Age Old Hunger / Austin City Limits (A two-CD post!)

I got stuck in traffic on the way home from work the other night, and one thing you have to love about public transit is the fact that when you get caught in a traffic jam on a bus, you can let someone else worry about navigation. So instead of worrying about driving I thought about the CD on my player, which of course was Age Old Hunger. I even made some notes, although I’ve pretty much abandoned them in writing this entry.

I’ve already been over the strangely anachronistic (in a good way) sound of the CD, and certainly said enough about Denny’s voice. What stands out to me on repeated listens is how well he understands his voice as an instrument. I was struck, on the bus that evening, how many long vowel sounds there are in his songs. My favourites on the CD are the songs that feature long held notes, and it’s obvious I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a strength of Denny’s because those long vowels are obviously there for a reason. Even the two covers (one by Kristofferson and one by Cash) include the same long sounds. It’s been pointed out to me by my cousin, who is a singer, that Kristofferson as a singer has an amazing ability to sing entire lines on a single breath. He’s less impressive as a singer of individual notes, but the songs are written with room for a singer with different strengths to play on them.

That’s a major difference between the originals on this record and the covers. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Denny singing his own songs, because really their impact is more about the arrangement of sounds than the content of the lyrics. I’ve said it before but it’s true, Denny would still be able to get the emotional content of his songs across if he wasn’t singing in English at all. His phrasings are idiosyncratic and the structure of his songs isn’t as mature as it will be—several of them just seem to end, rather than coming to an actual conclusion. You notice it more when you pay attention to the covers, particularly the Kristofferson one. Obviously you can’t really compare the work of a twenty-three-year-old to that of the master songwriter, but “Loving Her Was Easier” is much more complete, structurally, than pretty well anything else on the record. The difference here is that one writer is universal while the other is still strictly personal—not a problem or a complaint, as a matter of fact. It’s appropriate for a young songwriter to be internally focused. It’ll be interesting to see how he develops.

Musically, there’s a lot of organ and harmonica being used as a lead instrument, and that too is interesting because those two instruments have some of the same qualities as Denny’s voice. There’s no sense of musical confusion here anywhere, all the main sounds complement each other and, if you will, tell the same story. Again, this is a career that'll be interesting to watch.

I was at HMV the day after my traffic-jam listening party and picked up a Kristofferson CD recorded at Austin City Limits in the early 1980s. Listening to this one back-to-back with Denny’s is sort of going from the sublime to… well, the sublime, really. The arrangements of the songs are very early-eighties country, by which I mean they’re a little too bright and sparkly. Kristofferson sounds like he’s having a great time, though, and the overall effect is more exuberance than anything, sort of the sound of a man who’s beaten the devil and is celebrating it.

Sound-wise, though, I preferred the solo-with-guitar version of things I heard from Kristofferson last December in Halifax. It took me a little thinking to come up with the reason. I’ve said before, and said to death, that Kris isn’t a particularly gifted vocalist, and he’s not even such a great guitarist. And at that show he was beginning to show the vulnerability of advancing age.

The net effect, though, was this: there was absolutely nothing between the listener and the words. And Kristofferson’s gift is the universality of his words. They were right there in front of you to share.

Anyway, two very different singers and very different CDs, but they're both worthwhile for their own reasons.