Sinead O’Connor
Event on 2012-02-21 20:00:00
Sinead O'Connor
Sinead O'Connor How About I Be Me (And You Be You) There has never been mistaking Sinead O'Connor for anybody else. A voice born to break as many hearts as windows, as tender as it is lethal. The face, simultaneously that of ocean-wide-eyed angel and shaven-headed warrior queen. And the spirit, courageous in its conviction, undaunted by controversy and fortified with endless reserves of resilience. Sinead O'Connor is that rare thing in popular music: a complete one-off. From her first breakthrough hit, 1987's 'Mandinka', to the multi-platinum international success of 1990's I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got with its unforgettable number one version of Prince's 'Nothing Compares 2 U', from her fearless genre-crossing forays into Irish folk and roots reggae to her collaborations with artists as diverse as Peter Gabriel, Massive Attack and The Chieftans, O'Connor has trodden a unique path to become the most iconic Irish female artist of the past 30 years. There is no one like Sinead O'Connor. There is only Sinead O'Connor. Lest the world dare forget who Sinead O'Connor is, it's about to be reminded once more. 25 years after her debut, 1987's The Lion And The Cobra, she returns with How About I Be Me (And You Be You), her ninth studio album and as showstopping a performance as her silver jubilee deserves. Produced by long-term collaborator John Reynolds, its ten tracks play like an encyclopaedic definition of O'Connor's oeuvre: songs about love and loss, hope and regret, pain and redemption, anger and justice. "I kind of realised I've spent a lot of my life as an artist being told what I should be," says O'Connor of the title. "Being told you should be this, you should do this, you shouldn't do that. You get to a certain age when you realise no, it's perfectly OK for me to be me, thank you very much, and you to be you. But it's very much an Irish thing. It's really a comment about Ireland and what it's like to be an Irish female artist, and particularly THIS Irish female artist." It begins with O'Connor as a giddy bride-to-be on the infectious hoedown '4th & Vine'; or as she laughingly puts it, one of many "girlie songs" on the album. "There are quite a lot of love songs on the record. It wasn't deliberate, but I'm pleased about it cos I never really did write love songs." So too the rousing 'Old Lady', a tongue-in-cheek punk ballad written about her crush on friend and Crying Game director Neil Jordan, and the buoyant call of 'The Wolf Is Getting Married'. "Another song about girlie issues," she says of the latter. "The title is something I've been wanting to use for years. When I lived in London I was in a cab having a chat with the young Muslim driver. The sky was really grey with just a little bit of blue shining through the clouds. He told me in Arab countries they called that the wolf is getting married, like he's smiling on his way to his wedding. I thought that was a gorgeous expression." Stepping out of herself and into character, the dreamily poignant 'Back Where You Belong' is a love song from a dead father killed in war to his son, originally written for the 2007 children's fantasy film The Water Horse. "There are several songs on the album which are character songs," explains O'Connor, "not necessarily me but a part of me." Equally emotive is the murmuring techno pulse of 'I Had A Baby', sung from the perspective of a single-parent. "It's a subject that people don't really write about. Even thought parentlessness is such a huge thing in the world, you rarely hear about it in a pop song. The character is a woman singing about a child she's had with a married man who's opted to have nothing to do with the child. And really, what that's like for the child and for the mother, how painful that is." The theme of pain, emotional and physical, casts its shadow wide. The beautiful 'Very Far From Home' is a personal catharsis of the loneliness of life on the road, as written and sung by a mother of four. "I can get very lonely on tour," admits O'Connor. "It's funny, I am a strong person but we're all contradictions and I'm quite vulnerable as well. Unless I have my home, my kids and all the things that keep me rooted I get quite freaked travelling around the world. When you're away from home you feel guilty. You're lonely, you're in Ostend or wherever and it's like, what's the fucking point?!" On 'Reason With Me', O'Connor delves even further into the dark, prompted by the personal testimonies of lives ripped to shreds by addiction. "The song is mostly inspired by this guy I met in Ireland, a heroin addict all his life and he thought he was a total piece of shit. He was like someone who had concrete poured all over him. Then I saw him again six months later and there was the same guy after he'd started to take action and there was this light in his eyes, he was a different person, the concrete was off him. He wasn't perfect, but he was happy and hopeful. So the song really sums that up." Living up to O'Connor's reputation as a powerfully original interpreter of other songwriters is the album's one cover version, John Grant's uncompromising lover's kiss-off 'Queen Of Denmark'. "It's a song about taking back your self-esteem and I loved the anger of it," she enthuses. "I didn't know John before but through doing the song we became mates. He has a great way of saying angry things in a terribly funny way." Unquestionably, the album's dramatic highlights are the two songs born of O'Connor's passionate response to the 2009 Murphy Report, the Irish government's enquiry into institutionalised child abuse in the country's Catholic school system and the cover-ups by the church hierarchy. On 'Take Off Your Shoes', O'Connor becomes a mouthpiece for, as she describes it, "the Holy Spirit with an AK rifle on the train on the way to the Vatican." As one of the most vocal campaigners against the attempted whitewash, O'Connor was eager to acknowledge her beliefs in song. "I liked the idea of scaring the fucking shit out of [the Vatican]," she explains. "What makes me angry and a bit of a soldier is I don't like the Holy Spirit disrespected. To me that's how it comes across, that they don't have any respect for the Holy Spirit if they can stand in its presence and lie over the rapes of small boys, covering these crimes up and yet it takes them two minutes to condemn Harry Potter for being evil." Which brings us to the captivating hymnal finale, 'VIP', where O'Connor turns her wrath on her fellow international Irish musicians too timid to step in and help her rattle the Papal cage. "We had a great tradition in Irish history of artists being a major part of the creation of history and the running of our culture," she explains. "They were very involved politically and half of them were driven into exile because they'd challenged society. Writers like Edna O'Brien, J.M. Synge, even James Joyce. Now you have this thing in Ireland where the artists have ceased to be interested in Irish issues and I find that very, very heartbreaking, especially with the publication of the Murphy Report." "I had tried," she continues, "to get a number of enormous internationally successful Irish musical artists to get involved in the struggle, to lend their voice, including someone who had actually endorsed Pope John Paul II and I was met with a stonewall of disinterest. So I think it's kind of criminal that the major musical artists from Ireland are doing nothing. And what annoys me is the one who endorsed the Pope is someone who goes on about believing in God all the time. So my view is, as artists, don't wave your fucking Grammy around going on about believing in God if you're not prepared to stand in the street and fight for the honour of God in your own country when your church has been raping little boys. It's just fucking stupid. And I was a bit nervous of challenging these artists. I've nothing against them personally. But it's time to say things as they are." Saying, and singing, things the way they are: it's what Sinead O'Connor's been doing best for the last 25 years. "I don't like comparing my records," she concludes, "but I do think there is a confidence there with this one. For a few years I went very into myself and I think I wasn't confident to be me because I was taking a kicking every time I did anything. So it seems to me that with this record I am more confident being me. You just grow into that way of thinking, y'know, what?" she laughs, "Fuck off!" The irrepressible, irreplaceable Sinead O'Connor. How about she be she and we just be thankful for it.
at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
6000 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, United States
Little Feat
Event on 2012-03-18 20:00:00
Doors: March 18, 2012 7:00 pm
Special Guest: The Villains
Cost:
Age: 12 & over (under 16 must be w/adult)
Little Feat Official Website Facebook Page
In his liner notes for Join the Band, Little Feat’s 2008, career-summing CD, Bill Payne described their motivation for recording as a way of locating the band’s influences. When you’ve played together for nearly forty years and have the instrumental chops and ears that Feat does, that’s a lot of influences, so that they can work with friends from Jimmy Buffett to Dave Matthews to Bob Seger to Emmylou Harris to Vince Gill to Chris Robinson and Mike Gordon – and it all makes musical sense.
Little Feat is very possibly the last-man -standing example of what used to be the norm in American music, a fusion of a broad span of styles and genres into something utterly distinctive. Feat took California rock, funk, folk, jazz, country, rockabilly, and New Orleans swamp boogie and more, stirred it into a rich gumbo, and has been leading people in joyful dance ever since. Join the Band sums up that story, and it’s a complex and interesting one.And it all began because in 1969 Frank Zappa was smart enough to fire Lowell George from the Mothers of Invention and tell him to start a band of his own. Paul Barrere, Feat’s guitarist, wrote recently, ”It’s almost 33 years ago exactly since Mr. [Lowell] George came to the front door of the Laurel Canyon house I was livin’ in, with that beautiful white ”p“ bass in hand, and asked if I wanted to try out as bass player for his new band. As most who know the story’s end can tell you, as a bassist I make an excellent guitarist…”
Actually, there were about 18 bass players that first year – that seat took a while to fill. George first settled on keyboard wizard Bill Payne, then added drummer Richie Hayward and bassist Roy Estrada (also a Zappa vet). They were quickly signed by Warner Bros., and began working on the first of 12 albums with that venerable company.
The first album, Little Feat, featured the instant-classic tune “Willin’,” and the follow-up Sailin’ Shoes added “Easy to Slip,” “Trouble,” “Tripe Face Boogie,” “Cold Cold Cold” and the title track to their repertoire. Estrada departed, and the band signed up (on guitar!) Paul Barrere, Sam Clayton (percussion) and Kenny Gradney (bass), and the new guys are still around.
1973’s Dixie Chicken gave them the title track and “Fat Man in the Bathtub,” as good a blues as any rock band’s ever written. The hits kept coming: the title track from Feats Don’t Fail Me Now (1974) and The Last Record Album (1975), which included “Rock and Roll Doctor,” “All That You Dream,” and “Oh, Atlanta” – another Southern-based winner (pretty good for a bunch of guys from L.A.! In 1977, Time Loves a Hero delivered the classic title song, and their career to that point was summed up with the live Waiting for Columbus, truly one of the best live albums rock has ever heard.
Success is hard. It cost Feat their founder, Lowell George, who passed in 1979 while working on Down on the Farm. And it cost them, temporarily, their joy; shortly after, they disbanded.
In 1986, Barrere and Payne met up in a chance jam session, and found that they could still find that inspiration. What they had written in ”Hangin’ On To The Good Times Here“ – ”…although we went our own ways, we couldn’t escape from where we came, so we find ourselves back at the table again, telling stories of survivors and friends” – was of course true, as with any righteous song – and in 1988 they hit the road again, where they’ve been ever since, joined by Craig Fuller on vocals and Fred Tackett on guitar. Let It Roll re-introduced them to the world, and was followed by Representing the Mambo and then Shake Me Up. Craig left and Shaun Murphy joined from 1993 – 2009; bringing her feminine energy and powerful blues vocals.
Live from Neon Park – the name was a tribute to the album cover artist most often associated with Feat – was a two-CD set taken from shows at legendary venues like San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, and Portland (Oregon)’s Roseland Ballroom. The studio albums Under The Radar and Chinese Work Songs added new favorite songs, especially “Calling The Children Home” and “Just Another Sunday,” along with creative covers of Dylan, The Band, and Phish songs.
In the early part of the new millennium, Feat started their own Hot Tomato Records and began to share their rich archives with their fans, producing the double CD collections of rarities Raw Tomatos and Ripe Tomatos from both fan and band tapes. 2002 also yielded Live From the Ram’s Head, a two-CD acoustic show, and in ’03 came Down Upon the Suwannee, a live show recorded on the banks of the river at the Magnolia Festival in northern Florida. Hot Tomato also gave the musicians the freedom to deliver solo work, as well, first with Fred Tackett’s In A Town Like This, and then Bill Payne’s Cielo Norte, an intimate, lyrical marriage of keyboards.
Little Feat’s rich legacy was acknowledged at the 25th anniversary of the monumental live album Waiting for Columbus when Rhino Records put out a special two CD edition of the original concert, plus outtakes, along with Hotcakes and Outtakes: 30 Years of Little Feat, a four-CD, 83 track boxed set featuring hits from all of Feat’s albums as well as alternate takes and rarities from a rich past, which has included playing with everybody from Bob Dylan to Beck, Willie Nelson to Bonnie Raitt, Robert Plant, John Lee Hooker, and…you name it.
And now there’s Join the Band, in many ways a summing up of all that’s preceded it. Bill Payne said it was about locating their influences. In some ways, it documents the way they’ve influenced the musicians who listen to them. And it certainly documents a musical career.
You can go a number of ways when you spend your life on the road. You can get eaten up by the stresses and quit, or just die inside and get bitter and think you’re owed something. Or you can hold on to your music and your friends and the joy of the people out front and keep the priorities straight the way the six Featsters have.
Almost two score years later, they’ve been up and they’ve been down and they know where they belong – standing or sitting behind their instruments, playing for you. Join the Band will tell you that story – up to now. Because the end is not in sight.
at The Uptown Theatre
1350 Third Street
Napa, United States
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