Album Reviews

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

Named for a now defunct Northern New Jersey, Route 23 lawn furniture emporium (bought my chaise lounges there!), Fountains of Wayne has been making consistently tuneful and erudite observations about just plain folks since 1996 when they released their eponymous first album on Atlantic Records. The core was then and is now, the delightfully bratty-voiced Chris Collingwood and his multi-instrumental partner Adam Schlesinger.

(Note: this review originally stated that the lacquer cut was from the 3 track master. That was incorrect. The master here was the two track original that hadn't been used since 1980. While the tape had some dropout and other issues, mastering engineer George Marino determined it still sounded superior to any of the copies used for subsequent reissues.)

Few jazz musicians attain pop star status while retaining credibility with their "base." Louis Armstrong managed and of course so did Miles Davis. Stan Getz was another.

After a series of albums that tried too hard to advance the cause and so seemed self-consciously so, Paul Simon has produced his best since Graceland. The album title explains how he's managed. It celebrates the significant but demolishes it at the same time.

In 1975, with complete artistic control written into his new Columbia Records contract, Willie Nelson entered Autumn Sound, a small Garland, Texas studio, to record a sparely arranged concept album based upon the semi-obscure song "The Red Haired Stranger," written by Carl Stutz, a Richmond, Virginia based radio announcer  and Edith Lindeman Calisch, the amusement critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper. The pair was best known for writing "Little Things Mean A Lot," which was a hit single for the pop star Kitty Kallen back in 1954 and featured on the wildly popular TV show "Your Hit Parade." Stutz went on to become a high-school math teacher.