My vision is to tease people. I never make a stand, you know, never put my feet down. If I write a love song, I'll always make fun of it to my friends. As a matter of fact, I'm sickeningly smug.
-- Nick Lowe in Newsweek, 1978
I liked being in a band, and I liked people patting me on the back telling me I was great and having lots of great looking girlfriends and everything like that. But I kind of knew I was getting away with it. I was only operating on two or three cylinders, and if I tried to get serious, then I didn't like it. The thing is that the older I get, there doesn't seem to be anything remotely more interesting than talking about love and the lack of it and what happens when it's taken away from someone who's had it.
-- Nick Lowe in Esquire, 1998
Ironic, isn't it? In the mid-to-late 1970s, much of the rock world was bloated with pretension. Art rockers such as Genesis and Yes were determined to "improve" rock 'n' roll by infusing it with classical music and jazz. Meanwhile, Rush proclaimed unrest in the forest, the Eagles stabbed beasts with their steely knives, and that guy in Jethro Tull played his flute while perched upon one leg. Styx actually had a hit single in which, with straight faces, they sang: "We thought that they were angels but much to our surprise, we climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies." And just when all this self-important foolishness seemed unbearable, Nick Lowe showed up to puncture these fatuous poses with a wink and a nudge and some pop hooks that just made you feel glad all over.
Twenty years later, the artistic pretension most in need of puncturing is a pervasive and emotionally stunted irony, where job one seems to be that you should make fun of everything while holding it as a point of honor that you stand for nothing. And it is in this climate that our cynical old friend Nick the Knife has gone and got sincere on our asses.
His last two albums, 1994's The Impossible Bird and 1998's Dig My Mood, found Lowe placing his winks and put-ons aside in favor of pure pop for mature people. The Convincer, his eleventh and latest album, may be his best yet. Delivered with uncommon craft, unexpected sincerity and, of course, an unrivaled sense of humor, it's exactly the sort of heartbreakingly beautiful pop record you figured Lowe had in him all along. More than ever, its songs live up to the rock and pop traditions Lowe has admired since he was a boy.
Nick Lowe was born in 1949 in Walton-on-Thames, England, but because his father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, he mostly grew up in Cyprus and Jordan, political hot spots that in the 1950s signaled the final days of the British Empire. Given his father's vocation, Nick spent most of his time with his mother.
"She came from a sort of showbiz family," Lowe explains over the phone from his home in west London. "She was very interested in music and got me interested. But she had very curious musical tastes. For instance, she had, rather unbelievably, quite a lot of albums by Tennessee Ernie Ford -- he sounded to me like a kind of Disney cartoon character -- and she also had a lot of show tunes, of course. That's what middle-class people were really into then, show music and music from soundtracks. I got a real love for that kind of music, which endures today."
Lowe's early devotion to his mother's favorites -- unabashed pop music that was playful, clever and catchy, yet often quite in earnest -- was evident when, at age 8 or 9, he purchased his first record: Perry Como's Magic Moments, a U.K. chart-topper in 1958 and an early success by songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Its nostalgic collegiality aside, Magic Moments features the sort of waggish rhymes ("The way that we cheered whenever our team was scoring a touchdown/The time that the floor fell out of my car when I put the clutch down") that Lowe would deploy one day in his own songs.
Around the same time, Lowe began learning guitar. "My mother taught me my first chords," he remembers, "and we'd sit around playing Lonnie ["The King of Skiffle"] Donegan tunes. I learned his entire songbook. He was fantastic. He had this wild, sort of snarly voice, which was very unsettling. He was the nearest thing we had to a homegrown wildman."
By this time, Lowe was slowly becoming aware of American rock 'n' roll, an import that would change his life forever. "We only used to get the [Armed] Forces radio and they didn't usually play any real wild stuff. But I remember that the first time I heard Little Richard, my mother leapt three feet into the air and went racing to the radio to turn it off. I definitely remember thinking that this was American music and that I liked it a great deal.
"I remember Conway Twitty's 'It's Only Make Believe' and the Everlys, of course, and 'Battle Of New Orleans' by Johnny Horton, that sort of stuff, and later on Eddie Cochran. I had an older sister who liked Elvis, but she also liked Pat Boone, who I thought was really lame even then. She preferred his version of 'Rip It Up' [to Little Richard's original], which I could not understand at all.
"See, in those days, and of course it's been said many times, America seemed like this impossibly, fantastically groovy place. England in the '50s really did look like those old movies. It was absolutely gray -- shades of black, shades of white, shades of gray. And this American music was so far ahead of our homegrown stuff that we thought it was hopeless, really, until the Beatles."
Just 14 years old when the Fab Four's second single, "Please Please Me", cracked the British Top Ten, Lowe and his schoolmates were the audience for Beatlemania. Lowe was inspired to learn bass guitar, a la Paul McCartney, and soon enough he'd quit school to work a long string of odd jobs ("There was zero unemployment then, and we just didn't think about the future at all"), while he tracked down the Beatles' American influences and dreamed of pop stardom.
"I heard some great records in school, especially from Chuck Berry and Motown and Leiber & Stoller," he laughs, "but I didn't really do very well academically....I think I knew all along I was going to be in the music business somehow. Although initially I just wanted to be kind of famous. There wasn't any real artistic drive; I just wanted to meet girls."
In 1968, Lowe received a phone call from guitarist Brinsley Schwarz, an old school friend who had landed a record deal with EMI. "At that point, if you weren't actually hideously deformed, and you could string a few chords together, you could get a deal, and they put a single out on you," Lowe explains in his typically self-deprecating manner. Schwarz's group was a fairly generic British Invasion pop-rock outfit called Kippington Lodge, and Lowe signed on as a singer and bassist. At the end of 1969, five singles later, the band hadn't scored so much as a minor hit.
"We didn't write our own songs, of course; we did what we were told," Lowe says. "Back then, the music business was just a branch of show business, really. In fact, our first agent -- I'm exaggerating this story to make a point, but only just exaggerating -- when we got our first proper London agent, we'd sit in a waiting room to see him with these other acts: plate spinners, comedians, strongmen who blew up hot water bottles, things like that.
"But it didn't take too long before we realized you had a choice. You could be a dimwit who did what these old blokes told you to do...you smiled and sang these wet songs. Or you could learn how to write your own songs."
In 1969, having decided to do the latter, and now referring to themselves collectively by the name of their lead guitarist, Lowe and the other members of Brinsley Schwarz answered a small Melody Maker ad that led them to their next manager, Dave Robinson. After working with the band for a few months to no tangible result, Robinson had a brainstorm: In order to create what's now termed "buzz" for the debut album they had already recorded with their own funds, Robinson's company, Famepushers, would fly 150 British journalists to New York's Fillmore East to see the band open a bill that included Van Morrison and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
This idea alone persuaded United Artists to sign them to a recording contract, but the concert itself was a disaster before the group even left England. The band's departure for the States was delayed by days because of visa difficulties, and the plane carrying the music writers arrived in New York hours behind schedule.
The result was a lackluster band performance offered up for review to a weary and irritated press contingent that was only too ready to disbelieve the hype. The critics panned Brinsley Schwarz's self-titled debut when it was released just a few weeks later ("They cut another record, it never was a hit," Lowe sang in 1978, "'cause someone in the newspaper said it was shit"), and the fiasco haunted the group throughout its existence.
"I suspect few people knew the ramifications of that trip," Robinson wrote in the liner notes to the band's posthumously released 1978 album, Fifteen Thoughts Of Brinsley Schwarz. "Apart from the financial pressures, which crippled the band for years afterwards, the mental strain was extreme. The Brinsleys rolled on for a full five years after the Fillmore episode, but it was only after they split up that they escaped its shadow."
By this time, though, Lowe and his mates in Brinsley Schwarz weren't just escaping a shadow. They were casting a bit of one as well. Brinsley Schwarz cut a lot of tunes in the first half of the '70s, most of which Lowe wrote and sang but none of which were hits. Nevertheless, when the Brinsleys disbanded in the spring of '75, they were at the forefront of an influential London-based musical style called pub rock.
"We used to copy other bands that we admired," Lowe admits. "As with any artistic endeavor -- pop songwriting being absolutely the lowest head on the totem pole -- you're just a product of everything you've ever admired, really. Obviously, when you start off writing songs, your heart and your influences are very much on your sleeve. You just rewrite another group's material that you like.
"And then you sort of get fed up with that and move on to another group and rewrite all their stuff. And so on and so on, until the day comes when you're doing one artist's stuff and then you decide to add some other earlier influence you had in with that as well. As this starts to happen more and more often, you've got so many influences in there that you've got your own style."
This creative learning curve is easy to spot on Original Golden Greats, a sampler of the band's early-'70s output originally released in 1974. Almost without exception, each track is a mimeograph of another band: track one, Crosby, Stills & Nash; tracks two and three, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo-era Byrds; track four, the Van Morrison of Tupelo Honey; track six, the Grateful Dead; track seven, The Band; and so on and so on. This roots-rock-based approach placed the Brinsleys at the British vanguard of what's now termed country rock, but it also means the group's earliest recordings are largely indistinctive.
Quickly, though, Lowe and the Brinsleys began to spike their country-rock and folk-rock licks with the rhythms of R&B, reggae, and first generation rock 'n' roll. The result was pub rock -- soulful, eager party music, ideal for a night of dancing and lifting a few pints with friends at London nightspots such as the Tally Ho and the Hope And Anchor.
Like fellow pub rockers Ducks Deluxe and Eggs Over Easy, Brinsley Schwarz never sold many records. But with Lowe's increasingly irresistible melodies, punctuated by Schwarz's snaking guitar lines and the pinwheeling organ of keyboardist Bob Andrews, Brinsley Schwarz's back-to-basics approach to pop music presaged the coming of punk and stood in refreshing contrast to the album-oriented art rock of the period.
"If you will put up with the premise that pop music started in the mid-'50s -- I'm talking about rock 'n' roll -- I would contend that by about 1974, it all had been done," Lowe says. "And I don't actually think that really anything new has been done since. It's just that every generation has sort of reinvented the styles that were done before it.
"And this was bang on the time when I and my contemporaries were the next generation. And we were most dissatisfied with what we saw. The pop business was full of these dreadful groups, Genesis and Journey and REO Speedwagon and people like that. And it was all safe and run by these bean counters and know-nothings. That's why, over here, the pub rock thing started up.
"When punk came along a few years later, that was the thing that it really needed, but I would say that pub rock was spawned for the same reasons -- dissatisfaction that it was all rubbish and needed to be pulled down. Because it had gotten to a point where you just couldn't have another concept album or triple bullshit thing."
In 1974, just months before Brinsley Schwarz threw in the towel, the band cut a new Nick Lowe song, "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding", that in many ways anticipated Lowe's future. In 1978, of course, Elvis Costello would cover the song in a way that made it unmistakable just how pissed off he felt that the question should even need to be asked.
Lowe's version with Brinsley Schwarz is harder to read. Its good-time melody, tommy-gun drums, sweet harmonies and primal power chords make for some irresistibly straightforward rock 'n' roll -- even though those chords have been lifted from The Who's AOR staple "Baba O'Riley". "What's so funny about peace, love and understanding," Lowe asks repeatedly. And then, after he's got you searching for the answer, he launches into a recitation delivered with such hyper-sincerity that it pulls the rug out from under the entire proposition: "We must have peace, more peace and love -- if just for the children of a new generation." You have to wonder: Is this record in love with the power of rock 'n' roll, or is it parodying it?
After Brinsley Schwarz, parodies and musical jokes became Nick's specialties. In a ploy to get out of his contract with United Artists, which remained interested in him despite his former band's lack of sales, Lowe brought the label a preposterous little cheerleader called "Bay City Rollers We Love You", a record he was confident would dampen the label's interest.
Instead of cutting him loose, though, UA released the single under the pseudonym the Tartan Horde. It actually sold fairly well, particularly in Japan, forcing Lowe to resort to "Let's Go To The Disco" (by "The Disco Bros."), which was apparently more than unpopular enough to get him shown the door. "I really needed a complete change," Lowe told writer Alan Robinson in 1999. "I wanted to get fired."
Next, Lowe hooked up with his old manager Dave Robinson and his new manager Jake Riviera to start Stiff Records in 1976. Modeled after the American independents Riviera had observed while touring the U.S. as manager for pub rockers Dr. Feelgood, Stiff focused on singles, and Lowe was its flagship artist. His "Heart Of The City", the label's first release, was a sonic manifesto, a manic guitar-and-drums attack that sprinted through its two minutes and two seconds, trailing garage-pop sparks all the way.
Lowe became the de facto house producer for the new enterprise ("If it's a Stiff, it's a hit" was the label's tongue-in-cheek battle cry) for a simple reason: He was the only one who'd ever produced a record (the Tartan Horde scam), an interest he'd first acquired while watching new pal Dave Edmunds produce Brinsley Schwarz's last recordings. Employing a "bang it out, tart it up later" approach, Lowe produced such notable records as The Damned's "New Rose" (often credited as the first British punk record) and Elvis Costello's debut album, My Aim Is True.
In 1977, Lowe's own Bowi EP combined Stiff's flair for winking promotion -- to create as much confusion as possible, its cover design was a dead ringer for David Bowie's Low -- and his increasingly sardonic songwriting, the most obvious example being the notorious "Marie Provost". A hilariously dark comedy that now comes off like an out-of-sequence sequel to Robbie Fulks' "She Took A Lot Of Pills (And Died)", "Marie Provost" recounts the tale of a silent film star who fell out of favor, grew old and killed herself, only to be eaten by her hungry pet dachshund. "She was a winner/Who became a doggie's dinner," Lowe sings as Beach Boys-styled harmonies "ooh" and "ahh" behind him like an angelic laugh track.
It's a hilarious send-up, particularly dangerous if you should hear it for the first time just as you're taking a sip of soda. Each time you encounter it, though, its humorous effect dulls just a bit. That's the trouble with punchlines; with repetition, they tend to lose their punch. Nearly a quarter-century on, though, what continues to stand out is the expert pop sense Lowe fashioned to frame his jokes -- and the song's one moment of plain empathy. "She never meant that much to me," Lowe confesses. "But now I see. Poor Marie."
At the end of 1977, Lowe left Stiff (along with Elvis Costello) and followed Jake Riviera to his new label, Radar. The move heralded a hectic period for Lowe. He was now, along with guitarists Dave Edmunds and Billy Bremner and drummer Terry Williams, a member of Rockpile, which would eventually play on solo recordings by both Lowe and Edmunds, as well as two early-'80s albums by country-rock singer Carlene Carter, who Lowe married in August 1979.
He was also an increasingly sought-after producer in these years, working on some of the finest and most important records of the era, including "Stop Your Sobbing", the Pretenders' first single, and Howlin' Wind, the debut LP from Graham Parker & the Rumour (which included Lowe's former bandmates, Bob Andrews and Brinsley Schwarz), as well as several more Costello albums.
Lowe's debut album (Radar's, too) was released in 1978. Jesus Of Cool -- retitled Pure Pop For Now People upon Stateside release -- was a kaleidoscope of pop and rock fashion, and it made plain Lowe's prankster persona even before you'd ripped off the shrink wrap. On the front cover, Lowe posed in a half-dozen stereotypical rock star costumes, and on the back, he wore a re-creation of Frank Gorshin's first Batman Riddler suit, covered in question marks.
Whereas Costello and Parker were Angry Young Men, pissed off both at England's economically unpromising future and at what had become of the rock 'n' roll they loved, Lowe was devil-may-care. Sure, he loved the sound of breaking glass, to quote one of the album's singles. But not for rebellion; he just wanted to have fun. Lowe was winking and cool, appreciative of the absurdities of rock 'n' roll excess, and game for anything as long as it was hummable and made him laugh.
Of course, there are limitations to such a satirical approach. For one thing, some listeners are likely to hear nothing but the jokes; Rolling Stone, for example, actually termed Pure Pop "a novelty record." But Lowe's seriousness about his music is right there in the grooves of the record itself. In addition to earlier Stiff recordings such as "Marie Provost" and "Heart Of The City", Pure Pop includes "Rollers Show", an impossibly perfect Bay City Rollers impersonation that sees the ridiculousness of the teen stars' immense popularity even as it can't help shrieking along; "Nutted By Reality", which rakishly pairs the castration of Castro with a undeniable rhythm track swiped from the Jackson Five's "ABC"; and "They Called It Rock", a skewering of fickle rock critics that's too catchy to be anything but critic-proof.
It's recordings like these, coupled with the soundbites Lowe provided in interviews of the period (From 1978, Lowe on Grace Slick: "She's like somebody's mom who's had a few too many drinks at a cocktail party"), that led writer Ken Tucker to label Nick "the best performing rock critic since Pete Townshend."
The next year, after touring the United States with Rockpile, Lowe recorded and released Labour Of Lust, every bit as strong as its predecessor, partly because Lowe's songs are as infectious and funny as ever. Mainly, though, the credit goes to Rockpile, particularly the ringing-a-bell licks of Edmunds and the flawless timekeeping of Terry Williams.
On "Switchboard Susan" (written by Mickey Jupp, who Lowe had produced and Rockpile had backed the year before), Williams plays like a piledriver with a feather touch as Lowe blurts to his operator sweetheart: "When I'm with you girl I get an extension/And I don't mean Alexander Graham Bell's invention."
The unforgettable "Cruel To Be Kind", a song Lowe had written in the Brinsley days with bandmate Ian Gomm, was the album's breakout pop hit. Also memorable, and far more unexpected, was the hushed "You Make Me". Lowe had recorded similarly gripping dramas before, but he'd tended to bury them in out-of-the-way places: "Endless Sleep", on the Bowi EP, was harrowingly intimate with hopelessness and suicide; the grim "Basing Street", B-side to the Lust single "Cracking Up", detailed a bloody crime scene.
But "You Make Me" marked the first time Lowe had stripped his sound down quite so prominently. Backed, just barely, by acoustic guitar, Lowe's character cops to, and rejects responsibility for, hurting his lover, all in the same whispered breath: "I don't want to do wrong to you/You make me." Upon its release, Rolling Stone noted, "Listening to this song is like discovering the class wit, who's always seemed invulnerable, can actually cry."
As "Cruel To Be Kind" climbed to #12 on the U.S. and British charts, Lowe's production work continued to garner attention. It was a heady time. "Round about the end of the '70s, for a short and glorious time," Lowe says today, "we were the monkeys in the wheelhouse." In fact, it's possible to pinpoint this moment quite precisely, at least in the States: The summer of 1979, when along with "Cruel To Be Kind", rock 'n' roll records such as Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him," Bram Tchaikovsky's "Girl Of My Dreams," and Sniff 'N' The Tears' "Driver's Seat" all breached the U.S. Top 40, while the Fabulous Poodles' "Mirror Star" and Dave Edmunds' "Girls Talk" cracked the Hot 100.
The result, on the radio and in the music industry, was a New Wave. "The heads rolled and all these major moguls in the music business were suddenly seen to be incredibly unhip and lost their jobs," Lowe recalls. "It didn't last long, though. They put some guys with skinny ties and spiky haircuts in their place. It was basically the same people."
At the close of the '70s, Lowe was on top of the mountain. The '80s were another story. He continued to produce good records for other acts -- The Fabulous Thunderbirds' T-Bird Rhythm, John Hiatt's Riding With The King, for example, in '82 and '83, respectively -- and at least one very good one -- blue-eyed soul man Paul Carrack's Suburban Voodoo, in 1982.
But so many things were unraveling. Not long after releasing the marvelous party album Seconds Of Pleasure in 1980, Rockpile broke up acrimoniously, largely due to disagreements between Edmunds and Lowe.
As the decade progressed, Lowe drank too much, gave up producing altogether, and suffered periods of depression. Friends tried to snap him out of it (Costello got him to produce his 1986 album, Blood & Chocolate; Hiatt enlisted him to play bass on his comeback record, 1987's Bring The Family), but with limited success. And, in 1990, his marriage to Carlene Carter ended in divorce.
It is perhaps to be expected that, throughout this rough period, Lowe's albums were, in his estimation, "rather patchy." "I was churning out records when I didn't have enough good material," he said in 1999. "I was seeking inspiration in a bottle....You can't do that consistently, though, and sooner or later, normally sooner, you get found out."
"I've always tried to do my best," Lowe says today of the time. "But sometimes my best really hasn't been much good....I wasn't very good in the '80s."
There were high points, all the same. His Cowboy Outfit, a rock 'n' soul tour de force from 1984, is the finest of his '80s albums. Both funny and heartfelt, the songs are first-rate, particularly "Half A Boy And Half A Man" and "L.A.F.S. (Love At First Sight)", and the performances have energy to burn.
In truth, each of Lowe's albums in the decade had its memorable moments: The delightfully juvenile kiss-off "Stick It Where The Sun Don't Shine" from 1982's Nick The Knife, for example, or the punning humility of "Time Wounds All Heels" from the following year's The Abominable Showman. Many more songs, though, were simply generic. And others appeared to be more concerned with their clever conceits -- as in, "(For Every Woman Who Ever Made A Fool Of A Man There's A Woman Made A) Man Of A Fool" -- than any sort of emotional payoff, a state of affairs that was beginning to frustrate Lowe deeply.
"I always wanted to do stuff with bottom," he explains. "It's an old-fashioned expression and means something with substance, something with real feeling. But at that time, it didn't really come out right whenever I tried to do it. I was having too much fun or something like that.
"For example, I had a song called 'Raining, Raining' on one of my albums, not a very good one [Nick The Knife]. In the studio, I thought it was really good, but now I know it's not thought out, not right, and it's too fast. It's a great idea, but I was so astonished that I came up with something quite poignant in the midst of this terrible time that I rushed it on to tape.
"In a way, I think I was waiting to get older," Lowe says now. "That's what's unusual about my career; getting older suits me. I don't mean the fact that I can't read anything without glasses or that I creak when I get out of bed. I mean artistically. In this business, you're supposed to do your best work when you're a kid, and then you get worse and worse until you become a cartoon of your former glory, either getting laughed out of the place or joining some awful retro tour. But that doesn't seem to have happened to me. I made some good records, sure, but I think it was more by luck than judgment. Judgment comes with age.
"And of course it certainly doesn't hurt your writing to get your heart broken. As we all know, that's a rite of passage that has to be endured and it's absolute misery. But if you're a songwriter, it's brilliant raw material."
Today, Lowe lives in West London, where he spends his days visiting friends (including Jake Riviera, his manager now for 25 years), going to the movies ("I especially like French films because they don't mind having a sort of fat guy as the love interest"), and writing songs. During the last decade, Lowe has seen his songs cut by Johnny Cash, Freakwater, Rod Stewart and BR549, among others, and he's written with Raul Malo and Jim Lauderdale.
"Get a producer to say this is a great song but we can do it better," he jokes, "and next thing you know the line goes taut, the rod bends, the reel starts to scream and you're reeling in a nice fat fish!" Indeed, in the mid-'90s, Curtis Stigers recorded a version of Lowe's "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love And Understanding", and because it appeared on The Bodyguard soundtrack next to Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," Lowe landed over a million dollars in royalties.
Meanwhile, his recording career has proceeded down a less visible track. It's been two decades since he was among "the monkeys in the wheelhouse," but he's making the most emotionally compelling -- and the most personally satisfying -- music of his career.
"I was really trying to develop another way of recording," Lowe explains. "I wanted to be sure I was right about the way I wanted to record and the kinds of songs I wanted to write for myself. But I couldn't get anyone to help me. They all kind of patted my head and said, 'Yes, Nick, I know you want to do it like that but just do it like everyone else, there's a good chap.'...When I did Party Of One, Dave Edmunds produced, but he really wouldn't let me do it. I tried to persuade him to let me cut it live, but he wouldn't have it. So I had a little hiccup there.
"What I couldn't understand was when I'd write a song back then, I'd sing it into a little desktop tape recorder. And I'd think, 'Well, that sounds good.' But then I'd take it to the studio with a band and slowly it would change. The tempo would generally get faster and it'd be pitched too low for me, so we'd change the key so I could shout above the band. Bit by bit, my idea would get turned into some kind of crappy old rock thing. And I thought, I've got to find a way to duplicate what I'm doing here on my tape recorder....The only way to do that is to have the song absolutely in charge, and the singer.
"It sounds so easy, what I'm saying. But it wasn't, for me....I hate to use the phrase 'the courage of your convictions,' but I can't really think of anything better. It sort of came together with The Impossible Bird."
Lowe recorded 1994's The Impossible Bird near his home at the Turk's Head, a little village hall attached to a pub where he booked time between the hall's "Keep Fit" classes and meetings of the Cub Scouts and local choral society. He rehearsed for 1998's Dig My Mood and for his new The Convincer there as well, though he eventually recorded them both in a proper studio.
In this setting, Lowe says, freed from the "tyranny of the snare drum," he's able to sing quietly, the better to explore the deeper nooks and crannies of his mature voice. "We mike everything up like a jazz group, play quietly and as close to each other as we can. The guys I play with know I'm going to know my songs absolutely back and front. And I just show it to them, just so they can get the barest minimum, know how the chords go....We try to engender a kind of relaxed concentration in the studio, where we can just use any and everything that comes to us.
"It's amazing how you wise up," he continues. "Suddenly you come to a stage in the studio where you can say, 'Well, it's got sort of that feel from 'Band Of Gold' by Freda Payne. But it's got this chorus like that one Supertramp song, remember?' And no one holds their hands up in horror and says 'Supertramp! You must be joking!' You just use what works. And it's wonderful when that happens. It's a real breakthrough, really, when you can shrug off all that youthful kind of snobbery. It's liberating. And once we got our version, we'd go right ahead and start overdubbing and turn it into a pop record."
The Impossible Bird included some of the twangiest pop music of Lowe's career, featuring the chugging guitar licks of Bill Kirchen on a hilariously unproductive "12-Step Program (To Quit You Babe)" and stripping everything back to highlight Lowe's wearied vocals for "Withered On The Vine".
Dig My Mood, a much jazzier affair, was actually reviewed in Downbeat, thanks to torchy tracks such as "You Inspire Me", which Tony Bennett should cut immediately, and "What Lack Of Love Has Done", a song that summarizes perfectly the intent of Lowe's latter-day songwriting even as it provides a stellar example of the same. "Well I go around the world, and this is what I do/I say love's a hurtin' thing, 'cause I know it to be true/When I get up in the spotlight and my story has begun/I try to explain what lack of love has done."
"I know [my cliches] when I hear them," Lowe says. "That certain kind of glib thing, being too clever with plays on words. What I like about The Convincer, and my last record and the couple before it, and a few other things as well, is I can't hear my old cliches."
The Convincer opens with "Homewrecker", in which a man who's been kicked out of the house by his wife calls out the woman he blames for tempting him astray. "You look like butter wouldn't melt in your mouth," Lowe begins. Then, after a long menacing pause: "But I know it will." The rest of the album is filled with men finding their way back home.
The music here, provided by keyboardist Geraint Watkins, guitarist Steve Donelly, and Lowe's longtime collaborator, drummer Bobby Irwin, with Nick himself on bass, is by turns smokey and pristine, rootsy and lush. Several songs possess the soulful rhythms of Muscle Shoals, but they go where they need to go. The comically impatient fellow in "Has She Got A Friend" watches the clock to rockabilly licks and "Bye Bye Love" drum turnarounds that suddenly open up for a bridge that suggests Gamble & Huff. In the spare folk of "Indian Queens", a man rambles around before deciding to return home for what he's lost, and appropriately enough the melody keeps hinting at "Detroit City". "Some of these days I'm going to get back on my feet and quit this blue address," Lowe vows on "I'm A Mess", a simmering country-soul number that would have been perfect for Charlie Rich.
And always the focus is on the songs, which Lowe has crafted and crafted until the craft has disappeared. "You're always taking stuff out," he says. "You never put stuff in; you're always removing stuff. Taking it out, making it more concise and shorter and clearer. I work on it like mad until it feels like I'm singing someone else's song and I can take any kind of liberty with it I want."
When Lowe's finished whittling, what remains is ordinary speech. Or rather the illusion of it -- songs where melody and language are so completely intertwined that it just seems natural that the singer should be pouring his heart out in lines sparkling with the most elegant internal rhymes.
"That untouched Tanqueray/I brought home the other day/Has quite a lot to say," he admits in "Lately I've Let Things Slide", his phrasing as easy as unhurried conversation. "Please reach into your quiver/And deliver/One last time," he pleads in the stunning pop-soul of "Cupid Must Be Angry".
In this context, it's easy to see why he was drawn to cover Johnny Rivers' "The Poor Side Of Town" (opening couplet: "How can you tell me how much you miss me/When the last time I saw you, you wouldn't even kiss me"). It's about welcoming someone home, tentatively, and its language is as straightforward as Lowe's own.
At the close, one of his characters sings "Let's Stay Home And Make Love" to the woman he adores, and after a musical quote from "Tears Of A Clown", Lowe affects, subtly and for just a moment, the smarmy croon of a lothario. It's comic, deliberately so, but he's not entirely kidding, either. His wink is just a self-effacing way of smoothing the path for his earnest plea, a playful way to convince the woman of the sincerity of his desire.
The songs on The Convincer can be very, very funny; they're Nick Lowe songs, after all. But these songs, like the best of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, as well as those written by latter-day masters of the pop song such as Leiber & Stoller, Pomus & Shuman, Smokey Robinson, Roger Miller, Harlan Howard, Bacharach & David -- are not just funny. They have bottom.
"A couple of years ago, I was at home for Christmas," Lowe recalls, "and my old dad struggled up to the attic and came down with this gigantic Grundig tape recorder. It was one of those real '50s jobs, where the tape runs really, really slow. You get about a day's worth of recording on one tape. He put this tape on of me running through my repertoire at about age eight or nine. And apart from the squeaky, high little boy's voice, I was amazed by how it sounded exactly like what I do right now. It's basically exactly the same stuff."
David Cantwell and fellow ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren have just completed Heartaches By The Number: A Critical Guide to Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles, to be published next year by the Country Music Foundation. There are no Nick Lowe or Rockpile singles in the book, but there could have been.
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