Songs are always about time and place. The time and place where the composer conceived them, with a new set created when a new person hears them and associates them with a place, lover, or friend. You can say the same about a cover version.
Kurt Weill’s best-known songs come from a place of emotional turmoil, at a time of national confusion and fear. There was some resolution on the former, but the wider issue turned into an international catastrophe. This is always the challenge of covering the songs of interwar Germany. How can you capture the sense of the time and place that the songs came from, when you know the disastrous outcome?
For instance, Alan Cumming played Emcee in Cabaret hundreds of times in London and New York, and even at the Kennedy Center. He knew how the show was going to end. The reason that he won a Tony Award for the production is that he could hide that knowledge from the audience at the exuberant start of the show, but could still generate the necessary pain at the end. When Ute Lemper recorded her wonderful Weill album in 1988, she was doing so in West Berlin before the Wall came down. She does not hide that she knows where the chaos of the Weimar Republic led, and how the story had gone. She saw it every day, and that is what drives the album’s emotional intensity.
Rufus Wainwright, a Canadian citizen, has chosen to release an album of Weill songs from a period when an angry but complacent nation wandered mistakenly into disaster, without seemingly seeing it for what it was, until it was too late. Perhaps because some of them were having too much fun, or were too selfish to care about others. Who knows why?
Wainwright clearly knows these songs very intimately, and feels them closely and strongly. He may have been listening to them since before he was born. His parents would be familiar with one of the greatest songwriters of the period, and both he and his sister Martha have performed versions of them over the years. He has said that Canadian Opera singer Teresa Stratas’ interpretations were his touchstone in developing his love for the songs. He has exquisite musical knowledge of the genres that Weill operated in, having written operas, worked in jazz, and lived in the home of the Moritat. Also, he has a huge linguistic advantage, having loved in three of the languages that Weill created songs for, and has lost in at least two of them (his marriage to a German seems solid).
All of this means that, whatever the driver for doing it now, we are on solid ground. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Wainwright Does Weill features a series of tracks with the Pacific Jazz Orchestra, recorded live, with occasional guest artists. It is a marvel and a joy.
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Chrissie Hynde has been a rock star for more than fifty years. The Pretenders have not been together quite that long, but Hynde was already making her name as a girl about town and rock-star-in-waiting in London. She has lived the life full-time for all of that period. It is a surprise, then, that she does not fully appreciate the credit that has accrued with that history, and how people still want to hear what she has to say.
Rufus Wainwright’s Folkocracy is a reminder of how different a context is the word folk, when there is that Atlantic Ocean dividing America and Europe. This album feels a very North American version, where, broadly, anything much with an acoustic guitar, and on the softer side of rock, fits the bill, with often a fair old slice of the older social commentators, Seeger, Guthrie et al, chucked in for good measure. In the UK, folk tends more to the trad. arr., in style if not necessarily sacrosanct in content, and of a devoutly Celtic or Anglo hue. Wainwright doesn’t totally ignore any particular aul’ country, but Folkocracy is full of nods, sometimes eccentric, to an early 60’s heyday of Kingston Trios, Peter Paul and Mary and that ilk, if with a few left field lurches into Broadway and Hollywood. At times it is astonishing, in a beguiling way, sometimes bewildering and sometimes just plain odd. But, overall, this album is impressive, if more on the side of to be admired more than loved, with a slew of guests adding their varied (and variable) flavors at several stages along the way.