Make Every Song Your Favorite Tune

By Stefan Beck | Monday, November 17, 2003

Recently, on doctor's orders, I adopted a regimen of daily physical exertion (I had suffered a series of minor heart attacks while climbing the stairs to my room). I took up rock climbing. While I was aware that grass-smoking, yurt-dwelling Naderites make up a great deal of the mountaineering subculture, I didn't know that these gentle but primitive folk would be operating the stereo at the Daniels Climbing Gym.

it's bad enough that I have to spend several evenings a week pulling groin muscles and falling on gym mats. I should not have to endure this while listening to hippie music. This music could be used to wear down detainees at Guantanamo. No thanks, Peace Frog, I do not care to "groove" on a 38-minute live version of "Dark Star."

Of course, neither should a sober hippie. Now, it's rumored that some of these malodorous gnomes eat mushrooms or devil cactus before they begin their climbs, to endow themselves with special powers. (Indeed, I once heard a climber marvel that the walls were turning into neon green rock candy.) Most of the time, though, they appear to be stone sober.How can they bear it—this meandering non-music isn't meant to be experienced with a clear head. Drugs are to be used with hippie music just as medieval cooks used spices on rancid meat: to cover up some really bad taste.

So a word to the wise, hippies: your music eats it.Fear not, though.I'm here to help.I have an album that Long-Haired Freaks and Decent Christian Folk alike are sure to enjoy?Josh Ritter's crystalline Hello Starling (Signature Sounds Recordings).It belongs to the songwriting tradition of Bob Dylan, the vocal tradition of Nick Drake, the fun-loving lyrical tradition of Paul Simon.It suffers from none of the whippet-addled whimsy of the Donovan tradition.It kicks ass, and it won't even mess up your high, maa-aan.

At first listen, one might wonder why this critic, an avatar of rock music appreciation, is wasting time on a softie like Ritter. True, Hello Starling has some delicate numbers, and it's earnest—at times embarrassingly so. I wouldn't usually purchase an album with an opener called "Bright Smile," but Ritter's last album, 2000's Golden Age of Radio, earned him the right to be as sappy as he likes.It placed him in the pantheon of great country singer-songwriters, with million-dollar lines like "I got a worried mind, I know/ I hear the ghost of Patsy Cline/ on the Grande Ole Opry show."

Every song on Hello Starling is very good, and a few of them showcase a truly unusual talent. "Kathleen," which should have opened the album, will get plenty of mixtape mileage from hopeless romantics. What girl will not melt to hear, "All the other girls here are stars/ you are the Northern Lights?" Or the lovely "You act like you're hip to their tricks and you're strong/ but a virgin Wurlitzer heart never once had a song?" Over the swashbuckling chords of Ritter's guitar and Sam Kassirer's Wurlitzer organ, it's all solid gold.

Ritter's strongest numbers are "You Don't Make It Easy Babe," "snow is Gone," "The Bad Actress," and the perplexing but affecting "Bone of Song." The latter song is played against type; its music is too eggshell-fragile to resemble a typical country song, and its lyrics are bizarre: "In the hieroglyphs of quills and quatrain lines/ Osiris, the fall of Troy, and Auld Lang Syne/ Kathleen Mauvoreen, Magnificat, Your Cheatin' Heart/ the words of a covenant king singing for the ark." What's it all mean, Mr. Ritter? I have no idea, but I'm sure the hippies could tell us a thing or two about it.

Josh Ritter may stand accused of being derivative. A friend of mine heard some selections from Golden Age of Radio and groaned, "Oh, Nick Drake again?" (tellingly, he also refused to turn off the album). I like to think Ritter preempts this sort of criticism in his warm, muted "California": "Don't say the trip's been done/ a hundred thousand times/ 'cause this one is mine."' It couldn't be said any better. Ritter may sound like a lot of country and a lot of folk, but his songs bear his stamp.I didn't even know they still made music like his.

At first I found it odd that Hello Starling debuted at number two on the Irish charts. Ritter's music is uniquely indebted to American music, and songs like "Harrisburg," "Lawrence Kansas," and "California" testify to that. Now I understand the appeal: Ritter's music, though certainly new-sounding, builds on a tradition devoted to melody and sentiment—of memorable and very singable songs?that belongs to Irish as well as country music. What better songwriter than Josh Ritter for a country where grown men weep whenever the pipes, the pipes are calling? (Nota bene: Josh Ritter is playing on Friday the 14th in Rutland, Vermont, at the Marble Valley Correctional Facility, and in Rutland on the 15th at the Paramount Theater. Ritter is excellent live and a lot of fun, and Dartmouth students are encouraged to attend whichever performance is more convenient.Be advised, MVCF may be a "member's only" affair.)

I've revealed my terrible secret: I enjoy sad songs with sad lyrics and guitars and lap steel accompaniment. Now I'm going to save face. I enjoin you hippies to part ways with me, because the music I'm about to recommend would just about stand your greasy dreadlocks on end. No, not the Strokes. A few people have asked what I think of Room on Fire. Here's the capsule review: a) I liked it the first time I heard it, when it was called Is This It; and b) Whatever its merits (and it does have a few), it's really just music for Chapin girls to listen to while they toot "reindeer dust" off their Noguchi coffee tables. There, I said it.Let's move on to the matter at hand: the Constantines? Shine a Light (Sub Pop).

This album is the best thing to come out of Canada since?it's the only good thing to come out of Canada, save Mark Steyn. Back in May of 2002, I wrote in TDR that "The Constantines burst forth from [Guelph, Ontario] in 2001, with their jarring 13 Songs. The album is named after Fugazi's famous debut, and the Constantines sound more than a little like DC's Hardest Working Band—but not in a ripoff way." Critics still coyly say that the Constantines sound like a cross between Fugazi and Bruce Springsteen, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say?at this stage, they sound like the Constantines.

Where to begin with this piece of work 'shine a Light, which includes a song by that name, is apparently not named after the great Rolling Stones number. Even so, it has something in common with Exile on Main Street, on which the first "Light" appeared (in fairness, there are many songs called 'shine a Light? by lesser artists). Keep in mind these lines from the Stones "Light": "May the Good Lord shine a light on you/ make every song your favorite tune." The Good Lord answered that prayer, and every song on Exile was an instant classic. It seems the Constantines unwittingly inherited some of the satanical Jagger juju, because there isn't a single track on Shine a Light that couldn't be the Very Last Encore at the Big Rock Show. This is genius from soup to nuts.

The opener is "National Hum," reprised from a 1999 demo, but we might as well begin with track two, "shine a Light." Its rhythm plods, with death-march drums and brutalizing chords that make "seven Nation Army" sound like "Ten Little Indians." It has menace, and its lyrics owe a vague debt to older blues: "Baby's got the fever/ Mama's washing the white sheets/ my man is sleeping naked/ with a fire under his feet." The song is punctuated with false starts and stops and violent swells.It gives in without warning to the furious but curiously resigned "Nighttime Anytime (it's All Right)," which is followed by the minor key and gothic feeling of "Insectivora."

Then the album takes a different turn.Dark passages and wicked sneers give way to bright, vigorous anthems.There is the rallying cry "Young Lions," keyed up and guileless almost to a fault. Lines like "Make your love/ too wild for words" and "run like a river/ glow like a beacon fire" are certainly not for the cynical. "On to You," "Poison" and "scoundrel Babes" are gold nuggets in a similar vein. But there are so many brilliant songs on Shine a Light—twelve, to be precise—that it seems more useful to comment on the album as a whole. I'll be brief: the album is perfect, so buy it. A single listen will clarify why it's just not fair to sing hosannas to the Strokes while leaving these guys in the cold. It's enough to make a hippie take up arms.

Make Every Song Your Favorite Tune

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