The concept of "pairing," where one identifies flavors that go well together, commonly applies to food and drink. Music is just the same, working with whatever is going on in front of you, like playing “Dancing in the Street” while literally dancing in the street, or singing “Staying Alive” to yourself when said street has a lot of high-speed traffic. In Album Pairings, I note the charms of a great album, then recommend particular activities to pair such albums to. All album pairings have been tested first-hand by the author, but does not necessarily promise the same level of joy for the reader. Also included are hypothetical bad pairings, because no album or song works in every context and, if paired poorly, can ruin both song(s) and event at hand. Such well-known examples include singing the chorus of “Wake Me Up When September Ends” every single day of September in a workplace or quoting “It’s Gonna Be Me” by N’sync on April 30.
LOVEBLOOD by KING CHARLES (2012)
Romanticism’s opposing forms- tragic melancholy and theatrical devotion, is a malady afforded only to the young for a short while, before the greys of life wash over and flood the sharply cut assumptions. This idealized view of reality assures that the man who chases a woman to the airport (she’s leaving, watch the first sixty minutes of the movie for context) will not only get through the gate in time to declare his love, but exist in a world where she couldn’t possibly say no.
We need this spirit as much as we need the spirits of the child and functioning adult and the wise elder. Indeed, for most of us life can feel like a ride on a merry-go-round, and each new full rotation brings on new sights because we’ve become different people. That is, you may see an older person in Romanticism’s grip, but it probably ain’t pretty.
Which brings us to the 2012 debut album LoveBlood by British singer-songwriter King Charles. Most people don’t know about LoveBlood or King Charles. He never blew up in either the United States or his home country. His commercial peak was also his beginning. LoveBlood reached 36 in the UK album charts, 78 in Scotland’s and 168 in France’s. Only one of his singles has ever charted: the fourth single from LoveBlood, called “Mississippi Isabel,” at no. 84 in Belgium.
It is impressive for any musician to ever chart in anything, anywhere, and 99.9 percent of musicians never will. I won’t and I’m assuming you won’t either. It’s basically impossible. There’s label politics and chance and all sorts of things you wouldn’t wish on your worst imagining of an in-law. In 2012, King Charles did.
Born Charles Costa in West London, England, and raised with a classical music background, Costa played in a group Adventure Playground in the late oughts, touring with Noah and the Whale. Adventure Playground broke up in 2008 and he took on a new persona, King Charles, complete with the fineries of royalty and a costume fit for a Paris noble; the long pencil thin mustache and bouffant ‘do. It was as if Prince was performing a concert in the Château de Versailles.
The next year, he entered a song called “Love Lust” into the International Songwriting Competition in Nashville. Judges included Tom Waits, Loretta Lynn, Adele, Toots Hibbert, and Weird Al Yankovic.
He’d been working on his debut album. It was planned for early 2010. Then, tragedy struck when he experienced a skiing accident in Austria. The injuries were fierce. He was bedridden and fighting brain trauma.
“For six months,” he said, “I had to just get my head back together, because my brain was all bruised – I didn’t know who I was. But I’d been entered for this competition and a few months later, I got a call from them saying I’d won it. That was really amazing – although at the time I didn’t really notice it. I was in such a state in my own head, I couldn’t really process that much of what was going on.”
All judges voted for “Love Lust,” no exceptions.
On the strength of this win, he was signed to Universal and flown to L.A. He would re-record his first album, this time in a high-end studio with engineers and producers a juggernaut like Universal could afford.
“I recorded the first album in America with an American producer and it sounds quite... American,” King Charles said.
That producer was Matthew Wilder. Born in 1953, Wilder was an industry lifer. In 1970’s New York City, he was half of a Greenwich folk duo called Matthew and Peter. A very permed and goateed Matthew (Wilder) strummed guitar while a very long-haired and clean-shaven Peter (Darmi) played flute. They released one album under Playboy Records in 1972 called “Under the Arch.” It looks bad. You know the stereotypical image people have of 60’s hippies, the one that people use in cartoons and costumes and stuff? They look like that. They look like the final photo a powerful artificial intelligence would conjure up after combing through every single representation of hippies ever. Matthew stands behind Peter with his arms crossed, wearing a plaid vest and looking like the least intimidating bouncer ever guarding the entrance to a poetry reading. Peter is wearing a standard loose-flowing hippie garb with bead work, all flowing hair, flute held in his left hand like a staff. They look both lost and confident, the way nervous kids try to be neither.
Songs include “Seeing is Believing,” “Fist Through a Wall,” and “Lullabyes,” a title that’s so dumb-clever I’m surprised it hasn’t trended on Twitter. I could not find the entire album available to listen online, but did find the opening song “Smiles,” which is about busking and people’s smiles. There is a lot of flute. It is the answer to the question, “what if there was Crosby, Stills and Nash AND Simon AND Garfunkel?” This is not music I enjoy, regardless of the quality, so I am biased. However, there is obvious talent at play, particularly in the chorus. Wilder liked choruses.
Matthew and Peter broke up sometime later and Wilder moved out to L.A. in 1978. He got a deal with Arista Records in 1981. It was not a good relationship and Wilder languished for two years making and remaking his album. Clive Davis, Arista president and mogul, wanted hits. Covertly, Wilder recorded a song “Break my Stride '' with his own money. It was a jaunty, reggae-tinged synth tune with a powerful chorus. “Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride, nobody gonna slow me down, oh no, I got to keep on moving/ Ain’t nothing gonna break my stride, I’m running and I won’t touch ground, oh no, I got to keep on moving.”
Ostensibly a song about a breakup with a woman, “Break my Stride” shows Wilder’s persistence, his struggles with Davis and Arista Records. When he sent the song to Davis, the only reply was a note that said, “Interesting song, but not a hit.” Wilder quit the label and signed to the newly-formed Private I Records, ran by Joe Isgro, record producer, reputed soldier in the Gambino crime family, and a practitioner of the ancient dark art of Payola, or, “paying off radio stations and DJs to play your songs.”
"Through a lot of fancy footwork at radio,” said Wilder, “Joe was able to create the illusion that 'Stride' was really blowing up on the charts, even at R&B radio, and eventually the tune did seep into the culture and become a legitimate crowd pleaser, and that's when it went Top 40 and then Top 5."
Wilder’s subsequent albums didn’t ever match the success of “Break my Stride.” He stopped performing and turned to songwriting and producing. He’s now an LA music industry veteran with hundreds of credits to his name, including as a composer for Kelly Clarkson and Miley Cyrus, producer for No Doubt, and co-writer of the soundtrack to the hit 1998 film Mulan, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.
I was in college when my buddy Chris showed me LoveBlood. It sounded fun, fresh. I remember a group of us were at a friend’s house and Chris did a goofy jig to the song “Bam Bam,” which made us laugh. I’d occasionally play the album while studying, or, rather, attempting to study. After college, the album faded away,
Recently on a long trip, I had run out of surefire, known records to play, and so I grabbed something from a long-neglected account in my memory’s bank, and I pressed play on LoveBlood, an album I hadn’t heard since Obama’s first term.
It’s not a bad album. The first half is quite good, but it falls apart by the end like lots of debuts. Wilder took Costa’s songs and “Americanized them,” meaning, he gave the songs its own Wall of Sound layering. There is a recording of “Love Lust” from 2010 that Charles plays on a guitar in a shed, and it’s a very pretty song. It’s also pretty folk. The album version of “Love Lust,” like all the songs, is grand, big, full of strings, piano and loud drums. It is meant to grab you. It is commercial music.
Listening to LoveBlood nearly a decade later, it’s startling how of its time it is in production and aesthetics and outlook. The album is steeped in the year 2012. It is so 2012 that if you play it around people who aren’t music nerds, they will say things like, “this sounds really early 2010’s.” It is the sound of “world music” influences as interpreted by an uppercrust white dude, a la Paul Simon or Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend. It is the earnest folk-rock constructions of Mumford and Sons, who is featured on the song “The Brightest Lights.” There is baroque, anthemic rock-pop that recalls the band fun. Remember fun.? There are handclaps. There are lyrics like “Well, I got love in my blood/ and I got you on my brain/ I haven’t got enough blood/ I cannot love you enough.”
Popular Western commercial music in 2012 tended to be much more positive than music now. This could be very grating, especially if you were not in the mood to be blasted by a giant chorus at, say, Subway. The phrase “YOLO,” a bastardization of the ancient Roman phrase “You only live once,” was everywhere. Some American millennial trends included mason jars, ugly Christmas sweaters, and the urge to dress like a time-traveling railroad tycoon. Politically, both the UK and US were less divided. There was less dread. Glee club attendance was at an all time high. In the secular imagination, “travel” had gained ground as a way to find your life’s purpose that also happened to include eating exotic foods, hanging out on beaches, and not having to work at a job.
So, listening to LoveBlood in 2021 is listening to correspondence from a world that is quickly fading farther and farther away. All art is a record of its time and place. Good art transcends its time and place, however, with deeper substance. After all, there will always be love and joy and hope and faith and pain but, as culture moves on, there will not always be banjos and violins and Marcus Mumford and the twee bright light of the UK folk scene, that little star that came up like Glam and Punk and Brit-pop before it, reigning for awhile until it couldn’t any longer.
And what of my own relationship with these songs? Lyrics like, “I rode her on my bicycle all the way in the rain, she kissed me once, I took her out for lunch, and she never kissed me again” were once charming, whimsical, and memorable. Why now was that line trite and silly? Why was I rolling my eyes at such things?
The songs hadn’t changed, but their concerns and romantic framings were the property of the young, and I couldn’t ever go back there, even if I tried. That wild country of melancholia and euphoria and tyrannical self-seriousness, where each emotion and thought is so real because it's your emotion and thought, had closed its roads and borders. It couldn’t allow for new developments from the outside. Out there past romanticism’s margins were regular bills, board meetings, the repetitious minor cruelties of bureaucracy, the required stoicism to get through the day, the new wrinkle and added pound. The songs resided, in short, before adulthood.
Since 2012, Costa still performs under the King Charles moniker but got rid of the costume. It was a smart move. People are less and less fond of kings these days, even the fake ones. He left Universal and has released two subsequent albums on his own label, Buffalo Gang. 2016’s Gamble for a Rose was a more muted, mature affair. It was produced by Marcus Mumford. Charles’ most recent album, Out of My Mind, was released last year and was a pivot shift in sound, far more influenced by modern R&B, with whispered falsetto vocals and dark production. It sounds very 2020. It was produced by Matthew Wilder.
I imagine there’s a kinship between Costa and Wilder. The parallels are hard to deny. Two guys who have been in the music industry since they were kids, both very talented but not going to be the next giant superstar. Both their debuts are distinctly of that era, 1972 and 2012, respectively. Both love the big choruses. Two men that didn’t let anything break their stride but kept on moving.
Time is the ultimate judge of the works we make, and it is a cruel judge, both indifferent to the creator's motivation and their life itself. A work exists as an object, and objects decay into artifacts, often only remembered as an historical curio, if at all. Only the truly substantial stuff holds steady. Most stuff just doesn’t last.
In the novel Dance, Dance, Dance by Haruki Murakami, our unnamed narrator describes his work as a magazine writer reviewing restaurants:
“Well, somebody’s got to write those things. And the same can be said for collecting garbage and shoveling snow. It doesn’t matter whether you like it or not- a job’s a job. For three and a half years, I’d been making this kind of contribution to society. Shoveling snow, you know, cultural snow.”
Cultural snow is that which melts when the season ends. It’s the Netflix show you binge once and barely remember. All the cash-in pop ditties cranked out to make a buck. Law and Order spinoffs you watch in a motel room. The bajilion covers of “Hallelujah” on YouTube that turned into a public flogging of a dead horse. Bazooka Joe comics and their jokes printed on gum wrappers. Fortune cookie prophecies and tourist brochures. It’s the very words you’re reading right now.
But what of it? We must continue shoveling snow. It may not seem all that flashy or important, but we sure are aware of its absence. As Murakami says, “a job’s a job.” Honest work. And what of posterity? There are plenty of songs lost to time immemorial, but I’m sure the Medieval peasants, Benin Empire soldiers or Edo period farmers had a good time singing them. I know, in 2012, LoveBlood helped give me some good times, like witnessing a friend make his friends laugh to its songs or humming “Missisippi Isabel” while riding my bike. I’m grateful for these memories. How wonderful this world doesn’t only require masterpieces. How comforting to know good things can be done by those of us who shovel the snow.
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