Breaking the Line

Paul Wiliams: '70s Hitmaker on Writing Songs for Kermit, the Carpenters and Ishtar

The documentary Paul Williams: Still Alive distracts from its intriguing subject with the naggingly persistent intrusions of the filmmaker himself, who more often than not seems to be making the film as a means to buddy up with his musical idol. (It doesn't work.) But if nothing else, it has put Williams, a prolific lyricist whose songs include "We've Only Just Begun," "Rainy Days and Mondays" and "The Rainbow Connection" back in the spotlight, and gave me a chance to talk to him about them for the A.V. Club. It also gave me a chance to pursue what's become an accident campaign to mention the cult classic The Phantom of the Paradise in as many recent articles as possible; see here and here, and stay tuned for my upcoming interview with the guy who played Beef.

 

"It's Laura Now": Against Me! and Its Transgender Singer Own the Stage

As a critic, sometimes you get paid to be in the right place at the right time. I'd somehow missed the fact that Against Me! was playing at Philadelphia's Electric Factory this past Sunday until my Inquirer editor asked me to cover the show — something about the phrase "opening for The Cult" evidently induced some form of temporary amnesia. But being present for the band's first tour with singer Laura Jane Grace — who, up until a few months ago, was known as singer Tommy Gabel — turned out to be a genuine privilege. I suppose the fact that the throng pressed up against the stage had paid headliner prices to watch the band play a 45-minute opening set meant they were a self-selecting group of diehard fans, but even so, it was amazing to watch heavily tattooed dudes jab their fingers in the air, biceps flexing, as they shouted along with the words to the unreleased new song "Transgender Dysphoria Blues," whose lyrics include the lines, "You want them to see you like they see every other girl / They just see a faggot." Even more extraordinary was the moment when an aggrieved looking fan, dressed for the occasion in an Against Me! t-shirt, yelled out, "Play some old shit, Tom!" and the man behind tapped him softly on the shoulder and gently chided him, "It's Laura now." More on the show, including a few words on the ostensible headliner, in my Inquirer review.

As a codicil, here's a review I did a few weeks back on Wish Me Away, a documentary about country star Chely Wright's decision to come out as a lesbian. The movie spends a lot of time worrying about whether the country music establishment can ever embrace an openly gay performer, but I wonder if the individual fans might be turn out to be more open-minded than the industry that services them gives them credit. If Carrie Underwood can embrace gay marriage, maybe we're not as polarized as some would have us believe.

Metric's Emily Haines: "It Was Always the Dream to Reclaim Radio"

I don't know many critics who rated Metric's 2009 album Fantasies quite as highly as I did, but if you like your pop music unabashed, heavy on sleazy synths and swing-for-the-rafters choruses, it's just about perfect. And while plenty of the popular music I love ends up being, in fact, not all that popular, Fantasies sold nearly half a million copies worldwide, especially impressive considering it was the band's first self-released album. Their new Synthetica doesn't have anything as punch-you-in-the-face awesome as "Help I'm Alive" or "Gold Guns Girls," but it turns out to be a surprisingly effective grower, not to mention a good pretext for me to chat up singer Emily Haines about the band's ongoing quest to make music people listen to without selling their soul in the process. More, including thoughts on sharing a vocal booth with Lou Reed, at eMusic.

Garbage's Shirley Manson: On Coming Back, Katy Perry, and Terminating Her Solo Career

I talked to Shirley Manson from Garbage. It was pretty great.

Feist's "Broken-Hearted Love Songs": Turbulent, Violent and Not Suitable for Easy Listening

I don't often (read, almost never) get around to posting my Inquirer concert reviews — sometimes because thanks to the paper's nightmarish website, I can't even find the damn things — but I'm pretty happy with how this account of Leslie Feist's show at the Academy of Music turned out. For me, at least, the show was a revelation, a dramatic and at times emotionally violent performance that sent me back to Feist's albums, wondering, "How did I miss that?" In all honesty, I still thought of her principally as the woman behind the ubiquitous, Muppet-friendly "1234," pointedly absent from Tuesday's two-hour show. But I also think that she's got an unfortunate tendency to sand the edges off her spiky and surprising songs on record; they literally get lost in the mix. The show transformed how I think of her, a rare experience for which I'm always grateful. Plus, any chance to drop a gratuitous Mary Margaret O'Hara in the pages of a major daily is a welcome thing.

Also in the Inky's pages recently: whistling virtuoso Andrew Bird, and the graceful aging of Nick Lowe.

Patti Smith: From Horses to Twelve, Soup to Nuts

I'm more or less on vacation at the moment, so I'll keep this short, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point you in the direction of my just-posted review of the entire Patti Smith discography for eMusic. It's been too long since I've really listened to Horses, let alone dipped back into it for several weeks on end, and boy, does it hold up like a friggin' tank. (Sadly, I was 2 when it was released in 1975, so despite that fact that I lived in Manhattan then, I was sadly not hip to the downtown goings-on.) No surprise there. What did surprise me was how strong some of Smith's latter-day albums are, especially the consecutive trio of Gone Again, Peace & Noise and Gung Ho. The topical lyrics of Gung Ho's "Glitter in Their Eyes" may be loaded with clunkers, but it boasts the catchiest riff in Smith's oeuvre since "Because," and the unlikely pairing with producer Gil Norton produces surprisingly potent results. Lots, lots more at the link.

 

Adam Schlesinger: From Fountains of Wayne to Josie & the Pussycats

I've been trying for years to write an article encompassing Adam Schlesinger's double life as a rock musician and protean songwriter-for-hire, and the A.V. Club's Set List provided the ideal opportunity. In addition to playing bass and writing songs for two great bands — Fountains of Wayne, whose album Sky Full of Holes is out today, and Ivy, whose After Hours comes along in September — he's become Hollywood's guy for fake band songs, whether it's creating an '80s synth-pop ditty for Hugh Grant's washed-up teen idol in Music & Lyrics or fleshing out the back catalogue of Josie & the Pussycats. (Lousy movie, great soundtrack.) Even in a lengthy conversation, we couldn't get to everything — no "Stacy's Mom," sorry — but I think I succeeded in touching every base. Here's one you might not have seen, the Neil Patrick Harris-sung opening number for this year's Tony Awards:

 

And while we're on the subject, here's a 2009 interview centering on Schlesinger's involvement in the odd-sock supergroup Tinted Windows (also including Smashing Pumpkins' James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos and the singer from Hanson), and a review of Fountains' great acoustic tour earlier that year. Bonus track: Talking with Schlesinger's former roommate — and Oneders lead vocalist — Mike Viola about his contribution to the decade-spanning oeuvre of fake star Dewey Cox for Walk Hard.

Gillian Welch: "It Wasn't Like I Had Writer's Block. I Just Thought It Was Shit"

Bad enough it took Gillian Welch and her partner, David Rawlings, eight years to record their new album, The Harrow & the Harvest, but now they've got to suffer through a string of near-identical interviews rehashing the long dry spell. I bit the bullet right off when I interviewed Welch for the A.V. Club, but I put a slightly different spin on the question: Instead of asking why it took so long to produce Harrow, I wondered if she ever feared there might not be another record in her. As it turns out, she did. She and Rawlings were constantly writing new songs, but, well, you can see what she thought of them above.

More with Welch, including thoughts on collaborating with The Decemberists on The King Is Dead and her advice on how to stain Harrow's letterpress cover for that perfect old-timey feel, here.

Britney Spears: Can't Act, Can't Dance, Can Sing a Little

Some show reviews I pitch because you can't beat getting paid to go to a concert you'd see anyway, and some I suggest out of simple curiosity. What follower of the culture at large could resist the opportunity to check in on Britney Spears, and especially to find out who, after all these years, is still showing up to see her? After Saturday's concert in Philadelphia, I can verify that Spears still has a robust following of women in tight clothes and gay men in even tighter clothes, but Nicki Minaj's opening set, and especially the deafening roar that went up from the crowd as she closed with "Moment 4 Life," should have been enough to put Spears on notice. Minaj reappeared during Britney's final song, but only as a virtual presence, adding a pre-filmed rap verse to "Till the World Ends"; apparently Minaj has taken the stage sometimes and not others during the Femme Fatale tour's six weeks, but you have to wonder if it's Spears' way of holding off the competition.

Further thoughts on the show, via the Philadelphia Inquirer, are here, but a tad more on Minaj that I didn't have room for in the short piece. This was an entirely different, and substantially more girl-friendly staging, than her opening set on Lil' Wayne's "I Am Still Music" tour, which is to say more feminist sci-fi, fewer dildoes. The overarching narrative, in which Minaj battled a Predatory villain named Nemesis, was semi-coherent — the muffled sound mix didn't help in that respect — and bit more than a little of off Janelle Monáe, but it indicated that she's thinking big, and that thrilling things are still ahead.  

Marianne Faithfull: "I Was Awfully Beautiful — That Was the Trouble"

Suppose I'd better catch up a bit so a talking vagina isn't the only thing I've posted in a week. How about this interview with Marianne Faithfull, which starts with her new album, Horses and High Heels, works its way back through Brecht and Weill, Broken English and heroin abuse to the mid-'60s, when she was an icon of Swinging London and Mick Jagger's inamorata? I talked to Faithfull two years ago for the movie Irina Palm, in which she played a small-town widow who turns to priming men's pumps for money in order to pay for her grandson's operation. (Yes, really.) This time, we met in person, at a table outside New York's Standard Hotel, where she could smoke freely and reminisce about the bad old days. Through an accident of timing, we met just days before the final edition of The News of the World, an occasion on which she had a few choice words for her longtime tormentor.