More than three decades after disbanding, The Jam continue to inspire a fiercely loyal following as well as a legacy that only magnifies with each passing year. Last year alone, the amount of archival releases and other such homages devoted to the seminal British band rivaled if not surpassed the output of most otherwise contemporary acts. Foremost among them was The Jam: About the Young Idea, a sweeping exhibition curated by Somerset House in London, endorsed by the band’s classic lineup — lead vocalist and guitarist Paul Weller, drummer Rick Buckler, and bassist Bruce Foxton — and stocked with memorabilia and multimedia that contextualized the trio’s musical contributions and lasting sociocultural impact.
A supplementary retrospective album and documentary (both of them bearing the same title as the exhibition) offered further perspective, as did Fire & Skill, a staggering six-disc box set boasting as many complete performances culled from the band’s live vaults. Even solo endeavors — Weller’s twelfth solo LP Satterns Pattern was released in May while, mere weeks prior, Buckler’s autobiography That’s Entertainment: My Life with The Jam was published — stoked further interest and appreciation. Irreverent and iconoclastic, The Jam hit their sonic and modish sartorial stride amid British punk’s boorish late ‘70s insurgency, amassing eighteen consecutive top-forty UK singles like “In the City,” “That’s Entertainment,” “Town Called Malice,” and “Going Underground,” barnstorming through rapturous, packed-to-the-rafters live performances along the way. Today, fans who are too young to have experienced The Jam’s singular fury firsthand consider their songs to be as vital and relevant as anything on mainstream radio, arguably more so. “They’re discovering The Jam’s music now,” bassist Bruce Foxton told Write on Music last year, calling from Weller’s own Black Barn Studios while at work on his forthcoming solo LP Smash The Clock (due March 18). “That’s partly, maybe, through their parents — their parents were into The Jam many years ago — and also with Paul, because Paul Weller is still out there in his own right, writing new, great albums. When young people go see Paul, they may well think, This guy’s great. What else has he done?” The question is one that Foxton is all too happy to answer in his own right with his aptly named outfit From The Jam. Formed in 2007 with Buckler, vocalist Russell Hastings, and guitarist David Moore, the band was welcomed with the sort of rapturous passion that recalled the glory days. Boasting the old band’s rhythm section didn’t hurt, either, of course. Buckler walked away in 2009, unfortunately, but Foxton continues to soldier on with an unwavering faith in this music that not only means so much to him but to countless fans around the world.
“It was a big decision in 2007 to actually do what we’re doing,” he said, “because those songs are held in high esteem and high regard in fans’ hearts and mine that we didn’t want to ruin that.” Perhaps part of the reason fans have such an attachment to The Jam has to do with how the music mirrored its time, addressing prevalent issues and societal burdens with staunch ferocity. It’s not difficult to conceive that, for younger fans in particular, such songs fulfill a void that is lacking from music of their own era. Foxton concurred. “I think there are not a lot of current bands out there really saying much,” he said, adding, “whereas The Jam, rightly or wrongly — obviously we were very young when we voiced our opinions on the country, etcetera, but — a lot of it is relevant. A lot of it is probably naïveté on our part [as well]. We were young then and it was just our view at the time. We weren’t trying to become prime minister. We were just airing our complaints and annoyances at various things in the country. “I don’t think there’s a lot of people saying much in their songs,” he continued. “They might be some good tunes, but lyrically it’s not saying anything at all.” Whether or not a song’s lyrical context explicitly resonates with listeners today — Weller based the lyrics to “Eton Rifles,” for instance, on a television news report he’d seen about a Right to Work march where unemployed protesters faced ridicule from conservative adversaries — the spirit of it does.
So too does the spirit of the culture from which that music came. “At our shows people come obviously to hear those great Jam songs,” explained Foxton, “but it’s also a really big social gathering where people come from all parts of the country — [people] as far afield as Japan come to some of the shows. It’s primarily about the music, but also about the clothes and the attitude. It’s a meeting up with friends again, basically. They’re into the same things. It’s a real big community kind of spirit now.” What about Weller, though? Does From The Jam, which of course perform many songs he wrote, have his blessing? “To be honest,” Foxton replied, “Paul probably doesn’t care one way or the other. I think if he came to a show he would accept that we are performing those songs really well, but he’s got his own life. He’s doing his own thing. He’s not bothered, really, either way. There’s really no more I can say about that. He really doesn’t care.” Despite appearing in the About The Young Idea documentary (and attending the exhibition at Somerset House), Weller hasn’t always gone out of his way to embrace his past with the band, particularly in his live performances which have often overlooked much of The Jam’s back catalog in favor of newer material. “Paul did try for a while to deny it almost, which I couldn’t understand,” Foxton conceded, adding, “but that was his frame of mind in that particular time. “No matter how much Paul tries to literally pull away from what got him to where he is today,” he continued, “he’s even realized now that he is expected to play some of those great Jam songs, and he does. And he should as far as I’m concerned, because that’s how he got to where he is.” As for Foxton, with a new studio album on the horizon and a slew of tour dates scheduled throughout 2016, the bassist is busier, more in demand, and more enthusiastic than ever. “We still perform those songs with as much passion and energy as we can,” said Foxton. “We’re not a covers band. We’re not a cabaret band. We believe in those songs, and if I didn’t think we were as a group doing those songs justice I wouldn’t have embarked on From The Jam.”
The Temperance Movement had already opened for the Rolling Stones on a handful of dates last year, but when the nascent British-based band got the nod to do it again this past June at Orlando’s Citrus Bowl, age-old anxieties emerged. Of the sold-out audience, for starters, Australian-born drummer Damon Wilson recently told Write on Music on the phone from his UK residence, recalling his speculations, “What kind of mood are they in? Are they sitting down? Are they drunk? Are they sober? Is it daytime? Is it nighttime? What’s going on out there? What’s the feeling? What [was] the main act’s soundcheck [like]? What are they gonna do? You’ve got to factor in quite a lot of things.”
As showtime loomed, however, Wilson was at least sure of one thing:
Nobody was coming to see his band.
“When you go to a Stones gig it’s all about the Stones,” he said, “probably more than any other band. They’re actually a bit of a challenge to open for because they don’t need any warming up. People are there and they’re ready to go.”
Since forming in 2011, the Temperance Movement (whose self-titled debut LP was originally issued on indie label Earache Records in 2013 and was re-released this past February on Fantasy/Concord Records) have built a burgeoning fan base all their own. Messengers of chiseled, rhythm-and-blues-soaked rock ‘n’ roll in the vein of The Faces and Humble Pie, they deliver rambunctious album standouts like “Midnight Black” and “Ain’t No Telling” with a swagger that comes from having hit the proverbial jackpot. For the band’s five members — besides Wilson the lineup includes frontman Phil Campbell, guitarists Luke Potashnick and Paul Sayer, and bassist Nick Fyffe — that’s not too far from the truth.
In fact, as Wilson recalled, the band’s earliest rehearsals not only proved to be worthwhile for everyone involved but enlightening and inspiring as well.
“The sound came instantly,” he said, “so it was very clear that we weren’t a pop group. It was also clear we weren’t a death-metal band.
“If I was to make it really simplistic,” he continued, “I think we kind of jokingly said, ‘Let’s be the next Black Crowes.’ I guess. That’s kind of the dream for any musician, to be in a band that people respect the musicians and the music [of] but you also get played on the radio and you get to travel the world. I think that’s what most musicians want.”
That’s not to say there haven’t been any tentative moments in the band’s evolution thus far.
“For the first probably six months, I remember,” said Wilson, “when we did bits of recording, a handful of gigs, it was very part-time. But even as that was going, I knew what we were doing was brilliant. I just didn’t think that anyone else would think it’s brilliant.
“It’s not that we didn’t have any confidence,” he continued. “We had loads of confidence. I’d never really taken a band from nothing to as far as we’ve gone before.”
Greater success seems all but certain to follow. Performing their music to audiences at every opportunity, the Temperance Movement are currently touring across the United States and Canada — the band’s latest single, “Take It Back,” currently tops the Canadian Active Rock chart — and no doubt earning new fans each step of the way.
“It’s not necessarily how good the musicians are, because there are plenty of better musicians than us,” said Wilson. “It’s just that it works. That’s a really nice thing about music — that’s why people never get sick of new bands — because there’s something special that goes on that you can’t put your finger on, that at least one unique combination of people works.”
It wasn’t until she moved to Nashville in her early twenties that Shannon LaBrie made up her mind to pursue a career in music. Far from chasing some starry-eyed or naïve ambition, however, LaBrie was calling on a lifetime to that point spent learning her craft: practicing classical piano since she was a toddler, fostering a four-octave vocal range, and composing original songs. Any idealism she entertained upon her move to Music City, actually, was mitigated by the work she knew it would take to succeed.
That was five years ago, and since then it’s been a steady climb of concert stages and recording studios, of seeking opportunities at every turn and making ends meet in the meanwhile.
Her diligence has paid off with her debut LP, Just Be Honest. The album, which premiered in the Top 10 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart upon its release last February, is a superb work of mostly acoustic, often jazz-and-blues-inspired pop, rendered in a voice rich with such expressive depth it seemingly belongs to someone much, much older. In a way, it does.
“Writing songs and singing and playing, those were tools in me overcoming a lot of trials and grief in my youth,” says LaBrie, 27, who at 14 suffered the loss of her father to cancer while at the same time contending with a chronic, undisclosed illness of her own. “After my dad died I started playing guitar, and I kind of became obsessed with it. As I moved through college it just became more and more apparent that this was just something that I had to do.”
Such existential jolts undoubtedly have a way of impacting one’s own sense of purpose, and LaBrie concedes that hers likely galvanized the determination that has fueled her musical ambitions. “But also I attribute it to growing up with a really great mother and a dad for the short time that I had him,” she adds. “They really gave me a good foundation of belief and trusting and not getting obsessed with, like, ‘What if I fail? What if this doesn’t work out?’ That was never anything that was scary to me as a child, and I would attribute that to my parents a lot.”
Having found her footing within Nashville’s burgeoning independent music scene, LaBrie signed with Zodlounge Records, a boutique production company that afforded her the time and guidance she needed to take her talent to the next level. “You have to be working in a place where you’re able to feel relaxed and comfortable,” she explains, and the contentment she felt in the studio ultimately freed her to concentrate in ways that served the songs well and, as in such sultry moments as “Getting’ Tired” and “Slow Dance,” allowed her gorgeous voice to shine.
“I could write songs like that the rest of my life,” LaBrie says of the latter. “That’s kind of where my heart is.”
Then there’s “I Remember a Boy,” the album’s breakout song and a heart-wrenching lament of disillusioned love. “It was the first song of many that was extremely honest,” says LaBrie. “I felt like I said exactly what I wanted to say.”
While she speaks her piece through her music LaBrie says she’s not spilling her guts, so to speak, underscoring what is not only an act of self-preservation but also a means to resonate with listeners. “I like writing songs that everyone can relate to,” she says, “because if I were to write out the gory details I’d feel like people couldn’t relate to it as much. But when you can express an emotion that everyone’s feeling in a broader sense I feel like more people can relate to it.”
As long as LaBrie continues to write songs that embrace and build upon the quality and sophistication of the ones on Just Be Honest, it’s a wish she should have no trouble making come true.
“This is what I was made to do,” says LaBrie. “It’s in my heart and I just can’t do anything else.”
For more information on Shannon LaBrie, please visit the artist’s official website. Just Be Honest is available now at retail and online outlets.
“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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