Freedom Road @Vagabone may not be so in the wilderness as he'd thought. Freedom Road is not without merit, but it doesn't gel for me. I'll second the dull, slow and plodding comments. (And it probably doesn't help that I'm not a big fan of Americana-infused music). I agree with @radiophonic that there's something here that just doesn't pass the cultural sniff test. But at the same time I wholeheartedly agree with Neil that reaching beyond the "write what you know" boundary is healthy, and I wouldn't want to discourage it. More bothersome to me is the voice--here the accent, although mild, is more an affectation to my ear. I'm not a fan of a singer adopting a different voice based on the content or narrator of the song. He's got a wonderful voice and style and there's no need to adapt it or to pander (well, that's probably putting it way too strongly and not his intention of course; but my appreciation for a song isn't enhanced by the voice matching the character--I'll let my imagination make any necessary adjustments.) While Freedom Road is my low-point of Absent Friends, it's not a 0 or a 1.....I love the general idea of a closet poet or aesthete in any profession, especially one such as trucking, ostensibly at odds with beauty. The idea of an inner stirring from the natural world and the resultant ache to create, as @TheLemmingFace mentioned, works well in contrast to the outward overall world-weary dullness expressed in the voice. And musically there's a lot to like here: the swell of strings as we approach the list of sights that take this trucker's breath away, and the overall subtle, tasteful instrumentation. Finally, I'm fond of those deep bass pedals (?) that kick in with a touch of menace after the "...look me in the eye again" line. I do like the live Black Session version. The voice sounds a bit straighter, though that could be my imagination. The cello works nicely here. 2.6/5
Absolutely this. Two bands that get mentioned a fair bit around here are Pet Shop Boys and Saint Etienne - two of the best examples of how the arrangement of the song can sometimes be at least 50% of the song. Sure, you can play “Nothing Can Stop Us” or “Left to My Own Devices” on an acoustic guitar... but you’re really not getting the full experience!
Yeah I would go far more than 50% to be honest! Generally speaking I find slow acoustic covers of non acoustic songs to be pretty nauseating (Dancing On My Own springs to mind). Its a bit different when its the artist themselves doing it I suppose.
I kind of agree with you both that it's wrong to say a song isn't a great song if it doesn't sound good on solo acoustic guitar (I seem to remember Noel Gallagher was criticised for suggesting this)... but there's a very special pleasure to be had when you realise that a song you assumed would sound rubbish stripped down, actually still sounds great. This was my experience with "Our Mutual Friend", as I said before. Its nice to have such songs to add to the solo repertoire. "Left To My Own Devices" is mostly spoken word and as such doesn't lend itself to solo acoustic performance... but "Domino Dancing", from the same album, is another song that I discovered to my surprise sounds great in bare bones form. (No fear of me putting my version on YouTube- I'm quite happy playing it at home for my own amusement). While I'm posting anyway, I might as well state the contrary view that I don't mind spoken interjections and spoken lines, in fact I usually like it.
Freedom Road This feels very familiar but it’s not coming to me what it is, no doubt some of you will put up possible influences. I like the sparse opening and the gentle sway of the strings coming in. Is there a dulcimer on this? It’s a nice sound. 3.5/5
I like the artist themselves doing an alternate acoustic version (sometimes at least). But it’s fair to say I wouldn’t fall in love with the acoustic version of that song if it’s all that existed. It probably mostly works because my brain is filling in the rest...
I think Neil said it was a zither! Not that familiar with either to be able to tell you the difference...
Freedom Road If I passively listen I find it slightly boring. If I actively listen I like it quite a bit more, but in either case it's probably my least favorite on the album. I think I like how it fits on the album and the mood it helps create more than the actual song. The least good song on an album that I think is very strong is still a pretty good song though. 3.25/5
I also didn't rate this much at first, but it's grown on me over the years. It's very poorly placed; it needs to come at the end of a long journey, so it can feel like a turn away from exhaustion, a settling down. But that clashes badly with the inert frivolity of The Happy Goth, and the supposed forward motion of Absent Friends as a restart album. So the song feels out of place, hard to get a handle on. It's a sort of Kraftwerk tribute isn't it? The octave-spanning bass of Autobahn, once the foundation of Kraftwerk's expansive outward vision, now turned inward, slowed down, spent. And maybe more - the high strings are Radioactivity, the harpsichord after 'takes my breath away' possibly Franz Schubert or similar. I can see how an American would find this song ridiculous, but the setting is just a fantasy for me, inaccurate as it might be. The thing is, the UK is really so small, so insular; the green spaces all humanised, the houses crammed together like matchboxes. When I first flew to the West Coast, I couldn't believe how much wilderness there was. The mountains and forests went on for hours. The SUVs looked like beetles; of course people were skeptical of climate change, how could these little cars be having an effect on all this? Believe it or not, 45 years later, Springsteen is still kind of iconoclastic here. You can't be born to run in the UK; there's nowhere to run to. So I totally get Neil romanticising the trucker life, but yeah, the song's completely uninterested in accurately portraying that life, it's just using these images to point at something else. Instead, as usual, it's a song about Neil - trying to reconcile his solitary artistic nature, and the wild dreams of pop stardom he had in the attic of his youth, with his current life as a family man and label employee. It's possibly about the breakup of the band, his truck-stop friends who he suppressed his grand ideas for, his rig that he parked up and walked away from. But probably not, given that this lyric apparently came after the US tours. Anyway, I find it moving as a closing of some chapter in somebody's life, the corn and the storm just metaphors for the piling up of vivid, hard-won memories, experiences warping and dissolving childhood fantasies, reducing down to the quiet resolve of adult life. It's time to move on. I agree it's no classic, but in the right mood, on the right day, it makes me tingle from the moment the zither starts panning left to right to the evaporation of the strings in the sunlight. 4.5/5
If it’s of any interest to people, the I-19 that he refers to is in Arizona (far from the corn, by the way). Perhaps the empty stretches of desert helped inspire the song.
I never used to particularly care for this track, but over the last year or two it has grown on me more and more... there is just something beautiful about the way the vocals and the instrumentation intermingle with one another, and the lyrics - talking as they do of a fictional truck driver who feels such strong emotions and thoughts about the beauty in the commonplace, but who feels like he has to hide these emotions in order to "fit in", even if it is quite probable that everyone else he knows feels the same way and unnecessarily repress themselves for the same reasons - strongly remind me of the deep yearning I have to express myself so much more than my social anxiety, self-doubt and autism ever allows me to do. There's something perversely surreal about knowing that I am a naturally demonstrative, affectionate person but that another equally-intrinsic part of my nature will always get in the way to some extent 4/5 Personally I think that the idea of a "marks out of 5" scale rather carries the implicit existence of a zero score as given not that I think I will ever need a zero mark in the posts to come..... although I may need a 0.5 mark or two at some point! Whoever claims this to be the case in all sincerity has never heard "Supper's Ready"
I once saw an acoustic tribute to Genesis - I don't remember the exact line-up but proably two guys with acoustic guitars and an acoustic bass guitar. "Now we're going to play 'Trick of the Tail'", they said - and started up 'Dance on a Volcano', followed by 'Entangled', followed by... well, you get the picture! It worked surprisingly well but that's probably because we were at a Genesis fan convention and most people had had a few beers...
"Freedom Road" scored 64.75 points from 18 votes, for a preliminary score of: 3.60 (as an aside, I like how we all seem to be able to agree that "Absent Friends" is an album of highs and lows... it's just that nobody can agree which songs are which!)
Today's song is: Laika's Theme A short instrumental piece before our final track. Nothing about it in the sleevenotes but here's a couple of tweets from Tim's Twitter Listening Party: "Laika's Theme - anyone for more zither?" "Laika's Theme is dedicated to everybody's favourite space dog. She serves as an emblem for how humans think they're better than every other species on the planet." Here it is:
"Laika's Theme" wasn't always an instrumental, though - as the 2020 Bonus Disc reveals. Here it is with lyrics. The first time I heard this, I thought "Well, obviously that should have been on the album instead"... but after a couple more listens, I'm not so sure. See what you think!
The side 2 doldrums continue. Hearing it with a vocal melody doesn't make it all make sense for me - even with vocals it's still, along with Freedom Road, the weak link on the record for me. 2/5
That's interesting. First time I heard this alernate version of Laika's Theme, it rather set my teeth on edge, but I couldn't work out whether that was because of the lyrics, or the way they were sang, or just because it felt intrinsically wrong after hearing it instrumentally for so long. Truth be told, there's nothing inherently bad about the alternative version, I don't think, but it's fascinating that it ended up the way it did. We know from the boxset (and before, to be fair), that Neil's lyrics often go through significant re-writes, sometimes turning into completely different songs, but this is the only example we know of where he dropped them entirely and left a track as an instrumental - I wonder whether he just though that was what the album needed, or whether he bashed away at those words but couldn't get them to where he wanted so gave up? The liner notes would have been an obvious place to let us know, I guess. As an instrumental, it's very pleasant. Too short and sparse to really love - in my opinion - but I think it's a helpful link between Freedom Road (which is quite brooding and dense) and Charmed Life, which is a bit frothy. An important bit of structure, rather than a great track in its own right, but there's nothing wrong with it as a concept or as execution. The title is a nice call-back to the opening track but, of course, it's difficult to know whether that's really what he had in mind. Without listening to the bonus version again to check (I'm at work, so can't right now), are there any references to Laika in the lyrics? 2.5
I laika Laika's Theme. It's maybe nothing super special, but it's got a nice mournful or contemplative feel. And is a nice follow-up to Freedom Road. Definitely happy it's on the album. 3.9/5
Its a bit inconsequential but it's quite nice. If Godrich's mixing had any influence at all then it's here, a suitably spacy feel the the theme. The tune is very simple but I really like how it resolves at the end. Reminds me of the kind of tune you'd get on 90s PlayStation games a bit too. I also think that it's a little bit of a lullaby, which feeds nicely into the last song. Ultimately, nice when listening to the while album, rarely a song I'd seek out on it's own. 3/5
As the one who gave out the first 0, I always thought the same: if you score out of 5, there obviously can be a 0/5 whereas a 6/5 is out of the question. If @LivingForever had forbidden the 0 at the time I would have argued the same but backtracked if he had insisted. Incidentally, in the Popjustice rates, they have a score out of 10 and even with that larger scale the occasional 0 isn't disputed but expected. By the way, they usually allow one exception to go beyond 10: you can award a single 11 for your favourite song in the rate. My belated score for "Freedom Road" will arrive shortly (and it's not a 0).
Ooh, that reminds me of something - a quote from Neil on Twitter that I neglected to pull out at the time we were discussing "Sticks and Stones": "On the second verse of Sticks and Stones Nigel Godrich's mixing really comes to the fore.. " This brings me back nicely to the instrumental version of "Sticks and Stones" which I posted the other day and I'm not sure whether anyone listened to. But in addition to the extra choral-sounding intro (which I still think is pretty interesting), if you listen to the second verse without Neil on it, there are some distinctly Godrich-y noises going on in the background...
Another lovely, romantic song review! I love reading these Laika's Theme Sweet, pretty contemplative little instrumental theme. Its placement on the album reminds me of Europe By Train and Theme from Casanova, which also precede a wildly sentimental final song. Its just a lovely little unhurried, spacious-feeling piece. 3.5/5.0 Alternative version I'm glad the instrumental is on the album instead as this feels quite personal (although it may not be). It has something of 16th/17th century English romantic verse/songs (e.g. Song to Celia/Greensleeves) and a nursery rhyme feel. Its overly cute and sickly sweet, but I find the pretty melody, hopelessly romantic symbolism and Neil's quite plaintive delivery quite affecting (against my wishes!), especially the final 'just tell me you'll stay', as though he knows its already hopeless. And who doesn't like anthropomorphic, starry-eyed flowers? None at all! Lyrics are: I promised you roses and here they are With small button noses and eyes like stars The garden of Eden for us. I promised you flowers, a thousand stems Through sunshine and showers I tended them I won't let them wither away I won't let them fade Just tell me you'll stay.
