Sometimes trying to make new pop music for grownups is a fool's errand.
Maybe by the time you hit 40 or so, you should move away from the dog-trotted rhythms and familiar chord changes that informed the music you swam through when you were a kid. Maybe there comes a time when we ought to put aside childish things when we realize that Chuck Berry had a business plan.
Or maybe there comes a time when you've got enough music, especially now that streaming services allow us to dive deep into our personal mythologies and build ourselves impregnable playlists thousands of tracks deep. We can insulate ourselves with Miles and Brubeck, with Jethro Tull and Rory Gallagher, with Janis Joplin and Janis Ian.
It's hard for new music to cut through that mix.
But you need to hear Arkansas native Chris Maxwell's new record, New Store No. 2 (Max Recordings). Given the way music distribution has evolved, that's not much of an ask, is it? Fire up your favorite streaming service, search for "new store No. 2," pop in the earbuds and listen.
Really listen.
That's what the album rewards, the deep attention that some of us used to give records after we brought them home from the record store, slit open the shrink wrap and gently settled them onto the turntable. Remember the days when you could spend hours with an album, staring at the cover, reading the liner notes and lyrics, and noting who played what on what track? Approach this with the same reverence, just as an experiment.
It opens with a tune called "Birdhouse," a synthy little swell, a six-note music box figure and then a slightly grainy male voice singing about how a bird got into his house on a "marvelous afternoon."
It makes me think of They Might Be Giants, the venerable New York alternative rock band that consists of John Flansburgh and John Linnell and their confederates. The obvious reason is that one of TMBG's most famous songs is "Birdhouse in Your Soul," which was one of three singles off their major-label debut Flood, which was released in 1990, the same year the Little Rock-based Gunbunnies -- for whom Maxwell was guitarist, singer and chief songwriter -- released their major-label debut, the Jim Dickinson-produced Paw Paw Patch. You might have caught "Birdhouse in Your Soul" back to back with the 'Bunnies "Put a Tail on Your Kite" on MTV that year.
The connection is deepened by the fact that, about 20 years ago, Maxwell and Phil Hernandez, who comprise the Elegant Too, a music production and recording entity, collaborated with Flansburgh and Linnell on a number of tracks (of which "Robert Lowell" seems the most enduring, though the instrumental cover of Paul McCartney's "Ram On" is wonderful in its own demented way).
Despite the contextual connections, the two Birdhouses don't seem to share much DNA: TMBG are going for full-on quirk pop, with oblique lyrics (the song is allegedly written from the point of view of a nightlight shaped like a blue canary), while Maxwell's is a lovely soul number that evokes the marvelous sun-shot afternoon Maxwell describes.
It feels warm and hazy, with dust motes dancing lazily as the singer morphs into the bird with Coltrane murmuring in the other room.
"Come if you want to," he calls to his lover, to us, inviting us to follow him on an adventure "you don't have to see to believe in."
Maxwell has said elsewhere that this album is made up of a mix of pop and personal songs, and the second track, "Walking Through the Water," is one of the most personal, derived from grief over the loss of his brother last year.
It feels meticulously calibrated, like one of those early Steely Dan cuts before Donald Fagan settled in as the band's definite vocalist. While the production is immaculate and the song arranged with a jeweler's precision, it's Maxwell's voice, always an interesting texture, that is the clear focus. It has aged into an exquisite instrument, capable of registering and delivering nuanced emotion.
Pay particular attention to how he comes into the second pre-chorus around 2 minutes 47 seconds in, at the slight quiver and exasperation that bleeds into the lines "All heads shake/All hearts break/All hands wave goodbye." It's the sort of vocal acting that Levon Helm could pull off, although we understand from Janet Steen's liner notes that Maxwell's not acting. (Or maybe he's method acting.)
Anyway, he leans into the second pre-chorus in a different headspace than he did the first time around. He's not just singing in the middle of the notes; he's like a painter for whom the draftsman's work has become automatic. There's a heartbreaking granularity to his attack.
Third track "K.J. Jamel" is a 26-second interstitial snippet, presumably of Maxwell's maternal grandfather chanting. Jamel was a Lebanese immigrant who came to Morrilton and eventually opened a dry goods store, the New Store No. 2 that provides the album and the fourth track a title.
A lilting melody is anchored by a gorgeous bass line, filigreed with piano, organ and horns and something sawing in the way back, as a life is limned Dorothea Lange-style in a few snapshots: "Got drunk with Pretty Boy Floyd/Loaded cannons in the Korean War/Sharpened knives and pedaled Levis/Then opened a general store ... "
Maxwell's voice then releases into the chorus: "Where Petit Jean lies on top of the mountain ... "
It's great production applied to excellent songwriting. While Maxwell obviously has a lot of resources he can apply -- his list of collaborators includes Amy Helm, Rachel Yamagata, Ambrosia Parsley, Marco Benevento, Zach Djanikian, Conor Kennedy, David Baron, Mark Sedgwick, Jay Collins, Aaron Johnston, Jesse Murphy, Cheme Gastelum, Larry Grenadier and others -- his mixes never sound cluttered, baroque or even terribly ordered.
They just sound right, soundscapes that pull the listener in, if the listener is willing to be pulled in. Magic never works on the resistant.
"Eloise" sounds like the best Paul Simon song of the 21st century right up until the moment it becomes one of Elvis Costello's most beautiful art song-y ballads.
Then we're back to the personal songs with "Cause and Effect," about a teenage car crash that claimed the life of one of Maxwell's best friends: "Blame it on the stars/Blame it on black ice ... Imagine a different day where it did not rain."
That's followed by a muscular soul number that merges Maxwell's junk rock credentials (he was part of rackety band Skeleton Key through much of the '90s) with Memphis Soul, the honking "Most of What I Know I Learned From Women." (While it's not our place to make such suggestions, this would be a great tune for Kev "Shinyribs" Russell to cover. )
Which is followed in turn by the string-driven chamber piece "I Wasn't Concerned Till Now" and the quasi-murder ballad "Jack Lee's Dead," which I'm guessing Maxwell would place in the pop songs bin, though they both demonstrate a mastery of aural sculpting and the song building craft.
"Dear Songwriter" is a wonderful bit of pop jazz that somehow reminds me both of Michael Franks and the Pixies and sets up the album closer, the ambitious and remarkable "The Song Turns Blue" which refers to the record we're just listened (closely) to, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Presley and the slow (until it's not) curdling of the world.
It's one of those anthems that sounds happy until you attend to the words, one of those hope shining into the oubliette songs that pop musicians can sometimes pull off better than poets. (Like Cohen said, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.")
People always tell me how useless it is to try to write about music. About the best a writer can do for a musician is to mention their name, loudly and incessantly, until people get annoyed and decide to find out for themselves.
Maxwell has grown up in this form and has had a lot of triumphs (his work for the Fox series Bob's Burgers is sometimes sublime -- the 30 seconds of "Sky Kiss," the outro for a season seven episode, is some of the best sugar pop this side of Astral Drive; Woodstock, a 2018 EP he produced for his old Gunbunnies' teammate David Jukes, has been in my go-to playlists for months). We might reckon a lot more disappointments.
His last two records -- 2016's Arkansas Summer and this one -- approach the pinnacle of a certain kind of adult pop music that was once fairly common (Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks, Joni Mitchell) but is now nearly extinct.
New Store No. 2 doesn't pander or condescend, and doesn't pretend to be any less intelligent or melancholy than it is. It doesn't pretend the world is a party or that we can change everything by holding hands and thinking sweet thoughts. It offers solace to those of us who can still find solace in something as transitive and ephemeral as pop music. It might reaffirm the faith of those who grew up on silly love songs.
Love isn't silly. Neither is family, or friendship or the warm community available in collaborating with people who have a certain expertise.
I've sometimes thought that what we call rock 'n' roll was rightfully the province of enthusiastic amateurs making joyful, accidental noise. But without intention, there is no art. And Chris Maxwell is an artist of the first order. You won't regret listening to him.
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Style on 02/23/2020