Robbie Robertson
Storyville
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Storyville,' the second solo album by Robbie Robertson, the former guitarist and main songwriter for the Band, is an imaginative and spiritual journey, with New Orleans as its inspiration. The album takes its title from a section of the city once known, in Robertson's words, for its dedication to "fast living, hot music and moonburnt nights." But the album also trades profitably on the metaphoric meanings of its title, because Storyville is itself a community of stories – stories about love and its loss, about the search for meaning, about faith and faithlessness, about losing the world and saving your soul. It is a mature and masterful work that lends additional luster to the
Read More formidable legacy Robertson shaped with the Band. Although New Orleans-derived music has grown increasingly fashionable over the past decade, Robertson's conception of the city and its sounds is far more sophisticated than most you're likely to encounter. For one thing he doesn't reduce New Orleans's rich musical tradition to accordion-driven party rhythms. Instead, while recording parts of Storyville in New Orleans, he called on a host of the Crescent City's musical finest, a diverse group of musicians capable of evoking a wide range of moods and styles. The reunited Meters and members of the Neville Brothers provide a healthy dose of funk and R&B; the Zion Harmonizers, a vocal group, deliver the redemptive power of the gospel sound; three separate horn sections, playing parts beautifully arranged by Wardell Quezergue, alternately supply melodic texture and rhythmic punch. In the hands of Robertson and his co-producers, Stephen Hague and Gary Gersh, none of these musical elements overwhelms any other. They blend into a transporting, sinuous groove that runs through the entire album and spellbinds the listener. This musical suppleness is evident from the very first track on Storyville. As its title suggests, "Night Parade," a tale of parted lovers, introduces a world defined by both darkness and celebration, by a lust for life intertwined with an aching melancholy. The song is steeped in romance ("A silhouette, face in the darkness/I've been waiting for the call"), as percussion and horns provide subtle rhythmic accents and Robertson's eloquent rasp – intimate as a whisper, straining for notes it can barely reach – communicates a moving hybrid of longing and hope. "Day of Reckoning (Burnin for You)," which Robertson wrote with producer-songwriter David Ricketts, emerges as Storyville's thematic center. An elaborate chronicle of young lovers who meet in a small town and then split apart when the woman leaves for mysterious reasons, the song ensnares the rest of the album in its "tangled twisted strands of love." Indeed, Storyville can be heard as a cycle of songs about love in its many aspects. The delicate, dreamy "Hold Back the Dawn" casts a vision of lovers blissfully "lost in the forever night."
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