Jonathan Richman, O Moon, Queen of Night on Earth

review by dave heaton

Jonathan Richman has a new album; who knew? I didn’t, and I pay a ton of attention to new music, and am a longtime Richman fan. I’ve read little of substance about this album. Perhaps it’s getting lost in the clutter of our Internet era, when so much information flies so many directions at once. Somehow that’s appropriate. One of the albuim’s main subjects is finding calm and quiet in our world of noise.

It’s a quiet album, sometimes sounding like Richman is alone in a field somewhere with his guitar, occasionally joined by another person or two. It’s a soft sound, even on an uptempo dance number with drums, like “Sa Voix M’atisse” and “Winter Afternoon by B.U. in Boston” (another in his long line of songs about his hometown).

That image of a pretty, melancholy, winter afternoon feels right for the sound of the LP, as do late-night communing with the moon alone, or standing by the sea feeling like it’s calling to you, as on “The Sea Was Calling Me Home”. That song has death as its specter, as does the album. He feels it in the air, isn’t ready to give in. An interesting relation is “The Bitter Herb”, a song about giving into bitterness after years of focusing on the sweetness of life.

Trying to be something you’re not is dealt with humorously on “My Affected Accent”, and is part of the fabric too on “If You Want to Leave Our Party Just Go”. The latter pairs well with “We’ll Be the Noise, We’ll Be the Scandal”, which suggests Richman as the head of a movement. If he is, it’s a movement towards simplicity, towards nature, towards a gentle thoughtfulness. Are music fans ready for those qualities?

Why does the first Modern Lovers album get so much more attention still than Richman’s solo work? The claim that Richman’s solo albums are too sunny, too free of darkness, too un-complicated, can’t be convincingly made against this album. Listen to the eerie reprise of “The Sea Was Calling Me Home”, where you imagine the sea (death) rages forward and swallows him up, as it eventually will to us all. He finishes the LP singing to us from the other side: “It was time for me to be with her / someone I recognized to be from the other world.”

The allusions to death color how we hear the rest of the album. His calls for silence take a different tone. “If You Want to Leave Our Party Just Go” would on another Richman album be a silly song, about not staying at parties that you’re bored by. Here the song has a slightly morose tone, which builds. Maybe you will hear it as another frivolous Richman song, but I can’t hear it as not also about suicide, about choosing to leave our party on earth. Maybe I hear it that way because of the sting still of Vic Chesnutt’s passing, and remembering how often Chesnutt and Richman toured together, and remembering Chesnutt’s stunning last album Skitter on Take-Off, produced by Richman. Within that inescapable context, there are moments in the song that never fail to send chills up my spine.

{www.vaporrecords.com}