LONESOME BILLY

 

- Girl's Club

- Think of All

- Shoulder

- Gaslight

- Ghost In My Piano

- Strangers

- My Funny Valentine

- Peninsula

- Talking to the Queen

- Red Balloon

Lonesome Billy was a chance for Bill to revisit and regenerate some of those orphaned songs, a chance to retrace some steps and see what might have happened, and, of course, a chance to try a few things that wouldn't have been possible within Buffalo Tom's tripartite democracy. Rounding up a few like-minded musicians - Howe Gelb, Joey Burns and John Convertino from Giant Sand and Chris Toppin from Fuzzy - he took off for a ramshackle 16 track studio in the middle of a railroad freightyard in Tucson, Arizona, opened a few bottles of cheap wine, and started playing. Three days recording and two days mixing were enough to produce an album which eschews sonic tinkering in favour of gut-level feeling and rough and ready honesty. The structural and technical simplicity are deceptively naïve, like a hessian sack which holds the music in place but allows more complex things to leak through, emotions bleeding from the songs like feedback leaking from mic to mic, the fine mists of distortion and muddied harmonics conjuring bruised, vague and compromised feelings throughout.

Treats along the way include the impetuous surge of "Gaslight", the drunken Waitesean tragicomedy of "Ghost In My Piano", the raggedy homespun harmonies of "Strangers" and the mournful feedback that gathers behind the melody of "Talking To The Queen". Despite his abundant songwriting gifts, Bill has always wanted to tackle a standard, so there's a shameless crying-into-your-beer take on "My Funny Valentine", while, in duet with Chris Toppin, he revives the ghosts of Lee and Nancy on "Red Balloon". As the song gradually fades to silence, its drawn out close haunted by player piano chimes, an unknown freight train engineer outside the unsoundproofed studio sounds his whistle in perfect time, bringing the aching distances of the continent outside to bear on the music, and providing the perfect conclusion to the album. Bill has described this "a cosmic moment", and he's got a point.

Lonesome Billy isn't a lo-fi record, but it expresses the same kind of freedom as a lot of the lo-fi stuff. The sense that moments of casual magic can be as valuable as finely crafted effects and the feeling that blurred and wayward music is sometimes the best partner to a blurred and wayward life. It's a record which sees a gifted songwriter going with his instincts, letting himself explore sides of his talent that are usually held in check, and producing ten quietly memorable and genuinely touching songs in the process.

Lonesome Billy is released on vinyl and CD.

The flies on the ceiling have been counted. The distance between settee and toilet is exactly 17.4 footsteps. That fridge could do with a defrost...ENOUGH! You are a rock star-type person, you are finally off the road and, yes, you are bored bloody shitless. There is but one thing to do. You must record A Solo Album.

And, given that you are the erstwhile head honcho of plaintive Yank grungers Buffalo Tom, that means rounding up a few similarly plaintive chums and sodding off to Arizona with naught but an acoustic guitar, the entire bourbon shelf of the local off-licence and some decidedly maudlin intentions. Buffalo Tom aren't exactly the chirpiest of combos and, minusthe constraints of those pesky band members, much navel gazing surely awaits.

And, with an album title like 'Lonesome Billy', it's not long in arriving. Shoulder, replete with frigid bedrooms and hot coffee, is a late night lament to all things romantically glum while Talking to the Queen is, well, exactly the same, but even sadder. Add a self-indulgent 'romp' through torch song standard My Funny Valentine and we're talking happiness of Leonard Cohen proportions.

All of which, give or take the odd drum fill, wouldn't sound amiss on the more dour moments of the last Buffalo Tom albums, so what's the point? The point is that Lonesome Bill's cohorts have thought exactly the same thing, spiked his coffee with a generous glug of bourbon and loosened up the wannabe troubadour.

Which, as all students of US indie rock (melodic Dept.) will affirm, means some good ol' country music. Hardly a million miles away from the day job but, with Giant Sand's Howe Gelb spooking up Ghost in My Piano's Tom Waites caterwaul and Fuzzy's Chris Toppin playing Emmylou Harris to Janovitz's Gram Parsons for the lush duet of Red Balloon, new country lanes are at least sauntered down if not fully explored.

Of course, none of this can truely save Lonesome Billy from being a Buffalo Tom album in all but name (and a pretty damn fine one at that) but, given the usual experimental excrement that passes for a 'solo project', then here's heartfelt, homespun proof that sometimes a rest is as good as a change.

- Mike Goldsmith

Reviewed in Melody Maker - 7 December 1996

"I left her with a six pack and my polka dotted shirt", croaks a temporarily solo Janovitz, as he ditches Buffalo Tom in favour of a snapshot of the American heartland. Shoulder - a tale of spiritual disquiet - is probably the sort of song Raymond Carver would have written if he'd chosen a guitar over a typewriter.

On Lonesome Billy Bill Janovitz has stripped his usual sound down, so that after about eight listens you can hear the silences between the words. Think Of All, like most things here, is propelled by pedal-steel guitar and other Nashville influences. It begins with an acoustic strum and then the band comes sweeping in, light as a whisper: "That technicolour churchyard dawn / Your patron saint out on the lawn."

We're talking Edward Hopper paintings, breakfast beers, all night road trips, falling asleep and waking up minutes later to find your cigarette has burned clean through your trousers, Super-8 home movies of small town Americana, "Exile on Main Street" and "Black and Blue" by the Rolling Stones, blue skies and black eyes. Talking To The Queen throbs with drunken regret, moving from one chorus of: "I did / That night" to "With you / I'm wasting my time" each wash of cry-baby guitar taking his voice closer to breaking.

This is the sound of a man trying to express something that cannot be expressed.

- Nick Johnstone

Reviewed in The Sunday Times - 1 December 1996

The defining moment of this album comes right at the end; as the final track, Red Balloon, fades (or, rather, disintegrates) into a series of random piano notes, cymbal splashes and studio noise, a freight train passing outside sounds it's whistle, pulling the whole thing neatly to a close. Such happy accidents are what this album is about. Recorded and mixed in only five days, Lonesome Billy contains not a single second to which the adjective "polished" could be applied. These are songs that Janovitz felt didn't fit his regular group, Buffalo Tom. So, retreating to a basic (evidently unsoundproofed) studio in Tuscon, Arizona, he bashed them out with an equally basic backing group. The dominent sound is acoustic guitar and padal steel over drums and upright bass. Ghost in My Piano is a mutant polka; Strangers is pure country; while perhaps the biggest surprise ia an absolutely straight - and genuinely touching - version of My Funny Valentine.

This isn't a great album, but it is rather charming; and anyone who enjoys listening to real musicians playing real instruments together will find moments to savour.

- Mark Edwards