With many R & B balladeers eliciting oohs and aahs with melismatic vocal contortions, it's refreshing to hear from a woman who knows the value of sighs and whispers. Working in a genre that tends to be awash in syrup, Watley is neither too sticky nor too sweet. The sixth solo album from the onetime Soul Train dancer and former Shalamar chanteuse is a pleasant exercise in restraint. Yet Flower finds the singer, producer and songwriter experimenting with an unrestrained and transparent marketing strategy. The album arrives just as the April issue of Playboy, starring Watley in a six-page pictorial, lands on newsstands. (Atlantic)
Nick Lowe
As a veteran of the legendary British pub band Brinsley Schwarz and producer of Elvis Costello's classic early albums, Lowe was an architect of Britain's New Wave explosion in the late 1970s. And, with a string of his own sprightly solo albums (including 1978's Pure Pop for Now People), Lowe helped define Brit Pop, England's current musical flowering. Although he has inspired everyone from Costello to Hootie & the Blowfish, the fame and fortune of mainstream success have eluded him. Dig, his 10th solo album and first since 1994, finds him crooning a cycle of melancholy songs about heartbreak and emotional redemption. With his appealing vocal style, his undiminished gift for lyrics and his knack for composing three-minute rockabilly gems, it's a mystery why Lowe remains an underappreciated pop treasure. (Upstart)
Mike Ireland & Holler
He has the sort of hill country twang in his voice you'd expect to hear in a backwoods holler. But Ireland and his backing band come from the urban flatlands of Kansas City, Mo. And while their hard-rocking brand of honky-tonk puts them squarely in the y'alternative school of country-rock, the 37-year-old's press agents have dubbed his sound "countrypolitan." Brand it what you will, Ireland makes his impressive debut on Sub Pop, a Seattle label best known for launching Nirvana. With moaning fiddles, viola and—no kidding—a cello, Holler provides Ireland a garden wall of sound for songs about heartbreak, remorse and, on "Banks of the Ohio," even a gothic tale of misogynistic violence: "I murdered the only girl I love 'cause she would not be my bride." A hint of Ireland's affinity for dark themes might be found in the name of his previous band—the Starkweathers—after the notorious mass murderer Charles Starkweather. (Sub Pop)
Steve Poltz
Poltz's solo debut album is at least witty and musical enough to lift him from the shadow of his former girlfriend Jewel. As the cowriter of her 1996 hit "You Were Meant for Me," he has been best known for his appearance in her video for that tune, even though he was also a cofounder of the Rugburns.
Poltz's often wry and pining tunes evoke the work of one of his idols, Rickie Lee Jones, as well as that of Loudon Wainwright III. He is supported on this album by keyboardist Benmont Tench, accordionist Van Dyke Parks, drummer Jim Keltner and even the old girl herself, Jewel, who adds vocal harmonies on two tracks. Sense of humor is not the strong point of many pop singers, and it's refreshing to find one performer who can laugh at himself a little. (Mercury)
Pulp
Unlike such fellow British upstarts as Oasis and the Verve, Pulp has not caught fire on this continent, where the group's album sales have been as tepid as warm beer. Yet Pulp's lanky leader, Jarvis Cocker, is a beloved eccentric in England, where his witty, literate songs chronicling British suburban life have earned comparisons to the master of bemused English introspection, Kinks kingpin Ray Davies. Cocker is admired too for his iconoclasm (he once mooned Michael Jackson at a televised awards show, in protest, he said, of the singer's humorlessness). Jarvis, who studied film in London before forming Pulp some 15 years ago, is hardly irony-impaired, as these 13 world-gone-wrong songs demonstrate. Chock full of wordplay and wry musings—"I could be a genius if I just put my mind to it," he sings on "Glory Days"—Hardcore is alternately sarcastic and wistful. At 34, Cocker already rues his generation's youth obsession. "Help the aged," he sings, "one time they were just like you, drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue." (Island)
Waylon Jennings
Nobody ever accused Jennings of ml being a New Age Sensitive Guy. So this children's album is really a little boy's album, "a big rascal singing about little rascals," as Jennings has put it. It is, political incorrectness notwithstanding, a delightful romp, with all the tunes written from a boy's perspective. In "All of My Sisters Are Girls," for example, Jennings sings, "They can't climb a tree and they can't catch a ball/they're really no fun at all." In "Dirt," he philosophizes, "You can throw it and kick it and it don't even hurt/So a kid's best friend just got to be dirt."
A sweet-voiced children's chorus provides appropriate backup, Caroll Spinney of Sesame Street makes a brief but amusing cameo appearance as Oscar the Grouch, and studio harmonica whiz Terry McMillan adds to the playful atmosphere. And since Jennings himself is much more in granddad than outlaw mode these days, he seems the ideal singer to communicate to all the little good young boys out there. (Sony Wonder)
>Van Halen's Gary Cherone
ONE-WAY TICKET TO RIDE
WHEN HE HEADED TO L.A. IN 1996 TO audition for a job as Van Halen's lead singer, Gary Cherone wasn't planning a long stay. Cherone, a former member of the Boston-based group Extreme, had never been a fanatic fan of Van Halen, despite their millions of album sales, didn't know the words to their songs and envisioned a quick tryout followed by a quick turnaround flight. Things changed after his first meeting with leader Eddie Van Halen. "I could tell he didn't suffer from LSD—Lead Singer Disease," says Van Halen, 43, alluding to the band's previous vocalists, David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar. "When he was still standing there with his bag in his hand, I knew he lived and breathed music just like I do." Within half an hour, Cherone had written words and Van Halen music for their first song. Almost immediately, I "bonded on a deeper level than I ever have" with a fellow musician, says Van Halen.
The band's new album took longer to put together. Cherone, now 36, moved into a guest house at the home Van Halen shares with actress-wife Valerie Bertinelli ("I'm the rock and roll Kato Kaelin," he jokes) and during the next year of work even vacationed with them.
With Van Halen III now in stores, the band—including Eddie's brother Alex on drums and Michael Anthony on bass—will soon tour. And thanks to their new singer and wordsmith, says Van Halen, there will be more than music for fans to appreciate. "No lyrics ever inspired me until I heard what Gary was writing," admits Van Halen. "It had always been music first for me. And 9 times out of 10, the lyrics were about female body parts."
- Contributors:
- Steve Dougherty,
- Ralph Novak,
- 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!
