Marshall Crenshaw’s album by segments is now in its second year and sixth installment with no lessening in quality: six new songs, six covers, six live songs, six re recordings, and all about exactly what you would’ve hoped. Much like the Easybeats cover here, “Made My Bed, Gonna Lie It”, it is youthful, quirky, superbly arranged with some great harmonies, like the Beach Boys go to Liverpool, and oddly out of time. Everything Crenshaw touches right this second has this sense of innate dignity without being stuffy. Nobody would consider the Easybeats song stuffy, indeed, it is a confused song about growing up, but the Crenshaw take is also about growing old. It is a great take on an oldie I’d forgotten long ago; it expresses pride in craft and in time.
The re-recorded “Something’s Gonna Happen” makes maybe the most sense here, one of his earliest songs, the tale of infidelity and seduction, sounds fuller and more powerful or would do except it is actually the earliest home demo version of it, before Crenshaw met Alan Betrock (so much for my ears)! Which is great because I don’t think the masterpiece needed it, I mean after Ronnie Spector has covered a song I guess it is kinda over, right? But this demo version only adds to the legend.
“You Should Have Been There”, the live one,has a spectacular guitar solo, probably why Crenshaw chose to release it, and “Grab The Next Train” would have fitted nicely onto Downtown and also on to What’s In The Bag? Both of them. It has the beautiful blues moodiness but with even more distraughtness. It is another perfect Crenshaw song, a sturdy construction that belies the fault lines just below it, the song is like an earthquake that haven’t exploded.
Obviously, I am a well documented fan of Crenshaw’s songwriting, like Patrick Stickles, Taylor Swift, Joseph Steinhardt and Tomas Doncker -he is a songwriter I completely get. Still, here is a complaint. I am so hungry for an album filled with new material but the music business world is such that, as Crenshaw himself noted, you spend two years working on an album that disappears in a week, and I haven’t gotten a new album this decade. Maybe it is a lot of work for a little, yet Jaggedland is still there, isn’t it?
Grade: A
