25 years of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Adore

June 2, 2023

25 years ago today, in 1998, the Smashing Pumpkins put out their 4th studio album, Adore, and it sounded like no album they had put out before. The band cast aside their trademark wall-of-fuzz-guitars sound in favor of a newly light and loving quality, but the album was also tinged with a bittersweet wistfulness. After their previous album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (1995), the Pumpkins had been through a lot: their touring keyboardist died of a heroin overdose, they fired their irreplaceable drummer Jimmy Chamberlin (who also had a heroin problem — fortunately he was able to rejoin the band for later albums), and singer Billy Corgan was suffering one personal loss on top of another with the death of his mother and the end of his marriage.

Adore was a commercial disappointment for the band at the time, but it’s become a fan favorite. That’s reflected in my own history with the album: when I first heard it I thought the Pumpkins had lost their spark, but today I listened to it from beginning to end and felt like I finally appreciated it. It helps that by now I’ve seen the band play some of the songs in a great concert in New York City in 2018. I remember watching Corgan put aside his guitar in the middle of the show and go up to a higher level to play piano while singing this poignant ballad about his late mother, “For Martha”:

Maybe this is the album that should’ve been called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

Tina Turner has died

May 24, 2023

Tina Turner has died.

The New York Times reports:

Tina Turner, the earthshaking soul singer whose rasping vocals, sexual magnetism and explosive energy made her an unforgettable live performer and one of the most successful recording artists of all time, died on Wednesday at her home in Küsnacht, Switzerland, near Zurich. She was 83 …

Ms. Turner embarked on her half-century career in the late 1950s, while still attending high school in East St. Louis, Ill., when she began singing with Ike Turner and his band, the Kings of Rhythm. At first she was only an occasional performer, but she soon became the group’s star attraction — and Mr. Turner’s wife. With her potent, bluesy voice and her frenetic dancing style, she made an instant impression.

“I’d be writing songs with Little Richard in mind, but I didn’t have no Little Richard to sing them, so Tina was my Little Richard,” Mr. Turner wrote in “Takin’ Back My Name: The Confessions of Ike Turner” (1999), written with Nigel Cawthorne. “Listen closely to Tina and who do you hear? Little Richard singing in the female voice.”

Their ensemble, soon renamed the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, became one of the premier touring soul acts in Black venues on the so-called chitlin’ circuit. After the Rolling Stones invited the group to open for them, first on a British tour in 1966 and then on an American tour in 1969, white listeners in both countries began paying attention.

Ms. Turner, who insisted on adding rock songs by the Beatles and the Stones to her repertoire, reached an enormous new audience, giving the Ike and Tina Turner Revue its first Top 10 hit with her version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song “Proud Mary” in 1971 and a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a group. …

But if the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was a success, the Ike and Tina Turner marriage was troubled, and Ms. Turner’s career faltered after a painful breakup in the late 1970s. Her album “Private Dancer,” released in 1984, returned her to the spotlight — and lifted her into the pop stratosphere.

Working with younger songwriters, and backed by a smooth, synthesized sound that provided a lustrous wrapping for her raw, urgent vocals, she delivered three mammoth hits: the title song, written by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits; “Better Be Good to Me”; and “What’s Love Got to Do With It.”

Tori Amos — From the Choirgirl Hotel

May 5, 2023

The brilliant singer/songwriter/pianist Tori Amos put out her fourth album, From the Choirgirl Hotel, 25 years ago today, in 1998. The first song, “Spark,” kicks off the album with a great energy (while dealing with a personal tragedy):

“Cruel” brings out Tori Amos’s grunge rock side at the beginning of this concert:

Gordon Lightfoot has died

May 2, 2023

Gordon Lightfoot, the Canadian folk singer/songwriter, has died at age 84.

Here’s a live performance of his beautiful song “If You Could Read My Mind” (1970), which he wrote about his divorce:

In the live video he sings, “I’m just trying to understand the feelings that you lack,” which is in the original recording too. Later on when he played it live, he changed one word at his daughter’s request, instead singing “… the feelings that we lack.” He realized that the deeply personal subject matter had prevented him from being objective enough to think of that improvement.

Rick Beato spends 20 minutes on what makes that song great:

Happy 80th birthday to John Eliot Gardiner!

April 20, 2023

The English conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner was born on April 20, 1943. When I was starting to become a fan of classical music, his fresh, energetic approach got me excited about listening to Beethoven’s complete symphonies.

Here he is conducting Beethoven’s Ninth, performed by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir in 2020:

Here’s an interview with him:

Something he says in that interview is very relevant to Beethoven’s Ninth:

There is a difference in conducting a choir and an orchestra, but I try to minimize it, because part of my aim is always to try to get the orchestra to imitate voices, to “speak their lines” … to give a sense of rhetoric, a sense of the underlying narration of the music. So I try to make [the orchestra] as choral as possible, and I try to make my choir as orchestral as possible.