A Collaboration From Pop/Rock Heaven

23Jul08

It’s one of those weird coincidences – two of the more obscure musicians in my hero-list are collaborating. Of course there would be nothing weird about that in normal circumstances – the music industry is fairly incestuous and those who are chewed up and spat out by the conventional record labels seem to tend to huddle together for warmth in the shadows. But even then this is a bit of a turn-up.

The first collaborator is Jason Falkner, who would top my list of ‘people who inexplicably found no success in the mainstream’ – he seems to make audience-friendly power-pop, is a good-looking guy, and can really sing and play. I wouldn’t expect superstardom, but you’d think that at some point he would at least make the radar somewhere. He’s only notable really as a member of early Jellyfish, providing much of the guitars on their first album Bellybutton. Then he resurfaced with another Jellyfish-collaborator Jon Brion (who later found fame and success with movie soundtracks to Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love) with a band called The Grays – their one album ‘Ro Sham Bo’ is one of my favourites, but found no success and they split. And Falkner has been bubbling under ever since – I don’t think he’s made a great album since the turn of the century, but he keeps threatening to . Here he is performing Friend Of Mine last year – some of the guitar improv late in the song is very impressive.

Right. The other guy is Anne Soldaat, who is an ex-member of Daryll-Ann, my favourite Dutch indie band that nobody in Holland even seem to care about. Whenever I meet anyone from the country I ask them if they’ve heard about the band, and I have a 0% strike rate so far. They had a little pitch at stardom with a bit of label support in the mid-90s but soon got dropped and went away and just made some magnificent folk-rock with two albums, Weeps and Happy Traum, in the late 90s. Here’s Soldaat, with that unique guitar sound that could only come from a boy with a girl’s name, playing one of my favourite Daryll Ann songs ‘We Love Danger’ with his new band, Do-The-Undo.

Okay, so, long story short, I’ve heard that Soldaat is going/has gone to America to make an album with Falkner. It’s an idea so out of left-field that it blew me away. Maybe they met at some festival someday in the past – maybe they were always blood-brothers. But it’s news to me. It’s just special that two inspirational figures in my life are getting together to make some music which I presume is going to be awesome at a 200% level. Certainly, some magic is bound to occur here – I predict many layers of guitar, and riffs that may just cause spontaneous combustion in a sort of light pop/rock way.

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Tags: Anne Soldaat, Daryll-Ann, Do-The-Undo, Jason Falkner, Jellyfish, The Grays