Anyone who knows me know one thing: I LOVE the work of Harry Nilsson. LOVE it. I trace that love all the way back to a very odd start.
It was Popeye.
Yup, the Robert Altman Popeye movie. 10-year-old me was absolutely captivated by it. I loved the character, and it was also my first musical. I sat in that theater absolutely transfixed. Yes, it’s a movie that did not age well (and some say it stank from day one) but I loved it. And from the first song, Sweethaven, I was hooked.
Sweet Sweethaven
God must love us
We the people
Love Sweethaven
Hurray hurray Sweethaven
Flags are wavin’
Swept people from the sea
Safe from democracy
Sweeter than a melon tree
Put here for you and me
Sweethaven
Sweet Sweethaven
God must love us
We the people
Of Sweethaven
God must have landed here
Why else would he strand us here
Where the air is nice and clear
Sweethaven even sounds so near
To Heaven
God will always bless Sweethaven
God will always bless Sweethaven
God will always bless Sweethaven
Only as I got older did I get interested in not just music, but the people who brought that music to life. And one such person I locked into – HARD – was Harry Nilsson.
I won’t go through his whole discography, but suffice it say Harry did some amazing work – a good start is his first album, Pandemonium Shadow Show. If you like that, you have good taste. Keep going. I was so obsessed I produced a Nilsson app for the late lamented Windows Phone.
Well now, Harry is back… even though he died in 1994. His song Gotta Get Up is a core motif in Netflix’s Russia Doll series. Thanks to technology, he sang co-lead vocals on the title track of 2016’s Monkees album Good Times (using a previously recorded demo he did in the 60s). And finally, we have his last “lost” album.
Losst and Founnd is based on solo recordings Harry did in 1993 and 1994. He had no label, was struggling financially, and was fighting health issues (the probably result of a hard drinking, hard living rockj and roll life style). His voice was nowhere near his early beautiful falsetto… but that wasn’t the point. The words were.
Harry, like other favorite songwriters like Warren Zevon or Richard Thompson, wore his heart on his sleeve. He wrote what he felt, and never looked for a “hit” (which was part of the reason he died with no record contract). His iconoclastic lyrics were HIM. He was more a writer than a musician. Want to know where his head and heart was at a particular point in his journey? Put on the album he released that year.
Might be why I love him so.
Losst and Founnd is produced by Mark Hudson (who tried to get the album made way back in ’94) with help from Jimmy Webb, Van Dyke Parks, and Harry’s son Kiefo. Using the original audio recordings (which has been described as “Harry with a mike, a cigarette, and a guitar”), and sweetened with a lot of modern tech and studio work, the album is quite good. Not quite an amazing album, and we already heard many of these songs on the bootleg Papa Got a Brown New Robe, released years ago.
But.. It’s Harry. NEW Harry Nilsson. A final chef’s kiss.
Next week is Thanksgiving. The instant I put on that first track, I started celebrating Thanksgiving early.
Thank you, Harry.
