Pop que sueña que está soñando/Paddy McAloon’s sad, beautiful Taj Mahal

My friend Wenceslao Bruciaga recently asked to write an essay for the Mexican music magazine Marvin, to run as a companion piece with his own on the songwriting of Paddy McAloon. One of the foundations of our friendship has been the icon position we reserve in the pop canon for McAloon/Prefab Sprout, so it made sense to share a space reserved for their praise.

As the piece has only been published in translated Spanish, I offer it here in its original English version.


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As a teenager, I would not only take command of the family car’s stereo system, but would purposely play music I thought would irritate my parents. If a song failed to do so immediately, I would offer up incendiary commentary.

“This is a criticism of Bruce Springsteen,” I told my father one day, when he seemed to be grooving to Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls,” a hit from their third and most radio-friendly album, From Langley Park to Memphis.

“Why would they want to do that?” asked my father, scowling at the thought of a (supposedly) posh Brit insulting a working-class hero.

“Because life’s more complicated than cars and girls!” was my answer.

In the intervening years, I have personally softened on The Boss. And I’ve come to understand that the lyrics of “Cars and Girls” flatter Springsteen as much as they scorn him. Prefab Sprout’s chief songwriter and lead vocalist Paddy McAloon starts off, “Brucie dreams life’s a highway/ Too many roads bypass my way.” But by the three-minute mark the contempt dissolves: “Brucie’s thoughts, pretty streamers/ Guess this world needs its dreamers/ May they never wake up.” Brucie might be naïve, but perhaps that’s the best way to get through this life.

From the very beginning, McAloon seemed intent on subverting love-song clichés, finding uncharted anxieties in dark corners of the human heart. In “Cruel,” from the audacious 1984 debut Swoon, he celebrates feminism while lamenting the predicaments it presents for straight male lust: “If I’m troubled by every folding of your skirt/ Am I guilty of every male-inflicted hurt?” The sentiment is repeated three albums later in “Nancy (Let Your Hair Down for Me),” which depicts an emasculated office worker who accepts his wife as his boss, but pleads for her to show her feminine side at home: “Nancy let that fall off your shoulders/ I’ll be your husband once again.”

These are not the lyrics of a man who believes in an eternal love that washes away all problems, or that eternal love is something attainable at all. Prefab Sprout’s discography is filled with the polished tune-smithing and the sly sauciness of McAloon’s heroes George and Ira Gershwin. But the best songs are too loaded with frustration and disappointment to sit easily as cheerful standards in the pop canon, even when the breathy melodies are busy conjuring shimmering summer days. McAloon seems determined to thwart listeners who want to love his music for purely sentimental reasons.

Though Prefab Sprout is undeniably a pop group (these days comprised solely of McAloon), individual pop songs alone haven’t been able to contain McAloon’s anti-sentimental romanticism. They’re an album band. Loosely connected song sequences allow McAloon sift through the stages of infatuation, entanglement and heartbreak from multiple points of view. On 1990’s ambitious Jordan: The Comeback, the seduction of an “Ice Maiden” leads to the birth of Baby “Paris Smith,” followed by apologies from a hapless protagonist incapable of dancing “The Wedding March.” On 1985’s brilliant Steve McQueen, the confession of an affair in “Horsin’ Around” (“I was the fool who always presumed that/ I’d wear the shoes and you’d be the doormat,” a line seemingly designed to make Cole Porter smirk) is answered with the rueful, bitter fallout of the next song, “Desire As:” “So tell me, you must have thought it all out in advance/ Or goodness, goodness knows why you’d throw it to the birds.”

His favourite characters, from Jesse James to Lucifer, are haunted by past mistakes, yearning to make amends, but somehow held back from redemption. Even at McAloon’s most rapturous, there’s sand in the ointment. “Love is the Fifth Horseman of the apocalypse,” a line from 1997’s dreamy Andromeda Heights, does not conjure an evening spent cuddling. The devil (who appears in Prefab Sprout’s songs almost as often as cowboys do) may have the finest tunes, “but of course it’s always over much too soon.”

What makes McAloon a legendary songwriter, though, is his ability to seed grace amidst all this futility. There’s the companionship of being “one of the broken,” one of “us poor cripples” or with someone “behind enemy lines.” There’s the impulse to search, regardless of whether it ends in love or redemption (it probably won’t). And there’s the power of music. It took McAloon until 2013’s Crimson/Red to make the baldest declaration of his artist thesis, the five-word song title, “Grief built the Taj Mahal.”

Revisiting the albums of my youth: I’m Your Man

In my university years, my musical tastes started to stray from the pop charts, but mostly on a quest for the newest thing, and what was fun to dance to. The Sugarcubes, The Pogues and The Smiths, house-y hits like Inner City’s “Big Fun” and the slick delights of Black Box. If the band was British, like Fine Young Cannibals, or from Narnia, like the Cocteau Twins, so much the better. This was before Canadian music went global with the likes of Alanis, Shania and Celine. National acts like Glass Tiger, Corey Hart, Doug and the Slugs, and Haywire were starting to feel uncomfortably provincial. National treasure? I’d probably have said Anne Murray with an ironic laugh.

I had a roommate who played a passable guitar and I have to admit that I did not find his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” compelling, no matter how many times he played it. Hippie Canadiana from the 1960s. Ugh. Even my admiration for Joni Mitchell leaned toward the overproduced Dog Eat Dog and the guest-laced Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (Peter Gabriel! Don Henley! Billy Idol! So many indicators of global hitdom!) over Blue, which seemed like a quaint artifact (history loves proving people wrong). 

“Suzanne” was driven by little more than a plink-plunky guitar; no Thomas Dolby in sight. The voice was whiny. The lyrical imagery, I felt, was something between Medieval and “White Rabbit,” far beyond my experience and interest. I think my roommate also played me “Who by Fire,” which I found repetitive and naively romantic (not a good thing when you're in your early 20s). I have no memory of hearing “Hallelujah” in those days, which has come to be a song that I, along with the rest of the world, love. But if I had, I imagine I would have dismissed it as quickly as something by Gordon Lightfoot or any singer my dad might like.

So when Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man started to filter into my consciousness, I was initially resistant. “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” the first song from it that I remember, had radio-friendly production—a little meh. But its chugging bassline reminded me of John Waite’s “Missing You (I Ain’t Missing You at All),” which I had liked a few years earlier. Yes, I am framing my discovery of Leonard Cohen, one of the last century’s towering artists, by way of a one-hit-wonder. But that’s how the process of musical discovery works.

The black and grey album-cover design was decidedly of the moment. But what was he doing, dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses? Eating a banana? He was definitely an old guy. That was a strike against him. I wasn’t totally dismissive of music that was sought higher meaning and deeper emotions, that sought to qualify as poetry. I loved Bruce Cockburn (always timely). I loved Suzanne Vega (and still do). But Vega was only 10 years older than me, a wise older sister, really, whose sharp observations could be applicable to my own life. Cohen was definitely of my dad’s generation, though definitely not to my dad’s taste.

On I’m Your Man, the voice that had irritated me on “Suzanne” had grown deep, growly and menacing. The voice was so deep, it almost seemed capricious, like he was doing it on purpose, like Prince using his falsetto to bring other characters into a song. Now that kind of playfulness and pretence was appealing! I loved the band Shriekback for their tribal rhythms and primordial imagery (“We drink elixirs that we refine/ From the juices of the dying”) and The Cocteau Twins for their perverse avoidance of any lyrical sense. As an over-caffeinated student in my early 20s, I welcomed any sort of audacity.

It was probably “First We Take Manhattan” that sold me and built the foundation of my future Leonard Cohen fandom. The churning bass synth sounds seemed dated—but, I was realizing, knowingly so. The violins, the choir in the background, the fluttering sci-fi sounds were all apocalyptically over-the-top, allowing for another reading of Jennifer Warnes’s otherwise MOR vocals. This was like the devil’s misjudged attempt at huggable that ends up scorching its recipient.

Digging into the album, “Jazz Police” seemed to confirm my suspicious that the whole thing was a dark joke. (I remember being at a party and forcing people to wait in silence while I cued up the song over and over again on cassette, perhaps in an effort to drive my fellow students crazy.) The cheesy drum machines sounded as if someone was gleefully testing out how many beats their new Yamaha Portasound could jam into each measure. The silly high notes of the background vocalists, the lyrics about being mad about turtle meat. Here was an old geyser pulling a Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

In hindsight, I can see that only a couple of the songs were that wacky (Cohen took the grand apocalypticism even further on his 1992 follow up The Future), though it’s what got me hooked. Pushing past the leftfield production and getting used to the voice, I started to appreciate the lyrics. Oh, man, the lyrics. These days, I love Cohen’s poetry as much as his music. I chuckle at it. I memorize it. I try to learn from his poems even as they cleverly thwart any attempt to marshal them into a fixed world view, ideology or something you’d see on an inspirational poster.

Where the lyrics of “Suzanne” had seemed like a rambling chore (I’m still not a fan of it), every line on I’m Your Man was a potential quotable quote. There was built-in irony: “Everybody knows that you've been faithful/ Ah, give or take a night or two.” But there was knowingness a listener could bring along too. You can chuckle or feel wise at how a lover’s declaration of “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” mixed the sacred and the shallow.

That very line is one I put to use back in my university years. “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” is what I once said in reply to a classmate’s tender confession of a growing attraction for me. I sang the line a few times, warbling on “clothes.” At the time, it seemed like both a way forward and a way out. A sly reciprocity. Now I realize it was a way of being an ass without entirely betraying another person’s vulnerability.

Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man was simultaneously of this world and beyond it, a love letter to the human condition and an escape hatch from it. It's an album that divides his career into two halves, the first of which was, for me, merely a sketch for the masterpiece of the second. 

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Super Trouper

Released in 1979, ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was, in my home, generally acknowledged to be my father’s album, though anybody in the family might open the gatefold and crank up “Does Your Mother Know” or “Take a Chance on Me” to summon a quorum in the living room. It was perhaps the first album I recognized as a family endeavour, like Disney World or cross-country skiing. Until then, my father listened mostly to country music, which I hated.

Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most of it, even the songs I disliked.

Super Trouper was not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode and obsess over. Having discovered Super Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring, though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.

The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus “The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics could be quite delightful.

As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of the question went way over my head.

The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?

The Super Trouper song that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or, I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers, could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps and unsuccessful improvisations.

Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes, I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

Four of Super Trouper’s 10 tracks are ballads, the spinach of a 12 year old’s musical taste. “The Way Old Friends Do” was something you’d hear at a wedding dance you didn’t want to be at. My sister loved “Andante Andante,” but it put me to sleep. I didn’t even know what the title meant. I liked the clever, hook-filled songs that were for and about nightclubs, not the ones set in a meadow. Their “pretty” songs have always left me cold.  

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Zooropa

Music makes its deepest mark on us when we’re young; there’s no favourite song like the one we had when we were, say, 15 in the middle of our first crush.

Some of those early music revelations we carry forward, going back to listen to our personal classics again and again (for me, Mark Knopfler’s Local Hero soundtrack), or following the bands we adopted then through their various iterations and reinventions (Pet Shop Boys, New Order).

At the very least, our youthful music catalogue determines our taste later in life. As someone shaped to my core by brightly imagined 1980s acts like Thompson Twins, ABC and, a little later, Prefab Sprout and Deacon Blue,  the time-travelling neo-’80s sound of Alphabeat, Cut Copy, Capital Cities and Penguin Prison in the last decade has been like a dear friend coming back from the dead.

Some music doesn’t attach so tightly to us. We buy albums (we bought albums—this is the streaming age now, I know) during a particular time and place in our lives, with a particular set of contextual motivations that mean much less later on. Hype or an affection for the last record send us rushing out to plunk our hard-earned money down for something we hadn’t heard and, damn it, we were going to love it. Or feel betrayed. An album that seems like a revelation when we buy it can eventually sound like a dated dud, or vice versa.

I decided to go back into my CD and cassette collection (my mother got rid of my albums back in the 1990s during a major yard sale purge) to listen to things that I had set aside after my first infatuation, just to see if there was any lingering feelings of affection or resentment.

Back in 1993, I remember sending two friends who I knew from my university years a missive that somewhere stated that U2’s Zooropa “changes everything.” I want to believe it was a CC email, but since I wasn’t on the Internet until 1994, it must have been a letter I printed, copied and mailed. Neither of the recipients shared my enthusiasm; they didn’t argue back one way or the other and it was at this point I started to doubt our friendship.

I had avidly followed U2 since 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire—even now I can only listen to The Joshua Tree album when I am emotionally grounded enough to handle an intense rush of teenage nostalgia. While other bands had laid claim on my desire to dance or my sense of humour or my romantic side, U2 occupied the most existential chamber of my heart. By the time Zooropa came along, though, they were starting to feel too earnest to be as slick and clever as I wanted to be in my early 20s. My letter signalled that I wanted U2 to still be relevant, but also that I had reservations that that was so.

Listening now, “changes everything” was certainly naïve and definitely an overstatement. Sure, the grainy, lime green and hot pink digital imagery of the glossy CD booklet signalled a shift in U2’s image, which had until this time been etched in wood, stone and rust, smeared with dust and blood. The purposeful tackiness signalled a new ephemerality. The Unforgettable Fire may have been for the ages, but Zooropa came with a best-before date.

For U2 at the time, all the production tricks—the sound effects, the distortion, the bleeps and bloops, the non sequitur intro and extros—seemed bold and mysterious. In retrospect, the production was not much more aggressive than their previous album, Achtung Baby, which has sold more over time and is regarded with much more affection than Zooropa. (I probably listen to it more now than any other U2 album.) Zooropa had less sweat and grit, so was another small step away from U2’s core sensibility. But compared to today’s producer-driven chart-toppers, Zooropa still allows you hear each band member’s instrument as an instrument. The synth fuzz rarely gets in the way of The Edge’s guitar, Adam Clayton’s bass and Larry Mullen Jr.’s drums. It would be another six years before producers autotuned Cher for her Believe album; Bono’s singing is pretty much what it was on U2’s seven previous studio albums.

While Achtung Baby seemed to have placed every sound in its right place, Zooropa’s sonic texture, designed by Flood, Brian Eno and The Edge, comes across as sloppy to the point of contemptuous of the songs themselves. Which might have worked better if the songs were stronger. U2’s catalogue to that point was full of singalong classics. Quirky as it was, Achtung Baby was a genuine karaoke carnival: “One,” “The Fly,” “Mysterious Way,” “Even Better than the Real Thing.” As far as melody goes, Zooropa offers little to sink one’s teeth into. Beneath the layers of production, it now feels like a roundup of Achtung Baby B-sides tarted up to hide their deficiencies. The title track is supremely blah, even as it echoes their most anthemic work.

My choice for most appealing song, “Numb,” is a mumbled rap that only works as karaoke if you or your singing partner can pull off the chorus’ falsetto. The mumble/falsetto schtick also carries the next track, “Lemon,” making the songs feel like a two-for-one package, a charming “concept album” conceit that hints that neither is able to stand on its own.

On the first few listens back in 1993, I remember being fascinated by “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Perhaps for its grinding audaciousness, its strangely undanceable proximity to electronic dance music. It’s a song that’s constructed, not inspired. Now it seems like pure novelty, along the lines of Prince’s “Batdance.”

Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey were diva-ing away at the top of the singles charts in 1993, but so was Robin S. with “Show Me Love,” and Snap! with “Rhythm Is a Dancer.” Pop music was breaking into piece, with the dancey singles part getting much fluffier and, on the album-driven side of things, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, Wu-Tang Clan and Pearl Jam bringing on the heavy. At this time of my life, still going to nightclubs, I was definitely siding with the lighter stuff.

We tend to rebel against the music of our parents, which for me was country and western. So the guest of appearance of Johnny Cash on “The Wanderer” was a factor I could not overlook. My rationalization: The song was a joke, its fat, artificially squishy bass-line making fun of Cash’s existential doom. With a more seasoned taste, I can now hear the song as U2 trying desperately to add something—anything—to the force of nature that is Cash, before whom they were bowing down in homage. Perhaps the weirdly awkward production which placed quotation marks around Cash's appearance (he's credited as “starring” in “The Wanderer”), was what started me down the road to eventually appreciating him as a music legend, a hidden trigger that caused an explosion decades later. 

Though Zooropa may have signalled the end of U2’s cultural dominance, they were still gliding along at the height of their global commercial success. The band could pick and choose the best of what everyone else was doing, or zig when everyone else was zagging. Zooropa is a cocky album, but you can also hear it hedging its bets. That caution worked against the album as a reinvention, I think. The songs that were the U2y-ist, like “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” and “The First Time” get more respectful and traditional treatment. Even if they’re weaker than other U2 hits, they wouldn’t be jarring on a compilation album. “Changes everything” was more of a business plan than a new chapter of artistry.

For me, Zooropa was a signal to move on. It was the last U2 album I bought. I was sad it had put me on the wrong side of the divide between me and the university friends I had written to about it.

U2 would never be as playful as Björk, who has burst onto the scene and seemed to be able to harness philosophizing to goofiness and danceability. And they had seemingly given up on their desire to be grand and inspiring. (Though they did reclaim that on later albums.) For earnestness, I held onto Sting, though I was not included to proclaim my affection for him to my peers. He, too, was starting to feel a little embarrassing, a little too much like dad music.

That seemed to be the fight Zooropa lost—to not be music your dad would listen to. But I didn't take to it in my early 20s, and I am not much more fond of it now that I'm dad-aged.

Nothing compares to Prince

Already, 2016 has sadly taken two seminal artists from us. And I must confess I’m more shaken up about Prince.

Bowie was an artist you discovered, his handful of chart hits pointing to a fantastical world build just over the next hill. Prince pitched his tent right in the middle of everything, where he simply couldn’t be ignored.

The two artists, who died too young just a few months apart, were monumental. But while Bowie will be an interesting historical figure, dancing somewhere on the edge of both the music and art worlds, Prince got his hands truly dirty, changing the culture at its heart, on the charts and in people's bedrooms. You never had to seek him out to hear him, who he was influenced by and who he influenced.

Which is not to say that Prince failed to build imaginative worlds as elaborate as Bowie. Unlike Bowie, who relied on costumes, dramatic changes in genre and references to history and other forms of art in order to conjure his vision, Prince, for the most part, built his worlds right there in the songs. You didn’t have to read a novel or know the backstory to see “Raspberry Beret” unfold in your mind’s eye. In fact, you didn’t even have to see 1984’s Purple Rain to “see” the soundtrack. Prince’s roles as a musician and storyteller were much more inseparable and intertwined than Bowie’s.

Oh, that Purple Rain soundtrack. It landed right in the middle of my teens like an atomic bomb. A bomb that got played on the radio. “Darling Nikki,” which wasn’t played on the radio, was the first song that I knew for a fact I couldn’t let my parents hear. Lyrics didn’t get much more sexually overt than “masturbating,” especially when masturbating was just the tip of the song’s iceberg, a hint that life and relationships could be much different than what I saw on TV sitcoms. The sonic texture was loud and carnival-like; nothing about “Darling Nikki” could be ignored. But it was not smut, or merely smut. It created a new moral universe that I only was able to parse out with age and experience. Sex was not just a component of romance and love; sex could be its own thing.

While Bowie came across as a mostly solitary artist, despite his many collaborations, Prince populated his world with characters that enriched what he had to say about desire, power, beauty and sex. Wendy and Lisa, Sheila E., Vanity 6, Morris Day—Prince was a school of thought, a way of life. And notice that four out of five of those names are women. Though womanizer was part of his brand, Prince’s erotic power did not come from dismissing women or controlling female sexuality. Neither did Bowie’s, of course, though Bowie’s oeuvre was always something less than erotic. Bowie was thinky sexy—an abstract prelude to the act, perhaps—not messy sexy.

Despite the musical community around him, Prince often did seem alone in the industry. His genius came much closer to mania than did Bowie’s; the thought-outness of Bowie’s personas and outfits suggested investments that were as methodical as they were fantastical. Prince’s name changes and reinventions seemed more personal than strategic. His Slave period—perhaps his weirdest and the one that perhaps lost him his many mainstream followers, not because they disagreed with him, but they lost a sense of a regular supply of music—seemed devoid of caprice. He was mad at his record company for claiming ownership of his music—his soul—and for all his wiliness, Prince lacked a polished retaliatory strategy.

With the charts as Prince’s main vehicle for disseminating his work, his singular sound, inherited from the best of soul and funk, left him standing outside current commercial trends later in his career. But whenever you checked in, there was always genius there. The rest—the interviews, the gossip, the packaging, the posturing—seemed irrelevant. All you needed to know was in the songs.

I don’t mean to detract from Bowie, who I admired. He created an abundance of serious art atop the humble platform of pop music, and more importantly, became a beacon for those in the 1970s, ’80s and beyond who felt they were outsiders. (Though I will always feel Bowie’s walk-back from his 1976 claim to be bisexual showed him to be as much a politician as showman.)

Bowie made weirdos feel it was cool to be weirdos—an astonishing accomplishment.

But Prince? He sang directly to the outsider freak in each one of us. And our freaks couldn’t help but dance.

Prefab leak

Exhibiting symptoms of Internet-distraction-itis, this week I went from watching the Stars video “Hold on When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give it” to co-lead singer Torquil Campbell’s voluminous Twitter feed. When I read Campbell's tweet, “All thats left online of the prefab album which recently surfaced and vanished. I've heard it though....,” I went on a frenzied mission to see if I could dig up the alleged album, employing nefarious means if I had to.

I found it. It’s been dubbed The Devil Came A-Callin’ which is also the name of one of the tracks. For Prefab Sprout fans, it’s manna from heaven. Devotees ascribe band leader Paddy McAloon with legendary song-writing powers, though his output has been minuscule since the early 1990s. So the fact that the leaked album is also very good—and very satisfying for fans—is enough to make me delirious.

It’s hard to tell when the 10 songs were written and recorded. The band's last release, Let’s Change the World with Music, came out in 2009 but was comprised of demos recorded in 1993. That album had a grand self-important sound that came across as bit stilted and surprisingly sentimental for a band that built its reputation on being anti-romantic (One of their best known songs, “Cars and Girls” from 1988, was an attack on Bruce Springsteen’s supposedly limited view of matters of the heart). It didn't have much humour.

This new mystery album channels the looser, raw quirkiness of the early albums, though the song craft is some of Paddy McAloon’s best. There are no breathy vocals from Wendy Smith, so we have to assume that the material is, at the very least, more recent than 2000, when Smith reportedly left the band.

Is it real? Of course it is. There’s the exuberant glee of “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” the soulful “Mysterious” and the heartbreaking “Grief Built the Taj Mahal,” where McAloon chases Gershwin as doggedly as he ever has.

No word on if and when the album will be released—no word acknowledging the thing at all—but some of us will certainly will be raking the sky, “listening for smudged echoes of the moment of creation” until it appears.

Changing the world with music

Picking favourite bands when you're young is a little like betting on a horse race without even knowing it. Pick someone like the Eurogliders, and the horse doesn't even make it out of the gates. I loved the Thompson Twins and figured they would be around for a long time--I remember some music magazine calling them the future--but they barely stumbled into the 1990s. If you backed U2, you never stopped counting your winnings. Whitney? It's still up in the air.

Then there was Prefab Sprout, a band with an obscure name that never charted very high, never broke into America despite the exuberance efforts of 1988's From Langley Park to Memphis to take the world by storm. That single-filled album, with a candy-store of production tricks by Thomas Dolby, was their best bet and, still, they remained a cult act. Under pressure from the record company, they had even shelved Protest Songs, the more forlorn album they had recorded before it, in order to break into the charts. Their last release was a 2001 concept album about cowboys, though not country music, except a reworked version of the "Streets of Laredo." Which is all to say that Prefab Sprout are an unlikely endurance runner. To cite them as one of my favourite bands has been to invite a scrunched face and a "Who?" It is to end a conversation about music. I wouldn't have guessed that would change in the late noughts.

If great philosophy is untimely, so is great music. It's been funny over the last few years to hear younger bands like Stars cite Prefab Sprout as an influence, to have them name checked in the New Yorker and The Guardian. It's the world that's changed, moved itself a few degrees closer to the sensibility of the Paddy McAloon, the man at the heart of the Sprouts. The release this month of Let's Change the World With Music, an album slated for release in 1992 and then shelved, is the ultimate vindication. Its contents were placed in a time capsule, let sit for 17 years and, voila, it's something fans of Beirut might enjoy.

It's easy, from the commercial point of view, to see why this album was not released. Each of the songs touch on the idea of music, which seems indulgent, and God, even more so. With its Irving Berlin and Ira Gershwin flourishes, its grandiosity and genre-less-ness would have seemed out of place in the era of grunge. But while the definition of hit music has narrowed--aren't a handful of producers responsible for most of the songs that chart nowadays?--the definition of pop music has relaxed. Even the 1990s production values of this reworked demo don't come off poorly compared to, say, Cut Copy or Lily Allan.

At the core of Let's Change the World With Music is McAloon's song-writing skills, which produce melodies which worm their way into your head after only a few spins. "I Love Music" sounds at first like a half-hearted Frank Sinatra parody, but gets you with its genuineness, its coy phrasing, those little pauses in lines like, "Who's my hero? The unnerving, unswerving Irving Berlin." In another homage to tunefulness he yearns for sweet gospel music to "carry this boy away from danger." If movies about movies aim to show us how our visual landscape is created, then music about music shows us how our emotional landscape is renewed and regenerated.

McAloon has gotten flack for the pomposity of some of his themes; one UK critic said the album title was worthy of U2. And though he he's not being sarcastic with songs like "Earth: The Story so Far" there is a humility that's inherent in the Prefab Sprout enterprise, which started at as definitively anti-romantic with a faux-blues song like "Cruel," which always struck me as a celebration and critique of feminism ("Cruel is the gospel that sets us all free, then takes you away from me"). McAloon has matured since then, realized that celebrating love without deconstructing it is part of what music does. But no matter how much he wants to change the world with music, he's well aware of his own limitations and that of art. It's not a choice between self-aggrandizement and irony, it's a choice between giving up and pressing on. And if digging through their vaults for these gems is pressing on, I figure I've backed the right horse.

Monetizing music

I actually don't think levies on memory is a terrible solution to the collapse of the music industry.

Let's play with some rough numbers, just for fun. Let's say you had a music consumer who used to spend an average of $150 a year on music--10 albums annually at $15 a pop. Now a compulsive downloader, he doesn't spend anything but his annual music downloads have a retail value of $4,000.

Right now, the music industry seems to think it's entitled to the $4,000. But if illegal downloading were to end tomorrow, so would his massive music consumption so he's soon be back to the $150 of spending again. So the question is not how to prevent this guy from downloading every song ever recorded, but how to extract $150 or more annually from this guy, no matter how much music he gets. It would be better if he paid more for more music, and there are probably ways of doing that, but for the moment we're just trying to restore an acceptable level of financial remuneration to the system. I think "the same as before" is more acceptable than zero.

But I'm not even sure "the same as before" is possible when your starting point is zero. So let's be even more realistic. I've read reports that artists have make as little as 30 cents per album, that $1 per album is a good deal. So under the new business model, why don't we give the artist $3 per album. With downloading as part of the new distribution model, let's keep marketing and administration costs to another $3 per album. Now our music fan is paying $60 for his 10 albums. Pro-rated as a fee applied to media that can hold music files, that's not an outrageous amount of money.

How do we get a little closer $150? License file-sharing services that meet certain criteria. Better search function, better speeds, fewer ads and spyware programs and less bogus files would lure people from illegal file-sharing to legal file-sharing. Or, because those terms are a little moralistic, unlicensed file sharing to licenced file sharing.

Even someone obsessed with "free" would give serious consideration to a monthly fee of $7.50 to legally download all the music he wants in a way that's as convenient as iTunes and that actually gives money directly to the artists he likes, much like how libraries pay fees to the creators of works that circulate. In fact, in paying for high-speed Internet access, he's already accepted the premise that downloading media files is going to cost him something each month. Why not 10 or 10 percent more, especially if he's getting value for it and is no longer a "criminal"?

The thing is to keep the price low. $7.50 montly is a much less dramatic departure from zero than, say, $30. Again, the industry is obsessed with the $4,000 worth of songs on his hard-drive, but they've got to let it go and focus on the conversion rate, rather than on their idea of justice.

By charging a (mandatory) fee on storage devices and by charging an (optional) monthly high-volume file-share fee, we can bring the same $150 a year back into the music industry. But, with online distribution and a de-emphasis on corporate systems, we've eliminated many of the "suit" and retail positions, giving the more of that money to artists instead. We give indie bands comparable access to larger acts, if they can do a good job of getting their name into the memories of music-searchers. If we have a system of licensed file-sharing services, we can keep track of who is getting downloaded and split the storage fee and monthly fee in a fair way. The distribution/marketing system becomes the finance department.

The corporate suits, though, are not interested in exiting stage right and so obsess over the $4,000 in "lost revenue," not realizing that that money is never going to be available to them, no matter how many court cases they launch. They've got to start with zero and build up, not start with "He's got our whole catalogue on his hard-drive!" and seek revenge.

All in a Heap

Funny where naiveté can leave you. When I had seen the name of the musical entity Imogen Heap in print, I had, in my head, pronounced it "Ih-MOE-gen Heap" and visualized some nasty punk band, referencing toxic waste. So I didn't care when their song appeared on The OC. Of course, Imogen is pronounced more like "Emma-Jen" and the "heap" is a last name, not a metaphor. And she sounds more like Sarah McLachlan produced by Enya, with bursts of Bjork kookiness and Tori Amos indulgence. Actually, the songs on her new album have more shape than Sarah's, Bjork's (well, late Bjork) and Tori's. She's a much more grounded eccentric, musically speaking.

In fact, I think Imogen has taken over the sleek and emotional pop ship Dido abandoned after her debut album (well, she abandoned the "sleek" and the "pop" part).

Anyway, Ellipse is a lovely album, especially the first single.

Electro Calvinism

As much as I loved "I'm Not Alone," the first single from Calvin Harris' new album Ready for the Weekend, I knew there was trouble on the horizon when I read an interview with him talking about how, at 25, he was starting to feel old, wondering about the merits of club life. Oh God. The man who sang, "I like all the girls" is getting philosophical and world-weary. Most young turks manage to get a couple of albums to market before they consider themselves codgers.

But maybe there is a finite amount of energy in each of us and Harris front loaded most of his. His fantastic debut album I Created Disco was the kind of pure deadpan chutzpah only the British can get away with. Each song contained such audacious and catchy ideas, the execution hardly mattered. "I've got my car and my ride and my wheels, when I go to Vegas," he sang, glorying in the stoned redundancy. The songs on I Created Disco may not merit a place in the immortal canon of pop music, but they grabbed you immediately, gave you a laugh on the dancefloor and stayed with you for weeks, at least. Call it vapid, the album knew it was vapid and let you in on the joke.

The songs on Ready for the Weekend aren't so starved for attention. The world, it seems, is a more serious place and Harris has had to impose some structure in order to survive. The humour, which had made Harris a peer of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk, is notably absent.

It's like Harris is pacing himself. Each of the songs has its role to play, sometimes dance-y, sometimes more--it freaks me out to say this--reflective. "Burns Night," for example, is a loping late-night instrumental jazz jam, seemingly designed to encourage drunk patrons to roll home, while "Limits" is full of robotized regret.

Ready for the Weekend is simultaneously a more utilitarian and more serious album. Its 90s aesthetic aims to please with its piano chords and house-soul backing vocals. "Stars Come Out" reminded me of nothing less than the dancey tracks from Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I'm quite sure Harris wouldn't take as a compliment.

But when you're self-consciously producing a retro album, I suppose that effective emulation is an accomplishment. There are four tracks here that would not drive me from the dancefloor and two more--"I'm Not Alone" and "Dance Wiv Me"--that I would scramble across a crowded room to turn up. It's a far cry from I Created Disco but it's still a better batting average than most pop-dance albums (though I suppose that one could say that Lady GaGa had raised the bar in this regard).

It's the future I fear for. The best track, "Dance Wiv Me" an electro-hip-hop collaboration with Dizee Rascal, predates the rest of the album. Harris' more methodical direction seems to be taking hi further and further away from what made him such a lovable sod.

Game-changing moves

Depeche Mode had been around for a decade when it released 1990's Violator album. It turned out to be a game changer for the band and for electro-pop/Brit pop in general. The Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece Behaviour was a response to it, an album that placed the PSB on a track that has kept them relevant to this day. Depeche Mode had shown how versatility and depth could be wrung out of a preexisting sound and image. Shania Twain performed a similar kind of magic when her Come on Over album showed how country music could be loosed from its genre, how production techniques could re-purpose songs for different markets.

(As an aside: During DM's recent Toronto concert, the first time I've ever seen them live, I was surprised how theatrical the show was, how much closer it was to glam rock than to knob-fiddling; as someone who does most of his music-listening through headphones, who thinks of Depeche Mode as a studio band, the energy and the spectacle was totally unexpected, helping me understand how the band's longevity and success has been nurtured on the stage as much as in the CD player. It's hard to imagine, say, New Order selling millions of concert albums and tour T-shirts.)

When it first came out, I thought Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" video was brilliant. Well, of course, a lot of other people did as well. But it wasn't until I saw Shakira's "She Wolf" that I realized that "Single Ladies" was a game changer.

Dance has always been integral to the music video genre; early videos were often merely shots of people dancing. As some contributors to the recent outpouring of retrospection about Michael Jackson have argued, dance was an integral part of Jackson's talent tool-set long before the "Thriller" behemoth. But, with due respect to Paula Abdul, "Single Ladies" is a particularly provocative waypoint.

Where music-video dancing had, even at its most profound and eye-catching, usually been relaxed and accessible, with moves the viewer might want to casually try out at a nightclub, Beyonce introduced a particular kind of aspirational precision coupled with a choreographic specificity. If you have mastered these steps in "Single Ladies," you will not be muddling through them to an Ashlee Simpson song, you will be tied to a very singular notion of what those moves are--your success or failure at mastering them will be obvious to any observer.

Not only are Beyonce and her posse tight and polished, the steps they are dancing are innovative, adding contemporary dance tropes to refined hip-hop moves. And they're shot in a way that the dancing is the video, not just something to cutaway to, from closeups of an emotive singer or some vague storyline. The presentation is relentless. Even in her regimented "Rhythm Nation", Janet Jackson doesn't stay so intently in choreographic character, breaking from shot-to-shot to swaying-and-facing-the-camera mode. The group dancing in Janet's video also allows the camera to break away from close-ups, allowing any potential flaws to be edited away.

Which brings me to Shakira, who has recognized the athleticism and the precision of Beyonce--well, she's even recognized the hair styling and posture of Beyonce--and met the challenge with a style that's both exact and--her own contribution--loopy. Her flexibility is aspirational. Her choreography is as unnerving as some of the most cutting-edge contemporary dance. Her delivery is clean and confident, as it it is perfectly natural to arrange your knee above your head. Her spider pose, for example, would be a little circus-show freaky if it was not delivered with a playful wink. Shakira has shown that she can match Beyonce move for move, that she can suffer the glare of an unforgiving camera and also--her trump card but also the twist that might obstruct her way to international domination--that she doesn't take her Olympian performance skills so seriously.

Pride notes

A few quick thoughts on this year's Pride celebrations in Toronto.

* Major parade trend: So many cops marching. You only have to go back a few years to the time when it was just the LGBT police liaison officer and her girlfriend driving a single car, unable to find any other officers to join them.

* Queers Against Israeli Apartheid had a large, colourful contingent. So did the pro-Israeli group. Neither overwhelmed the parade. Nobody seemed particularly shocked or upset or distressed. Guess what: Free speech works.

* The recession cast a shadow over the parade's fabulous quotient--many of the floats looked makeshift. Major sponsor TD had a lot of bodies in the parade, but the float was very basic. No lavish spending in sight. At least two entries looked to have recycled old Christmas decorations.

* I only saw one Michael Jackson look-alike all weekend.

* Yet again, the Sunday night Wellesley Stage lineup--which hosts the biggest acts-seemed designed to kill as much buzz as possible. There was talent there--Kelly Rowland, ABC and Divine Brown, for example--but the strange sequence, long gaps between acts and sleepy interstitial soundtrack cleared the air of any sense of build or excitement. I don't know if this is a contract-management problem or if Pride organizers purposefully want to drive audiences out of the venue in order to bring in fresh supplies of drinkers. Regardless, poor talent curation hurt the mood more than the rain.

UPDATES:
1. QuAIA organizer Andrew Brett gives his take on the issue here and clarifies that the pro-Israel contingent was the Kulana Toronto group. My comments on this issue are regarding the appropriateness of these two groups carrying the messages they carried in the parade--I think it was all perfectly appropriate and any debate their participation generated has been positive all around--not on whether Israel is more pro-queer than the rest of the Mideast (a fact so obvious it's not worth debating). In the last few years, Pride Toronto has increasingly taken on a global human rights agenda. In doing so, the organization has opened the door to giving a platform to groups who have things to say about what's going on in countries beyond our own and, while I think it will take some finesse to manage this evolving role (check out how Pride handled the anti-Catholic Raelian entry in 2004), the increased relevance makes the effort totally worth it.

2. I did like the parade this year; sorry if I gave the impression I didn't. Though many floats wore their budgets on their flatbeds, there was a lot of creativity and many small touches that turned what would have been dull marching contingents into something special. It's amazing what energy and splash can be accomplished with a sequined hat, a tinselled pompom and a genuine smile. When I see pictures of the beefy go-go boyed parades of, say, Paris or Sao Paulo, I am proud that Toronto's Pride parade is filled with such a diverse cross-section of this city's (this province's? this world's?) citizens who are there because they want to be, not because they're paid to be there and look good. We may not have the flashiest Pride in the world, as defined by cookie-cutter standards, but we have the most engaged and real one.

Waiting for an inspiration

When I got a review copy of Moby's Play album in 1999, it was a revelation. The tension between the sombre chords he had picked up during his classical training and archival recordings of gospel and folk music created something simultaneously fresh and obsessive--I couldn't stop playing it and neither could Madison Avenue.

Deep Forest had done something similar with samples of pygmy songs on its 1992 self-titled debut, but there was a more straight-forwardly colonial smell to Deep Forest's cultural appropriation, perhaps because the cultural gap was so wide. Moby's use of sampled vocals--clipped short and repeated incessantly--was perverse enough to turn them into something other than themselves without insulting the emotions of the original performance.

Play was also, unlike his previous efforts, a smooth album, free of tracks that would make a dinner-party host hit the Next Track button. The manic punk influences were gone; Moby's restlessness infused itself into each individual track, rather than dashing across the entire album. But Play's breakout success and its resulting ubiquity was both a blessing and curse for the shaved-headed New Yorker. Its ingenuity was retroactively rewritten as a formula, a formula Moby has struggled with ever since.

2002's 18 was an unapologetic retread--Play's lost tracks--right down to its sampling strategies and its mix of poignant ballads and dance tracks. But the freshness was lost in a post-9/11 gloom.

2005's Hotel abandoned sampling, and any dance-oriented throwaways, leaving the songs to stand on their own as pop; only a couple, like "Life Me Up" and "Raining Again" were up to the job. The beats returned for 2008's Last Night, which was a semi-successful attempt to capture the disco exuberance of Go and the lighter parts of Everything is Wrong.

Just a year later, we have Wait for Me and you have to wonder if money was the main motivation for rushing this undercooked, world-weary album to market. This is Moby at his most mopey.

Wait for Me is his most intensive purging yet, eschewing both samples (except for one spoken-word speech in "Study War") and dance jams, leaving us with little more than the minor chords that have always formed the foundation of his music. It's little more than aural wallpaper. High hats and synth chords wander freely but timidly from beginning to end. Melancholy vocals visit once in a while but fail to give the tracks bite, cohesion or resonance.

Some of Wait for Me sounds like an electronic version of prog rock, but, even then, there's no journey, no build. Abandoning random play for in-order listening does nothing to take us deeper inside. It's too coolly pretty, too empty and much too smooth. Moby has claimed Wait for Me is more personal and experimental. I don't know about personal--unless it means lack of concern for creating material that will engage listeners--but if this is experimental, then Enya is an alter ego of Arthur Russell.

Moby's post-Play albums, mistaking an abundance of tracks for artistic generosity, have start strong (or, at least, sturdily constructed) before trickling out into a Muzak wankfest. (Hotel came with an entire album of ambient fiddling and you have to wonder if Wait for Me might have, setting financial incentives aside, been conceived in a similar vein.) Wait for Me is a lube-driven affair from its opening track to its last.

If I see a light flashing

I'd never be one to disagree with a Helder,but I do think, though it's a tough call, the new Calvin Harris track , is a tidal wave compared to the pretty storm of Basement Jaxx's "Raindrops". The Jaxx track is slicker, more layered and more thoughtful--these guys are producers' producers--but the jaggedness of "I'm Not Alone" makes it more dramatic: the unsteady vocals, the change in tempo give it an emotional fragility. And the lyrics of a 25-year-old who is tiring of club culture are particularly evocative.

Red wine's got him gaga

My admiration of Sasha Frere-Jones’ writing on music for the New Yorker, though enough in itself, also makes me feel a little smug to see that he’s fallen into the much derided “red wine” trap in his analysis of Lady Gaga. The cri de guerre at the beginning of “Just Dance” certainly sounds something like “red wine/got me/gaga.” It's what I sang for a long time until online flamers set me right. The spoken phrases are actually the part of the song where its architects are announced: Red One/Konvict/Gaga. I’m sure Lady Gaga is more of a vodka drinker; red wine is for the bourgeoisie.

I remember the day I first heard Peggy Lee sing "Is That All There Is?" I was eating a bagel at the corner of Davie and Denman in Vancouver and I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe the song had been recorded. It seemed so... immoral. It seemed to be pulling back the curtain on how the world worked, showing something dark and then, perplexingly, celebrating it. I still have a problem getting my head around it. Is it satire or philosophy? Are we meant to take the chorus as a consolations for life's disappointments or are we meant to roll our eyes?

Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." This 2006 Entertainment Weekly article on the history of "Merry Little Christmas" has stuck with me. I have to say the Judy Garland lyrics are my favourites.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC9o4oYMIqI