Josh Rouse’s second album, Home, was released in 2000 and basically picked up where Dressed Up Like Nebraska left off. Rouse was born in Nebraska, incidentally, a distinction he shares with fellow pop tunesmiths Elliott Smith, Conor Oberst and Matthew Sweet. Must be something in the water of the Great Plains.
Home has a more polished sound than Rouse’s debut and introduces horns and strings into the mix. But it’s otherwise not much of a departure… more solid, mostly acoustic pop songs.
Recently, I was scrolling through my iTunes library trying to decide who should be honored with my next theme week (it’s a big honor, you know… you should see the stack of mail I have from performers asking to be featured). And I was shocked to realize I’d gone this far without spending a week on Josh Rouse.
It’s not that he’s a household name — on the contrary, he probably has family members who aren’t aware he records albums. But in my household, he’s as well-regarded as any Hall of Famer. Rouse is one of those artists whose entire discography I cycle through every other month or so. When I’m grabbing CDs to load up the car stereo, he’s always represented and usually over-represented.
Bob Dylan’s third album of original material, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was very appropriately titled (even though Dylan himself later said he disliked the title for being so obvious). After making his name as a singer and writer of political protest songs, Dylan’s new record was a far more intimate affair.
Dylan caused outrage when he later “went electric” (and we’ll get to that on future weekends) but he received a whole lot of grief before that just for trading issue songs for introspective songs. Folkies bashed him for navel-gazing when he should have been saving the world. It’s fascinating exactly how rigid the confines of genres were back then, or at least the genre into which Dylan originally exploded.
Yesterday’s Dar Williams post is a nice segue into another Bob Dylan weekend, because Dylan is certainly another example — perhaps the best example — of an artist whose lyrics are just as effective on paper as in song. Some people would argue that his voice actually detracts from the power of his words, though I strongly disagree.
I’m pretty certain Dylan writes the lyrics of his songs before the music. He also goes off text quite a bit when performing, as you’ll see over the course of these weekends. All of the lyrics I post here are from Dylan’s own Web site — they are the official lyrics of his songs. And yet if you follow along as he sings them, you’ll find he mixes and matched verses, changes phrasing, adds and drops words on the fly.
Of all the artists in my music collection, Dar Williams is one of the few whose songs I would just as soon read in a book as listen to on record. That’s not a criticism of her voice or melodic gifts — she’s pretty great on that front as well — but a testament to the power of her poetry.
Because Williams is a poet, a label I wouldn’t assign to most songwriters. Songs are generally meant to be listened to, not read, and laying them out on paper (or a computer screen) makes that very obvious. And I don’t mean that as a criticism to most songwriters… I’m guessing they fully appreciate the difference between song lyrics and poetry.
Meet Me In Montauk 