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Al
Stewart Engages You Emotionally |
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This month (September) Stewart and Nachmanoff are
releasing a collaborative effort
Uncorked that
Stewart says, “was a chance to explore things that I hadn’t played in thirty
years. I hadn’t played the “News From Spain,”
(1972) for thirty years for example. I hadn’t
played Warren Harding (1973) for thirty years, so I said let’s make an album of
obscurities and Dave thought that would be a great idea.
Uncorked
(consists of) all of the songs that I have neglected for thirty years and I
probably shouldn’t have done. We had a fine old time, because I have twenty or
thirty songs that I literally never play, so we started playing them at shows.
We dug up all of these things, and of course some of them didn’t work at all,
but some of them did (you can hear a quiet sense of satisfaction in his voice).
We got a great version of “News From Spain,” on this album with Dave, because he
took Rick Wakeman’s piano part and he covered it on the acoustic guitar and the
result is pretty mind boggling. It is different from the original, but I think
that it is (still) quite a powerful thing. The idea was to make an album of
obscure songs that people wouldn’t expect.”
In a way
Uncorked
represents the second piece in what could become a three part chronology of
Stewart’s career, as he previously did a live recording with Peter White with
whom he played for a good portion of his career, and that album covered
Stewart’s hit tunes. He has also expressed interest in getting together with
Laurence Juber (formerly of Wings) to record some of the songs from the four
albums that Juber produced for him.
Throughout most of his career, Stewart’s signature
has been his penchant for writing songs that cause the listener to think about
the lyrics and his words are often informed by historical events or the
reflection of cultural awakenings or transitions that took place during certain
periods of history, such as his thirteen minute odyssey “Class of ’58,” which
unfortunately the record label EMI wanted to drop from the album
A
Beach Full Of
Shells, and only agreed to let it stay, once
Stewart had literally gutted the song to make it more acceptable length wise in
the eyes and ears of the talking heads at the label. Stewart later released the
full thirteen minute version as a single.
Speaking about the EMI decision, Stewart says, “This
is something that annoyed me, because I have made I think, nineteen albums and
they all went fine, and no one at any record label has ever commented on
anything that I have ever done, apart from I delivered it, they stamped it and
put it out. “Class Of ’58,” was thirteen minutes long and it ran the whole gamut
of the history of British rock and roll, from ’58 to ’68, how it developed out
of forty year old session players doing horrible cover versions of America’s
greatest hits and how it eventually went through Cliff Richard’s
Move It,
which was the seminal record of English rock and roll.
Move It
was the first good record ever made in Al Stewart speaks rather melodically as his voice rises gently and falls softly, and his sentences seemingly flow into one another. His passion about songwriting is evident when he describes fellow artists such as Joanna Newsom as the best lyricist in the past twenty years, but his passion is never overbearing, his charm is disarming and his wit is ever present.
“If I engage you emotionally, it is accidental; it is
a much more intellectual thing. Most rock and roll is visceral and emotional and
I like the music to be like that. In fact, I have a personal credo which is play
like Eddie Cochran and to think like Barbara Tuchman. What I am looking
for is for the songs to go where they have never gone before lyrically and in
terms of subject material. I am a great dust bin. In the songwriting that I have
done, I will write about what no one else has written about. If someone has
written about love, or all of the things that normally get written about, I
don’t want anything to do with any of that. If I am going to write about
something, I want it to be about something that isn’t in popular music.
Secondly, I want to try and use lyrics that haven’t been used in a popular song
before. If you look at something like, “Royal Courtship,” on
A
Beach Full Of
Shells (The song is about) the Austrian empire
in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the king kept sending forth
different people to the object of his affection and they keep sending back
different people and the whole thing gets lost in translation, so they never get
together. There is language in there that is not in any other popular
song, so it is not only the subject material, but the actual physical words. I
try to make them different from what a normal popular song is. It is just
a way to write outside of the box,” says Stewart.
Stewart also likes to have fun with his music and in
one of his tunes from
A Beach Full Of
Shells, he inserts a pun and waxes
philosophical. He describes, “Katherine of Oregon,” as, “probably the simplest
song that I have ever written. After I had waded my way through all of these
fairly intense things (earlier songs such as found on
Between The Wars),
I wanted to write a really simple, straightforward, easy song about growing old.
“Katherine Of Oregon,” says that, “When
I get even more old than I am now / I will have a house overlooking the water /
And I’ll pile all of my suitcases up in the corner.”
If you are me, and what am I now, sixty-three, and I have spent literally the
last forty-five years of my life going around and around the world in circles
and I am still doing it. It never stops, but one day, the time will come when I
actually do have to pile up my suitcases in the corner and I will read all of
the books that I never got around to. Whether or not at that point in my life I
am able to spend my life with someone called “Katherine of Oregon,” I don’t
know, but it is such a nice idea. Eventually, if you spend your whole life on
the road, one day you are going to sit down and you aren’t going to do it
anymore. Of course ”Katherine of Oregon,” is a play on the six wives of Henry
VIII, because his first wife was Catherine of Aragon. I love the idea of just
this silly little pun coming into “Katherine of Oregon.” I liked it so much that
I was tempted to do another song called Ann of Cleveland,” he says laughing, an
allusion to Henry VIII’s fourth wife Anne of Cleves.
The past few years have been a renaissance of sorts
in Al Stewart’s career and he views his two recent solo projects,
A Beach Full Of
Shells and
Sparks Of Ancient
Light, as the long lost follow-up albums to
Past,
Present And Future recorded in 1973. He says
he had been diverted by all the pop records that he made during the 1970’s,
which he confesses had both good and bad things about them. He now believes he
has returned to the place that he wants to be artistically and
Uncorked
sees him revisit his folk rock roots.
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English
folk artist Al Stewart was speaking to me just hours before he was to open the
first of two nights in which he performed at Hugh’s Room in Toronto, Canada, one
of several Canadian and American appearances on his mini tour with guitar
virtuoso 
the Kinks and Phillips had Wayne Fontana
and the Mindbenders and it went down from there. If you absolutely couldn’t get
a deal with anyone there was Oriole Records and they signed Rory Storm and the
Hurricanes after Ringo left. Oriole didn’t have any of the first tier or second
tier (artists). I wrote my little throw away line, “the song came out on Oriole
and it did not make the charts,” and the thirteen minute version is full of
these little references. If you grew up with the English record industry you
would understand. I think the song went straight by EMI. I don’t think that they
understood what I was trying to do. They thought it was silly and they said, ‘We
don’t want this song on the album,’ so I edited it down to three minutes and
thirty seconds or whatever the hell it is on the record. I kept the beginning
and the ending and the whole of the middle is missing.”