![]() ![]() Given the opportunity to play anything at all, this Songs: Ohia band opts to flirt with the edge of silence on the opening cut. Some of that heaviness comes by way of suggestion. It’s a strategy Molina had used for past records, but it had never yielded anything as cogent and heavy as Didn’t It Rain. Mistakes would be made and overdubs were not an option, so the idea was to keep playing and to capture the performance raw. Surrounded by posters of blues musicians from Chicago that Molina had brought with him, they were all asked to play in the same room together and to invent their parts as they went along. The only two people at Soundgun who had recorded with Jason before were producer Edan Cohen, who, in 2001,manned the boards for Jason’s cover of Boz Scaggs’s “Sweet Release” and Jennie Benford, who that same year sang backup on the Cohen-produced 7” version of “Lioness.” Everyone else came to the game a rookie. So it’s no surprise that, for Didn’t It Rain, he traveled to Soundgun Studio in Philadelphia to play with eight musicians he barely knew. But Molina never stuck with one group for very long, on the road or in the studio, and he wouldn’t until after 2004’s Magnolia Electric Co. While Other Roads didn't scale the charts as an album, and is regarded as a minor work, hearing it in the 21st century reveals Scaggs' ambition and vision reach outside the box in a collection of great songs - even if the production doesn't fare as well as the material.Songs: Ohia - Didn’t It Rain (Deluxe Edition) (Secretly Canadian)ĭidn’t It Rain is the sixth and final Songs: Ohia studio album, the enigmatic zenith of a seven-year run that saw Jason Molina record with no fewer than seven different bands. ![]() Scaggs was in top vocal shape when he cut this: cool, bemused, but able to capture and communicate emotion mellifluously with freeze frame accuracy. The set closer is a dreamy adult pop ballad entitled "The Night of Van Gogh," co-authored by him, Caldwell and Peter Wolf. "Claudia," by Steve Williams is one of Scaggs' classic mid-tempo, broken love songs with a killer bridge, and stellar guitar work by Lukather. "Cool Running" written by Scaggs with Patrick Leonard is a solid, grown up, island groover with staggered R&B horns contrasted with a female backing chorus and a bridge of vocal counterpoint. There's a strange futurist club noir inherent in both "I Don't Hear You" and "Crimes of Passion" written by Carroll and the Huffs. "Right Out of My Head," written with Dan and David Huff, juxtaposes Steve Lukather's blistering guitar work against a synth fill right out of Gary Numan's "Cars." Scaggs nailed another number one with "Heart of Mine" co-written with pop-jazz songwriter Bobby Caldwell (and the only cut produced by Stuart Levine). Other Roads is odd from the start: the opener, "What's Number One?" is a spacey pop number written with the late poet and songwriter Jim Carroll and bassist/arranger Marcus Miller. ![]() He doesn't always succeed in keeping the balance, but the attempt sets him apart from most mainstream acts at the time. Scaggs tried hard to walk a line between the decade's obsession with more processed studio sounds that utilized electronic keyboards and drum machines up front, while relying more heavily on electric guitars and kit drums. Produced by Bill Schnee, it featured some of his most unlikely songwriting collaborations with instrumental backing by Toto along with some studio aces. #BOZ SCAGGS OTHER ROADS RAR FULL#When Boz Scaggs released Other Roads in 1988, he'd been off the scene for a full eight years. ![]()
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