Daring Adventures

Richard Thompson: Daring Adventures [June 1986]

I feel I have to add a personal parenthetical note about each of Richard Thompson’s solo albums (from Hand of Kindness on), to the effect that at the time of each one’s release, it was a regular part of my daily life and experience. Each one has its own rich set of associations with where I was and what I was doing at the time. All of these albums (along with many others, of course) were quite important to me, and each bears its own particular feel that is attached to memory.

That being said, I have to admit, that new releases tend to supplant old ones in my attention zone, and there are many of these discs that I have not listened to for quite some time now. I "discovered" Richard Thompson with Shoot Out the Lights, which has maintained a kind of permanent standard in my listening habits ever since. While, in the course of this project, I was listening freshly to the Fairport Convention albums, as well as the 1970s Richard & Linda Thompson releases that were new to me, there was inevitably an exciting sense of revelation - of new discoveries deferred.

In the case of the post-SOTL recordings, however, I am experiencing a "re-discovery," and it is proving to be revelatory in a different kind of way. With vantage from both sides of the time spectrum, the music plays itself differently for me. Many things I have forgotten - much of the others are now heard in a fresh context. There have already been many surprises for me, and no doubt I will encounter some puzzlements as well.

This was certainly the case with my fresh listening of Daring Adventures from 1986. I remember loving this album, along with its feel at the time, but after the first time through - on this voyage - I was disappointed. The album simply did not seem to hold up for me in any way or degree of intensity with the albums that came before it, particularly in comparison to its predecessor, Across a Crowded Room.

Wanting to be as fair as possible to the material, I decided to allow some time to pass before returning to it, so that I would not rush into any harshly formed judgements. I’m glad that I did, for Daring Adventures took some warming up to in the wake of what I had been listening to, along with my anxious expectations.

On first listening, I found most of the album dull and uninspired. Now, after longer and closer examination, I am more comfortable with it, though I do find it to be a kind of "transitional" album in Thompson’s career, and its imperfections are natural reflections of the necessary re-alignment and refinement of Thompson’s style and songwriting.

This is only natural, after all. Perhaps the most important singular important thing about Daring Adventures is, after all, that it is pointedly not Hand of Kindness or Across a Crowded Room. That is to say, Thompson seemed determined to stop making sequels to Shoot Out the Lights and to get on with his life and career. One can only maintain a reaction to a life crisis for so long without becoming pathologically obsessed and repetitiously boring.

That’s not to say that Daring Adventures does not carry any morose overtones about love - it certainly does. But in this case, those songs ("Missy How You Let Me Down," "Long Dead Love," "Lover’s Lane," and "Nearly in Love") seemed to be formed more distantly, in a more abstract, less personal way. These songs are more about craftsmanship rather than the release of personal angst, which truly is, it must be admitted, a more difficult thing to pull off effectively.

This is not to imply that these songs are any less "real" than Thompson’s previous songs - they do indeed carry the content of his character and perspective with tremendous conviction and honesty. It simply means that as a writer, Thompson was now having to return to writing from a more imaginative, less immediately personal perspective. And at this point, I have to say, that sometimes the work suffers - it labors in the transition.

On the other hand, Thompson here introduces (or should we say "re-introduces") newly narrative-type songs that will become more and more commonplace for him - and that these songs are by far the most interesting and successful on the album. Indeed, the album ends with one of Thompson’s unquestionably great accomplishments - "Al Boylly’s in Heaven," an imaginative narrative in an experimental form that stands easily alongside any of his work in wit, pathos, and finally, in emotional catharsis. Indeed, Daring Adventures is so dominated by the power of this song that in my mind, I almost see them as equivalents. And if the rest of the album does no match up to the power of this masterpiece, that is not really a great fault.

For these songs are daring adventures after all - they are each a personal excursion by Richard Thompson into attempting to stretch and grow - to pull away from the baggage of his past, while at the same time attempting to achieve something like the power of discovery that marks the uniqueness of his artistry. The album is indeed a self-challenge, and one that will soon begin to pay off huge dividends on subsequent releases.

So my criticism is tempered by this realization, and I can enjoy this album for what it is, rather than damning it with faint praise for what it is not. And with "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven," we already have the first full fruits of the labor in hand. Yes, the song is that good, and it - along with a few other delightful "adventures" - are reason enough for any Thompson fan to deem the album critical to his canon, and well worth possessing.

Daring Adventures would be Thompson’s second (and final) release on Polydor, and more importantly, his first in a series of collaborations with studio whiz-kid producer Mitchell Froom. At this point, Froom was most notable for his work with the lush recordings of the Australian pop group Crowded House, and beginning with Thompson, Suzanne Vega and the L.A. roots band Los Lobos, would soon begin crafting unique sonic soundscapes that some fans felt were foreign to Thompson’s style. I believe the collaboration holds up very well on these works, however. Froom is interested in establishing certain textures that match up well to the environment of a song, and not overwhelming them. From my listening perspective, Froom’s keyboard-rich, lush sonic pallet enervates and keeps current Thompson’s songs, while providing them with the necessary punch to retain the immediacy that his performance deserves.

No doubt that there will always be small factions of disagreement among Thompson’s followers about whether Froom was a good match for Thompson, but after surveying the results of their work together over five albums - including some of the finest work of Thompson’s career - I belive the point is now moot.

Richard Thompson albums are about the songs, not the sound. And on all of these albums, there are very many wonderful songs indeed. And yes, they sound good. What more could any listener reasonably ask for? Accept the daring along with the adventures, and you will not be disappointed.

"A Bone Through Her Nose" - Daring Adventures begins more than promisingly with this hilariously savage broadside. This is Richard Thompson at his hardest rocking, his snidest and perhaps most affectionately best. Moreover, "A Bone Through Her Nose" represents a shift both in sound and subject matter that makes it sound like a genuine advance - in direction, if not quality - from his most recent recordings.

Taking a cue from the outraged confusion of "Little Blue Number," this song is a singularly charged diatribe of the follies of a young lady’s forms and fashions in the context of the increasingly ridiculous parade of societal fads. In the face of the post-modern malaise that demands extremes of expression, but without any intelligible social context - a situation that still lingers among many youth today. "A Bone Through Her Nose" is a wonderfully precise portrait of the hopeless attempts of the young to escape the oblivion of conformity in a commodified world that has already pre-empted the very concept of "cool."

How Thompson succeeds without falling into old-fogeyism is through the sheer power of his state-of-the-art electronic attack, combined with his witty words and the ferocity of his singing, which maintains a purely natural, careful edge between exaggerated outrage and "in-the-know" humor.

The song kicks the album immediately into high gear with the playing of a sarcastic little riff on electric keyboards that is reminiscent both of a taunt and a satire on a vaguely Oriental sense of exoticism. Stated right at the beginning, then returning to answer every phrase in the verse, It’s particularly nasty and fun - inspired snottiness.

Thompson and Froom give plenty of time and space to settle into the tough-hearted groove of guitar, bass and drums before the lyrics kick in. This is, indeed, one of the keys to the song’s effectiveness - by establishing itself right at the outset as the equal to any of the hardest and most skilfully crafted rock music, "A Bone Through Her Nose" seizes its authority to judge its subjects by effectively out-pacing them. This 35-year-old folk-rocker is not going to blanch at being culturally outmoded, and he out-mock-rocks his younger contemporaries effortlessly, stealing their sonic thunder with a greater wallop than they could hope to muster. In short, the song is a middle-aged-man’s coup - a tour de force of maniacal post-punk power that shrivels its contemporaries’ pretensions.

There is also authority in Thompson’s vocal delivery that matches his sense of outraged sarcasm. At the beginning of the story, our heroine is in a free-fall state of fashion grace, and adjustments must be made:

Oh, the drones on the corner don’t look her in the eye when she comes out to play.
And three times now at the Club Chi-Chi, they’ve turned her away.
Last week she was the belle of the ball, but another week passes.
It’s time to cast off crutches, scars and pebble glasses.

A buzzsaw guitar changes the chords that begin the refrain that leads into the chorus:

She’s got everything a girl might need,
She’s a tribal animal, yes indeed . . .

Tribalism is the key word here. Archeologically speaking, it is a most helpful definition that puts the young girl’s fashion dilemma into perspective. With just a change of outfits, one can change social sets, and thus adhere, belong. But it if it is nothing more than that, of course it is a hollow adherence to an aggregate group in which individuality, ironically, is subsumed in the colors of the "tribe." Through such a metaphor, modern, or even "post-modern" quandaries can be seen as thoroughly primitive as any kind of human behavior can be.

The chorus brings the defining edge of this fashion-mongering, homo sapien adaption mechanism to its logical conclusion. Try as she might, she has not quite reached the fullness of primitivist behavior, because, as Thompson slyly observes:

But she hasn’t got a bone through her nose, through her nose,
Hasn’t got a bone through her nose . . .

Indeed, that’s all that is missing to make the atavistic transference complete. Thompson repeats the chorus like a primal chant, driven by the relentlessness of savage drumbeats that pound in point like the height of ritual jungle ceremony. Setting a marvelous counterpoint to this is the sophisticatedly unexpected downward modulations of the chorus’ melody and harmony. The song hits its target quick, hard and sticks.

The second verse catches up to our young lady and her current fashion habits:

Oh, she gets her suits from a personal friend, Coco the Clown.
She’s got dustman’s jacket, inside out, it’s a party gown.
If it’s bouffons, she’s got bouffons, if it’s tit she got tat.
She’s got hoochie-coochie Gucci (whoo!) and a pom-pom hat.

Thompson’s verbal wordplay is thrillingly funny, matching Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan in wit and invention, but with his own personal flair.

Thompson thwaks his Stratocaster mercilessly in a hardcore rhythmic holding pattern before breaking out into a run of staccatto lines that dance on the edge of the beat, like flames around cannibal’s boiling pot. Froom’s pseudo-exotic synthesizer picks up the lines of an imaginary melody that leads back to the third, and final verse:

Well, her ma writes cook books, she wrote one once, and it sold one or two.
Her pa’s in the city, he’s so witty, he calls it "the zoo."
Her boyfriend plays in Scrutti Polutti, Aunt Sally’s brown bread.
In a few more years she can marry some fool and knock it on the head.

The mocking reference in the third line refers to Scritti Politti, a British post-punk band that had moved to a synth-based kind of power pop which had proved a sensation the year before with their top-selling album, Cupid & Psyche 85. Thompson "pollutes" their name, perhaps in the same manner as the band had "polluted" its radical vision for a more commercial, manneristic style. Not knowing quite what Thompson thought of their music, the inclusion of this reference point still helps to tie down the milieu to which our heroine is tied.

However, the problem is not tied to this historical cultural moment, given the girl’s vacuous family background. And the concluding line attests to a future in which her vapidities will be perpetuated even further down the generational line.

Thompson repeats the chorus again, finally giving out his chant and picking up a taunting, sliding guitar line, which gradually gives way in the fade to the sound of human voices childishly intoning, "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah . . ." The song thus ends in utter disdain.

So we come finally to the question of the point of this manic little diatribe. Aside from the obvious critical attacks, we know Richard Thompson to be a sensitive individual (though certainly a sarcastic one), and one is loathe to simply leave the interpretation at that. Of course, at its core, "A Bone Through Her Nose" has a negative subject matter, which is indeed the absence of a fully developed human personality, complete with the intellectual and emotional grounds for confident self carriage.

This is nothing new in Thompson’s writing repertoire, but "A Bone Through Her Nose" is certainly a stylistic breakthrough, and one that more than adequately demonstrates his tremendous power to remain alertly relevant - indeed, within the context of the contemporary music scene, he appears here, as later, to be a "cutting edge" performer, and a worthy companion to such younger College Radio staples as R.E.M., Talking Heads, the Smiths and his quirky American counterpart, Tom Waits.

This seems to be an odd key to Thompson’s cultural position as a cult icon. Absorbed in "adventurous" popular music from the very beginning of his career, his unique modern vision, tied as it is to the conservative perspective of the folk singer, lends him a strange combination: the traditionalist modernist. The ever-living crank, "Henry the Human Fly" is buzzing about in a new setting, and it is in a place that is just as absurd as it always was - indeed, will always be.

"A Bone Through Her Nose" is as exciting and catching beginning to an album of the period as could be imagined. (Note: I saw Thompson and his band perform this curio live in September 2007, and it had lost none of its good-natured savageness, sounding surprisingly relevant and fresh.)

"Valerie" - The mood established, Thompson sustains it - even attempts to pump it up - with this fast-rocking crazed portrait of a girlfriend who is making the singer crazy himself. "Valerie" is the true successor to "Little Blue Number," in its "Too Much Monkey Business" virtuosity of insanities. In tempo and tone, the song more resembles "Tear Stained Letter" in its Jambalaya footstomping fun, but it fails to live up to (or even attempt) to reach that brilliant song’s ability to turn horror into a joke - and vice versa.

"Valerie"’s litany of challenges to her lover/author can either be seen as funny or tedious, depending upon one’s disposition. I tend to enjoy it, and it features a particularly hilarious, nervous-breakdown guitar solo towards the end. The lyrics are clever, but they’re really not worth repeating here - there is wit, but no real savagery of insight, especially compared with "Bone Through Her Nose."

This is not particularly a criticism. "Valerie" is a good-time, silly rave-up that can be especially enjoyed in a live performance. But it’s not pushing Thompson into any new direction. Instead, he begins to sound like he’s repeating himself here - and other places on this album. We can see that at this point, the artist is attempting to shake the personal debris away from his work, and needing a subject matter, begins turning to portraiture - or in this case, caricature.

The Richard Thompson of Henry the Human Fly and I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight never seemed to suffer from lack of inspiration through observation. Dwelling too long in the shadows of his own emotional ecstasies and nightmares, the transition back to more objective songwriting seems a little elusive here. But it will not remain that way for long.

Video - Richard Thompson performs "Valerie" (solo, acoustic)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EGhHbJo7PCE

"Missie How You Let Me Down" - Next comes what by now is seeming an obligatory "bad love song." This man seems out of pain and out of guilt by now - one never asks if this Celtic-tinged lament is addressed to Linda or not. It’s clearly a formula song. Once again, this is not to be too critical. "Missie How You Let Me Down," is a perfectly realized dirge of sadness and regret, and it sounds beautiful. There is a peculiar soulfulness to the number that makes it an especially enjoyable listen, and Thompson puts the lyrics across with professional conviction.

I find it difficult to castigate or dismiss songs like this, as coming from anyone else, I should probably find them rapturous. Indeed, I think if I had never heard Richard Thompson before and listened to this album, I would instantly fall in love with this and many other songs. Sometimes it’s difficult when you have set so high a standard. (Just ask Bob Dylan.)

"Dead Man’s Handle" - I do not own a copy or am familiar with First Light or Sunnyvista, both of which have less than sterling reputations. So for me, I have to say (with that qualification) that this is Thompson’s least-inspired, dullest song so far - a real dud.
Using train metaphors again (e.g., "Fire in the Engine Room"), "Dead Man’s Handle" is a cautionary tale that completely fails to engage the emotions in any way whatsoever. The worst thing about the song, however, is that its structure and feel are practically a carbon copy of "Wall of Death," arguably Thompson’s greatest single achievement. This is certainly an argument that inspiration far outweighs technical proficiency in either folk or rock music (or many other arts for that matter.) "Dead Man’s Handle" is quite professionally constructed, but there is no spark of life. It’s just a dead fish of a song.

Once again, you cannot accuse Thompson of not trying here. You can feel commitment is real - the magic just isn’t coming. Not yet, not here.

"Long Dead Love" - My first impression was that this was another confection of love-loss, and if Thompson wanted to shake the overtones of his marriage break up, he should avoid these. (Let’s just say that it’s not exactly "Love in a Faithless Country.") But listening through it again, the song seems curiously designed. Just who is being addressed here, and what is the situation being described?

Somebody’s walking, oh somebody’s walking
There on the grave of our love.
And somebody’s kicking the dust and the ashes away.
Why don’t they just let it die
And fade and grow cold again?
Better our footsteps divide
And our memory grow cold again.

Oh, long dead love,
Long dead love.
How much dirt must you shovel on what’s already dead?
Don’t send flowers to remember, send thorns instead.
And who’s that polishing the tombstone over our head?

Who is doing the polishing, indeed? There’s something about "Long Dead Love" that shows that it’s closer to Thompson’s nervous system than you might at first think. If one thinks of the song as a complaint, then is it to a media that will not let his failed marriage drop? Or is the song - somewhat obliquely - directed to Thompson himself?

It seems easy to read the song as a self-complaint. Clearly, Thompson is wearied of writing about his failed marriage - whether intentionally or not - but he’s having trouble stopping.

This reflects a real artists’ dilemma - for three amazing albums, Richard Thompson has emptied out his guts in ways that few artists can without seeming cloying or self important. Thompson has always taken the personal to the universal and made every ounce of his guilt, fear, loss and disgust the property of every listening human being’s nervous system. It is quite clear by now that he is not only tired of following this pathway, but that those emotions have cooled in him that gave those songs their impetus and force to begin with.

Real passion seems to rise out of "Long Dead Love," but it is the passion of frustration with oneself. His vocal reaches a truly violent pitch as he spits out the words, "You know that grave-robbing is a sin and this is a crying disgrace!" before launching into a powerful guitar solo that simply drips with invective and (self?) loathing.

Slow guitar arpeggios reminiscent of the Beatles’ malevolent sound on "I Want You (She’s So Heavy)" drive the song through chord changes that resolve in a still bridge, surrounded by a funereal organ:

Deep in the night, the cruel intention comes stealing.
Deep in the night, I can’t close my eyes for this feeling.

"Long Dead Love" may not be a great song, but its emotion is both genuine and compelling, even if it does remain on such a solipsistic ledge. The passion that is conveyed is the effort one hears - especially in the guitar solo - to break out of this prison of self entrapment.

A "transitional" song in the most literal sense of the word, "Long Dead Love" adds much-needed passion to an album that so far has been either coy or emotionally redundant.

"Lover’s Lane" - Sonically, melodically and vocally, this is by far the most powerful piece on the album since the opening "Bone Through Her Nose." The LP era still overlapped the digital at this point, and this song brought a haunting conclusion to side one. It still feels that way, even on CD.

The song is almost static, a chant resting on Thompson’s frantic guitar picking, and none of its melodies resolve to a conclusion. Mitchell Froom’s production is especially striking here, as he provides Thompson a synthetic wash, accompanied with an uncertain-sounding stand-up jazz bass that gives "Lover’s Lane" a complimentary sheen that does not overwhelm the simplicity of the song.

We return here again to the subject of dead love, but somehow there seems more of a purpose here. If Thompson is going to write about failed love, he’s found an effective way to do it here, with a ghostly simplicity and an emotional emptiness that matches his subject matter:

False hand in false hand,
Down Lover’s Lane, we walked, we two.
Love sold for fool’s gold,
Down Lover’s Lane, we walked we two.

A striking chord change leads to a chorus that simply drips with disgust:

On your back I’ll climb,
Or you climb on mine.
Deception is the rule
On Lover’s Lane.

The scorn is distributed evenly and not a word or phrase is wasted. As though sick of writing these songs, Thompson pushes the edge of his disdain to a fine-pricked point and leaves it there.
The second verse is filled with empty sentiment:

Fine friend, fine friend,
I held such dreams in my caress.
Fine airs, fine airs,
The best of manners and address.

Thompson repeats the venom-filled chorus, then allows the shimmering sounds to wander off into silence. The effect is not the wistfulness of "Ghosts in the Wind," but something much nastier - it is vindictive indictment - self indictment, love indictment. "Lover’s Lane" is effective, perhaps because it is so extreme, untempered by any relief or latitude for understanding. It’s a nihilistic little jab, and the execution of it is so perfectly extreme that it is more than welcome.
If you are going to sing about what you are sick of singing about, perhaps it’s best to thrust as much disdain for your subject matter as possible. On "Lover’s Lane," Thompson does just that, and it works - breathlessly.

"Nearly in Love" - What would be side two of the LP opens with this half-sarcastic romp, in which the singer celebrates a new relationship with what can be seen as a sensibly won (yet somewhat sad) attitude of caution. It’s funny and snide at the same time, while being intelligently believable - a unique hallmark of Richard Thompson’s songwriting:

You’re the one I’ve wanted so long.
But then again I might be wrong.
Now you look just right in the pale moonlight
But let me turn the headlights on.

‘Cause I’m nearly in love, nearly in love.
I’m almost aware of walking on air,
Yes, I’m nearly in love.

This "not-quite" anthem is joyously played and the sarcasm is subdued inside ebullient mid-tempo rock that could remind a listener of Born in the U.S.A.-era Bruce Springsteen - albeit with a slight Celtic tinge reminiscent of Big Country’s eponymous single.

One can’t help but smile listening to this declaration of hesitancy - it is, after all, a mature response that most people in their mid-thirties could appreciate. But the darker undercurrent is the suggestion that for those of us (like Thompson) who have been burned by the fire of their own passions, is that this is the best we can hope for.

"Nearly in Love" is a lively, witty and self-mocking song that kicks in nicely to help re-establish the album’s momentum and which will gradually drive it home to its momentous conclusion.

Video - Richard Thompson: "Nearly in Love"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=l5cklUcNZxI

"Jennie" - This song begins with one of Thompson’s greatest lines: "Oh, trouble becomes you, it cuts you down to my size." Unfortunately, "Jennie" does not lyrically remain at that level (though it reaches toward that height again with, "How many days of his life can a man regret?") This is essentially another lost-love song, quite similar to "Oh Missy How You Let Me Down," but this example seems to work better.

I truly hate to damn Richard Thompson with faint praise, and "Jennie" is truly a lovely, heartfelt song. It simply does not match up to the incredible standards that Thompson has set for himself.
That will not prevent me from enjoying the song - either on CD or on stage, as it is truly soulful and emotionally effective. Thompson plays a particularly evocative guitar solo here, full of slides and mournful bagpipe motifs, in what seems a near-perfect distillation of Celtic rumination and Eric Clapton-style blues. Mitchell Froom encloses the song with soulful organ chords, dulcimer chirps, and a glowing synthetic chord drone that seems to open up into another universe.

Despite its undeniable loveliness, "Jennie" is yet another song that makes one feel that Thompson is grappling to relearn to write songs again. There is an artfulness to it that keeps it distant from Thompson’s own soul, and finally, therefore, ours. This is a recurring problem here on Daring Adventures, and one that Thompson will confront directly before it is all over.

"Baby Talk" - This is another joke song, an upbeat country/Cajun foot-stomper that relates a lover’s complaint with his girlfriend’s proclivity to babble like an infant. I am reminded of the canoe seen in Horse Feathers when Groucho Marx remarks to a similar coquettish ploy with, "If wittle girl doesn’t stop talking like that, big bad man is going to kick all her teeth wight down her thwoat." I actually had a friend whose wife had this proclivity so annoyingly that he sat her down and played this song for her to try to get his point across to her.

Yes, it’s a fun little song - and it could even be hilarious in another context, but here, it’s just another weak attempt on an unsteadily weak album. I struggle to drag more meaning out of the relative immaturity of the singer’s partner. While such implications definitely lie there undeveloped, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to attempt to drag them out here and place them in any larger context that would give "Baby Talk" more resonance. Perhaps it’s better to just enjoy it for what it seems to be on the surface, or maybe even just skip over it.

"Cash Down Never Never" - This song is basically another confection, but it’s one that I’m quite fond of. The narrative addresses the endless cycle of credit and indebtedness of the modern family, especially in an uncertain economy. The lyrics flow glibly and ominously, landing right on target:

Young love, I wish you well,
Shotgun and wedding bells.
Semi-semi and the damp is peeling,
Hole in the roof wets the baby’s head.

Back streets, real scum about.
Need a car, a little run-about.
Some down and a fistful later,
Sign on the line like the nice man said.

Once again, the verbose humor of Chuck Berry is invoked (along with the nervous rhythm of the driving guitar), but here it is employed in an indictment of the savage necessities of pathetically living life in the modern age. (Presumably, this song re-visits some of the same territory as Sunnyvista, but we would like to have a copy of that album to actually scrutinize.)

This song works more broadly than most of the others on Daring Adventures, possibly because, ironically, it is set at a certain distance from the singer. In singing about other people in other circumstances, what he inevitably reveals about himself is his own alienation from modern culture. And given that we know that Richard Thompson as a universal creature, a traditionalist caught in the madness of machinery (either emotional or economic), the song works.

As in "A Bone Through Her Nose," Thompson is re-discovering the power of narration in second or third person. This is something he has done quite successfully since Henry the Human Fly, but in the powerful emotional wake of his Sufi conversion, up to his messy divorce and aftermath, his strength has come from the sheer intensity of his first-person experience. Rediscovering this method of narration is a technique that serves him well here, and it will pay off hugely in many songs to come.

Thompson and Froom really let the effects fly here, making "Cash Down" sound like an ominous horror movie soundtrack, complete with threatening theramin and Exorcist-like tubular bells. Once again, this is not a great song, but it is a treat to listen to.

"How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" - For those of us who might have wondered whatever happened to Richard Thompson the folksinger, he suddenly, unexpectedly re-appears here, acoustically unadorned, save for an unobtrusive upright bass.

The effect is shattering. In the midst of all the clattering of Daring Adventures, Thompson suddenly reaches deep into his old kit bag of English balladry to pull out this breathtakingly, eye-welling simple tale. Ironically, this unexpected simple song takes on all of the dilemmas that Thompson the artist has been struggling with throughout the album and immediately exorcises the demons that howl about him simply by honestly confronting them.

In one of Thompson’s simplest, plainest melodies, he tells a first-person narrative of a soldier encountering a young woman during wartime:

Oh, she danced in the street with the guns all around her,
All torn like a rag doll, barefoot in the rain.
And she sang like a child, "toora-day, toora-daddy,"
Oh how will I ever be simple again?

With exquisite precision and economy, Thompson presents his - and perhaps all of our - dilemmas in an exquisitely metaphorical form. The image of the war-weary, hard-souled soldier observing this startling image of childhood joy is completely disarming - both to him and the listener.

"How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" is a masterpiece of self discovery, and in a sense, of self-recovery. In the distance between the eyes of the soldier and the view of the innocent girl dancing lies the measurement between Thompson (and ourselves) as cynical survivors of life and the idealistic purity with which we all began our journeys.

On another level, this is Thompson the artist, asking of himself how to be an artist once more. All throughout Daring Adventures, we have observed him struggling with the art of effective, emotional songwriting - something so natural to him that he seems born to do nothing else - without retreading his own shattered nervous system and psyche. Like a miracle, he happens upon this exquisite little tale, and all of the pieces fall right back into place. He asks himself precisely the right question, and in asking it, is graced with his answer.

The image that the soldier encounters is told with such dexterity and simplicity that it is completely disarming. The observations do not need any commentary, and are first received with a kind of wondering shock:

She sat by the banks of a dirty grey river
And tried for a fish with a worm on a pin.
There was nothing but fever and ghosts in the water.
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?

The sense of wonder with which he views his remarkable image is truly transformative. The song carries the same poetic resonance of the marvelous scenes in film-maker Jean Renoir’s great humanist masterpiece, Grand Illusion, which could have indeed provided inspiration for this song - even if it did not. In such simple, yet boundlessly powerful images, the soldier/singer’s psyche is transformed and he is re-humanized:

In her poor burned-out house, I sat at her table.
The smell of her hair was like corn fields in May.
And I wanted to weep, and my eyes ached from trying,
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?

Thompson follows with one of his most sweepingly beautiful acoustic guitar solos, notes perfectly placed and delicately balanced, no gratuitously showy technique, but simply, perfectly arched phrases of beauty.

He concludes the song with a plea:

So graceful she moved through the dust and the ruin,
And happy she was in her dances and games.
Oh, teach me to see through your innocent eyes, love.
Oh, how will I ever be simple again?

Once again, and finally, the singer answers his own question, perhaps without even realizing it. His witnessing and acknowledgement of innocence automatically endows it upon his own weary soul. By the end of the song he is truly free.

I can only surmise that this amazing song - certainly one of Thompson’s greatest - probably came unexpectedly, perhaps from the back of his consciousness. Its naturalness is astonishing, and one can feel the pathos of the song singing the singer back to a place from which he can finally begin afresh. There is no question in the listener’s mind that this song is about himself, on the deepest of levels - and no less doubt that its discovery and performance are blissfully curative.

It could certainly not have been planned that Richard Thompson would discover in mid-album a song that would be a pivotal moment for both his art and his life. But nevertheless, coming so unexpectedly at the penultimate moment for Daring Adventures, "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" seems to magically turn all the neurotic struggling of the preceding songs around and to lay the groundwork for the rest of his career, which would begin immediately with the triumphant closing song of the album.

"Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" - I would probably risk going too far if I were to call this Richard Thompson’s masterpiece. There are simply too many remarkable songs from what is by now obvious to be one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th and 21st centuries. But "Al Bowlly" is special indeed. The song not only ranks alongside his very greatest work, which is certainly saying quite a bit, but it also marks an incredible turning point in Thompson’s perspective, approach to songwriting, and his maturity. I do not think it is going too far to say that "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" definitively lays down a method and approach that would serve Richard Thompson as a continuing, potent and important artist for the next 20+ years.

Of course, I don’t even know which song was conceived first - but in its sequence on the album, "How Will I Ever Be Simple Again" serves to psychologically pave the way for this amazing piece. I mentioned the process of "re-discovery" when talking about the prior song, and that same re-discovery is at the very essence of what Thompson accomplishes here.

The question that has emerged throughout Daring Adventures is how is the artist to reconnect with his innermost spiritual self and communicate it so directly and powerfully, without relying on his own immediate personal ecstasies and crises in order to accomplish it.

Thompson solves the dilemma by returning to narrative form. In creating a fictional character, as he had done with his early work, he could sketch a terrain that on the surface is quite foreign to him, but by placing it in first person, he could inject all the details straight into his own nervous system and lay out his heart for all to see.

From this point on, we will have many portraits and many guises - some first person, some second - emerge powerfully, and growing in succession - from the pen of Richard Thompson. This is nothing so unique, actually - it is the very stuff that folk music is made of. But beginning here, with "Al Bowlly," Thompson recovers its very heart and soul and applies his own very unique flourishes to the most profound effect.

Interestingly, "Al Bowlly" sounds nothing like a traditional folk song. Nor is there anything particularly "Anglican" about it, except for the narrative. Instead, this is set as an old jazz standard, reminiscent in sound and feel of "St. James Infirmary." The nostalgic feel of the song embodies its subject matter perfectly, providing an awe-inspiring blend of hipster celebration with melancholy loss. Its design is nothing short of perfect. No songwriter other than Richard Thompson - with the possible exception of Ray Davies - could pull off something this amorphously strange while making it sound so personal and desperately vital.

The character inhabited by the singer is an injured war veteran - not from Viet Nam, but from an entirely different era from the rock age, World War II. The theme of the song is the sense of sacrifice and betrayal after giving everything one has to a reality that time slowly dissipates and vanishes, leaving the protagonist a wasted shell of a human being. "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" is not an anti-war song, per se - it is more an anti-time song. It is the universal realization that the pathos of man is to outlive his relevancy and meaning to an ever-changing world.

The song begins in a minor key, with acoustic guitar chords, and an ominous start-and-stop shuffle. An upright bass enters, resting on one note. Thompson’s vocal emerges, off-centered, on a blue note, with a voice that sounds both commanding and defeated:

Well, we were heroes then. and the girls were all pretty.
And a uniform was a lucky charm, bought you the keys to the city.
We used to dance the whole night through
While Al Bowlly sang "The Very Thought of You."
Now Bowlly’s in heaven,
And I’m in limbo now.

For American listeners, particularly those under the age of 50, the name of Al Bowlly is unlikely to strike any recognition, let alone resonance. Bowlly was a British singer of the 1920s and ‘30s, an extraordinarily popular and influential "crooner" in a similar style to Bing Crosby. His popularity, in fact, was so great that he has been called "the first pop star," displacing the bandleader as the main name attraction at performances. Bowlly was popular in America, but enormous in Britain, where he sold millions of records - 1937’s "The Very Thought of You" was one of his biggest hits.

I have always found it a very interesting phenomena that the musical stylings of the "rock era" have survived and thrived as long as they have, rock and roll artists of the 1950s and ‘60s finding favor with succeeding generations. On the other hand, most of the pre-War popular music and its influences has simply seemed to vanish in popular consciousness. If the singer of "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" was 20 years old in 1940, when Bowlly was headlining a new band in London, where his audience consisted of young men in uniform, then in 1986 (the date of this album’s release), he would be a mere 46 years old. However, the culture in which he flourished would have been so dead by then that it would seem - to anyone who knew of it - to be anachronistically ancient.

This is part of the singer’s dilemma. The entire world had undergone such a powerful and complete cultural and political revolution, that someone like the narrator would find himself an absolute stranger in contemporary society. For some perspective, consider that here, in 2008, we are listening to an album from 1986, thus making it 22 years old. To us, Daring Adventures sounds remarkably contemporary - so much so that it could easily be a current release. That there has been such a cultural continuity in this long period of time is absolutely amazing. Perhaps more puzzling is the fact that the music and styles from 26 years preceding Daring Adventures were so distant as to seem to belong to another world entirely.

This is the crux of the dislocation in which the singer finds himself in "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven." This is, to a large degree, part of the "limbo" in which he finds himself.

Al Bowlly, on the other hand, is in heaven - that is, he (along with his vast cultural influence) is quite dead. Bowlly was killed in his London flat in 1941 during a campaign of the German Blitzkrieg. He is quite literally, as well as figuratively, gone from the scene.

The description of the scene in the first verse sets the picture very clearly for its context - the aging veteran is recalling his youthful heyday, and if he is exaggerating its glories ("We were heroes then, and the girls were all pretty."), it is probably not by much. At any rate, this is certainly the way the picture lives in the man’s memory.

The second verse goes on to detail is story more closely:

Well, I gave my youth to king and country.
But what’s my country done for me, but sentenced me to misery?
I traded my helmet and my parachute
For a pair of crutches and a demob suit.
Al Bowlly’s in heaven, and I’m in limbo now.

Injured, perhaps crippled during the war, the singer was returned back to his society with barely a thank you, and apparently no financial or psychological assistance. The "demob suit" was a standard issue, cheap, double-breasted suit-coat that each British soldier received during his "demobilization" after the war. The singer’s implication, is of course, that this is all the assistance given to him in his re-transition back into society.

The first bridge of the song, a beautiful, plaintive melody set in a relative major key, wistfully details the kind of life the singer has been living ever since:

Hard times, hard, hard times,
Hostels and missions and dosser’s soup lines,
Can’t close me eyes on a bench or a bed
Without the sound of some battle raging in my head.

Ill equipped, physically or psychologically, for re-entry into British commercial society, the singer has had to resort to a life of living off charity, and his post-war stress syndrome has never been dealt with and has never dissipated.

As time passes, friends fall away or die, the environment becomes ever foreign, and the effort required to keep on surviving gets more and more demanding. The third verse tells it all:

Old friends, you lose so many.
You get run around, all over town,
The wear and the tear, oh, it just drives you down.
St. Mungo’s with its dirty old sheets
Beats standing all day down on Scarborough Street.
Al Bowlly’s in heaven, and I’m in limbo now.

The specificity of the English names and phrases in the song personalize it severely. It is in the details that help make the singer’s plight so convincingly moving. St. Mungo’s is London’s largest charitable organization for homeless people. "Dirty old sheets" is enough to tell the listener all he needs to know about the amenities such charity. Scarborough Street is a public works program, which involves primarily street sweeping and other menial tasks. The picture being painted is not pleasant, and the choices are narrowed down to one humiliating, dehumanizing situation to another. This is a cruel limbo indeed.

Thompson follows with an acoustic guitar solo, backed by bass, brushed snare drum and vibes. For once, he has found an appropriate place to display his Django Reihardt-inflected jazz vocabulary to turn in a stunning performance that wordlessly epitomizes both the bluesy despair of the conditions being described, along with a brilliant flush of grandiose excitement that harkens back to the great days of Bowlly and the big bands. It’s one of Thompson’s most emotionally effective - as well as technically proficient solos - which is saying quite a lot. Through the seeming magic of the note choices of his runs, he manages to both decry and celebrate an entire lost culture, while at the same time evoking it.

As the solo ends, the song moves into its second bridge, which plunges the singer deeper into hopelessness and despair:

Can’t stay here, you’ve got to foot-slog,
Once in a blue moon you might find a job,
Sleep in the rain, you sleep in the snow,
When the beds are all taken you’ve got nowhere to go.

Froom adds synthetic chords that mockingly - though subtly - remind the listener of the sound of the horns of the big bands. For the beginning of the last verse, however, all instrumentation drops out again except for the spare guitar, bass and brushes. Here we enter the center of the singer’s psyche - the memory of the brief time of youth where his life mattered, where he was fully integrated into a community - in fact was king of the world. Thompson’s voice dips into a sense of wondering revery:

Well, I can see me now - I’m back there on the dance floor.
Oh, with a blonde on me arm, redhead to spare,
Spit on my shoes and shine in me hair . . .

A simple drum flourish kicks the music up a notch, as vision unfolding in the singer’s mind takes full form, and he explodes into the unbridled delight of an ecstatic vision:

And there’s Al Bowlly, he’s up on the stand,
Oh, that was a voice, and that was a band . . .

The music pauses, then slows for the ultimate, sad conclusion, the bursting of the dream:

Al Bowlly’s in heaven, and I’m in limbo now.

Thompson sings this finality in a large, haunted, ghostly voice, and as the last chord resolves, the song, as well as the album, are finished.

The moment is sublimely ironic and pitifully sad. We realize, along with the singer, that Al Bowlly is not merely dead, but exists only in an idealized memory or vision - a kind of "heaven" that is accessible to the singer only through his imagination.

The song is much more than a kind of nostalgia - it is the tragedy of human diminution through the loss of time and place. If a human being has no cultural context in which he can function, he becomes an apparition in himself, an aimless ghost wandering around the waste-land limbo of his own soul.

Thompson intuitively taps into the great theme of alienation, which is a universal, not limited to a specific time or place. And like the poor, entrapped "Deserter" of Liege and Lief, he is used by a political machinery that does not care a whit for the nature of his own right to humanity.

Alienation, a theme present from the beginning of his work, begins to take hold here in an entirely new ironic dimension. "Al Bowlly’s in Heaven" is a very important song for Thompson’s development of association through character. In a sense, the song is the "flip side" to the album’s opener, "A Bone Through Her Nose," which traces the desperate attempts of a young woman to stay fashionably up to date. Definitions of self, if allowed to be determined by one’s country, time, phase or fad are a fruitless endeavor, destined to land the individual into a meaningless shell of existence.

The real problem - for Richard Thompson, however - is the question of what is the alternative? If one remains true to one’s self, is the only recourse a trip back into the solipsistic world of emotional suffering? What is preferable - a limbo or a hell?

In Pour Down Like Silver, the young Sufi convert sang about what it would be like to be "Walking Down the Streets of Paradise." An older, wiser man, is now still pondering just how to get there.

This, in essence, is the problem that Richard Thompson has set up for himself, what he sees basically as the universal problem of mankind. In the song "Al Bowlly," he has, as I have said, "re-discovered" a songwriting technique of character creation, one that requires empathy and involvement on the part of the performer and listener. In his examination of his character’s anguish, Thompson discovers his own humanity through this other person’s experience. It is a technique that he will begin to return to, again and again, in many different guises and approaches - it is a kind of writing that allows the artist to enter from the outside, where he can find identity with another and thus discover the depth and wealth of all the emotional and spiritual yearning within himself.

"Al Bowlly’s in Heaven," finally, ends Thompson’s own "daring adventures" and releases him from his own sense of limbo. What he discovers here is that he does not need to sing about himself in order to uncover the truths about himself. There is more than enough human material to pursue to awaken the universal longings of the infinity of the human within - and to transmit that that back to his audience.

After all this time, Thompson’s adventures are, in a sense, just beginning.

Video - Richard Thompson Band performing "Al Bowlly's in Heaven," 2007:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-Vgq6eryp4g

"Second Stream" Recordings I

Richard Thompson: Doom and Gloom From the Tomb, Vol. 1 [1985]

There are those who could credibly argue that none of Richard Thompson’s recordings are meant for the mainstream market. it is, after all, a market that has never embraced him, and Thompson remains, to this day, something of the quintessential “cult” favorite. But even within a cult (or rather, a relatively small, yet extraordinarily loyal fan base), there lies a deeper core of hard-core devotees who yearn for more production from an artist than even a meagre market will bear.

Richard Thompson realized this quandary as early as 1985, when he released this cassette-only collection solely to members of his fan club, by mail order. Little could anyone imagine that this type of direct marketing to the faithful few would eventually develop into an entirely second stream of releases that would become an ever-growing part of the Thompson catalog.
Doom and Gloom From the Tomb (what a wonderful title!) was indeed a collection for hard core enthusiasts, featuring demos, live recordings, and previously unreleased songs from Fairport Convention, Richard & Linda, as well as newer solo recordings. No doubt Thompson was correct in his estimation of his niche in the market, and a collection such as this would be an effective, yet affordable method to deliver the most of his music to the hungriest of his followers.
Issued on his own Flypaper label, created exclusively for this purpose, Doom and Gloom was never intended to have a long shelf (or rather postal) life. It was soon out of print, which it remains today. Thompson would issue a second volume in 1991, and by the end of the next decade would begin a steady stream of (mostly) live albums from his own Beeswing label - all available by mail order only.

This concept would prove not only to be a reasonable business practice, but it makes for a much wider appreciation and assessment of Thompson’s music than would otherwise be possible.
The down side of this method, from a collector’s point of view, is that these recordings tend to go out of print after a few years, and it remains to see if many of them will ever be resurrected. Such recordings must be seen, therefore, as a separate, “second stream” of issues and cannot be considered part of the Richard Thompson canon proper.

This does not mean that they are neither interesting or important for our purposes - I would certainly review and analyze Doom and Gloom if I had a copy in my possession. But since I don’t, we must pass by it without much more ado.

When we begin to reach the mail-order titles that are currently available, we will make a decision as to how thoroughly to scrutinize them at that time.

For those interested in the contents of this recording and other details, they are readily available for scrutiny at Thompson’s official web site, Beesweb at http://www.richardthompson-music.com.

Across a Crowded Room

Richard Thompson: Across a Crowded Room [April 1985]

Even more so than his solo "debut," Hand of Kindness, this follow-up, full-throttle electric album defined what would be come to be known an understood as a "Richard Thompson album" during the 1980s and ‘90s. Speaking personally, I recall feeling at the time that Across a Crowded Room was a richer, more fully accomplished piece of work than its predecessor at that time. What sticks in my mind is mostly the unified and distinct sound and mood of the album.

Recorded in late 1984, and still produced by Joe Boyd (though issued under the Polygram label), Across a Crowded Room bore the stamp of the lush, high-treble production values of the MTV-era ‘80s. The album seems to have been recorded in a kind of ghostly echo chamber environment, and Thompson’s voice is loaded with reverb. It is a sound that is very similar to Bruce Springsteen’s epochal Born in the U.S.A., released the previous summer, but its mood is much spookier - and much more idiosyncratically personal.

Listening freshly to the album today, the tone and quality of the entire project seems much less consistent (and more transparent) than it did at the time. But if to conclude that this is finally inferior to Hand of Kindness, in retrospect, it in no ways devalues a fine collection of songs, a small fistful of genuine classics that rate with the best that Thompson has ever produced.
As a whole, however, I cannot say that the album stands up the standards that Thompson set before - or after. The fact that this does not diminish in any way the memory of the haunting power that it held over me in 1985 suggests that it could still have a similar effect on a newcomer to Thompson’s music. That is to say, Across a Crowded Room is still more vital, powerful and compelling listening than 99% of the albums by other artists from that time hence.

One oddity about the album is that it was the first by Thompson to be released on compact disc. The LP configuration and the CD differed - both by running sequence and the inclusion of an additional song on the CD. It is the LP that I purchased at the time, and that I fell in love with - and it is the CD that I am listening to today. Could such subtle changes effect the impact of an album to such a degree that it substantially alters its overall impact to its detriment - in fact, making it, however slightly psychologically, into a very different statement? This is a question I will return to after discussing the songs as they stand on the CD version I possess today.

Changes in tone coincide with changes in theme, and in this sense, Across a Crowded Room is somewhat retrogressive. If Hand of Kindness stands as a kind of contrite, yet self-affirmed declaration of independence for the artist, Crowded Room seems antithetically hushed, pushed back into a psychological mire of guilt and defensiveness. This, odd as it seems, however, is not a criticism. It is precisely that claustrophobic sense of inward paranoia that gives Crowded Room much of its power.

In fact, it might not be going to far to say that this is the album one might expect to follow Shoot Out the Lights - the ghost of Linda and the messy emotional fallout of the divorce seems to permeate it to the grooves. The accumulated, sprawling mess of unrelated objects depicted on the front cover seems to be an apt symbol for the disordered debris left in the chaotic wake of this personal cataclysm.

The density of the sound of the album fits this theme well - and Across a Crowded Room indeed works best when it adheres to the thematic motifs suggested by its title and the artists’s history. As a matter of fact, Crowded Room seemingly begins its odyssey as a concept album, strictly regarding the aftermath of the breakup. One can understand why Thompson would not want to do an entire album of this nature, but it is true that whenever the songs veer away from this central sphere, the emotional center seems to be lost, and one has to wait until another great, thematically-related song comes around to re-center the record again.

There is no question that there are some of Thompson’s most powerful and frightening works on here - and songs like "When the Spell Is Broken" and "She Twists the Knife Again" function on a much deeper level than any witty or poetic conceit could possibly take complete claim for. This is where Thompson seems to be digging under his skin, and whenever he does this, with all apparent honesty and horror, it is exactly what is communicated directly to the listener, as if via an intravenous tube. Whenever that appears to be happening, that is where Crowded Room is functioning at its best, and indeed, where it sounds like the masterpiece it quite could have been.

"When the Spell Is Broken" - Across a Crowded Room kicks off breathlessly with this ominous, moody classic - one of Richard Thompson’s greatest songs and vocal performances. The effect, in fact of "When the Spell Is Broken" is so powerful as to completely dominate the entire sense of the album, so that expectations are not only phenomenally high for the rest of the disc, but in retrospect, whenever one thinks of Crowded Room, this is immediately the song with which they associate it.

"When the Spell Is Broken" is actually a very simply constructed song. Based in a minor key with a threatening, steady mid-tempo drumbeat, it immediately drags the listener into a deep, heavy groove that is reminiscent of "I Heard it Through the Grapevine."

It is, in fact, to a large degree, due to the song’s simplicity that Thompson is able to make such a deep, immediate emotional connection. The supreme artistry of the song is that there appears to be no artistry involved whatsoever, and the result is a hushed glimpse directly into the singer’s soul.

And soul is a key word here - for all of Thompson’s vocals, and he is definitely a powerful (if Anglo-centrically eccentric) soul singer rest so deeply and effortlessly on his melody and lyrics that a very special kind of starkness comes breathing through which is utterly and hauntingly convincing. One cannot help but as though they were listening directly on a conduit to Thompson’s soul itself.

"When the spell is broken - When the spell is broken -." Thompson intones the fragment twice before starting into the verse proper. The first chord change, delayed so long, adds a twisted poignancy to the singer’s lament:

How you ever gonna keep her now?
You can’t cry if you don’t know how.
When the spell is broken.
When the spell is broken.
All the joy is gone from her face.
Welcome back to the human race.

The sentences are clipped and direct, each one packing its own tight little punch, which joined together serve up quite a beating indeed. "Welcome back to the human race" is such a disarming line in itself, so revelatory in its compact puncture of love’s delusion of happiness - so final, in fact - that it is surprising to hear it used as a springboard to the development of the melody, which stretches out in long, rising arches, letting Thompson’s lonely voice hang, hurt and helpless, dangling in the air before falling gradually back down to the bottom, where it began.

How long can the flame
Of love remain
When you curse and fight
And never see a light
Or hear light spoken?
When the spell is broken . . .

A huge electric wave of an open-tuned minor guitar chord washes over the refrain, as two background voices (male and female) answer back, almost mockingly in harmonized monotone - "Can’t cry if you don’t know how . Can’t cry if you don’t know how. . ."

This song is already a masterpiece. Nothing really needs to be added at this point, but merely extended. There is no climax. Or rather, perhaps the climax is reached right here, or even sooner: perhaps with the first line, or even the first chord of the song.

Thompson has created something very, very personal here, yet something completely universal. Struggling to describe it, I might call it his own personal re-creation of the blues. "When the Spell Is Broken" has all the simplicity and emotional directness of the greatest blues songs, though it is really not structured so and sounds like the blues only through analogy.
There is something in the honest, committed mastery of the music that lends the song something of the great authority that the blues carries. With a great blues singer, like Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, or B.B. King (not to mention Hank Williams) emotes so directly that nothing stands in the way of his bared soul and the listener’s ear, the effect can be an overwhelming experience. There is no strained artistry to admire, but something shimmering, pure and human that speaks directly to the soul. And here, on this song, Thompson most perfectly achieves this effect.

For Richard Thompson, one can finally now affirm, is truly a great vocalist. After all his odd and tenuous starts with Fairport and on Henry the Human Fly, where we heard an unsteady but unique voice, through the ‘70s albums with Linda, where his rough but affecting vocals alternated so effectively with her perfectly honed instrument, here after singing in public for going on twenty years, Thompson has become a master of phrasing, of tone and breath control. Yet his greatest vocal triumph is that you believe every word he sings and that he feels each difficult, painful phrase, right down to his bare bones.

It is this remarkable singing that is the key, fusing with the simple melody and tonal structure, along with the heartbreakingly lonely words that make "When the Spell Is Broken" such an overwhelming listening experience. With this song, Thompson has crafted his own personal version of "The Thrill Is Gone," a singular and humbling accomplishment, even within the context of his own wide and varied discography.

"Can’t cry if you don’t know how" - this multi-repeated line seems to be the key to the entire predicament. Yes, we can fall back on biographical interpretation again (and we will), but one does not need to know of Thompson’s marriage self destructing to fully grasp the sense of the dilemma of love falling away. There is a long and great tradition of "losing love songs," particularly in country & western music, as well as the blues. But the dilemma is usually the departing of the loved one’s affection and the pain that it causes the lover. Here the situation is very different.

What happens when two lovers - even two partners in marriage - both fall out of love together? Or what if you are the only one? This is a human experience that is all too common, too real - and yet so mundane that it is hardly ever given any voice of expression in song or lyric. The act of falling in love - especially mutually falling in love, is an experience taken as so divine that it always will inspire great odes of rapture. For falling in love, two people discovering the oneness shared in each other is one of the most powerful experiences human life offers. It is a transforming, transcendent, mythical experience that is so difficult to put into words that it is constantly being set to the ineffable qualities of music.

But what happens when the inverse occurs? Is this loss of love a reverse-transcendent experience? Do we recede back from the beauty and joy which we have discovered back into the world of the mundane? And if so, is there a concomitant realization that what we experienced was false, just an illusion? How does the human psyche deal with the disillusion of fading love? Do we now disavow love, or do we simply recognize that it is a state which cannot be perpetually maintained, although it remains, secure in its transcendent realm, and is simply - even if temporarily - cut off from our accessibility?

In short, "is love real?" And in the great mythic heart of the devoted Sufi, Richard Thompson, "is transcendence real?"

The truth is that we do not live always in bliss - but that the potential loss of bliss is a constant state of the reality of being human. With heaven comes the possibility of hell, which is what makes all the stakes of life so vital. The problem is that not all of us are equipped to deal with it, and that mastering the great tragic sense of loss is part of developing human maturity.
This is the singer’s dilemma. He is unfamiliar with the grim realities of loss, and he is getting a hard lesson in how to deal with them. It is there in his very inability to cry that leaves him in a kind of state of suspended animation. All he has known is the bliss - and once that is gone, he feels nothing, surely a terrifying prospect.

The song leaves no sense of hope - only a strange and discomforting stasis. Does this mean that "When the Spell Is Broken" is ultimately cynical, even nihilistic? I don’t believe that is Thompson’s perspective, although emotionally where the song resides is in a kind of spiritual limbo, if not a hell. No, no one is going to fight their way out of this song, through the context of the song. One must put on additional perspectives, grow a little more, before one is able to advance. But that is perhaps the function of other songs. This song is dedicated to that one, undeniable, and often unexpected truth of the great potential of loss. And this is the song that lays the groundwork or mood for all of Across a Crowded Room.

The title of the album is taken, of course, from the lyrics of "Some Enchanted Evening," from the Broadway show South Pacific. The song deals with love at first sight: "You may see a stranger across a crowded room." The romantic epiphany of this event is celebrated, and within the context of both song and show, the result is eternal happiness: "Once you have found her, never let her go." In Thompson’s real-life nightmare becomes the haunted question, "How you ever gonna keep her now?" Indeed that is the question, as is its corollary, the unspoken "How you ever going to leave her now?"

The grim realities simply build until they are undeniable:

All your magic and your ways and schemes,
All your lies come and tear at your dreams,
When the spell is broken . . .

Now you’re handing her that same old line,
It’s just straws in the wind this time.
When love has died,
There’s none starry eyed.
No kiss, no tears,
No farewell souvenirs,
Not even a token,
When the spell is broken . . .

Thompson’s plaintive guitar solo emerges slowly out of this miasma and treads restlessly back and forth in its entrapment of non-modulation until it jumps up, double- time against the beat in a fruitless effort of high chords to break out of the grim cycle of entrapment.
One last verse remains, in which Thompson pleads with his listeners:

Don’t swear your heart
At the very start.
Love letters you wrote
Are pushed back down your throat
And leave you choking,
When the spell is broken . . .

Is caution truly the answer? Is that what is to be learned here? It is not a very convincing argument, and though the singer undoubtedly will be more wary, more cautious, the human heart will always be susceptible to new awakenings. And this of course means it will always be susceptible to new disappointments.

The singer is in no position here to get a grasp of any perspective. The song files out slowly, steadily, leaving him isolated in his limbo of non-feeling. "Can’t cry if you don’t know how," he joins in the chant. In the universe of the song, he is ever stuck in the remorseless cycle of regret and incapacity as the litany slowly, fatalistically fades away, seemingly into a forever realm of non-escape, his controlled yet impassioned guitar an Anglo-Saxon counterpoint to B.B. King.
"Welcome to my world," Richard Thompson seems to say to his audience at the opening of his new album. "I’ll show you pain that you never even knew you had." Is it really any wonder that the record didn’t go platinum?

Video - Richard Thompson: "When the Spell Is Broken"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=PED03yVaLj0

"You Don’t Say" - This extraordinary song is the perfect follow-up to the opening, and places the singer in a present-day context after getting over "the spell." It is as cold, harsh and unblinking as anything Richard Thompson has ever done, which is saying quite a lot.

This is a very nervy performance, and Thompson must have realized the effect it would have in re-focusing, re-directing attention back on himself and his breakup with Linda. Though he can disclaim biographical writing, songs like "When the Spell Is Broken," and especially "You Don’t Say" simply belie any disclaimers. That is not to say that there is not a universality to them - indeed, it is precisely in the reality and honesty of the representation of the personal that such songs find their grounding depth that can connect so powerfully with a sensitive listener.
The obvious oddness of this song is in the schematic of the singing of the verses, which is given over entirely to a female chorus. Thompson only sings on the refrains, the same ambiguous response, over and over.

The song begins with a quick, anxious chirping of electric guitar which suggests a kind of pop-rock hyperactivity, or even paranoia. It seems desperate to communicate something, but the holding, the forestalling of any development gives it a quizzical urgency that is held in abeyance.
Finally, unexpectedly, the reverb-soaked female voices enter, scatting their words quickly, like gossips in the street or unwanted whispers in the brain:

I saw your old flame
Walking down the street.
She’s back in town again,
She’s looking out for you.
She says you used her,
And you were indiscreet,
It really wounded her
When you bid adieu.

Confronted with this sudden barrage of information, accusation, recrimination, what is left for the singer to reply?

Do you mean she still cares?
Do you mean she still cares?
Do you mean she still cares?
Oh, you don’t say.

I cannot think of a comparable instance in which perspective has been twisted around in a song quite like this. The effect is shocking, so matter-of-fact in its delivery that it is simply disarming.
Thompson wrote those self-accusing lyrics and submits them to himself. Anyone with any knowledge of the breakup with Linda can clearly hear these reproofs as accurately emanating, if not from her, then from Richard’s projected psyche of his ex-wife. He can’t deny the accusations, and when he is implicitly asked for a response, there is literally nothing he can say.

Thompson sings the lines of his response without any sense of disdain - indeed, he seems genuinely touched, truly moved. He, however, has moved on with his life. What can he possibly say to meet this confrontation, either on the street or within himself? His feelings are gone, but his guilt remains. "Oh, you don’t say," simply stops the conversation in the air. It is not that he does not care, but that there is nothing he can say or do to possibly alter the reality of the circumstances.

The turning of all this emotional invective into a simple point of conversational acknowledgement is not just an act of cold dismissal - although he must be aware that it certainly comes off that way. The simple truth is that he has nothing to say to this person that is now part of his past, and he can neither deny nor defend any of the accusations hurled at him.
Thompson is absolutely ruthless with himself here. There is no soft-soaping, no self-remorse, no relenting in the dialogue directed against him: He goes out of his way to show precisely who he’s writing about and that the situation is not misrepresented:

She keeps half a ring,
She says you’ve kept the other,
She says you broke your word
When you pursue another.
She says, "You’re getting love
Mixed up with sympathy.
Young man, do your duty,
And come on back to me."

Responding simply, as before, it is clear that Thompson seeks no pity and offers no excuses for his actions. Things are precisely the way they are, and there is simply no changing them.

The question emerges as to why a writer would feel the urge to put up such blatant self-flagellation before the public? Guilt must be part of the answer. But Thompson’s casual, though sad, dismissal of his obligations to do anything risk painting himself as an utter heel. His motive must lie deeper, must lie beyond guilt, must penetrate to the very nature of his being. The song is no answer to his critics, much less his ex-wife. They seem to arise from a compulsion to be completely honest in the face of truth.

This is really rather extraordinary, when you think about it. Do we come away thinking anything good about Richard Thompson after hearing this song? Is it really enough to say, "Well, at least he can admit he’s an asshole." We still don’t wish to admire or emulate assholes, do we?

I think that the most positive thing being said in this song is precisely what is left unsaid. Richard Thompson does not have the arrogance to say, "Put yourself in my position - this could happen to you." But by placing us precisely in his position and hearing all of our faults thrown back in our face, we can begin to appreciate the common humanity and the sheer impossibility of dealing with just such a situation ourselves. Who among us hasn’t acted the bastard sometimes? Who hasn’t broken faith? Who indeed has not felt shame and regret, and yet has nothing left to do to amend it? What in the world can we say in response to our own shortcomings?
Sometimes there is simply nothing one can say - and that is precisely the point.

Video - Richard Thompson: "You Don't Say"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=EKWdzeyf1-A

"I Ain’t Going to Drag My Feet No More" - This song moves the album one or two emotional steps further. Here, if we take the album as a universe in itself, rather than merely a collection of songs, the singer has moved on from his old broken romance and is ready to pursue a new relationship. "Drag My Feet" is a kind of pep talk to oneself, a pumping up resolution to go ahead and go after the girl, despite a litany of past excuses, all culminating essentially in shyness and fear of rejection.

This is a marvelously (and rare) optimistic song for Thompson, and he plies it on with great gusto and good humor. It’s in a major key with a 4/4 tempo, that pumps "whack-whack-whack" on his guitar and on the drums - which feature a delightful hesitation/tempo switch on the first chord change of each verse. It’s like a kick start in the middle of a speech to keep up the courage, to man the pace, and the accompanying accordion and saxophones remind one of the sound of the band on Hand of Kindness.

The verses extend to build in verbosity, resolution, and rapidity to open up into the chorus, in which female singers accompany the happy, almost gospel-like release that comes with self determination:

Where I come from feeling is a crime.
I thought I could take you in my own good time.
Like a jumped-up fool, now down I climb,
And I ain’t gonna drag my feet no more,
I’m running to your side, going to beat down the door.
I ain’t going to drag my feet no more, no more.

After two verses and choruses, there is a brief instrumental excursion into relative minor, with a sweetly contrasting romantic accordion lead, reminiscent of a burlesque of a Parisian love song, after which the singer returns to his self-rant, this time pushing the boundaries, pushing the meter, pushing his voice to an almost hilarious, but exhilarating pitch:

I worked my hands ‘til I couldn’t spell your name,
I rolled and roared ‘til I couldn’t see your face,
I leaned on the jukebox ‘til I couldn’t hear your voice,
Put my head in the sand, but that won’t do it -
I swore I was above you, but that won’t do it -
And I tried and I tried, but that won’t do it -
And I ain’t going to drag my feet no more . . .

The singer’s resistance is futile, so he is choosing acceptance and pursuit. He is opening up his heart and saying "yes" to love, "yes" to life. Thompson’s vocal is excitement itself, almost coming unhinged in a most endearing way. A fun, bouncy, and relatively simple guitar solo follows and plays along until the song fades.

Once cannot help but feel that this is an honest, liberating song for Thompson, and I really don’t get any sense of irony here - which, as I have noted, is a rarity.

This is a very jubilant, "up" and powerful song, and lots of fun to play and sing along with. The question still remains as to its place in what has become - and will return to be - a very bleak album.

Video - Richard Thompson: "I Ain't Going to Drag My Feet No More"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9p0zHht9rKw

"Shine On Love" - This song was not included on the original LP release of the album, and, perhaps consequently, it seems to always stick up out of place for me. This could be a trick of psychology, of course, for like "Living in Luxory" (which it somewhat resembles), there is a feeling of a B-side stuck on a CD to help flesh it out. However, while "Luxory" was tacked on to the end of Shoot Out the Lights as a pointless (and potentially anti-climactic) addendum, "Shine on Love" here appears as the fourth song in the running sequence. We must, therefore, step back a bit and think of it as a legitimate extension of the album.

Thematically, the song works beautifully as a follow-up to "Drag My Feet" - essentially a logical progression in the sequence of the romantic evolution that the album seems to be following at this point. If "Drag My Feet" was a determination to pursue love after disappointment, "Shine on Love" is right there in the heart of a blissful relationship. Hence, the movement of the previous song has been successful, and it is celebrated here.

The song begins with an accordion-led fanfare with an almost Elizabethan feel. As in "Devonshire," there is an abrupt key change as the vocal enters, though without that song’s devastating, undercutting effect. As a matter of fact, all of "Shine on Love" has a kind of formal, fanfare-like feel - which is a cue to me not to accept it at face value. Such annunciations in Thompson tend to hide something - an ironic fault that underlies the entire sentiment and structure. But I’m trying to be careful not to be too hasty in my analysis here.

Right at the opening verse, there is a specific reference back to the line, "Where I come from, feeling is a crime," from the previous songs:

When I was a boy
I was nobody’s joy,
I was guilty in love,
Guilt, guilt, guilty in love.
More fool me,
I could never see what I was guilty of.

This guilt theme about love - which we encountered in "Small Town Romance" and will surface most prominently in the later magnum opus "Can’t Win," opens questions that can’t be satisfactorily answered. But what does clearly come through is the portrait of a young man whose environment frowned upon such expressions. One could speculate on the reserved British middle-class tradition of reticence and almost Vulcan-like rationality, but this seems to be more of a setting than a key to understanding Thompson’s emotional torments. Shyness (resulting in guilt) may be simply a part of one’s nature - and Richard Thompson was a notoriously shy boy and young man - and one’s cultural environment may reinforce this without necessarily being an evil culprit at the root of heartbreak. We will see this theme widen in Thompson’s work, however, culminating, finally in the epic suburban sprawl of Mock Tudor (1991).

In this song, at any rate, the problem has ostensibly been overcome. The beginning of the second verse affirms this and leads immediately into the stately, yet celebratory chorus:

Now you steered me right,
And I’m standing in the light,
So shine on love.
Shine, shine, shine on love.
Don’t slip away,
Darkened day.
Let it shine on love,
Shine, shine shine on love.

As a male and female chorus joins in with Thompson, almost as at a church service, the sentiment is made to facile to be fully trusted. Cliched lyrics ("Like a hand in glove") make one suspicious as well.

This is not to say that "Shine on Love" is not a pretty or even a pleasant little song. It really is a kind of tasty little confection. That’s just the problem, however - if it’s truly serious, the sentiment is so slight that it cannot truly be taken too seriously.

A stately march-tempo accordion solo reinforces this notion, as the sound is reminiscent of a stately gallop of peasants going to the royal nuptial rather than a sincere outpouring of emotion. The song, while not obviously an ironist’s nasty little portrait, simply does not hold up with any sincerity.

The question, of course is did Richard Thompson plan this progression of sentiment here for overall ironic effect in the structure of the album, or does "Shine on Love" sit here on what should be the Side One of Across a Crowded Room as a quirky little aberration? (Could it even be a failed love song?)

Of course, we would not be asking this question were it not for the dichotomy of sequences between the two formats. So I think we should be cautious, at least for the moment, in making any final decisions concerning its overall relevance and meaning. Listening to the song in the context of the original LP, it may seem out of place and superfluous, taking us emotionally far afield and blurring the overall impact of the album. Any album beginning with "When the Spell Is Broken" produces a dark, spooky mood which cannot be dispelled by a "Shine on Love," and as we will see, succeeding songs will darken the vision even deeper.

Planned or not, "Shine on Love" can only be seen as a kind of ironic counterpoint if it is to work in this context at all. Its dissonant, unresolved final chord only seem to reaffirm this point of view.

"Ghosts in the Wind" - On the original LP, this was the final song on the album. I will discuss this change in format and attempt to assess its impact in my final summation of the album.
"Ghosts in the Wind" is one of the starkest, most hauntingly beautiful and lonely things that Richard Thompson has ever put on record - which is saying quite a lot.

The song is very simple in structure, for the most part built around only two chords, with just a few changes at the refrain. Thompson’s finger-picked open acoustic guitar alone is enough to set a breathtakingly haunted mood. This would become, indeed, one of the singer’s most effective solo pieces, but the added instruments and production techniques both enhance the overall effect of the song and connect it marvelously with the sound of the album established on "When the Spell Is Broken."

Thompson’s voice is soaked in reverb, and it carries the sound of a damaged soul, fully inhabiting the bleak melody and lyrics:

Did you call my name?
Did you call my name in the night?
In the whispers and sighs,
In the whispers and sighs of the night?
Ah, ghosts in the wind . . .

There is a spooky feel reminiscent of "Ghost Riders in the Sky," but more introspective, more elusive here. Thompson’s sliding electric guitar fills the blend, along with a deep, jazzy bass and the sporadic crashing of echo-drenched drums and cymbals that help reinforce the sense of stasis. Eventually is added a kind of hum that suggests some kind of electronic equivalent of a bagpipe drone over which the entire song seems to hover.

The theme of loss and abandonment is amplified and expanded upon here in brief, subtle images:

Now this old house moves,
This old house moves and moans.
The tongues of the night,
The tongues of the night stir my bones.

The image of the empty house at night could well be the emptiness of the singer’s soul. The movements and sounds are his memories of a love lost, and these shadows grow until they are seemingly all that is left of the singer’s psyche. It is a dramatic moment when the long-delayed chord changes come about, and the singer departs to ask his single forlorn question:

When will my sore heart ever mend?

But this does not pull us out of the haunted shell of the song, but merely allows us to scrape the edge, as the return to solidity of the enclosing chords make clear.

The song has a natural partnership to "When the Spell Is Broken," both thematically and tonally. Here the "spell" is the song itself. And rather than being an illusion of bliss, this spell is an all-encompassing void, the emptiness that remains long after a relationship has soured and ended.

Thompson will return again and again to the image of an individual as a haunted being in songs such as "Uninhabited Man" and "The Ghost of You Walks." Here, there is something unnervingly real in the starkness image and palpable sound of loneliness and deathless loss. It is a sound and a feeling that is simply too stark, too real to describe adequately. Thompson sounds like a lonely ghost singing it, and it is one of those rare and tremendous performances that sounds as though the singer/player must be living it, inhabiting it. It is this utter lack of any sense feigning that goes to reinforce the notion that he must be singing about himself, from his very soul.

I want to try to avoid moving back into autobiographical territory here. And indeed, we do not need to. "Ghosts in the Wind" is the result of great artistry as well as great personal sensitivity. Plus, the depth of feeling that comes across can easily (inevitably?) be placed in context with the terrain mapped out in rest of the album so far, especially the first two songs.

Thompson begins a stark, yet jittery electric guitar solo that takes over where his voice left off. Playing inside and outside of the two chords he has set up, the simplicity and sadness of the piece produces a very personalized equivalent of the blues. This, indeed, could be B.B. King or Eric Clapton territory - not to mention Robert Johnson himself - but with little or no reference to the traditional pentatonic blues scale. The emotional resonance is the same, however.

Thompson returns for the last verse:

I’m empty and cold,
Empty and cold like a ruin.
The wind tears through me,
The wind tears through me like a ruin.

The word "ruin" intensifies the meaning of the self as "house." As he repeats the refrain, the singer seems to disappear, vanishing like dust on the windy desert floor. The guitar returns and rides the song out, seemingly replacing whatever was human there with a strange, searching presence that continues until the entire piece fades away into silence.

Thus, "Ghosts in the Wind" turns into a kind of vanishing act, as both singer and song gradually fade and disappear. Here we have one of Thompson’s most moving and terrifying feats to date, and his lonesome howl leaves a lasting echo in our consciousnesses long after he is gone.

Can a person simply wither and die, disappear like a ghost, through the haunting of memory and time? This song not only suggests it, but manifestly demonstrates it and proves it to the listener.
"Ghosts in the Wind" is another unqualified great song by Richard Thompson, and as undying a testimony to his greatness as an artist as you are likely to find anywhere.

"Fire in the Engine Room" - Side two of the LP opens with this breakneck rocker, a desperate runaway train of speed and paranoia. Driven by a reckless hard guitar riff, doubled by saxophones, this is an extended metaphor of jealousy.

If one is attempting to follow Across a Crowded Room as a kind of narrative (ignoring "Ghosts in the Wind" for the moment), we could say that this is the beginning of the crisis point of the new relationship that was picked up on "I Ain’t Going to Drag My Feet No More" and "Shine on Love." The broken past of the old relationship of "When the Spell Is Broken" and "You Don’t Say" is here beginning to repeat itself. This interpretation of the album suggests problems as internal universals that play themselves out, over and over, throughout successive relationships, no matter who is involved.

I am not here attempting to establish that this kind of schematic reading of the album is what Thompson intended, but it can easily be read that way. Perhaps in the end, it doesn’t really matter - the songs reflect back and forth on each other no matter what order you put them in, and the end result is a rather disturbing view of human relationships, no matter how you look at it.

"Fire in the Engine Room" is one of those unique kind of Richard Thompson songs that seems to be injecting humor in the nightmare through a kind of musical and verbose overstatement. The song is, indeed, a kind of fun rush to listen to, with its breathless, compulsive opening:

Well, Luke told Danny, Danny told Betsy,
Betsy told me, and I’m telling you,
You better stop doing the things you do,
There’s a fire in the engine room, fire in the engine room.

The singer’s source of anxiety comes from a fourth-hand source, which of course suggests that it comes more from in himself than anywhere else. The mad images keep coming, along with the relentless propulsion of the song:

She’s making eyes with the fool with the shovel,
That son of a grease-gun must be insane.
I hose it down and he fans the flames . . .

The paranoid visions are beginning to take physical form born from the images of his own metaphor. This guy is losing it, and losing it fast. The singer sees himself as a marked man:

It must be the head-hunting season,
And there’s room in the old trophy room.

And:

And you know how uncertainty can linger
With a rattlesnake wrapped around your finger,
One day it may wake up and sting you.
Here’s a toast to the bride and the groom.

In this scenario, any relationship is doomed. The singer’s obsession is self-fulfilling - if his jealousy does not bring about infidelity, it is at least going to sow alienation and possibly reap an inevitable sundering.

This leads us to a kind of conundrum about the relationship of the writer to the content of the song. Thompson is here being satirical, of course - he knows precisely what the singer’s problem is, but that does not dispel the question as to his own guilt in the attitude portrayed. This is, of course, something we cannot possibly ever know - unless Thompson were to inform us that he was being self-mocking here. This is a question that will become increasingly complex in analyzing Thompson’s work - when is he pointing a finger at himself, and when is he merely harpooning another?

We get even less help from the performance - Thompson plays and sings with such passion and conviction that it is impossible to tell whether he means what he says or is simply parodying it. And of course, that’s one of the most exciting wonders of his best work. Thompson creates impossible situations - situations he knows are absurd - then thrusts himself into the center of them. Is he holding himself up for self crucifixion? Is his ultimate target himself?

(A great comparison would be to a later jealousy song, "Don’t Tempt Me," which is even more ridiculously obsessive than this one. There, the jealous martyr - also presented in first person - is mocked beyond belief. But the insanity of the protagonist is so intense that it seems impossible not to be a self-indictment.)

Whether serious, half-serious or not, "Fire in the Engine Room" is a roughneck, welcome addition to a collection of songs questioning the impossibility of relationships. It is beginning to become a very crowded room, indeed.

Video - Richard Thompson: "Fire in the Engine Room"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zaacRvnPoV8

"Walking Through a Wasted Land" - Here Thompson takes the wasteland of the soul and enlarges the vision to a portrait of contemporary England. Though he does not mention Margaret Thatcher by name, it is recognizably the wrecked landscape of her reign to which he alludes. The song resonates with the kind of passion of economic decline that filled Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. album of the previous year:

Sweat is the name of this town,
It’s an ugly old, dirty old disgrace
And now that the steel’s shut down,
It’s fear that puts the sweat in a man’s face.

Instead of Springsteen’s empathy and sadness, however, Thompson’s vision is filled with bile and disgust. Probably, this is not an exclusively political song - it is a larger picture of a country that has lost its soul. "Where is the future we planned?" calls out this aging baby-boomer’s disappointment in any sense of youthful idealism he once maintained.

The song itself is an angry stomper, a march ("Walk down!") through a country for which he probably has no more use or desire left. It contains one of his angriest, most stinging guitar solos yet, and the defiant accordion and blazing saxophones give a kind of triumphantly angry glory to his denunciation.

The song may not be profound - it is not one of Thompson’s best. But it does help flesh out the theme of desolation that the album is painting to give it a larger, more universal nature, and the tough anger of the piece adds to the record’s sense of aggressive hard rock in its texture. It fits well here, and moves the album along quite nicely.

"Little Blue Number" - Here we have what will become one of Thompson’s specialties - a blistering tale of astonishment over something so outrageous that lets him pull out all the verbal stops. If "Walking Through a Wasted Land" is Thompson’s disappointment with the old, "Little Blue Number" is his shock of the new. Like "A Bone Through Her Nose," that will kick off his next album, Thompson is sent into hilarious verbal spasms over a female’s appearance. Yes, partly, this reveals a conservative nature, but as such a brilliant innovator in a traditionalist’s garb, he seems to earn the right to get fed up.

At any rate, the lyrics are so funny and exaggerated, the thrust of the song so wickedly fun-rocking, that you can’t help but love it. Basically, "Little Blue Number" is a workout in the tradition of Chuck Berry’s "Too Much Monkey Business," which was later transformed into Bob Dylan’s surreal take on modern culture in "Subterranean Homesick Blues." This is Thompson’s own private appropriation of the tradition, and whenever he applies this technique, it is always, uniquely and hilariously his. With his remarkable play with words and daft sound of astonishment, he comes off not like an old fogey, but rather like perhaps the last sensible man on earth:

Where did you get that little blue number?
How do you make those rhinestones shine?
Do you go on the prowl while other folks slumber?
Did you steal those things right off of the line?
Hold, your horses, that’s something of mine!
That little blue number, little blue number . . .

Thompson’s guitar solo bends like a country pedal steel, and in fact the entire song sounds like it could be a country & western stomp, were it not for the bagpipe sounds and Thompson’s northern English accent. This is another unique type of fusion at which he is so proficient (see "Tear Stained Letter," among many others), and the end result is something quite unique.
"Little Blue Number" once again expands the album’s theme and texture, and after these brief excursions into different modes of alienation, Thompson is set to return to the central theme of the agonizing impossibility of human relationships.

Video - Richard Thompson: "Little Blue Number"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SQ1KItC80FA

"She Twists the Knife Again" - In a more perfect world, this would be a universally known, well-loved part of the rock ‘n’ roll repertoire, blazing in the collective conscious alongside such other demented masterpieces as the Stones’ "19th Nervous Breakdown," the Who’s "I Can See for Miles," Talking Heads’ "Psycho Killer," and everything on Elvis Costello’s first three albums.
Going past the satirically humorous sado-masochistic text, the song spills over into real (and scary) emotional territory and Thompson just pulls out the stops to deliver one of the greatest horrific rock anthems of all time. Yes, this should have been a hit in any era, and it is so gripping that you can’t help but punch the repeat button and jump out of your chair.

It is emblematic of Thompson to grow from a lyrically extreme position and have the subtext of the song spill over directly to hit an open nerve, and that is precisely what "Twists the Knife" does. The rocking, charging hook of electric guitar and drums is so powerful and committed that it sucks the listener in from the instant it begins. Then begins Thompson’s lament:

I keep my nose clean, I keep my speech plain,
I keep my promises, she twists the knife again.
I shut my memory, I close my eyes and then
She takes another bite, she twists the knife again.

The effect of these lyrics is a brutal attack. The words stab like little knives in themselves, piercing and relentless. In the beautiful transition to the chorus, there is no respite, just a hurt-dog memory of abuses:

She never leaves me my dignity,
Makes a dunce of me in mixed company,
No bygone can be a bygone,
She throws the spanner in,
She puts the screws on.

At the point of the chorus, the song seems to lose control, turning into an hysterical scream for help:

In the middle of a kiss, she twists the knife again.
When I get up off my knees, she twists the knife again.
When I think I’m off the hook, she gets me,
She twists the knife again!
She twists the knife again!

Rarely do the words and music of a song come together so perfectly that they seem to be one organism, a single blade, if you will. They emphatically do here.

The most amazing thing about "She Twists the Knife Again," however is the frightening conviction of its performance. Thompson does not have to resort to any vocal histrionics - just his singing puts the message across so forcefully that there is absolutely no question that he means every word he is saying in this pastiche.

"Who is he singing about?" We don’t even have time to wonder at this before the image of Linda pops in our minds. Is this about his ex-wife? Is it his excuse - or perhaps is it his guilt? There’s no way to know, and finally, we must concede that the question is simply irrelevant. What he is singing is very real, however, and any of us who have ever felt hopelessly entangled in a no-win situation will attest that he seems to be channeling our own nervous systems.

I suppose you could say that "Twists the Knife" is the crisis point of the entire album, whether we follow a schematic pathway or not. In whatever relationship he finds himself, old or new, this is the howling of a man totally entrapped. There’s no way out of this hell - even sundering such a relationship leaves the psychic wounds that one will carry on into any future experience. As a matter of fact, "She Twists the Knife Again" could easily be about a relationship that is already over. Guilt scars deep - and the attack (as well as the song itself) is completely relentless:

I make my moves well, I let her tell me when,
I walk a fine line, she twists the knife again.
Just when the scar heals, just when the grip unbends,
That’s when her mind reels, she twists the knife again.

She can give it out, she can’t take it,
She smells something bad, she has to rake it.
I bring home my packet, my white-collar money,
I’m in a fist fight, she thinks she’s Gene Tunney.

Even the silly humor of such an unlikely reference as this now-obscure boxer does not blunt the blows of the song. It remains magnificently, scarifyingly real. All humor here is pure gallows - a defensive move to keep one’s sanity under such mental abuse.

Thompson’s guitar begins a repeated phrase, stepping down in repeat during each measure, as if he was slowly being pushed down, ground into the dirt. When he finally does let loose, he soars into crying, out-of-harmony excursion of which we have not heard the like since "Shoot Out the Lights." He does not remain long here, however, but is quickly pulled back into the trapped wheel of the chorus. For an ending, all he can muster is the charged repeat:

She twists the knife again!
She twists the knife again!
She twists the knife again!

followed by a sudden silence that is all too final.

It is precisely this type of song that drives Richard Thompson fans insane - you want to talk to your new fellow-music fanatics, and all you receive is a "Who?" "God-damn it," you want to scream. "Listen to this! I lived through this!"

Video - Richard Thompson: "She Twists the Knife Again"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5g2rABfoV4M

Video - Richard Thompson performs "She Twists the Knife Again" solo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uILkhhMwg48&feature=related

"Love in a Faithless Country" - The CD version of Across a Crowded Room ends with this, one of Richard Thompson’s strangest and most threatening-sounding songs ever. (Which is saying quite a bit.)

It begins with a dissonant, trebly guitar arpeggio just hanging in space, dangling. Even as Thompson’s voice enters and the song proper begins, "Love in a Faithless Country" seems to float, ungrounded, almost suspended in time. A restless bass moves up and down, as scattered drums punctuate certain spare points.

The spare melody is almost a bi-tonal chant, moving slowly, back and forth from a pivot point between two clashing chords. Thompson’s voice is ominous and hollow. The lyrics seem to be giving instructions for actions during wartime:

Always move in pairs and travel light.
A loose friend is an enemy, keep it tight.
Always leave a job the way you found it.
Look for trouble coming and move around it.

The music trails off and time, for a brief eternity, seems to hang totally in suspension.
Suddenly there is the brutal crashing of an electric guitar chord in savage minor, and hard, echo-riddled drums hold a slow beat. Thompson begins to chant the chorus:

That’s the way we make love.
That’s the way we make love.
That’s the way we make love.

This sudden and jarring juxtaposition between apparently differing subject matters contains a powerful mental and emotional jolt. This song has departed even further from dichotomies first laid out so powerfully and strangely in "The Calvary Cross." Here, love is depicted as a battlefield - a strange, barren landscape of deadly and cautious motions, requiring extraordinary vigilance, grounded in a knowing fear and dread.

This is perhaps the bleakest that Thompson has ever gotten in detailing affairs of the heart. The song makes no apparent effort to reconcile or explain the relationship between apparently incongruous verses and chorus, no attempt to justify the pronunciation of the assertion that love is a dangerous, violent game. The simple assertion of the chorus, combined with the huge, ominous sound of the instrumentation are enough to convince - or at least confound - the listener.

"Love in a Faithless Country" is a bold experiment, and one that lays Thompson open to criticism not of morbidity, but of the aesthetic and emotional justification of such morbidity. Here, like "The End of the Rainbow," one can easily charge that Thompson is simply going too far. The riposte here, as there, is finally that in this song, like the other, Thompson is painting a picture of a shattered psyche. Indeed, it is even a more justifiable interpretation in this sense, as the entire world of the song is ultimately related back to the first-person (plural).

Personal experience and individual emotional perspectives are difficult to criticize, but they depend for their effectiveness upon the listener’s sensitivity, as well as the capacity of the artist to convincing express his unique point of view. The answer will vary from person to person, but the basic question is whether Thompson’s construction is adequate to the task of making a convincing case of such an extreme position. In short, does he present an honest nightmare or just a ridiculous grotesquery?

There are two ways to answer this question, and two ways to test the result. First of all, there is the question of the power of the musical construction, the recording in itself - is "Faithless Country" strong enough to convince on its own? And secondly - and perhaps more importantly here - is the question of whether the larger context - the album as a whole - works to support such an imposing edifice.

We will return to the question of context in a moment. For myself, I believe that this is a supreme example of an extreme piece of art or communication that relies upon its context - the album at large for its effectiveness. An album that has established itself so firmly with such haunting and convincing masterpieces as "When the Spell Is Broken" and "She Twists the Knife Again" has eminently established itself as such a unique artifact that an experiment as extreme as "Faithless Country" has not only earned its right for our attention, but makes a bold claim for us to take its extremities seriously.

But let us return to the song proper. After the initial chorus, the song pauses and hovers before moving into the second verse:

Always make your best moves late at night.
Always keep your tools well out of sight.
It never pays to work the same town twice.
It never hurts to be a little nice.

The lyrics leave the activities being undertaken very ambiguous, though there is no question that they are dark and are directed towards actions of a surreptitious, if not even criminal nature. The advices given are instructions for paranoiacs, frighteningly vague and knowingly ominous. The choice of advices is very interesting, seeming cliches of strategy from a seasoned practitioner to a novice. After finishing the fourth line, the music stops and hovers once again before crashing back into the chorus:

That’s the way we make love . . .

The song begins to take on more power here, and it is largely due to the insistent incongruity of the singer chanting this mantra over and over that helps to make the song become compelling and believable. The sound is intense, the voice dead serious. It is becoming more disturbingly obvious that the singer is speaking from direct personal experience, and that it is the authenticity of this experience that allows him to speak so authoritatively, and hence, chillingly.

The strangeness of the song builds, in other words, giving it more power as it continues. The very obsessiveness of it is a kind of testimony to its authenticity. Plus, the lyrics of the verses are becoming a little clearer in their relationship to the chorus - they are beginning to sound more and more like internal instructions for maintaining a relationship than disconnected metaphors.

If this is meant as serious advice from a lover, then it helps to recognize him as the poor protagonist of "She Twists the Knife Again" who simply cannot win, no matter what or how he behaves. He is speaking hard-won, but apparently doomed lessons that have taught him how to survive in an ultimately unmanageable situation.

The advices are, on one level, sickly reasonable, even in their (clearly) dysfunctional context:

1) Always make your best moves late at night. - This is a strategy of timing, looking for the point at which the other party is at its weakest and least resistant.

2) Always keep your tools well out of sight. - Whatever emotional techniques you employ for manipulation must not be visible or known to the other party.

3) It never pays to work the same town twice. - This could refer either to using the same emotional techniques in the same way, or even to never attempt them with the same person.

4) It never hurts to be a little nice. - This one, the most chilling of all the machinations, reveals that there is fundamentally a deceptive play going on - and a wide divergence between the actions and the feelings underneath. It reveals the ulterior motive, whatever that is, as clearly separate from surface actions. A reminder to be "nice" to a lover or potential lover seems to be the ultimate revelation of a subterfuge of depthless proportions.

As the chanting of the chorus makes clear exactly what we are talking about here, it also locates it specifically in the relationship between the singer and his partner. "That’s the way we make love" suggests a kind of unspoken agreement between two willing participants in a relationship of manipulation and struggle for dominance.

Another reading, however, could suggest that the "we" intended is both the singer and ourselves - that is, this is a larger observation about the duplicity of the entire human species when it comes to matters of the heart.

Whether this meaning is intended or not, it is certainly there for the taking. If we protest that our actions in love are not stealthily selfish and calculated like this - that we are perhaps more authentic than the portrait being painted here, I think it is also an admission of honesty that we all do indeed - to some degree, practice various types of calculated behavior modification to get what we want. The question here is of degree - and from the perspective of the song, it is this base calculation that is being highlighted, so that it becomes the all-in-all of the relationship.
Can we presume that Richard Thompson feels that this is his essential nature because of this song? I think that is going too far. Just because one can locate a tendency or a fault in oneself and is honest enough to throw light on it, then it becomes, spatially centered in art, so to speak, the defining characteristic of that work of art. And seen from the perspective of that art, the rest of life seems fractured and insincere. This is one of the great roles and functions of art - by shifting our perspectives just enough, we can look at imbalances that we usually repress in order to return to a more truly informed, balanced perspective that humanizes us.

That is not to suggest that art is a panacea, or even that we should use it as a prescription for keeping ourselves emotionally healthy. But if art is to do anything useful at all, it is to place us in a unique mode of perspective that will alter the way in which we view things, one way or another. For art is not merely entertainment - it is discovery, a discovery of hitherto unexamined possibilities of perspective.

This, of course, is one of Richard Thompson’s specialties, particularly in the lyrical construction of his songs. Thompson, at least since Henry the Human Fly, has always sought to distort our visions of reality, to make us see things at least slightly askew. What he is practicing more clearly, here, in the burgeoning of his "solo career" is a transformation of himself into the subject of his inquiry. If he distorts himself, it is to gain wisdom through honest inspection - and if that self-inspection becomes infectious, he his doing a very good job indeed.

Across a Crowded Room, like Hand of Kindness before it, can be seen as a brave journey through this personal odyssey, both coming in the wake of the explosive self-deconstructions of Shoot Out the Lights. It is almost as if we are playing with the debris left over from that enormous explosion, still trying to patch together and make sense of it all.

If "Love in a Faithless Country" is a description of Thompson’s relationship with his ex-wife (as many listeners will assume, and the context of Across a Crowded Room in general will certainly attest (see "You Don’t Say"), it is not strictly - or even primarily - limited to that. The breakdown of that marriage - and more importantly, the mythical document of that breakdown, the transcendently horrifying revelations of Shoot Out the Lights itself - is best seen as the foregrounding for Thompson’s work here. Were he simply documenting his own personal problems, the songs here would not have the kind of resonance that they have. The fact is, that these are universal songs, though songs not rarely written or heard, and it is the grounding of those songs in the reality of the artist’s personal experience that lends them such an authoritative sense of power.

To return to the song, it begins to become more clear as it progresses just from where "Love in a Faithless Country" derives its sense of authenticity. And it does so artfully, which is only natural. In the second chorus, Thompson injects a "response chorus" of heavily echoed female voices, whose own chanting is difficult to understand, but is clearly a female correlative to his own perspective and voice. Perhaps the difficulty in understanding the words of this chorus is intentionally devised to highlight the inaccessibility of the essence of the fundamental other in a relationship - and consequently, what mechanisms she is devising, and for what purpose. In fact, the choral responses, seem strangely to emanate (as they actually do) from the singer’s own subconscious.

The rhythm tightens up briefly, and Thompson moves into a guitar solo that takes us further and further afield in an inspired blend of passion and technical virtuosity that is astonishing even from him. The use of the harmonic materials contained in the two unresolved chords of the chorus creates a fantastic fabric that looms frighteningly like the score of some horror film of the mind, and when the more stable chords of the chorus come back around, the perpetual, questing action which has been set in motion is unresolved, chiefly through the use of quick rhythmic variations and surprise climaxes that finally melt back away to the hushed, sustained mystery of the initial, hung arpeggio with which the song began. Underneath this, the female chorus goes on with its incoherent chanting, casting an impenetrable spell until all ceases completely, and this nightmare of a song is ready to continue.

The guitar solo is an important point, not only in this song, but in Richard Thompson’s music in general. Thompson is such a brilliantly virtuostic musician, and his playing is of such superb intelligence and power, that he could be (and perhaps should be) known primarily as a guitar player. This has never been Thompson’s methodology, however - he has always put the song first. His guitar playing remains, just for this reason, ever a kind of secret weapon. No matter how familiar we become with him, it is still a shock when he rips into a majestically authoritative solo such as this, thus stamping the song with a kind of supernal power that not only validates, but exceeds anything the song is already attempting to deliver.

It is my perception that as soon as the guitar solo has completed, "Love in a Faithless Country" is absolutely justified as a sincere emotional expression as both a song and a performance. There appears nothing false or conceited about it at this point. The guitar solo has hammered down the intent, criticism is disarmed, and we are ready to proceed to the end.

The final verse:

Learn the way to melt into a crowd,
Never catch an eye or dress too loud,
You’ve got to be invisible my friend
To find the joy on which we must depend.

Admonishes the singer (and presumably us) to recede into the background, to keep unnoticed, "invisible." This willful repression of the personal self, this unnatural stealth, it is argued, is necessary, both for protection and for the attainment of the ultimate goal: "the joy on which we must depend." We presume this "joy" is sexual, but the implications need not stop there. If we are looking for emotional compensation and security beyond the mere physical need, we must, to some degree, remain duplicitous, play a role, if we are not to give ourselves - and our secret intentions - away to our intended lover(s).

As unnatural and sick as this sounds, this is not unfamiliar advice. Just consult any dating guide to discover how to behave as to maximize one’s chances with the member of the opposite sex. It is cultural common knowledge to feign "naturalness," a truly perverse notion once one begins to think of it, to have success with seduction. Placed in these terms, however, and in the context of this music, the subterfuge becomes eerily redolent of the maliciousness of a stalker. And thoroughly speaking, what exactly is the difference?

As the chorus storms malevolently out into infinity, it is first joined, then finally superceded by the guitar again as Thompson plaintively chants "Love, love, love." The song builds to its climax, then ultimately breaks down, leaving only the dangling notes of the opening chord and the eerie, unintelligible chant of the female chorus, sounding strangely like a demonic church litany.

It is finally clear that the "Faithless Country" is not located anywhere geographically, but is centered in the false parts of the human soul, which has been so manipulated and broken apart by fear that stealth and deception have become absolute necessities. And it is here, on this hellish revelation that Across a Crowded Room finally ends - resting uneasily on that last unresolved chord, dangling on a precipice.

Video - Richard Thompson: "Love in a Faithless Country"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=dPI54pmDU7c

But should it?

I began my discussion of Across a Crowded Room by pointing out the discrepancy between the sequencing of the CD and the original LP format. Unquestionably, "Love in a Faithless Country" derives part of its power and authority by its inclusion on this album - and the album gains strength from the song. But sequencing is very important - it is a very tricky business, not just from an emotional perspective, but the placement of a song on an album can alter the meaning of both the song and the whole, just as a scene in a movie can alter both meaning and impact, depending on when it is placed.

On the original release of the album, this was the sequencing:

Side One
"When the Spell Is Broken"
"You Don’t Say"
"I Ain’t Going to Drag My Feet No More"
"Love in a Faithless Country"

Side Two
"Fire in the Engine Room"
"Walking Through a Wasted Land"
"Little Blue Number"
"She Twists the Knife Again"
"Ghosts in the Wind"

I have gone back and programmed my CD to play the songs in this sequence, and I find it infinitely preferable to the way that they are arranged on the disc. Of course, it is shorter (no "Shine on Love"), and the sequence is obviously, inextricably linked to the LP format for which it was originally devised.

The first big change is the sudden appearance of "Love in a Faithless Country" as the fourth track. There is a strangeness and a kind of disruption of having this monster of a track appear so early. It functions to both wipe out what came before it (particularly "I Ain’t Going to Drag My Feet No More"), and to sum up and contextualize the entire first side. Situated here, the song seems less a summation of the album than a temporary resting place - a limbo, rather than a hell - before moving on into new territory. The implications are different - the repeats of "That’s the way we make love" sound less final, and the ending of the side leaves us in a state of abeyance that keeps us dangling until the record is turned over.

The effect of the songs leading off side two is dramatic. Emerging from the context of the big, hollow void of "Faithless Country," "Fire in the Engine Room" takes on a new urgency, as if there were a rushed energy to try to identify and fix the problems at all costs. "Walking Through a Wasted Land" stomps in mock defiance and "Little Blue Number" takes on a maniacal fury that is given new life by the momentum created by the disruption and re-start provided by making "Faithless Country" the centerpiece, rather than the conclusion, of the album. Everything seems to matter more, more is at stake, once that song has been heard.

"She Twists the Knife Again" takes on new meaning as the climax of the album, with emotional situations taken to their most extreme. There seems to be an organic growth from the middle of the album to this point, and there is no big "topper" that one has to follow when one has to get through after the catharsis of this extraordinarily propulsive song.

Instead, we conclude with the wistful, haunting grace of "Ghosts in the Wind," which is emotionally much more satisfying as a release, as well as a much more profound philosophical conclusion to the album. Instead of everything feeling so bottom heavy, as it sits on the CD, it opens out, letting things be what they are in a wisely weary gesture of letting go.

Indeed, "Ghosts in the Wind" takes us full circle, back to the brooding, beautiful opening of "When the Spell Is Broken," emotionally and texturally reminding us of that haunting, doomed beauty that opened the album to begin with. Ending with "Faithless Country" essentially choked off anything that came before it - along with stamping a damning finality on the album. In this configuration, where "Faithless Country" serves as an interruptus, we can finally sail out of the world of the album with a kind of spooky ambivalence (and acceptance) that feels ultimately more satisfying, tying the entire collection of songs together.

Apparently Thompson (if he had any input into the decision) agreed, and the original CD format which I still possess has gone out of print. In the re-release on the British BGO (Beat Goes On) label, the CD reverted back to the original LP format. It is currently only available as an import in the United States, and it is hopeful that if it is picked up and re-released in America, that this will be the sequence retained, perhaps with "Shine on Love" (among others?) as a bonus track.

No matter how you get it, however, Across a Crowded Room is absolutely indispensable to an understanding and appreciation of Richard Thompson, particularly as a signpost for the direction of his solo career. Finally told, this is as moving and coherent (and disturbing) album as Thompson has ever done, and one in which his search to define love in the aftermath of disaster, to pick up the pieces of left from the shatters off the past before heading off in search of new directions.

And no one should be without "When the Spell Is Broken" or "She Twists the Knife Again," which do not appear on any of his compilations. For that reason alone, Across a Crowded Room is absolutely essential in any music collection whatsoever.