Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska (1982)

This is one of those albums you are told you "have to" have.   One of those albums that if you don't "get it" then you're not listening right.   You might say it's like "War and Peace," everyone praises it few actually read it, and even fewer actually get it, and most people start it and never finish it.   Well, if you look at it that way, you won't get far.   Look at it like a novella, not a novel, it's not Tolstoy, it's Kerouac.   Literary comparisons are well suited to this album as it should be read like a classic novel, in a comfortable place, with some time to spend.

To begin with it shouldn't be called Nebraska, rather is should be called New Jersey.   Despite the title song being called Nebraska, the album takes place largely in New Jersey.   The stories of broken dreams, and good guy gone wrong were echoed in his next release, "Born in the USA," but with bombastic flare and the human drum machine beats of Max Weinberg, who plays with the soul of a machine and the perfection of a human.   So firstly, forget about Nebraska, re-name the album for the second track "Atlantic City," and you'll get and like the album more from the get-go.

Let's take a moment and address the legend of Nebraska.   It was originally recorded by Springsteen at home as demos for a new album with the E-Street Band, on the recently invented "porta-studio" a way to record multi-track music at home on an everyday cassette with a slightly high quality sound making the result mid-fi.   It features Springsteen mostly on guitar and vocals with persuasion and other embellishments.  The limitations of the tape are said the be part of the album's greatness, the abundance of his and white noise helping to set the mood, this coupled with listening to this on a record reminds the listener of hearing early blues and folk music (Robert Johnson or Woody Guthrie)  and puts the whole thing in a nice little frame.

As I mentioned before the track, "Atlantic City" better sets the stage for the album with it's tale of love in a dead end life.    At times the fact that some of the songs seems to go on in epic saga style betrays the idea that these were just demos, and that this collection of songs were finished products onto themselves.    Also although the were recorded at home, there is a recording engineer listed on the credits, so rather than being someone messing around at home trying to write some songs, the songs are serious in delivery as well as their serious, at times somber, subject matter.    Even the album's closing track, the optimistically titled "Reason to Believe," describes the existence of optimism in spite of the overwhelming evidence presented on the album of it's futility.   Did I mention the subject matter is dark?   Ok, you've been warned.

Not ideal for your iTunes shuffle, the album should be taken in half or complete doses.    Turn the lights down and drop the needle into the groove and let the album tell you where to go.    

Los Lobos - By the Light of the Moon -1987

I have to begin by saying I'm biased, I am a big Los Lobos fan, and consider them one of the greatest American groups ever, right up there with the Band the Beach Boys.    Mixing blues rock and Telecaster driven Tex-Mex with deeply creative production with support from Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake.    This is an overlooked gem of the Lobos catalog and of the late 80's when the charts were topped by hair-band pop metal.  

This time around they went with producer T-Bone Burnett, leading to a bit more of a straight up Americana sound, then their later work which is often peppered with a bit of psychedelic rock and thick guitar tones.   This time around, it's smooth, clean and clear.

Songwriting is done in a Beatles mode.   Singer/guitarist David Hidalgo and drummer/guitarist Louis Perez are a team that writes most of the songs, but guitarist Cesar Rosas on his own will write 2-3 songs on each album in a slightly different style, his songs being more blues based, kind of the "George Harrison" of the band.   Rosas and Hidalgo are both spectacular guitarists, which overshadows Perez as the additional guitarist and saxophonist Steve Berlin seldom gets much solo time with two powerhouse guitarists in the band, however he doubles on keyboards.

Firstly, the album starts off with, "One Time, One Night," a twangy guitar driven riff and lyrics which detail broken American dreams with a small bit of optimism, much in the same way as their early song, "Will the Wolf Survive."    Then right into a Rosas jump blues rocker "Shakin and Shakin and Shakes."   Compared to other Lobos albums this album is more upbeat in tempo and feel and this sets the stage for a few bluey swinging songs to come.

Aside from the opening track on each side being stellar, the album's real gems are burried on the end of the B-side, the two ballads, "River of Fools" and "Tears of God."   Both these two ballads are amongst their best tunes and sometimes it's onel of those albums when it's better to start listening to the album on the B-side first.

Although my personal favorite Los Lobos album is and will be Kiko, but this album is highly recommended especially for anyone who wants to hear Americana/Blues based straight ahead rock, you can hear the ghosts of SRV and Hendrix in the guitars and even though electronic drums are used, the album is free of most 80's soul sucking production style.

Steely Dan -Katy Lied - 1975

Steely Dan is a controversial band, people either have a list of reasons they hate them, or a list of reasons they love them.    They are best remembered for their ultra smooth tone period in the late 70's and early 80's, and this is usually the basis for those people who refuse to like the Dan.   "Too produced, too smooth, too jazzy,"  whatever, if you like to bitch about Steely Dan, read no further, because this post is in celebration of their 1975 release, "Katy Lied."  

In this period their music was as much influenced by R&B and blues, as jazz, and the recordings were thick not sparse, with a technical mishap thrown in that screwed up the fidelity of the album, so the usual anti-Dan arguments don't stick.   Instead of a wide dynamic range, the album lacks top end and it's thick middle makes it sound more aggressive from the get-go.

This album also shows the band in transition, from beginning their carrier as a flashy band that didn't feature Donald Fagen on most vocals and co-band leader Walter Becker was on bass while two hotshot guitarists Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias did the shredding, and ending with Becker and Fagen being the sole members of a band that featured only session musicians.    This album finds a core group of members who contributed to past albums: Fagen, Becker, and Dias who were charter members, and Jeff Porcaro, Rick Derringer and Michael McDonald who were involved in past albums, and Chuck Rainey who would be their go-to bass man for a funky sound for years to come.

The songwriting follows a model of blues changes with unexpected turn-arounds.   Using a recognizable blues shuffle and putting interesting changes before going back into the shuffle, the album's first track Black Friday sets the stage for that.   Not a prediction of pre-Christmas shopping mania that would come many years later, but a tale of a financial fraudster's plan to get out just in time.   Also later on the album "Daddy Don't Live in that New York City No More," and "Chain Lightning" are based in the blues as well.

There are blazing guitars everywhere, a tremendous sax solo by jazz great Phil Woods on "Doctor Wu," but what carries the album for me are the lyrics.   The subject matter ranges from dark to very dark.   Steely Dan mixed simple rhymes with unusual subject mater what was often subversive and out and out perverted and often ironic in their meaning.   This was masked behind the musicality of the melodies and harmonies so well that many people don't dig into their lyrical contact.   For Example, "Doctor Wu" - drug addiction, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies" - amateur pornography, and "Rose Darling" - infidelity.   Also they had a way of writing a set of lyrics that were so imaginative and unusual, that they would spark an eternal debate as to what they're really about, for example, "Chain Lightning," with no chorus, no bridge and a few dozen words, it's definitely about something, but just what is seems to be up to you. The important thing about Steely Dan's lyrics is your don't have to understand them in depth if you don't care to, they are there to remind you that you are in an alternate realty where something is not quite right.

The album is a time capsule of 70's hippies turning into yuppies, on a diet of alternating uppers and downers, that never seems to land back where it came from.   Taking the blues form into uncharted territory, bringing a high level of musicianship to FM radio as well as open references to a dark underbelly carefully masked behind musicianship.   Due to using an experimental form of noise reduction used while recording that backfired by stripping the high end off of the sound and thickening the mid-range, the album seem to be masked behind a haze of Vaseline which gives them an early Hollywood film texture, technically perfect beneath a mask of a technology that created an unreal recreation that made is seem hyper-real.