Powers of Observation

Dedicated follower of other people: Ray Davies. Courtesy V2 Records Canada.

Ray Davies would like to introduce you to a few of his neighbours. Their surnames — Jones, Smith and Brown — are common enough to suggest that the characters in Davies’s song Next Door Neighbours are apocryphal figures rather than folks who live down the street. Their colourful details — one runs off with “an Essex blonde,” another “threw the telly through the window” — point to the former Kinks leader’s long-standing interest in lives and perspectives other than his own. It’s a quality that has long made him an anomaly among songwriters.
 
Davies’s much-revered catalogue of songs since the mid-’60s includes character studies of a disappointed tourist (Holiday in Waikiki), Swinging London’s most swinging dandy (Dedicated Follower of Fashion) and a lonely voyeur who conducts a romantic affair by proxy (Waterloo Sunset). Few fans were surprised when Davies named his first solo disc Other People’s Lives (which was released in late February), as the title would have fit most of the records he’s made in his 42-year career. Wry, bemused and rarely sentimental, Davies’s approach runs counter to the notion of the songwriter as both storyteller and open book, someone who’ll shine a light in every dark corner of his or her psyche. Davies is more apt to direct that attention outward.

Rockers, even thoughtful ones, aren’t known for their use of the third person. That approach has been crowded out by the super-sized solipsism of people like Chris Martin. A graduate of the Bono school of songwriting, Martin spent most of Coldplay’s third album, X+Y, struggling on your behalf with life’s big questions (“what if there was no time, and no reason or rhyme?”) and making achingly sincere pledges (“I will try to fix you”). Amid the therapy-couch-ready confessions of Fiona Apple, the carping of punks young and old and the self-mythologizing bluster of hip-hop’s stars, there’s not much room for a songwriter with more modest ambitions, like Davies.

One reason “I” rules is that pop music thrives on directness, whether in the melody, the beat or the lyrics. What’s more, the success of many artists depends on the careful maintenance of a public persona that encourages listener loyalty. But it’s hard to see why taking an interest in other people’s lives remains a rarity when so many major artists in the past have walked a few miles in others’ shoes.

When the Beatles recorded Eleanor Rigby and Paperback Writer, they set the template for the pop song as character sketch, helping establish the idea among rock’s nascent audience that lyrics could support something more than sweet nothings. (Cole Porter, Billy Strayhorn, Doc Pomus and the countless other greats of jazz, Broadway and Tin Pin Alley proved that lesson long before, but that’s ancient history to most boomers.) The Rolling Stones would follow suit with Mother’s Little Helper and the epochal Sympathy for the Devil (the latter inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s book The Master and Margarita).

In early originals like The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan bridged the gap between traditional folk and country song forms and the emerging rock sensibility. Yet if there’s one artist who established pop’s first-person vantage, it’s Dylan. On his best albums (1965’s Bringing It All Back Home and 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, to cite just two), he stays at the centre of the action, even as he shifts between the roles of poet and seer, forlorn lover and sharp-eyed surrealist.

Questions about the nature of Dylan’s public persona continue to surround him — Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home (2005) and Dylan’s own memoir Chronicles Vol. 1 reveal how hard he has tried to keep people guessing. But his influence on how other singers would craft their songs and personas has been immense. After Dylan, singers who performed songs written by other people — a category that included Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley — would be deemed artistically suspect. While the practice of singing professionally crafted songs remained acceptable in country and R&B, it was insufficiently authentic for rockers and folkies. From James Taylor to James Blunt, sensitive singers who poured out the contents of their hearts could always find an audience that savoured their candour.

A wearer of many hats: Bob Dylan on stage in 1978. Photo Express Newspapers/Getty Images.

Other artists picked up on the more literary qualities of Dylan and the Beatles, as well as their most sophisticated folk, pop and jazz forebears. That wasn’t always for the better. The early rock operas of the Who and the Pretty Things marked attempts to expand the song form to encompass larger narratives that included a variety of characters. That trend gave way to the concept album, one of the most unfortunate developments in rock’s first decade. Such a careful writer in his early sketches, Davies would also be seduced by the possibilities of working with a larger canvas. As a result, the Kinks’ career was mired in a series of baffling productions like 1973’s Preservation Act 1. Davies only recovered his edge when punk inspired a return to basics.

Even though later musicians and scholars regard the early ’70s as an era of decadence and pretension, the era was a golden age for finely wrought, character-based songwriting. Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Rickie Lee Jones, Warren Zevon and Jackson Browne explored other people’s lives (sometimes each other’s) with great flair. The era also saw the emergence of two of Dylan’s most gifted stylistic heirs. Discovered by John Hammond — the same man who signed Dylan to Columbia Records — Bruce Springsteen wrote songs that combined robustly poetic imagery and sympathetic portraits of New Jersey’s most desperate denizens. Right from his earliest recordings, Springsteen’s music boasted both an emotional intimacy and a keen sense of character. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan were less keen on tugging heartstrings. These eggheaded hipsters enlisted top session players to enliven their acerbic sketches of con men, mavericks and hopeful losers.

Both Springsteen and Fagen recently released albums that emphasize the virtues of their early work. On Devils and Dust (2005), Springsteen adopts the imagined voices of folks in trouble, including a U.S. soldier in Iraq. On the haunting title track, he wonders what happens “if what you do to survive kills the things you love.” The third of his occasional recording ventures without Becker, Fagen’s Morph the Cat (2006) is a series of darkly comedic vignettes about mortality and post-9/11 paranoia. In Security Joan, a traveller develops a romantic obsession with a woman who runs an airport security point; Mary Shut the Door depicts the 2004 Republican convention in Manhattan as if it were an alien invasion, with Fagen presenting himself as a terrified onlooker who sees “the headlights through the blinds.”

Of course, many young songwriters use the same tactics — maverick rappers like MF Doom and Buck 65 shuffle voices like it’s second nature. For veteran songwriters, employing such diverse perspectives may be a matter of necessity. After all, smart writers understand that it’s harder for the average listener to relate to the life of a millionaire musician than someone less blessed by fate. (What’s more, any new song about stardom’s toll on love could never have the magic of Beth by KISS.)

The sharpness of Davies’s new album is a testament to his enduring skills of observation. Even so, the line between keen-eyed reportage and self-revelation can be a thin one; not for nothing did Davies dub his 1995 memoir X-Ray “an unauthorized autobiography.” In a self-penned note included in the jacket of Other People’s Lives, Davies describes his modus operandi as a writer in typically ambiguous terms. “It is wrong to assume these songs are a diary, a narrative of my actual life,” he explains. “Generally, I look at the world and observe characters from it.” But he also says that Jones, Smith and Brown “are all parts of me”; he seems to own up to the idea that these characters — and those in so many of his past songs — could be versions of himself.

Yet further down in the essay, he refutes that interpretation: “At the end of this record please remember this. IT’S NOT ABOUT ME, IT’S OTHER PEOPLE.” Those big capital letters suggest rock’s greatest observer might protest too much when asked whom he’s really writing about. If he’s that upset, he should think about suing his autobiographer.

Ray Davies is playing Theatre Olympia in Montreal Mar. 29 and Massey Hall in Toronto on Mar. 30.

Jason Anderson is a Toronto-based writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.