Authentic and Unpretentious
The second song Until
it Hurts on Chip Taylor’s latest album is so symptomatic of the great
songwriting on this album: simplicity swelled with experience and
meaningfulness. Essentially a spoken narrative – addressing songwriting itself
– Taylor talks about honest
songwriting whilst he ruminates on the death of David Bowie and Lou Reed. Prior
to this, the song had begun as the most ordinary account of walking to the
health club for a workout [and the song has a chorus-build very similar to
Trent Reznor’s Hurt, presumably a
direct echo because it uses that word], and when he puts the earplugs in getting on the treadmill he delivers the line I listen to a collage of our love and pain, turn the numbers up again
and again until it hurts and you assume this is about a personal
relationship – but it is, I presume from what follows, about the music that has
and will always survive the artists [writers and performers] who have died.
The album opens on a clever, affecting song, Crazy Girl. Delivered like all in a grizzled spoken vocal, the
rapid repetition of crazy girl and with
the sweetest eyes/humble eyes and another
repetition she could sing my song my song
my song it is genuinely so powerful. It could be any girl, of course, but
it could be any one or an amalgam of Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Dusty
Springfield and others who sang his songs.
This is an intimate acoustic recording, so close and real
that you hear Taylor’s breathing and other sounds of being so close to the
microphone. It really couldn’t get any more authentic and unpretentious than
this.
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