Chip Taylor – Unglorious Hallelujah
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Posted On July 1, 2006
Songwriters are as properly wary of cliche as critics, but both know cliches often earn that designation because they’re true. So here goes: Chip Taylor’s new two-CD set — one disc is titled Unglorious Hallelujah, the other Red Red Rose (And Other Songs Of Love, Pain, And Destruction) — would have been stronger had its 24 songs been edited to a single disc.
Taylor’s a veteran songwriter (“Wild Thing” and “Angel Of The Morning”, as incongruous a pair of mega-hits as one might imagine coming out of the same composer) and performer who once left the music business for a career as a professional gambler. His profile has risen in recent years through his duo work with the much younger Carrie Rodriguez, whose twangy voice and fine fiddle provide a zesty counterpoint to Taylor’s quiet, plainspoken vocals.
The prolific Taylor says that as he accumulated songs which didn’t lend themselves to the duo format, he’d gather his musicians (John Platania on guitar, Anton Fig on drums, Rodriguez on occasional harmonies) for “a few hours of musical therapy.” As with therapy sessions, some recording sessions turn out more productive than others. So for every tune such as “This Old Town”, which evokes a hometown sweetly defined by family, there’s an undercooked song such as “I Need Some Help With That”. And while the two discs are loosely organized by themes — Unglorious Hallelujah addresses the world at large while Red Red Rose focuses more on the personal — they share a common inconsistency.
Songs such as “Daddy Why’d You Take My Guitar Away” (“You took that Gibson, and my heart too, and ran down south with a girl named Sue”) and “Red Red Rose” (“I’d like to buy you underwear, underwear, for under there”) are not about to endanger Chip Taylor’s reputation as a distinctive songwriter. Yet one suspects he knows what Townes Van Zandt might say about a rather generic (and self-conscious) tune called “What Would Townes Say About That”. He’d say the collection’s concluding ballad, “I Don’t Know Why I Love You (I Just Do)”, is a much better song.
