Tony's Picks - 2022

It’s that time of year when every music/movie/book critic puts out his/her favorites for the year. I’ve done only one of these in the past few years because I simply didn’t have the time or energy to do it. This year I have plenty of time. I'm not so much a critic as I am a fan. Last year’s list was fairly eclectic with progressive rock, metal, English pop, some Americana, and a chick singer. For the most part, this year’s list has a bluish tint.

Bonnie Raitt - Just Like That... [2022] – Death casts a shadow over this collection of songs, and since it was recorded while the pandemic was raging, why not? There’s a convicted murder who seeks redemption as a prison hospice worker in Down the Hall. In the title track there’s the stranger who shows up unannounced on a woman’s doorstep after he received her dead son’s heart via transplant. Bonnie alludes to those no longer with us in Livin’ for the Ones, when she proclaims “If you ever start to bitch and moan, just remember the ones who won’t ever feel the sun on their faces again.” For the rest of the album, you get what one comes to expect with a Bonnie Raitt release ever since Nick of Time [1989], and we’re better off for it.

Buddy Guy - The Blues Don't Lie [2022] – The last of the blues giants is finally slowing down. His tour to support The Blues Don't Lie has been billed as the farewell tour. Unlike others who’ve had farewell tours only to come back [The Who, Kiss, Ozzy], I’ve got a feeling that at age 86, this one will stick. Since 2008, Tom Hambridge has been Buddy Guy’s producer, and since 2008 there’s been a formula. Guest musicians? Check. Songs written by Hambridge, Gary Nicholson, and/or Richard Fleming? Check. Playing like the assassin that Jimi Hendrix wanted to be? Check. For the most part Buddy has been recording the same album for over thirty years, not that there’s anything wrong with that. The only thing that doesn’t work here is “I’ve Got a Feeling.” Buddy Guy and the Beatles are mutually exclusive, and they should remain that way.

Eric Gales – Crown [2022] – “My name is Eric Gales – any questions?” So begins this superb album. Once upon a time, Eric Gales was a blues prodigy. He released his first album when he was sixteen. Eighteen albums, descent into drug addiction and some jail time later, Gales releases a flawless album. Produced by fellow blues prodigy Joe Bonamassa and his partner in crime Josh Smith, Crown has the blues, rock, soul, rhythm & blues, funk, a little bit of swing, a healthy dose of horns, and guitar heroics – lots of guitar heroics. Most of the songs are written by Gales, Bonamassa and Smith, Gales sings about race, jail, getting knocked down and getting back up, his wife [who sings backup and takes lead vocals for Take Me Just As I Am]. Check out Gales’ guitar duel with Joe Bonamassa on the title track. Somewhere Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan are smiling. I have one question, Eric – why has it taken this long for me to find you?

Larry McCray - Blues Without You [2022] – Like Eric Gales’ Crown, this too was produced by Joe Bonamassa and Josh Smith. Those two are getting pretty good at the record production thing. The lead-off song Arkansas is a smoking autobiographical, horn-laden, funky statement of intent. Without Love It Doesn’t Matter changes things up immediately thereafter with a Fats Domino groove. Breaking News, with a 1970s sound of horns and strings, draws inspiration from the steady drumbeat of bad news heard every night. Roadhouse Blues [not to be confused with the Doors song of the same name] is Albert King territory. Drinkin’ Liquor and Chasin’ Women is back to the Fats Domino vibe [thanks to Reese Wynans]. Down to the Bottom is a big ballad with Warren Haynes. Mr. Easy is a slower, funkier tune with exceptional horns and the guitar talents of Joe Bonamassa. The album closes with a solo acoustic blues called I Play the Blues. I’m not sure which is the better album – Crown or Blues Without You – but both would be worthy additions to your blues collection.

Los Lobos - Native Sons [2021] – This came out last year, but I didn’t buy it until this year. Musicians had lots of time on their hands when COVID hit, many of whom recorded new music with imaginative titles including the word “lockdown.” Los Lobos put some thought into what they would call their collection of songs recorded under similar conditions. This is a covers album [except for one original song, the title track], but this one has a theme – it features a dozen songs originally written and recorded by artists from Los Angeles. Their choice of songs reflects the melting pot that is LA music. They cover the Chicano side with Thee Midniters, Lalo Guerrero, and Willie Bobo. I admit to being ignorant of their music, but as luck would have it, the one song I did recognize was Lalo Guerrero’s Los Chucos Suaves, which I heard him sing on Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine album [on which David Hidalgo played]. They venture to the black side with War’s The World Is a Ghetto. Their clever medley of Buffalo Springfield’s Bluebird and For What It’s Worth brilliantly captures the interplay of the guitar parts as done by Stephen Stills, Neil Young and Richie Furay. They keep the original arrangements but add their own Los Lobos spin. One band I never imagined Los Lobos would cover is the Beach Boys, but they chose wisely which song to cover – Sail On Sailor. The other knuckleball they threw me was when they ventured into singer/songwriter territory with Jackson Browne’s Jamaica Say You Will.  Only once did they pay tribute to one of their contemporaries – The Blasters [Flat Top Joint].  This eclectic set of songs is a good companion piece to The Ride/Ride This [2004], which included performances from a couple of the artists covered here [The Blasters’ Dave Alvin and Thee Midniters Little Willie G.]. Covers albums are ok for a stopgap, but I would love to hear original music from this great band.

Tears for Fears - The Tipping Point [2022] – Here’s something that is completely unlike anything on this list. I have always been a sucker for good English pop, and this one’s pretty good. Eighteen years had passed since TFF’s last album [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending]. They wanted to record another album shortly after that last album, but Roland Orzabal’s wife got sick. She died in 2017, then Orzabal had his own bouts with ill health. He turned to his TFF partner Curt Smith to create something new. What resulted was a collection of songs dealing with loss, grief, and reconciliation. Given my own circumstance, this hit home, and it spoke to me – I knew the feeling all too well. That is reason enough for me to include this on my list.

Edgar Winter – Brother Johnny [2022] – Johnny Winter has been gone since 2014, when he passed away in Zurich while on tour. His brother Edgar resisted doing a tribute album. He felt like doing so soon after his brother’s death would be exploitative. Eight years have passed, and Edgar reconsidered – the time was finally right. For this album he gathered many guitarists - Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Joe Bonamassa, Warren Haynes, Derek Trucks [without his wife for once], Billy Gibbons, David Grissom, Joe Walsh, Steve Lukather [yeah, the Toto guy], Doyle Bramhall II, and Keb’ ‘Mo. Oddly enough Rick Derringer is nowhere to be found here. Edgar sings some but not all of the songs. His voice has gotten gravelly over the years, but this is the blues, so it works. Rather than go song-by-song because they’re almost all good, I’ll single out one as being great – Mean Town Blues. Edgar sings, Joe Bonamassa plays. I single this one out because, if you close your eyes while you listen, you can hear Johnny Winter. Joe B nails Johnny’s tone. This is an Edgar Winter CD, but it’s his brother’s music, and it’s wonderful.

Gov’t Mule - Heavy Load Blues [2022] – Ever since the Allman Brothers Band called it a day in 2014 [and Gregg Allman’s subsequent death two and a half years later], Gov’t Mule has been the next best thing for me.  I have followed the Mule since the beginning, when Warren Haynes and Allen Woody were still in the Allman Brothers and Gov’t Mule was still a side gig.  In those 28 years hence, Heavy Load Blues is the first [and hopefully not last] “all-blues” album. Of the twenty-one songs that make up the two-disk version, thirteen of them are songs by Little Milton, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Junior Wells, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, and Muddy Waters among others. The remaining songs have the blues vibe but have the hard rock ethos we’ve come to expect from Gov’t Mule. One foot in the blues, indeed. I saw Gov’t Mule twice this year, and the “new” songs were fabulous. Eleven years ago, Warren Haynes recorded an R&B/soul album under his own name, Man In Motion. It’s the blues side of soul [the “B” in R&B is “blues," after all]. I think of Heavy Load Blues and Man In Motion as companion pieces. Buy both of them.

Walter Trout – Ride [2022] – Walter Trout is one of the best blues guitarists nobody has heard of. I saw him open for Gregg Allman in Sacramento in 1998. I loved what I heard and have been a fan ever since. Ride is his 30^th [!] album, a superb follow-up to his equally superb Ordinary Madness [2020] album. Trout’s music is joyous, or at least as joyous as the blues can be. He can step on the gas and go full throttle, or he can ease back and play a slow, minor-chord blues that would make Gary Moore or Peter Green proud. A ferocious soloist, this 71-year-old blues man shows no signs of fading into “adult contemporary Hell,” unlike a British guitarist of renown I could mention.

Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs - External Combustion [2022] – I never saw Tom Petty live. This year I saw the next best thing, Mike Campbell and his band The Dirty Knobs. I saw them open for Gov’t Mule in October. Wouldn’t you know they played a fairly Tom Petty-centric set, but I digress. External Combustion is this unit’s second album [Wreckless Abandon (2020) being their first]. During his life as a Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell never had to write an entire album’s worth of material himself. With a songwriter as great as Tom Petty he never had to. Now he’s done it twice, and he’s made the transition from being Tom Petty’s co-pilot to front man look easy. It can’t be easy to start your career over when you’re seventy, but Mike Campbell has done it. In addition to the hard-hitting rock one comes to expect from the Dirty Knobs, they cover more stylistic bases - rockabilly [Bridget Bardot], “country”-ish rock [Electric Gypsy], ballads [State of Mind, In This Lifetime], boogie [Lightning Boogie], and ELO/Revolver-era Beatles [Cheap Talk]. With External Combustion, Mike Campbell & the Dirty Knobs have avoided the sophomore slump.

The 1980s - Tears for Fears

I am a sucker for good English pop songs.  That’s why I like Tears for Fears.  A guilty pleasure?  Perhaps.  If Ritchie Blackmore and Cozy Powell can like ABBA, I can like Tears for Fears.  They came along at a time [the 1980s] when I was of college age, when She Who Must Be Obeyed and I started to get serious.  Hearing them today reminds me of that time, before middle age, before deaths in the family, before the bodily sound effects that come with waking up every morning, before cancer, and before dementia.

I first heard this group in 1985.  They had this album called Songs from the Big Chair.  When I saw the cover of the album I thought “who are these smug-looking English twerps with bad 80s haircuts”?  And what was this "big chair" that these songs came from?  More on that later.  Tears for Fears [where did that name come from?] was two guys from Bath, England - Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith.  In an interview with iTunes, Curt Smith described the both of them as guys who didn’t know their fathers very well and were primarily brought up by their mothers.  Both are in my age group [a little more than a year older than me].  Both had an interest in primal therapy and the writings of Arthur Janov.  If you know anything about the Beatles, you’ll recognize that name.  John Lennon heard about his primal scream therapy, which was a huge influence on the songs on the solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band.  One of Janov’s books, Prisoners of Pain (1980), talked about children’s nightmares and the need for “monsters”.  Children invent things that they’re scared of because they’re afraid to admit the real things they are scared of, which could be parents, teachers, peer groups, etc.  The theory is that if children were allowed to be more natural [like crying, for instance] instead of being told to shut up and quit crying, then maybe they wouldn’t have these fears – tears as a replacement for fears, hence the band’s name.

I wasn’t what one would call a huge Tears for Fears fan.  Far from it - I was a casual fan at best.  I was on my own musical trip in those days which had nothing to do with English pop.  Songs from the Big Chair is probably everything one could ask for in a mid-1980s album.  Keyboard synthesizers? Check. Programmed drum machines? Check.  Somewhat pretentious lyrics? Check.  Bad haircuts?  Check.  Very British?  Double check.  Suffice to say, Songs from the Big Chair is an album of its time that could be a museum piece for 1980s music.  But here’s the catch – there are some catchy pop tunes contained therein.  The songs were always on the radio.  We didn’t get MTV where I lived.  On the occasions I did get a glimpse of MTV, there were the TFF videos for Shout and Everybody Wants to Rule the World in constant rotation.  Suffice to say, TFF got a heavy dose of exposure from the musical outlets at the time.  This was a time when radio DJs could play pretty much whatever they wanted to play, and MTV actually played music videos.  Oddly enough, although Shout and Everybody Wants to Rule the World made a mint, they weren’t even the best songs on the album.  I thought the two songs were okay, but then I heard the six-note introduction to the next single, Head Over Heels.  THAT song piqued my interest.  That was the hook, and I’ve been hooked ever since.  Oh…that “big chair”?  They got the title from the movie Sybil, she of the multiple personalities.  Tony’s rating – 4.

To show how closely I paid attention to TFF, for years I thought Songs from the Big Chair was their debut album [heresy!].  That honor goes to The Hurting (1983).  I’m sure only the hardest of hardcore TFF fans knew of this album’s existence.  It did well in the UK but barely dented the album and singles charts over here.  It is only in retrospect that I found there was more music where Songs from the Big Chair came from.  While both Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith shared an interest in the work of Arthur Janov, Orzabal wrote all the songs on The Hurting.  And all the songs touch on, one way or another, subjects covered by Janov in his work – primal scream therapy, broken relationships, childhood trauma and the like.  Curt Smith sang the more poppy tunes like Mad World and Pale Shelter, while Roland Orzabal took the main mic on the more brooding, navel-gazing material.  As for the sound of the album, I hear lots of Peter Gabriel’s third album.  You wouldn’t think such dark subject matter would sell many records, but UK fans ate it up.  I wasn’t a teenager in Maggie Thatcher’s England so I probably can’t relate personally, but this music struck a chord with the English music-buying public.  Some of what is contained within The Hurting is music to slit your wrists by.  Trent Reznor probably owes his career to these guys.  Tony’s rating – 3.75.

Things got more interesting for me regarding Tears for Fears.  In 1989 they had a new album, The Seeds of Love.  The title song [sort of] was Sowing the Seeds of Love, and it sounded very familiar, almost too familiar.  And then it hit me – I Am the Walrus!  That was one of the more wacked-out songs John Lennon ever did, and it remains one of my favorites to this day.  It turns out I wasn’t far off the mark.  A few years ago, TFF did a live-in-the-studio concert that was like a VH1 Storytellers format.  Roland Orzabal told the story of the song’s creation.  He wrote it during the same week Maggie Thatcher won her third election as British Prime Minister in 1987.  Hence the line about someone not “knowing how the majority feels”.  Curt Smith chimed in that the song was an homage, a “blatant rip-off” of I Am the Walrus.  Even if you played the song acoustically you can hear how Beatle-esque the song is.  Suspicion confirmed! 😊

The idea for the whole album was to get away from that 1980s sound which they were known for and change up the sound in a radical way.  With the hit singles they had, they’d made their money, now it was time for something more “artistic”.  In retrospect, that was a damn good idea because the two albums that came before sound like the time from which they sprung.  Not so The Seeds of Love.  It has a more timeless quality.  Orzabal said they wanted to get away from that Eighties sound and come back with something surprising and shocking.  Their Beatles influence kicked in, and that of Little Feat and others.  They looked back at the history of rock and roll and wanted to compete with that instead of their contemporaries.  They wanted to recreate the orchestral atmosphere that was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, because not many people have been able to do it, but when they do it’s pretty exciting.  I think they pulled it off.  The drum machines and sequencers were replaced by real drums and humans playing them, there are real strings [not synthesized strings], you’ll hear a Hammond B-3 organ here and there, and better still there are longer songs that are more free-form.  TFF brought in a third voice, a female voice, that of a singer they found in Kansas City.  Her name is Oleta Adams.  On the more “soulful” songs, that’s where she comes to the fore. 

The Seeds of Love is definitely NOT for those with short attention spans.  The album took a long time and a lot of money to make.  The Beatles weren’t the same after they finished Sgt. Pepper, and The Seeds of Love had a similar effect on TFF.  Since the album took such a long time to make [roughly three years], Orzabal and Smith had a falling out.  Also, Smith and his first wife divorced.  Plus, they discovered their manager was misappropriating band funds, and they argued over whether to keep him or fire him [they eventually fired him and took him to court].  After the tour for the album, Orzabal and Smith “divorced”.  They had been playing in bands together since they were teenagers, they were nearly thirty, and each wanted to seek his own path [sound familiar?].  Despite the album being a product of the 1980s, The Seeds of Love has aged well.  Tony’s rating – 4.5.

The Seeds of Love didn’t get a proper follow-up for fifteen years.  When Curt Smith left, Roland Orzabal kept the Tears for Fears name and made records that were TFF records in name only.  They didn’t sound like TFF records.  They were Roland Orzabal records.  He found a new musical partner named Alan Griffiths.  The two records they made together [Elemental (1993) and Raoul and the Kings of Spain (1995)] were okay.  There’s good music to be found on those records.  They’re just different and don’t sound like TFF.  Alan Griffiths is a good musician, but Curt Smith is a far better singer.  That counts for a lot.  If you take the good songs from each album you can make one good album.  Tony’s rating [for this period] – 2.5.  After Raoul and the Kings of Spain, TFF released an odds and sods kind of thing that collected the B-sides of their singles onto their own album called Saturnine Martial & Lunatic [1996].  After that album’s release, Tears for Fears quietly dropped off the musical map.

After fifteen years apart, Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith reconnected.  Despite all the time they were apart, they still had some non-musical business things that kept them tied together.  One day while conducting business, Orzabal emailed Smith [he didn’t have his phone number].  They exchanged emails, then they talked.  According to Orzabal “the angst had gone…we had different lives.”  They had grown separately from when they were growing up as kids in Bath.  Once they reconnected as friends, they wondered whether they would be able to make any music that had any commercial viability.  The two joked amongst themselves that they got together to create an album that has a “happy ending”.  Curt Smith went so far as to say that if their career and their break-up after The Seeds of Love was a Hollywood movie, they would have to re-shoot the ending to give the movie a happy ending.  What came next was called Everybody Loves a Happy Ending [2004].

If The Seeds of Love was Tears for Fears’ “Sgt. Pepper”, then Everybody Loves a Happy Ending is their Magical Mystery Tour.  Magical Mystery Tour was not an exact musical clone of Sgt. Pepper, but it had the same “peace, love and hippy shit” vibe to it.  Everybody Loves a Happy Ending was the perfect follow-up to The Seeds of Love that Elemental was not.  Both albums have the same vibe to them such that I like hearing them back-to-back [mostly], as you’ll see on my playlist.  While the Beatles connection on The Seeds of Love is Sowing the Seeds of Love, Who Killed Tangerine serves the same purpose on Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.  It has the same drum pattern [almost exactly] as that on Come Together, and if you listen closely right before the chorus [repeated a lot like Hey Jude] you can hear an orchestral sample from A Day in the Life.  One song doesn’t make for an album.  This one is packed with good, melodic music.  Curt Smith contributes more to a TFF album since Songs from the Big Chair.  In his time away from Tears for Fears, he gained a new musical partner - Charlton Pettus.  Pettus, Orzabal and Smith wrote the whole album.  Tony’s rating – 4.

Tears for Fears are reportedly recording another album.  I’ll believe it when I see it.  Thirty-four years have passed since Songs from the Big Chair, and I like their music more today than when it was first released.  Here’s my suggested playlist:   

1.      Sowing the Seeds of Love [The Seeds of Love, 1989] *

2.      Who Killed Tangerine? [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004] *

3.      Raoul and the Kings of Spain [Raoul and the Kings of Spain, 1995] *

4.      Head Over Heels [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985] * -> Tony’s favorite TFF song

5.      Everybody Wants To Rule the World [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985] *

6.      Shout [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985] *

7.      Mad World [The Hurting, 1983] *

8.      Pale Shelter [The Hurting, 1983] *

9.      Bad Man's Song [The Seeds of Love, 1989]

10.  Advice for the Young and Heart [The Seeds of Love, 1989] *

11.  Swords and Knife [The Seeds of Love, 1989]

12.  Year of the Knife [The Seeds of Love, 1989]

13.  Famous Last Words [The Seeds of Love, 1989]

14.  Tears Roll Down [Tears Roll Down (Greatest Hits 82–92), 1992] *

15.  Everybody Loves a Happy Ending [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004]

16.  Closest Thing to Heaven [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004] *

17.  The Devil [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004]

18.  Secret World [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004] *

19.  Quiet Ones [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004]

20.  Killing With Kindness [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004]

21.  Ladybird [Everybody Loves a Happy Ending, 2004]

22.  Floating Down The River (Once Again) [Secret World Live in Paris, 2006] *

23.  Porn Star [Curt Smith - Deceptively Heavy, 2013]

24.  I Love You But I'm Lost [Rule the World: The Greatest Hits, 2017]

25.  Ideas As Opiates [The Hurting, 1983]

26.  Watch Me Bleed [The Hurting, 1983]

27.  The Prisoner [The Hurting, 1983]

28.  The Working Hour [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985]

29.  Broken [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985]

30.  Head Over Heels / Broken [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985] – this isn’t a typo; I have both the single and the album tracks listed.

31.  Listen [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985]

32.  Broken Revisited [Songs from the Big Chair, 1985 (Deluxe)]

33.  Elemental [Elemental, 1993] *

34.  Cold [Elemental, 1993] *

35.  Break It Down Again [Elemental, 1993] *

36.  New Star [Saturnine Martial & Lunatic, 1996] *

37.  Don't Drink the Water [Raoul and the Kings of Spain, 1995]

38.  Creep [Live] [Raoul and the Kings of Spain, 1995 (reissue)] – this isn’t a typo either; they did a good job on the Radiohead song.

*Available on compilation Gold [2006]

If complete albums are your thing, buy Songs from the Big Chair, The Seeds of Love, and Everybody Loves a Happy Ending.  If you want just the hits, the compilation Gold [2006] is a “can’t miss”.  You can cherry-pick the rest of the songs from the other albums.