Eric Olsson’s songwriting has evolved significantly since he mostly shelved the guitar and began obsessing over the piano. Dirty Little Secret showcases every aspect of this transformation, from ragtime to jumpy, Blues Brothers/zydeco-inspired fare to intimate ballads. At its best, it’s achieved something as genuinely Chicago blues/New Orleans Cajun as you can get in New England (we’ll call it “Dr. John Kerry” gumbo-chowdah groove). Some tunes nearly verge on the icky commercial blues/pop of Randy Newman, though mostly it’s too legitimately jazzy to get there and instead veers into melodic English rock/pop a la Queen or cabaret-style numbers (“Broken Clock”) that recall the Dresden Dolls or Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, and certainly don’t come from any place that’s sunny all the time. There are truly soulful moments in numbers like “November Song” that are 1970 Van Morrison-worthy. —Tom Sturm

Thursday, June 23, 2011

“Dirty Little Secret,” by Eric Olsson, is a piano driven rock album that pulls elements from New Orleans-style stride, boogie woogie, blues, and gospel piano. And it’s recorded to tape. Good, old-fashioned, frustrating, noisy tape. If you drop a magnet next to it, you’ll pull all the sound off of it and lose the whole day’s work! Listen for the clicks and pops. Tape hisssssss and tape echo. The perfect level of imperfection for a world obsessed with polish and perfection. Computers have helped usher in an age of inhuman precision in music with sampled instruments and auto-tuned voices.

No noise, no limit to the number of takes, and the ability to edit a performance endlessly. Gone are the days when bands had to play an entire song from start to finish in order to record it. While this has some benefits, it has also taken some of the soul out of the music. The quest for perfection robs each performance of a certain tension. And it no longer requires the level of skill or musicianship of the past.

“Dirty Little Secret” was recorded using as much analog equipment as we could get our hands on, in as few takes as possible. We recorded to tape, actual spinning reels of black magnetic tape. Which, BTW, are pretty hard to get your hands on these days. Each reel is a rare commodity that is only fifteen minutes long. You can’t do endless takes until you finally get it perfect. And you can’t edit out all the mistakes. You have to land that great performance, channeling the energy and the feel of a live performance and to hell with the little gaffes and ‘whoops’ that would be digitally edited out. The signal was passed through tubes and hand-wired circuits. Even their distortion sounds good, unlike the cold accuracy of digital distortion.

A digital sample of a Melotron is easy to use, quiet, and easy to keep running. A real Melotron is almost fifty years old, nigh impossible to keep running, and difficult to play. But boy does it sound great! And boy does it feel great to play! A Hammond B3 from the 1960′s, with the tubes warmed up and the Leslie speaker spinning round and round creates a sound that computers just can’t compete with. This is what we’ve wound up, we hope you enjoy it.