Daniel Merriweather: New Blues

This posting is well over due. I meant to write it about two months ago but it got lost in all the other stuff I have been doing especially the creative writing. I hope to be able to post a steampunk (or as Michael Moorcock prefers, a 'steam opera') novella next month. In the meantime, as noted in recent postings I have been listening to a lot more mainstream pop music and critiquing some of it as I have been going. Perhaps it is my age, but some of it seems very silly. There is strong music around and possibly as a reaction to rap music in rock seems to be having a revival. Muse, Green Day, The Kings of Leon, The Lost Prophets all seem to have become mainstream even though some of their songs are challengingly about sex and politics. The 1980s revival is patchy but provides a bit of variety to another slew of talent show winners and losers, especially solo female artists, though even Alexandra Burke seems to have adopted a rockier approach to dance music and it has given her a No. 1, with something a bit better than another Whitney Houstonesque power song.


Anyway, my focus in this posting is none of these, but a man who is very difficult to categorise. Wikipedia lists him as performing 'r&b and acid jazz' which is a rather eclectic mix. Of course, r&b, these days bears very little similarity to 'rhythmn and blues' of say the 1960s and is really more about rap music with less rap. There is a clear identification between r&b and black American culture so it has become a catch-all. The references to getting rich and having lots of sex, to some extent can be related back to such sentiments in soul music of old, though sheared of any real heart and certainly any real tension or trauma. In addition, the female perspective is generally missing from r&b in a way it was not from many soul songs.


I think this is what really struck me when I came across 'Red' by Daniel Merriweather. To British listeners his name makes him sound like a folk singer from Somerset and with Seth Lakeman with pop/folk crossover with 'Lady of the Sea' in the past year and Mumford & Sons more recently, you could be forgiven for thinking Merriweather was another, that is until you hear him sing. His career is interesting, he is in fact Australian, born in Melbourne in 1982. His music has been eclectic, encompassing r&b (he supported Kanye West on tour) and some rap on his records (not by him), yet he appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2008. He has done a lot of work with producer Mark Ronson who in himself is difficult to categorise musically but whose greatest hit in the UK has probably been Amy Whitehouse's cover of 'Valerie'. Merriweather sung on Ronson's version of 'Stop Me If You've Heard This Before' (originally by The Smiths) which is an incredibly camp song, though even there Merriweather provides the heartache in his singing especially in the line 'I love you only slightly less than I used to'.


'Red' really showed off Merriweather's talents and added another element to his musical persona. As with many white male singers with a rich voice, I assumed he was black before I saw the video. In fact he is a rather baby-faced (though also scarred) man who looks like a rockabilly, the clothes he wears makes you think he just stepped out of a pick-up truck somewhere in Kentucky. He does look like he is on the verge of tears at time, but the emotion he conveys in his singing comes over as authentic. 'Red' is almost a song about torture, seemingly about a man whose female partner is suffering depression or some kind of mental breakdown and he is at his wit's end trying to work out how to deal with this and also how to help her recover. It is not a theme for an r&b scantily-clad women dancing round the pool video, and naturally the video is dark, simple but powerful. Merriweather shows his vocal range and really packs power into his singing. You really feel he is working for his pay in a way that Tinchy Strider, for example, as yet, has never done. 'Red' got into the top 10 in the UK charts, despite being very different to a lot of other tracks around at the time and I think will endure as a song.


In seeking my own categorisation for Merriweather's song, I came back to The Rolling Stones, not the bloated stadia-filling performers of now, but them pre-1973. A lot of early Rolling Stones is original rhythmn and blues covers of US performers with a style that you could believe you were hearing them performing live in a bar. In line with issues of the 1960s a number of the songs they released in 1966 are about mental health, especially '19th Nervous Breakdown' (1966), 'Mother's Little Helper' (about tranquilisers - 1966), 'Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?' (1966) and, of course, 'Paint It Black' (1966). Other melancholic tracks include 'Heart of Stone' (1964) and 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' (1969). They have more positive songs, and that soul-influenced references to sex, as in 'Let's Spend the Night Together' (1967). By the 1970s they had moved away from the introspective material (I suppose you can even put 'Get Off of My Cloud' (1965) in there even though it is a forceful tune) to make more explicitly rocky and positive songs.


I feel what runs through both 'Red' and this Rolling Stones material is a blues baseline. After all, blues is about unhappiness and the burdens of life. It is music that is about resilience despite all those challenges. Rhythmn and blues moves it on, gives it a more popular musical setting, more accessible to the average listener, but it does not tear away the blues sentiment in the way that contemporary r&b seems to have done entirely (though even then occasionally as with 'I'll Be Missing You' (1997) by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans it does remember you can have a heart and that song stays just the right side of being schmaltzy). I doubt Merriweather and 'Red' will spark off blues flowing into current popular music, but it is nice to have heard a strong performer and hear a song which is about something more than how many women the singer can sleep with or how big his car is.

Retro Pop Continues to Thrive

Last year I noted how many current pop songs seem to be using 1960s style arrangements even though the artists performing the songs had not been alive during that decade. This trend continues now and seems to show no sign of abating. Despite (or may because of) all her personal problems Amy Winehouse continues to be a best seller with her soul-motown style (and on the album she also has music in dub/early reggae styles too) in both the UK and the USA. Here her profile was mantained by her collaboration with Mark Ronson on the cover of 'Valerie' by The Zutons (2006) and inadvertently creating a lesbian anthem.

Of course in the wake of Winehouse and the other singers like Christine Aguillera and Faith Hill who did one-off retro songs, others are coming to the fore, notably (Amy) Duffy who was born in 1985 but sings as if she was a member of a girl group of the mid to late 1960s. Her style is shriller, less earthy than Winehouse and she even cites Millie Small singing 'My Boy Lollipop' (1964) as an influence, along with Sandie Shaw (with a bit more credibility as Small has a terribly girly voice), but I suppose that fits in with the uber-girly style that so many young women are engaging with at the moment. In her song 'Mercy' which has reached number 1 in the UK the lyrics are incredibly submissive about a woman begging for mercy 'on my knees' to be released from her attraction to a man who wants her simply as 'something on the side' which is hardly an empowered young woman's behaviour. Winehouse's lyrics may speak of losing control to alcohol or love but references in 'Rehab', 'Back to Black' and 'Tears Dry On Their Own' are about women taking back the control with greater experience. Maybe it is time for Aretha Franklin to start re-releasing her back catalogue from 'R,E,S,P,E,C,T' to 'Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves', she was there in the 1960s and it seems, still has a great deal to say to women in the late 2000s as society seems to be pushing hard to return to the gender balance of 40 years ago.

The retro style is not confined to women and a number of established groups are making forays into the retro scene. I have heard a number influenced by the MerseyBeat style sounding rather like The Kinks and other male bands of the time. Unfortunately many of these slip from radio consciousness faster than I can keep track of them. There was one by a former member of Pulp (though half the music population of the UK seems to have been in Pulp at one time or another) and the one that sticks out currently is by Badly Drawn Boy who formed in 2003 and have had moderate success. Their single 'Time of Times' has a kind of cross-over British music scene sound with hippy inputs. You could easily have listened to it in 1967 and not been surprised by it. It is musical, though the concept of the lyrics is limited, I personally would prefer it over any rap track around at the moment. Maybe all of this is about Britain, though clearly US artists are joining in too, it seems more sustained here. The British always took on board all kinds of American influences of all kinds, for much of their career The Rolling Stones were a rhythm and blues band before morphing into more of a rock band in the early 1970s and you can hear the blues in their early songs applied to concerns of the time like abuse of prescription drugs. However, the sounds and style were mixed in with British sentiments as they seem to be doing now. The 1960s were a period in modern British history when the country seem to be successful and the general standard of living was pretty good and opportunities for people to advance in society were greater than before. No wonder there might be a nostalgia for such times or among people not born then an interest in music influenced by that era. The issue is, however, is what messages are being brought forward in time is it the line of Winehouse about becoming stronger after challenges or of Duffy about submitting in a male-dominated society or Badly Drawn Boy about a time of change. Maybe it is only people like me who worry about what songs are saying and the bulk of the population consume pop music because it engages emotionally with them. Of course music of the 1960s was often well crafted and you can note often the complexity of the instrumental usage. Some of it was simplistic, naturally, but maybe after so long of pumped electronic background and grunted lyrics people are seeking something more satisfying.

I had anticipated that the retro pop era would fade, but we are now into its second year and if the sales continue to be this high and the range of artists coming to this style of music in its wide range of forms then we can only speculate how long it will go on. It would be interesting if The Rolling Stones on their next tour started performing 'Not Fade Away' (1964), 'It's All Over Now' (1964 - a counterpoint male dominance song) or 'Time Is On My Side' (1965) or even 'Let's Spend the Night Together' (1967 - too controversial for 1960s USA 'the night' had to be substituted with 'some time' and I could imagine it would still be frowned upon in the sexual abstinence culture of a lot of the USA of the 2000s) or 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' (1973) as a counteraction to our current consumerist obsessions (though saying that Mick Jagger is a terribly Thatcherite Conservative and tax avoider, his solo single 'Let's Work' (1987) was an appalling New Right anthem against 'benefit scroungers'). Personally I am intrigued to see what happens next, which other vein of 1960s music is re-excavated, how well it is accepted and what it can tell us about life in this decade.