Suzanne Vega: Suzanne Vega (A&M, 1985)


Suzanne Vega is perhaps the most imaginative and inventive songwriter in pop today. A bold declaration, and one I don't make lightly. For the hundredth time, I'm not given to hyperbole. I cannot think of another single songwriter who so consistently surprises me with a unexpected melodic turn or a clever lyrical faint, and who still manages to tie it all together at the end of the song so I'm left thinking I'd just heard the perfect song. Nearly every single time, at least six or seven times with each new album.

When I first heard Suzanne Vega I was probably eighteen, practicing guitar three or four hours a night, writing the occasional, strained song and nurturing secret dreams of touring with Tom Petty. The first time I listened to the album I knew it was special, but I didn't know how. The meandering melodies and soft-spoken vocals disguised the astute brilliance of Vega's austere, minimal lyrics.

As I listened through a couple more times, I began to recognise the layers - of meaning, of musicianship. Songs like "Marlene on the Wall", "Some Journey" and "Knight Moves" are like a core-sample of a life. The closer you look, the more you can extrapolate and deduce.

By about the fourth listen I realised that I'd never be able to produce a song I could be proud of or to play it as well as I wanted. But I also realised that I was okay with that, because somebody had already said everything that I could think of saying, and had said it more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy: Master and Everyone (Drag City 2003)


Don't listen to this if you're having doubts about staying married. Or even carpooling with someone for a long time.

Will Oldham, ever the free spirit, dissects this free-wheeling image and lets selfishness and desire off the leash with a self-conscious clarity of purpose - and production - and the results tell you (and the women in your life - for the moment, anyway) all there needs to be told about the workings of the male mind.

She loves a soul,
That I've never been
A dog among dogs,
A man among men
And every day,
When I come home to her
She holds a phantom,
She kisses and she hugs him
And I am not
Averse to how she loves him
Why must I live and walk,
Unloved as what I am

Why can't I be loved as what I am
A wolf among wolves,
and not as a man
Among men

She craves a home
That she can go in
A sheltered cave,
That I have never seen
Not in my life,
And not even in my dreams

Why can't I be loved as what I am
A wolf among wolves,
and not as a man
Among men

Unfortunately for the serial mongamists and co-dependents out there, this is what is going through your man's mind when you cuddle up to him on the couch after work.

At least you can rely on the fact that he probably won't leave. He'll bury it instead.

The BoDeans: Outside Looking In (Slash/Warner - 1987)


I've never understood why the BoDeans never made a bigger splash than they did. Treading a well-worn path between honest, blue-collar rock and Arizona-flavoured folk-country, they always managed to hang on to something authentic in the music.


Outside Looking In came on the back of the success of "She's a Runaway", off their first album, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams. "Runaway" probably raised label expectations, and Jerry Harrison was brought in to produce most of the album. The BoDeans release two biggish singles off the album, the mildly anthemic "Dreams", and party-driving "It's Only Love".


The fact is, a lot of Outside Looking In sounds a lot like "Runaway". There's a tantalising urgency to the set, even on the the quieter tracks like "Pick Up the Pieces" and "Someday". In fact, the only time the band sounds like they've grabbed a couple of beers and put their feet up in on the last track, "I'm In Trouble Again", which core band members and songwriters, Kurt Neumann and Sam Llanas produced themselves. But for all the urgency of the music and the earnestness of the lyrics, Outside Looking In never pretends to be more than it is, it never tips over into didactic preachiness or heartfelt advice for the lovelorn. It's always, always just about the song.


Which brings me to what I love about the album; whatever they're singing about, whatever new heartbreak they're committing to prostarity, they sound so darn happy just to be there - making music, feeling the guitar strings under their fingers and making a joyful noise just for the hell of it. And why the hell not.

Stephen Cummings: A New Kind of Blue (True Tone/EMI, 1989)


In 1990 I was kind of dating a girl that worked in the same department store as me. She had long red hair and looked perfectly at home in Laura Ashley prints and I was pretty certain I was in love.

I had a copy of Stephen Cummings's A New Kind of Blue. It was a fairly new acquisition; one of about seventeen CDs I owned at that early stage in my move from vinyl and hissy, dubbed cassettes for the car. I played the album for her when she was over one night. She looked at me like I'd trod on her toes when she heard the cheesy faux-trumpet opening of "When the Day is Done", but with "Screwed Up State of Affairs" she was being drawn in by the casual elegance of Cummings's delivery, and by "When Love Comes" She was hooked. We listened to the album twice more before turning in. The next day I gave it to her.

Stephen Cummings is one of those musicians that seems to have always been around; not standing on the perifary, but not garnering the string-of-hits success that passes for a measure of talent, either. I suspect that part of the problem is that Stephen Cummings is too smart for his own good. In Australia we like our singers the same way we like our footballers: fabulously successful, inordinantly wealthy regular guys.

Cummings is moderately (probably comfortably) successful - his songs still make rotation on the radio; he hasn't gone into real estate - and on the face of it, he's a regular guy. But listen to his lyrics - and their world-weary, heart-mended delivery - and the sheer brilliance starts to creep through.

I was trying to figure out where it all went wrong
You said, hey but you're so headstrong
You're way off groove
You can't make a move
Without screwing up
That's what you're doing
(from "Screwed Up State of Affairs")

It creeps up behind you and whacks you over the back of the head with a rolled up newspaper. Those rhymes should be hokey. Instead, they're the expression of a man having a laugh at his own expense, at his own tragedy. Cummings is possibly the closest thing to a Leonard Cohen that Australia has produced. Robert Graves once said, "There's no money in poetry; but then again, there's no poetry in money, either."

We dated for a couple of months before she decided I didn't fit in the life she was making for herself. But before it ended I took her out to a little hole-in-the-wall called Club Foote, and we sat at a little table and drank a couple of beers and listened to Stephen Cummings and his truncated band play two sets of about an hour and a half each. It was probably a conspiracy between the music, the beer and the romantic palpatations of my own heart, but that night is one of my favourite live-show memories. I still wonder, now and again, if she I come to mind when she listens to that album.

She does.

Liz Phair: Liz Phair (Capitol, 2003)
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Liz Phair fans hated this album before it was released. They heard she’d sold out. They heard that there was two tracks produced by THE MATRIX (the producers behind Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”), for crissake. They felt let down. They felt taken in. “How could you betray us like this?” they said, clutching their copies of Whip Smart to their chests; “How could you go commercial on us?”

Cursed with disproportionately good looks, Phair released her first album, Exile in Guyville – a song-by-song response to the Stones’ Exile on Main Street – and became the new Betty Page for tens of thousands of indy dorks (yeah, me included). From that point on she was doomed. Whatever she did next was going to disappoint. Whipsmart, Phair's second album sizzles with smart, smart-arse lyrics and alt-pop hooks - it was a great set in it's own right, but it wasn't Guyville. Liz Phair was Phair’s fourth album. With each release she was losing the alternative press – this one severed the ties.

Never mind these guys are now ten years older and many don’t still live with their mothers and some might have got day jobs, even been on a real date. A girl has to eat. In 2003 Phair was a single mother who made a pragmatic decision to chase the dollar. And she did this without compromising her values as a lyricist. If you pull your head out of your ass long enough to listen to some of the Michael Penn produced tracks, you’ll hear the same Liz you had that crush on before she broke your heart.

We got a Thing going on
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Music collections are extremely personal things. People often decide how much to invest in a relationship purely on the basis of what music someone likes. Some share their choice in music like they would treasured photos, use them to convey messages like clandestine go-betweens. Some conceal their favourites as if they were adulterous affairs.

In a spirit of openness, a brave, stupid few have taken up the challenge of throwing open their music collections to the world, inviting derision and ridicule as they justify, one by one, their musical acquisitions. It could be messy, it will probably be ugly, but it will surely be amusing.