A timely holiday-themed song!

We’re going away for the rest of the week, so this one’s  kind of  on the fly.  I’m very pleased with how the guitar came out on this one.  I didn’t know it was going to sound like that.  This song, too arty for its own good probably, has been hanging around for a couple of months, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to do the guitar.  In my head I was leaning toward something more Ry-Coodery, a messy, slack-string, open-tuned arrangement played with a slide maybe if I could pull it off–something with a lot of space in it–and this recording was meant only for figuring out what key suited the song.  But I was surprised by how it sounded.  I like it when that happens.  I’d still be interested to hear what it sounds like the way I originally had in mind, but I’m going with this version for now. 

I like the guitar.  The vocal . . . .  

I used to not have much respect for singers.  I thought you could either sing or you couldn’t, and if you could, lucky you.  Granted, within that category of people who can sing, there are those who have greater or lesser ranges, but that doesn’t matter for most songs.  Unless it’s opera or the “Star-Spangled Banner” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” i.e., a song that spans a big range of notes, you can usually transpose any song to a key that will fit a particular voice.  Within that category of people who can sing, there are certainly ones who have vocal qualities that are more pleasing or less pleasing–timbers, textures, phrasings, other-words-that-don’t-really-mean-anything, etc.–but if you can sing at all, at least you can sing at all.  Whereas all people who cannot sing are equal in their nonability to sing.  But mostly I thought if you could sing, all you had to do was do it.

Now, though, I recognize that there’s more to it than that.  Few people are born with a set of pipes like Aretha Franklin’s, but such people do exist, yet there’s only one Aretha Franklin.  So there’s more to it than just having the natural ability.  Mariah Carey and Reba McEntire probably have voices as strong as or stronger than Franklin’s, and there’s nothing wrong with the quality of their voices, but I love Aretha’s voice and can’t stand to listen to Carey’s or McEntire’s warbling histrionics.  Aaron Neville, a highly regarded singer, probably has as much range and control as Frank Sinatra and George Jones, but I love Sinatra and Jones while Aaron Neville’s voice makes me want to drink paint.

So I now believe that artistic judgment and technique are things to be valued in a vocal performance.  Lots of people can hit the notes and have pleasing voices, but that doesn’t mean they’re good singers.  People with good voices have a wider range of choices, and sometimes they make bad choices.  Singing ability is not the thing that first attracts me to a song–when it comes to a singer’s voice, I’m pretty forgiving (as I hope you are)–but I do appreciate some voices very much.  My favorite voices are often the quieter ones, the ones who don’t get out in front of the song but stay within the song and use minimal ornamentation, not even vibrato.  They’re mostly women.  Among them would be Linda Thompson, Cassandra Wilson, Sylvia Tyson (thank you, Wendy, for informing me about her), Diana Krall, Norah Jones, the non-heliumated Joni Mitchell (who is kind of a female Merle Haggard in having every base covered:  singing, songwriting, musicianship) and, lately, an insanely great Irish singer from back in the fifties I just heard of a few months ago, Margaret Barry.  On the male side it’s mostly just George Jones and Levon Helm.  Man, I love Levon Helm’s voice.  John Hiatt’s, too.  Here’s both of them.

 At the other end of the spectrum are those who cannot sing, not really anyway, and who don’t have any choices to make but who bring something else to their interpretation of the song that somehow compensates for their lack of natural talent and proficiency.  John Prine can’t sing.  His voice is a raspy wheeze.  But most days I’d rather listen to him than almost anybody else.  He’s one of my favorite songwriters (in fact, this week’s  song is pretty much a pastiche of me doing Springsteen doing Prine), so that probably has something to do with it.  I doubt I’d much care for John Prine doing covers of other people’s songs (though his version of  Blaze Foley’s “Clay Pigeons” is convincing.)  Prine doing his own songs, though, is sublime.  His songs are sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful, almost always wise, and his voice has an endearing quality that makes it the ideal vessel for bearing bad news.  Other people can cover Prine’s songs and do them as well as Prine, but they can’t really bring that endearing quality that Prine brings to them.

I feel the same way about Willie Nelson.  I’m commiting some heresy here, because Willie gets a lot of critical respect for his singing, with the emphasis being on his “phrasing” ability.  I think most of that respect is unwarranted, and as for his “phrasing,” people forget that Willie is stoned most of the time and probably couldn’t find the beat with a Geiger counter.  What they’re calling “phrasing” may very well just be Willie intermittently waking up to the fact that somebody’s playing a song he is expected to sing on.  (And if you’ve seen Willie in the last several years, you probably know he has pretty much quit singing altogether.  His performances are essentially recitations of the lyrics done in the general vicinity of his band.)  Willie can hit most notes, so he’s not an un-singer like Prine, but the thinness of his voice at higher registers is grating.  Willie doing his own songs, however, (especially in the solo acoustic album Who’ll Buy My Memories?, popularly known as The IRS Tapes), or Willie doing that mosaic of “found” music he puts together in Red Headed Stranger, is pretty special.  Willie doing “Always on My Mind” or “Bridge Over Troubled Water” is simply unnecessary.

And just to make sure I cover the last two of my main heroes, there are those who get little respect for their singing and who are popularly regarded as being “bad” singers but who in fact are great singers.  That would be Bob Dylan and Richard Thompson.

The Okie twang from early in his career is what most people remember about Dylan, and from that it was determined that he couldn’t sing, but in fact Dylan has many voices and infinite versatility within those voices.  Unlike Prine, there’s nothing, or very little, endearing about Dylan.  Even on his most vulnerable songs, such as “You’re A Big Girl Now” and “Up to Me,” there’s a standoffishness.  He may sound like a helpless animal caught in a trap, but if you get close enough to try to help him get loose, he’ll probably bite your finger.  That snarl featured in “Positively 4th Street” and “Like a Rolling Stone” is never far below the surface.  His voice has gotten only more expressive and supple with age (and he doesn’t do the weird “Lay Lady Lay” voice anymore.)  On his later stuff (and the albums of the last ten or twelve years have been as great as anything he did at any point in his career), the snarl is at bay, and now he sounds alternately like Beezelbub or that leering, creepy uncle who turns out to be harmless.  He’s lecherous, teasing, funny and goofy on his latest records, and it’s all done with the voice.  Try singing like Dylan sometime if you think he can’t sing.  He’s the greatest songwriter who ever lived (and I’ll stand on Townes Van Zandt’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that), so it’s no wonder that a lot of people can cover his songs and do great versions of them, but nobody but Dylan can bring to a song what Dylan brings to a song.   Listen to how he turns a song that really has no melody at all into (I think) one of the saddest songs ever performed.  Every line is given an intense reading.

“No one else could play that tune.  You knew it was up to me.”  Like he said.

It’s probably going too far to say that Richard Thompson is a great singer, but for his songs, his delivery is apt.  His voice has a modal quality, which is a fancy way of saying that his range is severely limited and that, even within that range, there are some particular notes he can’t squarely hit so he has to get to sideways.  Thompson often sounds like he’s fighting the song itself, which gives the performance kind of a meta quality.  Many of his songs are dark and bitter anyway, and listening to him sing them is like reading Beckett, which is to say it’s like watching a starving, half-mad dog scratching and biting at fleas.  (Don’t know Thompson’s stuff?  Look on Youtube for a video of almost anything he does, but especially “Beeswing” or “Vincent Black Lightning 1952,” which are his main show pieces.  I’m tired of linking and embedding stuff.  Or you can read  the opening verse of “The End of the Rainbow”: 

I feel for you, you little horror
Safe at your mother’s breast
No lucky break for you around the corner
‘Cause your father is a bully
And he thinks that you’re a pest
And your sister she’s no better than a whore.
Life seems so rosy in the cradle,
But I’ll be a friend I’ll tell you what’s in store
There’s nothing at the end of the rainbow.

See?  I told you he was bitter.)  Like Dylan, Richard Thompson is a great enough songwriter that any good singer will get something worthwhile from the songs, but it won’t be what Richard Thompson gets out of them.  We’re not even talking about his guitar-playing here, which is a whole different discussion.

It’s disappointing for all of us, I know, that Buck and I aren’t better singers (and that nutcracker doll has a lot of nerve to bill himself specifically as a “singing” nutcracker doll.)  When I first started messing around with the recorder, I was surprised by (i) how good the guitar sounded and (ii) how bad the vocal sounded.  Knowing how unlikable the vocal is on some of these songs has made me regard singers in a new light and listen more closely to what people do with their voices.  So, my apologies to all you great singers out there I sort of put in the back of the bus.  You really are musicians.  I acknowledge that now.

(Still, you could at least hold a tambourine, right?)

We’re out of town through the weekend, so next week will most assuredly be a punt.

To end, here’s Cassandra Wilson, whose voice is luxurious on this song.