my new band includes Steve Pinkerton from The Anyones and the Ronson Hangup on drums and flute traverse, Matt Ridgway from Winterpark on guitar and stuff, Ian Kitney from Overnight Jones and The Temperance Union on bass, and various floating instrumentalists.
Beyond the din of popular music, the chimes of artistic freedom can be heard. Michael Dwyer meets some of those putting meaning to melody.
No matter which way you read it, Bob Dylan's honorary Pulitzer Prize of April just didn't scan. To those long hip to his revolution, it was a lame apology for a sustained and deliberate insult from the American literary establishment.
Besides, what do songwriters have to do with that world any more? It's 40-odd years since Allen Ginsberg drew fleeting academic attention to Eleanor Rigby and Subterranean Homesick Blues. Popular song has long since resumed its lowly status in the public imagination, a village idiot to the educated society of art and literature.
That perception is based, of course, on the overwhelming audibility of the lowest common denominator. Where is the legacy Bruce Springsteen identified when he inducted Dylan into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame 20 years ago? "Bob freed the mind," he said, "the way Elvis freed the body."
Gone to ground, is the short answer. The genie Dylan let loose can never be rebottled but, from an industry viewpoint, it's obvious that the body remains the more attractive dancing partner. Art is ballast for music tragics while cheaply synthesised froth rises ever more thickly to the top of the charts.
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If there is a silver lining to the global freefall in CD sales, it's the palpable ascendancy of this kind of thinking in a new generation of independent musicians. Cheap home-recording facilities, the new MySpace democracy and fading prospects for mass-market penetration are redrawing aspirations at a grassroots level. It's not likely to be a rebirth of Forster's "golden age of songwriting", in which the inner monologues of Dylan, Lennon, Morrison and their ilk briefly intersected with the appetites of the commercial mainstream. But the collapsing pop market may slowly clear the air for less calculated, more individualistic voices to be heard.
Melbourne auteur Ross McLennan (no relation to Grant) hasn't been anywhere near the ARIA Top 100 with his latest home-recorded opus, Sympathy For the New World, though it has been lavishly praised by critics. Comparisons to unstable pop geniuses Scott Walker and Brian Wilson are apt: there is a kind of madness in McLennan's motivation and process.
"I guess it quietens my brain down," he says. "I start off angry and confused and upset about something and when I come out the other side, when I have one of those moments that I consider magic, when I've nailed exactly what I wanted to say, even if it doesn't make sense, I'm very happy and relaxed at the end of it."
His new album's impressionistic theme is of a world unhinged by fear, dogma, greed and other seeds of destruction. Welcome to World's Fair is its dramatic culmination. Its rolling rhymes and half-spoken, free-metre form recall Beat poetry, one of his recurring influences.
a solitary soul surveys the paucity of potential suitors pushes past her fellow commuters looks around and sits down next to the guy with the brown tie and the laptop computer the heavily coutured strain under the weight of their creations their postures wear the gravity of their special situations and the doors groan open for the latecomers come one, come all comers take a seat, welcome you are all frontrunners
The trip winds on, morphing into a metaphor for social hierarchy and aspiration, until haves and have-nots reach their mutual destination in the fire of a terrorist's bomb. Only in the indescribable shock of the explosion does the song spiral out of literal narrative into what McLennan calls "magical thinking".
the 8.15 rounds the corner past the everyday people suddenly swirling up around the synagogues, minarets and steeples a traditional lament that travels by world's fair encoded in its resonant machinery cats' whiskers and leg hairs laid flat like the scenery and it tolls as it tears flesh and sprung fit panels it tolls as you scan the shortwave channels it's kept burning in trapped flame a crucifix filament its pealing hand is dealing to the guilty and the innocent and people forget that people are born people forget
Again, meaning and emotion soar beyond the realm of poetry. Lugubrious horns play the desolate traffic, sliding strings infer the slow outward pull of camera perspective. Rebecca Barnard's husky chorus vocal is the broken mother's plea while the narrator's tone mirrors the short journey from boredom to confusion, disbelief and devastation.
Speaking about his influences, McLennan mentions novelist/philosophers Kurt Vonnegut and Albert Camus before John Lennon and Ray Davies, but "Dylan's always there," he says. "I remember reading . . . about the madness he went through when he was writing Chimes of Freedom. I feel a sympathy for that type of mind."
It's that type of mind, rather than anything you can notate, record and take to the bank, that defines Dylan's legacy among his golden-age peers and countless subterranean acolytes. Maybe it's neither pop nor poetry they're writing but something with no practical use for a shelf label at all. It was only ever popular by default, after all, when the auteurs of the '60s briefly took control of the vehicle and leapt the rails of teenage heartbreak and euphoria to cruise the labyrinth of imagination.
The often-asked question of whatever happened to the great songwriting visionaries is easily answered. They were simply sidelined by an industry with no time for mind games and a greed for instant gratification. Who can even wonder why pop idols are now fine-tuned on TV by expert panels and SMS voters? Commerce demands vast committees that overrule all but the most obvious keynotes of heartbreak and euphoria in songs we already know by heart. These are the tunes that play best in the mall.
"We're not making wallpaper for people," says Ross McLennan. "When people go shopping they want wallpaper. That sounds misanthropic; I don't mean to be. Maybe it's just rare these days to find intelligent people wanting to pursue pop music as their favourite thing."
One suspects it will take more than one Pulitzer Prize to change that, but at least the chimes of freedom are still tolling out there for those with a mind to listen.
Influences
I'm unsure of the significance of any of my various influences. Due to various neuroses and obsessive characteristics I listened almost exclusively to the beatles from age 13 to 15. I scaffolded myself to a whole bunch of 60's stuff later on, partly through fear of the unknown but also 'cause it just clicked. I don't feel like part of the retro thing yet I love the morbid resonance of very dated sounds put in different contexts. Driven largely by financial reasons, fear of my contemporaries, and a growing interest in tape loops and samples etc, my main music purchases became old op shop records. This really fragmented my listening habits. That's kind of where I've been at up until the time of writing. I forget alot of stuff so it's difficult for me to think of the names of tons of stuff that has had an impact on me.
Inescapable influences; the beatles, the beach boys, gershwin, debussy,
w.c. handy, jesus christ superstar, desmond dekker, kurt vonnegut jr, michael leunig, the jam, pavement, and many more.
I used to be in a band called snout. Now I am a person. In 2003 I released a solo album "hits from the brittle building". It was album of the week on the JJJ youth network if you must know. I have recently completed another album which has been released by mistletone records. It is called
'sympathy for the new world' and it is as grandiose as the title would suggest.
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“There is genius among us” - MUSIC AUSTRALIA GUIDE
“Ross McLennan excels with this stream of musical consciousness, forging a new strain of languid psychedelia from off-kilter strings and spidery guitars, all spilling harmonic colours outside the lines” - THE AGE A2
“Like Beck, Brian Wilson or Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, McLennan’s musical vision is unimpeded by predictability or tradition… As time passes, McLennan asks more of his listeners but all parties can take that as the highest compliment.” - THE AGE EG **** four stars
“If you want an Australian album that will still be causing you glee and aural wonderment in 2050, hunt down this gem” - HERALD SUN **** four stars
“McLennan’s voice is like a lone man walking through the night with a lamp, so it doesn’t tread heavily but it does find a way to inveigle you along. This is an album in the mould of Scott Walker but with its pop heart as valuable as its head.“ - SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“Yet another sparkling, irreverent slice of cerebral pop that leaves you scratching your head - bewildered that such a musical magician is not globally revered, sought out as a musical Dalai Lama, a new Jesus of Cool” - RHYTHMS
“Whispered vocals and noir-ish psychedelia, like a collaboration between Lambchop and the Flaming Lips” - WHO Weekly
“A fresh and fascinating grandiose pop gem” - TIME OFF **** four stars
“With Sympathy For The New World McLennan announces himself once and for all as one of the few truly original pop songwriters in the country, and trust me, you’ll be hard pressed to hear a better album all year.” - BEAT
I am back in Melbourne on Wednesday night for a very special
performance with the immortal Victoria Williams. We are playing The
Empress Hotel in Fitzroy. It starts at 8:00pm. So come on down and
spend an evening with us before Victoria bids Australia a reluctant
fare-the-well and heads back home to the beautiful expanse of the
Californian desert …
Dan Lethbridge continues his June residency at Wesley Anne this Thursday with support
from one Tim Cannon. Come warm yourself by the open fire, have a drink
and relax with some fine music.
Ross I was BLOWN AWAY by the Thornbury Theatre gig felt very spoilt that night to hear such quality in such a cool old building. Hope you do another one soon where you're allowed to do the encore evreyone wants at the end... Ben
Hey Ross McLennan, we've had a coulpe of weeks off the live circuit to lay down some funky new electro glam numbers which we will be unveiling at our next show - Sat 28th Feb at the PUBLIC BAR in good ol' NORTH MELBOURNE - with support from COMFIRMED REPTILLIAN and MACHNIA - entry from 8pm - Get yr freak on !!!
High! Pablo here, reporting from Inner Space to wish you a great 2009! (we interrupt this comment with a brief announcement): Pablo's first new album in 5 years,"Take Two," Is Here & Now! -16 tracks of sugar coated insanity - Stop by my page to hear 4 new songs! (P.S. the new album is best appreciated on a higher plane....;)) God bless!!! P
Hey Ross, How was your christmas? Are you enjoying your holidays so far? I am :) but sometimes i get so bored that i want school to come back! =S I get worried about myself sometimes. Anywho, have a good one & KEEP IT REAL! xo bec
