Two years after Guest Host, Stew released his second album under his own name, 2002’s The Naked Dutch Painter and Other Songs. This was his second straight album to top Entertainment Weekly‘s year-end best-of list, and again, I don’t know how I missed that. It would be another year-plus before I discovered him.
Naked Dutch Painter was mostly recorded live, though a few songs have studio parts blended in. It’s not a concert album but rather an album he chose to record in front of an audience. You don’t hear the crowd except for some polite applause at the end of some songs.
Stew does offer up stage banter before some tracks, musing on why there’s only one picture of Che Guevara and bemoaning that the word garnish means both a pretty thing on the side of a dinner plate and the reduction of wages.
The album alternates between smart art-pop (such as opening track ‘Single Woman Sitting,’ a hip, ironic sketch of a certain kind of big-city woman), dreamy mood music (the three-part ‘Drug Suit’) and pitch-perfect pop (today’s track, among others).
My favorite is ‘North Bronx French Marie,’ about the singer’s unrequited love for an exotic woman. Stew makes wonderful use of language in this song, painting a picture not just of this tricky relationship but of the New York streets where the song is set. I particularly love the play on words in this line: “It’s not the heat but your sweet humility that shakes my tree, sticks to me, French Marie.”
Of American landscape night
Typical Tuesday night
My love is standing in the doorway and she
Unlocks the screen door for me
Juvenile fantasy
Still houses whisper ever so silently
I’m alone on the sidewalk you see
Waiting for French Marie
Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
But it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree, sticks to me
French marie
I’m waiting to see where the wind blows
Maybe she’s lost in thought about me
The way I’d like her to be
Tomorrow she’ll ask “why’d you wait so long for me?
Are you all knocked out baby?
That would be too crazy!”
I tell the girl “don’t flatter yourself so”
But you know
I’m deep in check you see
Waiting for French Marie
Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
But it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree, sticks to me
French Marie
Well, she smokes half my cigarettes
And laughs at me
And asks if all the Negroes are like me
Well, baby
Tonight I sleep with television
The warm talkative lover
Sexy electric
North Bronx Marie is somewhere screaming at the leaves
Of her hopeless brother
I guess her life is hectic
I’d like to think she needs a fireman like me
To get her out of her family tree
The way I’d like her to be
Look what the New York summer’s done
You’re in a punk rock t-shirt melting in the sun
But it’s not the heat but your sweet humility
That shakes my tree, sticks to me
French marie
Meet Me In Montauk 
This song captures a bit more of that theatrical style of Stew to which I was referring earlier in the week. That’s partly due to the music and the live quality of the recording, but mostly because of the lyrics and delivery. In an odd way, I could also hear this being a TV sitcom theme song for a new show on NBC called “French Marie.”