"Change His Ways" by Robert Palmer (1988)

Aside from cloying humidity and beaded necklaces designed to elicit fleeting nudity from soused dames, southern Louisiana is known for a delightful musical melange of R&B and Creole called zydeco. Largely driven by accordion and guitar, zydeco is custom built for filling the dance floor with ebullient joy, so no matter your age, color, or creed, it's pretty hard to sit still once those propulsive rhythms kick in. So naturally, zydeco connects with people who live for dance music. People like Robert Palmer.

"Change His Ways," a tale of the ebb and flow of a love affair, is a musical outlier on Heavy Nova, but it does feature Palmer's trademark vocal harmonies as the foundation to the zydeco flavors, adding layers of sweetener to a song that doesn't need it but benefits from it. And I haven't even mentioned the yodeling yet. Palmer's peripatetic zest for genre-hopping may be off-putting to some, but tracks like "Change His Ways" offer further evidence that Palmer can serve the song, no matter the genre. Or the yodeling.

Comments

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...

Some 2024 Listening Pleasures

It started with a gift of two JBL Control 25 speakers, and by "gift" I mean "borrowed" -- a.k.a. "will never return" -- from an obsolete tech detritus pile at work. I may have snagged more than two gifts, of course, but the raw footage proving such a claim remains elusive. And after installing the JBL speakers into the upper corners of the music room, and after installing speaker stands for the rear speakers I already had, and after making the hard choice between a big-ass bean bag and a comfy leather recliner to properly center myself in the audio field (R.I.P., big-ass bean bag), there was only one missing piece: the Apple TV 4K unit. So for me, 2024 was the year I streamed a lot of music in Atmos through Apple Music, surrounded by new tunes and old bops in thrilling new dimensions. Some might say you don't need surround sound, 'cos the two ears + two speakers modality has been dandy for a while now, but that's like saying you don't need ...

“Keep America great”

“Keep America great” Right now, I can’t watch MSU or U-M football, I can’t go see a movie at the State Theatre, I haven’t been to a concert in almost a year, my neighborhood is swaddled in flags made in China that aren’t the Chinese flag, I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since February, some of my retirement stocks lost almost 40% of their value, I can’t find certain types of food and drink in the stores, the price of toilet paper has exploded, we are running out of coin currency in circulation, and I haven’t set foot in a classroom since 11 March, which is the last time I saw my friend and colleague alive. “Keep America great” In the United States, there is minority rule from an ignorant off-white supremacist cult leader and the rich and powerful people who can misuse the law and his followers to become more rich and powerful, while people that don’t look like them are being shot in the streets or their homes, or being put in concentration camps where infants wail for their absent ...

THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Search This Blog