[face of glass]

Ah, the Christmas rush. No time to post when you want to. And the Ledge can be down sometimes too. Sorry about that; I won’t be digging up this old stuff anymore.

But Johnny Stew deserves a proper answer, as usual:

I tend to think sometimes that he's too self-conscious in his attempts at diversity though, but that's ok...
Individuality is a VERY good thing, but it's always best when it's not forced or over-thought.[/b]

I agree about Lindsey’s self-consciousness. I sometimes get this feeling of some ideas of his being “forced”; they can just jump at me and startle me. It was a bit like that with “Say Goodbye” too; I didn’t feel instantly comfortable with that guitar percussion and the fast tempo. However, I’ve always felt that if there’s something for me to like in a track, it will eventually win me over. Go Insane may be dated in the terms of tone colours but otherwise I have no problem enjoying it. With “Say Goodbye” I got over certain things very fast. But I agree that music should often appeal to one naturally; you shouldn’t force yourself to like it.

Yes, individuality can be “forced or over-thought” (God knows how many times I’ve been guilty of that). But when you’re doing works of art, plenty of them, you’re bound to start repeating yourself if something/someone doesn’t shake you up once in a while. Stevie is very natural in her writing but I’ve always felt that she too often presents the same thing from a different angle and it can wear me off. But it’s my problem, I have my preferences in this band’s canon too.

I've always felt that production touches... even the most avant-garde ones... should be done to benefit the song. Not just for the sake of being different.

I understand. If it’s “songs” you’re after, then I accept your viewpoint with no qualms whatsoever. When I listen to music I’m not always after songs though. A simple keyboard drone can be enough, provided that it creates an atmosphere I haven’t heard before. If it creates a picture of something into my mind, if it makes my back shiver or if it moves me in any way, then it’s good for me.
Les said it better and in a much more up-to-the-point way than I ever could, but I’ll try this again: Lindsey can often work like an abstract painter. He may not try to create a portrait with a single song; he’s just trying to grab a particular random/senseless/significant moment into a recording. In Les’ site LB says the following on the “Artwork” page:

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Jackson Pollock paintings before he threw away his brushes? They’re making this attempt to get to this sense of something, and he can feel it with his body and he can see it in his mind and he’s not getting there! And then suddenly, one day, he says, “Well, screw this!” And he throws the canvas down on the floor and he starts dripping paint on it and you see this tremendous sense of release and energy! And that’s, you know, a fairly apt analogy, I think, to what can happen in music as well if you sort of break through barriers and find new ways to work with colors.

That, I think, is what happened to Lindsey too, when he went from Rumours to Tusk.

Not sure if you have this misconception or not, but I just wanted to clear it up in case you did... I'm not a Lindsey & Stevie Romantic.

I knew you aren’t, although my post may have suggested that. And I’d like to apologize to all romantics who may have read the previous post; I do not think that you people are “cheap sentimentalists” or whatever. I just got way too carried away with the whole thing.

Even still, that wasn't the song I had in mind when talking about "Say Goodbye." I was thinking more along the lines of "Never Going Back Again." Something that could give the vocal melody and harmonies room to breathe.

“Never Going Back Again” has, for me, a sense of bitterness. As Les suggested, Lindsey likes to run two or more emotions alongside. Therefore it makes sense that the playful arrangement of “NGBA” goes with those lyrics. With “Say Goodbye”, the lyric of which communicates mainly sadness to me, the same approach wouldn’t work, at least for me.
And I think it’s also about the vocals too. Stevie is more convincing in slow ballads of this type than Lindsey; “When I See You Again” appears as simplistic with those lyrics, but when that woman is using that voice of hers it immediately clicks, because she has that songwriting-voice-and-lyrics relationship. If Lindsey was to approach “Say Goodbye” in a very stripped-down manner then I would probably lose a lot of my interest. The same goes for “Save Me A Place”; if it didn’t have those harmonies the tune would be a time-waster on Tusk.
So, “Say Goodbye” communicates sadness, loss, things like that. The fact that he put it in a faster tempo immediately makes clear that this isn’t your usual “sad song”. The “rush” of it all tells me that the two lovers have to separate quickly; that the whole song and the whole separation is just a natural thing to get over with. That’s what life can be like; we don’t always have the time to wallow in a certain emotional state like “When I See You Again” seems to suggest.
The fact that Lindsey put these weird harmonies and these percussive sounds to the song is similar to a way a cameraman would use a filter on a camera. “When I See You Again” shows us Stevie with no filter at all, completely bare before us. LB hides behind his arrangement and shows us that he’s not totally through with the separation. These “bells and whistles” give us a distorted picture, one that’s not as clear as the one in “When I See You Again”. But it’s not any less moving for me.
Yes, I definitely read too much into things there.
I honour Les’ posts. She obviously reads into Lindsey’s music more than I do; a song that I may brush off as “fun” or “lightweight” will mean more to her. And the fact that she’s capable of looking at Lindsey’s albums as a whole, as a continuation of the same thread, is impressive. So, even “Steal Your Heart Away” isn’t that obvious, even though I still may think so.
In the end I agree with Johnny Stew; pop music shouldn’t be that easily brushed off as “shallow” or “just-for-kicks”.

(By the way, you might be surprised to know that one of my favorite L.B. songs has always been "The Ledge." ) [/B]

It just goes to show that "no one falls into a simple set of labels".