The 40-year career of the English singer-songwriter
Nick Lowe constitutes a paradox: the songs he has written are better known than he is. He cheerfully acknowledges that many people think that Elvis Costello is the author of the Lowe song “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and that the
Johnny Cash version of
“The Beast in Me” has come to overshadow his own, which was used on the soundtrack of the HBO series “The Sopranos.
But at a stage in life when many of his peers are content to live off past glories, Mr. Lowe, now 62, is enjoying a remarkable second wind. Originally a purveyor of witty subversions of Top 40 confections — his first United States solo album, released in 1978, was called “Pure Pop for Now People” — he has reinvented himself in recent years as a writer and performer of spare, reflective songs rooted in the American country music and rhythm ’n’ blues he imbibed as a child.
At the same time Mr. Lowe has remade his image to align it with the more mature content of his work, the latest example of which is
“The Old Magic,” a CD released on Tuesday. Once the prototypical long-haired, insouciant rocker, he now affects an avuncular look, with a shock of snow white hair, à la the older Cary Grant, and a pair of black Buddy Holly specs. That way “I won’t have to continually be pretending, like a lot of my contemporaries sadly have to, that they’re still young and copping this act they used to do and are condemned to do,” Mr. Lowe said during an interview in New York last month. “It’s a sort of unseemly sight, and one which I wish to avoid.”
It’s a remarkable turnabout for Mr. Lowe, who was associated with three of the most important British pop movements of the 1970s: pub rock, punk and new wave. An early band of his, Brinsley Schwarz, was the anchor of pub rock, and as a producer, he shaped and supervised Mr. Costello’s influential first five albums, as well as recordings by Graham Parker, the Pretenders, the Damned and Dr. Feelgood.
“When the punk scene came along, Nick was in the right place at the right time,” said Will Birch, an English musician, songwriter and producer who is also the author of two books about 1970s British rock. “He was Mr. Fixit, the guy who could produce a record,” but also “a sort of headmaster who made sure everything was kept very to the point, short and snappy.” A subsequent rockabilly-inspired group, Rockpile, generated gems like
“I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock ’n’ Roll)” and “When I Write the Book.” But Mr. Lowe also maintained a skeptical distance from what was going on around him. “I’ve never really liked being in somebody’s gang,” he said. “As soon as I feel like I’m being encouraged to join someone else’s gang, I react rather badly to that.”
What set Mr. Lowe on the path to his current sound was a run of bad luck in the early 1990s. His record label had dropped him; he was coming off what he described as “the disastrous end to a love affair”; and even a return to producing seem closed to him, since “the general public had become conditioned to hearing a record sound a certain way, with a certain sheen,” rather than with the “scruffy, homemade sound” he prefers.
But then he had an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. Curtis Stigers’s version of “Peace, Love and Understanding” was included on the soundtrack album of the movie “The Bodyguard” (1992), which went on to sell an estimated 44 million copies worldwide and earn Mr. Lowe a windfall in songwriter’s royalties.
“I didn’t buy racehorses or yachts or anything like that,” he recalled, “but it was a big, big payday, and it enabled me to make a break with the past. I didn’t have the pressure to play the game. I could turn stuff down and avoid the slippery slope of me being forever in a ‘Remember those fabulous punk rock days? Well here they are again!’ sort of thing.”
Instead Mr. Lowe followed the advice of two friends whose records he had produced, Mr. Costello and John Hiatt. Touring with Mr. Costello, he began performing solo, and when he got home to London, where he still lives with his wife and 6-year-old son, he emulated Mr. Hiatt’s habit of “going to work every day” to write songs in a sort of office at a performance space in a neighborhood pub.
What emerged from that process was a CD called
“The Impossible Bird,” released in 1994, and a new stripped-down and rootsy sound. “The Beast in Me,” written specifically for Johnny Cash, Mr. Lowe’s former father-in-law, emerged from those sessions, and on subsequent recordings like
“Dig My Mood,” “The Convincer” and
“At My Age,” that approach has been refined.
” A lot of people overproduce records, and in the early days he and I both did the kitchen sink. But now he’s focused on what he really wants to be, and there is no dead wood at all,” the singer-songwriter Daryl Hall said.
In recent years Mr. Lowe’s virtues as a songwriter and performer have been garnering more recognition, especially among younger musicians. Two tribute albums featuring other artists interpreting his songs, “Lowe Profile” and “Labour of Love,” have been issued, and this year he was invited to do performances-cum-songwriting-workshops at both the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.
“Nick Lowe is a major, major influence for me,” said the indie rock and alt-country singer Neko Case, who has recorded a pair of his songs. “He’s the most consistent artist I can think of, and there is something about the lyricism and gracefulness of his songs that I just love. Their cadences are unusual and addictive, and the way he sings them, his phrasing, it’s just beautiful.”
This fall Mr. Lowe will tour with Wilco, which just recorded his tongue-in-cheek late-’70s composition
“I Love My Label.” But Mr. Lowe will undoubtedly be doing things in his own understated way, even if it costs him: Huey Lewis, a friend for 30 years who credits Mr. Lowe for jump-starting his career, recalls inviting him to join him onstage for “I Knew the Bride” a few years ago, only to be told “Huey, I don’t rock anymore.”
“Obviously success is crowned with some sort of financial reward, that’s what puts the stamp on it,” Mr. Lowe said of his current trajectory. “That sort of stuff comes along, but that’s not really what I’m after. I’m not a greedy man. I’ve lived well, but I’m not really interested in that. I’m more interested in seeing what happens next, what the end of the movie is.”
Larry Richter @
'NY Times'
