It's unbelievable.
What I'll do, when the budget permits, is get hold of Harmonium, the new album from the latest singer here to make clear she'll give an earful to anyone who says "Tori Amos."
This, we know, drives them almost all mad!
On the finely-bred young Vanessa Carlton, I'd placed what I thought to be a secure bet when her first album bowled me over. It was sure she'd provide me with a safe contrast to another well-raised singer to be noted at once for an equally classical background.
Vanessa's now "just" 23.
Since my nose for superb noises sniffed her off a shelf by chance and she looked very dreamy, an impression borne out on first taking to Be Not Nobody, I felt we could hear such a "young" distinctive classicist who uses pianos that seem sometimes to dwarf her against a cellist who's often on sex and draw a line.
Yet even "Carlton (...) loves getting nude (...)":
"I like the area where my butt meets my thigh and I like the size of my boobs -- they're small and I don't have to wear a bra," she said, apparently proving it, for a recent summer 'Bare Issue' of a US rag, according to ContactMusic.
So much for one possible contrast between songs that apparently innocent debutante of 2002 and the raunchy Lauren Kendall, who wears as little as she can on the cover of her second album; that means, nothing. She gives us a nice back view.
 So we're stuck -- not unhappily -- with a favoured preoccupation of better-known names mentioned of late whose albums won't be brand new any more by the time I reach them: the variations on what our hearts get our bodies tangled up in are an inescapable theme.
Vanessa, whose voice is simply luscious, tackles love's languages from several directions on 'Be Not Nobody'. She apparently left almost nobody certain whether she was a rock musician or a potential concerto performer headed one day for Carnegie Hall and a go at Ravel or Debussy.
She's a bit of both, that's the answer, and more besides, but certainly a dreamer, which is our first insight into her mind when she starts, one "ordinary day", with a boy she sees:
"And as I looked up into those eyes
His vision borrows mine.
And to know he's no stranger,
For I feel I've held him for all of time.
And he said take my hand,
Live while you can
Don't you see your dreams lie right in the palm of your hand
In the palm of your hand.
Please come with me,
See what I see.
Touch the stars for time will not flee.
Time will not flee.
Can you see?
Just a dream, just an ordinary dream.
As I wake in bed (...)."
By then she's woken you up, listening to 'An Ordinary Boy', and you don't know whether Vanessa -- her home site says she was 17 when she wrote the bulk of that first album -- is really dreaming. This is probably just what she wanted of an astounding debut it takes three or four hearings fully to enjoy. She's spoken of her "stream of consciousness" style and has a devoted Carlton fan following that adores it.
People familiar with 'Harmonium' say it outshines what Vanessa considers an effort of "purest inspiration". In 2002, she tried and successfully evades expectations, forsaking formulas to make quite clear who's in charge. She is. Her writing reminds me of the Kid's, since my daughter's little younger now than Carlton was then. They both approach sex with a combination of frankness and a highly romantic outlook one can only hope for in sound adolescents.
There's little worse than lovey-doveyness and pseudo-coyness in such young people when they know better. Vanessa's streams of consciousness flow so far from what prudes would call the "gutter" of language -- though to my ears, the right words in context from women ennobled by raw experience and scars aren't filth -- it's nearly reassuring to know she's happy with what she's got and as keen occasionally to display it as an ever astonishing number of her elders.
I opt neither for that nor the habitual languid beauty pose of some photos, because my recent listening -- regardless of intent -- keeps pushing my geography the same odd way. So the above pic, pinched from the fan site, is Vanessa a few months back, in synch with that quirk that sends me ever back to New York!
She is that mad: she's signing on for the marathon.
It's worth a more leisurely little diversion to note that when another "teen star", Christina Aguilera, turned 23, her music suddenly caught my attention because she 'Stripped', said so in the title of the CD where it happens and began breaking free of the pop mould into which most cast her along with Britney Spears.
There's some genuinely heart-wrenching and burning ballad writing on the Aguilera album that warns "Watch out, I've decided to grow up and if I go on busting out, I'll get you hooked on how I feel." She does, given half a chance, just as elsewhere I've noted Jennifer Lopez has started doing the same, but those women are changing "pop stars" and more, not prodigies.
Prodigy is not a word to use carelessly, especially now skilled technicians can help deceive the ear and fabricate such singers, but Vanessa's stuck with being the real thing. An astute Manchester listener at Amazon UK catches the "dynamic choice of syntax in her lyrics"; that's exactly right.
That dynamic -- dreamy sometimes -- way with word structure Vanessa has is part of the music's originality, an audible game of mirrors, where she's bold enough to risk a fully orchestral approach or take on The Rolling Stones to 'Paint It Black'. She does OK there, her voice ensures that, but I prefer her own songs and took particularly for a while to the closing number, 'Twilight'.
Being a prodigy forced Vanessa to choose a difficult musical path on this album, since the love lyrics are fine if not anything exceptional from a girl of that age -- it would be a pity if they were since nobody needs disabusing any sooner than life almost invariably throws this at them -- while in the performance there are hints of uncertainty about "How much do I risk showing just how talented I can be?"
To a jaundiced ear, unwilling to listen with her age in mind (I've read a few such views), she goes too far in feeling she's got something to prove, but in 'Twilight' this is directly, touchingly acknowledged in the refrain:
"I will learn to say goodbye to yesterday and
I will never cease to fly if held down and
I will always reach too high cause I've seen, cause I've seen, twilight..."
In light of praise elsewhere hinted at here, people turned on to a hitherto unknown might take a look and think, "Well, if I want to try Vanessa, it'll be 'Harmonium'." Fair enough; but I didn't need to read rave reviews to bung it on my wishlist because I'm glad I've got the first one.
"So many second albums are made in fear," Vanessa says. And don't you know it, if you're here for whatever I can tell you, because we've heard that so often! She's no different; she means the "fear" raised by those accursed expectations among "samers" -- a name I guess I have now for everybody who denies their favourite singers the sovereign right to change.
"I couldn't make a new album based on remaking the last one, and I was not afraid to make an album based on what feels fresh and reflective to me. I think I realize only now that I really did take a risk."
I'd guess Vanessa means with 'Harmonium', but the risk she took before she was even what most people would consider an adult is one that pays dividends. For what she finds in "twilight" is conveyed in a sound I'll either tell you more of once I've heard the new album or return to here later.
It's Lauren's turn now, as someone with a similar classical inheritance to bring to stand-out songwriting, into the limelight. What does she wear (a vivifying question that helped put me back on track, viz. previous entry)? Well, I said "nothing", sometimes, a last echo of amusement on Vanessa's site, also from a garb-conscious bloke: "If 'Be Not Nobody' was wearing a cocktail dress, 'Harmonium' is wearing jeans and a vintage shirt."
That's what A&M record label president Ron Fair said anyway. I dunno what kind of "vintage" you apply to 23, just that thereabouts is one of those ages you can judge "musical women" by, seeing their past and future (I know all kinds of odd generalisations like this, which could make for a "taliesin's odd generalisations" page like my glossary).
Women are no longer "kids" then, but with luck at around 23 they've got what it takes to turn a then fairly confident "dead sexy" into a "drop-dead gorgeous" appeal that can start making them and life really exciting once the hormones and years -- decades for the luckiest -- kick in hard (don't tell my daughter I said this, let her poor bloke find out for himself).
Fellow explorer -- some of you are -- my lack of knowledge on encountering Lauren Kendall was so blissful it didn't even sink in for a couple of songs on 'Red' that this chick was not just singing me some of her most intimate private mail, but playing that cello herself!
 Intimate mail? Oh yes, she may well stick her tongue out, but you'd better believe it; this was last week before I fell sick, I felt as horny as can be -- i.e., very -- and at an utter loss because those dummies who dictate fashion trends (Paris-London-New York-Tokyo-"next stop-Nairobi" is an in-joke, I'm afraid, for Factory hands who follow that industry) had wreaked their annual havoc.
Lauren's words were a bright candle in the darkness, like a friend you might find you've got in a woman who says "Come here and sit on the rug in front of the fire and let me sing you my stories by the flickering flames off the logs". That's 'Red'.
"I've seen in a day what some never see in an entire life --
Loved, hated and lived through it all.
I've made love out of bed, outside of my head,
Earned my own way and been damn tired too.
Oh, if you could only see what's behind these eyes.
So, why am I still so 'young'?"
Holy Cackle is where Lauren lives and you can find her lyrics. It's a lovely name, holy cackle, and there you have her in 'So Young' beginning to cheer me up about the ageing October question that got me really down. I've felt days like those and they're scary as well as damned tiring, especially when the weather takes a cruel turn for the damp cold threat of a season to come and life on streets, in bars and in the Métro gets those clothes designers going bonkers
It's all black, what women wear! If not, its usually so dark it's as close as dammit. Within but a fortnight of the likes of nice navel-ornaments, tantalising tattoos that look all the more interesting just beyond where they're on show and, now I'm at it again, even the "Vanessa vintage" that darkly, pertly points out "I don't have to wear a bra", whether they feel they do or otherwise, is made hard to discern for the musical eye by darned winter wardrobes.
Lauren gets dark, private ideas she'll share without being so damned stupid as to go for deliberate gloom, which she doesn't, like those fools who decided the sunless season would be improved by making it yet darker in what people wear as standard equipment. Black and navy blue's fine in summer, but in winter you have to look pretty hard or expensively -- woman or man -- to find anything else supposedly stylish to wear, unless you want to end up looking like a Michelin person with spare tyres you don't have in the first place...
Don't say "beige". It's an improvement, but not really, when winter could make me a leather fetishist! Well, despite such a topsy-turvy world where jet-setting twits make murk more miserable, Lauren prefers to be melancholy in 'Red'. We've most of us known this sort of choice, when it comes to bedclothes:
"His scent is in my bed.
Sheets I shared with him just once before
I'd even decided how much of him
To let in.
His scent lingers still.
I haven't smelled it yet, but I know it's there,
Like the others who have come and gone --
Their scents always linger there.
Oh, what a scent can conjure in my mind, in my
soul!
Oh, what your scent conjures in my body.
Do I change my sheets?
Do I sleep in his memory?
How pervasive is his smell?
Is it enough to make me want to wrap
Myself in it once more?"
Such feelings about 'Scent', along with a 'Never Could Tell' song about how love becomes a very ambivalent hatred for somebody you turn away from yet always back to in the same breath almost: these are splendid and stark songwriting, where, as often, the bare words alone tell just a part of it.
Yet Lauren's so little-known that I must break with preference in the links and send you to the US store for Red, since it's almost invariably out of stock here and unobtainable at the UK store.
'Katy's Lullaby' is among the finest songs by any woman for her child I've yet to hear; it's as full of love as the album is of poignant, sad tenderness delivered with the voice of a practised classical performer -- for all its differences -- that gets me putting Lauren in the same entry with Vanessa. There's even a maybe of the "If you like this, you'll love this" kind for vocal distinction -- the famous Lisa Gerrard, for instance, or a Heather Nova.
Lauren's voice has a slightly nasal, husky edge I find very attractive, while with Vanessa, she shares the "stream of consciousness" approach, often in very free verse with Kendall. But to imply any gabble is misleading, though both would agree on the flow, since it's about intimacy, those very private sentiments we're let in on like invited friends, shaped and not splattered on to a musical canvas.
I'd call both "chamber musicians" and currently identify with perhaps a method that called me to what they do, despite an age and experience gap that's of no odds in this respect. It's like listening to others engaged in what I've told you I do in the mornings, letting intuitive stuff well up from deep inside, then to be shaped by the creative art, rather than wanting "over-thinking" anywhere in the process.
Kendall has a band as well, when she wants, but even on re-listening, it's almost a surprise when the "conventional" rock band sound's suddenly there. Lauren's own harmonic gift is so strong and never trite she can use an obvious piece of what could be mere "studio magic" to superb effect in almost unaccompanied choral work.
She doesn't steer clear of a "Why the hell didn't you tell me?" and the like in her memories. Such language doesn't jar when she uses it, but makes her another of those to remind me swear-words are devalued once you know better than to over-use them.
A very musical friend once said, "Never mind a good 'fuck', but could you leave the blasphemy out, Nick?"
I reflected for an instant, then thought, "Yes I could, easily, if it bothers people." So I did from that moment on, just like that, and our respective religious beliefs have nothing to do with why. The relevance is in how this site was developing out of listening, which brings me to Lauren and Vanessa.
I want their audience ratings boosted; my own are going up because you're here -- among others like you. Of various ways to help, one is to "explain" what these two and the others do with notes as I might. How, for instance, does Lauren sometimes get so close to a traditional hymn sound without being there?
But do you care? No. Neither do I. Off log, maybe my VoW book gets another few footnote lines, but on site, you really want to know what to my ear makes these people tick. Me too. Lauren's homegrown bio is out of date, there's a different "mystery" there from the one Blake her percussionist lends to songs full of the stuff.
"So many times, same old shit,
Same old lies.
Oh, when
Would we ever learn?
Boys may come, they definitely go,
And then you're on your own
To give
To yourself again.
You're the most deserving person I know
To receive the gifts you've wasted on everyone else"
That's wryness. That's rawness. And it's acutely heard. Superbly sung, 'To Her'. Who "she" is -- but I hear was in words and music -- we don't know and don't need to know.
Lauren is somewhere Vanessa was headed in 2002 and might have found in 'Harmonium', so much so I've put iTunes on "artist alert" for it. That place is far beyond talent, which is itself remarkable when it's really there. It's the place where most women render comparison so abominably pointless.
On her debut, 'When,' Lauren proved an exception to my bugbear piece of stupid "she sounds like" writing by lending her choral treatment to Tori's 'Mother' -- as a tribute -- rather than fleeing from the magnificent Amos because of morons. But on 'Red', Kendall's soul speaks to us.
The word "soul" has a deep, indefinable significance for me now, that's for ever; it's where music is, makes for another album that is light shed in our dark places, and I find Lauren doesn't hesitate to use it herself:
'Red' "is much more personal, more daring. When you start writing songs that you’re afraid to show to your mother, you know you’re hitting on some personal issues. I’m also incorporating more cello into the songs—it creates such soul in so many of the songs” (Songplanet offers an up-to-date bio).
Sometimes I'm glad my mother doesn't want the Internet since if she knew a fraction of what you lot do... I shan't finish or explain that remark so don't ask; it's a bare aside and all you'll get by way of acknowledging "truths" smart people correctly think they've guessed about a few "whies" of me and the evolutions that led to this site's destiny.
The logger of old might have written a bit more of his mum's harmonics, though they're hers and to be valued as such; this one just says we share different things. Lauren Kendall is into the sharing so many women singers are that's made the new log one way of saying "Thanks".
In her own words (though the stylist in me tones down some of her capital letters and punctuates with fewer exclamation marks):
"Free MP3s are still available. Go to Amazon.com's free digital network (...) and search for works by Lauren Kendall. Then tell your friends!
The more you download, the better my ranking. Download often. That's right. I'm ENCOURAGING you to steal my music! You can buy it later. ;-)
Downloading is fun!*"
_______
*So it is, but let's also be fair.
Thereupon my ideas turn to 'Pirates with White Flags' out back, since one can't really draft any "economics of the soul"...
It's just there's "piracy" and there's "theft". Lauren's encouraging invitation is one for me -- and you if you like -- to draw the line where we should.
3:50:55 AM link 
|
|
postbox