Spoon is America’s most unsinkable rock band, a juggernaut of near-flawless albums and iron-clad hooks. Behind it all is singer/guitarist Britt Daniel, alone with his broken heart, self-doubt and relentless pursuit of perfection. By Corey duBrowa
Why am I down here dicking around with my pedals? I shouldn’t be doing this. I’m killing the moment.
Britt Daniel genuflects before 2,500 or so fans, mere moments away from one of the most important sets his band has ever played. As he adjusts his guitar knobs in a last-minute effort to get the sound right, this is the thought roaming through his head. That and, “Are my father and stepmother comfortable?” (They’re out there somewhere in the frothy, capacity-plus crowd.)
Scattered across the outdoor stage at Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, Texas, on the final night of this year’s South By Southwest festival, Daniel’s band—drummer Jim Eno, keyboardist Eric Harvey and ex-Get Up Kids bassist Rob Pope—busies itself with final preparations for tonight’s gig. Spoon is the last group between the rapidly swelling audience and its date with Iggy Pop and his reformed Stooges, the eagerly anticipated headliner for tonight’s
Esquire magazine showcase. Earlier this evening, the line to get into Stubb’s backyard wound up, down and around three city blocks, and it’s now clear that hundreds of people seeking a way inside—even with the venue’s laissez-faire approach to calculating fire-safety-compliant maximum capacity—will instead be turned back at the gate.
In keeping with
Esquire’s glittery reputation, the VIP crowd has already made the prologue to Spoon’s show something of a my-parents-are-away party for the rich and semi-famous. Ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha slouches at the bar, ordering a drink and looking bored beyond belief, answering questions from the well-meaning bartender as if manning the drive-through window at a bank.
Spider-girl Kirsten Dunst and her new boy toy, Razorlight singer Johnny Borrell, are chain-smoking in the corner, staring fixedly at one another as if there was no one else in the place. Austin homeboys Lance Armstrong and Matthew McConaughey have appeared. And there’s R.E.M.’s Peter Buck, arm-in-arm with wife Stephanie Dorgan, owner of the Crocodile Café in Seattle (the place where this story ends, two months later). All the while, some random garage band plays a blaringly bland variety of Southern-fried rock
a la Kings Of Leon—right down to the muttonchop sideburns—which is somewhat ironic considering that the Kings themselves have just wrapped up a set outside.
From this surreal set of tabloid images, a realization emerges: Although Stubb’s amphitheater is packed with ardent admirers in Spoon’s hometown, the sweaty, semi-clothed crowd surfers are clearly Iggy’s people, politely acknowledging Spoon’s set while biding their time in anticipation of the main event.
Daniel, his Gibson hollow-body guitar slung low, swaggers into the rolling groove of “Don’t You Evah,” one of three songs Spoon will play tonight from its forthcoming album,
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The band moves through its one-hour set like a shark silently and effortlessly circling its prey. Spoon’s spare, linear sound gives the impression of complete control and little wasted effort, whether toying with the catch-and-release tension of “The Beast And Dragon, Adored” from 2005’s
Gimme Fiction or the slinky new “Rhthm And Soul,” which features backing vocals provided by actress/Amy Winehouse look-alike Yasmine Kittles. (More on this connection later.)
Even the barrelhouse keyboard hook to “The Way We Get By,” a song from 2002’s
Kill The Moonlight also heard in last year’s underrated Will Ferrell movie
Stranger Than Fiction, leans more toward “precision” than “party.” Along the way, Daniel sheds his black military jacket and works in some between-song banter about Public Enemy, which performed last night as part of the SXSW festival. “Did you guys see those S1Ws? Insane!” Merge Records, Spoon’s label, will later post a completely incongruous photo on its Web site of Daniel hanging out backstage with Flava Flav.
Spoon heads for the turnstiles with another new song, the George W. Bush-baiting “Don’t Make Me A Target,” before wrapping up its set with a rousing take on
Gimme Fiction’s ominous “My Mathematical Mind.” Then, just as efficiently as they took the stage and worked it for the alcohol-sodden crowd, the four members of Spoon walk off, allowing the shirtless, occasionally pants-less Iggy to assault the gathered throng with old favorites (“No Fun,” “1969”) and new, uneven material from underwhelming comeback album
The Weirdness. By the time the Stooges have invited the audience to crash the stage for final number “Fun House,” it’s clear their buzzsaw sound (marred when bassist Mike Watt’s amp appears to implode mid-set) and group interplay are secondary to the creation of the perfect environment in which to behold the almighty aura of the Ig in the flesh.
Across the street from Stubb’s, there’s a raging after-party in progress at what is euphemistically called a “green room” but functions as more of a safe house owned by the venue’s booker, Charles Attal. Strangely, the only person who appears even remotely responsible for the place is the silent door guy letting people in and out. Musicians, managers, scenesters and other assorted characters wander through at will, passing by the living-room foosball table on their way to the kitchen to grab a beer. There’s a pay-per-view boxing match on a big screen in one of the bedrooms, opening act Paolo Nutini is being carried around on the shoulders of one of Stubb’s bouncers (evidently on the way to his next stop for the evening; Nutini’s shoes have gone missing, and he’s refusing to walk any further), and three-fourths of Kings Of Leon are downing beers by the fistful. Buck patiently explains why R.E.M. played a cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” during its recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (“The Stooges should be in there already; we played it in protest”), while Daniel stands near the fridge—alone, naturally, with nary a bandmate or friend in sight—fretting over his set and wondering whether Spoon really delivered the goods. As it happens, Daniel lives in terror of letting people down, and in his view, tonight was not one for the ages.
“It was a little rough,” he says regretfully, taking a pull at his beer. “When someone first suggested that we should open for the Stooges at Stubb’s, I was psyched. Can you imagine a better show? But once we were onstage, there was so much anticipation for the Stooges.” He pauses. “Obviously, there wasn’t that kind of wall-to-wall intensity when we were playing. I understand; people grew up on this music and thought they’d never get to see this band again. So it was cool, but it definitely wasn’t a typical hometown show for us.”
And with that, Daniel stalks off into the night.
No time to be fancy or cute; these are gonna have to be “speed mixes.”
Type Foundry Recording is a deceptively large, cozily appointed studio facility in an industrial corner of Portland, Ore. Surrounded by metal-sided warehouses in an upstairs location accessible only by what appears to be a converted fire escape, the 3,000-square-foot studio is easy to miss and has the distinct aura of a place where serious people get down to serious business, as evidenced by the wall-mounted CD inserts of all the artists whose albums have been created here, including M. Ward, the Decemberists and the Thermals. On this otherwise nondescript, rainy afternoon, that’s precisely what’s going on inside as Britt Daniel rolls up his sleeves and goes to work.
Clad in Oregon-issue winterwear—dark sweater, dark utility trousers, dark Converse sneakers—Daniel is hunched over the studio’s main mixing board with a set of earphones on. The skeletal, piano-based strains of a demo of his new “My Little Japanese Cigarette Case” streams overhead. Lounging on the control room’s hand-me-down sofa is one of the studio’s four partners, Norfolk & Western frontman Adam Selzer, who occasionally offers technical advice.
In this elegiac, demoed version of the song, falsetto vocals fly in and out of the mix—sometimes overlapping or harmonizing, more often echoing off of one another with delay effects—and the tune’s heartbroken core is revealed in a way that’s never approached on the finished product’s more up-tempo arrangement. Through the addition of a few lyrics and a bridge Daniel will later excise from the altogether more cryptic album track, it’s obvious what we’re listening to is a break-up song: “I’ll always want you/My Japanese cigarette case/Since I saw you in the flesh/I knew my life was a mess … Oh, I’m never gonna see you again/I tell myself it’s over/Yet I want you back again.”
Daniel recently split with the longtime girlfriend he followed to Portland two years ago, and
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is consequently littered with the relationship’s nuclear fallout. (The album’s improbable title is taken from the name of an early demo of “The Ghost Of You Lingers,” another somebody-done-somebody-wrong song.) Despite the emotionally fraught content of the track, he remains focused on plowing through the mixing chore, given he has the studio for only one day and nearly a dozen tracks to mix down for use as b-sides and import singles.
Calling Daniel “obsessive” is like labeling Jimmy Buffett’s outlook “78 degrees and sunny.” When it comes to his music and band, there’s no detail too small for Daniel to sweat. Over the course of the afternoon, he’ll play back the track a dozen times to ensure the disorienting, ping-pong vocals he hears in his head—and in his earphones—are as closely replicated as possible. He moves on to an acoustic recording of the Jon Brion-produced “The Underdog,” breaking out a yellow legal pad full of meticulous notes documenting the four-track demo tapes he stores in a white box for safekeeping. Each of these tapes is numbered and corresponds to flurries of handwritten thoughts that help him decode the tracks later.
“I finally broke 100 with this record,” says Daniel of the tapes that go all the way back to his earliest recordings, made 18 years ago. “A star means it’s worth listening to again. An X means it’s not worth listening to again.”
“It can’t all be wedding cake/It can’t all be boiled away/I try, but I can’t let go of it,” Daniel’s voice pours urgently out of the speakers, insistent in its distinctive, scratchy-throated cadence, pitched halfway between Kurt Cobain’s howl and Prince’s cooed come-ons. This song, too, provides evidence of the emotional trauma that sits just beneath the surface of nearly every track on the album.
“I felt really desperate, to be honest,” says Daniel. “We broke up while I was making the record, and when I was listening to some of the rough mixes over Christmas, I immediately thought, ‘Yes, this is exactly how I feel right now.’ I don’t know that I’ve ever really had one of our records hit me like that.”
It’s a time-worn cliché that emotional hardship produces the best work of an artist’s career. Spoon’s 13-year overnight success story proves Woody Allen’s old saw about perseverance (“80 percent of success is just showing up”), and the band has often done its most compelling work with its back against the wall.
Born in the coastal Texas oil town of Galveston in 1971 and raised a few hours north in Temple’s hill-country environs, Daniel arrived in Austin in 1989 as a freshman at the University of Texas. In between classes, he started a band called Skellington (after the Julian Cope album of the same name) and eventually ended up with a degree in radio/television/film and a lengthy DJ stint at KVRX, the student-run station. Through a mutual friend, he met drummer Eno, a former microprocessor designer and the only other band member on every Spoon album. The two ended up playing together in the rockabilly-influenced Alien Beats before trying their hand at collaborating on the songs Daniel had been writing since his teens.
Daniel and Eno’s full-length opening salvo as Spoon—the name came from a Can song, necessitated by “a show we booked on a Friday, so we sat around Thursday night and just picked one,” laughs Eno—was the Matador-issued
Telephono, which ended up selling only 3,000 copies despite the fact that Spoon’s hard-charging, Pixies-influenced post-punk sound had also attracted the attention of Geffen, Interscope and Warner Bros. By the time the band had finally gotten over its major-label misgivings and signed with Elektra in 1997, it had been through a prolonged legal wrangle with bassist Andy McGuire for a share of songwriting rights to
Telephono. (McGuire ended up with a third of the album’s royalties and advance money instead.)
As Daniel and Eno regrouped with new bassist Josh Zarbo for 1998’s lean, angular
A Series Of Sneaks, it was clear that Spoon’s tenure on Elektra would be a stormy one. First, the band’s manager, Pat Magnarella, who was also working with the Goo Goo Dolls at the time, told Daniel that his new batch of songs had “taken a real step backward” and fired Spoon. Then Ron Laffitte, the Elektra A&R rep who had championed the band, left the label, and Spoon found itself dropped a mere four months after signing, its major-label debut instantly relegated to forgotten status.
“At the time, you could find that record in just about any cutout bin in America,” says former touring bassist Roman Kuebler, who currently fronts the Oranges Band. “It was sad.”
“Britt has a long, particular memory about that era,” says band manager and Post-Parlo Records founder Ben Dickey. “He and Jim call those ‘the Locust Years.’”
Two years passed before Daniel and Eno finished the material that eventually became Spoon’s Merge debut,
Girls Can Tell, which, when paired with the near-simultaneous release of the
Love Ways EP, documented the evolution of the band’s sound toward a sparer, more pop-oriented style. Daniel’s songs were slowly revealing more of who he was, albeit in sly, non-obvious ways: “1020 AM” and “The Fitted Shirt” reflected obliquely upon the impact of loss (Daniel’s paternal grandfather had died that year, and the funeral proved a watershed moment), while the album’s closing track, “Chicago At Night,” showed an uncommon emotional depth and a spooky way with atmospherics and studio technique.
Girls Can Tell caught the attention of critics and established expectations while Spoon’s comeback took shape over the next several years with the minimalist
Kill The Moonlight and the darker, more expansive
Gimme Fiction. As the group began to fill increasingly larger venues, Daniel’s self-assurance grew. Suddenly, Spoon became “one of the handful of bands you must pay attention to whenever they release something new,” according to Greg Glover, co-owner of the Arena Rock label and host of Portland’s KNRK
Alternative Mornings program, one of terrestrial radio’s most influential indie-rock shows. “I don’t think they’ve ever made a bad record.”
After this period of relative success and progress, the unraveling of Daniel’s personal life has formed yet another setback. “It was hard,” Daniel says of his split with his girlfriend, his voice heavy with regret. “It’s
still hard.” A long silence ensues before he picks up the conversation. “What was the question again?” h says, laughing at the obvious nature of his evasive action. “We both had our problems, like most break-ups, probably. Being in Austin for five months recording certainly didn’t help any. I would have come back here a lot more often if we hadn’t broken up, but we did, so I just stayed away.”
Overhead, an unreleased track called “Dear Mr. Landlord” wafts by, its repeated motif (“Be a man, kid/Do what’s right”) reminding Daniel of his emotional tumult of the last year, his move to Portland and his effort to pick up the pieces. “We tried and tried, but we just couldn't make it work,” he says. Daniel's precise meaning—the relationship or the song?—is unclear, and his words hang in the air conspicuously until he explains further: “You can tell I was just learning the song when we cut this.”
Outside, the rain pours down on the studio’s corrugated roof, sounding like the roar of the ocean as Daniel clamps his headphones on and buckles down to work.
Good evening and welcome to the acoustic show by the guy who can’t really play guitar worth a damn.=]]]]]]]]]]]
For most musicians, confidence is an elusive thing. No matter that he’s done dozens of them over the years, solo shows are always among the most nerve-wracking affairs Daniel willingly tackles. “I’m in my room practicing,” he texts from his hotel prior to the evening’s show. “I need the practice.”
Daniel is something of a text-message addict, having dispatched a series of quirky observations from the road during Spoon’s recent tour. “Just saw Wesley Clark at 15th and 5th, all alone, hailing a cab”; “Bob Barker just sat down across from me here at DFW”; “Just played Tufts University. Worst onstage sound I’ve ever experienced. Afterwards some German (?) guy told Rob, ‘Your new lead singa is not as goot as the olt one.’”
Daniel has agreed to headline a muscular dystrophy benefit concert and now stands alone at the foot of the stage inside the Crocodile Café, peering out into the darkness. Various plastic bugs and rubber snakes hang by their threads from the ceiling, alongside a giant glow-in-the-dark arrow pointing toward a devil’s mask. The smallish room is filled with admirers, many of whom have had their albums signed or snapped camera-phone photos with Daniel earlier in the evening.
“For those of you who faced the dilemma of whether to go to the Velvet Revolver show or come here tonight,” cracks Daniel, “let me assure you that your money is going to a much worthier cause.”
Even with a recent 10-shows-in-10-days East Coast tour behind him, Daniel’s work ethic remains almost Amish in its inexhaustible appetite. His acoustic guitar strapped high to his chest, he proceeds to knock out 25 songs in an hour and change, with a set list covering the entirety of Spoon’s career and a great cover of “I Am The Key,” an obscurity by cultish Liverpool pop outfit the La’s. In contrast to his typically enigmatic persona, Daniel—either despite his nerves or because of them—is clearly enjoying himself, fielding requests (“Do you want to be witness to a disaster? I really don’t know that one!”), tossing off one-liners and gleefully taking risks he’d usually avoid with Spoon. There are a few flubs, some timing miscues with the boombox playing beats behind him and occasional flashes of brilliance, such as the set’s final song,
Kill The Moonlight tightrope walker “Paper Tiger,” which Daniel sings with nothing but the naked beat ricocheting off the walls. Suddenly, the song ends, and the assembly stands there transfixed, clapping, but not yet making a move to leave.
Winding down after the show, Daniel sits in the Crocodile’s tiny dressing room, having just performed his one self-described stupid party trick: removing a beer cap with a plastic water bottle. “(Merge’s) Mac McCaughan taught me that, and it’s the single best thing I’ve learned in the last decade,” he laughs.
A tall, beautiful woman is practically throwing herself at Daniel as he goes through the motions of making small talk. She brazenly asks for his home address (“I moved here eight years ago,” she explains. “The allergies in Portland almost did me in”) and all but climbs in his lap, at one point telling him, “You’re not as tall as they say,” despite Daniel’s thin 6’2” frame towering over hers. For his part, Daniel politely concludes the discussion, acting as though he’s seen this movie before and arching his eyebrows conspiratorially as she leaves.
Reconciling the playful, relaxed version of Daniel with his more inscrutable public persona is part of Spoon’s mystery and mischievousness. At one point, Pitchfork posted more than 15 different stories about the band over the three-week period in which
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga was still being called
Trouble Minx,
Stroke Their Brains or
It’s Frightening, depending on the source. Entertaining anecdotes pour forth about Daniel’s various antics over the years. A former tourmate remembers a late-night episode at New York’s LaGuardia Airport involving Daniel wheeling himself around in a courtesy wheelchair, acting as if he had a speech impediment and asking a hapless Au Bon Pain cashier if the restaurant granted handicapped discounts. Another details a late-night call to a friend during which Daniel pretended to be despondent in order to extract some intimate personal information from his victim, then revealed that he had obtained a police scanner and rigged the phone to be played to an audience of friends who listened to every word on Daniel’s car stereo.
As alluded to earlier, Daniel encouraged Eno and Pope to propagate a rumor at South By Southwest that bandmate Harvey and British singer Amy Winehouse were an item. When confronted about the veracity of the story, Daniel casts doubtful glances and sidesteps the question.
“That was Yasmine Kittles,” admits Harvey, chagrined that the story still has legs. “We were hanging out backstage like a couple of starstruck teenagers while Iggy walked around in a towel. I’m pretty sure Amy Winehouse was outside on the Kings Of Leon’s tour bus, arguing over who wore the tightest pants.”
“Britt has successfully put a little bit of old-fashioned mystery back in this thing,” says producer Jon Brion, who met Daniel when Spoon played a show at Amoeba Records in Los Angeles, next door to the studio where he and Kanye West were recording. “Spoon is the antithesis of your usual indie-rock, three-minute great white hopes for commercial victory. What they’re doing is classic; it just happens to be in the rock idiom. Britt reminds me of Neil Young in that I can hear him fully committed to following his whims, making the kinds of records I’ll still want to hear 10 years from now.”
Given the serious-minded nature of the band’s body of work, “Spoon” and “whimsy” are hardly the most intuitive combination of words in the Encyclopedia of Modern Rock. If anything, Daniel’s quest for discovery and sense of reinvention rivals that of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Both bands are releasing their respective sixth albums this year, have shared a manager (Tony Margherita) and have pledged allegiance to the vinyl LP, sequencing songs to reflect an a-side and a b-side. Both carefully select album artwork that shapes perceptions about what’s inside—
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga sports a moody black-and-white photo of American industrial artist Lee Bontecou—and have even recorded different songs titled “Reservations.”
“We’re all a bunch of perfectionist assholes,” laughs longtime Spoon producer Mike McCarthy of the comparison. “Spoon tries to outdo themselves every fucking time, and for it to survive, to grow, it has to continue that way. Britt works harder on his music than anyone else I know. He’s at it daily.”
True to his pointillist attention to detail, Daniel has been laboring on a solo record for so long that he now characterizes the project as “completely self-obsessed and non-existent.” Even with Spoon, it’s difficult to know when the music is finally ready for prime time.
“We worked on ‘Target’ as a song for
Gimme Fiction,” he explains. “I wrote the original riff in 2004, and we probably did it 10 or 15 different ways—the verse, the chorus—before I took a year off from it. It was like putting a puzzle together that we couldn’t get exactly right. Later, it became obvious to me what needed to be pulled out, what wasn’t working. Every song has to have some kind of unique angle to me. In my mind, I think there should be an element that makes a song a single. Like Prince’s ‘Kiss,’ where you hear it and your first reaction is, ‘That’s a fucking hit.’ For me, that’s always the driving thing.”
With the dark, dazzling
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon has saved its best work for a time when more potential fans seem poised to embrace the band than at any other point in its history. Given Spoon’s previous jousts with fame and its attendant downsides, the sense of déjà vu must be profound. Yet Daniel remains guardedly optimistic about the future.
“I’m always surprised with each step getting better or easier,” he says. “We’re doing all the same stuff we’ve ever done: touring, putting care into the recording of the album, thought into the presentation. I don’t know. Maybe now’s finally our time?”
"I don't think we're going to threaten the Jonas Brothers," says James Iha of Tinted Windows' self-titled debut, recently released on S-Curve Records. But the power pop generated by the multigenerational band—which also includes Adam Schlesinger (Fountains Of Wayne), Taylor Hanson (Hanson) and Bun E. Carlos (Cheap Trick)—is a teenage dream of catchy choruses and withering walls of guitars befitting the former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist. Iha is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all this week; read our Q&A with him to get a glimpse into the formation of Tinted Windows.
Iha: Christopher Hitchens, the British-born journalist, literary critic, pugilist, heavy drinker and author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, is one of my favorite thinkers and commentators. As a self-described "anti-theist" and former Trotskyite, he is a critic of the left as well as the right. Buy his books, catch him on CNN, MSNBC and Fox as a political commentator (check out the videos after the jump), or read his columns in Vanity Fair and Slate (here is an article he wrote on the beatification of Mother Teresa). He is always brilliant.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at8kdzJdrjs[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4e9yOPPUIJY[/youtube]
MAGNET's Corey duBrowa picks his favorite electronic/dance albums of 2009: Raekwon (pictured), Phoenix, the Field, the xx, Maxwell, DOOM, Q-Tip and more.
So here we are in the years: A dozen beyond my very first feature for what was then only a magazine, this edition of Beats/Breaks marks my final editorial contribution to MAGNET. A lot has changed about music during the past decade-plus: Downloads have replaced discs, the industry has lost more than a third of its monetary value, and “indie” has become a meaningless term (especially in an era when MTV no longer stands for Music on TV any more, but rather, Mooks on Jersey Shore). But one thing hasn’t changed: the power of music to elevate, to inspire, to transcend genre and even moment-in-time and make itself an immortal part of the pop landscape from the moment it graces the ears of listeners. Despite the industry-wide chaos, 2009 was a terrific year for music in general and beat-related music in particular, as artists continued to experiment with technology and genre-blending to create new sonic vistas that got feet shuffling and booties moving on dance floors ranging from Buenos Aires to Berlin to Boston. The list below represents a body of work as diverse and imaginative as the times in which we live. So aloha, Mr. Hand: These are the best beats/breaks of 2009, and this is me signing off for now.
1. RAEKWON | Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ... Pt II [EMI]
Like The Godfather Part II before it, this sequel to the Chef’s 1995 classic (arguably, the finest Wu-Tang joint ever released) is equal, if not superior, to the original in almost every way—a pirate’s bounty of imaginatively drawn narratives, cinemascope detail and an embarrassment of hip-hop riches. Despite its twisted history (multiple release dates, a gaggle of part-time producers, delays and drama galore), tracks such as doo-wop-flavored posse cut “New Wu” and “House Of Flying Daggers” reestablished Raekwon as the Shaolin Superman, a microphone killer with a closetful of incarcerated scarfaces straight from Central Casting and a pile of past-due contracts to execute.
2. PHOENIX | Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix [Loyauté/Glassnote]
Most bands I know of would kill for even one dance-floor anthem as brain-alteringly catchy as “Lisztomania,” “1901” or “Lasso” to be visited upon them at some point in their careers; this French legion conjured up three of ‘em on the same album. A record that renders labels such as beats, breaks, dance or whatever term you might assign Phoenix's caffeinated jitterbug completely meaningless, other than “must have.”
3. THE FIELD | Yesterday And Today [Kompakt]
With only six tracks (three of which clock in at more than 10 minutes in length), Alex Willner’s ambient electronic opus slid under the radar of most listeners in 2009 but remains one of the year’s finest records, an album that does as much for so-called minimalist techno as bands such as Ride and Slowdive did for shoegaze, back in the day. Featuring input from guests such as Battles/ex-Helmet percussionist John Stanier, samples from the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and a welcome cover of the Korgis’ “Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime,” Yesterday And Today might be the most surprising and rewarding dance release of 2009.
4. THE XX | XX [Young Turks]
How can a band citing influences such as Aaliyah and Rihanna, production work from Diplo and an educational pedigree that includes graduation from London’s Elliott School (featuring alumni such as Hot Chip, Four Tet and the immortal Burial) be anything but a dance act? Give a listen to the slyly catchy “Islands” or “Heart Skipped A Beat” and tell me that the xx's amalgam of the Cure, New Order and Young Marble Giants shouldn’t rise up to rule the dance floors of the world. Bring back the Haçienda, ya’ll! Wave those sad-colored glowsticks in the air like ya just don’t care!
5. MAXWELL | BLACKsummers’night [Columbia]
Less a dance record than a neo-soul addition to the canon of classic work from predecessors such as Prince, Stevie Wonder, Al Green and Marvin Gaye before him, Maxwell’s fourth LP is his best by a country mile and one of the most underrated releases of 2009, a Let’s Get It On for the millennial set and as confident a statement of artistic purpose as this messed-up year had to offer.
6. DOOM | Born Like This [Lex]
The metal-fingered supervillain may no longer be the novelty he once was when his masked live appearances (or, if you believe the rumors, his hand-selected imposters pulling one over on audiences and the rap game in general on stages the world over) set tongues wagging about his strange and tragic backstory as KMD’s Zev Love X, but the man known by his “government (handle) Daniel Dumile” still packs a verbal punch or two, tossing out tracks such as the shuffle-march “Ballskin” like knives and making sure suckas recognize the continued staying power of DOOM. (“All big letters but it isn’t no acronym.”)
7. Q-TIP | Kamaal The Abstract [ZLG/Battery/Red]
Seven years after it had been recorded, originally planned for release and then shelved, Kamaal The Abstract snuck through 2009’s back door in its Black Album disguise but really bears more in common with Kind Of Blue. A wildly experimental, horizon-expanding jazz album in but name only with some of the most inspired rapping by Tip.
8. MOBY | Wait For Me [Mute]
No matter what you think (or don’t) of his extreme Christian views or meat-is-murder POV, the urchin known as Richard Melville Hall to his family can still craft a killer tune with a heart-wrenching, tearjerking vocal like very few others on the planet. In what may be his best album since 1999’s Play (and the most understated work of his career), Wait For Me and its center-of-gravity killer track (“Walk With Me,” sung with passion and pulse by soul sister Leela James) makes a strong case for dance music heavy on the IQ scale.
9. RÖYKSOPP | Junior [Astralwerks]
In which the Norwegian producers/alchemists move deliberately away from the trip hop that initially defined them and toward a more club-friendly electronic pop (blitzkrieg bopper “Happy Up Here,” the Giorgio Moroder-indebted “The Girl And The Robot,” featuring a cameo from Swedish Eurodisco chanteuse Robyn) guaranteed to endear them to the after-midnight set. Intoxicating.
10. DIZZEE RASCAL | Tongue N Cheek [Dirtee Stank]
Maybe Dylan Mills’ mushmouthed, amphetamine-laced Brit-hop isn’t ultimately meant to cross over to these shores, but any album with cuts as frenetically hip-gyrating as “Bonkers” and the hilariously bold “Dance Wiv Me” (“I’m lookin’ for the perfect view/The way I see it that’s right next to you”) deserves its moment under the mirrorballs of the world.
The intimidating Monsters Of Folk (pictured)–Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and singer/songwriter M. Ward—are releasing their self-titled debut September 22 (on Shangri-La Music). The quartet has been playing shows under the Monsters moniker since 2004 … Minus 5/Young Fresh Fellows mastermind Scott McCaughey returns July 7 with great new records from both bands. Fans (and non-fans, too, we guess) who pre-order the Minus 5’s Killingsworth and the Fellows’ I Think This Is (both on Yep Roc) from the label's 
"We're going to party like it's 1699," sings Nina Persson on Colonia, the second album the Cardigans frontwoman has released under the 
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Iha: I love dogs. Crazy about 'em. Man's best friend is just that—they seemed destined to always be by our side. Whether having a thoughtful walk in the park, mischievously running away with the newspaper or saving a building from being blown up by terrorists, dogs are the best!!
This concludes “James Iha
Iha: The genre that draws inspiration mostly from the British Invasion and the Beatles; the reference for Tinted Windows. There are different types of 
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"I don't think we're going to threaten the Jonas Brothers," says James Iha of 
Iha: 
Iha: Like a lot of people, I'd never felt so vested and interested in every aspect of a presidential election. It was awesome and dazzling in every sense, and it seemed like I was checking my computer every couple of hours for the latest news. And like a lot of people (there's an Onion story on this), I felt this huge vacuum in my life once it was all over. I started reading the recaps (the post-election Newsweek issue, in particular), but then I was like, "This is pointless." And, of course, I was crushed when my man lost. Just kidding!
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For power-pop junkies, 
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? They let musicians onstage! Here are tonight's notable performers:
Late Night With Jimmy Fallon (NBC): 
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Starting March 24 and continuing throughout 2009, Reprise is releasing Green Day’s entire catalog on 12-inch vinyl. 1990's 39/Smooth and 1992's Kerplunk, the multi-platinum nimrods’ first two records, will be the initial offerings; LP number three, 1994's Dookie, is out on April 18, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is Record Store Day … And speaking of this now-ubiquitous occasion, Louisville, Ky.’s My Morning Jacket has picked Record Store Day to issue Celebración De La Ciudad Natal (ATO), a live EP sold only in independent shops. The seven tracks are from gigs at Louisville’s famous Ear X-Tacy record store and local landmark Waterfront Park. 
Is Ryan Adams one of the greatest singer/songwriters of his generation? Or will he emerge as another in a long line of pretenders to the Dylan throne? If only you could ask him, he’d surely set you straight. By Corey duBrowa
“Time let me play and be/Golden in the mercy of his means.”
—Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”
The Legend Of Ryan Adams has taken on the outsized dimensions of urban folklore. The myth has become so preposterous—we’re talking Bob Dylan-sized footprints here; the only thing missing is the invented motorcycle accident—that it’s remotely possible Adams himself is now embarrassed by some of the brushstrokes that have been applied to his impressionist portrait. Sorting out the truth from fiction takes a little doing.
Adams’ former band, the turnstile-spinning collection of lineup changes known as Whiskeytown, ultimately became more recognized for its wildly erratic onstage exploits and a treasure-trove of unreleased material supposedly on par with The Basement Tapes than for its body of actual recorded work (which, in any event, remains some of the finest ever committed to tape in the name of the nebulous alt-country genre). Adams is now aggressively in pursuit of a solo career that’s gaining industry-wide “It Kid” momentum; his second album, the wishfully titled Gold (Lost Highway), can be found prominently spotlighted at a record-store listening post near you. Along with this newfound status comes a breathtaking array of rumors, half-truths and stories that have a Replacements-like haze of manufactured danger about them.
Here’s a representative sampling: Whiskeytown got into a backstage altercation with former Blasters guitarist Dave Alvin. (False.) Adams duked it out with Keith Richards in the studio after the legendary guitarist took offense to what he felt were Whiskeytown’s obvious Stones borrowings. (Half true: It was guitarist Phil Wandscher, and not quite so dramatic.) Adams has verbally or physically threatened countless journalists who’ve penned less-than-flattering articles about him. (The stories are legion; more on this later.) Adams fired the entire membership of Whiskeytown onstage in Kansas City in 1997 and sent them back to North Carolina, only to play the remaining dates as an acoustic duo with violinist/vocalist Caitlin Cary. (True.)
Herein lies the dilemma: saving Ryan from himself. It isn’t exactly news that some of the most brilliant people of our time have possessed all-too-human personality flaws to balance out their superhuman talents; it’s said Einstein could barely tie his shoes, that Vince Lombardi rarely spoke to his children during football season, that Kurt Cobain rewrote his personal history to ensure the legend would obscure the less-appetizing truths of his upbringing. While Adams isn’t nearly as accomplished as any of these figures, his overstuffed knapsack of tall tales certainly fits this description. He possesses as conflicting a set of traits as anyone in pop music today, which makes assessing his work a tad more challenging than simply sitting down with his records and trying to make head or tail of the output.
So which is the “real” Ryan Adams? The man his former tour manager calls a “charming and completely likable guy”? The artist who veteran rock critic David Menconi once described as the writer of “presence of greatness, Hall of Fame-type stuff”? Or the sellout who WXDU DJ and Raleigh/Durham music-scene raconteur Ross Grady pejoratively labels “the Rod Stewart of his generation”? Paradoxically, even after spending time with many of his former business/artistic cohorts (Adams declined to be interviewed for this story; his publicist lamely offered that “Ryan is just an out-there kinda kid” after rescheduling our interview on three different occasions and eventually canceling it altogether), it’s hard to say this picture is any clearer. He’s become all of them, which might just be the way Adams wants it.
Expecting To Fly
For as long as anyone who’s known him can remember, Ryan Adams wanted desperately to be a rock star. He was born November 5, 1974—exactly 28 years after the birth of one of country music’s most fabled characters, Gram Parsons, to whom Adams has been compared on countless occasions. Growing up in the coastal, Marine-base town of Jacksonville, N.C., Adams transported himself beyond the limitations of his particular backwater via visits to the record store, ultimately bonding with one of the clerks, a fellow outcast named Jere McIlwean. Adams and McIlwean formed a ratty punk band called the Patty Duke Syndrome, which consumed enough time to make Adams’ commitment to his education a vanishing memory. He quit high school, got his GED and set off for the “big city” of Raleigh, where he and McIlwean eventually hooked up with future Polvo drummer Brian Walsby.
“I met him when he was 16,” says Walsby. “He was a hyperactive, spazzy, smelly little kid who I thought was full of shit—someone who just couldn’t be as enthusiastic as he appeared. One night at the Cat’s Cradle (a Chapel Hill club), I was talking with Mac (McCaughan of Superchunk), and Ryan came charging up and wanted him to autograph some old single by Wwax (McCaughan’s pre-Superchunk band) he had bought down in Jacksonville. He talked with him like he’d known him forever.”
The Patty Duke Syndrome ultimately dissolved into the folds of faded memory (Adams wrote a song about this tense time period called “Bastards I Used To Know”), and Adams began to put the word out in Raleigh he was thinking about changing gears and forming a country band. McIlwean—“a dangerous closet drug addict,” recalls Walsby, and someone who never had much regard for Adams’ occasional dalliances with country—died from a heroin overdose in 1997. (Adams’ bleak tribute to his friend can be heard on Whiskeytown’s out-of-print 1997 Bloodshot Records single “Theme For A Trucker.”) Meanwhile, some interested/interesting parties began showing up on Adams’ doorstep.
“I first met Ryan when I was in grad school at North Carolina State,” says Caitlin Cary. “I had just moved to Raleigh and was definitely not an ‘insider’; in fact, I’d never even played in a band before. A guy in my English department must’ve talked to Ryan, because Ryan called me literally from out of the blue and told me he was starting a band and heard that I play violin and would I think about it.” When local bar owner Skillet Gilmore agreed to play drums and guitarist Phil Wandscher and bassist Steve Grothmann joined in 1993, Whiskeytown was born.
From the band’s earliest days, it was clear Adams was a prodigious talent, fanatically prolific and hell-bent on capturing as many ideas as possible before they somehow escaped his grasp. Whiskeytown spent a tumultuous 10 days in a converted barn called the Funny Farm and emerged with Faithless Street (released in ‘96 on local indie Mood Food, then sonically resculpted and rereleased in ‘98 on Outpost Records after Whiskeytown had signed its major-label deal). Cary describes the band’s time at the Funny Farm as “kind of a blur; we were all drinking a lot and didn’t really know what the hell we were doing.” Despite such distractions, the album was hailed at the time as one of the treasures of the emerging alt-country movement. David Menconi, pop-music critic for Raleigh’s The News & Observer, was one of the first to take note of Adams’ potential and served as an early booster of the band. Menconi was also a witness to Adams’ penchant for excess.
“Ryan always talked a good game about how ‘Whiskeytown is a band,’ but deep down, I don’t think he ever believed that,” says Menconi. “Caitlin used to call her song ‘Matrimony’ the ‘Ryan Interlude,’ because he didn’t have anything to do while she sang it. So he would sometimes leave the stage. One night, they were playing the Brewery in Raleigh, which is connected to the Comet Lounge (namechecked on the Strangers Almanac song ‘Yesterday’s News’). And during that song, he went next door, bumped into a friend, had a few drinks. Suddenly, he remembered he was supposed to be onstage and ran back to find the band had gone on without him; they’d run out of songs and were playing covers. So he ran to the front of the stage and started heckling them, yelling that they suck. He told me later that there’s ‘nothing more fun than heckling your own band.’ He really understands rock mythology and how to play into it. He’s perfect for the part of a rock star.”
Transformer Man
Ryan Adams has said the name Whiskeytown is Southern-colloquial shorthand for “fucked up” (e.g., “After that fifth of Jack the other night, I was totally whiskeytown”); even a cursory listen to his songs reveals a recurring alcohol motif that’s hard to miss. So it didn’t surprise those who knew him that Adams’ transition from “unknown with potential” to “rock-star brat” manifested immediately once his music—and outrageous behavior—began to catch the attention of people beyond the Raleigh/Durham area code.
A major-label shootout ensued after Whiskeytown’s breakout performance at the South By Southwest festival in 1996, with Geffen’s nascent Outpost offshoot emerging as the winner. The band huddled in Nashville with producer Jim Scott and recorded a whopping three dozen songs, the best 13 of which became the basis for its second release, 1997’s Strangers Almanac. It was Whiskeytown’s calling card for greatness: a rock album with overt country references that drew as much from the Fleetwood Mac playbook as from Parsons’, spawning at least two classic songs (“Avenues,” “Houses On The Hill”) and another cut that should’ve been a hit (“16 Days”). But Outpost’s insistence that the band tour to support the album was the beginning of Whiskeytown’s long undoing, an ugly unraveling that helped cement Adams’ bad reputation while sealing his band’s fate.
Recalls former Whiskeytown tour manager (and Adams’ ex-roommate) Thomas O’Keefe, “I did nine different tours with Whiskeytown (from 1995 to 1998), and not one of those tours lasted longer than five weeks. That was our limit. Ryan gets bored easily. He didn’t care one lick for touring and couldn’t do it for five weeks without a complete meltdown—that’s when all the bad shit happened. He’s immensely talented but needs to be busy. I always thought of Whiskeytown as a punk band, so it was never surprising to me when Ryan would be laying on his back onstage, playing one note over and over again for 10 minutes. But if you’re some ‘neck in a Son Volt hat with a Budweiser in your hand, it’s probably not as cute.”
Latter-day Whiskeytown guitarist/co-writer Mike Daly was along for the ride during some of the band’s wildest years. “I met the guys for the first time the month before Strangers came out,” he recounts. “I flew from New York down to North Carolina, but Ryan was down in Austin taking care of some business. So I hooked up with Phil (Wandscher), and he asks, ‘Do you have your (swimming) trunks with you?’ And I had to say that, no, I didn’t. So he got me a pair, and we went out fishing; that’s how I was introduced to my new bandmates. I didn’t actually meet Ryan until a week later, when we opened for Cracker at Tramps (in New York City). It was kind of a handshake: ‘This is Mike, he’s a fuckin’ great player,’ and then I walked onstage and played the show. I had my musical shit way more together than they did at that point, so it wasn’t that hard to learn the songs. I just made up my parts as we went along.”
Among the looming legends in the Whiskeytown pantheon is the story of how Adams decided to pack the whole thing in one September night in Kansas City. “Yeah, Ryan just freaked out,” recalls Daly. “He turned around in the middle of one of the songs we were playing and yelled, ‘I’m quittin’ the band.’ And I wasn’t quite following him, so I asked him if that meant we were still gonna play ‘Waiting To Derail’ or not. Clearly, that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. I guess he was hoping I’d stop to talk him out of it.”
Tour manager O’Keefe also remembers the night vividly. “It was near the end of a tour in 1997,” he says. “They were playing a song that ended up on Pneumonia—’Jacksonville Skyline’—and I could hear Ryan changing the lyrics, cussing to himself. This dissolved into a 10-minute tirade about all the things Ryan hated about the music business. He finally ended the song, smashed up his guitar, grabbed the mic and told a rather stunned audience, ‘Get on the Internet and tell your friends you just saw the last fuckin’ Whiskeytown show.’ He then sent everyone else in the band, except Caitlin, home in the RV that I had rented on my American Express card—the band, the soundman, everyone. Ryan, Caitlin and I then proceeded to hop in the minivan and play the last four dates of the tour as an acoustic set.”
O’Keefe has a host of other Adams stories, including the time he threw the monitors off the stage at the Fillmore in San Francisco (resulting in Whiskeytown’s subsequent performance ban in the city), a Vancouver show where he demolished a $4,000 Gibson Firebird guitar and a tour-ending Houston gig that resulted in every piece of equipment onstage being reduced to splinters. “Yes, it really was that fucked up,” laughs Cary. “More than you know.”
Even after such clichéd rock-star shenanigans, Adams reconvened with a different version of Whiskeytown in upstate New York in 1998 to record the songs that would come to be known as Pneumonia. By this point, nearly 20 people had passed through the band’s ranks, including former members of the Backsliders, fIREHOSE and Superchunk, as well as Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson and Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, prompting a piece of graffiti to begin appearing on various bathroom walls around Raleigh: “I used to play in Whiskeytown and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” When Outpost dissolved in the wake of the 1999 Universal/Polygram merger, Pneumonia—widely available as a bootleg on the Internet with a different mix, running order and track listing—went into limbo for nearly three years, at the very peak of the band’s creativity and popularity. It was the last straw.
“Let me put it this way,” declares Daly. “If Pneumonia had come out when it was supposed to back in 1999, there would probably still be a Whiskeytown today.”
For her part, Cary concurs with the notion the delay was instrumental in stopping the band in its tracks. “I suppose it’s possible that we might still be together, but Whiskeytown seemed to have something of a half-life,” she says. “We never really worked very hard. We toured hard, but the way you make it in this industry is, besides being talented and driven, you have to play the game. Kiss a lot of ass along the way. And Ryan was never very good at any of that stuff.”
For all the memories—good, bad, indifferent—the band ever conjured, don’t waste time hoping for a reunion tour. “I wouldn’t set up a tent in front of Ticketmaster any time soon,” Daly says dryly.
After The Goldrush
Two years have come and gone since Whiskeytown’s demise. Ryan Adams has endured a painful breakup from his long-time love, music-industry publicist Amy Lombardi. Their separation is documented for all to hear on his beautifully conceived solo debut, Heartbreaker, issued in 2000. A song on the new Gold, “Harder Now That It’s Over,” even provides his version of a nasty beer-tossing incident that resulted in her brief spell in police custody. Adams moved from New York to Nashville, but he now resides—Led Zeppelin style—in a hotel in Los Angeles. He’s been spotted on Winona Ryder’s arm, though that relationship also tanked.
The starmaker machinery is now fully engaged in taking Gold over the top. The 16-track album began as a 25-song concept piece Adams jokingly titled Career Suicide (this from the man who once told interviewers Pneumonia had been provisionally called Never Gonna Fuckin’ Come Out). Prolific as ever, Adams is purportedly working on a play, a novel and a “Replacements-like” rock project called the Pink Hearts that’s scheduled to release a record in early 2002. New famous friends have namechecked him in interviews and given props on their sleeve credits (Elton John’s latest, Songs From The West Coast, reads, “Special thanks to Ryan Adams, who inspired me to do better”). The glossy features rolled in by the truckload: Vanity Fair, GQ, Interview, New York Times, Rolling Stone, his hair expertly tousled for every photo session, cigarette dangling from his lips. The obligatory Saturday Night Live and Letterman appearances came off without a hitch. It’s a hard-knock life.
Not everyone thinks this is for the best, however. Those who adored Adams’ previous incarnation as a scruffy, punk-ass brat occasionally capable of creating great art are now hearing the excesses of Tinseltown embedded in his work. Says Menconi, “I really think Ryan hanging around in L.A. is a mistake, in terms of the musicians he’s surrounding himself with.” He may have a point; Gold’s short list of contributors includes such lesser lights as the Counting Crows’ Adam Duritz and Stephen Stills’ son Chris. “When he was living in Nashville, playing with people like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the music was so much better than what he’s doing today,” says Menconi. “Five years from now, when Ryan is doing his Behind The Music episode, I suspect Ryan will admit he knew deep down that Gold wasn’t very good.”
Although the critical response to Gold has been almost overwhelmingly positive, some of Adams’ former supporters have recently come out in opposition to the album’s overtly pop-flavored direction. No Depression, one of the alt-country scene’s most thoughtful and well-respected journals (and an early Whiskeytown adopter), recently published an editorial by co-editor Peter Blackstock that took Adams to task for “fooling himself. [Adams’] previous releases reveal an artist with a genuine gift for melody and songcraft ... Gold doesn’t sound like that artist; it sounds like the guy who does terrible impersonations of his stuff.” Blackstock’s well-reasoned criticism strikes at the heart of the album’s many faults. For all the joy of the occasional gems found lurking within (“‘When The Stars Go Blue’ is a killin’ tune,” Daly says with justified enthusiasm), there are twice as many wrong turns, overindulgent cul-de-sacs and outright bad ideas. The curse of the prolific artist finally rears its head; Adams has apparently lost the ability to self-edit at a time when his career needs this skill the most.
Though he’s said he has a new ground rule in place (“not to read my own press”), Adams is someone who’s never accepted criticism very well. He insisted in one early Whiskeytown interview that the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau was “just asking for a visit to his office” for having the temerity to write a middling review of the band. One wonders how Adams will handle the white-hot glare of the spotlight that comes with “It Kid” territory. From all appearances, it seems Adams is as pissy as ever when not handled with care.
In apparent response to Blackstock’s piece in No Depression, Adams posted the following screed on the GuitarTown newsgroup (www.guitartown.org): “You are a stupid asshole. Fuck you for having the balls to fucking decide what my fucking standards are. Fucking No Depression magazine ... whatever. Do you fucking call Emmylou Harris—or maybe Steve Earle—when they’re in the studio to check in and make sure she’s making an ‘acceptable record worthy of her talents’? I’m sure she would kindly hang up the phone. Should I fucking call you at home Peter, and ask you if it’s okay if I wanna try something different next time??? It will be interesting to see how glossy your magazine covers are when Universal and Lost Highway stop giving you the money to buy the ink you use to be a self-righteous asshole with. Fuck you and fuck your magazine.” The implied threats and out-of-body fury are pure Adams—raging at the machine while simultaneously adding fuel to the fire.
Perceived personality flaws aside, it’s worth noting that, to a person, each of the individuals interviewed for this story went out of his or her way to highlight Adams’ considerable talents, nearly to the point of turning the story into a high-school yearbook of last-chance praise.
“I value his attitude that what he’s doing matters and is for real,” says producer Chris Stamey, who’s worked with Whiskeytown in the studio.
“He has the unique ability to paint a really vivid picture with very few words; an economy with images and melodies that is unmatched,” raves O’Keefe.
“Ryan and I had a ‘musical romance’; he’s one of the most incredible, special people I’ve ever made music with, and I miss that,” pines Cary.
“There were some sessions we recorded with Dave Dominic producing called ‘Hoboken One’ that were the most amazing things Whiskeytown ever did,” recalls Daly. “It was a totally magical night. We cut eight songs in 19 hours straight, no breaks, and this experience taught me how amazing music really can be and how pedestrian most music really is.”
Reconciling the two Ryans—the artist who’s recorded several albums’ worth of material still locked away in unknown vaults (the aforementioned Hoboken sessions and solo demos such as “Memories,” “Petal In A Rainstorm,” “Hey There Mrs. Lovely” and “Nighttime Gals” rank as some of the most exquisite songs he’s created) and the one responsible for a track as flaccid as Gold’s “Enemy Fire”—is now a task that falls to record buyers who’ll be exposed to his work for the first time through the release of Gold. One can only hope the “real” Ryan decides to comes out and play soon, before his career drifts away like another of his discarded tunes.
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