Robyn Hitchcock's second (and final) studio album for Warners was 1999's Jewels For Sophia. The songs for this album were recorded in four cities with four different producers (most notably Jon Brion) and an assortment of backing musicians, but I think it hangs together pretty well as an album.
Jewels is in my regular rotation, and I listen to it a lot more than Moss Elixir, for example. The tracks with Jon Brion ("Mexican God",etc) were recorded at Jon's house in L.A., so they have a "hangin' at the Largo with Jon and Robyn" sort of feel. The tracks recorded in Seattle with Scott McCaughey and Peter Buck ("Viva Sea-Tac" and "Elizabeth Jade") are like proto-Venus 3 tracks, and the ones recorded in London sound like extensions of Moss Elixir. It sounds more like a compilation of multiple EPs than a complete LP, but all the songs are great, and the producers (even Brion) don't overwhelm them with too many flourishes.
Here's a performance of my favorite song from the album "I Feel Beautiful" (after a minute or so of hangin' with Jon & Robyn in Santa Monica) from an unaired 1999 pilot of the Jon Brion show. The vibraphone is fortunately a lot less prominent in the recorded version of the song!
A few months after the release of Jewels For Sophia, Robyn released an album of outtakes called A Star For Bram on his own Editions/PAF label. It's kind of a companion/extension to Jewels (the Side 3 to its Nextdoorland), but I think Bram merits its own blog entry, so I'll post about it next, either tomorrow or later today. We've made it to the new millennium!
1 comment:
"I Feel Beautiful" is one of my very favorite love songs. I got this record pretty recently and was listening to it a lot in November or so -- It seems like a bunch of really fantastic songs, but I don't quite think of it as an "album" -- there isn't much of a link between the songs that I can see. "Gene Hackman" is corny and a lot of fun.
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