For most of his storied career as a songwriter’s songwriter and an enduring veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene that rerouted the course of American music, Eric Andersen’s press package has carried a couple of curt but unambiguous endorsements from the typically tight-lipped Bob Dylan. “Great writer” and “a great ballad singer,” Dylan has said of Andersen. To get that much out of Dylan, and with no signs of underhanded trickster misdirection, is quite a feat. The weary signet sticks, even burns. It won’t ever wear off Andersen’s brand. If, in 1976, Dylan had called me “the punk with the curly hair,” it would still headline my C.V.
Long-time former Woodstock resident Andersen has released a kind of mountaintop, career-surveying 36-track epic this week, Woodstock Under the Stars. It’s work of great local resonance, as you will see below. The sweet curveball with this one is that while all his best-known songs are here, and much of his recent work as well, this is not a proper greatest-hits compilation made up of album-version recordings. Of course he already has about a half-dozen of those from various junctures of his prolific, 50-plus year career.
This massive collection is stripped down, intimate, mostly live, and recorded relatively recently. It finds the veteran writer weathered of voice and urgent of intention. It’s definitely an offering for his fans, first and foremost. Ater a few spins, however, you will be inclined to write Eric Andersen into a bigger part in your version of the revolution.
Intimate live sets of career-defining songs are hardly unique. What’s important about this one is that is not coming out after years of silence or career stasis. Some of Andersen’s most unusual and ambitious projects — settings of the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, songs drawn from the writing of the existentialist novelist Albert Camus, numerous other collections of new songs — have been undertaken in the last decade or so.
Andersen is in every respect a lifer, a finisher. There will be no mistaking this retrospective for a cash grab (not least because there is no cash left to grab with a recording), or dismissing it as a late bid for career reconsideration and last sliver of spotlight.
This is Andersen owning his songs with a new depth of both voice and perspective. In some ways, it reminds me of how Leonard Cohen reclaimed his entire career with newfound gravity after his voice dropped a third of an octave. And for most us, the very best of Cohen is the early stuff, but sung late. Incidentally, Cohen once credited Eric Andersen with inspiring the Canadian poet to write songs in the first place.
About the structure: CD one encompasses 15 songs from across his career, most performed live in at various times in the early 2000s. The interpretations are up close and unvarnished. The mix places you right in Andersen’s gritty throat, the lyrics not merely intelligible but utterly unavoidable. You will hear. You will understand.
For filigree and variety, there is usually one other instrument voice going — lead guitar; slide guitar; a period, wheezing harmonica. Tracks one and two define the parameters of Andersen’s craft, and indeed, of his generation of folk generally. “Rain Falls Down in Amsterdam” is a politically charged, topical travelogue of the kind that leftist folk writers from Woody Guthrie to Bruce Cockburn have engaged in: striking, reportorial images meet big themes. Track two, “Sudden Love,” quickly exposes the other side of Eric Andersen, the side Dylan must have been remarking on with the “great ballad singer” comment.
If long form narrative folk with minimal ornament and arrangement is a little Spartan for you, a couple sweet-plum studio tracks break up CD one — the original “Liza Light the Candle” and a cover of Fred Neil’s oft-covered cult classic Dolphin. Of course, if long form narrative folk with minimal ornament is really not your bag, I’m not sure what you’re doing this far into my review.
CDs two and three really bring home the Woodstock in the collection’s title — they total 21 songs drawn mostly from the Eric Andersen & Friends live-stream webcast produced at Chris Anderson’s Nevessa studios in Woodstock in 2011. Several songs receive multiple performances across the collection, and the list of collaborators is a Woodstock honor roll: special guests Rick Danko, John Sebastian, Garth Hudson, Happy and Artie Traum, the drummer Gary Burke. Other guests include Eric Bazilian, Inge Andersen (singer/songwriter, Eric Andersen’s wife and harmony singer), Joe Flood (The Bottle Rockets, Blues Traveler), Jonas Fjeld (Judy Collins), and Robert Aaron (Blondie, Wyclef Jean, Willie Nelson, David Bowie).
The texture of these recordings is freewheeling and diverse, almost sharing of the kitchen-sink feel of the Basement Tapes but of course live and intimate. With the exception of three previously released songs and the briefly available (by subscription only) stream, the performances on this compilation were never released to the public.
Eric Andersen didn’t really need to make a case that his voice matters — the historical record is pretty clear about that. But it is kind of cool that he is able to make a case like this, with five decades of this unwavering quality of songcraft, and with this grade of enthusiastically willing collaborators.
Woodstock Under the Stars will be released on June 19 on Y&T Music. For more information, visit http://www.ericandersen.com.
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