The New Troubadours

By JAY COCKS

The music everywhere, on the air and on MTV, seems noisier than ever. Every time you change a channel it seems like some rapper is sticking his finger in your face: Yo! Listen up!

Well, not right now. I've got other things to listen to. O.K. -- you can hear the rejoinder immediately -- like what . . . Zamfir? Bart Simpson? The Brandenburg Concertos reinterpreted with singing crystals by Linda Evans' boyfriend?

Well, no. Just look around a little. There is some rock-solid music in our midst, but its coming has been so quiet that it seems to have arrived almost by stealth. Certainly it is not overwhelming the charts, and it is probably not to be heard on the radio anywhere short of the far ends of the FM dial. But it's worth searching out. If there's a college station in your area, they'll play it; any record store that doesn't feature a life-size color cutout of the Nelson twins will probably stock it. A couple of the musicians' names will be familiar to connoisseurs: Richard Thompson, Paul Brady. More -- and this is the beauty part -- will be new: Chris Whitley, Will T. Massey, Peter Himmelman, James McMurtry.

They are working, each on his own, the same territory. The music will sound familiar to anyone who has a long memory and an affection for tradition. It has shades of folk, honky-tonk, urban blues and revisionist country, but all of it can be called highly personal rock 'n' roll. These tunes have passion, intimacy and a shared but singular voice: the voice of the new troubadours.

It is hard to remember any time since the mid-'70s when there has been such a sudden flowering of reflective songwriting. Back then, the smash success of the Eagles, with their ingratiating harmonies and their canny outlaw lyrics, kicked open the doors for a whole generation of songwriters, from Jackson Browne to Warren Zevon and Karla Bonoff. Whether any 1990s group will crash the charts in such big-time fashion is not yet known. But they are already making a joyful noise, a reworking and reinvention of what the Irish songwriter Paul Brady, 44, calls "blue-eyed American rock 'n' roll."

And clear-eyed too. Whether they are veterans like Brady or Thompson, who at / 42 is in the bright midst of a career that started in the mid-'60s; or upstarts like Whitley, 30; or standard bearers like Himmelman, 31, who is Bob Dylan's son-in-law and has already released his fourth album, From Strength to Strength (Epic): all of them write songs with the same emphatic edge and aesthetic urgency that impelled the Lost Generation to write novels. Their songs carry similar thematic weight and have that same kind of conviction.

"I think of records as different chapters in an incredibly long and disjointed novel," says Thompson, whose superb new Rumor and Sigh (Capitol) displays both his carbolic lyricism and his stunning guitar virtuosity. Whitley's peak-heat debut album, Living with the Law (Columbia), comes out of a period of personal turmoil and heartbreak, including the dissolution of his marriage, about which he says, "It was a difficult time. Sort of impossible. I've always needed to write. ((But)) there is a price you pay for whatever goes on. I feel that I've paid something. You get scars from whatever you do."

If the new troubadours talk about their music with a high but easy seriousness, the tunes themselves have a driving dynamic that needs only a chorus to shake off any lingering academic taint. Massey, 22, has himself a real sit-up-and-take-notice debut, Will T. Massey (MCA), in which the restless soul of Hank Williams matches up effortlessly with a rock-'n'-roll heart. Co- produced by Roy Bittan, the piano wizard from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, the record thumb-trips across a desert of burned-out hopes. "There's a coffin curse assailing me/ There's a highway hearse tailing me," Massey sings in one of the album's standout cuts, nailing in two fleet lines a spooky vision that owes a little to the Boss and a lot to the likes of Woody Guthrie and Sherwood Anderson.

The lyrics are the showpieces for the new troubadours. Thompson has heavy chops as an instrumentalist; the others, in varying degrees, just use their guitars as a way to put the song across. McMurtry, 29, even has a little trouble keeping his voice in gear, but it does not greatly matter. His acerbic yet compassionate chronicles of life on the thin edge, where country folk move to the fringes of the big city and start to fall apart like so many patches in a crazy quilt, owe a spiritual debt to the work of his novelist father Larry. James, who is based in Austin, has a terrific second album, Candyland (Columbia), likely to be released by the end of the year, but he warns that he has "about used up all my old scrap pile. You get tired of writing about the same place and you have to move on." After deciding to get serious about songwriting, he almost pulled up stakes and moved on to Nashville a few years back. But his father, working on a screenplay with John Cougar Mellencamp, got his collaborator to play James' demo tape. Mellencamp offered to produce his debut album, and McMurtry, and his roots, stayed put, where they could be nurtured.

There is a certain kind of open emotion required for all music of this kind, which can clash with the macho posturings required of most male pop stars. That could be why the singer-songwriter torch has been borne lately most noticeably by women -- Rickie Lee Jones, Bonnie Raitt, Toni Childs, Tracy Chapman -- who according to show-biz cliche are usually expected to wear their hearts on their guitars.

If this group of troubadours is confounding such stereotypes, it is also playing into some expectations. Whitley has a photogenic scruffiness and a life story that makes him sound the prototypical ramblin' man, '90s style. "My parents were kind of . . . bohemian isn't the right word," he says. "But it was the '60s, they were into acid and getting stoned." His father was a mechanic who became a Madison Avenue art director; his mother was a sculptor who took the kids to Mexico, then finally roosted in a Vermont hunting cabin "with wood heat, no hot water and an outhouse." Whitley himself spent much of the '80s in Belgium. Sounds like material enough for half a dozen records right there.

Brady is looking at his breakthrough year. He wrote two songs on Raitt's brand new Luck of the Draw, including the title track; and she returns the favor by singing lead and background on the title track from Brady's own Trick or Treat (Fontana/Mercury), which may well be the prize work in this very fine bunch. Brady's solo career as a songwriter began more than a decade ago; before that he had been known as a reinterpreter of traditional Irish music. After his fourth solo record, in 1988, followed the usual pattern -- critical accolades, cult status, stubbornly low profile -- "I decided to take a year off" to work out the key question: "whether I actually wanted to go on making records and trying to have major success in the mainstream. A lot of the songs on Trick or Treat reflect what I was going through. They're songs about looking for something, looking for a sense of what you should be doing, about facing up to the fact that you may never find out."

More than the music itself, which ranges from Himmelman's slightly mystical lyricism to Brady's graceful rock to the saw-toothed blues riffs that Whitley lays down, this may be what unites the work of this burgeoning group, even as the mainstream comes within hailing distance. There is nothing refined or settled in any of this music. Look elsewhere for something that placates. Every one of these songs is a wound that goes unhealed, a question that stays open.

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York