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MP3 Gwin Spencer - Addicted To The Motion
13 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Funk Rock, ROCK: Modern Rock
Details:
As she began recording demos for songs that would later help make up her solo debut ADDICTED TO THE MOTION, Gwin Spencer received aid from a most telltale benefactor.
"A friend of mine Pete Matthews played Diane Hendrix a killer version of ''Addicted to the Motion'' that he and I had done, and he told her I was trying to make some demos," Spencer says. "She told him she heard Jimi in my playing."
Soon after, Spencer received a $500 check from the Hendrix Family.
"She told Pete she just wanted to help me, which was really unbelievably cool."
While Spencer cites Hendrix and a host of other artists as influences on her songwriting and guitar playing, her music sounds anything but derivative. ADDICTED TO THE MOTION confirms the arrival of a singular talent, someone who has ingested nearly a century''s worth of Mississippi Delta blues, Stax soul, British metal gods, and fellow Memphian Elvis''s sexual magnetism to create an idiom all her own.
"I got an opportunity through A&R guru Derek Oliver to go to New York and record this record with Eddie Wohl, and I chose to do so," Spencer says. She spent a month with Wohl, whose hard-edged, industrial production created an irresistible tension with Spencer''s blues-influenced songs.
"I used more new drum sounds and new make with this record, but it still has that basic raw honesty to it as well, and that''s the kind of idea I had for this project," Spencer says.
ADDICTED TO THE MOTION is a raucous, soul-bearing meditation on both the pain and joy love generates. On the record Spencer melds eloquent songwriting with the sort of musicianship that has caused old bluesmen to shake their heads in wonder to achieve a plainspoken honesty that harkens back to her musical forerunners.
"I think it''s real simple," Spencer says about her songs. "I feel things in my heart, and I express them a lot of times in my music, and it''s no different than what anyone else is feeling."
The opening and title track makes the seemingly self-evident yet often forgotten observation that whatever agonies love may bring about, "It''s all been worth it when we''re moving in time."
The track also showcases Spencer''s smoky alto, and the sexy push-pull sound of the guitar riff sets the tone for the rest of the album. Whether good or bad, relationships can be an all-consuming and scary thing, Spencer notes.
"I''d never see the light of day till the morning rose from you," Spencer sings in the album''s second track, "Don''t Say It." Spencer''s impressionistic lyrics evoke the album''s main themes of what she calls "breaking up and breaking down."
The song''s bridge vividly depicts the disintegration of a relationship in heartbreaking detail:
Shadows fall on a wall
With pictures in frames that don''t mean a thing.
Lovers sing their songs
Till the song comes to an end.
Left wondering what you lost
Left wondering what you won
Tangled in something
Captured in moments
Longing for something more,
More...
Spencer follows it with frantic guitar solo. "I felt that solo to the bone," she says.
"Yesterday and Days Before," may well be the best breakup song ever recorded. More pop-influenced than her other songs, it nonetheless shows off her searing guitar work and knack for melody and phrasing.
The language Spencer uses is deceptively simple, yet it nails her target. "The one that''s thrown away has finally locked the gate."
At the same time Spencer doesn''t spare herself: "I guess you left wanting more than yesterday and days before."
Released late 2002 on THE MEMPHIS BELLES--PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE compilation CD, "Yesterday and Days Before" garnered great reviews from the Memphis music press. Memphis Commercial Appeal, Mark Jordan wrote, "The funk rock of ''Yesterday & Days Before'' from Gwin Spencer (formerly of [The] Mother Station and band director of [The] Keenan Ivory Wayans Show) portends great things from the upcoming solo album from which it is culled."
The song following it, "Killing Me," takes an even more merciless view of romantic chaos. The guitar intro mimics a siren while the underlying rhythm is twitchy. "I would walk across a razor to feel your hand on me," she proclaims. "And where you go you''d know I follow. To hell and back I guess we''ll go."
She ends it with the understanding, "You''re killing me, but I guess I let you..."
"I Can Feel It" sounds like the sort of old R&B song that the Stones might have covered in their ''60s heyday.
"That line, ''make a clock run backwards/make a freight train take a dirt road,'' it just popped in my head, and that line itself leads to kind of a funky rhythm," says Spencer.
The song pays homage to her influences from the righteous, paranoid lyrics to its screaming guitars to its flowing rhythm, something that is too often absent from today''s rockers.
"I think rock went from being something that moved back and forth to something that was stationary and hard-headed," Spencer says. "It''s ''rock,'' not ''cement'' we''re talking about here."
The closing track on the album "Slave" circles back to the reason we risk breaking our hearts in the first place. A sonically lush, dreamy ballad, "Slave" evokes the similar push-pull motion that brings about love''s addiction.
When Spencer sings, "I put my finger upon my trigger happy lover. I have something for you that I have for no other," not only do you believe her, you hope that she''s singing about you.
"I really love the break and bridge in this song," Spencer says. "It has that push-pull thing that does it to me every time.
Spencer is proud of the album and what it represents. "The songs are all very close to me. I think just because it''s honest, and I did something different, and I''m glad."
Spencer has already started to record songs for a new, as-yet-untitled follow-up to ADDICTED TO THE MOTION that she says will be more overtly blues-influenced.
"I''m looking forward to my next project that will be to the extreme of being very raw," Spencer says.
Given Spencer''s talent and mastery and self-awareness, she should put out another album that bears witness to her genius. Or, as she purrs at the start of her third track "Testify" following a guitar intro that sounds as if it''s been filtered through the devil''s effects pedal --
"Watch this..."
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