New Nick Lowe album
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Another one!
I was driving along today listening to Jonathan Ross and on came a song with a familiar voice and a ludicrously misogynistic lyric that just had to be ironic about how he trained her to love him so he could get revenge on womankind, etc. Yep, Nick Lowe. At first I thought it was from the 60s or even 50s, possibly from a compilation called 20 Misogynist Classics, couldn't guess it at all. Very funny.
I was driving along today listening to Jonathan Ross and on came a song with a familiar voice and a ludicrously misogynistic lyric that just had to be ironic about how he trained her to love him so he could get revenge on womankind, etc. Yep, Nick Lowe. At first I thought it was from the 60s or even 50s, possibly from a compilation called 20 Misogynist Classics, couldn't guess it at all. Very funny.
There's more to life than books, you know, but not much more
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/revi ... 90,00.html
Nick Lowe, At My Age
**** Not a note wasted as this veteran returns with a vengeance
Graeme Thomson
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer
While old mucker Elvis Costello hangs with Sting, endorses cars and credit cards, and fails perennially to add a single memorable melody to his repertoire, Lowe has sharpened an already prodigious talent in the six years since The Convincer. His new record is a masterclass in both classicism and economy: the nine originals sound like long-lost standards - no note is wasted, no sentiment over-played. Straddling ska, soul, country and rockabilly, and channelling everyone from Al Green to Dean Martin, Lowe pulls it all together with warmth, wit and searing emotional honesty.
Nick Lowe, At My Age
**** Not a note wasted as this veteran returns with a vengeance
Graeme Thomson
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer
While old mucker Elvis Costello hangs with Sting, endorses cars and credit cards, and fails perennially to add a single memorable melody to his repertoire, Lowe has sharpened an already prodigious talent in the six years since The Convincer. His new record is a masterclass in both classicism and economy: the nine originals sound like long-lost standards - no note is wasted, no sentiment over-played. Straddling ska, soul, country and rockabilly, and channelling everyone from Al Green to Dean Martin, Lowe pulls it all together with warmth, wit and searing emotional honesty.
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... d=11194522
World Cafe, June 19, 2007
World Cafe from WXPN
Nick Lowe: Rogue, Misanthrope, Elder Statesman
by David Dye
Set List
"I Trained Her to Love Me"
"You Make Me Want to Be a Better Man"
"People Change"
"The Beast in Me"
In a music career spanning more than 40 years, Nick
Lowe has profoundly affected the music industry as a
singer, songwriter and producer. He began recording in
1966 as a member of the rock band Kippington Lodge,
which was later renamed Brinsley Schwarz, notable for
its influence on '70s punk. When the group split in
1975, Lowe turned his attention to production for
artists such as Elvis Costello, The Fabulous
Thunderbirds and John Hiatt. His song "(What's So
Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" became a
major hit for Costello, but he's also recorded
steadily as a solo artist since the late '70s.
Lowe's 1994 album The Impossible Bird helped launch a
comeback of sorts, finding sleeper success and
re-establishing him as a lovably misanthropic pop
elder statesman. It also laid the groundwork for the
cult-hit follow-ups Dig My Mood (1998) and The
Convincer (2001). Another, titled At My Age, arrives
next week.
World Cafe, June 19, 2007
World Cafe from WXPN
Nick Lowe: Rogue, Misanthrope, Elder Statesman
by David Dye
Set List
"I Trained Her to Love Me"
"You Make Me Want to Be a Better Man"
"People Change"
"The Beast in Me"
In a music career spanning more than 40 years, Nick
Lowe has profoundly affected the music industry as a
singer, songwriter and producer. He began recording in
1966 as a member of the rock band Kippington Lodge,
which was later renamed Brinsley Schwarz, notable for
its influence on '70s punk. When the group split in
1975, Lowe turned his attention to production for
artists such as Elvis Costello, The Fabulous
Thunderbirds and John Hiatt. His song "(What's So
Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" became a
major hit for Costello, but he's also recorded
steadily as a solo artist since the late '70s.
Lowe's 1994 album The Impossible Bird helped launch a
comeback of sorts, finding sleeper success and
re-establishing him as a lovably misanthropic pop
elder statesman. It also laid the groundwork for the
cult-hit follow-ups Dig My Mood (1998) and The
Convincer (2001). Another, titled At My Age, arrives
next week.
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http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/alb ... /at_my_age
On his first record in six years, this proto-punk icon keeps it terrifically mellow without getting mushy in the head. Lowe sticks mostly to roughly crooned ballads and vaguely Sixties-sounding rock, the best of which reveal a fighting spirit under their catchy exterior: Witness "I Trained Her to Love Me," a funny, nasty jab at an ex in which Lowe plays an aging ass man in the tradition of Frank and Dino.
roughly crooned? aging ass man?
On his first record in six years, this proto-punk icon keeps it terrifically mellow without getting mushy in the head. Lowe sticks mostly to roughly crooned ballads and vaguely Sixties-sounding rock, the best of which reveal a fighting spirit under their catchy exterior: Witness "I Trained Her to Love Me," a funny, nasty jab at an ex in which Lowe plays an aging ass man in the tradition of Frank and Dino.
roughly crooned? aging ass man?
Like me, the "g" is silent.
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Cruel to be kind of old: Nick Lowe grows better with 'Age'
by Jim Farber
New York Daily News
19 June 2007
Nick Lowe had one fear about growing old in pop.
“I didn’t want to become one of those thinning-haired, jowly old geezers who still does the same shtick they did when they were young, slim and beautiful,â€
Cruel to be kind of old: Nick Lowe grows better with 'Age'
by Jim Farber
New York Daily News
19 June 2007
Nick Lowe had one fear about growing old in pop.
“I didn’t want to become one of those thinning-haired, jowly old geezers who still does the same shtick they did when they were young, slim and beautiful,â€
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070625/ap_ ... m6MaFxFb8C
Acting his age works for Nick Lowe
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Entertainment
Jun 25 '07
Many of singer Nick Lowe's peers dye their hair or squeeze into clothes better suited for their children. Lowe has a shock of white hair and titles his latest CD, "At My Age."
He's 58, and not afraid to admit it.
The simple act of not fighting the passage of time led Lowe to a surprising second stage for a career that flowered during the first punk rock generation.
Lowe frequently sings from the perspective of a man who's lived a life and learned its lessons. It's not geriatric rock, just the type of music you heard — but didn't understand — when dad played Frank Sinatra while driving you around on Saturday chores.
The man in his song "Long Limbed Girl" has come across a picture of an old girlfriend and wonders what's become of her. The narrator of "I Trained Her to Love Me" is an aging lothario who knows he's going to break another heart and couldn't care less.
A younger Lowe had a hit single ("Cruel to Be Kind"), produced Elvis Costello's early albums and was the bass player known as "basher" in Rockpile, a cult favorite band that, like its music, was often like a speeding car careening out of control.
All during that time, Lowe said he was "looking over my shoulder waiting for it to end."
"I knew how the industry talked about artists, how they despise them and kind of regard them as morons," he said. "So I knew my career was going to come to an end, because I was not someone like Elton John or Cher."
By the mid-1980s, with a string of non-hits, a music royalty marriage to Johnny Cash stepdaughter Carlene Carter that "had not so much collapsed as disappeared" and his own near-alcoholism, the bell was tolling.
But he wasn't ready to give up on music. He noticed that age is no impediment to classical or jazz musicians, and wondered why it couldn't be the same for pop musicians. It made sense, particularly since the first vanguard of an influential generation was Lowe's age.
"I was sure that I could find a way to use this to my advantage," he said. "Luckily, all of my influences, all of the things I liked musically, were all rather old for my age."
Stage Two Nick is reminiscent of Charlie Rich, with courtly country, jazz and rock influences mixed in. He slowed and quieted his songs down, made his points more directly. The simple, scary reading of his song "The Beast in Me," featured on the premiere episode of "The Sopranos" and also covered by his former father-in-law, is a good example of what he does now.
The "basher" is now a craftsman who looks back at some of his old songs and sees mistakes made in haste.
"The older I get, the simpler I want to make it," he said. "I want to make absolutely no doubt what I'm on about lyrically. When you're younger, you bluster or bluff so much because you're impatient for the songs to come out you can say, `it's poetry, man,' and come up with some rubbish."
To somewhat humorous effect, clarity eludes some listeners when he plays "I Trained Her to Love Me" in concert. Women get right away they're hearing a funny song about misogyny. Many men think he's celebrating behavior they don't recognize as caddish.
Lowe just doesn't want anyone thinking it's autobiographical.
"I've known lots of men like that, who style themselves as ladies men when they're the opposite of that," he said. "They can't stand them, and yet they're extremely successful with them."
"At My Age" is Lowe's first new music in six years. Life intervened. Both of his parents died. He also became, somewhat unexpectedly, a dad for the first time. Having tea in London recently with Costello, Diana Krall and their infant twins, they marveled at how improbable their diaper-changing duties would have seemed years earlier.
"It's really hard work, especially for someone who's led an almost entirely selfish existence for 40 years," he said. "It comes as quite a shock to suddenly have to worry about someone else and, indeed, his mother."
Soul singers Solomon Burke and Howard Tate have sung versions of songs that Lowe includes on his new album. He also received an assist from old friend Chrissie Hynde in writing and singing "People Change." The young Nick Lowe produced "Stop Your Sobbing," the very first single from Hynde's band the Pretenders.
Lowe's most enduring composition has been "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," which has been covered more than 30 times and matured into an anti-war anthem for a new generation. Costello, whose cover is the best known, paid Lowe the ultimate compliment: playing the song during his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction when he had hundreds of his own compositions to choose from.
Lowe wrote it as a comic song while a member of the band Brinsley Schwarz in 1973. The narrator was an old hippie from the 1960s being laughed at as outdated and responding by saying what was so funny about our ideals, anyway?
When he was done, Lowe considered it the first original thought he'd had as a songwriter.
"I'm extremely proud of it," he said. "I've got Elvis to thank for that. He always liked it when the Brinsleys did it and when he did it, he sort of gave it this anthemic thing, which was a brand new idea. You can hear it done now in all different ways."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stori ... 45974.html
June 13, 2007
Krall was at home in Vancouver when she spoke with the Sun.
Q: How is your husband?
I saw his show in New York recently. It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to in my life.
Do you and he have any differences of opinion about music?
No. Never, actually. Not really.
What about in child rearing?
No. That's why we got married. We get along very well, I must say.
How has having children affected your career?
It's challenging because I want to be with them all the time. And I also want to be a musician, because that's what I've always done my whole life. I've never known anything else. I've always played music. It's been my life force, my everything to me, and now my children are everything to me. So, I have to pace myself. It's a challenge .
Do you feel guilty that music takes you away from your children, or your children take you away from your music?
I don't feel guilty. Guilt is not a good word. I don't feel guilty at all. I just feel tired. I'm not guilty, just tired.
Having 6-month-old twins must be a handful.
It's intense, but it's great. I'm in Vancouver, B.C., right now. I'm lagging really hard because we just flew from London. I'm jet lagging. It's been hard on the babies. I've been mostly paying attention to them all day, as you should.
This is your first tour since their birth. Is Elvis staying home with the children while you travel?
Oh no. I'll take them with me.
Acting his age works for Nick Lowe
By DAVID BAUDER, AP Entertainment
Jun 25 '07
Many of singer Nick Lowe's peers dye their hair or squeeze into clothes better suited for their children. Lowe has a shock of white hair and titles his latest CD, "At My Age."
He's 58, and not afraid to admit it.
The simple act of not fighting the passage of time led Lowe to a surprising second stage for a career that flowered during the first punk rock generation.
Lowe frequently sings from the perspective of a man who's lived a life and learned its lessons. It's not geriatric rock, just the type of music you heard — but didn't understand — when dad played Frank Sinatra while driving you around on Saturday chores.
The man in his song "Long Limbed Girl" has come across a picture of an old girlfriend and wonders what's become of her. The narrator of "I Trained Her to Love Me" is an aging lothario who knows he's going to break another heart and couldn't care less.
A younger Lowe had a hit single ("Cruel to Be Kind"), produced Elvis Costello's early albums and was the bass player known as "basher" in Rockpile, a cult favorite band that, like its music, was often like a speeding car careening out of control.
All during that time, Lowe said he was "looking over my shoulder waiting for it to end."
"I knew how the industry talked about artists, how they despise them and kind of regard them as morons," he said. "So I knew my career was going to come to an end, because I was not someone like Elton John or Cher."
By the mid-1980s, with a string of non-hits, a music royalty marriage to Johnny Cash stepdaughter Carlene Carter that "had not so much collapsed as disappeared" and his own near-alcoholism, the bell was tolling.
But he wasn't ready to give up on music. He noticed that age is no impediment to classical or jazz musicians, and wondered why it couldn't be the same for pop musicians. It made sense, particularly since the first vanguard of an influential generation was Lowe's age.
"I was sure that I could find a way to use this to my advantage," he said. "Luckily, all of my influences, all of the things I liked musically, were all rather old for my age."
Stage Two Nick is reminiscent of Charlie Rich, with courtly country, jazz and rock influences mixed in. He slowed and quieted his songs down, made his points more directly. The simple, scary reading of his song "The Beast in Me," featured on the premiere episode of "The Sopranos" and also covered by his former father-in-law, is a good example of what he does now.
The "basher" is now a craftsman who looks back at some of his old songs and sees mistakes made in haste.
"The older I get, the simpler I want to make it," he said. "I want to make absolutely no doubt what I'm on about lyrically. When you're younger, you bluster or bluff so much because you're impatient for the songs to come out you can say, `it's poetry, man,' and come up with some rubbish."
To somewhat humorous effect, clarity eludes some listeners when he plays "I Trained Her to Love Me" in concert. Women get right away they're hearing a funny song about misogyny. Many men think he's celebrating behavior they don't recognize as caddish.
Lowe just doesn't want anyone thinking it's autobiographical.
"I've known lots of men like that, who style themselves as ladies men when they're the opposite of that," he said. "They can't stand them, and yet they're extremely successful with them."
"At My Age" is Lowe's first new music in six years. Life intervened. Both of his parents died. He also became, somewhat unexpectedly, a dad for the first time. Having tea in London recently with Costello, Diana Krall and their infant twins, they marveled at how improbable their diaper-changing duties would have seemed years earlier.
"It's really hard work, especially for someone who's led an almost entirely selfish existence for 40 years," he said. "It comes as quite a shock to suddenly have to worry about someone else and, indeed, his mother."
Soul singers Solomon Burke and Howard Tate have sung versions of songs that Lowe includes on his new album. He also received an assist from old friend Chrissie Hynde in writing and singing "People Change." The young Nick Lowe produced "Stop Your Sobbing," the very first single from Hynde's band the Pretenders.
Lowe's most enduring composition has been "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding," which has been covered more than 30 times and matured into an anti-war anthem for a new generation. Costello, whose cover is the best known, paid Lowe the ultimate compliment: playing the song during his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction when he had hundreds of his own compositions to choose from.
Lowe wrote it as a comic song while a member of the band Brinsley Schwarz in 1973. The narrator was an old hippie from the 1960s being laughed at as outdated and responding by saying what was so funny about our ideals, anyway?
When he was done, Lowe considered it the first original thought he'd had as a songwriter.
"I'm extremely proud of it," he said. "I've got Elvis to thank for that. He always liked it when the Brinsleys did it and when he did it, he sort of gave it this anthemic thing, which was a brand new idea. You can hear it done now in all different ways."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This must have been in May , as this DK interview indicates -Having tea in London recently with Costello, Diana Krall and their infant twins,
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stori ... 45974.html
June 13, 2007
Krall was at home in Vancouver when she spoke with the Sun.
Q: How is your husband?
I saw his show in New York recently. It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to in my life.
Do you and he have any differences of opinion about music?
No. Never, actually. Not really.
What about in child rearing?
No. That's why we got married. We get along very well, I must say.
How has having children affected your career?
It's challenging because I want to be with them all the time. And I also want to be a musician, because that's what I've always done my whole life. I've never known anything else. I've always played music. It's been my life force, my everything to me, and now my children are everything to me. So, I have to pace myself. It's a challenge .
Do you feel guilty that music takes you away from your children, or your children take you away from your music?
I don't feel guilty. Guilt is not a good word. I don't feel guilty at all. I just feel tired. I'm not guilty, just tired.
Having 6-month-old twins must be a handful.
It's intense, but it's great. I'm in Vancouver, B.C., right now. I'm lagging really hard because we just flew from London. I'm jet lagging. It's been hard on the babies. I've been mostly paying attention to them all day, as you should.
This is your first tour since their birth. Is Elvis staying home with the children while you travel?
Oh no. I'll take them with me.
- mood swung
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So, is everybody adoring this as much as me? His best yet, I think. I love each and every song, with one exception.
ET (phone home!) wrote
and oldhamer said
not this time, old ham. It just makes me ardently wish Chrissie had stopped by when they were doing Hope For Us All, where she would have shined. Shined, not choked on self-loathing singing the crappy parts they cut out of one of those we-are-the-world songs. No offense, Nick, and everybody else who likes it. One dud in 12 is pretty darn good.
The rest is brilliant. The covers blend in so well. Reminds me kind of the Amy Winehouse retro thing, only coming out of that whiter side where that Pat Boone sound-a-like who recently died lives - and I mean that in a good way. The cover is cool. One thing - the photo on the inside: is Nick supposed to look like he's got dirt smudged on his nose? is he wearing those little glasses? is it just a FU on my copy?
Tour dates are beginning to pop up (none close enough to me yet, so please think happy thoughts there), and he's supposed to be on Conan on the 16th.
ET (phone home!) wrote
yep, that's the one.Except one track, People Change, is embarassingly cheesy
and oldhamer said
I think as mood once said, it's Nick Lowe cheese, so it's good cheese.
not this time, old ham. It just makes me ardently wish Chrissie had stopped by when they were doing Hope For Us All, where she would have shined. Shined, not choked on self-loathing singing the crappy parts they cut out of one of those we-are-the-world songs. No offense, Nick, and everybody else who likes it. One dud in 12 is pretty darn good.
The rest is brilliant. The covers blend in so well. Reminds me kind of the Amy Winehouse retro thing, only coming out of that whiter side where that Pat Boone sound-a-like who recently died lives - and I mean that in a good way. The cover is cool. One thing - the photo on the inside: is Nick supposed to look like he's got dirt smudged on his nose? is he wearing those little glasses? is it just a FU on my copy?
Tour dates are beginning to pop up (none close enough to me yet, so please think happy thoughts there), and he's supposed to be on Conan on the 16th.
Like me, the "g" is silent.
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well, we can agree at least that there's only ONE dud on the album. we just can't agree which one it is. Nick pushes the edge of cheesiness a lot - lyrically, sometimes it's ... garbage, but it's so powerfully delivered that (for me, - or as I'm known to my dyslexic friends (and self) - em), they transcend the cheesiness, at least 99.9% of the time. People Change falls in to that tiny percentage.I love People Change.....the only song that I skip is The Club, which i find a bit irritating for reasons I can't quite explain.
Now, The Club - how can you not love a song with this lyric: this club's not for the happy types, got up in pinks and yellows*?
*my best 11 pm interpretation/memory. subject to change.
Like me, the "g" is silent.
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BBC Four Sessions: Nick Lowe
From London's LSO St Luke's, Nick Lowe performs, with a specially assembled band, songs from his latest album along with old favourites including Cruel To Be Kind and You Inspire Me. [S]
BBC Four, Fri 20 Jul, 22:30-23:30 60mins Stereo Widescreen
BBC Four Sessions: Nick Lowe
From London's LSO St Luke's, Nick Lowe performs, with a specially assembled band, songs from his latest album along with old favourites including Cruel To Be Kind and You Inspire Me. [S]
BBC Four, Fri 20 Jul, 22:30-23:30 60mins Stereo Widescreen
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