Last time
David Baerwald
released an album -- and it was a good, long nine years ago -- he went for the deliberately obscure and willfully difficult, from the title
Triage
on down to the deep, dark grooves of the music. Now, in 2002, he came back seemingly from nowhere with a record that announced its intent in its title:
Here Comes the New Folk Underground
. Of course,
Baerwald
didn't spend the years since
in exile -- he was an instrumental force in
Sheryl Crow
's breakthrough
Tuesday Night Music Club
and was nominated for a Golden Globe for
"Come What May,"
the love song for
Baz Luhrmann
's
Moulin Rouge
. Still, the comeback in 2002 seems apropos of nothing, but
claimed in the press release accompanying his album that he thought there was no place for his kind of songwriting until
Lost Highway
came along. And that very well may be true -- though he certainly wasn't a stranger to slick productions in the past (both
David & David
Boomtown
and his solo debut were state-of-the-art productions), he wrote songs more reminiscent of short stories than radio-ready ditties, and his music was firmly entrenched in classic
singer/songwriter
tradition, hardly a welcome sound in the
post-grunge
'90s. So, he sat it out, eventually coming back once the
alt-country
movement made it OK for him to resurface, but the thing is, as this understated but gloriously realized comeback illustrates, he's both too literary and too musical to be grouped with the humorless, doggedly serious traditionalists that have laid claim to
roots
music and
tradition through passive-aggressive maneuvers. With a sly, deft hand,
reveals the folly of treating songwriting as a gravely serious matter, turning out a record that is warm and musically supple, filled with words that are as effective at relating pathos as turning a joke. This doesn't reveal anything new, but it's much more accessible than
, more resonant than
Bedtime Stories
, and as consistent, in content and theme, as
. This doesn't mean it's a masterpiece, since he still falls into some of his pitfalls -- pretension gets the better of him a few times, whether it's in the deliberately sub-
Bukowski
,
Randy Newman
-meets-
Tom Waits
"If (A Boy Whore In a Man's Jail)"
or the "slip-slide" motif on
"The Crash"
-- but these become endearing with repeated listens, and the fact is, very few contemporary songwriters wind up with albums as musically and emotionally satisfying as this. Let's hope it doesn't take a decade for
to release another record. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine