Experimental singer-songwriter
- Thread starter blissblogger
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blissblogger
Well-known member
Saw this new documentary on Sinead O'Connor and it occurred to me she might fit this category - not so much for any sonic weirdness (for the most part the backing is that sort of attractive AOR type music, in the mode of Margaret O'Hara or even Tasmin Archer) but for that whooping war cry thing she does with her voice, and the extreme emotional catharsis, which can get quite harrowed.
shakahislop
Well-known member
Love this era of James Ferraro. You're right, I'd never particularly thought about him as singer-songwriter, but he does do things which are in that vein every now and then. This one soundtracked a particularly bleak hot summer when I'd just moved to NYC. A lot in common with singer-songwriter land, almost a chopped n screwed version of it.
shakahislop
Well-known member
I don't know 70s folk land very well but to my mind the thing that Neil Young did well in that period was pushing the limits of that folk structure. Might be wrong but I don't know if there was much else that sounded like On The Beach (the song) in 1975. Apart from slowing things down and playing quite loose, his voice is shitty unpleasant reedy enough to qualify as an experiment for the time.
shakahislop
Well-known member
A different kind of experiment, but mount eerie, who for me is generally boring, pushed the singer-songwriter 'singing your emotions' thing to a limit by making an album dealing very explicitly and without any artiface or cover with the recent death of his wife. It's unsurprisingly a sad thing to listen to and I do wonder a bit about how he feels now about having put it out got the world to see. But while I don't get much out of it now on a relisten, at the time it felt like a very pure thing. The disappointment with singer-songwriter stuff is that in the end its often hollow and fake; the promise is a kind of emotional intimacy but generally it feels like a simulation of that. The experiment with that mount eerie album is that there's no attempt to dress up the sadness as something profound, the pain is unmediated.
maxi
Well-known member
Yeah love that one too. I wish he'd start singing again. It seemed like for a while the next album would be a take on middle america in the same way the other two albums approached NYC and LA, but that might be lost now. I dreamed of a return to the plastic cowboy last american hero sound but with added autotune crooning
shakahislop
Well-known member
yeah. it was only those two, the skid row one and the nyc 3am one, that i ever got into. the singing was key for me. although i never went back into the discography before that i think.
blissblogger
Well-known member
wow that is bang on the concept - electro-blues
Todd is totally singer-songwritery especially when he does those gloopy ballads but also does all the wacked out psychedelia-never-ended doing-it-ALL-myself maximalist ultra-layered sonic overload