After tuning into my first televised musical competition last Spring with The Voice, I signed on for my second this Fall with The Sing-Off.
In an era of Auto-Tune and processed pop stars, there is something very refreshing about a competition that features nothing but the human voice. And the a capella groups featured on this show do jaw-dropping things with those voices.
Next week I will start counting down my top ten songs of 2011, focusing not necessarily on hot singles or songs that captured the zeitgeist this year but simply the songs that affected me the most for one reason or another.
First, though, I will spend a week on several odds and ends that didn’t make the countdown but made my musical year brighter each in their own way.
I’m afraid I was a bit harsh in my description of Paul Simon’s Songs From The Capeman yesterday. While it was certainly a letdown following a seven year wait after his two best albums, and it’s something of a half-baked affair, it isn’t without special moments.
If I hadn’t already posted the wonderfully profane centerpiece track, ‘The Vampires,’ I wouldn’t be able to resist highlighting it on Christmas morning. That song alone is worth the price of the Capeman album.
The seven years between The Rhythm of the Saints and Paul Simon’s next studio album felt like an eternity. Following the one-two punch of Graceland and Rhythm, I was primed for whatever he would come up with next and had to just wait and wait and wait.
In the days before the ubiquity of the Internet — before Twitter and official artist websites — it was hard to know what a musician was up to. It turns out that Simon spent much of that seven-year span researching and writing a Broadway musical called The Capeman about a Puerto Rican gang-banger in New York who turned his life around in prison.
My final post of the three-week Bruce Springsteen series takes us to his most recent album, 2009’s Working On a Dream. This record was released just two years after Magic but found Springsteen in a much different frame of mind.
Released the year he turned 60 and a year after the death of E-Street band member Danny Federici, Working On a Dream finds Springsteen contemplating his own mortality. But this isn’t a morbid record — on the contrary, it’s a celebratory one. On songs such as ‘Kingdom of Days’ and ‘Surprise, Surprise,’ he embraces the joys of a long life lived well.
