MUSIC COMING

The Flaming Lips
At War With the Mystics
Out: April 4th

"This record sounds like Black Sabbath got Herbie Hancock to record with them, and they asked Syd Barrett to write something he would say at a funeral," says Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. Recorded off-and-on over two years with longtime producer-collaborator Dave Fridmann, the songs are actually more focused and restrained than the wild soundscapes of 2002's Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, with straightforward songs like "The Sound of Failure/Is It Always This Dark?" about a young girl struggling to cope with the death of her best friend, and "Haven't Got a Clue," which takes on the Bush administration. "Hopefully, it doesn't sound thematically in any way like the last record," Coyne says. "We would rather go into oblivion than do something that's just reminiscent and less powerful than something we stumbled upon in the past."

Mark Knopfler/ Emmylou Harris
All the Roadrunning
Out: April 25th

For the past decade, whenever Harris and Knopfler found themselves in the same city, they'd rent a studio and lay down country duets. It started with a brief session seven years ago and ended with two weeks in Nashville in 2001. The result is a quiet, country-flavored album featuring twelve tracks mostly written by Knopfler, including two ballads inspired by 9/11, "This Is Us" and "If This Is Goodbye." The latter, inspired by an Ian McEwan story about the doomed airplanes, has Knopfler and Harris portraying a couple contemplating their final moments together. "I'm glad it works as a straightforward love song," Knopfler says. "I wanted to just point out the value of a life lived with love in it. If there's any answer to barbarism and backwardness, then that is it."

Bruce Springsteen
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Out: April 25th

Springsteen has been known to wait as long as seven years between studio releases, but he's been on a roll lately: Just a year after releasing the mostly acoustic Devils and Dust, he will return with his first-ever album of covers, focusing on traditional folk songs such as "Old Dan Tucker," "Jesse James" and "Oh, Mary, Don't You Weep." But it's no somber solo acoustic disc. The album features an ensemble even larger than the E Street Band, with ten to twelve musicians on every track, and Springsteen is planning to tour with those musicians in the spring. "The album has a light, swinging, incredibly joyful sound to it -- it rocks," says Springsteen's manager, Jon Landau. "It's folk and old-timey instrumentation mixed with a large horn section and a big vocal-chorus sound." Springsteen, who has been quietly working on the project on and off since as early as 1998, first heard many of the songs in versions by folk legend Pete Seeger. "He was the hovering spirit in this project," says Landau. And although Springsteen has been pursuing the kind of political activism that has been a hallmark of Seeger's career, Landau says there's no particular message in the release. "Bruce just loved the music," he says. "It's really something original."

Pearl Jam
Pearl Jam
Out: May 2nd

"A couple of rock songs, a couple of ballads -- it's not rocket science," says Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard about the band's new disc. Not that he wants to undersell the hard work the band put into its eighth studio album, and its first studio record for Clive Davis' J Records. Pearl Jam entered Seattle's Studio X in November 2004, each member armed with ideas. After whittling about thirty songs to sixteen working tracks, singer Eddie Vedder took the rough sketches and wrote lyrics for them. "That took a while," says Gossard, "but it was worth the wait: He wrote some beautiful lyrics for this record." The title, Pearl Jam, reflects the group's most collaborative effort yet: It produced the album together, along with Adam Kasper; each member will receive writing credits; and, for the first time ever, guitarist Mike McCready contributes lyrics, to the album closer, "Inside Job." Gossard's two musical pieces, "Parachutes," an island-flavored beauty with acoustic guitars, a Wurlitzer and shifting time signatures, and "Life Wasted," which features a bridge reminiscent of Pink Floyd, are among the twelve or thirteen tracks that will make the final cut. "It feels like a new opportunity for us," says Gossard. "We're proud of the songs, and we think they have a chance to do a little better commercially." The boys are also bracing for a yearlong world tour, to kick off in late spring. "All of our new stuff is so much fun to play," says Gossard, on a break from rehearsing the album's first single, "Worldwide Suicide." "I can't wait."

Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Show Your Bones
Out: March 28th

"It's more like a laser beam than a hurricane," says Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O of her band's second album, Show Your Bones, the surprisingly polished follow-up to the Yeahs' noisy, chaotic 2003 debut. "We spent lots of time working together on the songs," Karen O says. "Before, it was just me and [guitarist] Nick [Zinner] in a room with a four-track." The New York trio wrote most of Bones in an L.A. studio, piecing together the songs on ProTools. Aided by a big-league budget and hip-hop-savvy producer Squeak E. Clean (a.k.a. Sam Spiegel -- the brother of Karen O's ex-boyfriend, Spike Jonze), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs turn in some of their catchiest, most sophisticated songs yet: The resplendent "Cheated Hearts" begins like R.E.M. and ends up somewhere near Siouxsie and the Banshees; "Phenomena" is a jagged, blood-on-the-dance-floor rocker; and "Gold Lion," the propulsive first single, is outfitted with a swaggering, syncopated groove and Karen O's howling ooh-ooh hook. Throughout the album, Karen O trades the wailing anger of the first album for a more decidedly good-natured vibe. "I blew out my angst light bulb a while ago -- or maybe it's shattered," Karen O says. "I guess you could say there are shards of it all over this record."

Re: the above Emmylou song...

Only Love and Then Oblivion
© Ian McEwan, September 15, 2001

Emotions have their narrative; after the shock we move inevitably to the grief, and the sense that we are doing it more or less together is one tiny scrap of consolation.

Initially, the visual impact of the scenes - those towers collapsing with malign majesty - extended our state of fevered astonishment. Even on Wednesday, fresh video footage froze us in this stupefied condition, and denied us our profounder feelings: the first plane disappearing into the side of the tower as cleanly as a posted letter; the couple jumping into the void, hand in hand; a solitary figure falling with a strangely extended arm (was it an umbrella serving as a hopeful parachute?); the rescue workers crawling about at the foot of a vast mountain of rubble.

In our delirium, most of us wanted to talk. We babbled, by email, on the phone, around kitchen tables. We knew there was a greater reckoning ahead, but we could not quite feel it yet. Sheer amazement kept getting in the way.

The reckoning, of course, was with the personal. By Thursday I noticed among friends, and in TV and radio commentaries, a new mood of exhaustion and despair. People spoke of being depressed. No other public event had cut so deeply. The spectacle was over. Now we were hearing from the bereaved. Each individual death is an explosion in itself, wrecking the lives of those nearest. We were beginning to grasp the human cost. This was what it was always really about.

The silent relatives grouped around the entrances to hospitals or wandering the streets with their photographs was a terrible sight. It reminded us of other tragedies, of wars and natural disasters around the world. But Manhattan is one of the most sophisticated cities in the world, and there were some uniquely modern elements to this nightmare that bound us closer to it.

The mobile phone has inserted itself into every crevice of our daily lives. Now, in catastrophe, if there is time enough, it is there in our dying moments. All through Thursday we heard from the bereaved how they took those last calls. Whatever the immediate circumstances, what was striking was what they had in common. A new technology has shown us an ancient, human universal.

A San Francisco husband slept through his wife's call from the World Trade Centre. The tower was burning around her, and she was speaking on her mobile phone. She left her last message to him on the answering machine. A TV station played it to us, while it showed the husband standing there listening. Somehow, he was able to bear hearing it again.We heard her tell him through her sobbing that there was no escape for her. The building was on fire and there was no way down the stairs. She was calling to say goodbye. There was really only one thing for her to say, those three words that all the terrible art, the worst pop songs and movies, the most seductive lies, can somehow never cheapen. I love you.

She said it over and again before the line went dead. And that is what they were all saying down their phones, from the hijacked planes and the burning towers. There is only love, and then oblivion. Love was all they had to set against the hatred of their murderers.

Last words placed in the public domain were once the prerogative of the mighty and venerable - Henry James, Nelson, Goethe - recorded, and perhaps sometimes edited for posterity, by relatives at the bedside. The effect was often consolatory, showing acceptance, or even transcendence in the face of death. They set us an example. But these last words spoken down mobile phones, reported to us by the bereaved, are both more haunting and true.

They compel us to imagine ourselves into that moment. What would we say? Now we know. Most of us have had no active role to play in these terrible events. We simply watch the television, read the papers, turn on the radio again. Listening to the analysts and pundits is soothing to some extent. Expertise is reassuring. And the derided profession of journalism can rise quite nobly, and with immense resource, to public tragedy.

However, I suspect that in between times, when we are not consuming news, the majority of us are not meditating on recent foreign policy failures, or geopolitical strategy, or the operational range of helicopter gunships. Instead, we remember what we have seen, and we daydream helplessly. Lately, most of us have inhabited the space between the terrible actuality and these daydreams. Waking before dawn, going about our business during the day, we fantasize ourselves into the events. What if it was me?

This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others. These are the mechanics of compassion: you are under the bedclothes, unable to sleep, and you are crouching in the brushed-steel lavatory at the rear of the plane, whispering a final message to your loved one. There is only that one thing to say, and you say it. All else is pointless. You have very little time before some holy fool, who believes in his place in eternity, kicks in the door, slaps your head and orders you back to your seat. 23C. Here is your seat belt. There is the magazine you were reading before it all began. The banality of these details might overwhelm you. If you are not already panicking, you are clinging to a shred of hope that the captain, who spoke with such authority as the plane pushed back from the stand, will rise from the floor, his throat uncut, to take the controls...

If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality. The hijackers used fanatical certainty, misplaced religious faith, and dehumanising hatred to purge themselves of the human instinct for empathy. Among their crimes was a failure of the imagination. As for their victims in the planes and in the towers, in their terror they would not have felt it at the time, but those snatched and anguished assertions of love were their defiance.