Marshall Crenshaw
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Marshall Crenshaw's
Brand New Bag
By David Chiu
Singer and songwriter Marshall Crenshaw's
career can be described this way: 'always the bridesmaid but
never the bride.' The 49-year-old artist has put out 20 years
worth of critically acclaimed albums containing brimming melodic
pop that for some reason the greater public never really caught
on. While rock critics and serious fans may lament at the lack
of wider recognition and commercial windfall for the artist,
it might have helped him too. Since he has never made the definitive
album (if you don't count his debut record), Crenshaw was able
to record and branch out musically on his own terms.
To be totally accurate, Crenshaw had a
brief flirtation with commercial success thanks to his best known
and only hit "Someday, Someway" from 1982's Marshall
Crenshaw (He also co-wrote the Gin Blossoms hit "'Til
I Hear It From You" in 1995). As the late writer Cub Koda
wrote, Crenshaw music recalled various genres in popular music:
British power pop, Memphis rockabilly, and '70s R&B and soul.
His songs have been widely covered by artists as diverse as Bette
Midler, Robert Gordon, Kelly Willis, and the Bellamy Brothers.
Aside from scoring for television (Sex and the City) and
film, Crenshaw has also dabbled in acting which included playing
John Lennon in the theater production Beatlemania, and
his hero Buddy Holly in the movie La Bamba.
Now Crenshaw has recently released his
brand new record in four years called What's In the Bag?
(Razor and Tie). So what has the man, who in early days was,
to quote from an early song, rockin' around NYC, done in the
last four years? "I've been living my life," he explained
from his home in Woodstock, New York, which was him spending
more time with his family and playing gigs. "A lot of things
have happened in the past four years. 'Been working and living
basically."
Work on the album that eventually became
What's In the Bag? started two years ago and it became,
as he described, a long process. "I started seriously working
on this record about two years ago now. It was a long process
as far as writing and recording and stuff. I just had sort of
these amorphous ideas in my head about the record and I started
trying nailing these things.
"I had some ideas about the musical
direction. Once I started writing, with each piece of music I
sort of sat down and started playing. I used to carry this mono
cassette machine with me. I came to the house to write or to
get an idea while I was traveling. And I would push 'play' and
'record' and picked up my guitar and start. A lot of it was really
spontaneous and arose out of what I was feeling at that moment."
While Crenshaw has built a reputation of
being a clever and insightful lyricist, he is also an accomplished
musician. He displayed his skills on two instrumentals "Despite
the Sun" and "AKA A Big Heavy Hotdog," for which
he felt words were unnecessary. "The music in itself expresses
emotions," he said. "It can stir your imagination on
its own. It's a different way of telling a story-the words don't
need to be there. I heard a song on the radio the other day by
[the late salsa singer] Celia Cruz. I don't know what any of
the lyrics were about-I don't speak Spanish, but I can just feel
something from the performance and from the music. It's the same
thing [for instrumental music]. I think it's cool to put something
out there is open- ended like that for people to listen to."
The results of the new album, although
displaying typical melodic flair, yielded something reflective
and mature, as evident on the stunning track "Where Home
Used to Be." "With every song I've written I always
had a piece of music first," he said of his songwriting
method for the track. "I was in this melancholy place emotionally
when I wrote it. Once I figured out the melody and structure,
I just set it aside for a while and decided at some point I needed
to write some lyrics.
"The first thing I came up with was
the title. I just needed a phrase that [stood in for that] piece
of melody. I ended up writing about the idea of revisiting of
a place where you might have lived during some formative period
in your life and you're going to take a look at this place and
years after the fact and it has been drastically altered or destroyed.
I just sort of took it from there." Crenshaw also pointed
out that the song had nothing to do with September 11, 2001,
but offered this point: "On the other hand, the emotional
state I was in after September, it just put me in a place where
I would have written a song like that in any other time."
One of the interesting songs on the record
happens to be the two cover tunes on the record, Prince's "Take
Me with U" from the Purple Rain soundtrack (the other
cover being funkmeister Bootsy Collins' I'd Rather Be With Your").
Recording the track came spontaneously when Crenshaw visited
his friend and Steve Earle's guitarist Eric Ambel in Brooklyn.
"He invited me to come over and try out his studio. I didn't
have a song of mine finished that we could do. I thought what
cover tune we can do, and that Prince tune just popped into my
head. I thought we could just have a good time with it. I think
it's one of the best covers I've ever done. I love the Purple
Rain soundtrack. It really brings back good memories for
me."
It is no secret that Crenshaw is a pop
culture fanatic which explains why his music embodies and expresses
his encyclopedic knowledge of dead-on, familiar pop and rock
genres. "It's just a superwide range of stuff," said
Crenshaw. "People always talk about Buddy Holly as an influence
and that's accurate. When I heard his music, I don't know why
it struck me the way it did. It just hit me and stirred my inner
hillbilly."
The artist's ability to craft an interesting
story or point of view came at an early age as a kid in Detroit
in the late '50s watching old Warner Bros. gangster films and
movie musicals in front of the television. "I always loved
those movies and the songs," remembered the artist. "There
was a real kind of slyness to the lyrics. And these songs were
always descriptive and cinematic. I loved these songs and the
ones that Fred Astaire sings, the Irving Berlin and the Cole
Porter ones."
Blues music and the 'Wall of Sound' of
pop producer Phil Spector found their way into Crenshaw's music-making
processes. "Another record I love that has been stamped
into my brain is Bo Diddley's 16 Greatest Hits,"
he said. "I always have shakers in my records. That comes
from Bo Diddley. The sound of those Chess Records is a beautiful
sound to me. If you listen to my first album especially and the
second one [Field Day] too, those are like Phil Spector
tribute records to me. Guys like Phil Spector and Buddy Holly
their stuff was really personal, you sensed they came from one
person's soul."
Whatever number of influences critics and
fans can pick up on from his music, basically it all adds up
to something very original. "What I do just comes from inside
of me. I just listen to stuff that strikes a nerve in me. The
thing about influences is that it's not like they tell you what
to do, you're gonna do what you do."
Speaking of Detroit, I thought about its
famous native son, rapper Eminem and his recent film 8 Mile.
I asked Crenshaw if a review of that movie would have made it
onto his movie-music book Hollywood Rock. He said he liked
the film and it would have been an entry in the book if it were
updated. Currently there are no plans to. He felt the publisher
mistakenly marketed Hollywood Rock as a celebrity tome,
although he's proud of it as a serious reference tool. "I
think it would have had a really long shelf life," he pointed
out. "I know that's true because over the years I've been
continuously approached by film historians and documentary producers.
It has been considered by people the book and the source of information
for that kind of stuff. I wanted to make it a good, entertaining
reference book."
In 2000 Rhino Records reissued Marshall
Crenshaw in an expanded form including bonus tracks. After
21 years since its release, it still remains one of the best
debut albums of its time (Rolling Stone voted it one of
the 'Top 100 albums of the '80s'). Crenshaw explained why that
album and its infectious single "Someday Someway" still
holds up. "The songs are good, the lyric writing is good.
There's a viewpoint behind the record-it's personal. It's got
its own vibe to it. The sound for my own taste was kind of a
little watered down but I made up for that on the next one. So
if you add those two together, you can get an accurate picture
of the sound that I was looking for.
""Someday, Someway," which
still has a pretty long after life, I think one of those reasons
why the record has held up because it was has a good groove.
And a good groove is timeless. We had about 50 takes and that
song on the record is number fourteen or something. I was really
impossible to please at the moment. Someone noticed that version
was good and sure enough we hit the right tempo. It just feels
really right."
If the artist decided to hang up music
all together after being in the biz for this amount time, there
is a good chance the Crenshaw name will carry on. Crenshaw's
four-year old son Dean has often jam with his father. It was
Dean who called one of the new album's instrumental "a big
heavy hot dog," which inspired the title.
"He really is obsessed with music
at this point in his life," he said proudly of his boy.
"He has a great sense of rhythm like I do. Somebody pointed
out to me when [Dean] was two years old strumming his guitar
and said, 'Look at him, he's in the pocket. He's keeping time.'
In other words he has talent and musical ability. It's kind of
born in him. My friend Don Dixon said 'Oh no he has the curse.'
It remains to be seen what he does with it."
Right now Crenshaw is focused on this new
album as he embarks on the tour to support it. "Honestly
I love the whole record. I'm still listening to the record and
enjoying it. I just had some really good memories of making the
record. It is a good representation of what I've been feeling.
It came from my heart and life experiences."
He doesn't have any grand expectations
on how the record is going to be received (although What's
In the Bag is destined to be another shoe-in for raves from
music critics). As he said himself, it's better not to have any.
"My friend Harry said it's better just to kick it out the
door and trust the music. And I figure that's the smartest thing
for me to do. I'm convinced and determined that it's great stuff.
So I don't know. We'll just see where it goes and takes me."
http://www.marshallcremshaw.com
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