Our Town Could Be Your Life

I’m as guilty as the next guy, but we music writers do Alan Singley
a disservice when we unfailingly compare him to Burt Bacharach. (See?
We can’t help ourselves.) We do it with the best of intentions, of
course, and for plenty of good reasons.

Singley, like Bacharach, is a tremendously talented pop-rock
singer/songwriter with a predilection for unexpected, jazz-inflected
chord progressions. He, like Bacharach, tends to write memorable
keyboard melodies and unabashedly sentimental lyrics that touch on
love, weather, and the bittersweet passage of time. Singley is himself
anything but wary of the comparison (he has performed fronting a cover
band called BacharachAttack), and it’s even more legitimate now that
his wonderful new album Feelin’ Citrus is out, a testament to
his aptitude for composing and conducting lush string-and-horn
arrangements, a Bacharachian (Bacharachanoid?) feather in the musical
auteur’s cap.

The thing is, as relatively unique as this constellation of skills
and sensibilities is in the Portland of 2009, the historical firmament
of American popular music is studded with ambitious, jazz-aware
songwriters and arrangers working in a host of rock idioms. New York’s
famed Brill Building was lousy with them in the ’60s; Neil Diamond,
Phil Spector, Carole King, Bobby Darin, Neil Sedaka, and, yes, Burt
Bacharach—all of them worked there, churning out the hits, and
each seems to have left an impression on Singley. In fact, it seems to
me that any one of these progenitors of the “Brill Building Sound”
could serve as a reasonable Singley comparison, an odd thought given
just how different, say, Spector’s style is from Diamond’s. This is
because what they had in common—and what we use Bacharach as a
convenient, admittedly colorful, somewhat inaccurate, and certainly
baggage-bearing cipher to gesture toward when discussing
Singley—is that they wrote songs that were designed to be, and
indeed became, ’60s standards. Another word for this kind of standard
is classic, and, as Feelin’ Citrus proves, this is what Singley
writes, too.

Singley began recording most of the songs that would come to
comprise Feelin’ Citrus while in a cabin in the wilds of Idaho
back in 2007 with the same backing trio (collectively known as Pants
Machine) that played on his 2006 album Lovingkindness.
Production was derailed later that year, though, as guitarist Leb
Borgerson suffered a finger injury, while Singley went through a major
romantic break-up, and coped by burying himself in his work as a youth
music teacher at Portland’s nonprofit Ethos Music Center.

Singley’s professional and creative worlds began to meld, however,
as he recruited his colleagues at Ethos to help him arrange and overdub
horn and string parts on the Pants Machine Idaho sessions. The results
so thrilled Singley that he set about finishing up overtly jazzy,
un-amplified arrangements for three long-gestating songs which he then
recorded live at Ethos with an ensemble including fellow music
instructors, members of Point Juncture, WA, and Blue Cranes saxophonist
Reed Wallsmith—who subsequently joined Pants Machine for good,
along with a second sax man and a new drummer. Add in a year for
mixing, mastering, and hooking up with label Bladen County, and here we
are in mid-2009, finally hearing Feelin’ Citrus.

In spite of the varied recording conditions and strategies, and the
amalgam of indie-rock-oriented and jazz-leaning tunes, Feelin’
Citrus does not feel at all incoherent as an album. On the
contrary, the proximity of hooky, up-tempo, indie-pop gems like single
“Le Rain” to wistful, gently dissonant, fully orchestrated jazz ballads
like album highlight “We’ll Become Sand” brings out Singley’s knack for
melody in the latter, and the surprising harmonic sophistication in the
former. The stylistic breadth of Feelin’ Citrus comes across not
as a series of genre exercises or period pieces, but as the genuinely
varied expression of a gifted, multi-faceted lover and maker of popular
song. What’s more, it makes for what I think is one of the finest
albums of 2009.

And I don’t even like Burt Bacharach.

Alan Singley and Pants Machine perform at Mississippi Studios on
Thursday, August 27.