Highs and Lowes
The irrepressible Nick Lowe, playing the Belcourt this week, still pops for the moment
If you go see Nick Lowe expecting the perky poppiness of his Stiff Records classics, prepare to be shocked, although the music Lowe's purveying these days is certainly "Pure Pop for Now People," as his Stiff motto read. It's just that that was then and this is now.
Then, Lowe was working with a record label so close to his vision that he wrote a song, "I Love My Record Label," for it. He was an artist, a producer, a sideman and, soon, a star. He married royalty—Johnny Cash's stepdaughter Carlene Carter—and formed a supergroup with Dave Edmunds that lasted just as long as supergroups should.
That was then. The marriage ended, a second supergroup, Little Village, flopped, and things got kind of quiet. A couple of years ago, new albums started appearing. It was the same wry man with the same melodic gift, but cheery, goofy Nick was gone, replaced by someone who'd taken a hard look at himself, and didn't always like what he saw. The music, too, was moving toward a more intimate, late-night-in-the-lounge kind of sound, although traces of the country and pop stuff remained. Lowe's most recent album, The Convincer, is a collection of statements about loneliness and despair (one's even called "I'm a Mess") leavened by a few brighter moments, but continuing the theme of honest introspection about personal failures.
It sounds a lot grimmer than it is, thanks to the music, much of which is made with a keyboard player named Geraint Watkins, who'll open for Lowe at the Belcourt Tuesday. A man who titled an album Watkins: Bold as Love clearly has a sense of humor, but he's also got serious soul and jazz chops. No doubt most reviews of his new album, Dial "W" for Watkins, will focus on his Mel Torme-like reading of the Beach Boys' "Heroes and Villains," but there's some serious songwriting going on here, as well as some serious silliness. Watkins helps Lowe from falling into bathos by injecting his own left-field personality into the mix.
A double bill for adults, or any people who live in the now. In other words, now people.
—Ed Ward
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