60 Watt Silver Lining

構成数 : 1枚
合計収録時間 : 00:54:02
Personnel: Mark Eitzel (vocals, arranger); Mark Isham (trumpet); Bruce Kaphan (piano, pedal steel, bass, organ); Daniel Pearson (acoustic bass, mandolin, drums); Simone White (drums).
Recorded at Music Annex, Menlo Park, California and Hyde Street Studios, San Francisco, California in September and October 1995.
With the breakup of his band, American Music Club, which applied weird, shifting rock arrangements to barbed and wired torch ballads, singer-songwriter Mark Eitzel was left to hang out in a bar. There, backed by a smoky, acoustic jazz band that includes two other AMCers and trumpeter Mark Isham, he sings brooding pop songs for and about junkies, fag hags and other misfits. As he puts it in "Some Bartenders Have The Gift Of Pardon," Eitzel is at home in a room "with the same old tape wearing out in the background/Billie Holiday `Solitude' or some sad old Irish folk songs." He's the guy in the back scrawling poetry in a notebook, counting his failures and dreaming of being Barbra Streisand or Carole King.
In fact, 60 WATT SILVER LINING opens with a cover of King and Gerry Goffin's Brill Building classic "No Easy Way Down," which looks matter-of-factly at someone else's fantastic failure and offers no comfort except for a pillowy pop hook. It's "a better song than I could ever write," Eitzel claims in the liner notes; but what really matters is how perfectly it serves as an overture for Eitzel's own word play. He allows himself one actual love song, "Saved," and for the rest of 60 WATT SILVER LINING he roots and croons for an assortment of oddball acquaintances whose only real hope is that their own failures can at least be fantastic ones.|