Caught in the Carousel

The Deep Night Of Day: Swing Out Sister’s Filth And Dreams Ten Years Later

By Thomas Cooney

Swing Out Sister

I suppose one could argue that if I truly believed my thesis, there would be no need for this preface, this preamble. But there is a history to contend with, and histories are tough things, and so justify is what I must do: Because even if it were revealed that I had taken Edith Piaf aside, circa 1950, and said, “Okay, just forget about hitting your notes, you couldn’t miss them if you tried. Hit your pauses, your silences between the words, and forever the history of singing will always be told in a descending narrative with you at the top. Like Picasso or Matisse, they will say, In the end there is only Piaf,” my thesis still wouldn’t be taken seriously, my pretensions of acumen would be only that.

But what if it were true that I’d kept the letters Leonard Cohen and I sent back and forth in the early 1980’s wherein he included the lyrics to “Hallelujah” and feared that there was something missing and I wrote back: “Great stuff, Lenny, just add one more line: Maybe there’s a God above/But all I ever learned from love/Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you”? Would there still be outrage about my forthcoming claim? Yes, I’m quite sure there would be. But that’s not all. There’d also be demands for my computers, typewriters, iPods, stereos to be surrendered at midnight, preferably in some village square. My editor would receive letters asking for my resignation. My agent might take me off her client list.

And it’s all because music journalism has a tendency to be too hip for its own good. Too many of its “journalists” despise the news of their darling indie bands selling more than 100,000 copies. They insist that it is an irrefutable law that any band or musician’s early work is their only good work. They choose one artist (think Bob Dylan in this country) who they keep close to the breast as proof that they don’t in fact resist the growth and aging of their musicians, that they don’t dismiss everything out of hand by anyone over the age of thirty. Music journalists also, most criminally, do not forget and they never forgive.

Swing Out Sister

But in order to accept my forthcoming declaration one must both forget and forgive, because ten years ago, in 1999 the finest album of the decade, and perhaps the finest album in the history of pop music, was released: the album was called Filth And Dreams. The band, you ask? Swing Out Sister. Yes, Swing Out Sister. Go to YouTube and search for their 1987 smash hit “Breakout” and you can see what must be forgotten and forgiven. (Unfair to be so harsh to a song that clearly launched the group—now a duo—and which also inarguably allowed them to continue on and reinvent themselves into one of the classiest and most engaging acts in music). But start there we must. Cue the chunky beats, the horns and the keyboard swells:

In July of 1987 I was traveling with my best friend through Europe and we met up with my brother in London where he had just finished a year studying abroad. We were accompanying him to Oxford Street so he could buy an enormous suitcase (a cheap suitcase that he intended to use to bring all his books home with him; a suitcase which broke before he even managed to check into his flight at Gatwick Airport, 22 years later and that suitcase still gives my best friend panic attacks). On the shop radio came a song that seemed silly and tinny to me. I was twenty-two at the time and currently in a mad affair with everything Bryan Ferry. “This is the song I was telling you about,” my brother said. I took a casual listen, long enough to catch the chorus: “Don’t stop to ask/Now you’ve found the break to make at last/You’ve got to find your way/Say what you want to say/Breakout.”

“Garbage,” I said. We were brothers and too close in age to agree on the same movies, music, films.

Fast forward five years and I am on his couch in Paris where he has just moved and started his new life. He is newly employed in our mother’s home country, while I am consistently floundering in the year past our mother’s death. MTV Europe is my only drug, and while my brother works, I just watch MTV in my boxer shorts, read a bit, get restless, ignore the boredom-induced erections, watch more MTV, go to a pastry shop, ride the metro to nowhere. On heavy rotation that summer was a fetching little ditty called “Am I The Same Girl?” by Swing Out Sister, with the lead singer whose name I somehow knew (Corinne Drewery . . . I have always been a music junkie after all) dressed in fiesta wear and running around; it must have been Mexico because I remember sombreros and piñatas. The retro-sound first hinted at in their hit “Breakout” is refined, the sound flawless. I couldn’t stop singing the song. Yes, go ahead, imagine it. Twenty-seven-year old, unemployed “writer,” two years away from being a law school dropout, sitting on his brother’s couch in a new Paris complex with padded peach-colored walls, crumbs of myriad pastries around his mouth, an ignored erection possibly calling out for attention, singing to himself, “Am I the same girl? Yes I am, Yes I am.”

Swing Out Sister

A month later, back in the States, a shred or two of dignity left, I bought the duo’s latest album, Get in Touch with Yourself. That ‘70s sound they aimed for in that Barbara Acklin remake “Am I The Same Girl?” is fluid throughout the CD. There is something disarmingly sweet about the album. Pretty girl and handsome chap going about their way in slick outfits prime for the flight crew of Braniff Airways circa 1970, oblivious to the tattered grunge sound racing over their heads, angrily pushing them out of the way along the myriad airport concourses.

Braniff

Three more years would pass before they re-announced themselves with The Living Return, an even looser, jazzier riff on a certain ‘70s sound. Isaac Hayes standing tall on the soil of American soul and then, in one deft move, reaching behind him for a little soupçon of Francis Lai from 1960’s Paris. However, the production values seemed not up to the task, and though there was a minor hit with another reinterpretation “La La (Means I Love You),” mediocre sales and a seeming inability to categorize themselves for the U.S. market seemed to spell the end of Swing Out Sister.

And then. Cue F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “There are no second acts in American lives.” Well thank God the duo is British. Corinne Drewery and Andy Connell find the missing ingredient, always there but buried a few inches too deeply: Bacharach. And in 1997 they delivered Shapes and Patterns, an album so charmingly reminiscent and youthful that to dislike it is akin to mocking three-legged dogs. To refuse to enjoy this album is to be that angry uncle at the fair who rejects a free cloud of cotton candy even though he hasn’t diabetes or a single cavity! Though the album sells decently in the States, it soars in Japan, producing one of the biggest-selling singles in the history of Japanese music: “Now You’re Not Here.” And the thanks Swing Out Sister gets is a non-U.S. distribution for their next album two years later.

Swing Out Sister

In Art Speigelman’s astounding 1994 Maus I and II, he gives the second volume the alternate title: And Here My Troubles Began. So, forgive the borrowing, but walking south on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California, in June 1999, ten minutes after shelling out $27.99 (plus tax) at Amoeba Music is where a certain madness began. I had slowly been growing convinced that Swing Out Sister knew exactly what they were doing every step of the way. Each album seemed a move away from that tinny ‘80s sound and toward a looser, livelier jazz session. And when I saw a new album of theirs (Import Only), I didn’t hesitate to pay the hefty price. I popped the disc into my discman and started with track one: “Who’s Been Sleeping.” I was thirty-four at the time and had learned a bit about patience by then. And this came in handy, because suddenly, the band had regressed. The sound was poppy, bouncy, and, in a way, desperate. And could you blame them? The music scene was in disarray. Fred Durst was managing record labels, making executive decisions. A blow job in the White House seemed to encourage puerile lyrics, and everywhere you looked—from the smooth, bubblicious new VW Beetle to the obsession everyone under the age of thirty seemed to have with being completely hair-free from the neck down—there was, at century’s end, a lurking fin de siècle sense that the country had become a nation of pedophiles. What was with that Britney Spears’ “Ooops, I Did It Again” video after all?

I previously mentioned the death of my mother. I was only twenty-five at the time; had only really been an adult for five years. Five years to love someone for who they are, not for what they do for you. To adore that person. Five years! Count the days; you can. It was an album that got me through that time. Hats by the Scottish band The Blue Nile. A brilliantly artistic 38 minutes that has, at last, not aged as flawlessly as I’d expected. But it will always be a dear friend, a material matter that possessed the ability to transcend the listener. I was once in Quebec City visiting that same best friend with whom I’d traveled to London, and we were at a second-hand CD store when I saw a copy of Hats. On the back of the sleeve was the previous owner’s phone number. I wrote that number down on my hand and later called him. “Oui, allo?” he said. “What were you thinking?” I said and hung up (God how I miss the pre-caller ID days). You see, to love music is to always want more albums like that. Each of us a selfish, rapacious, needy, and deserving lover. And now, ten years after Hats, I had felt an immediate, sort of jaded disappointment with this new Swing Out Sister album, Filth and Dreams. As track one faded out in giggles and chatter, I had to accept that this album would not be such a companion as Hats had been.

And then came track two starting in with a simple yet transporting dance of a piano. It sounded like Vince Guaraldi’s theme for Peanuts. And Drewery jumped in with, “A summer breeze/a sleepy head/a woken dream/an empty bed/a lazy smile/a broken life/a bitter moon/a velvet sky/a golden hour/a perfect curve/a traveled mind/a curse of love/a stolen day/a moment’s calm/a storm of doubt/a false alarm/closer than the sun” and before I knew it, in floated in some badha, bop, badha, badha bops that would make Richard Carpenter wonder how he and Karen had got it wrong when they’d seemingly perfected that sound two decades earlier. Later, in the lyrics at song’s end, one senses a more pronounced shift in Swing Out Sister: “Life’s dirt and dreams, tattered and torn/Cracked and fragmented, weary and worn.” If one felt that every previous Swing Out Sister CD should have come with a wear-while-listening pair of sunglasses, it became clear that the duo could also paint darker landscapes. If Swing Out Sister’s previous album brought the hidden Bacharach to the front, this one revealed the moodier ingredients of Drewery’s lyrics. Many years from now, history will reflect that a blind grab of any Swing Out Sister song is bound to contain lyrics with the word “tomorrow” or “future.” (“Night” is the only other word that gets as much air time on any Swing Out Sister album.) If the word “tomorrow” seems to exist in every SOS song, it’s because of the tone of their work; their implied notion that pop music is just that. It is not an answer to world poverty and peace; it is not a cure for cancer. But Filth and Dreams is the album that probably has more references—direct or indirect—to “yesterday,” the word forces itself into the songs. Yesterday and today existing side by side. At the same time. Past and Future. Dark and Light. Filth and Dreams.

Back to 1999 and my walk down Telegraph Avenue. I continued walking home, but I would only arrive there by rote. “Sugar Free” came in next through my headphones which might as well have been hypodermics by then: “Do you ever stop to wonder/Playing games that you play/That our dreams couldn’t last any longer/While the world passed us by/You took my dreams and destroyed them completely.” Seemingly twelve years of naïveté and insouciance had completely been wiped clean. This was not the same group. Consider these fragments from the fourth track “Filth and Dreams”: “Happiness can’t be gained/Till you’ve felt hurt and shame/Until you’ve suffered enough . . . I said it may sound mean/But where there’s dirt there are dreams.” It’s not that I considered the lyrics poetry then or now; it’s that I assign the lyrics throughout this astonishing album a higher accolade: unvarnished truth.

This cultural obsession with music being populated with only people under twenty-five has been one of the industry’s big mistakes. This isn’t Logan’s Run. If Mick Jagger could possibly, possibly lose his caché as one of the all-time greats, it’s because he continues to prance and sashay around a stage singing about teenage girls. Whereas that dandy who reportedly kicked the living shit out of Jagger in the late 1970’s, Bryan Ferry, has brought his listeners along on the voyage toward middle age and is set to steer his vessel toward the twilight years, and I, for one can’t wait. If he can do in those fading years what Leonard Cohen has, there are masterpieces on the horizon. As for 1999’s Swing Out Sister, Drewery, having arrived at the doorstep of her forties, understands the world in a way that one doesn’t in one’s twenties or thirties. Thus the sincerity behind the lyric later in the song, delivered with a snarl that seems a challenge: “This mess we’re in is where the joy begins.”

Swing Out Sister

“Happy When You’re High” comes next, buzzing in like the going out of electricity before Drewery’s smooth voice softens the feedback. The music seems to juxtapose the song’s title, with the brush of the triangles and the Fender Rhodes lifts, soft Xylophone touches, drum loops, and the recurring lyric: “Because good things are fast becoming/a thing of the past.” And then, what the song is about becomes difficult to discern because the music slows down a bit, that lovely, plush feedback comes back in, and then there is a latin-accented woman speaking through a telephone: “Varadero. Varadero. V as in Victor, okay? A-R-A-D-E-R-O. Varadero. Varadero. That’s like right by Havana. That’s like the main beach over there. Varadero. That’s like the number one beach in Cuba.” I have no idea what this means in relation to the rest of the song. But eight years after first hearing this album, I spent a number of days in Havana. And though a whole slew of great music has found its way onto my stereo since 1999, I kept returning to this album while in Havana. Havana: that great anachronistic city taunted by the Atlantic to join the 21st century, its grocery stores empty of meat or bread, but filled with rum and myriad mixers. Those Habaneros with their unmatched beauty. Their perfect skin, their perfect teeth. Their perfect literacy. Their tested patience when their ripe mangoes are shipped off to China or North Korea, leaving them with hard runts of yellow fruit. Their lusted-after cracked eggs thrown out—unused—by the nicer hotels. Their willingness to sit at any restaurant or bar or even right there along the Malecon, talking to you all night, lowering their voices for the few complaints about Fidel, or wherever you’d like to move the conversation, anything is fine provided that you make the gesture of paying for the bottle of rum you all share. The beautiful streets with the crumbled sidewalks, the silhouettes of those iconic American cars of the 1950’s, their hoods up for the endless repairs made with fishing wire here, a quick wrap of tinfoil there. The owner’s decision to close the hood and leave the oil rag on top of the engine to clean his hands when he next has to have a look inside that gaping mouth a few blocks later. This was a place of Filth and Dreams. In July of 2007 I became certain that the album was about Cuba.

It had to be. How else to explain the whisperings of the Latin man in the background of the next track? About three minutes into “If I Had The Heart” he says, “It moves, but at the same time the rhythm is pumping.” The song itself is four-plus minutes of absolute nirvana. It is that brief, sensuous ache that every heart feels when encountering loss, when a blow has been struck and the nerve sensors in the brain have yet to decide whether to register this as pain or pleasure. The song starts with Drewery whispering soft in the ear, audible only for you in the bed next to her, and then the song builds some momentum on the back of some quieted down drum-n-bass that was so en vogue in 1999. The lyrics are as spare as the arrangement, all serving to bring Drewery to her most pitch-perfect moment in her singing career as she asks over and over: “And if I had the heart to tell you/Would you have the strength to go?” This is one of two songs—from the same album—that seem in a constant battle to be crowned with the title Greatest Pop Song of All Time. It is a song that both seduces and destroys. It is carnal and ethereal. It is a song I want to tuck me in at night, with that beautiful siren leaving me with that question, giving me the night to think it over, wrapped as I am in the blankets that are in turn blanketed with her scent.

The next song, “When Morning Comes” starts with another man, speaking in Spanish about a posada and then the harp swirls in and Drewery starts right away with a song that is perhaps the most atypical Swing Out Sister song: “I walk these city streets/All paved with dirt and dreams/Wishing the rain would come/And wash my sadness clean/I work these city nights/All bound in love and lies/And when the lights go out/The darkness lets me cry.” Yes, there are few clichés as timeless and tiresome as the hooker with the heart of gold. But that is not the case here; the minutes are dying out for this woman-of-hours, and she is desperate to find a love that most of her johns come to her to escape from. And if in so many of Swing Out Sister’s previous songs, the bah, bah, bahs were a shade darker than Richard Carpenter-white, here the chorus is taken over by a few men repeating a very Cuban-sounding bah-lay-o. This builds strength in the song, leading into the middle lyric which very well be Drewery’s finest lyrical moment: “I breathe this city air/There’s traffic in my veins/And if my heart survives/I’m sure to lose my mind.” One senses the euphoria of a drug-addled woman, bounded at once by unrealistic hopes and unrequited emotions. And yet, the music, that sensual samba beat, entrances the listener. It is a fantastically joyous song that fills the listener with a sense of promise and despair.

That song is a perfect lead into “Invisible,” one of the most intimate Swing Out Sister songs (although intimate of the mind, not the body). “And if you see me don’t pretend to look away,” Drewery sings at the song’s beginning. The music is starker than anything that they have ever done before or since. The lyrics are informed by age. This could not have been written by anyone under the age of thirty-five: “Impossible/That we should choose the life we live/Insatiable/We’ve given all we’ve got to give/We’ll never find the dreams we left behind/Discarded, left for someone else to find/Lonely places I have found/Undiscovered in my mind.” The heartbreak in this song is total when Drewery’s voice aches with a new sense of vulnerability. Even an artist of the caliber and longevity of Swing Out Sister has moments of doubt and regret. It is yet another track that really illustrates how this album is the most original and daring of all of the band’s work.

Swing Out Sister

Since high school I have been writing music reviews and have always felt it necessary to choose an album of the year (I also do this when I am not currently writing for a media outlet). I even have a small CD tower at my house that is reserved for albums of the year since I started a year-end list in 1982 (Roxy Music’s Avalon, Costa Gavras’ brilliant Missing for film-of-the-year). And often, at year’s end, one of the most telling factors is how many of the album’s song ever sat in my head as the best on the album. “Closer Than the Sun,” “Happy When You’re High,” “If I Had the Heart,” “When Morning Comes,” and “Invisible” have all occupied that slot. However, it’s this album’s penultimate track, the sixth to have been at some point my favorite on Filth And Dreams, that still astonishes the most these ten years later. “World Out Of Control” begins with a 70’s cop show lead in before being rescued by some keyboard wizardry that would make Eno jealous. Interestingly, the lyrics are among the least strong on the album and yet this may be the duo’s finest moment. One minute you feel this is the soundtrack that should be playing while in line at Disneyland’s long-defunct “Adventure Thru Inner Space,” and the next you realize this song has a feel to it as if a paean to the future of air travel as envisioned in 1967. And though the title might lean toward the mayhem that would arrive in New York two years later, it’s actually a more innocuous loss of control. This is really a song for a future that never came but which all of us couldn’t wait to experience. This is a song that you almost immediately realize is much cooler than you could ever be but which at the same time invites you to race alongside it, to catch up. If music were things, this song would embody the queer sadness one feels at seeing the short-lived wisps of air collapsing behind the wings of jumbo jets as you’ve given over that person you love to the skies and the fates. Turn away now, shuffle down that endless airport concourse; that lost-waltz of saying goodbye at an airport gate (the figurative dance hall condemned by bin Laden), shielding the tears behind sunglasses as you walk the long, waxed floors of the terminal, the lit advertisements for colognes and perfumes, scarves and liquor and cigarettes guiding your way.

In their effort at pop perfection, Swing Out Sister close down Filth And Dreams with the melancholy “Make You Stay,” a song that has that end-of-summer feel. Not any summer, mind you, but the summer of your youth. The summer of fading Kodachrome images of you and your brothers (dressed too much alike) on some ride wherein the capsule holding you is a small smiling whale or a hippo or a teacup, remnants of cotton candy stuck to your cheeks the way cottony remnants remain now when—out of sheer, inebriated boredom—you peel the label off a bottle of liquor. If there is a complaint to be lobbied against Swing Out Sister, it would be that at times they show their influence too obviously (you can’t listen to “Closer Than The Sun” and not be reminded of Jobim’s “Waters Of March,” or their 2004 miracle “When The Laughter Is Over” and not think, lyrically, of “Windmills Of Your Mind”). However, that complaint reverts to admiration when you realize that they are not only paying homage to those originals that influenced them so elegantly, but that Swing Out Sister is—by offering superior compositions—elevating the quality of the originals. But “Make You Stay,” is the first time I can think of where Swing Out Sister is echoing an earlier work of their own. The melancholy herein seems on an emotional note-for-note par with the “Icy Shades Of Winter” which closed out 1997’s Shapes And Patterns. Where that song announced the cold January emptiness of the Coney Island landscape of the album, “Make You Stay” is the Labor Day of Filth And Dreams’ summery, jazz-infused, perfect cocktail of the Caribbean.

It might already be clear by now this is not intended as an essay for musicians or fans who want to know about musicianship on the album. As a reader of music criticism myself, I am often bored by the-who-plays-what-on-which-track recipe of music journalism. Suffice it to say, the musicianship is astoundingly alive in this recording. Whatever keyboards or electronic embellishments may have been used, they are never obvious or intrusive as they so often tend to be in lesser hands. One can hear every single chime of the triangle, the hop across the Xylophone, each caress of the harp. There is a mellow, jazzy, trip-hop feel with more bass than Swing Out Sister had used in the past.

Far more important is the feel of the album. The lyrical synthesis with the music. That battle between “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” It’s clear that Drewery and Connell understand that even though all the cheap and ignorant therapy-babblers might urge one to “move on” or to “seek closure” or to “stay away from your comfort zone,” it is the past that informs the future and thus cannot be so easily Paxiled away. The result is an album whose optimism is not a naïve one. The implications have been weighed, the tears have been shed or choked back, the letters received have been filed away or kept bedside. And life goes on, every morning containing the possibility of transforming into a day of sheer blissed-out joy.

Swing Out Sister

I woke up at 6 a.m. on June 16th of this year in order to give my voice a good half hour to wake up. At 6:30, on the dot, I dialed the number my editor had given me to The Roger Smith Hotel in New York. I asked for room 1211.

            “Hello,” the voice said, warm with New York’s 9:30 charm and England’s lilt.
            “Is this Corinne?”
            “Yes. Is that Thomas Cooney?”
            “Yes.”
            “Hallo!”

I went through the obligatory but sincere routine of thanking her for agreeing to the interview, and congratulating her on the duo’s new album Beautiful Mess (which at the time was climbing Billboard’s list, finally ascending to #1 on the Jazz chart) and their recent concert at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco.

I knew I had to operate on the assumption that thirty minutes was the norm. I couldn’t linger. I had my playlist in front of me, but she started right in, discussing the album. I sensed a kind, if rehearsed script. I interrupted her. “Sorry, I’m not sure if your publicist got the information to you correctly. I already reviewed that album last year when it was an import. I’m writing a much longer piece. A ten-year retrospective on Filth And Dreams, an album I am ready to call the greatest album in the history of pop music, and the best album of its decade.”

“Filth And Dreams? Wow,” she said, slow and perplexed. And then her mood seemed to lift as if relieved to not have to talk about the same album she had probably been talking about for the past fifteen months. “That is one of our more challenging albums. In terms of public reaction, distribution. All of it.”

“Look, I am honest to a fault. I don’t really know what ‘Who’s Been Sleeping In My Bed’ is doing on that album, but the rest of it. My God, it just blows me away.”

“’Who’s Been Sleeping’ was the last song we cut for that album. And often the last song done for an album often ends up sounding as if it belongs more on the next album. It’s often, for us, a shedding of the skin. The last trace of the album.”

We were thrown off-track by questions about song choices at the concert, about the fight in front of the stage that she didn’t see, that seemed to make her feel as if Swing Out Sister had “arrived” now that fights were breaking out at their shows. We talked about Oakland (which she said she preferred to San Francisco) and about the new America. I eventually steered the conversation back to the album so that I could ask about the Cuban experience, the Havana-ness of it. The “filth” and the “dreams.”

“Well, that’s great that you got that aspect, but I wouldn’t say Andy and I located it as specifically Cuba. We wanted a Jobim style album but wanted it dustier, hotter. Messier, I suppose. I mean, Thomas, at my heart I’m a country girl who moved to the city and I am always pulled in opposite directions in life. I love the world seen in contrasts.”
“Exactly, and yet, no matter how dark things get at times, the albums always seem to end up sounding, for lack of a better word, optimistic.”

“Or, dare I say it, I hope that they have a sound like the sound we want love to be,” she said, the shyness necessitated by such a statement trumped by an energy that I suddenly realized has taken up almost forty-five minutes already. In a panic I told her, “I’m sorry to be going on here, I should focus. But you sound as if you’ve been up a lot longer than I have.”

“Ah, but I got my daily swimming in, Thomas. Very important. Makes me very jealous of you out there in beautiful California.” And here she wanted to know about me. Who am I in my life? What other writing have I done? Who are my favorite singers? She was thrilled to hear me mention Piaf (I do not know a serious singer who doesn’t place Piaf at or near the top of the standard by which . . .). When I mentioned that my mother had been French, she wasted no time in apologizing for her pronunciation when she sings certain lyrics in French on a few of their songs, most notably, a rare track called “Ensemble,” which I told her reminds me of the scene at a French restaurant in a far flung corner of the Third World where French expats congregate. When she finished her laugh, I said, “Do you know that whenever I am at a second-hand CD store, I look for copies of Filth And Dreams. To give away.”
            “Really? That’s what Andy and I do with the Quincy Jones album The Pawnbroker.”
            “The soundtrack? I don’t know it. I know the title song. Love Tony Bennett’s version. Is his version the one on the album?”
            “No, though it escapes me right now who it is. But yeah . . .”
            “And then Filth and Dreams is on eBay now and again for like $60.”
            “That’s what I’ve heard. That upsets me. I tell people not to buy it. We’ll do something. But then things get away from us and we don’t follow up. So much to do.”
            “It’s not even on iTunes.”
            “I know. We need to fix that, Thomas!”
            “You and me?”
She laughed again and I wondered if her perfectly-bobbed hair shook into a mess with her laugh and then went right back into place as if her scalp yelled “Halt!”

“Not that I am into blogs,” I continued, “but a lot of your fans seem to want to discount the album, as if it were recorded by your understudies.”

“I was in a darker place then. It was a lot of things really. I always write my ideas down, trying to capture an essence before it’s gone. I remember feeling very strong lyrically then and not wanting to overproduce the album so as to polish away the source. But I was also suffering at the time with a lot of migraine headaches and I was seeing an acupuncturist whose office was in the same building where we were recording. And, like I said, I was already feeling dark, lyrically, (although not Leonard Cohen-dark), and I would record after my acupuncture sessions. And I was a bit high from the treatment. I felt somehow freer. I mean I even have a line in one of the songs that goes: ‘Muscled up like Jesus.’” She laughed at that lyric (which, strangely, in the liner notes is written as “Where’s the love like Jesus”). “I mean that is not the lyric a typical Swing Out Sister fan expects from a song of ours.”

As I was writing this all down, she continued. “The funny thing is that when we were mostly done with the recording, I realized that I had been spending a lot of the time recording while seated on a bass booster.”
“Like the chicken or the egg.”
“Yes, exactly. Wait, what?”
“I mean, like did you get the headaches because you were sitting on the booster or were you sitting on the boosters because you were high from the treatments? Either way, it’s a great story. And it accounts for the trip-hop rougher edges that all added up to a brilliant album.”

“Thank you,” she said, thoroughly English, as if she had never said the lazier “Thanks” and gotten away with it.

“I did want to bring up something I’d read about on a blog because it seemed so ridiculous. A fan had written that he or she was convinced that the song ‘Invisible’ (which may have your finest lyrics) is about your disappointment that Swing Out Sister never conquered the world.”

Swing Out Sister

When she didn’t laugh, I worried that maybe she did write that song about not being a household name, but then I heard a deep breath. “That song, like so much of that album, was about a time in our lives. All of our friends had not only already had children, but also those children were growing up and you’d meet up with them, and all you are to them really is like Aunt Corinne or, well, you know. You’re not a singer or a performer. You’re just you, and you think, to them, they see themselves moving on, their parents moving on, but you, you’re just getting older. Still singing songs, no children running at your feet, no home where you live for any extended length of time. That song, for me. I don’t know, Thomas, but I knew I had to question the choices I’d made when it was getting close to be too late to change course. But in the end, I found that I only questioned those choices, never really doubted them. And that was important. I’m so glad you like that song.”

Glancing at my watch, I realized it was almost eight o’clock. We’d been chatting away with abandon for an hour-and-a-half. I had to apologize and when I did, her charm torqued into overdrive. “But Thomas, it’s been a true delight. To talk about that album over ten years later to someone who has been with it from the beginning. It’s been great. I truly mean that.”

Okay, so she must have seen me blush . . . and so, left with two more questions I had to offer them rapid fire. “Your all-time favorite singer?” followed by “How many times have you and Andy been to Havana?”
“My favorite singer? That is so hard. I mean, yeah, Dusty Springfield. But Elis Regina, if you know her.”
“She recorded with Tom Jobim. Of course.”
“A lot of the Brazilians. So many great singers everywhere.”

We chatted a bit more, I promised to send the article to her publicist when it hits, but she told me not to bother, just send it directly. “Here, let me give you my personal email. Got a pen?”

I wrote it down, thinking, you can only send her one email before the article comes out. Okay, maybe two. Three tops. We said our goodbyes, wished each other luck, and the phone was cradled again into its charging base, my ear was a bit cauliflowered, and the clock read 8 a.m. Time to start the day. Atop the world, a dazzled future ahead of me, if only for an hour or a day.

Two weeks later, I received the following email:

Dear Thomas,
It was a pleasure talking with you, and great that you appreciate some of our less
known work. No, Andy and I have never visited Havana--we should go before it
all changes. (I have always had a fascination with Cuba--perhaps because Castro
came into power the year I was born!) My friend's mother actually sold Che
Guevara Leyland buses when she worked for British Leyland transport. The ships
mysteriously sunk in the river Thames so they never even left the country-it was
recently revealed the CIA were responsible . . .

Corinne xxx

Swing Out Sister

Swing Out Sister’s 1999 album Filth And Dreams is—in addition to being the most perfect pop album of all time—the finest album of any genre of the 1990’s.

Any time a critic puts such a claim out there—whether it’s for books or movies or albums—he has an obligation to place the work in a context. If one were to send out a query for the Greatest Album of the 1990’s, one would most likely find a rather uninteresting, ethnocentric list (one of the great musical legacies of the 1990’s was the re-emergence of Cesaria Evora and yet nowhere in any of the Village Voice’s “Jazz Pop List” does Mar Azul, Miss Perfumado, Cabo Verde or Café Atlantico—the four best of the five albums she delivered that decade—appear in the top ten! But then again, despite a brilliantly mournful ballad now and again—“Sodade” for instance—these albums commit the American critic’s cardinal sin of often being too joyous). Instead we get Nirvana, Dylan, Radiohead. Beck thrown in for cleverness’ sake, and Eminem thrown in to make old journalists feel young (p.s. it’s a lot easier getting the Viagra refilled than it is to listen to The Slim Shady LP).

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll say that I never “got” Nirvana. I found it all a bunch of whining by bored suburban youth who adopted the less-than-original manifesto “I hate my parents.” The only difference this time around was that they had a new reason for hating those parents: they were either divorced or both had jobs or worked too hard to give little Davey and Chris and Kurt their undivided attention. To be honest, there are few things more nauseating than watching parents give their children complete undivided attention. One wanted to yell right back when listening to Nirvana and its progeny: “Read a book and stop yer bitching!”

A cursory look back reminds us that much of the 1990’s was a time of relative economic stability. Our shores were still free from terrorist attacks, one didn’t have to perform his latest Chippendale’s striptease act just to board an airplane. People wrote letters, one could go anywhere without the fear of the endless din and inane conversational blather from every idiot’s cellphone conversation in restaurants, movie houses, concerts, and bookstores (which were these quaint establishments that had books you could take from a shelf, hold in your hand and feel the paper between thumb and forefinger). We had a fantastic president in office who made the American brand popular again worldwide (Bill Clinton was loved more by non-Americans than he was by Americans—and there were millions of Americans who adored him then and now).

Swing Out Sister

Okay, grunge may have been a direct—and deserving—reaction to the garbage of the late 1980’s music scene (Milli Vanilli, Paula Abdul, Poison, Richard Marx, the list goes on and on). And for that, it is commendable—and impossible to dismiss—but it was not by any stretch of the imagination great. Look, it’s over ten years later. Can we just admit that Nirvana and all those flannel and Doc Marten convention attendees were little more than spoiled children and dubious lyricists? No? I offer you these lyrics that at the time were worshipped as if poetry itself were being reinvented: “I’ve been locked inside your heart shaped box for weeks/I’ve been drawn into your magnet tar pit trap/I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black.” Really? I mean, really? Is this really at all good? Or will history show that this was the beginning of an era that Simon Cowell (God bless him) is singlehandedly trying to destroy, i.e. the attention-demanding “poetry” of a child whose parent or grandparent can only ever offer heaps of praise upon him for fear of harming his “self-esteem”?

As for Dylan, the only man I can think of whose devotees will argue his voice as being superior to Pavarotti’s and the only artist I know of in any genre who can be discovered committing such a blatant act of plagiarism as he did with the appropriately titled album Love And Theft and be not only forgiven, but lauded. The Dylan Construct in America is one of the most confounding movements I have ever come across. I have often sensed that in other corners of the world, the type of praise heaped upon Dylan in this country is reserved for Leonard Cohen (and quite deservedly so, that elder man a far far far better writer, no doubt aided by the fact that he has a far more developed sense of humor).

Where Radiohead is concerned, I have never had anything but an admirable respect for the band—the way one does any artist or writer hitting all the right notes. And yet the admiration is kept at a distance as if all the while realizing that, musically, Roxy Music had already catalogued all these soundscapes years ago, selling off their rejects to Pink Floyd.

But as I mentioned earlier, there is a certain pretentiousness to the state of music criticism. Optimism, beauty, joy are often frowned upon, are somehow mistakenly shelved together with dime-store love songs and thus are easily dismissed. When Salman Rushdie gave one of his first public readings from The Satanic Verses after being sentenced to death and sent into hiding, he gave it at M.I.T. and he commented a short while later what a joy it had been to read from the book in front of an audience. That brilliant novel—perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century—which resulted in the death of so many and ruined the lives of so many more had been received with gales of laughter. Those Islamic extremists who’d taken such offense at his depiction of Mohamed and other notable figures had focused all their attention with dour mindsets, refusing to find any exuberance in a “serious” novel. And yet it seems that more than any reaction, its creator (certainly aware that he’d written a masterpiece for the ages) wanted jubilation. Laughter.

Swing Out Sister

Swing Out Sister followed up Filth And Dreams with the cinematic and moody Somewhere Deep in the Night in 2001, the summery and warm Where Our Love Grows in 2004 and the sensuous Beautiful Mess in 2008. Beautiful Mess was my choice for 2008’s Album of the Year, and all three of which are first-rate, and were it not for their albums to compete in the same year as the greatest living songwriter (Leonard Cohen) and the greatest living vocalist (Joanna Swan), all three albums would have topped my year end list (Leonard Cohen’s Ten New Songs, 2001, and Ilya’s They Died for Beauty, 2004).

But Swing Out Sister has never equaled the sheer genius of Filth And Dreams, and it is because there are reasons why there are certain books that writers can only write once, songs composers can only compose once, paintings artists can only paint once. And if that specific artist—whatever the medium—had remained true to himself, his tour de force breathed of its own. And at creation’s end, the repository he’d raided time and again in the engineering of that most personal masterpiece, was closed down. For good. He was brave enough to go into it, to tap into its darkness to find the sublime, and he had to be braver still to lock its doors and throw away the keys.

For me, Filth And Dreams will always be the masterstroke of Andrew Connell and Corinne Drewery. It is a transcendent work that bridges pop and jazz and cinema with the poetry of realism, all under the watchful tropical eye of the sun that sleeps nightly and that now and again surrenders its power to the shadings of the moon. It is that rare work of art that seems to prove that when our lives have come and gone, we will accept the fact that our shadows have touched more of the earth’s surface than we ourselves ever did.