{"id":41783,"date":"2009-11-13T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hey-la-hey\/"},"modified":"2009-11-13T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T00:00:00","slug":"hey-la-hey","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/hey-la-hey\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey La Hey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen King — he of the Rock Bottom Remainders<\/a> and New York Times<\/i> bestseller list — has called Chicago singer-songwriter Michael McDermott \u201cprobably the greatest undiscovered rock and roll talent of the last 20 years.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

The only logical response to this sort of assertion is to cast a pitying glance in the general direction of the artist in question, offer a knowing nod and mouth a sympathetically sardonic \u201cNo pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this case, however, no sympathy for the object of the famous big shot\u2019s over-the-top praise is necessary — because on his eighth solo album, not only does Michael McDermott exhibit no signs of feeling pressure, at times he actually threatens to put the truth to King\u2019s words.<\/p>\n

Early-90s Capitol signee McDermott has long since gone independent, and it\u2019s easy to see why.\u00a0 For while he shows plenty of melodic smarts, his dusky, folk-infused rock is simply too intelligent and literate for the average A&R guy — not to mention mallrat music buyer — to get his head around.\u00a0 McDermott\u2019s music is something out of time, beautifully cinematic Americana that\u2019s informed more by songwriting demi-gods like Dylan and Waits and Springsteen than anything resembling modern pop.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Hey La Hey<\/i> opens with the steady strum of an acoustic guitar topping a gentle country-rock beat as McDermott pours out his melancholy over a relationship teetering on the edge of dissolution.\u00a0 \u201cSo Am I\u201d is the story of two lonely people on the run from life, love and each other, all the while sharing an indelible bond that won\u2019t allow them to let go of one another. \u00a0Hearing the rough-hewn humanity of McDermott\u2019s expressive voice for the first time, it\u2019s a challenge to describe it as anything but Springsteenesque — but that\u2019s likely true also because McDermott, like Bruce, sings every word of these songs like he means it.<\/p>\n

This makes the decision all the stranger when McDermott chooses to step back from the foreground and offer guest vocalist Kate York the lead vocal for the second cut here, the darkly poetic \u201cHard To Break.\u201d \u00a0Make no mistake, York has a wonderful voice with a touch of Emmylou Harris\u2019 breathy vibrato; it\u2019s just a startling choice to place this one early in the tracklist.\u00a0 The impression that this is a significant misstep is only reinforced when the Steve Earle-ish honky-tonk of \u201cI Wanna Know Why\u201d kicks in and McDermott\u2019s range becomes fully apparent.<\/p>\n

From there, the songs just get more and more impressive.\u00a0 \u201cThe Great American Novel\u201d and \u201cThe Year It All Went Wrong\u201d are two of the most entertaining and well-crafted songs you\u2019ll hear all year.\u00a0 The former is a classic character study of a manic wannabe artiste with big dreams, big drama and no follow-through.\u00a0 Employing wonderfully detailed little character bits, McDermott manages to make this figure tragic, romantic, and in the end, comedic as well.\u00a0 \u201cThe Year It All Went Wrong\u201d is a travelogue of hard luck that\u2019s so expertly written and entertainingly rhymed that you don\u2019t want it to end.<\/p>\n

In between, a glimpse inside \u201cRoom 411\u201d at a Tennessee motel finds road-weary troubadour McDermott sitting alone with his acoustic, singing of the woman he\u2019s followed halfway across the country, only to miss her yet again.\u00a0 And then \u201cHey La Hey\u201d takes you back to the source of all the trouble and heartache McDermott has been singing about, presenting a character study of the woman he\u2019s falling in love with, complete with every contradiction and complicated piece of baggage that makes her who she is.\u00a0 (Another neat touch McDermott employs is to drop the phrase \u201chey la hey\u201d — meaningless but always evocative in context — into four or five different songs here, tying the whole album together with a single lyrical motif.)<\/p>\n

\u201cDream Came True\u201d opens with a string of world-class rhymes destined to make a word-geek like me grin, decorating a tune with a sort of gently epic falling-for-a-girl feel.\u00a0 \u201cThe Ballad Of Johnny Diversey\u201d is where McDermott really gets his early Springsteen on with a dense, winding fable about Louie and Freddy and the Duke and Johnny and Diamond Jim, a gaggle of small-town scufflers learning the hard way.\u00a0 And closer \u201cCarry Your Cross\u201d finishes things out with a gorgeous, haunting love ballad, a genuinely sad song of devotion.<\/p>\n

McDermott\u2019s sterling songwriting and heartfelt vocals are enough to make this album special on their own.\u00a0 What really takes it to the next level is the craftsmanship McDermott has applied in constructing a thematically cohesive album that seems at different times to be about attraction or desperation, passion or loneliness, devotion or running away — until you realize it\u2019s about all of these things at once, all the different facets of falling in love and losing control, all the way through from the first track to the last.<\/p>\n

Hey La Hey<\/i> is a superb piece of work from a top-notch singer-songwriter who, all authorly hyperbole aside, surely deserves a whole lot more attention than he\u2019s received to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[6437],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-41783","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-michael-mcdermott","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41783"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41783"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}