The Lowe Down
Not to wax overly sentimental, but it wasn't until Nick Lowe strummed the first few chords of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding" that I realized why I'd wanted to hear him sing outdoors at the base of the New York's towering World Financial Center One, a block away from Ground Zero. Has a better antiwar anthem come along since Lowe first released the song in 1974 on The New Favourites of Brinsley Schwartz? The most familiar version of the song is Elvis Costello's seething take on Armed Forces, which Lowe produced. And Curtis Stigers sang the most profitable for The Bodyguard, a hit movie whose hit soundtrack reportedly made Lowe a millionaire and allowed him to pursue his current solo trajectory.
Lowe has matured with enviable grace. Among the eleven solo albums the fifty-eight-year-old has recorded in addition to his work with pub rockers Brinsley Schwartz and rockabilly revivalists Rockpile, his three most recent are especially wonderful. Lowe reinvented himself in middle age as a deceptively mellow country crooner and marvelously expressive barroom balladeer in the tradition of say, Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Johnny Cash (to whose step-daughter, Carlene Carter, he was once married). From 1994's Impossible Bird through this year's At My Age, Lowe has written and sung material of increasingly dark wit and knowing maturity. The sardonic ire of "I Trained Her to Love Me," about a cad who attracts women only to break their hearts, is balanced by the redemptive modesty of "Hope For Us All," in which the singer reckons that if even a "feckless" man such as he can find love, anyone can. Having written "Cruel to Be Kind" and "I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass" back in his own feckless youth, you know Lowe knows whereof he speaks.