Lloyd Cole, Alright

Thesaurus has struck a tuning fork and the melodies and choruses of hundreds of singer-songwriters can be heard in my subtle acoustic resonations emanating from the tines.  While spoken for much different reasons in Cameron Crowe-ease, this blog title is a second round of cheers to Lloyd Cole.  Actually, I must broaden the cheers to all the singer-songwriters that have captured my angst, spoken of love, stung by heartache, found the humor, railed against injustice, ridiculed our “leaders,” and ultimately told stories of life and the human condition.  While I like to think I have an expansive taste in music, leave me on a desert island, put together an all-time top ten list, there will be many singer-songwriters joining me / on my list.

Before returning to Lloyd, I quick aside as to how I found him.  For many teenagers, music and youth are essential to survival.  With rampant hormones and voracious external pressures, relief must be found somewhere.  For me, the first time this happened was from my neighbors to the North in the form of Paul Westerberg, and when I heard Color Me Impressed, Within Your Reach, Answering Machine, Kiss Me on the Bus, Left of the Dial and most notably, Here Comes a Regular.  Who was this guy, with sloppy guitars, a voice that broke, and lyrics as clever, witty, mean, enlightening, and beautiful as any read in a book?  And are there others out there like him?  [As always happens, the rest of The Replacements are forgotten, this is unintended here, but Paul was the songwriter].

Well, that question has led to a lifetime of discovery.  Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Aimee Mann, Mark Eitzel, Tommy Keene, Shawn Colvin, Elliot Smith, Kevin Salem, Jeff Buckley, Mathew Sweet, Tommy Stinson, Josh Rouse, Ryan Adams, Conor Oberst, Neko Case, Ray LaMontagne, Bon Iver, Norah Jones, and so on.  And of course Lloyd Cole, who I first heard with the Commotions and Rattlesnakes, but it’s his self-titled first solo album that has deep grooves from its heavy rotation [“the coolest thing I ever saw, you were sitting there smoking my cigarettes.  You were naked on the bare stone floor”].  The guitar inter-play, the melodies and chorus, the lyrical references nuanced and complicated – all packaged in an amazing four-minute pop song.

The singer-songwriter has morphed into a pejorative in some circles, the pretentious poser rambling on and on with no direction, or the guy singing and strumming on the fraternity staircase as Belushi walks by and obliterates his guitar, or in the eyes of the old-fashioned record industry: music we can’t sell.  And most of those names listed above never found much widespread commercial success, certainly enough to make it their profession, but no boy band or virginal pop-princess fame and money came their way [of course, a few reached high up the rungs].  But for me, those names above represent me, my youth, my outlooks, my soundtrack.  So indeed, three cheers to Lloyd Cole, three cheers to the singer-songwriter.