Following a five-year absence from recording, Rocks In The Head didn’t roll out to a receptive or eager audience, which is a shame. Instead they fall to Daltrey's care, where they swell to grand statements. “Days of Light,” “You Can’t Call It Love” and “Everything A Heart Could Ever Want” might have been shopped to third-rate singers. To say these blossom in Daltrey’s care is an understatement he champions them, and the victories are his. McMahon’s material is good but the sort of thing that songwriters churn out in spades: mild rants in an election year, love songs, looking at the world around them and reflecting on what’s lacking. Produced, played and written in large part by Gerard McMahon, there’s no question who gets the better part of the deal. After more than half a dozen albums, his fans have already come to terms with the protean role of the singer/actor, and have learned to appreciate his willingness to invest songs good and bad with the same energy. His whole career has been a singalong Cyrano, appropriating the words of others and gilding them in his golden throat, imbuing them with the energy and charisma that oozes from the singer but rarely from the original songwriter. Hear the rest of their conversation at the audio link.S Roger Daltrey sings (and Gerard McMahon writes) on “Mirror Mirror,” “I can tell a lie real good / And maybe you’ll believe every word.” Rocks In The Head is a lie, like most Daltrey albums, a sham that earns another sweaty, gritty performance from one of the most gifted voices in music. "There's some reason why these great bands, like us and Zeppelin and The Beatles - it's the chemistry of the members that created this thing that is so much bigger than the sum of its parts."ĭaltrey spoke with NPR's David Greene about the early days of The Who and how severe illness forced him to face his mortality in the middle of a creative project. "There was something about the chemistry of us that worked," he says. Though they hardly see each other offstage anymore, Daltrey says he and Townshend still have a strong relationship grounded in honesty. After a month in the hospital and six months of recovery, Daltrey planned to shelve the project - until he got a boost of energy from his old friend Pete Townshend, who urged him to finish the project and offered to play guitar on it. Work on As Long as I Have You stalled when Daltrey was hospitalized for meningitis. Roger Daltrey's As Long as I Have You is available now. And, of course, as young English teenagers growing up, this was magical music," he says. After the war, we had the GIs over in England. "This is all American heritage music that Americans at the time didn't know about. As Daltrey explains, this was the music he idolized as a teen. The new album's title track is a cover of a 1964 song by soul singer Garnet Mimms. "The idea of doing pre-Townshend stuff was an idea that I had for The Who about 10 years ago, when Pete was struggling writing a new album." "This is the kind of material we were playing when we were at the Marquee Club and early gigs that we used to do in London around 1964, before Pete Townshend started writing the songs," Daltrey says. At the age of 74, the British rocker is returning to that music for his new solo album, As Long as I Have You. But when first it started in the 1960s, Daltrey's band was covering American soul songs. Rolling Stone wrote that the voice of The Who's Roger Daltrey was one of the most powerful instruments in rock. "Soul comes from the gut," Roger Daltrey says.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |