in that first volume, the only volume of the three that we’ve ever seen—he talks about when Daniel Lanois comes to him and says, “Can we have another song like “Hard Rain?” and Dylan says, “The spirits that gave me those songs aren’t with me anymore.” I thought that was incredibly self-aware. There’s something very, very astonishing about understanding that and carrying on. 

Dylan seemed to have a grasp on the world around him right from the beginning, whereas Cohen’s grasp seems to have evolved more as he’s aged—and maybe that’s simply because he started later as a recording artist—particularly with albums like The Future. 

But again, who cares how you get to the top of the mountain? You went up the challenging path with crampons; you walked up the easy slope. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you got there. That’s very interesting, I think, in the comparison of those two: how they go about getting there. They both get there. They both get to something profound and spiritual and deeply-connected, profound human observation and questioning. They’re questing.

What, in part, gives this album such a compelling character is how you’ve taken liberties with the arrangements in ways that make the performances your own. You’re not copying these songs; you’re interpreting them. For instance, in a song like “It’s Alright Ma” you have an upbeat arrangement that seems to play against the ominous subtext of the lyrics. Did you intend for those sorts of paradoxical moments?

When that happens that happens by chance rather than design. When we’re arranging, I never go into arranging thinking, “What I want this song to do is…” I go into an arrangement thinking, “What could happen with this song if we listen to it differently?” We ask questions. We try things and we ask questions of the song. We sit the song down at the piano and we go [to the song], “How do you feel if we do this? How do you feel if we moved that section about?” And the song is very clear. The song will go, “Yeah, I like that,” or, “What are you thinking? Don’t be an idiot.” We know that straight away from the song. 

The songs are like live things—living, breathing things. We’re talking about real songs here, songs that Dylan channeled, songs that Cohen crafted, those kinds of songs; songs that come from something really deep that’s to do with the art of songwriting, those songs. They’re alive in the world and when they come to me—and they do come to me—and they knock on my door and ask me to sit with them at the piano with Simon Wallace in this instance, then we have to be awake and alert to what they’ll accept. 

***

Considering the sociopolitical context that binds these songs on the album, did you ever consider recording Cohen’s “Democracy?”

Yes, I did. I couldn’t make it work. The song didn’t want to come. We brought the song to the piano and the song sat on the piano and said, “Get lost.” [Laughs] Interestingly, into the live collection we put “The Future.” That song sat down at the piano and jumped about like a pea in a pod. It was fantastic. We found a great way of working with the song and the song comes out live and rips people out of their seats. I do it after “Masters of War,” and it’s a very interesting juxtaposition of those two songs together. 

In singing songs in which the lyrics are not transparent—particularly ones that have been open to interpretation for many years now—do you have to form some meaning for yourself in order to deliver it with conviction?

Two things about that… I tend to be drawn to and songs are drawn to me—that is, it’s not a one-way street—that I feel can resonate for me. I don’t like analysis because I have to be an instrument for the song—I have to be a singing instrument for the song—and I play by the text. So my technique is the amount of vocal quality I can bring to the text that the text will ask in any given moment. The second part of it is that if I stay completely out of the way, if I do not impose my will upon the song—if I don’t use the song to tell you what I think, but I let the song tell me what it thinks—then the audience will get what the song thinks. And that’s far more interesting. 

So that means in every singing of the song I get something different because the song’s always got something new to tell me, because with songwriters like Cohen and Dylan the work is Shakespearean. It’s multifaceted and it’s mysterious. It isn’t a clear thing. It’s not, “This is a song about traffic control.” It isn’t simple. These are songs about the human condition. 

Hard Rain (The Songs of Bob Dylan & Leonard Cohen) is available now on Kristalyn Records. For more information on Ms. Jungr, please visit her official website.

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Boz Scaggs Commands New Dukes of September DVD

This is the sort of gig that looks promising on paper: three respected music veterans, each one as ostensibly integral to the lineup as the others, all of them playing together on a set of some mutually-loved old favorites (classic soul and R&B covers, mostly) while sprinkling in a few of their respective radio hits along the way. As is often the case with these things, though, all three artists on the bill aren’t all playing at the same level, with the same spark or apparent interest. In other words, someone usually packs more of a punch than the rest. 

On the just-released DVD (and Blu-ray), The Dukes of September: Live at Lincoln Center, which captures a performance by Boz Scaggs, Donald Fagen, and Michael McDonald in November 2012, it’s Scaggs who reigns supreme, connecting with the crowd through the sheer passion of his musicianship while delivering showstopper after showstopper with soulful, unassuming command. The hits (“Lowdown,” “Miss Sun,” “Lido Shuffle”) sound fresh and funky; the covers (“Willie Dixon’s “The Same Thing,” Teddy Pendergrass’ “Love T.K.O.”) sound inspired. Point blank, Scaggs knows his way around a groove, and his quiet confidence enthralls the audience at every opportunity.

That’s not to suggest nobody else brought anything to the party. Fagen, in particular, is spirited throughout, whether in taking a turn on the Isley Brothers classic “Who’s That Lady” or in satisfying the Steely Dan prerequisite with hits (“Peg,” “Hey Nineteen,” “Reelin’ in the Years”) and even a deep cut (“Pretzel Logic”) to boot. McDonald, however, is another matter. When providing backup to Fagen (much like he did on Steely Dan’s albums of old) he’s fine, but when he takes the lead—huffing and puffing through “What a Fool Believes,” “Takin’ It to the Streets,” and “I Keep Forgettin’”—he too often sounds overwhelmed, out of breath, and just plain tired. Such moments are relatively few, though, and Fagen and Scaggs capably pick up the slack.

Live at Lincoln Center is sort of a reprisal of the New York Rock and Soul Revue collective of the late ’80s/early ’90s at the Beacon Theatre, which in addition to featuring the same three principals also boasted such artists as soul man Chuck Jackson and the late Phoebe Snow. This 90-minute performance by the Dukes achieves much the same easygoing, collaborative vibe of those shows twenty-five years ago and, at certain inspiring moments, it exceeds expectation.

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An Interview with Suzy Bogguss

Suzy Bogguss knows a great song when she hears one, and in a career spanning three decades she’s recorded more than a few. As both a performer of her own compositions and an interpreter of works by such esteemed artists as Nanci Griffith (“Outbound Plane”), John Hiatt (“Drive South”), and Guy Clark (“Instant Coffee Blues”), she’s distinguished herself as one of country music’s most eclectic and versatile talents. 

All the while Bogguss gained invaluable insight to matters of craft and storytelling, knowledge which no doubt served her well in making her latest album, Lucky, on which she covers a dozen absolute classics written by the legendary Merle Haggard.

Suzy, did you learn anything about Haggard’s songcraft in making this album?

I think I learned a ton. I always thought that he was this really gifted, stream-of-conscious [songwriter who] sits down and [the songs] just all pour out, because they sound so simple..…  Once you get in there you find all the internal rhymes, the way that he turns it so that it sounds like an aw-shucks person saying it, but it’s absolutely sophisticated. 

It often takes a lot of work to make something seem simple.

Exactly. Honestly, I feel like I’ve been to school. Just as a singer, he really hits me as far as the melodies he writes. I love singing these melodies and some of them were challenging for me, being that he’s a dude. Guys have a different kind of range than females do as far as in the sweet spot of our voices before they thin out. So I had to dig down into some low notes that I hadn’t sung in a long time just trying to make sure that I kept it sounding like it was super-easy to sing. Because that’s the other thing that he does: He makes the melody so it’s very sing-a-long-able but when you actually sing the whole thing you’re trying yourself as a singer as well. 

Haggard often comes across as such a rugged guy, but his honesty and willingness to be vulnerable is a big part of his songwriting.

I think so, too. That actually presented a tiny challenge for me as well. For instance, in “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go” I really risked sounding like a whiny, feeling-sorry-for-myself broad, and I did not want to do that. I had sort of a little mini-movie playing in my head of a woman who was confronting this feeling that she was having and actually expressing it and saying, “Let’s talk about this, because it’s important that you know that I’m feeling this.” It’s not just about me taking it and whining about it. It’s me explaining it to you so that we can get this out in the open. That’s what I was trying to do with that song because it was really tempting to just play it sad because the melody’s so sad. Merle’s version is very sad, but for me I was like, “If I do that I’m going to sound too wimpy.”

Your version of “Someday When Things are Good,” coming from a woman, conjures up an entirely different perspective than Merle’s version.

It’s like I told my husband, “There’s some truth in a lot of these songs.” We’ve been married 27 years, which in the music business is a hundred. There are times when you’re just not in-sync with each other. There are times when you think, “Man, the only way that I can get out of this mood is to remember that I don’t have to stay here. There’s no way I have to stay here. I’m choosing to stay here.” When I was singing that song I was conjuring up those feelings of when you’re just contrary to each other. For some reason for a couple of days you’re just like, “I can hardly look at you.”

The variety of music you’ve made throughout your career—from recording country to jazz, from covering the work of other artists to writing your own songs—had to have provided a good foundation for interpreting these songs.

It did. I travel with a lot of these players that are on the record. We’re very in-sync with each other when we get in the studio, and they knew that I was wanting to give this the sort of flavor we have when we’re playing on the road. We tried to get a little bit of some of that flavor in there. I think you probably caught a little jazz in “I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink.” I always felt like there was some of that in Merle’s music as well. He had evolved and decided to incorporate some of that into his production through the years, especially in the ‘80s when he was using saxophone a lot. I tried to keep the real organic sounds on the guitar and the steel and everything, not using hardly any effects. 

Being that you’ve interpreted songs by the likes of Nanci Griffith, John Hiatt, Guy Clark, and now Merle Haggard, as a vocalist do you engage songs by other songwriters any different than ones you’ve written yourself?

I think I’ve gotten a little better at making them my own now. I listen to my version of “Outbound Plane” now and I think, “Oh my God, I totally ripped Nanci off.” I don’t like that feeling.… Even with John [Hiatt’s] version of “Drive South,” I had to sing that thing a million times to come up with a melody line for some of the high parts because he’s completely fearless. He’ll just screech out whatever he wants to, but I don’t sing like that. So I had to just sort of make stuff up to take it where I needed to take it. 

Overall, what was your biggest challenge in singing Haggard’s songs on Lucky?

I wanted them to feel as authentic as when he sings them. 

For more information on Suzy Bogguss, please visit her official website.

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An Interview with Lydia Loveless

“Shit, I don’t want to do this.” 

Such is what Lydia Loveless at times tells herself when faced with the often daunting, anxiety-inducing prospect of writing a new song. 

“Once I have my band involved,” Loveless explains, “it’s more fun when we’re arranging things and trying to figure out, ‘What’s the beat gonna be? Where can we put a weird little break?’ But sitting down by myself and writing or deciding, ‘I should write today,’ that can feel kind of horrible.

“You’re open and raw,” she adds. “It can be scary.”  

Yet as the 23-year-old Ohio native illustrates with her third and latest LP, Somewhere Else (Bloodshot Records), the reward was worth the risk. Searing with unvarnished abandon, the album is a gritty, glorious rock ‘n’ roll salvo of sexual turbulence and boozy indiscretions.



You’re known for being straightforward and unaffectedly honest in your lyrics, but do you ever have moments when you’re torn between writing what you want to say versus something more blunt just because it may be what your audience expects?

No, it’s usually the opposite, if I do have a moment where I’m thinking about an audience. I’ll kind of wonder if anyone will want to hear what I have to say in such a blunt way. [Laughs] I never really started out to be blunt. It’s just sort of my style that I’ve developed. I just don’t see another way of doing things. There’ve been times when I’ve felt so embarrassed, but I think it’s better to go for embarrassing than bad. 

Why would you feel embarrassed, though?

Maybe just giving too much away, but I don’t really feel that way very often.… I’ve just decided to completely let go and not worry about people’s feelings, which I guess can sometimes be awkward, but people generally don’t get mad at me or confront me about my lyrics. Maybe my parents. [Laughs] 

So there’s no reticence on your part, like as a means of self-preservation, about sharing anything—not necessarily about other people but about yourself—with your audience? Is everything fair game for you to write about?

Yeah, it has to be because everything I do… My main thing is to be a songwriter. It’s almost overwhelming. I’ll be doing something and be like, “I’ll write about this later.” Then I’m like, “Well, I don’t want to cheapen this moment by thinking about how I’m going to write about it later.” But I think that’s just a songwriter’s brain, I guess. So it all is kind of like potential songwriting fodder. 



In writing about sex or indirectly about sexual themes—as you do with something like “Head” on the new album—there’s a risk of coming across as gratuitous or as a means to shock an audience. Like with nudity in a film, some people will get turned off if it’s not particularly inherent to the narrative. Is that sort of concern one which you’re ever conscious of while you’re writing? 

I wouldn’t say I was ever being gratuitous or trying to shock. I mean, it’s 2014 so it’s kind of hard to shock people, but I think people are threatened by a woman singing about that sort of thing, which I guess is their loss. [Laughs] I mean, it’s just me writing about my life or things that have occurred or the things that I think. If people are going to get turned off by it they probably shouldn’t listen to it.

Of course, men have been singing about sex in rock ‘n’ roll and blues for decades.

It’s always been that way. There are songs like, [Singing] “I’m gonna wait ‘til the midnight hour,” which basically means, “I’m gonna have sex tonight.” It’s an age-old topic, but I don’t think men like it when women objectify them instead of the age-old concept of them doing otherwise.

What accounts for the creative curiosity that informs your work—be it your appreciation for so many styles of music or pieces of literature that inspire some of your lyrics? 

Well, I was home schooled and my parents were always very adamant about us all learning what we wanted to and always doing what we were interested in and what we cared about. We lived in the middle of the country, and everyone thought we were sort of freaks because we were intellectual and we had a huge stereo set up in our house and lots of books and movies. I was just being told as a kid to like whatever I wanted.... I got that from my parents, like, “If there’s something to be learned then you should go learn it.” They sent me to acting camp in summer when most of my friends were thinking who was going to get them pregnant that year. 

For more information on Lydia Loveless, please visit her official website. 

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