SOMEONE'S LISTENING IN: HOW INDIE ROCK MORPHED INTO ADULT CONTEMPORARY Sufjan Stevens and Feist are just the beginning
By Greg Burgett
This past November, during one of three consecutive sold-out nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music??s 2,000-plus seat Howard Gilman Opera House, the night??s star performer, speaking in a deliberate elementary-school storytelling fashion, easily extracted laughter from his rapt audience with a comically exaggerated account of the time he once spent at ??oboe camp.?
He hit many richly colored and sympathetic moments over the five-or-so minutes he spent on the topic: the indignities of having his name continually mispronounced, the cruel fate his instrument met (melted into unrecognizable gunk) when left on the radiator, and the suggestion that oboe camp is a purgatory to which bassoonists, evidently players of a higher league, are sometimes banished to for misbehaving.
Contrary to how it may sound, this was no National Public Radio monologist taping for a Sunday afternoon drive-time broadcast. The man on the stage, there to debut a half-hour-long orchestral instrumental he had composed explicitly for the three-night run, was celebrated indie rock singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens; and the story he told, seemingly based on true events but twisted to elicit more laughs, easily held the attention of the even the crowd??s most hipster-accredited pockets.
Stevens, of course, was getting standing ovations by closing night of The BQE??the extended instrumental piece he was premiering those evenings. And his nightly monologues, his by-and-large inoffensive instrumentation (banjos, pianos, seldom-distorted guitars), and the sheer air of respectability a host like BAM confers upon those who perform there, leads me to a simple observation: that indie rock and adult contemporary have for the last few years, been publicly and happily holding each other's hand.
There??s an even more obvious example than Sufjan, one that, even at this very second, has decent odds of being pleasantly pumped directly into your brain from white-wired earbuds: ??1 2 3 4? is the landing strip upon which the much-lauded Canadian chanteuse Feist has taxied an easy-listening-tinged, blue-skied flight path. (Just a few days before The Press went to print, in fact, the song had its penultimate airing: a live-TV Grammy performance.) The Reminder, the album from which Feist??s hit single was culled, was an unsurprising move to anyone who heard her 2004 release, Let It Die, which even featured a Bee Gees cover, ??Inside And Out,? affectionately laced with synth basslines and jazz piano.
The indie kids learned to do a lot in the last decade: First they found downloading, then they discovered dancing and finally??they went to work. And on their way to their 10 a.m. start times, their casual Mondays-through-Fridays, their five-dollar-a-day coffee habits, they assembled a so-appropriate soundtrack. Something that keeps their cred intact, their superiors pacified (even at audible-over-the-cubicles volume) and their New Yorker reading appropriately soundtracked.
We can??t blame them, really. We would have done the same. In fact, we have done the same: We are them. So settle down, dear reader, as I am not intending to upset, to confound or to insult. I have come not to shame Indie Adult Contemporary but to praise it. The indie set, at last, have something that reads more like literature, largely avoids the bland lyrical niceties that have long stunted the adult radio-friendly genres, and gives our boy Sufjan the chance, after he??s tracked his vocals and overdubbed his banjo, to fill in those remaining gaps with friendly woodwinds??even the oboe.
Maybe, I might concede, we??re losing a little something in transition. It??s arguable that Feist isn??t indie (Cherrytree, her U.S. label, is owned by Interscope), and some might say that her commercial breakthrough and her agreeable sound may strongly correlate to that fact. But she??s still on the independent Arts & Crafts label in Canada. And to those who use the word ??Indie? in it??s broadest capital-I formulation, her indie-rock status is more about dear Leslie wearing tights or having bangs than her corporate affiliations.
For the greatest number of casual listeners to this new, hybrid genre??and granted these folks are generally the latecomers??notions of what??s indie and what??s adult contemporary are seldom, if ever, points of discussion. They simply don??t know, nor do they care to.
That Feist knows, that Stevens knows (he even released an alternate version of ??Chicago,? his most famous composition, parenthetically and playfully labeled as the ??Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version?) indicates both a commitment to their craft and an appreciable lack of shame.
In taking the time to let you know, I??ve done my job. Once you determined whether or not to feel any shame, you??ll have done yours, too.
