Jason Anderson, Tonight

reviewed by dave heaton

The Clarence Clemons-style sax solo that kicks off the album (after a 1-2-3-4 count-off, of course) should clue you in as to where Jason Anderson is coming from with Tonight. Remember what the story used to be about a Springsteen show with the E Street Band? That the band gave it its all, every single bit of energy that they had, all night long? That people left feeling renewed, revitalized, like they experienced something special, a religious experience, a night that they’d always remember? In concert Jason Anderson has been trying to get that same feeling across (though instead of just feeling like that one night was special, he wants it to demonstrate the way every day can be like that, even the “ordinary” ones…but I’ll get to that shortly).

For years he’s been taking the slice-of-life, nakedly emotional, catchy pop/rock songs from his comparatively sedative albums and amping them up for shows all over the world – singing his heart out, jumping on and off chairs, getting right in the audience’s faces, sweating on them, hugging them, looking them in the eyes, goading them into massive sing-alongs and shout-alongs, even if no one there has heard the songs before. Tonight is him taking those songs – the new ones that those of us at his shows have sung along to – and recording them in the same fashion, with a roomful of people who he could interact with and get to sing his refrains back to him. And with a full, E-Street style band to boot! A band to do the songs right, to bring them into the state that you could hear them begging for, to make concrete the invisible full-on rock sound lying within them even when he was performing alone.

All of the natural expressions of Anderson playing to a crowd are intact. The impromptu exclamations like “I love this part!”, that grew to become a part of the song itself remain. You can hear the grin on his face as he performs, hear his voice strain when he sings hard, and witness – and participate in – the call-and-response sing-alongs. (The best part of any live album, by the way is that moment when you can actually hear the crowd singing along; it sends chills up and down your spine even if you’re listening at home on a CD and the concert happened ages ago. This isn’t technically a live album…or is it? It’s people playing their songs for other people. Then again isn’t that what every album is? Or should be?)

With each of his previous albums Anderson seemed to gain in his ability to write lyrics that convey a moment or feeling in memorably descriptive terms, where you can picture and feel exactly what he’s singing about. That isn’t lost here, within all of the energy. These songs contain their fair share of remarkable language, starting right away, with the opening song, “Tonight”, where a man gets off an 11-hour shift at a factory job he’s ready to quit, drives outdoors, sits down in the grass among the insects and writes a song. “I know you can only eat caterpillar for so long,” Anderson sings, “before a butterfly emerges from your mouth / an emerald / an anthem / a song”. Those are beautiful words, and even more so when sitting among a series of “Whoah-oh oh-a-oh-oh-oh-oh”s that build to the chorus “tonight! (tonight!) tonight! (tonight!) Oh Oh Oh tonight!” That’s the pleasures of popular music brought to its most elemental level, and Tonight is full of moments like that. It’s filled with those sorts of sing-along hooks: “Say yeah! (Yeah!)” “Woa-oh-OH-oh-oh (Woa-oh-OH-oh-oh)”. And their musical equivalent: a Chuck Berry-style guitar solo, a few perfectly positioned notes played on a piano or a familiar song structure (whether it’s the basic blues-rock romp of “Moving to the City” or the way the sublime “July 4,2004” echoes the chord progression of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”). But it’s also filled with lyrics that articulate the poetry and pain of everyday life, in a universal way. In a lot of ways this music itself is in the Springsteen/Van Morrison mold (and not just the uptempo songs – there’s also one story/song ballad that lingers on perfectly), but in Anderson’s case the larger-than-life myth-making gravitates always towards everyday, towards “ordinary” life.

“Remember that evening…” one song starts, “…when we sat on my coach and we tried to watch a movie about a painter, but we couldn’t get through it.” Or there’s the night in “Jonesboro”: “I slept on the coach / ate three bowls of Captain Crunch / and drove myself to Little Rock alone.” These moments might look ordinary on paper for a rock song; they don’t seem as bad-ass as wearing a leather jacket and riding down the highway on your motorcycle or whatever. But this is what life is built of: little stories and experiences. Moments. In the long run, to the people involved they are huge and important and bad-ass…and he makes them sound like they are. He invests them with real rock n’ roll glory, shows how momentous these little moments are by making them sound absolutely glorious and monumental.

It’s fitting, then, that towards the end of the album he presents a new version of one of his songs that best captures a specific moment, vividly. It’s called “So Long”, it was originally on his New England album, and it starts with the image “Sitting in your sister’s Volvo / in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant,” and builds from there, into a moving portrait of a moment when you don’t want to be anywhere else but right there, with whoever you’re with, doing exactly what you’re doing, no matter how insignificant. This version crystallizes Tonight’s whole endeavor of bringing the listeners into the song itself, of using sing-alongs to drive home the universal qualities of a song. At the moment which the song builds to, where in the studio version Anderson sang part of the chorus to Tears for Fears’ “Head Over Heels”, here he lays it all out: “The best thing in the world / is to love someone and they love you back”. And then he builds it into a truly epic singalong, letting the crowd vocals hit even more powerfully than his own. That moment, where everyone’s singing those words at the top of their lungs, with no instruments, is what this album is all about: how much can be communicated through a song, how songs link us all together, and how a song is larger than its creator, how it’s created anew by everyone who sings it, who carries it on.

After “So Long” Tonight has one more song, and sometimes it’s my favorite one, with a relaxed tone that’s the perfect come-down after the height of the song before it, lyrics that get across recognizable emotions in unique ways (listen for the unforgettable lines that start with the notion of “Tetris brain” and fold it into something bittersweet), and a melody I can’t stop singing. And it ends at the fade-out with Anderson quietly singing what feels like it’s probably a bit of someone else’s song, one I feel like I know, but just can’t place. That’s the mystery of a good pop song; melodies live on, somewhere in your brain, forever.

{wwww.ecarecords.com}