It’s been a bumpy road on the way to making the definitive Lloyd Cole album, as Cole himself will acknowledge.
“I’m forever making mistakes,” says Cole, 34, with a rueful laugh. “There was a large part of my personality in (my) late 20s that felt I should be starting to reinvent myself at every turn. I think that was because I was hugely influenced while growing up by Miles Davis and David Bowie, who were constantly changing, and they formed my impression of what a musician should be.”
Beginning in 1984 with his first group, the Commotions, the Scotland native developed a literate, post-collegiate style of chiming, folk-based guitar rock stuffed with wordy narratives and references to poets and philosophers.
As a solo artist, he veered from orchestral arrangements on “Don’t Get Weird On Me, Babe” (1991) to hard-rock tunes (“Sweetheart”) on his self-titled, 1990 solo debut. With “Bad Vibes,” released domestically in 1994, Cole’s increasingly fussy experiments with song form and production all but obscured his identity.
“My wife kept telling me the album didn’t sound like me, and she was right,” Cole says. “There were moments on that record that I was trying very hard not to sound like myself, because I was so insecure about my talent. I tried to push myself in directions I had no business going.
“But,” Cole adds firmly, “it will be the last super-insecure record I’ll make.”
Cole’s new release, “Love Story” (Rykodisc), is modest in comparison to the ambitious scope of his recent efforts, but it’s also his most consistent and potent album. Its straightforward title, a departure from Cole’s normally ironic approach, is the first indication that the singer-songwriter isn’t playing around anymore.
“Ultimately, I’ve discovered it’s best to be like Van Morrison, who just makes Van Morrison records over and over again,” Cole says. “But I had to go through some tough hoops to get to this stage.”
“Love Story” began as a loose, “Highway 61”-style jam session, with Cole throwing together a bunch of musicians in his new home of New York City. “It was a foolish mistake,” he says. “Spontaneity was my ambition, but I found you can’t plan spontaneity.”
Instead, Cole went back to a more intimate setting, by playing most of the instruments himself alongside his Commotions-era sidekick Neil Clark, and adding a couple of downtown ringers — percussionist Fred Maher and guitarist Robert Quine, who had worked on earlier Cole albums.
The record’s stripped-down arrangements, built around Cole’s acoustic guitar, focus attention on how economical his songwriting has become over the years. Built around the striking image of a holdup, the opening “Trigger Happy” comments on the cockiness, wonder and tragedy of youth, from an adult perspective.
“I wrote it after I heard Suede’s song `So Young,’ and I realized I no longer got it,” says Cole, the father of a 3-year-old son. “I found that their self-confident attitude did nothing for me, and that I must be completely out of touch because of it.
“So the song became a way of confronting that gap, from the perspective of an older person looking at a generation that has lost hope in many ways, that has no future other than crime. And I think about the strangeness of seeing myself still in this industry, which appeals so much to the young.”
Perhaps that’s why Cole’s new album has such resonance. With its understated, emotionally direct commentary on how people interact, “Love Story” is a statement that could apply to any generation, not just the one Suede addresses.
Cole headlines Sunday at the Park West.
– One would think that after reinventing pop culture in the ’90s by producing crucial albums for Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Sonic Youth, Butch Vig would be fearless.
“Actually, I’m somewhat terrified,” Vig says with a laugh. The Madison-based producer is talking about the inaugural tour by his new band, Garbage, whose self-titled album on the Almo Sounds/Geffen label is one of the year’s most impressive debuts.
“We’re a week away from playing live and we still haven’t worked out how all the songs are going to sound,” he says, calling during a break in practice sessions for the band’s performance Tuesday at Metro. The problem is one of translation: how to turn an album’s worth of songs embellished by rhythm loops, samples and effects into a dynamic concert.
“We want to use the technology without becoming a slave to it,” Vig says. Fortunately, there are strong melodies undergirding the sonic tinkering on Garbage’s debut and real musicians playing them: Vig and his accomplices in the famed Smart studios in Madison, guitarists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, plus vocalist Shirley Manson.
Besides Vig’s high-profile work on Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” Smashing Pumpkins’ “Siamese Dream” and Sonic Youth’s “Dirty,” he, Erikson and Marker specialized in doing club remixes for bands such as House of Pain and some of DJ International’s house artists, often stripping tracks down until only the original vocal was left and then building their own instruments, effects and rhythm loops around it to create a completely new sonic environment.
In a sense, “Garbage” was created the same way. “Not until we finished the album did we know we even had an album,” Vig says. “The songs veered all over the place, many of them went in several directions. Not until the mixing phase did it make sense.”
Another key ingredient was Scottish singer Manson, whose performance on a video aired on MTV with her former band Angelfish caught Vig’s eye and ear.
“She brought a new perspective that really influenced the direction of the music,” Vig says. He describes how he worked up the riff and some rough lyrics for what would become the album’s first single, “Queer”: “I’m very self-conscious about my singing, so I ran my voice through an amplifier to distort it and screamed like you’d hear on a Nine Inch Nails record. Shirley heard the demo and said, `I quite like that.’ Then when she recorded her vocal, she did exactly the opposite, all low and understated. It was perfect.”
To make Garbage work, Vig is turning down lots of potentially lucrative jobs as a producer. “My friends all say I’m crazy to do this,” Vig says. “But when I produce a record, I eat, sleep, dream and breathe that record, and my personal life suffers. But with this band, I get to watch the other three argue about things once in a while, while I sit in back and have a beer. It feels really good to be part of the dysfunctional little family that a band is.”
– The Vandermark Quartet, one of the city’s best, genre-hopping bands, has broken up for the usual artistic and personal differences. The band leaves behind two CD releases and dozens of incendiary live performances. Ken Vandermark, Michael Zerang, Daniel Scanlan and Kent Kessler won’t be lacking for work, however: each are in several other bands, and Vandermark says he and Kessler will probably continue to collaborate.
