New Monday #72
Happy Monday, friends!
Start here. Or, start. Hear.
https://youtu.be/HdG_0021ZU0?si=dab-8UBZltCVrjzj
You might recognize the hook. Bad Company recorded this, but this is the original, and to my mind, the best version of it, recorded by Mott the Hoople. Let it run while you read.
Ready For Love was written by Mick Ralphs, who died at 81 of a stroke last week. I don’t want to get into a bunch of obituary New Mondays, but there’s a bigger point to this, beyond the death of Mick.
That thinner, plaintive vocal—that’s Mick Ralphs; the gutsier voice is Ian Hunter. Mick Ralphs left Mott the Hoople for a variety of reasons, one of which was that Ian Hunter didn’t have the range to sing the melodies in Mick’s head. Paul Rodgers did. I dunno. Paul Rodgers is so smooth, so accurate, so frickin’ perfect a singer that he turns songs into "Live Laugh Love” signs cranked out of a Taiwanese factory. Mick and Ian sound like they’re making something out in the garage and cutting their hands up while doing it.
There’s a lovely, extended guitar solo on this, the best playing of Mick Ralphs career. The whole ending of this is superb all around—wonderful interplay between the drums, the bass, the guitar, perhaps a horn section creeping in behind it all.
Mick Ralphs can be summed up as competent and hardworking. He wasn’t flashy. He did what he knew how to do and did the best that he could with it.
Aside from the big hit he wrote for Bad Co, Can’t Get Enough, he wrote a lot of country-inflected things, especially for Mott the Hoople. Mott spent the early part of their career killing on the stage and floundering in the studio. Their 1971 album 'Wildlife' was especially all over the place, while at the same time being tender and soulful. This Mick tune is especially gorgeous: Home Is Where I Want To Be. Steal the pre-chorus. The riff’s great, too. Heck, the whole thing is lovely. Steal the whole thing.
Steal the lack of perfection. Steal the drums, which are overplayed and mixed with too much snare. And the bass, which occasionally vanishes in the goop of the mix. Steal the vocals, which are pitchy, with harmonies that fall apart the longer things are held out. I love how the band sort of wanders off in the fadeout.
Another Mick Ralphs song, Oh, Atlanta, as covered by Alison Krauss. Full bore country.
So, let’s contrast this guy with these guys:
Velvet Sundown
I’m not sure these guys are guys. But if there are guys involved, what they did was write prompts because the whole thing is an AI concoction. The photo screams of Midjourney, the bio is ChatGPT, including a made-up quote from Billboard, and if the music isn’t entirely from Suno, it was made with AI tools in a DAW.
Against my better sense of taste and ethics, here’s a link to it, and you can find it on all platforms. Near 400k listeners on Spotify.
It's vaguely hipster Americana, with a rhythm section trained on Wish You Were Here and vocals that are a less yelpie version of Thom Yorke. Lots of springy sound reverb everywhere. And ya gotta love lyrics like, "Peace is heavy, war is blind, leave the echoes far behind.” Bad enough to be on a Bush record, or from Foreigner. We’ll have to discuss bad lyrics in the near future.
It’s cliché and trite, and I wish it were worse than it actually is. To be completely honest, it isn't terrible, or even bad. It is listenable. I would love to hate what it actually is more, rather than just hating what it represents. Or perhaps it is more fear of what it represents.
We musicians and engineers and producers—we artists—like to think of ourselves as special, weird as a badge of honor. Pursuing these things we pursue out of love for the craft and hope for some sort of recognition. But maybe it's even less of a meritocracy than we imagined.
There's always been mediocre music and bad pop, but even that used to require knowledge and a work ethic. Things used to require at the very least someone like Mick Ralphs, who was ok with suffering on the road, going through the band fights, dealing with the bullshit of record labels, and putting in the hours.
But then there’s this guy...
Welles
Also known as Jesse Welles. A singer/songwriter from the Ozarks in Arkansas. Distributed his stuff on CDs he burned at home, starting in his teens. Lived in an abandoned house as part of an arts commune.
Welles is the current endpoint of a line that stretches back to Woody Guthrie, the left-wing folkie line.
I don’t recall any right-wing folkies. Let me know if you know of one.
There’s nothing, though, political about his voice, which has got a raspy patina to it, or his simple, incredibly hooky songwriting. Forget the politics, these are so damn good, from melodies to lyrics. And catchy.
Ozark - he sounds a bit like Mick Ralphs on this. And look! He’s recording out in what looks like a culvert in the woods with an iPhone!
My Billionaire Daddies Are Fighting - again, out in the woods on an iPhone. Archly political, but it is so lyrically clever, and again, catchy.
Also a bit of a mind blower: we live in a time where someone can release a song commenting on the news within HOURS rather than weeks or months, to 500k subscribers. Velvet Benddown, or whatever they’re called, has some catching up to do.
Welles put out his debut album in 2018 and it is KILLER. I missed this when it came out, but it’s on right now.
Red Trees and White Trashes is loud and noisy. The drums don’t sound like they were recorded in a garage; they sound like they ARE a garage. Super interesting production, with lots of movement back-to-front as well as side-to-side, sounds from soft to shredded, with worthy songs every step of the way. Woody Guthrie meets Nirvana. Highly recommended.
Have a wonderful week.
Warm regards,
Luke