"She's so high, high
above me / like Cleopatra, Joan of Arc, or Aphrodite"
"All of a sudden, all the
lights in the room seemed to dim, and I only seemed to be able to focus
on the page in front of me. Then it hit me like a sledgehammer!" Tal Bachman
is in the middle of gleefully recounting in dramatic detail a defining
moment in his musical life. He had grown up in a house thoroughly permeated
with music, mastering drums, piano, and guitar at an early age, and, thanks
to his father's voluminous record collection (his father is Randy Bachman,
erstwhile member of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive, and author
of such hits as "These Eyes" and "Takin' Care of Business") had grown intimately
acquainted with what he describes as "the popular music canon of the previous
fifty years" - everything from Rodgers and Hammerstein to Roy Orbison,
from The Kinks to Irish folk music, from Antonio Carlos Jobim and John
Coltrane to The Beatles and The Who, from Led Zeppelin to The Smiths. That
he should pursue music was obvious to everyone - except Bachman himself.
"When I was eighteen I stopped
listening to music," Bachman states flatly. "I was a huge U2 fan, but The
Joshua Tree unnerved me, and Rattle and Hum terrified me - my favorite
band was cracking up! The Smiths had long since broken up, The Cure had
become redundant, Queen had been comatose for years, hair bands sucked,
and I just freaked out." He spent two years abroad, and then, somewhat
peculiarly, enrolled in a small university in Utah, where he wound up studying
political philosophy.
Now, as he humorously recounts
it, five years after turning his back on pop music, he sat in a classroom
"in the middle of Utah" staring, transfixed, at his open copy of Plato's
Republic. "I had come to the section where Plato argues that everyone is
by nature suited to a particular activity, which ideally they would pursue.
Then I remember reading where Aristotle said that 'nothing which exists
by nature can be changed by habit.' And then I hit the part where Plato
explains why music is 'sovereign,' and how it shapes customs and laws and
how it can completely alter society, and I thought, 'What am I doing here?
I'm a musician - a songwriter! I'M AN ACORN, AND I MUST BECOME AN OAK!"
And so Bachman, still "smarting from Plato's sucker punch," surrendered
to nature and accepted his fate, quitting school and moving back to his
woodsy hometown near Vancouver, Canada, to begin searching for his muse.
The only hitch was that it
was 1995. The entire industry was still caught up in the search for the
next "alternative" breakthrough; and in the aftermath of Nirvana there
was no place for a songwriter like Tal Bachman. "I actually missed the
whole grunge thing," Bachman admits. "I didn't know what was going on.
I didn't care. I was out in the woods trying to look inside myself, trying
to make sense of these feelings I had - that I had to write songs, that
I had something important inside me that had to come out, something that
nobody could stop. I sent out tons of demos to record companies, but of
course, my material was hopelessly out-of-sync with what was popular. The
industry wanted 'attitude' and permanent angst and stuff, but I was just
trying to write good songs."
After all, it is in songwriting
"renaissance men" like Harry Nilsson, David Bowie, Elton John, and Paul
McCartney that one finds the proper context for what Tal Bachman does.
Pretty heavy company for sure, but the comparison comes from the fact that
these are artists great not for making the most of their limitations, but
for being completely without limitations. Like the aforementioned, Bachman
combines a reverential understanding of pop music history with an unabashed
love for - almost worship of - the powerful chord progression, the unforgettable
hook and the affecting lyric. During his period of introspection, Tal incorporated
these musical principles into a group of songs which he sent to a variety
of record companies as a self-produced demo. These songs caught the ear
of Columbia Records and now form the core of his self-titled debut album.
And what an album it is!
Crackling and bubbling with musical excitement, bursting with uninhibited
emotion, sparkling with lyrical wit, each song stands on its own as a miniature
musical document, yet somehow combines with the rest to form a seamless,
potent whole. Produced by Bob Rock (Metallica, The Cult, Veruca Salt, Aerosmith)
and Tal Bachman, the album is an explosion of exhilarating, hook-laden,
timeless pop/rock - in reality, a distillation of Bachman's lifelong torrid,
and sometimes volatile, affair with popular music (and brief fling with
philosophy).
It starts out with the one/two
power pop punch of "Darker Side of Blue" and "She's So High" - as enthusiastic
and catchy as prime Cheap Trick or ELO. (Indeed, Bachman remains an unabashed
ELO fan, proclaiming Jeff Lynne to be "better than Mozart - well, at least
a lot louder," and likes to refer to ELO albums as "sacred musical revelations.")
Up third is the atmospheric and heart-breaking "If You Sleep," a contemplation
of fate in the face of a loved one's illness, followed by the stirring
"You Love (Like Nobody Loves Me)." "Strong Enough"'s moody lyrics and crashing
choruses consider the risks of obsessed imagination, and "You Don't Know
What It's Like" drives the pop quotient even higher with its raunchy Jimmy
Page-like riffs and anthemic chorus. "I Wonder" is a Hunky Dory-esque tour
de force whose unusual lyrics depict a child who, provoked by an enlightening
encounter with his grandfather, suddenly begins to see himself in an entirely
new light. The innocent romance of "Beside You" is contradicted by the
tongue-in-cheek sarcasm of "Romanticide," which in turn is complemented
by the frantically accusatory "Looks Like Rain."
But the bitterness ends with
the haunting, intoxicating beauty of "You're My Everything," a soaring
love song featuring Bachman's crooning vocal, a breathtaking string score
by Bachman and legendary arranger Paul Buckmaster, and a seductive slide
solo. And fittingly, "I Am Free," with its majestic chorus and powerful
spiraling coda, brings to a close this extraordinary debut effort.
"It would be nice somehow
to rekindle the significance of rock 'n' roll," Bachman muses. "I want
this record to mean something to people, to entertain them, but maybe also
to jar them into seeing something a little differently, or feeling something
more acutely than before. I want it to move people."
Tal Bachman can bet on it.
