bookmark | print | email

Bryan Ferry - Dylanesque - Album Review

by Greg Kot

Chicago Tribune, 24th June 2007

---

Ferry sings the songs he didn't write

New album of covers bucks a trend in rock

Bryan Ferry, the dashing crooner who has fronted Roxy Music off and on for the past 35 years, is a rarity in the rock era. He sings cover songs. Lots of them. Advertisement In between Roxy projects and his own albums of original material, he has recorded five albums devoted to the work of songwriters he admires. The latest, "Dylanesque" (Virgin), narrows the focus to the songs of a single artist: Bob Dylan.

Ferry is one of two rock icons to re-emerge in recent weeks with new work that puts a premium on vocal interpretation. Patti Smith's "Twelve" (Columbia) is her first all-covers album. And in "A Tribute to Joni Mitchell" (Nonesuch), a dozen artists, including Prince and Bjork, cover the Canadian-born songwriter's work.

Through the '50s, vocalists depended on professional songwriters to provide them with material. Singers sang, writers wrote. Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday and countless other vocalists were celebrated for their ability to interpret the work of songwriters such as George and Ira Gershwin; Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht; and Hoagy Carmichael.

But with the rise of songwriters such as Dylan and the Beatles, the art of interpretive singing went out of fashion, and was viewed with some suspicion by the rock audience. Rock singers who sang other people's songs were seen as less authentic.

Jon Brion, a songwriter and producer whose solo sets are frequently highlighted by astutely chosen cover songs, once put it this way: "In the past, we didn't expect Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole to write songs. We expected emotional experience from them, and they delivered it. They delivered songs written by guys who sat in rooms all day drinking coffee. But not Dylan or the Beatles. Their example screwed up music for my generation. After them, people who didn't write their own songs became uncool."

Ferry runs counter to that trend. In the past, he has refashioned songs of every ilk: John Lennon's "Jealous Guy," the Leslie Gore hit "It's My Party," Weill's "September Song." With "Dylanesque," out Tuesday, he dives into one of the deepest songbooks of the 20th Century, and emerges with his hair still perfect. His smoothness masks a subversive streak that is essential to great interpretive singing: It's not enough to just sing a great song, but to home in on its previously underappreciated details.

It's a trait that Patti Smith has exhibited in the past. Though best known as a poet-turned-singer, and justly celebrated for her lyrics, she made her mark by covering other people's songs. Smith's debut single was a version of the rock standard "Hey Joe," and her radical reconfiguration of Them's '60s garage-rock hit "Gloria," written by Van Morrison, kicked off her 1975 debut album, "Horses."

She's equally adventurous on "Twelve," but the results aren't nearly as revelatory. Her creaky string-band version of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is an interesting experiment, but doesn't improve on the already well-known original. And she sounds at wit's end trying to punch her way through the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter."

Like Smith, Joni Mitchell's original songs continue to enchant generations of musicians. On "A Tribute to Joni Mitchell," a number of her disciples try to unravel those tunes, many of which are elaborate puzzles defined by Mitchell's multioctave voice, idiosyncratic time signatures and oblique melodies. Little wonder that Sufjan Stevens marches the breezy "Free Man in Paris" into a pit of fussy orchestration.

But "A Case of You" brings out Prince's androgynous sense of adventure, and Caetano Veloso gets mischievous with "Dreamland." The Brazilian virtuoso dances with polyrhythmic drumming even as he digs into a lyric about colonialism that cuts close to home.

It's the type of performance that can send a listener back to the original with mind and ears opened anew -- an underappreciated service that Ferry has been providing for decades.