David Baerwald – Here Comes The New Folk Underground

Two words that show up repeatedly in reviews of David Baerwald’s albums are “intelligent” and “Bukowksi”. The former is because Baerwald’s lyrics eschew standard romantic fare in order to essay big ideas, such as faith and despair, and because their turns reveal both more and less than might be expected. The latter reference is because Baerwald’s dissipated searchers generally inhabit dreary urban locales that overlap with those of the late Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski.

What’s overlooked in all this attention to Baerwald’s lyrics, however, is the music in which he places them. Here Comes The New Folk Underground, for example, is powered by eager pop hooks, shimmering guitars, and sly soul touches that contribute to meaning just as much as the words.

Baerwald’s Lost Highway debut is his first solo album in nearly a decade, but he’s been busy all the same. Baerwald was a major player on Sheryl Crow’s debut Tuesday Night Music Club; her hits “Leaving Las Vegas” and “All I Wanna Do” were co-written by Baerwald and bear his lyrical signature (cruel boomtowns that leave specifically named characters regrouping around down-sized dreams). And like one of his biggest influences, Randy Newman, he spent much of the ’90s writing movie songs (“Come What May” from Moulin Rouge, for instance) and composing film scores.

New Folk Underground returns Baerwald to the sort of pop music he made as half of the short-lived ’80s duo David & David. His lyrics are as intelligent as ever, and as moving. He often succeeds by having opposing images and moods butt heads. On “The Crash”, for example, the singer’s drunken partner, Rachel, is described with expected Bukowskian detail — she cuts her knee on broken glass and rips her stockings on an ashtray — but she’s also granted a moment of delicate grace: “She let the air flow through her hands.” At the chorus, the song’s seemingly innocent refrain (“Slip-slide, we were takin’ a ride”) is devoured by its grim resolution (“and we crashed”).

But the music matters too, particularly on those cuts where Baerwald uses soul-inspired arrangements. “Bozo Weirdo Wacko Creep” borrows the exuberant bass line from Charles Wright & the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band’s “Express Yourself”, a musical choice that adds a bitter twist to the track’s name-calling chorus. Similarly, “Love #29” is clearly inspired by the Brothers Johnson’s “Strawberry Letter 23”, yet Baerwald’s missive is more sour than sweet.

Best of all is “Compassion”, an infectious, chugging bit of not-quite-power-pop. Singing without a hint of irony, Baerwald neither mocks compassion nor cynically deploys the term to camouflage its opposite, as in recent pleas for “compassionate conservatism.” Rather, the song simply presents the emotion as one we might want to second. “Sha la la,” he smiles at the chorus, the better for all to sing along.