 
 A Troubadour Travels in Circles, With Lives Tangled in His Own Published: February 3, 2004 "What I do ain't exactly comedy, so if you laugh, you're as twisted as me," Stew rhymed to introduce "Stew's Travelogue of Demonically Energized Souls," his performance at the Thalia at Symphony Space on Friday night. Stew appeared as part of the theater's American Comic Vision series, but he is a songwriter, not a comedian. His travelogue reshuffled his songs into an itinerary, starting in his hometown, Los Angeles, and heading to Aspen, Kansas City, New York and Berlin before circling back to California. Along the way he sang about heroin addicts, artists, poseurs and polymorphous lovers, tracing a bohemian picaresque with a clear but forgiving eye. His final destination was "L.A. Arteest Cafe," a place he described as an "unemployment line with espresso." Stew, who is African-American, leads a rock band called the Negro Problem, but on his own he's closer to cabaret. Backed by Charlie Zyleskie on piano, Marty Beller on drums and Heidi Rodewald on bass and backup vocals, and sometimes fingerpicking an acoustic guitar, Stew set his tales to ballads, bossa novas and hints of Tin Pan Alley and Kurt Weill. Most of the time he sang straightforward stories about twisted lives: a couple trying kinky sex in a parent's home, a slumming heiress with "the scar and the switchblade mind," or "The Naked Dutch Painter" who has an ambivalent fling with the narrator. The character in "Re-Hab" goes back to drug rehabilitation two dozen times and never kicks her habit, as the song moves from gentle mockery of therapeutic clichés to desperate moments and an unexpected resolution. Stew is not a detached observer. His characters' lives get tangled with his, making for uneasy laughs and shifting sympathies. He understands the attraction of drugs and alcohol: "These magic liquids change the way you think," he sang in "Kingdom of Drink." He also touches on the odd behavior induced by racism: evasions, reflexive stereotyping, overcompensation. Onstage Stew was as much an actor as a singer. His voice is genial and adequate, but he had the rubber-faced presence to make each song vivid. He set up songs with droll introductions and turned himself into a secular preacher, a befuddled tripping teenager and a frustrated gay Ken doll who would prefer G.I. Joe to Barbie. Without cynicism or naïve optimism, he understands human weaknesses and all the fascinating trouble they can cause.
--JON PARELES
From its stark cover painting to the introspective lyrics and acoustical setting, Stew has boiled down all of the musical ingredients incurred from his solo discs and outings with The Negro Problem to leave his most intensely flavored and personal collection yet. Melodic meditations on love, loss, happiness, and regret fill the disc creating what feels like a musical self-portrait painted by Stew in an attempt to show us Something Deeper Than These Changes. Looking past the beautifully colored lines of pop melody, Stew's lyrics provide a dense, solid base that enhances the music with more depth than on previous discs. Setting the tone is the quietly affecting "Love Like That Can't Be Measured Anyway," in which Stew reflects on the love we receive, almost unknowingly, in our rebellious youth that is appreciate in later years as "loves taken for granite/when you don't understand it/since it came so easily/must be free." Later in the disc he views love from the parent's perspective in the sweet folk setting of "The Sun I Always Wanted," as a child's birthday means more than cake, ice cream, and presents. Throughout the disc, love is the central theme and even the darker aspects of loving something rather than someone are explored. In "Kingdom of Drink," Stew studies the seemingly magical and escapist world of an alcoholic who appears to love his life of indulgences despite the many downfalls. A circus-like lounge keyboard paints this picture of accepted despair framed by synthetic beats that drunkenly stumble along. But this bleak musical setting is balanced by Stew's aptitude for writing pop/cabaret-style songs that show off his influences as in "The Instrument of Pain," which sounds like a lost song from Burt Bacharach's early '70s collaborations with B.J. Thomas. With every brush stroke of music, Stew creates an indelible image in our minds that becomes deeper and more focused with each viewing. To simply call him an artist is an understatement as Something Deeper Than These Changes elevates Stew into the upper echelon of pop songwriting masters.
-Aaron Latham
Regarding "Something Deeper Than These Changes"... As is his habit, Stew has once again released an album that rests securely in the top ranks of my 'best of the year' list before the year has ended. Something Deeper Than These Changes is classic solo Stew, less baroque than his work with The Negro Problem, but no less rich in its relative simplicity. Whether he's celebrating the simple joys of love, exploring the world through the eyes of a courtyard statue or taking the listener on a breezy hometown travelogue through the streets of L.A., he's witty and affecting and, well, wonderful is the word that comes to mind. As in it makes me full of wonder that he can so consistently come up with just the album I want to hear at just the time I need to hear it. There's always debate in Stew fan circles about which of his albums to start with if you really want to appreciate him. This one will do.
-Shaun Dale, Cosmik Debris
"Today's lesson: love is not the instrument of pain, it's your own mind. Or so says the so-called Black Bacharach, the artist singularly known as Stew. Wistful trumps whimsical on such delicately rendered delights as "The Sun I Always Wanted" and "Love Like That". But don't get the idea that though its quieter in Stew's world, his provocative wit is by no means muted. While "Mind The Noose and Fare Thee Well" may be sparsely furnished sonically, from its title on down its commentary on the New Bush Order stings no less caustically. And it doesn't get any better than the supple "Statue Song," perhaps the most sublime outside-looking-in story put to song ever. Forget all the best kept secret, talent deserving more recognition blather. The proof is here in the digitally encoded pits. As members of the music consuming jury its fine time for you, as many normally cynical and hyperbole immune types have already willingly done, accept Stew as your own new personal Lord and pop music savior. Worship accordingly." -Michael Evans, Bad Analogies
http://badanalogies.com/
The XXL African-American gent who fronts pop-rock smarties the Negro Problem and records alt-cabaret songs under the chummy moniker Stew has an incredibly, er, black sense of humor for someone whose songs often recall lite-rock icon Bread. But Stew's latest finds his heart overtaking his sense of absurdity. "Love is not the instrument of pain," he advises on the song of the same name, "it's your own mind," while "The Statue Song" turns a high school English exercise ("Write from the perspective of an inanimate object") into a blue ballad about stasis and homesickness. YES, HE'S GOOD EW named Stew's last two LPs Albums of the Year; how many times must you be told? A-
-Will Hermes
STEW, "SOMETHING DEEPER THAN THESE CHANGES" (SMILE) Just as the psychedelic pop master Robyn Hitchcock alternated solo albums and discs with his backing band the Egyptians through much of the '80s and into the '90s, Stew (a.k.a. the linebacker-sized Los Angelino, Mark Stewart) spaces out offerings by his own Day-Glo group the Negro Problem with more stripped-down solo acoustic offerings. However, it's the latter that are finally winning this endearingly eccentric artist the national attention he so richly deserves. The comparison to Hitchcock goes deeper: Like the Man with the Replaceable Head, Stew has a razor-sharp literary eye and a wicked sense of humor. He adores free-flowing Dadaist wordplay, but also excels at the classic story-song, though here, as the ultra-rare African-American purveyor of psychedelic pop, he brings a perspective that's even more unique than Hitchcock's P.G. Wodehouse-on-acid routine. ("Frederick Douglass, hip-hop king/Came to me inside my dream/His advice rang like a bell:/Mind the noose and fare thee well," Stew sings in his particular cover of that folkie standard.) "Something Deeper Than These Changes" marks Stew's third proper solo album, and while the songs are a bit less immediate and a little heavier than those on last year's "The Naked Dutch Painter" (still my favorite), it's another winner, creeping up on you slowly as you're drawn in by the subtle melodies and dark-wry lyrical observations. Want another example? In "The Kingdom of Drink," another in his ongoing series of ditties about substance abuse, Stew offers some advice about the difficulty of finding booze in alcohol-free Saudi Arabia: "Just follow the Christians, they have that certain stink/Get baptized in the kingdom of drink." Cheers, mate; you've got me addicted.
-Jim DeRogatis
"Something Deeper" sounds like the soundtrack for a forgotten musical, with Stew's songs recalling Van Dyke Parks and Kurt Weill." -- Jeff Niesel, San Diego Union Tribune
"Stew is a force of nature; a slow ride that takes you on a sightseeing trip over the edge of the precipice with a tour guide that makes you feel that the fragility of your consciousness and all that you think you know is as breakable as a thin sheet of hot glass buffeted by gusts of a hot summer wind." Bill Thompson - Winamp.com News (click here to read the full review)
" Stew is the finest songwriter in the United States of America." Mark Cibula - Pop Matters (read the full review here)
"So the greatest songwriter in the United States decides to come out with a lurrrrrve album, and the results are amazing." -- Ink Blot Magazine (read the whole review here)
New Times - Los Angeles - L.A. Weekly (click here for the whole review) Tony Peyser Santa Monica Mirror The Naked Dutch Painter is that rarest of creatures, an album you will want to listen to again and again; not just tomorrow or next week, but next year, and five years from now. Stew is amazingly gifted, one of the few current performers we can think of deserving of the term artist, and the sooner you put this CD in your machine, the sooner you'll discover it for yourself. John Easedale - Album Network -- Matthew Greenwald - All Music Guide .....shot through with Stew's own contemporary pop finesse and wiseass lyrical charm. His debut solo album, Guest Host, was thoroughly captivating, an overpowering blend of pure pop innocence and scathing rock cynicism. Guest Host wound up on a healthy number of year end lists; Entertainment Weekly named it the #1 Album of the Year in its Alternate Top 10 of 2000. If Guest Host was Stew's vision of a contemporary Burt Bacharach, as some critics suggested, then his latest, The Naked Dutch Painter and Other Songs, must surely be his attempt to incorporate Kurt Weill into his already rich soundscape. ....Painter offers all of Stew's previously exhibited pop influences and throws in a dash of German expressionist cabaret....... "Giselle" gene splices "Mack the Knife" with "The Soldier's Wife" and grafts the whole thing onto a Bacharach arrangement, and for a sonic core sample of everything Stew does well, there is nothing finer than the album's tour-de-force centerpiece, "The Drug Suite," a 10-minute, three movement piece that is stunning....... The strange thing about all of Stew's work to this point is that, as good as it is, it seems to be merely hinting at the masterpiece he's capable of unleashing. Let's hope he keeps turning them out like this until then. - Brian Baker - Barry Smolin host of KPFK's The Music Never Stops -notlame -Shaun Dale, Cosmik Debris |
