FITTING INTO": LA Arrangements have become Kelley’s livelihood.
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When Paula Kelley left Boston for LA two years ago, some of her fans were concerned. Would she stick to the idiosyncratic pop that had been her staple here in town or start pumping out fodder for film soundtracks? Not to worry, she said last week as she prepared for a return visit. “Sure, I would love to write a piece of crap for money, given the opportunity,” she noted over the phone from her Silverlake home. “But you have to try so hard to hone that piece of crap to be the exact piece of crap people want. That’s embarrassing and un-fun. I have met with people who are into that songwriting-for-money thing, and I decided not to go into that. The great thing is that my agent likes me because I’m different and is marketing me as such, so he’s not making me write inane bullshit.”
Kelley’s previous album, The Trouble with Success or How You Fit into the World (released three years ago on Kimchee), is sounding more and more like one of the best local records of the decade, a semi-autobiographical suite that’s deeper and more ambitious than anything she’s done. So it may be a surprise that the overdue follow-up, Some Sucker’s Life, Volume 1 (Stop, Pop & Roll), is a disc of rarities culled mainly from her time leading the band Boy Wonder in the mid ’90s. She was good then; she’s much better now. By the time she went solo, she’d developed a deeper voice (in both senses) and worked her Bacharach/Bee Gees/Cardigans fanship into something more personal. Many of these tracks are worth unearthing: her take on Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Burning for You” is lovely and not a bit campy, and “Born To Be a *” could’ve been a Hole song circa Celebrity Skin. But the one new song, “Goodbye September” is the kind of indelible pop gem she’d been reaching for all along.
Given Kelley’s self-critical streak, why has she chosen to air rough demos? “These are the ones I could live with. It came out of the move, since Aaron [Tap, her husband and guitarist] found these scads of four-track tapes and said, ‘Okay if I go through these?’ I said, ‘If you want to put yourself through that, go ahead.’ It was interesting for me after we got past the more cringeworthy stuff. Hearing the old demos, I realized that the arrangements were always in my head from the get-go. So maybe my brain knows what it’s doing sometimes.”
Arrangements have in fact become Kelley’s livelihood. While making The Trouble with Success, she wrote scores for strings and horns, and she’s now working as a studio arranger. She’s lately done scores for the local group Turkish Queen and contributed to Bleu’s upcoming ELO tribute project. Meanwhile, work on her next proper album is finally under way. It’s likely to include some of the complex epic songs that she started playing live before she left town. “It won’t be any less over-the-top. One of the songs is another big-opus number; there’s four movements in it. It scared me a little when I wrote it. If the last album was my life story, maybe this one is the afterlife.”
Some new songs will debut this Tuesday when Kelley and her “Orchestra Jr.” will join the Silver Lining at their Abbey Lounge residency. It’s only the third time she’s played in town since the move, and her first full-band set. On July 8, she’ll be back at the Lizard Lounge for a one-time reunion of the Boyjoys, the Bee Gees tribute group she and Ad Frank put together a few years ago.
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TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT: Merrie Amsterburg comes to the rescue of “My Darling Clementine.”
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If you’re of a certain demographic, you’ll never be able to hear “My Darling Clementine” without imagining it sung by Huckleberry Hound. That’s one reason Merrie Amsterburg recorded the new Clementine & Other Stories (Q Division) — to rescue traditional songs. Interviewed at the Cambridge Common, she notes that she also turned up a version of “Streets of Laredo” by ’70s troubadour and “Wildfire” guy Michael Murphey, who treated it about as well as Huckleberry Hound did “Clementine.” More important, Amsterburg, who’s written plenty of deep and haunting songs herself, wound up falling in love with the traditional material. So what began life as a breather between original projects has now eaten up most of the six years since Little Steps (Zoë/Rounder).
Clementine still sounds very much like a Merrie Amsterburg album, with the same blend of rock, pop, and folk elements and a voice full of longing and regret. Some songs are done in traditional style; “Clementine,” however, becomes a full-fledged rocker with long-time partner Peter Linton doing some ripping lead guitar. And you don’t often hear the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts” with drum loops. “I was surprised myself at how they came out,” she admits. “That was the hard thing — to make it sound genuine for me but also to be true to the spirit of the song. I realized there were people living in these songs. ‘Simple Gifts’ had to be frenetic, so it could capture the Shaker experience of ecstasy. And I realized ‘Clementine’ had to be in a minor key when I thought about the history and the lyrics. Being stuck in a cave with your father is not a very attractive life.”
The closing funereal version of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” sounds like a political statement, but she says she recorded it before the Iraq War was declared. “It plays into my own memories of the Vietnam War, seeing the brutality everyday on TV and knowing my brothers would’ve had to go if they’d been drafted. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Amsterburg has written the songs for her next album, and she’ll be working on that next year. Meanwhile she’s been performing at grade schools, much as Pete Seeger used to, and largely for the same reasons. “Hopefully it will teach kids something about history and geography, where they live and where they come from.”
PAULA KELLEY + SILVER LINING | June 27 | Abbey Lounge, 3 Beacon St, Somerville | 617.441.9631