Ellen Foley
Peculiar in another way is this effort by a woman who had a modestly successful debut album, Nightout, in 1979. That elementally racking LP was best described, she admits, as "teen-idiom." This one, recorded in London and produced by her boyfriend, Mick Jones of the Clash, has a European music hall sound to it. Foley tries such songs as The Death of the Psychoanalyst of Salvador Dali, a not unamusing attempt by Jones and Joe Strummer to duplicate musically Dali's freely associated canvases; part of the lyric goes, "Gene Vincent's cuff links rusted in his shirt/ Priests married themselves using Bibles and mirrors/ In China all the bicycle chains snapped at once." Foley also renders an Edith Piaf favorite, My Legionnaire, in English, sounding a little like Lily Tomlin doing a Piaf imitation. Most successful are the rock-flavored cuts, notably M.P.H. and Foley's own Phases of Travel. Foley, 29, a Missourian (thus the title), went a long way to have a musical identity crisis, but as those things go, this is relatively entertaining.
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