Panther's picks - Willie Nile: Willie Nile - 1980
Imagine Ian Hunter, Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, eighties-era Rolling Stones, Joe Strummer, Deacon Blue, Willy De Ville, Bob Dylan, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Lucinda Williams, Lou Reed, Graham Parker and maybe even The Boomtown Rats got together to write some lyrics and come up with some perfect, inspirational feel good rock songs - then you've got Willie Nile. He really is one of rock's music's great conundrums. Just why in the name of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard didn't he make it? Why is that only a handful of the cognoscenti (it seems) know of him or his remarkable body of work?
It is a mystery to me. Equally perplexing is why it has taken until now for me to discover him. Listening to his many albums I feel I have had some sort of epiphany. They are all just superb - streetwise, earnest, moving and clever lyrics, killer guitar, captivating, emotive melodies that lift you skywards the moment you hear them. Just a few minutes of Willie Nile and my spirits start to soar. There's just something about the way this wiry, slightly unprepossessing little man who looks like a cross between Lou Reed and Leo Sayer put his material across. He's got it for sure. Or he thought he probably had.
So much of his stuff makes me think I've heard it before - Tom Petty? Springsteen? Maybe they were listening to Willie. In fact, I'm sure they were. Springsteen has acknowledged his own fandom, as has Lucinda Williams, who said that she should be supporting him when he was in fact the support act to her one time. Nile remains on the fringes of true critical acclaim, however, like Terry Reid before him.
Anyway....
In the midst of punk's end and the prime of new wave came Nile's superb and criminally-ignored, underrated debut. Quite how to describe it, particularly in a 1980 context is something I find difficult. It is not a 1980 album. It is yesterday, it is today, it is tomorrow. It is somehow timelessly good. I'll have a go at pigeonholing, though. The songs are all actually created and delivered in the three-four minute. perfectly-constructed new wave style - no rambling or jamming, every note in the right place. Classic pop-rock I guess.
If only I had heard this back in 1980 I would have loved it and gone around telling everyone who would listen that I'd found the next big thing. They would no doubt have ignored me!
There's some seriously good stuff on here, the Petty-esque opener, Vagabond Moon, the bluesy Dear Lord, the Boomtown Rats-ish new wave boogie of I'm Not Waiting, the Stonesy She's So Cold (they would later record a song of the same name - coincidence?) and the poppy new-wavey That's The Reason. How Petty-like is It's All Over too, by the way? Even down to the slightly bleating vocal, and the jangly guitar, of course.
Willie could nail an emotional, piano-driven street ballad too and he does so the max on the wonderful Across The River. Boy, would I have loved to have caught this guy in concert at a small venue back then. It would have been awesome. Man, how I love the evocative Dylan meets Lou Reed lyrical glory of They'll Build A Statue Of You. What a goddamn gem of a song. Love that guitar solo too. Play it Willie.
Old Men Sleeping On The Bowery is another of those songs that has me wondering what or who it sounds like. Maybe it doesn't sound of anything else. Maybe it sounds like Willie Nile. I know that like so many of the songs on here it is extremely catchy.
Behind The Cathedral for sure sounds like Bod Dylan, for me anyway, with possibly some hints of Van Morrison, both lyrically and in the Astral Weeks-style strummed acoustic guitar. More Petty vibes are back on the infectious country strains of Sing Me A Song.
In conclusion, this was one hell of a debut, but unfortunately one that has never achieved the success that it should have done. It stands as an unfortunate symbol of Nile's entire career.
