Cheap Familiar Songs (Music) (Tom Rapp) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Familiar Songs

Not a classic, but contains a classic
As many reviews have noted, this is not a first-rate record and it was initially issued 30 years ago without Rapp's knowledge or permission. On the other hand, it is not truly awful and there are several fine performances here. Less folky and more soft-rock than some of Rapp's or Pearls Before Swine's other records, the album nonetheless contains as its true highlight a beautiful folk rendition of Sara Teasdale's poem "I Shall Not Care," introduced by the Shakespeare song "Full Fathom Five." The melody Rapp has composed for Teasdale's brief paean to unrequited love, revenge and self-pity is melancholic and beautiful, a very nice counterpoint to the somewhat savage nature of the poem's words: in short, the melody and words blend to form a perfect sense of the tenderness and anger that merge when one loves and is not loved in return. Like Rapp's "Hopelessly Romantic" [on his "comeback" record "Journal of the Plague Year"], "I Shall Not Care" showcases a marvelous mandolin solo for the second verse which helps raise the song from effective and affecting to masterful and classic. This flawed album is worth owning, if only for that track, otherwise unavailable, as the version of "I Shall Not Care" on PBS's "One Nation Underground" is a completely different musical setting.

---

Oooh what a stinker..
I reluctantly write this review, because I love everything else Tom Rapp has put out. On this record however, beautiful songs from the past get butchered. All the mystique that made e.g.'The Use of Ashes' so special becomes undone in these remakes. It hurts most when 'Snow Queen', once so fragile, is put on a rocking horse. The best thing about 'Familiar Songs' is the cover art, which led one to hope for another purse of pearls. Unfortunately, the music sits like an alien hybrid in the jacket - this album should've been called 'Familiar Jacket'. Tom's liner notes explain a lot, and I'm very appreciative of his decision to give the 'go ahead' on the re-release of this tainted album: it's such a notoriously twisted affair it had to see the light of day again sooner or later. So, with all due respect: for completists only - and I'm one of them.

---

Looks like a duck...Walks like a duck
...sounds like a turkey, or the majority of the tracks, anyway. One month and-a-half in, no one wants to touch (review) this feathered fiend with an eleven-foot pole...which leaves it now up to moi.

Grace Street is the best of the lot, deserving a spot on a proper Rapp release. Ditto Full 'Phantom' Five, capturing a Rapp vocal high-point within a mesmerizing melody. The Snow Queen 'interesting reading' is made so by its 'bonafide knockout' status&strength as a composition. Charley and the Lady works due to its uniqueness as a Rapp honky-tonk vehicle, although thankfully just this once, please.

The remaining six tracks, three from Use of Ashes and three from These Things Too, sound as if they came down an assembly line where slapped-on jarring shifts of tempo tend to sabotage any positive parts of the individual arrangements. The main culprit is the lead wah-wah guitar, half Vegas leisure-suit coupled with union/session PBS wanna-be. The piano gets sucked into this onslaught half the time, adding injury-to-injury on these six tracks.

Justifiably the Tom Rapp liner notes put this morass into proper perspective, humble as they may be. Can't agree at all with the accolades paid the accompanying musicians, however. If the lead guitarist's work is playing from the heart, then it's as applies to other arrangements on other compositions in another setting, 'cause as a positive effect it sure AIN'T in evidence here.

Buy this CD for the four above-the-fray tracks and the liner notes, and then in playing it try to figure out how to slow it down say one percent, as was the LP intended and delivered. The last thing we need in trying to give these tracks any&every benefit of the doubt is a botched pitch acceleration...which IS regretably in-evidence here.