Boston Rose?

Nola ponders Nashville; Todd Thibaud goes solo

by Brett Milano

Nola Rose is one of the leading country-music performers in Boston -- a distinction that along with 85 cents will get you on the subway. You can be the token country band who appeal to a rock audience, like the Country Bumpkins or Wheelers & Dealers. You can swear you're not a country band anyway, like the Swinging Steaks and the now-defunct Courage Brothers. You can hang around forever, like John Lincoln Wright. Or you can think seriously about moving to Nashville, as Rose is doing at this very moment.

"Boston's a strange place to launch a country-music career," she notes over coffee at Cambridge's 1369. "People keep telling me, `Nola, you've got to move to Nashville,' and I've been thinking about it -- you can only get so far when you're typing 80 words a minute, 40 hours a week. I've checked out Austin as well, but it's so damn hot down there. Any move would take a couple years of gradual effort, and that's a hard thing to get ready for. Nineteen ninety-seven's going to be a year of big changes, though, I can tell that."

Meanwhile, Rose and the Thorns (who include guitarists Tom Yates and Phil Lipman and drummer Scott Sherman) have released a debut CD, Thought I Heard an Angel (on the homemade Rose/King label), and it's good enough for whichever city she chooses to work in. Although Rose says that a lot of her fans are "people who thought they didn't like country," her sound's about as stone-country as you could ask for -- which of course means that it has very little to do with what's coming out of Nashville nowadays. And whereas many of that city's current hitmakers have no qualms about their love for the Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd, Rose lays her influences on the line on the first track, "I'll Call You When I'm Ready," with its chorus of "I'll be dancing to the jukebox/Haggard, Dwight, and Jones." She earns her right to be on a first-name basis with Dwight Yoakam by doing a credible version of his "Bury Me." The band support the disc with a headline show at Johnny D's on December 18.

Like at least half of the good female country singers of recent years, Rose has an obvious jones for Patsy Cline -- but in her case it's the feistier Cline heard on the early recordings rather than the more polished singer of the later hits. Still, if I were to lump Rose in with any trend, it would be the small honky-tonk revival that was spearheaded by the New York-based Diesel Only label -- which proved that you can be true to your country roots without homogenizing the rock and roll out of your sound. Rose's album makes the same point with its convincingly Southern-accented vocals and its rough-edged two-guitar sound.

How she came by that accent is anyone's guess, since she originally hails from Iowa. "I'm always trying not to sing with an accent, just to use my regular voice," she says. "I'm sure I've picked up some inflections that make it more twangy. But this is the same voice I had back when I sang a Heart song at a talent show in Cedar Falls."

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Add the Courage Brothers to the long list of local outfits that never recovered from their experiences with record labels. For much of the past year and a half, the band -- who stirred up a buzz in country circles, despite being more of a songwriting-based rock outfit -- were being groomed for success by Relativity, who signed them to a contract and brought in star producer Matt Wallace to produce their third album. Then the Relativity bloodbath hit, in which the label declared itself "urban" and dropped all its rock bands (including Boston's Smackmelon, who broke up soon after). The Courage Brothers were also among the casualties, and the link-up with Wallace never happened.

The third Courage Brothers album, Favorite Waste of Time, is finally out, but instead of a band album it's the solo debut by frontman Todd Thibaud. It's essentially the same line-up that's carried the banner for the past year, since the departure of co-founder Jim Wooster and the addition of former Knots & Crosses guitarist Rick Harris. But Thibaud says that the old band really ended when his singing/writing partnership with Wooster dissolved.

To these ears, the result is more satisfying than either Courage Brothers album. Solo, Thibaud has a tougher and rockier sound than the old band did, with less of a tendency to jam and more to zero in on a hook. With the underrated Harris as lead guitarist and Kevin Salem producing (and playing on two songs), there's a lean and crunchy guitar sound like that on Salem's own albums. One would assume that the title Favorite Waste of Time is a tip of the hat to Marshall Crenshaw, who once wrote a great song of that name and operates in a similar roots-pop vein.

Thibaud admits he knew about the Crenshaw song but says the title is really there to reflect his feelings over the past year. And make no mistake, it hasn't been a smooth year. Consider this line from "That's Not Me": "I used to be so easy, man, I used to be so calm/But now my head pounds like an engine block, my temper's like a bomb." Or this from "Live Without It": "Feel like a prisoner in a burning hell/Locked in a nightmare that I know too well."

"I took a lot of inventory for this record," he says with a bitter laugh. And though the songs are kept non-specific, he says that most of the anger has Relativity's name on it.

"Yeah, a lot of it's related to the business side of what I'm doing. It's pretty tough when you're all set to make a record and find out at the last minute that it's not happening. And the way they handled it was pretty terrible; it's not the first time that's happened to me, and I'm not naive enough to think it's the last." Meanwhile, Favorite Waste of Time is required listening for any local bands who think that a record deal is the whole point.

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One Bostonian who did wind up in Nashville recently is Elisabeth Cutler, a Berklee-trained singer who left town at age 16. Since then she's lived a gypsy songwriter's life, basing herself in New Mexico and Seattle. A few years back she turned up in New Orleans as the lead guitarist in Charles Neville's jazz band (at the time, she says, the sax-playing Neville Brother had an all-female band, known only to its members as "Charlie's Angels"). Now financing her own tour, running her own Rain label, doing her own publicity, and probably making her own coffee, Cutler has released a CD, Bury the Ghost, and she hits the Kendall Café for an early set this Friday, December 6.

It's not often that someone calls you from Nashville claiming you'd probably like her music, but Cutler was right. She works in an elegant jazz/folk vein where the songs take a left turn whenever they get too precious. (A suitable local parallel -- more suitable than the numerous Suzanne Vega comparisons in her press kit -- would be Jonatha Brooke.)

"I'm into the indirect approach," she says. "There are some specific songs and some you have to dig deeper for, but it's definitely me and that's why I don't have any problem getting on stage and singing this stuff." Not only is she working her own CD, she also took the trouble to immerse herself in water for several hours to shoot the cover photo. "I liked the spooky thing of me coming out of the water; that and the album title tie-in with the daily challenge of confronting my own fears. I figured it was my one chance to make an artistic statement."

'80s TRIBUTE

When you hear that a bunch of alternative bands have joined up for an album of '80s Top 40 covers, you think you know what to expect. Probably a lot of thrash/trash versions of obvious-target songs, right? Wrong. The locally produced compilation Double Agent 1980 -- released by former Tufts student Peter Green on his own Double Agent label -- features a bunch of indie bands (including Boston's Push Kings doing Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" and Shiviki Asthana from Papas Fritas) covering highly unfashionable '80s hits. But the real surprise is that nearly everything is done in somber, mope-rock style (even David Bowie's "Modern Love," by New York's My Favorite). The result is surprisingly poignant, and it's enough to make you think that we didn't get our sensitivity from Morrissey or R.E.M.; we got it from Rick Astley ("Together Forever," done by the Softies, from Portland, Oregon) or even Bonnie Tyler (Green and Asthana emote away on "Total Eclipse of the Heart"). I was impressed by a tune I didn't recognize called "Holiday" (done by St. Louis's Bunnygrunt) and was afraid I'd been tricked into liking a Journey song or something. Turned out it was an obscure soundtrack song by the very credible Lindsey Buckingham. Whew.

"Basically, I wanted to prove the '80s didn't suck," Green explains. "Everyone thinks of the '80s as a joke, and thinks that Madonna and Culture Club had no musical talent. You look at the history of rock, and it goes from Led Zeppelin through to Guns N' Roses. What about all these bands who sold millions of records by perfecting a pop song? If it sounds a little sad, that's because everyone chose a song that really meant something to them." So his own band Class weren't being just a little tongue-in-cheek when they covered Jermaine Stewart's "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off"? "No, that's a great song -- it sounds really sweet when you take away the dance track." The scary part is, he's right.