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Dear Elvis,
I’ve been listening to your new album every day since it arrived a week or so ago. What gives? I mean, you’ve experimented with concept albums in the past, but this is a double-concept album – wedding the idea of songs as correspondence to the post-Kronos notion of string quartet – as pop vehicle. You’ve dabbled with Promethean arrangements before too, but these 20 richly recorded, all-string instrumental tracks with the Brodsky Quartet make The Hollywood Strings Play the Beatles sound puny. And I thought Mighty Like A Rose was thorny!
I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought up your previous album, because I can’t remember a single tune from it, and I’m already humming the hooks to “I Almost Had A Weakness,” “Jacksons, Monk & Rowe” and “This Offer Is Unrepeatable” from The Juliet Letters. Not that you’ve given us a lot of upbeat, catchy melodies here. Most of the sprawling, shimmering 63-minute disc boasts dark sonorities, moody changes of tempo, meticulous manipulations of timbre, and other qualities more closely associated with the fine art song than with the pop ditty. But you have given us some of your best singing ever (roll over Frank Sinatra and tell Van Morrison the news) and ample doses of the old version that unrepentant new wavers really relish.
As for the Brodsky Quartet, I’m no expert, but I sure do like their sound. Together you’ve thrown down the gauntlet: pop musicians had better deal with strings seriously from now on – no more Paul Buckmaster sweetening.
But still, I have to wonder, despite your detailed liner notes, where this brilliant project really came from. Was your mother traumatized by a loud Bartók recording while you were in the womb? Did you listen to “She’s Leaving Home” on Sgt. Pepper over and over again when you were 12? Has your pal Paul finally gotten to you? No matter. It may take me three months to penetrate all the lyrics, and I may not be able to tell my Arditti from a hole in the ground, but I applaud your ambition and I love this weird wonderful record. I love Juliet, too, especially played by Olivia Hussey in that Zeffirelli flick. Cheers!
Derk Richardson
P.S. I’ll be there when you and the Brodskys perform The Juliet Letters at Davies Symphony Hall in SF on March 14 (Tickets go on sale Feb 7.)
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