The Impossible Bird included some of the twangiest pop music of Lowe’s career, featuring the chugging guitar licks of Bill Kirchen on a hilariously unproductive “12-Step Program (To Quit You Babe)” and stripping everything back to highlight Lowe’s wearied vocals for “Withered On The Vine”.
Dig My Mood, a much jazzier affair, was actually reviewed in Downbeat, thanks to torchy tracks such as “You Inspire Me”, which Tony Bennett should cut immediately, and “What Lack Of Love Has Done”, a song that summarizes perfectly the intent of Lowe’s latter-day songwriting even as it provides a stellar example of the same. “Well I go around the world, and this is what I do/I say love’s a hurtin’ thing, ’cause I know it to be true/When I get up in the spotlight and my story has begun/I try to explain what lack of love has done.”
“I know [my cliches] when I hear them,” Lowe says. “That certain kind of glib thing, being too clever with plays on words. What I like about The Convincer, and my last record and the couple before it, and a few other things as well, is I can’t hear my old cliches.”
The Convincer opens with “Homewrecker”, in which a man who’s been kicked out of the house by his wife calls out the woman he blames for tempting him astray. “You look like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth,” Lowe begins. Then, after a long menacing pause: “But I know it will.” The rest of the album is filled with men finding their way back home.
The music here, provided by keyboardist Geraint Watkins, guitarist Steve Donelly, and Lowe’s longtime collaborator, drummer Bobby Irwin, with Nick himself on bass, is by turns smokey and pristine, rootsy and lush. Several songs possess the soulful rhythms of Muscle Shoals, but they go where they need to go. The comically impatient fellow in “Has She Got A Friend” watches the clock to rockabilly licks and “Bye Bye Love” drum turnarounds that suddenly open up for a bridge that suggests Gamble & Huff. In the spare folk of “Indian Queens”, a man rambles around before deciding to return home for what he’s lost, and appropriately enough the melody keeps hinting at “Detroit City”. “Some of these days I’m going to get back on my feet and quit this blue address,” Lowe vows on “I’m A Mess”, a simmering country-soul number that would have been perfect for Charlie Rich.
And always the focus is on the songs, which Lowe has crafted and crafted until the craft has disappeared. “You’re always taking stuff out,” he says. “You never put stuff in; you’re always removing stuff. Taking it out, making it more concise and shorter and clearer. I work on it like mad until it feels like I’m singing someone else’s song and I can take any kind of liberty with it I want.”
When Lowe’s finished whittling, what remains is ordinary speech. Or rather the illusion of it — songs where melody and language are so completely intertwined that it just seems natural that the singer should be pouring his heart out in lines sparkling with the most elegant internal rhymes.
“That untouched Tanqueray/I brought home the other day/Has quite a lot to say,” he admits in “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide”, his phrasing as easy as unhurried conversation. “Please reach into your quiver/And deliver/One last time,” he pleads in the stunning pop-soul of “Cupid Must Be Angry”.
In this context, it’s easy to see why he was drawn to cover Johnny Rivers’ “The Poor Side Of Town” (opening couplet: “How can you tell me how much you miss me/When the last time I saw you, you wouldn’t even kiss me”). It’s about welcoming someone home, tentatively, and its language is as straightforward as Lowe’s own.
At the close, one of his characters sings “Let’s Stay Home And Make Love” to the woman he adores, and after a musical quote from “Tears Of A Clown”, Lowe affects, subtly and for just a moment, the smarmy croon of a lothario. It’s comic, deliberately so, but he’s not entirely kidding, either. His wink is just a self-effacing way of smoothing the path for his earnest plea, a playful way to convince the woman of the sincerity of his desire.
The songs on The Convincer can be very, very funny; they’re Nick Lowe songs, after all. But these songs, like the best of the Tin Pan Alley tradition, as well as those written by latter-day masters of the pop song such as Leiber & Stoller, Pomus & Shuman, Smokey Robinson, Roger Miller, Harlan Howard, Bacharach & David — are not just funny. They have bottom.
“A couple of years ago, I was at home for Christmas,” Lowe recalls, “and my old dad struggled up to the attic and came down with this gigantic Grundig tape recorder. It was one of those real ’50s jobs, where the tape runs really, really slow. You get about a day’s worth of recording on one tape. He put this tape on of me running through my repertoire at about age eight or nine. And apart from the squeaky, high little boy’s voice, I was amazed by how it sounded exactly like what I do right now. It’s basically exactly the same stuff.”
David Cantwell and fellow ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren have just completed Heartaches By The Number: A Critical Guide to Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles, to be published next year by the Country Music Foundation. There are no Nick Lowe or Rockpile singles in the book, but there could have been.
