HOOKED ON SHANGHAI CIGARETTES

Caitlin Rose's Masterful "Own Side Now" Gets Another Shot

What's in a song title? Paul McCartney has been overquoted (sorry to do it again), saying that the original place-holder phrase that went with the melody to "Yesterday" was "Scrambled Eggs." The melody came in a dream, but the words needed some work. Right after breakfast.

I was thinking about "Strawberry Fields Forever." Would it have meant as much if the title had been "Addison Park Forever"? Same number of syllables. You could rewrite the verse: "Let me pick you up 'coz I'm going to/Addison Park/Where it's never dark/Addison Park Forever."

The title "Addison Park" would be just too vanilla. The times (early 1967, as one side of the two sided single with "Penny Lane" on the other), demanded something that sounded trippy and colorful: Strawberry Fields, and they are forever.

The Nashville singer-songwriter Caitlin Rose wrote and performed one of my favorite albums of 2011, Own Side Now, which is now being rereleased by ATO Records with two new songs. You can listen to it on Bandcamp.

My no-contest, favorite song of that year is now back in circulation: "Shanghai Cigarettes." The riff, the bounce, the energy, the fuzz guitar, the handclap rhythm, the punchy harmony from Rayland Baxter: the song keeps coming at you.

Like the best toe-tappy, hooky songs, "Shanghai Cigarettes" keeps giving pleasure: You want to chain smoke an entire pack.

The song was in my head again when I played it a few days ago for some students because I wanted to play around with this idea of titles. What if "Shanghai Cigarettes" was called "Goodbye, No Regrets"? It would have fit perfectly with the other songs on Own Side Now, a song cycle about a then-23 year-olds struggle for independence, against co-dependence, and relationships that always seemed like Dr. Doolittle's "pushmi-pullyu," the four legged, two headed llama-like animal that tries to go two directions at once. Desire for commitment and fear of it, the lure of freedom versus the safety of the same old, same old. Caitlin's young life, like those so many trying out and trying on relationships, was about trying to see what worked and didn't work. She was brilliant at that. And like so many of us at any age, not so brilliant about what to do about it.

The whole album is eminently enjoyable as the introduction to one of the pop/folk/country world's most original voices. I mean that from both sides now: both the freshness of the writer's voice, and the distinctiveness of her singing voice. She doesn't fit into any area of so-called Americana, country, folk, rock scenes, which marks her the right person for our post-genre times. And, her preternatural sophistication gave her one foot in East Nashville and the other in boho Brooklyn.

She comes from both a musical and music business family. I spoke to her dad Johnny Rose, a longtime Nashville marketing and distribution executive, a few times ten or more years ago when I worked on some freelance Roy Orbison special projects for Thom Duffy at Billboard. Long divorced from Johnny, her mom is Liz Rose, who became renowned as Taylor Swift's original songwriting partner: Swift/Liz Rose collaborations are plentiful on Taylor's first albums.

It's no surprise that Caitlin Rose knows how to finesse a lyric and melody, and deliver it with both fine pitch and a timbre that suggests a distinctive, even quirky personality. (Transparency note: Caitlin and I have shared casual notes of on Twitter. The notes mostly consist of me encouraging her to write more songs.)

"Shanghai Cigarettes," though. That is really the song. First of all, what are Shanghai cigarettes? If I was a teenager and it was 1967, I'd say, maybe it's young hipster slang for marijuana. I'd be wrong, the way my musical, analytical teenage friends thought that's what "Norwegian Wood" was about. So maybe "Shanghai Cigarettes" would be something you'd find in the opium den of my waking dreams. But I don't think so.

It is a wonderful metaphor for a sticky relationship, though, one as addicting and unhealthy as smoking. It's the archetypical, existential Caitlin Rose song.

Going so deep into smoking as a metaphor reminds me of "I'm So Tired," one of John Lennon's profound but sometimes overlooked contributions to "The White Album." He's exhausted, but he can't sleep. He sings: "I light another cigarette. And curse Sir Walter Raleigh, he was such a stupid git." See what Lennon does here? He takes his unfortunate addiction to tobacco all the way back to its source: Sir Walter Raleigh, we were taught in school, introduced tobacco to England in 1586 when the intrepid adventurer brought it with returning settlers from the Roanoke Island colony. Lennon's use of "git" is kind of perfect, being a mild swear for an unpleasant, incompetent, or annoying person. Raleigh was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I. More serious matters than being a git got Raleigh beheaded for treason by Elizabeth's successor, James I, in 1618.

Caitlin Rose, fortunately, still has hear head, and on "Shanghai Cigarettes" she also plays with the pack of smokes the way Ricky Jay handled a deck of cards. "Trying to quit makes you wish you didn't start/When the box is as empty as the hole in your heart."

I also love "New York," which has the rangy street smarts of a good Guy Clark song, with the same kind of word play. The key line is "New York's a good time to let go." At first one might think she's saying "New York's a good town to let go," but as someone who occasionally mishears the occasional lyric, I never doubted Rose's enunciation, and the playfulness that describes this Tennessee woman's sojourn in the city as a time, rather than a place.

The reissue of Own Side Now offers a two song teaser of new material, "Whatchoo" and "Only Lies." Both songs are as sturdy as a lumberjack's breakfast, but it is taking me some time to get used to the orchestral synths in the arrangements. Because if there's anything I know about Caitlin Rose, is that there's nothing synthetic about her.