Prefabulous

Okay, so I promised more on Prefab Sprout, and given the glut of free time I have at the moment, I am going to deliver a little.

Given their incredibly devoted cult following I won't exhaust myself by doing a band dossier. Instead, I direct you to this website for the most thorough rundown of this S-U-P-E-R-B (and severely underrated) group. It may not initially be your cup of tea. If it's a bit too sweet for you, or the sound seems dated, please read on and I hope you'll want to consider taking another sip. Or even imbibe it all.

I'll cull a few choice things about Prefab Sprout that I'd like to highlight:

Their most fruitful collaborator, super-producer Thomas "She Blinded Me With Science (hey, don't call me that)" Dolby mentions in his blog a recent encounter with Stevie Wonder, who was a Sprout supporter. On From Langley Park to Memphis, Stevie plays his patented harmonica on Nightingales, one of my fave Sprout tunes.

And Sondre Lerche, whom you know I am gaga for, is a huge fan of theirs. He covered Nightingales on his jazzy venture Duper Sessions.

Let me also say, frontman Paddy McAloon is one of the greatest living songwriters. Just a few top notch picks:

Okay I find their videos pretty awful, but the simple wisdom in this song is incomparable.



Off of their first album Swoon (a.k.a. Songs Written Out Of Necessity), "Cruel" is perhaps one of the greatest lyrical masterworks about jealousy and love. In fact, this vid has a play by play of the lyrics to drive the point home.



If you hear the lyrics for this tune, and then Sondre Lerche's "Two Way Monologue" (I love the dueling Sondres, don't you?), you'll see there's a Sprout reference, natch.




Paddy-Joe's lyrical derring-do has indubitably paved the way for other verbose and obtuse troubadours who have made considerable inroads, Sondre being the cuddliest of the bunch. But there's definitely a touch of his word-o-rama that similarly afflicts narrative-loving, eloquent tunesmiths like Colin Meloy. Essentially, the whole literate hipster music brigade should hold Paddy as an antecedent. They owe him big time for making verbosity work for the songwriting craft in a masterful way. Any discerning listener can surely see that he occasionally pushes the envelope and that it doesn't always work organically and can seem rather forced. But to go to the edge fearlessly, unafraid to takes risks, that's true artistry. The way that his vocabulary is all cylinders go, dizzying with the poetic imagery, alongside melodic restraint--pure gold when it's done right.

One the things I really want to talk about in relation to Prefab Sprout, however, is the lost art of the album. If we were to further discuss music, I am sure that this would be a recurring theme. Looking at Prefab Sprout's body of work, you can see how McAloon didn't just write songs, he wrote entire albums. Jordan: The Comeback is one of the best examples as it is loosely a concept album, a tapestry of interwoven melodies and ideas that blend from song to song. McAloon's clear fascination with Americana and various figures of American masculinity (coming from an Englishman) recurs in his work (e.g. Cowboy Dreams, an expressed love for Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb, and an album entitled Steve McQueen). But Jordan is the most forceful and complex meditation on this.

In the instant download, YouTube, iTunes music-sphere it's hard enough to make money and sustain oneself as an artist. Driven by a singles-oriented market, the true album is increasingly becoming a unicorn; an enchanted, mystical creature that only exists in legend, too impossible to actually survive. Take in a Prefab Sprout album in its entirety and you'll see what's sorely missing from today's pop fodder.

Although, there is the argument that music is more accessible than ever. Certainly the accumulative hoarding culture of music geekery has always been a bit uncomfortable to me. With so much more free access to whet my cash-poor musical appetite, I am certainly happy from this end of the development. But already having been able to at least gain some ground with buying used CD's and vinyl I always felt like I got more value for money with an album when I was paying for the music. While I can never claim to always appreciate the cohesiveness of an album's work because of distraction or short attention span, when I have taken it all in with repeated listens something richer and greater than the individual tracks often emerges. So I guess it's a double edged sword. What's your two cents, mate?

To end, here's a link to a little treat: a list of hypothetical albums Paddy McAloon has mentioned but never actually released. Use your imagination...

P.S. Thank you to PSA for the sole responsibility of converting me into a Sprouthead.