As American as… Ted Leo.
In honor of Independence Day this week, I’ve cooked up a flimsy little premise by which to tie this week’s entries together—focusing on artists and songs whose work in one way or another feels distinctively American to me.
Admittedly, I’m kicking things off with an unconventional pick—hence the flimsy nature of the premise—but I’ve been meaning to do a good write up of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists on here for a long while, and actually see them as fitting the bill in a lot of ways, as you’ll see later.
Sadly, up until this past spring the most I really knew of Ted Leo was his inexplicably brilliant cover of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone”, which I posted up here way back in the day. I knew he was supposed to be pretty good, and very political, but just managed to overlook him over and over— a fact which angers me a good deal in retrospect. Fortunately, I had some good friends show me the light this year, basically by burning me his entire catalog, and I can’t remember someone attaining a spot on my list of musical heroes so quickly before. The energy, intelligence, and heart this man puts into his songs is incredible and (this sound like hyperbole but isn’t) ultimately life-affirming, leading the listener to look for the potential in him/herself and the world around them. And I haven’t even began talking about his live show, which I had the pleasure of attending two hours away in Detroit the night before my Religious Politics midterm this spring (I aced it, by the way), which is easily one of the most intense, high energy, flat out loud shows I’ve seen in a while (my ears rang for at least a day afterwards). Even walking away from what I knew was a too short set complete with technical difficulties and the omission of several of my favorites (including “Walking to Do”, which never fails to put me in a great mood), I was more than pleased with what I had seen, and couldn’t wait until the next time I had an opportunity to catch him live.
As for the politics, which obviously is the key tie-in to the theme here… yes, Ted Leo is unabashedly liberal, and in particular anti-war. However, there’s a certain humanity to his ideology that makes it so much more than an anti-Bush tirade… his songs cover the battlefield, but also the personal and internal conflicts, discussing the nature of friendship, compassion, inequality, and illness in such a way that the lines become blurred almost entirely. While listening to a Ted Leo concert online (there’s a ton of them, free and legal, over at the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive), he introduced the song CIA off his latest album “Living With the Living” (for the first time, actually) with a dedication to a high school history teacher who happened to be in the audience, saying that this teacher helped him to think for himself and develop a lot of his political ideas later on. As he said this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own influential history teacher, Ron Weitzel of the House Page School, who passed away last year and did a lot of the same for me… in the end, I don’t think there’s much that’s more American than that.
So enjoy the track, taken from the 2006 South Street Seaport show… it’s actually a lot better than the studio version that resulted, in my opinion… much more up-tempo and urgent, and without the absurd sounding overlapping vocals at the end. (Actually, while you’re at it, head over and check out his entire set from that day... an excellent Ted Leo/Rx primer, and some stunning early renditions of tracks from Living With the Living.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists- CIA (Live at South Street Seaport 2006)
Admittedly, I’m kicking things off with an unconventional pick—hence the flimsy nature of the premise—but I’ve been meaning to do a good write up of Ted Leo and the Pharmacists on here for a long while, and actually see them as fitting the bill in a lot of ways, as you’ll see later.
As for the politics, which obviously is the key tie-in to the theme here… yes, Ted Leo is unabashedly liberal, and in particular anti-war. However, there’s a certain humanity to his ideology that makes it so much more than an anti-Bush tirade… his songs cover the battlefield, but also the personal and internal conflicts, discussing the nature of friendship, compassion, inequality, and illness in such a way that the lines become blurred almost entirely. While listening to a Ted Leo concert online (there’s a ton of them, free and legal, over at the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive), he introduced the song CIA off his latest album “Living With the Living” (for the first time, actually) with a dedication to a high school history teacher who happened to be in the audience, saying that this teacher helped him to think for himself and develop a lot of his political ideas later on. As he said this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own influential history teacher, Ron Weitzel of the House Page School, who passed away last year and did a lot of the same for me… in the end, I don’t think there’s much that’s more American than that.
So enjoy the track, taken from the 2006 South Street Seaport show… it’s actually a lot better than the studio version that resulted, in my opinion… much more up-tempo and urgent, and without the absurd sounding overlapping vocals at the end. (Actually, while you’re at it, head over and check out his entire set from that day... an excellent Ted Leo/Rx primer, and some stunning early renditions of tracks from Living With the Living.
Ted Leo and the Pharmacists- CIA (Live at South Street Seaport 2006)
posted by Jeff Lakin at 10:32 PM
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