Turning away from the bad news of the outside world, they focus on personal affairs: mostly romance, but also the endless processes of self-invention and finding a place in the world. Mayer and his fellow songwriters often play the same comforting role as their forebears. Mayer does, ''My stupid mouth has got me in trouble/ I said too much again.''
Taylor and Carly Simon, also released a debut album, ''Famous Among the Barns,'' with unmistakable paternal influences.īut what are younger songwriters, members of the punk and hip-hop generation, doing when they croon about the beauty of their girlfriends and the pain of getting kissed off? Shouldn't they be shouting rather than whispering, toughing things out instead of moaning, as Mr. Both 1970's stars returned to the Top 10 Ben Taylor, the son of Mr.
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Mayer hailed as ''the blueprint'' on the Grammy Awards show, released a new album and a greatest-hits collection, while Fleetwood Mac has re-emerged with an album, ''Say You Will,'' that deliberately echoes its mid-1970's heyday. To heighten the déjà vu, James Taylor, the songwriter Mr. John Mayer, who had been plugging away since the late 1990's, has become a headliner, and alongside him have come strummer-songwriters like Jack Johnson, David Gray, Pete Yorn, Jason Mraz, Howie Day, Jesse Harris, Mason Jennings, Scooter Scuderi, Steven Delopoulos and more. Three decades later, sensitive, guitar-slinging nice guys are once again swarming the airwaves, blanketing the concert circuit, accounting for innumerable Internet downloads and easing untold dorm-room seductions. All it takes is turning on a pop radio station or MTV to get the strange feeling that the mid-1970's have returned: the days of post-Vietnam and post-Watergate letdown, oil crisis, unemployment and soothing soft rock to provide consolation for it all.
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For a free Sound Bite, press 8125.Īll appearing Friday at Patriot Center with Simple Minds, Freedy Johnston, Pete Droge and Evan Dando in the HFS-mas Concert.IT doesn't require the Council of Economic Advisers to recognize that the United States is having economic troubles. VERUCA SALT - "Veruca Salt" (Minty Fresh/DGC).
To hear a free Sound Bite from this album, call 202/334-9000 and press 8123. THE GO-GOS - "Return to the Valley of the Go-Gos" (I.R.S.). At its best, "Veruca Salt" is quite winning, but few of the songs are as catchy as "Seether," "Forsythia" and "Number One Blind." The rough-pop songs are tuneful and vigorous, but on the mostly quiet, breathy tracks like "25" the occasional guitar flare-ups are insufficient compensation for the drably uneventful passages. The Veruca Salt recipe - sweet girlish harmonies, tart guyville guitars - is hardly novel, and aside from the current fashionability of the quartet's hometown (Chicago) it's hard to figure why the band's indie-album debut was picked up by a major label soon after its release. The results are listenable, but they're not exactly powerful. It combines stale samples with sauntering, sing-songy melodies in a manner that Jones has employed for a decade. Mick Jones, the only constant in this Brit-hop band, as much as admits that with "Looking for a Song," the most revealing track on the new "Higher Power." "It ain't as easy as it looks/Coming up with all those hooks," complains the former Clash man, but there aren't many hooks on "Power" and the album, if not easy, does seem a bit lazy. The latter show that the band's songwriting success ratio remains unchanged: "The Whole World Lost Its Head" is ebullient, while the other two are ordinary.īig Audio Dynamite, BAD II, Big Audio - the name keeps changing but the sound remains the same. Then the survey moves on to the highlights of the band's early-'80s albums ("Our Lips Are Sealed," "Vacation"), some live tracks and three songs recorded this year by the reunited band. In its early days, the quintet was as inept as any on the Hollywood punk circuit, and that period is more than adequately documented with 15 songs that precede the band's debut album only the true fan will want most of these, although "London Boys" is engagingly vigorous and the punk version of the Shangri-Las' "(Remember) Walkin' in the Sand" pays proper tribute to the band's girl-group forebears.
And, like the band's original albums, it mixes some catchy pop-punk with a surfeit of filler. Like most multiple-CD sets, "Return to the Valley of the Go-Gos" is an awkward combination of greatest hits (although the band already released a collection of those in 1990) and curiosities. HAVING REGROUPED yet again, the Go-Gos celebrate their semi-brilliant career with a retrospective that runs about as long as their three albums combined.