Multitalented Ani DiFranco is a Cinderella who doubles as her own fairy godmother. Bypassing the main thoroughfares to music-biz glory the Buffalo native started her own record label in 1990, becoming a one-woman conglomerate who served as singer, songwriter, guitarist, bassist, keyboard player, producer and distributor. This 31-song double CD is her ninth album and first live release.
DiFranco calls herself a folk singer, but don't expect to hear her on A Prairie Home Companion. She's a woman who has punched a big hole in the wall separating the conscious from the subconscious and who makes the crossing at will. In her songs, she stares down sexual abuse, the horror of entrapment in an adulterous love triangle and the pain of watching a loved one die. Those offended by strong language might have trouble getting past the words, but the message is worth the effort. Sometimes the message is even fun. DiFranco's stage patter shows a lot of good humor, and also delight at having made it to the majors on her own terms. (Righteous Babe)
Boz Scaggs
From Silk Degrees, his 1976 landmark album of blue-eyed soul, to the title song of his 11th CD, Scaggs has made a brilliant career documenting the gamut of human emotions; he is what he sings, or seems to be. But one hopes that his troubled mood on "Ask Me 'Bout Nothin' (But the Blues)" is pure fiction because he's starting to sound dangerously brokenhearted. In fact, despair dominates Come On Home, a combo of R&B standards—like David Porter and Isaac Hayes' "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)"—and Scaggs originals that often already sound like classics. When he does that husky, soulful slow burn on the pop standard "Love Letters," even the most jaded music buffs will swear they're hearing the tune for the first time. (Virgin)
Indigo Girls
Shame on You," the first single off the duo's sixth studio album, is rollicking folk-pop with a catchy "la la la" chorus...and a reference to illegal immigration. The Indigo Girls, singer-songwriter-guitarists Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, wouldn't be the Indigo Girls without tackling a few social issues; in later cuts they address sexual orientation (the Girls came out years ago), burning black churches, colonialism and poverty.
The politics will be familiar to their fans, but the Girls do strive for a different sound here, cranking up the electric guitar on most of the tracks. Still, what anchors the disc ultimately is what makes all their albums a pleasure: intelligent lyrics, rich harmonies and their signature intertwining voices set against a backdrop of homespun, melodic folk music. It's what they do best. (Epic)
George Strait
After 31 No. 1 singles, 12 platinum albums and seven multiplatinum albums, this 45-year-old country star doesn't take risks. With today's fans tempted by younger flavors-of-the-month, there might be a hazard in being too careful, but Strait keeps reaping million-sellers by serving up the same recipe. This release is business as usual—but a satisfying enterprise it is. The expected mix of bittersweet ballads, soft-swayin' rockers and boot-scootin' twang are all delivered in Strait's easygoing, dependable style. And while country's corporate Svengalis continue to hatch more hatted clones, this good ol' Texas boy proves again that he is one of a kind. (MCA Nashville)
Dan Bern
With his guitar and harmonica and nasal twang, Bern may sound, on his debut, as if he has listened to too many Bob Dylan albums. But his irreverent sense of humor is his own.In "Marilyn," for instance, he declares that Monroe should have married X-rated novelist Henry Miller instead of playwright Arthur Miller. "Jerusalem" is a spoof about waiting for the messiah. "It's like everybody's waiting... I know how I hate to wait/ Like even for a bus or something/...So I think it's time now, time to reveal myself. I am the Messiah," Bern sings, in a send-up of Dylan songs from his Christian music phase. Being compared to Dylan is the kiss of death for many aspiring singer-songwriters. Beck survived it, and the irrepressible Bern—less musically innovative than Beck, but more biting and accessible—may as well.(Sony/Work)
Doc Cheatham and Nicholas Payton
Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham may be the eighth wonder of the world. Some seven decades after his debut, the trumpeter (who turns 92 this week) continues to play with clear-toned, ever-soulful grace. Here he has teamed with 23-year-old fellow trumpet maestro Nicholas Payton for an intimate, extremely satisfying set of traditional jazz standards, including Hoagy Carmichael's "Stardust," Irving Berlin's "How Deep is the Ocean?" and Fats Waller's "Black and Blue." Cheatham's solos and vocals sparkle with a laid-back charm, while Payton's horn interplays with his mentor's with subtle sympathy, revealing an innate understanding of the music's tender side. The pair have crafted a work sure to pass the test of time. Much like the good doctor himself. (Verve)
The Byrds
The members of the legendary L.A. band led by Roger McGuinn started out as acoustic folkies who, galvanized by the '64 British Invasion, plugged in and took off. In the years that followed, the Byrds helped spearhead three separate, groundbreaking genres: folk-rock, acid-rock and country-rock. And they did it without losing their unique musical identity.
Columbia/Legacy, which reissued the first four Byrds albums last year, now revisits the final four of their remarkable '60s output. It's difficult to imagine discs as stylistically opposed as the spacy, Sgt. Pepper-ish Notorious Byrd Brothers and the rootsy country-rock gem Sweetheart of the Rodeo, or that such a focused, gentle album as the vastly underrated Ballad of Easy Rider could follow such a diffuse, rough-edged one as the aptly titled Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde. All of it, though, is still somehow the Byrds and still shimmering after all these years. (Columbia/Legacy)
>Squirrel Nut Zippers
SWINGING THE DREAM
"I FOUND A RECORDING OF BESSIE SMITH singing 'St. Louis Blues,' " recalls Jim Mathus. "I thought I'd found religion."
It's not surprising that the musical inspiration for Mathus, the vocalist-guitarist-trombonist for the North Carolina-based Squirrel Nut Zippers, should come from an LP bin at a yard sale. After all, the septet specializes in taking something old and giving it a new home. What is surprising is that its new home is on the charts. Hot, the Zippers' second album of '20s- and '30s-style jazz and swing, spiced with rock and roll, has made the Top 30 in Billboard; the video for "Hell" is in regular MTV rotation, and the band is packing clubs across the country.
The Zippers, who are all in their 20s and who named their band after a caramel nut candy, were formed in 1993 after Mathus moved into the Chapel Hill, N.C., farmhouse of his girlfriend (now wife) Katharine Whalen and taught her the banjo. They met vocalist-guitarist-saxophonist Tom Maxwell and discovered a mutual love for singers like Smith and Cab Calloway. "We started out playing informally, in a bistro, but it seemed like there was an audience for this type of unamplified music," says Mathus.
And whether or not they remain as hot as Hot, "this is a style we'd like to stick to," he adds. "We'll do this no matter what's fashionable in music. There will be no Squirrel Nut Zippers rap album."
- Contributors:
- Amy Waldman,
- Jeremy Helligar,
- Marisa Sandora,
- Randy Vest,
- Lyndon Stambler,
- Alan Paul,
- Billy Altman,
- Craig Tomashoff.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
