REVIEW: Ron Sexsmith, Other Songs (Interscope)
- Scott A. Miller
Ron Sexsmith is always surprised by how sad his songs sound, even the upbeat ones. "Some of the songs I've recorded, I remember just singing them out and having a really good time, and then the track is finished and it sounds sad," the Canadian singer-songwriter told Request earlier this year.
Sexsmith won't ever take you by storm, but his pure high tenor voice and unadorned observations on life will certainly keep your attention once he gets it. His second album, Other Songs (Interscope), is a mix of pop tunes, folk ballads and "near-rock" that builds on his successful 1995 debut.
There's a danger to calling Sexsmith a "sensitive" singer-songwriter, though, because it has the connotation that he's sappy. He's not. Take the song "Pretty Little Cemetery." It's a simple melody and story about a dad taking his young son to a cemetery. In the break though, the young son points to the graveyard and, in the way kids do, says to an elderly couple "this is where we go to when we die, my papa told me so. The old man says yes we know." You almost cringe at how real a scene like that is. And no pretty acoustic guitar solo is going to take away the sting of an innocent preschooler confronting an elderly couple with their own mortality.
This is what Sexsmith does so well throughout the entire album - challenge the notion that a pretty voice and pretty acoustic-based melodies equal clean-cut emotions and cookie-cutter songs. In fact, the emotional range runs the gamut, from uneasiness ("Pretty Little Cemetery") and poignancy ("Honest Mistake" and "So Young") to buoyant comedy ("Clown in Broad Daylight"), outright sadness ("Strawberry Blonde" and "Child Star") and self-deprecation ("Average Joe").
The arrangements are uniformly understated, but producers Mitchell Froom, who did so much for former Del Fuego Dan Zanes' 1995 album Cool Down Time (Private Music) as well as Sexsmith's debut, and Tchad Blake, who put the finishing touches on the album, imbue each song with its own unique flavor by adding an organ here and horn there.
Singer-songwriters remain relevant in today's hip-hop world because listeners still enjoy relating the confessions and ruminations of the artists to their own lives. Because he is a singer-songwriter at heart, some of Sexsmith's vignettes will have more meaning for certain listeners than for others. That's what makes it difficult to pick a standout track. I lean toward "Honest Mistake" and "Average Joe" but it's a tribute to Sexsmith's ability that others will choose other songs.
