Brandon's Buzz

EDITOR’S NOTE: I originally published this post on October 1, 2009, to celebrate the release of Whitney Houston’s long-awaited comeback album
I Look to You, and in light of yesterday’s tragic news, I can think of no more appropriate eulogy or tribute — particularly from and on a website that was designed for just such a purpose — than to revel one more time, with all the gratitude my soul can hold, in some truly great music. Need proof positive that the simple act of opening your mouth and belting out a magnificent melody (with perfect pitch, natch) is enough to transform, to CHANGE, the whole damn world? Keep reading.

Sherry Ann and I have this thing between us that we lovingly call “The Whitney Houston Rule,” which came to exist in the winter of 1998 when Miss Whitney became positively livid with the Recording Academy — not because they failed to nominate her soundtrack for The Preacher’s Wife for any major Grammys, but because they nominated her in what she perceived to be the wrong categories.  See, Whitney considered Wife to be the gospel album she had long dreamed of making, and while it was indeed top-heavy with selections from the God-is-love songbook, it also contained a handful of viable radio singles, enough to keep the boys at Hot 97 happy, and so the Academy deemed that the album was only eligible for the R&B categories, a decision which so enraged Whitney that she proceeded to embark on a nationwide press tour announcing her immense dissatisfaction over the news and proclaiming that she would not be showing up to that year’s ceremony to accept any awards she might win.  (The single funniest moment of this madness was when she appeared on Entertainment Tonight and slapped a deluxe diva diatribe — “I’m sick of work bein’ done and people not recognizin’ it!!” — upside poor Bob Goen’s head.  To this day, over a decade later, whenever either Sherry Ann or myself wish to give voice to something which frustrates or annoys us, we always preface it by cooing, Whitney-style, “No, Bob…”; and, to this day, the audio of Whitney’s hilarious hissyfit can be found on my iPod, where it continues to stay in pretty heavy rotation.)

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Upon its release back in January, my new online buddy Blake used this very website to more or less pan — or, at the very least, damn with imperceptibly faint praise — Lady Antebellum’s white hot sophomore album Need You Now, daring to call it “One Tree Hill with fiddles” and sending that phrase flying like an epithetical slap across Sherry Ann’s beautiful face.  (Lest you lose the thread here, Sherry Ann is the free world’s most passionate devotee of that angst-riddled assortment of Tree Hill confidantes and clotheshorses.)  He swore a number of times that he didn’t necessarily mean his phrase to disparage or belittle, even though Sherry Ann and I both took it exactly that way, and I repeatedly invited her to tear Blake’s flip, slightly sullen sarcasm to shreds — as only she can, trust me — right cheer on the Buzz.  She repeatedly declined each request, but having spent a good measure of time with this quite fine record over the past few months, I feel both compelled and qualified to weigh in with my own two cents.

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Because his knowledge of her remains woefully inadequate, despite my best efforts to indoctrinate him on the fly, A has been impatiently awaiting a Buzz playlist celebrating the worthy tuneage of Madonna for the best part of two years now. I’ve been letting the idea percolate for the whole of that time, penning its prose catch as catch can and waiting for the perfect moment to unleash the final product. Said moment has arrived at last: last year, the Material Girl marked her twenty-fifth anniversary of her gale-force arrival on the pop charts with a sterling double-disc Celebration of a handful of the most famous hits in pop music history, and this coming Tuesday, a much-ballyhooed installment of Fox’s zeitgeist-capturing smash series Glee themed exclusively around her iconic catalogue hits the air surfing a raging tidal wave of unfettered hype (magazine covers and profiles galore, and even a companion CD!), and if last week’s delicious sneak preview — a spot-on shot-for-shot spoof of the stylish, groundbreaking videoclip for “Vogue,” with the uproarious Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch, clearly relishing this role of a lifetime) stealing center stage — is an accurate indication of what’s in store, the Gleeks are in for one heck of a joyous, raucous ride.

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Earlier in the summer, one of Sherry Ann’s best friends was planning a trip to Mexico, and before she discovered that the friend doesn’t even own an mp3 player (!!), she proposed that I create a playlist of Mexico-themed tracks that she could load on the iPod. My initial reaction to her request was that it would be an entirely futile exercise, that there didn’t exist enough songs about our southern neighbors to even take down the fingers on one hand, much less fill up a brilliant Buzz playlist. However, a bit of spelunking into the scary depths of my iTunes library proved my original hypothesis to be incorrect. Indeed, some of my favorite songs ever (literally!) are either about outright, or — in their lyrics and melodies — ultimately evoke the spirit and mood of, Mexico. I quickly understood that she was on to something, and what follows is the final result of this earnest experiment. If, by the end of track number ten, you’re not picturing Mexico in a whole new light, do me a favor and start all over again at song one. And the second time through, listen harder.

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The Associated Press predicted Monday night it would likely be the biggest and most spectacular memorial for a public figure — bigger than Elvis, bigger than Diana, bigger than Marilyn — in the history of the free world, and having been glued to the coverage of Michael Jackson’s farewell service all damn day last Tuesday, surfing aimlessly across all the channels broadcasting the exact same action, I can scarcely imagine a more true statement.

Except to say that I found the overall presentation to be incredibly moving — and, when you consider the whole thing was thrown together on something like 48 hours notice, stunningly smooth — and that Miss Mariah would almost certainly have benefited from an extra hour of rehearsal time, and that the choice to finally cut his hair is the best creative choice John Mayer has made in eons, I haven’t much pertinent commentary to add to the growing list of funeral post-mortems. As I indicated in my initial Buzz eulogy, Michael’s music is strong enough to forever speak for itself, and, notwithstanding Al Sharpton’s pompous proselytizing, it by and large did on Tuesday.

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The bikinis are already out in full effect (lord love those becleavaged CenTex beauties), the mercury is already scorching (Austin promises to be in triple-digit territory by next weekend), and the pop has already taken a turn toward the mindless (thank you, Lady GaGa, for reigniting a trend, milady). Means only one thing: the long, hot summer is upon us once again, and spring, with its life-affirming promises of the spirit of renewal, has been sent packing for another year.

Sometime around early April, with the dazzling second act laid down by a white-hot cadre of Colorado boys who call themselves The Fray and the stunning returns to form turned in by Pet Shop Boys, Wynonna, Annie Lennox, and Kelly Clarkson, it became very clear that music as a whole had regained its mojo following a bumpy time last fall, and that, at least creatively, the industry was firing on all eight cylinders. Some damn fine tuneage made its way to the forefront of our collective consciousness in the season just passed; what follows directly is a convincing cross-section of same:

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I’m currently working (I promise!) on a Madonna playlist (for which A has been waiting patiently, as he requested it many months ago), as well as one inspired by Rick Dees’ legendary Weekly Top 40 program (archived episodes of which I’m thrilled to tell you are played on Sunday afternoons — commercial free! — on XM’s ’90s channel), but when I ran across the shimmering new single from one of the planet’s all-time great people — that sparkling newlywed Mandy Moore — on iTunes last week, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to reaffirm my profound devotion to her boundless brilliance.

Out in front of the May 26 street date for Amanda Leigh, Moore’s much-anticipated sixth studio record, the terrific romp of a lead single “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week” stands as an invigorating blast of pop nirvana and proves for all the world that Moore is an artist to be reckoned with.  (Any doubts that remained about that very fact in the wake of the aural miracles Moore set free on 2007’s grand, wondrous Wild Hope, “Heart” washes them clean downstream.)

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Are you believin’ we’re already a month into the new year?! The Buzz hasn’t even fully closed out the books on 2008 yet, and ’09 has already ticked away thirty precious days of its half-life.

I know that we’re already knee deep into the new year’s music slate, and that you’ve no doubt already largely forgotten all the brilliance 2008 had to offer, but please allow the Buzz a final opportunity to sway your ears. The ten tracks which make up the playlist that follows don’t necessarily comprise the absolute best music of the year just ended — any list of that stripe which fails to include Sugarland’s fascinating cover of “Life in a Northern Town,” Kings of Leon’s incendiary “Use Somebody,” Tift Merritt’s devastating “Another Country,” or Kacy Crowley’s wondrous “The Universe” is just ridiculously short-sighted and ill-conceived — and, indeed, a great many of these songs may have slipped entirely through the cracks of your musical cognizance last year. Do seize this shot to correct that foolishness. It may not come ’round again.

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(Editor’s note:  I handwrote this post two full weeks ago, back when the topic was considerably more timely.  All apologies for the delay.)

Fall has been in full swing for several weeks now, and to here, its slate of new music has been uniformly stellar:  the New Kids on the Block have executed one of the most brilliantly maneuvered comebacks in recent pop memory with their startlingly fine (and fun) new record The Block (keep an eye out for this set’s second “Single,” a terrific duet with the white-hot Ne-Yo); led by Caleb Followill’s achingly vulnerable drawl, the Kings of Leon have delivered an intoxicating masterpiece with their superlative fourth album Only By the Night; and top-notch singles from Ray LaMontagne, Brandy, Jon McLaughlin, The Killers (whose latest, the strangely alluring “Human,” is marked by dopey-even-for-them lyrical content — the chorus, swear to Jesus, opens with the line “Are we human / or are we dancer?” — but a brilliant beat that splits the blissful difference betwixt “Somebody Told Me” and “When You Were Young”) and others, which would only indicate that more greatness is imminent.

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He was studying in the New York City police academy, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Brooklyn beat cop. But his killer voice, his love of music, and his dream to be a part of that world carried him out west. A string of smashing club gigs in the Bay Area brought him to the attention of Columbia Records, which — thanks to the bracing success being enjoyed by a young Jersey Everyman called Bruce Springsteen — was at the forefront of the burgeoning regular Joe movement that was spreading like wildfire across the rock music landscape, which had struggled for a time to stay relevant in the wake of the disco explosion of the late ’70s. A strong debut album and a simple name change — Edward James Mahoney became one Eddie Money — and the rest was history.

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In a smashingly brilliant follow up to last year’s monumental ten-disc Classic Soft Rock collection — the infomercial promoting which was hosted by Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock (those peerless bastions of ’80s schmaltz who were better recognized by the masses as Air Supply) and was one of the finest, most compelling half-hours of television I have ever witnessed — the fabulous folks at Time-Life have truly outdone themselves with Ultimate Rock Ballads, a new eight-album assemblage of music which pulls together 133 of the most essential percussive dirges from the past four decades into one gloriously cheesy listening experience.

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For a minute there, didn’t it feel like Austin was gonna become the next Seattle?

In much the same way that Seattle gave birth to the grunge scene in the early ’90s, with homegrown bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Pearl Jam leading the zeitgeist-capturing charge, a new singer-songwriter boom — one, no doubt, which got kicked off by Jagged Little Pill, got stoked by the staggering success of Jewel’s debut and Sheryl Crow’s sophomore efforts, and got sent into orbit by the phenomenal, out-of-the-box success of Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair — exploded across the landscape in the latter part of the decade, and, thanks to the emergence on the national stage of supremely gifted local talents like Patty Griffin, Kelly Willis, Shawn Colvin, Sister 7, Fastball, and the peerless Abra Moore, its epicenter was Austin. Having long labeled itself the “live music capital of the world,” the city had all of a sudden become ground zero in the most significant cultivation of introspective music since the early days of Dylan, Mitchell, Collins, and Taylor. (Clive Davis was so certain it was gonna stick that he launched the Arista/Austin imprint to discover and develop new artists.)

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One of country music’s most beloved and respected artists looks back to the roots of her raisin’ with a challenging yet oddly comforting new project. Infused with the spirit and sound of warm, heart-tugging bluegrass, Coal finds the estimable Kathy Mattea continuing to stretch the staid boundaries of her creativity in search of a rich, resonant truth. Devastated by the recent rash of fatal mining disasters, and haunted by her own West Virginian upbringing (as the child from a significant lineage of black-lunged, sunken-cheeked coal miners), Mattea channels her own conflicted emotions and her own honey-sweet voice into eleven traditional dirges and spirituals.

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