Burt Bacharach and Daniel Tashian
Like many current pop records that take their cues from the past, the new EP Blue Umbrella skirts pop’s eternal content problem by concentrating on style. In this case, it’s a great style, and the content comes along with it. Daniel Tashian — whose co-production of Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 full-length Golden Hour helped create a pop album that doubles as a country record — collaborated on Blue Umbrella with pianist and composer Burt Bacharach, whose harmonically rich pop tunes helped define an influential strain of 1960s music. Blue Umbrella goes down easy, but it’s not retro.
Tashian and Bacharach recorded Blue Umbrella at Nashville’s Sound Emporium Studios in June 2019. For Tashian, who has lived in Nashville since 1984, working with the great songwriter — the new record is 92-year-old Bacharach’s first release of new original songs in 15 years — was an opportunity to revisit music that has become part of pop’s lingua franca.
“Bacharach’s music was one of the fundamental elements in the universe of music,” says Tashian from his Nashville home. “Mainly, the use of half-step major sevens and nines is something I find very pleasing to my ear. I asked Burt, ‘Is this part too dissonant right here? Should I try to straighten that part out? Is it too sophisticated?’ He said, ‘Nope.’ ”
Born in Norwalk, Conn., in 1974, Tashian grew up in a musical family. His parents are Nashville’s Barry and Holly Tashian, themselves fine singers and songwriters who have played country, bluegrass and rock music. Along the way, the younger Tashian has released a solo record, 1996’s T Bone Burnett-produced Sweetie, and he’s also written songs for the likes of Josh Turner and Lee Ann Womack. In addition, Tashian has led a pop-rock band, The Silver Seas, since 1999.
Blue Umbrella gives Tashian the harmonic space that Nashville songwriting tends to squeeze out of the picture. For Tashian, working with Bacharach — the songwriters began collaborating in Los Angeles in early 2019, after Tashian garnered a pair of Grammys for his production and songwriting work on Golden Hour — feels like a validation of his songwriting aesthetic.
“It’s been a struggle to learn it, and I think I really have learned the value of great collaborations and how they take on another dimension,” he says. “When I first got signed [to Elektra for the release of Sweetie], singer-songwriters were a part of my life. I was really into the folk scene.”
With Bacharach’s unmistakable piano leading the way, Blue Umbrella updates his signature sound. On now-classic Bacharach songs from the ’60s, lyricist Hal David created an idealized United States as viewed from a vantage point of middle-class leisure. For example, the duo’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” and the sublime 1970 B.J. Thomas hit “Everybody’s Out of Town” hint at the darkness that lies beneath the veneer of American consumerism and good cheer — but they are also exemplary pop tunes.
Daniel Tashian and Burt Bacharach
Tashian proves himself a suitably languid vocalist throughout Blue Umbrella. Every song sports a chord change that opens up the performance, and the record moves along at a medium tempo. On “We Go Way Back,” Tashian and Bacharach write succinctly about friendship: “Anyone who knows us / Knows we’re buddies / Yeah, that’s a fact / ’Cause we go way back,” Tashain sings. It’s the most affecting track on the EP.
Elsewhere, “Whistling in the Dark” finds Tashian walking in the rain, alone in an unnamed city. The track ends with two minutes of a stark two-measure figure, played by a string section, that repeats until the song comes to an end. Like “Everybody’s Out of Town,” the song is beautiful and subtly melancholy.
Tashian’s point of view as an observer, lost in the romance of the big city, works perfectly within the structures of Bacharach’s innovative music. Like other composers who helped revolutionize the sound of pop music in the ’60s — Brian Wilson, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Jimmy Webb — Bacharach expanded songwriting in ways that were unimaginable a decade before.
Tashian, who also released his second children’s record Mr. Moonlight earlier this year, tells me that Blue Umbrella is a stop on his journey as an all-purpose songwriter. Talking to him, I get the sense that he’s a pop adept in love with the idea of creating music by using time-honored conventions. In the New New Nashville, Tashian’s career suggests that the old country music capital might be ready for some California-style sophistication.
“After the project, Burt said, ‘Man, you really made a believer out of me about Nashville.’ I felt really proud, because that’s a testament to Nashville.”
