When rock musicians creep past middle age, it seems like their careers start careening in a number of disturbing directions. Some grow sideburns and a soul patch before heading out on their semi-annual farewell tour.
Some ignore their advancing age and wriggle into a pair of Abercrombie Kids jeans, to disastrous effect. Some sprinkle sequins on top of their sequins and become a Caesar’s Palace caricature, while others abandon making albums in favor of burying their car’s bumper in every stationary object in Long Island County.
And then there’s Nick Lowe.
The sixty-year old singer--and songwriter and producer and arranger and seriously, this man has more settings than my blender--hasn’t done anything of the sort. Instead, he continues to quietly make lyrically rich, carefully crafted albums while spending another early autumn touring the kinds of cozy venues eclipsed in their modesty only by the man himself.
I was lucky enough to catch Lowe’s concert last Sunday in Vienna, Virginia, a town located just four or five road construction zones outside of Washington, D.C. Despite marveling at his songwriting abilities for a solid decade, blaring "So It Goes" loud enough to alienate my neighbors at six different addresses and owning a tattered “It’s O.K. to Like Nick Lowe” t-shirt that has somehow outlasted all of my relationships, I’d never seen him live before. Saying I was kind of excited about the show is like saying that Amy Winehouse kind of likes bad decisions.
Last Sunday night’s performance was the final date on a two-week, eleven-concert trip across the U.S. “Let’s just say this tour hasn’t exactly been grueling,” he told the sold-out crowd packed into the tiny Barns at Wolftrap. “In Norfolk, Connecticut no one had ever heard of me, but they showed up anyway because I was the only thing on. Go sticks!”
The all-acoustic evening was beyond enjoyable with Lowe strumming his Gibson J-45 guitar while “taking a stroll through his back catalog”, as he phrased it. And what a catalog it is. He’s smoothed out some of the spikiness that punctuated his early pop-punk classics Jesus of Cool and Labour of Lust, but has retained the devastating wit that make even his love-iest of love songs seem clever instead of cloying.
Lowe has always surrounded himself with incredible musicians--from Ry Cooder to Geraint Watkins to Paul Carrack--but it was a treat to see him solo, which made it easier for Little Miss Rabid Fan here to hang on every word. No one can tightrope between humor and heartbreak like he can, nimbly moving from the broken-up after a breakup ballad “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide” into the salacious twang of “Has She Got a Friend”.
More than once, I caught myself wondering why Nick Lowe has never become a household name. It’s a mystery up there with how Lady Gaga conceals her penis in some of those outfits. He’s been an essential part of the British music scene since he plucked the bass for Brinsley Schwarz, a group of long-haired earnest Englishmen who helped usher in Pub Rock, a genre nestled between the overindulgence of prog rock and the three-chord blasts of punk.
From there he moved to the newly formed Stiff Records, an iconoclastic label that was equal parts brilliant and bizarre. Lowe worked as the house producer, manning the boards for albums by Elvis Costello, The Damned and Graham Parker, among others. In 1978, he released Jesus of Cool--one of the best debut albums of all time--which showcased his songwriting abilities but somehow never stuck to the charts.
Since then, he’s transitioned from genre to genre, conjuring thoughts of either Elvis--Costello or Presley--depending on where in his discography you drop the needle. He’s done power pop, bumped into roots rock and--with his more recent records--explored everything from Percy Sledge-style soul to the kind of timeless country that could’ve been filed between “Hello Walls” and “Heartaches By the Number”.
In the past 31 years, Lowe has released an economical twelve albums; by contrast, Robbie Williams has spewed nine since 1997. Earlier this spring, he released Quiet Please: The New Best of Nick Lowe a career-spanning collection of forty-nine of his greatest hits, which I encourage all of you to purchase from your nearest available retailer.
But back to the show. There wasn’t a lot of collagen left in Wolftrap’s decidedly older audience, but it was possibly the quietest, most attentive crowd I’ve ever been a part of. They clapped in recognition of old favorites like “Heart” or “When I Write the Book” and laughed--yes, laughed--at some of the lines in the aging disgracefully song “The Man I’ve Become” (Sample lyric: “His heart’s a prune/When it once was a plum/If you see him/That’s the kind of man that I’ve become”)
One highlight in an evening full of them was “I Trained Her to Love Me”, a three minute character study of a misogynistic womanizer that I’m pretty sure I dated once. (“This one’s almost done/Now to watch her fall apart/I trained her to love me/So I can go ahead and break her heart.”) The song collected some of the loudest applause, which seemed to relieve Lowe. “That one is sometimes seen as an unwanted blast of cynicism in an otherwise nice room,” he said, adjusting his glasses.
“When you hear the statement ‘I’d like to play a new song for you’, does your heart sink?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow. “Because mine does. When I hear someone say that, part of me dies.”
Um, no. When Nick Lowe is the man asking the question, my heart is launched like a runaway balloon that may or may not hold Falcon Heene. He didn’t disappoint with the “road-tested” but unreleased track “I Read A Lot”, another of the ‘She’s Gone, Now What?’ songs that he excels at writing.
In what was an excellent programming decision, he followed it with his best known track, the often-covered kind-of hit “Cruel To Be Kind”. After walking offstage to a standing ovation, he returned for a three song encore beginning with “Soulful Wind” and closing with “The Beast In Me”, which Lowe wrote for his former father-in-law Johnny Cash.
Start-to-finish, it was an exquisite way to spend seventy-five minutes. The length of the show is the only thing I would’ve changed--although I’d feel that way unless he somehow had enough guitar strings and stamina to get through every song he’d ever written.
But there’s a good chance he’ll be back next year, the warmth of his baritone taking the chill off another October evening. That’s the kind of man he’s become.
Beginning in mid-November, Nick Lowe has a number of dates scheduled in Australia and New Zealand.