The late novelist Pearl S. Buck once said that to find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
That idea seems to apply to singer/songwriter/musician Nick Lowe, who is riding high with Indoor Safari, his first full-length album in 11 years. On the touring front, Lowe has taken up with Los Straitjackets, an American instrumental rock band whose members don personalized Mexican wrestling masks whenever they take the stage.
And while the collaboration between Lowe and the Straitjackets dates back about a decade when they were paired together to play Christmas shows, they cut a trio of four-track EPs from 2018 through 2020. What started out as items for the merch table at shows evolved into the suggestion of combining these releases into one recording, a proposal the London native accepted with some caveats.
“The thing about these simple, but very direct songs that I was writing was that they only really get a personality and come together after you play them five or six times in front of a live audience,” Lowe explained in a recent interview. “When we came to record these songs, that process hadn’t happened. I said we had to either re-record these songs or revisit the original recordings and do things like redo the vocals or put bits and pieces on backing vocals.
“The last piece of the puzzle really was that we worked with the great Alex Hall, who is a fantastic engineer/producer/musician and has got a studio in Chicago. We went to see him and recorded two or three new songs. All the rest of it is Alex sort of putting his fantastic touch onto it. The whole record sounds like it was recorded in the same week instead of over three or four years,” he said with a laugh. “We’re very pleased with the results, and it has been received very well.”
What Lowe ended up with on these dozen songs is indeed pure pop for now people. Los Straitjackets provide the right mix of twang and sass that snaps, crackles and rocks. The songs range from the surf tango of “Love Starvation” and mid-tempo heartbreak of “Jet Pac Boomerang”—complete with layered Jordanaires-flavored harmonies—to the ruminative melancholy of “Different Kind of Blue” and the rave-up opener “Went to a Party.”
And what Lowe collection would be complete without at least a couple of covers? In this case, it’s Sammy Turner’s yearning R&B nugget, “Raincoat in the River,” and Garnet Mimms’ “A Quiet Place,” a wistful gem perfectly suited for Lowe’s rich crooning style. With the new material fitting in perfectly with the British power pop icon’s already-deep canon, concert-goers can expect a wide-ranging set list anchored by some popular staples.
“We’ve gotten to the stage now where there are certain tunes we have to play,” Lowe said. “I can’t really do a show without playing ‘Cruel To Be Kind,’ ‘Peace, Love & Understanding’ or ‘So It Goes.’ There is a sort of structure there, and it’s never a chore to play any of my well-known songs. But we’ve got a pretty big repertoire now… What can I tell you? No more than that really that the well-known songs will be there in some way, shape or form.”
What’s fascinating about Lowe’s career evolution is how he emerged from pub-rockers Brinsley Schwarz (where he penned the aforementioned “Cruel To Be Kind” and “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” to become an in-house producer and solo act on indie label Stiff Records, whose stable also included Elvis Costello, Graham Parker and The Damned.
And while Lowe found his own success co-fronting Rockpile with Dave Edmonds and became a darling of the emerging new wave movement, the early ’90s saw him transition from guitar-driven power pop into becoming more of a country crooning kind of elder statesman. He’ll be the first to say he was reading the tea leaves of trends.
“At that time, I realized that as always happens, the public had gotten tired of my schtick and actually, so had I,” Lowe explained.
“I suppose I started thinking about this back in the late ’80s, when my career as a bona fide pop star was over. I knew that had happened, but I was sort of relieved in a way because I thought that I had to think of something else now. What I came up with was that I was going to use the fact that my inevitably getting older was an advantage rather than it be something you cover it up and pretend wasn’t happening. I embraced it and figured out a way of writing and recording for myself while coming off as a groovy old bloke,” he added.
This pivot into becoming an acoustic guitar-strumming balladeer paid off in spades for Lowe, who released a string of critically acclaimed albums including 1998’s Dig My Mood, 2001’s The Convincer and 2007’s At My Age. And along the way, especially after hooking up with Los Straitjackets, Lowe noticed an intriguing demographic shift in his fan base.
“When the band and I started shifting from holiday material to what you might describe as out-of-season songs, our audiences started getting bigger and younger,” Lowe said. “Going back to when I started switching things up, I thought if I got this right, I’d at least either have a younger audience or attract a flow-through of younger people who run into my stuff. I find that the younger people that come to see me are not so keen on my earlier stuff. They prefer my later stuff.”
Having turned 76, Lowe is pleased to see how things have turned out. And along the way, he lived up to a piece of advice his late father-in-law, Johnny Cash, gave him about needing to figure out who he was.
“When he originally said that to me, I thought to myself, ‘Blimey, John, can’t you come up with something better than that?’” Lowe said with a laugh.
“The thing is that he’s absolutely right. It is quite difficult to do because when you’re young, you’re always trying to cop an act, and you think, ‘No one wants to come and see me. They want to come and see this magnificent personality that exists in my mind,’” he noted. “But his point was that if you can figure out how to be yourself, then you never have to worry about keeping an act up. If you embrace the things you are slightly embarrassed about (with) yourself, then that’s your own personal style.”
Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets perform at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, San Francisco, Oct. 3-5 (check schedule for updates); hardlystrictlybluegrass.com. Lowe joins Patty Griffin Oct. 3 (sold out) at Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell St., San Francisco. Los Straitjackets play Oct. 4 at the Ivy Room, 860 San Pablo Ave., Albany.
