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The 34-year-old Australian, who lives in upstate New York, says that while magazines may attempt to place him in such lofty company, he's not concerned with chiseling a spot on pop's proverbial Mount Rushmore. "It's pointless to try and measure music along those lines," Davies says on the phone from his home near Woodstock. "Music is one of the few things in life where you can be free, man." Davies is free these days, and he's taken advantage of his liberty to create two memorable and important albums of unabashedly melodic music: 1996's There's Never Been a Crowd Like This and the recently released Telegraph (Flydaddy). The singer-songwriter first earned notice as leader of the Moles, a Sydney, Australia, band that spent the early '90s churning out abstract garage-pop tunes. Davies then teamed up with Gresham's Eric Matthews to form Cardinal, which issued a self-titled 1994 record that The New York Times called "the most brilliantly understated album" of the year. As a solo artist, Davies has blossomed into a stylist with a sharp eye for detail and a rare melodic sensibility. He hasn't achieved anything as brilliant as Pet Sounds or "Penny Lane," but on songs from Telegraph, Davies unerringly chronicles man's frailties and life's bittersweet moments. "Crystal Clear," which he calls his version of Dylan's "Positively 4th Street," floats along on a gentle piano arpeggio as he sings of a soured relationship ("In the end, all my blues are red again"). For the lyrical, country-ish "Main Street Electrical Parade," Davies plucks out a singsong melody on acoustic guitar and uses the finale of a perennial Disneyland event as a metaphor for desolation. In the swirling rock opener, "Cantina," he recounts a road trip through a desert Indian reservation and tosses off plaintive lines such as "The river floods its banks too many times a year." On this track, it sounds like Davies is grappling with his newfound status as an American. "I don't even know if I'd be making music if I was in Australia," he says. "It'd certainly be a different kind of music. Being in a different country definitely influences the music you make. "America's an interesting place to live," he continues. "It's a great place to be a musician. In Australia, it's all past tense. Here, the rock 'n' roll story is still going on. There's no law that says in 1973 all good music had to stop." There are other benefits to living in the United States. Davies says he's been listening to a lot of old Motown compilations featuring classic songs by Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye, and he purchased them at the grocery store. "There's not many countries in the world where you could get that good stuff just after you bought cereal and bagels and some low-fat milk," he says. When he's not out shopping, Davies spends a lot of his time in the studio. His albums are as identifiable for their stellar songwriting as they are for pristine, thoughtful production. The reason he's often mentioned in the same breath as Brian Wilson is that Davies' solo records and his collaborations with Matthews feature the type of elegant compositional structure and expansive recording techniques equated with masterful '60s musicians and producers such as Wilson and Ronnie Spector. Davies credits Portland's Tony Lash, who has engineered and mixed records for him and other artists including the Dandy Warhols and the Rentals, with attaining warm, rich sounds in the studio. "Tony's a talented engineer," Davies says. Lash is currently the drummer for Sunset Valley and the organist in Isolade, the band that opens Davies' Portland show. "I don't think he gets enough credit." On stage, Davies doesn't try to emulate the streamlined sound of his records, instead interpreting the songs with help from highly competent backing musicians--guitarist Brendan O'Brien, bassist George Rush and drummer Kevin Shurtleff. With Telegraph earning high marks from the rock press and the chance to turn on new fans through touring, Davies may take a few steps closer to the hallowed ground of his musical heroes and in the process earn recognition from the masses. But while others may look to measure his success in terms of album sales and hit songs, he says he's content to keep recording albums and playing for audiences of any size. "People are very keen to be graded," he says. "I remember being in a class at school where the teacher announced in a revolutionary way that there'd be no exam at the end of the course. A lot of the people were shocked and horrified. They desperately wanted to be measured. And they were appalled at the idea that he was trying to teach us a lesson that the point of what you do is not to be measured. Life is much more subjective. I'm just doing what I'm doing. If I like a song and the guys I'm playing with like it, that's good enough for me." "There's no law that says in 1973 all good music had to stop," says Richard Davies. |
