Self Reflection In The Stars: Prefab Sprouts Twilight Waltz.
by Howard Cressi-Stallworth
Entering the late ‘90s, Prefab Sprout were firmly a vehicle for Paddy McAloon's mature phase era songs. Full of honesty and sentimentality, it was in full polar opposite of the songs of his youth, songs written by a person so willfully going against the grain that they occasionally got in the way of themselves by the twist of one clever line or major sixth chord. This is all, by the way, written in complete respect for the man. Had “Couldn’t Bear To Be Special”, “Moving The River”, “When The Angels”, and “The Venus of the Soup Kitchen” been written by a person with softer ambitions and more streamlined ideologies, they would’ve been run of the mill instead of some of the most curious and affective songs of the 1980s and early ‘90s.
Paddy McAloon was the type of songwriter who was so stubborn in doing things his way. He envisioned himself being a songwriter on his terms and his terms alone, and boy did he achieve them. By his own admission, he was so naive that he thought he could mix Neil Young, Stravinski, Michael Jackson, and Miles Davis together and make it sound normal. To some degree, he basically did that in small amounts. From Swoon to Jordan: The Comeback, Prefab Sprout made some of the most uncompromising and forward thinking pop music one band could muster, hopping from theme to theme and subject to subject without a care in the world. Paddy was trying to show he knew his stuff and was up to snuff whether you liked it or not. Oftentimes it was grand, sweeping and filled with emotion; sometimes it was interesting or at best cute (and at least once an album, cute was what it definitely was, no matter how smirk inducing).
Songs like “When Love Breaks Down” showed a willing ability to form to the conditions of the 1980s and was even their first hit right from the opening Yamaha DX7 electric piano preset. No strange meter or tone here! Songs such as “Bonny” and “Blueberry Pies” showed an aching and almost beautiful sentiment towards the human spirit; of longing and heartbreak, and of what was wanted and what couldn’t be had. The music was emotional and high brow, referential and oblique, daring and standard often all at the same time. “Cruel”, “I Remember That”, “Cars and Girls” and “One Of The Broken” demonstrate just some of the capabilities and talents to shift from style and genre to subject matter. “Cars” demonstrates straight forward pop rock and “Broken” shows classic country folk style ballads.
However Paddy wasn’t without maturation as a songwriter. His early career showed a budding young songwriter willing to ignore the common rules and define his own path while working within its framework. Their early work was closer to a more cubist Aztec Camera or Josef K only by din of existing at the same time those groups did. He gradually grew past the strange chords…somewhat, and trimmed down the beats in his measures and vocal lines. Paddy even came to writing some hits! If hit radio could take to Paddy’s songs, then what’s stopping them from playing June of 44? Prefab Sprout’s songs endeared them to the kind of smart record buyer that caused themselves to rolling their eyes when calling Prefab Sprout that oft annoying Sophisti-Pop label. Prefab Sprout were much, much closer to traditional American songwriters; it just wasn’t apparent until a few albums in.
Paddy’s obsessions might have been famous pop stars, but that was just him speaking out of turn and what was in front of him. One of his biggest influences was Jimmy Webb, the songwriting phenom of “Witchita Lineman” and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, the baby boomers dream writer who put his own personal turmoil in to such pitch perfect song styling that it has often been repeated but only rarely ever reproduced. His song studies were aped for years after their initial release by many such as James Taylor and The Eagles. Not bad company for a songwriter most can’t even name.
But Paddy wasn’t your normal song smith, at least until they got closer to the dawn of the 1990s as he had entered that Jimmy Webb mode he had so long strived towards. Paddy started writing character studies and mood pieces about people, places, and ghosts like he had before, but with each successive record became more streamlined. This does not mean Paddy’s work became less unique and individual. You can put songs from Swoon and Steve McQueen next to songs on Jordan: The Comeback and you know instantly who it is because the familiar parts and standard ideas from the very beginning of their career are still there. Now that is the mark of a great and unique songwriter.
Something always plagued Paddy, though. Paddy always and forever wanted to be a writer. It was Martin, his bass playing brother, that took his songs to publishing houses and record labels to get their music out there. If not, Paddy would’ve still been writing songs and placing them into a shoe box under his bed above his family's gas station to this day. Martin unfortunately takes a back seat to his brother's shadow but it has never bothered him. He has always stayed humble in retrospectives and interviews about the group. His bass playing was inventive, interesting, and served the songs well. He was as integral to the group's success as his brother's songs were.
That brother meanwhile had a neurosis that plagued his wish to just sit and write finally came true. Once the tour for Jordan: The Comeback ended, for all intents and purposes outside of a few gigs and extremely short jaunts, Prefab Sprout became a studio only unit. And because of their increasing use and reliance of studio musical creations, it only made sense for them to sit down for the rest of their career.
By 1993, Paddy was working on (and had even openly discussed in the press) an idea for a concept album about famous personalities called Let’s Change The World With Music. It was rumored to potentially be about Michael Jackson (something Paddy toyed with in the early ‘80s or even Donna Summer, a title of one of their earliest songs) but in all reality it was shelved until it was pulled out of the moth balls in 2009. Prefab Sprout by this point was not even a relic of the late 1980s but a minute fan favorite of culty record buyers. Not even fans of Jellyfish or R Stevie Moore could mention Prefab Sprout songs, something not aided by the fact that they barely charted in America nor ever toured there. Even bands that were minor one hit wonders had bigger followings than Prefab Sprout.
However time passed quickly from 1993 and in 1997 the group was making their follow up to an album that didn’t have any huge hit singles, Andromeda Heights. By this point since moving to being essentially an 80% studio based act, Paddy had installed a home studio on his property fittingly called Andromeda Heights. It was a (then) state of the art home studio with an Atari computer and Cubase and a large array of Yamaha and Roland keyboards as well as guitars. The music sounds like it, too. Some of the keyboard sounds Prefab Sprout often used dated them (see “When Love Breaks Down” and “Nightingales”). The band seemed not to care too much. On Jordan: The Comeback there was a confidence in the use of MIDI horns, percussion, and other effects; it proved there could be a group who could get great mileage out of stock sounds and factory patches. It stood in stark contrast to when they hired Stevie Wonder and the Andre Crouch Singers to guest on From Langley Park To Memphis.
This is all just to paint the sonic picture and mindset of Paddy who by this point had evolved from left of center songwriter to mature elder statesmen who preferred to ruminate on life, the characters within it, and most of all the sentimentality of those people and their emotions in a mainstream fashion more than ever before. Andromeda Heights is one of the most “I’m gonna start buying bigger clothes because I’m 50 years old and I don’t care” albums ever. It doesn’t care about cred, or staying relevant, or trying to break sonic ground or be timeless. It’s all about one man finally being comfortable with his ability to write how he always wanted to write.
Andromeda Heights opens with the glittery and smooth “Electric Guitars”, a contemplation of Beatlemania, but much more wistful and almost resigned. It’s a solid opener, letting the listener know from the get go how the record will sound and come off for the next forty or so minutes. The production isn’t what you would call glossy, but it is full and clean and shines like a building in mid day sun. The affectation of the production is something the group became comfortable with and is reflected throughout the album.
Paddy’s lean towards sentimentality comes through on Andromeda Heights, reflecting more so on memory, the moment, and love than ever before. On the following track, “Prisoner Of The Past”, this comes into full shine. One of the best songs in his catalogue, it comes over a “Be My Baby” style introduction, on what is clearly keyboard timpany followed by a fanfare of trumpets and other rock instrumentation.
“I'm a ghost to you now, I'm someone you don't really wish to see
I'm a ghost to you now, a shadow since you turned your back on me
Maybe you'll learn why it was I shook
Baby your turn to wear the haunted look”
It’s one of Paddy’s classic latter era character studies, but he might as well be speaking about himself. Paddy at this point was forty years old and had long faded from the multiple generations who discovered him with “When Love Breaks Down”, “The King of Rock and Roll” or even “Jordan: The Comeback”, and those who hung on throughout all those albums successes. This album was released seven years after their last and in that time Paddy had split up with co-vocalist Wendy Smith some time in the early ‘90s, but she still makes an appearance here on the album, her whispery thin vocals always being the compliment to Paddy’s song studies. Despite her involvement with the records being relegated towards singing lightly on the songs that featured her, she appeared more like a ghost than ever before on this album just as quickly as her split from Paddy became more apparent to the groups music.
“Prisoner Of The Past” has fantastic melodies complimented by its revenge filled, yet relinquished position. The tone of the song is one of “I’m gonna come back, just you wait”, but also “I am comfortable that no one knows me anymore and maybe that’s the way I always wanted it”, which wouldn’t be a surprise from a guy who is still in a band with his ex and is delivering a seven year long follow up album. Regardless of the intertwining ideals, “Prisoner” remains one of their strongest latter era songs and one of their most emotionally relatable.
That relatability connects itself in another way to the rest of the material. Touching on sentimentality again, just take a look at the song titles. “The Mystery Of Love”, “Life’s A Miracle”, and “Whoever You Are”. These are songs fully okay with being adult and not holding back on invoking cliches songwriters of a certain caliber fight their entire career to hide. These are sentimental, down to earth love and relationship songs. The kind of songs you only write once you get married and have children (which Paddy did end up doing once this album was finished.) The following lines open “The Mystery of Love”:
“Have you ever thought who made all those stars
In the endless sky above
It's a mystery, but no mystery like the mystery of love”
This dances dangerously close to pop radio fodder, and even torch song levels of Barbra Streisandian song craft. A young Paddy might have written a song involving stars, but it would’ve been obtuse or even as an indication of time passing and not in an adult fashion. “Mystery”, “Life’s A Miracle” and others on the album show a man becoming comfortable with flirting with Adult Contemporary sounds and styles.
That phrase, “Adult Contemporary”, is something the group always skirted near but never fully embraced until now. Adult Contemporary always floated around them as a label and even haunts the minds of those more record store nerd types who totally know that the band is invoking that, but they would never admit it. Their career is littered with songs that lean towards the ultra smooth, studio crafted and session musician polish that dressed up Whitney Huston songs, but because of Paddy's nature as a songwriter they never quite get there. “I Remember That”, “Nancy (Let Your Hair Down For Me)”, and “All The World Loves Lovers'' are all wrapped up in the kind of encroaching reminiscence that would make Irving Berlin blush. It’s a songwriter who is increasingly becoming unafraid of being someone he always was.
While Paddy was never a stranger to invoking the sounds and songwriting craft of yore, even going as far as mentioning George Girshwin in one of his song lyrics (“Hallelujah” off of Steve McQueen), no one would’ve guessed that the semi-obtuse and even then somewhat rocking songs of their past would lead to lots of songs in the key of C with saxophone solos and chord changes right out of the Great American Songbook. A C chord will go to a major seventh chord and then to a G and then a G minor and then to a G# Augmented before falling back to the C and so on. This isn’t the Paddy of strange, all four fingers jazz-like chords. This is someone who has studied the past classic songwriters and is settled into who they wanted to be all their life.
This becomes increasingly more apparent when we get to tracks like “Anne Marie” and “Whoever You Are”, two tracks that follow the rhythms and chord changes you’d expect out of an elder statesmen Elvis Costello or George Jones album. Ascending and descending chord progressions are complemented by classical pop style strings and backing vocals out of an rnb record. The lyrics are just as complimentary towards this “adult” style pop:
“Whoever you are I am looking for you
On street after street, in bar after bar
The search for love is never ending
Whoever you are”
The album maintains flirtation with more than lovelorn themes and character studies. While the musical content is certainly late ‘90s (and the numerous saxophone solos certainly recall Prefab’s ‘80s commercial heyday), the various uses of synthesis, marimba/vibraphone, horns and other ephemera are a very wonderful compliment to the traditional songwriting. It’s really quite a time capsule to hear such normal acoustic sounds alongside these clearly home studio elements of keyboard generated tracks.
Andromeda Heights is by no means a perfect or even Prefab Sprout’s best album. It has one too many tracks with the infamous Whistlin Joe preset (yes, that whistling on the X Files theme), Paddy sometimes gets in the way of himself with his obtuse references, and his need for mucking with song structures still hasn’t left his body (see “Swans” or “The Fifth Horseman”.) Most of the time the album feels demo-ish, if only because of the odd combination of organic and inorganic sounds with a relatively dry and at times spare sound, as if they had just gotten an audio interface with only 8 tracks available to use.
On earlier albums, the synthetic sounds complimented the music due to production aid by Thomas Dolby, and fully came into their own when on the experimental and curious “I Trawl The Megahertz”. It by no means lessen the impact of any of the tracks or their emotional content. If anything, Paddy’s songs overcome the production's lesser aspects and solidifies the theme of all of the songs on the final track. Paddy has always been keen on his album ending tracks. They’ve always had a religious and spiritual type theme and feel to them (no doubt a reflection on Paddy’s university days when he was studying to become a Priest and also his upbringing on concept albums of the ‘70s.) “Pearly Gates”, “Venus of the Soup Kitchen”, “Doo-Wop In Harlem”; these songs are always in a slow, hymn like medium and drift off on a repeating chorus. Their lyrics have that tone of “and now we walk off into the sunset”, half lone ranger, half maturing adult. On the title track, “Andromeda Heights”, Paddy finally puts down his religious tone and goes for full on adult family man reflection:
“We're building a home on the side of a mountain
Above the clouds, next to the sky
Our plans are ambitious, a blueprint of wishes
That will come true and when they do”
Again, this comes dangerously close to Adult Contemporary emotions, infringing on whispering to your children as you lull them to sleep, far and away from the complexities of youthful intensity and the songs they dream to produce.
While Prefab Sprout would make one more album as a cohesive unit (Songs For The Gunman), they continued releasing albums such as Let’s Change The World With Music (recorded in ‘92 and released in 2009) and Crimson/Red in 2013. Paddy is far from trying to prove himself and show the world who he was and what he wanted to be back then. Andromeda Heights was the first time he crafted songs full of intricate chords, rhythms, strange references and melodies that are emotional but comfortable with what they are. Now instead of mentioning his influences in song or referencing them as a nod, he is fully imbuing himself within those references and becoming more and more comfortable with the adult songwriter he had always wanted to become. Sometimes growth is aging gracefully regardless of what the “you of the past” thinks. Paddy realized on Andromeda Heights that he was never going to be a prisoner of his own past.