How much do I love Freedy? Assume I’m a pay check to pay check guy to start with so now lemme tell you I paid $56 to see Sheryl Crow at the Beacon, watched Freedy open and left , bc I got stand Sheryl (except for “If I Makes You Happy”. Go figure) . That was back in the nineties.
But last years covers album (starting with brother in lost causes Marshall Crenshaw) seemed relentlessly irrelevant to me and before that the last great Freedy album was the astoundingly blue Blue Days, Black Nights with the truly heartrendering “The Farthest Light”. I’ve written about this song often (not here I don’t think). A relationship is crumbling, an astronomer and his wife wave goodbye to friends who are leaving and the wife is leaving him as well. He stares into the sky, the light coming him from a great distance just as his wife looks at him him from a great distance: “so familiar and so far away”. he says “the farthest lights take us back in time, wonder how they’ve changed?” A heartbreaker. 1999.
Freedy’s first album of new material since 2001 was released on January 11th and damned if I knew about it. I went to new releases and checked em all out last Tuesday and didn’t see it. I started with one though I’ll end up buying the lot:, “Never Fall In Love With A Lonely Girl” off Rain On the City and it’s not “Bad reputation” but it’s not “Promises” either. It is a perfect Freedy pop song -a nicely twisted break, a great chorus, strings don’t get in the way and the guy can really sing.
I will explore further but you can buy “Lonely Girl” (buy the Justin one as well!!)
ps: im assuming you know the bloke to a degree, if you don’t buy This Perfect World immediately and “Tucumcari” and “The Lucky One” soon after.