By 1968 Herb Alpert was already famous because of his trumpet playing and his Tijuana Brass records. But not because of his singing.

In fact he didn’t have the greatest of voices. He didn’t sing on record very often at all and he must have felt much more uncomfortable and uncertain singing rather than trumpeting. But I remember reading that John Lennon once said something like ‘I eventually started writing on the piano because I got too good at guitar and since piano was less natural to me I rediscovered fresh ideas there’. He could have been talking about Herb’s performance on ‘This Guy’. Because in using his less natural instrument – his voice – he went well beyond what must have been his comfort zone and in so doing he created a track that is more novel, more from the heart and just more expressive than any of his trumpet-playing Tijuana hits.

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OK, time I covered some more recent stuff. Not least to prove that I’m still alive and listening. But mostly because there’s so much great stuff around these days. So the next 5 posts are all about recent(ish) tracks from the 2000′s. Except this one, which is a full 15 years old but still smells as beautiful as a freshly cut rose.

Lambchop are one of a kind. They were originally a shifting collective of musicians from the Nashville area based around the unique voice and songwriting of Kurt Wagner. Quite a collective actually – there were 13 of them plus a string quintet when they created ‘Theöne’. More recently they’ve become a stable and much smaller band. But back in their earlier days they were a collective, whose members had ‘proper’ jobs (Kurt layed wooden floors during the day) and seemed to come and go fairly randomly, but whose music was always consistently magical.

‘Theöne’ is one of those magical moments. It might appear on the surface to be ‘just’ another love song about a girl. Listen carefully to the words and just as importantly, listen to the fragility of the music and the almost spoken voice and it’s a lot more focussed than that.

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‘Natural Woman’ is not just a beautiful song about love.
For a start it’s far more insightful than most love songs. Instead of just reiterating that love can make you deliriously happy, it explores another aspect of what being in love can mean. That if you are lucky, very lucky, love can be so strong, so intense, so absolute that it changes your entire experience of the World around you. And that makes feeling ‘happy’ seem a little like first base.
If that was all (all!) ‘Natural Woman’ managed to do it would still be one of the most profound and beautiful sets of love lyrics ever. But Carole King’s version of the song she had earlier written with her husband specifically for Aretha Franklin to record goes much deeper than that.

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