Jason Anderson, Summer Style
review by dave heaton
I’m a sucker for ‘moving to the big city’ albums -- I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, for example. Of course, Jason Anderon already sang “Moving to the City”, on 2007’s Tonight, so his new album Summer Style isn’t about being brand-new in a city, but on some of the songs it sounds like he’s still getting his bearings. He’s new enough not to be jaded yet. The city in this case is “the city”, NYC, though appropriately for 2011, the one neighborhood mentioned by name in a song title is “Greenpoint”. That song begins, “The best view of the city is over the Pulaski,” and continues, “Bedford Ave never had much way with me”, but before you know it he’s in a venue in Brooklyn on a Thursday night, singing along with his crowd, which gets him thinking about the beauty in “never quite getting it right” and then mortality, and why we need to make the most of our time here; how every moment is wrapped up in doubt, but there’s power in the act of trying. By the end he’s worked himself, and presumably the crowd, to a fervor – “I wanna know that I tried…tonight!” “Tonight” is a word he comes back to a lot, one wrapped up with his live performance e strategy, which is an exercise in milking the night for everything it’s worth, reminding us of the fleeting nature of time.
On these songs, Anderson’s surroundings are often jumping-off points for bigger thoughts about life, the universe and our place in it, which are also always specific thoughts about specific people and events. “Subway” starts with him quietly contemplating the furtive looks of the strangers around him, which gets him thinking about the big sweep of humanity, how we’re all in this together, and finding himself overwhelmed by that notion. We were all babies, we all die. We’re all scared of death, as much now as when we were kids, yet “instead of crying at karate class / we cry walking home in the snow from Brooklyn Heights.” The song’s piano chords and acoustic guitar, plus Anderson tapping on the guitar as percussion, are the sound of that scene and that feeling. They’re comforting and lonely, the way he’s taking some comfort in the loneliness that’s essential to being alive. Street scenes where the air is filled with emotion, feelings about the boat we’re all in and what we do with these fleeting moments: that’s the basic atmosphere of Summer Style, which gravitates in sound towards quiet spaces but is decorated with outbursts indicative of those moments where your heart gets so heavy that you’ve got to scream and let it all out.
Of course, love is part of this all, but his love songs are not conventional, more concerned with capturing the thought patterns of someone filled with anticipation and longing – and, it sometimes seems, thriving off that state of being in-between. Like on “Edge”, where after describing at length the feeling that he and she are “so close to the edge”, he quickly exclaims, “that’s where I wanna be!” That song’s length, its ebbs and flows over 5 ½ minutes, is representative of the intensity in Anderson’s love songs, whether he’s racing through the streets in taxis, dreaming of her (“I can’t be stopped tonight!”) or sinking into the nearly seven-minute slow-burning come-on “Come With Me”, which has an amazing moment where he shifts to describe, in vivid detail, the city scene around him, by an abandoned Texaco, and feeds off it (“I wanna tell you what I feel…tonight!”) before going back to his original “come with me” line, which now has even more power and urgency.
The intensity here is the intensity of living – feeling every feeling intensely, each memory, each possibility, each disappointment and surprise. It’s there in the hyper moments and the quiet ones. His message is “carpe diem” but it’s always more complicated, less simple, than that tired phrase. There are no easy answers. It is an album, after all, which begins: “I’m beginning to wonder / I’m beginning to second-guess / the seeds of doubt have festered and sprouted / bulbs of uncertainty / they’ll bloom into flowers of regret.”
The final song , “ss 1”, brings the album to a close with another eight minutes which traverses all of these feelings and subjects, starting with Anderson painting a picture: a rusted bridge over a river. That image spurs memories – “in the kitchen where your hair fell on my shoulder / butterflies.” The subject is falling in love. He sounds like he’s going to blow his vocal chords when he gets to that word “love” and to “don’t be afraid!” The song ends not with that sentiment, but with a bittersweet organ tone, once again pairing his emotions together as they swell – excitement with worry, joy with tears, hope with fear of disappointment. Or, as a song title on Anderson’s last album put it, “Wanting and Regret”.
Copyright (c) 2011 erasing clouds |
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