Review of Nick Lowe’s The Old Magic (Yep Roc).Nick Lowe’s staunchest long-time supporter in the music business has been Elvis Costello – Lowe produced Costello’s first albums, they toured together, and Costello insured Lowe’s place in rock history (and ability to earn a living) by covering and popularizing his “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
Yet it’s hard to find two great singer-songwriters more different than Lowe and Costello at this stage in their careers. Costello’s work revels in the craftsmanship and effort that goes into the wordplay and melodic construction. He likes making you see that his art is very, very thought-through and dense with ideas. And his restless ambition propels him to keep tackling new and different styles.
Lowe, who at 62 is five years older than Costello, sounds on The Old Magic as natural – and at peace – with his musical approach as the Dalai Lama does at prayer. His craftsmanship is seamless. His songs and his vocals, a relaxed and warm but never slick form of gently introspective country- and soul-tinged Americana, fit him as well as crooning did Bing Crosby. And his writing – eight of the 11 songs here are his – is both artfully careful and as casual as conversation. It’s also dreamily romantic, but in a very adult way.
It’s as if Lowe, looking at the history of the kind of country music he loved, decided that it isn’t the hard-living outlaw stuff that allures him, as it does so many Americana artists, but the slightly mournful, casually elegant burnished ballads of Eddie Arnold or Jim Reeves (“He’ll Have to Go’).
Reeves was called “Gentleman Jim” for his delicately expressive voice and Lowe could easily be called Gentleman Nick. Yet Lowe isn’t just reviving a style; there’s something crucially new here. That kind of music was known as countrypolitan because the pop-styled arrangements seemed to hide the roots. They sometimes cloaked good melodies and lyrics in artificiality.
But Lowe has found a way to bare its soul while also revealing his own. The arrangements have overtones of the early Muscle Shoals sound of Arthur Alexander, as well as just a touch of the mysteriously ruminative uptown soul of, say, the Drifters’ “Mexican Divorce” or Ruby & the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come.”
His band of Geraint Watkins on keyboards, Steve Donnelly on guitar and Robert Treherne on drums is perfectly attuned to his intentions. It’s too active to be called “backing,” yet never tries to usurp his voice. Occasionally, there’s a bit of a Tex-Mex sound to the organ, or even a ska-like swing to the horns (on his cover of Jeff West’s “You Don’t Know Me At All”). Lowe and Treherne produced the record with Neil Brockbank.
Lowe’s “Sensitive Man,” with the ever-so-slight male background harmonies and the muted brightness of the horns, could be an early-1960s Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition by way of Nashville. And the lonely organ and wandering bass on the lovely “‘Til the Real Thing Comes Along” dredge up memories of “Any Day Now” and “On Broadway.”
Yet The Old Magic has an honesty to the writing that is more important to Lowe than conquering any particular style. He may make it look easy, but he obviously works hard at it, which is why this is his first release since 2007.
And he isn’t merely trying to find the best rhyme (although he has a keen knack for internal rhymes within a line). He’s trying to make sense of his surroundings, while surrounding himself with the ghosts of music past. And often they conjure the ghosts of personal memories past; the songs are often about lost love and personal failings. The lyrics to the metaphoric “Checkout Time,” which is both playful and revelatory, includes “Must I be condemned, forever damned for some long forgotten crime/Or singing Rock of Ages with the angels soon after checkout time.”
His songs about heartbreak and loneliness are tight wonders, focusing on some specific object or activity to illustrate his feelings in a concrete, vernacular way – as in the instant classic “House for Sale” and “I Read a Lot.”
The one song that works less well than the others is written by Costello, “The Poisoned Rose.” And it’s a good one, too – a melodically twisty, slow-build torch song, part jazz/blues and part George Jones, that builds to an exciting finish. But it also lets you know it’s written to impress you, whereas Lowe’s songs seem as second nature to the ear as air to the lung. And also as valuable. He’s a modern master.
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