By Todd Lavoie
Comeback of the year? Edwyn Collins, definitely. Back in February 2005, Collins - the former leader of jaunty Scottish post-punk charmers Orange Juice and a solo artist best known for the 1994 vibraphone-peppered finger-snapper "A Girl Like You" - suffered two cerebral hemorrhages that left him hospitalized for months. After undergoing extensive operations, he was unable to speak, and with the workings of the brain remaining a bit of mystery despite all of our progress in medicine, doctors were uncertain as to when he would regain his voice, if at all. Mercifully, Collins's rigorous neurological rehabilitation program was enormously successful, and the whip-smart crooner got his velvet-and-stinging-nettles baritone back. A gradual process, obviously, but his recovery was coming along at such a steady clip that earlier this year he decided to work on the material he'd recorded prior to his near-fatal attacks. Apparently the road to wellness has been rather smooth for Collins. Here we are, only a few months later, and Home Again (Heavenly/EMI) is already out. And it's fantastic.
From what I've gathered from recent interviews, nearly all of the music on Home Again was recorded before the hemorrhages, which meant the only work that remained to be done was the mixing. However, that's a mighty big "only" when you consider that Collins's recovery was a two-step process: first he had to re-acquire the faculties to make words and sentences, and then he had to re-familiarize himself with the sound of his own voice. For a singer - whose sense of identity is so deeply, fundamentally tied to having an intuitive understanding of the voice - such a setback must be daunting beyond belief.
In one interview, Collins revealed that when he was first recovering in the hospital, all he wanted was silence. Gradually, that position changed and all he wanted was his guitar, but it would take months before he was able to indulge that desire. Re-acquiring his voice meant much more than being to able to produce sound with his lips and tongue. It also meant a great deal of (self-)exploration, learning how to use the voice more effectively for conveying emotion. Listening to the tapes in his home studio initially was much like getting to know a stranger, he described in another interview. Chalk it up to a crack team of physical rehabbers and some seriously scrappy fortitude, I suppose, because Home Again is a clear sign that Collins possesses total control of his instrument. If the pre-illness Collins was indeed a stranger upon re-introduction, it mustn't have taken long before the barriers were broken down and a deeper understanding was achieved.
It's impossible for me to listen to Home Again without placing it in context of what happened, which adds an additional weight to the already-poignant mood of the album. Many moments address longing and nostalgia for Collins's native Scotland - he has lived in London with his family for many years - but it doesn't require much of a stretch to filter these expressions of desire through the lens of recent events, and thus the references to home and domesticity carry an additional emotional heft in light of his long-term hospitalization. Yes, I'm guilty of adding something which isn't there - these songs were all composed before his trauma, after all - but I imagine he must have had several moments of self-confrontation in his studio, listening back to earlier confessions which now carried a double meaning.
Example? Consider the chilling lines from "One Is a Lonely Number": "And if life breaks your heart / You needn't fall apart / 'Cos you've still got your mind / Which will serve you in kind / If you're true to yourself." Delivered over a dubby bassline and a moody banjo while a synth flutters an upper-register sigh above of it all, Collins's slightly wobbly croon makes for a touching opening statement. I cannot imagine a more affecting way to begin the album.
This isn't to say that Home Again doesn't display Collins's usual acerbic wit and flair for clever wordplay. Look forward to several lashings from the ole acid tongue over the course of these 46 minutes. Lately I've been quite taken by the sneering putdowns of "7th Son," a swampy piece of electro-blues featuring the gleefully jaundiced-eye observation: "Back street preacher's blues divine / bitter sweet like holy wine / But when your flock had gathered round / you had to dumb your message down."
And though he may not have dedicated as much of his time to the dissection (and desecration) of celebrity as Morrissey - who has?! - Collins makes yet another wonderful contribution to the dismantling of icons with his "Superstar Talking Blues." A Dylanesque rant pushed along by chugging harmonica and a train-track rhythm, this eye-rolling response to the deification of rock stars feels like the revved-up sequel to "The Campaign for Real Rock," the bitter-pill opener to Collins's 1994 breakthrough album, Gorgeous George (Bar/None). While "Real Rock" - with its epic crawl through a minefield of rock clichés and uninspired rituals - felt downright defeated from disgust with the predictability of rock 'n' roll, "Superstar Talking Blues" offers the same view from a much snottier lens. Here, the frustration with such celebrity self-importance finds release in a torrent of withering observations and undisguised mockery: "But all this howling at the moon / It's a jester's token gesture / it's a joke that's gone too far / still your entourage is laughing / 'cause they're made to / 'cause they're paid to/ superstar."
But ah, the soul! Let's not forget the soul! This is Edwyn Collins we're talking about, after all - the guy who led Orange Juice through the occasional Motown dabbling ("I Can't Help Myself") and whose biggest hit, "A Girl Like You" always made me think of Iggy Pop paying tribute to the legacy of Berry Gordy, Jr. With such a rich baritone capable of disarming tenderness, it'd be a damn shame if Collins didn't deliver at least one moment of silky smoothness. And here it is: "You'll Never Know (My Love)" is hands down the finest Style Council song of 2007, and honestly, I can think of no higher compliment. Check out the video - fantastic to see him doing so much better, too:
Best news of all? As I write this, Collins is playing his first show since his hospitalization, at the BBC's Electric Proms Festival in Camden. Fantastic! Better yet, there's already some rumblings about a tour.
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