As one of the more cerebral songwriters in popular music, Paul Simon once sang, “Maybe I think too much.” Tom Freund might wonder the same about himself. Though it’s hard to fault Freund’s ambition, the third solo album by the respected sideman (Silos et al.) finds his conceptual reach extending well beyond his lyrical command.
From the “Copper Moon” of the title cut that opens this song cycle to the “New Moon Of The 7th Sun” that closes it, and through the various phases of the moon in between, Freund subjects the listener to a string of images that are more maddeningly opaque than luminously lucid, set to music that invites comparison with an array of retro influences.
To what end? This listener is still scratching his head. On “C’est La Vie”, is the artist really this pretentiously cosmopolitan, or is this a send-up of such world-weariness? In “Babysitter (I’ll Watch Them)”, what exactly does it mean when he asks, “Why do pretty girls, I mean really pretty girls, always take the brunt of the litter?” And just what is he trying to signify in “October Girl” when he sings, “You once told me my hometown was very male in its ways, and I couldn’t agree more, uh huh”?
The opening and closing songs would fit fine on a Jackson Browne album from the early ’70s. “Leavin’ Town” and “Comfortable In Your Arms” pivot on Freund’s walking bass that evokes the beatnik noir of early Tom Waits, “Mercury” is Stones Lite, “Married To Laughter” channels the spirit of Buffalo Springfield’s “Bluebird”, and none of it gives me any better idea of just who this artist is, other than a guy with a penchant for American atmospheric enigmas. Where his 1998 solo debut, North American Long Weekend, brimmed with promise, Copper Moon sinks beneath the weight of its self-conscious poetics.