Breanna McCann looks back at the 1983 Modern Lovers classic, an album that’s driven by Richman’s relentless wonder at the world and all it has to offer
The song that introduces most listeners to Jonathan Richman is the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” an anthem in and of perpetual motion. Movement is a theme that carries through much of Richman’s work. From traveling songs like “Reno,” the New England stroll of “Twilight in Boston,” to his gorgeous cover of the Santo and Johnny classic “Sleepwalk,” Richman seems to always be on the move. He is restless, constantly searching for the next new experience and adventure.
Jonathan Sings! finds the ever-mobile Richman at a crossroads; He’s caught at a moment between his role as a punk progenitor in the Modern Lovers and his still-developing ideas of who he is as “Jonathan Richman.” Technically speaking, there are three eras in Jonathan Richman’s career — the two Modern Lovers albums, seven studio albums under the name Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, and 17 as a solo artist. Jonathan Sings! (1983) comes midway through his Modern Lovers tenure and six years before the first album to bear only his name. The early Modern Lovers derived a great deal of their energy from loud, driving guitars that showed their adulation of the The Velvet Underground. It wasn’t long until Richman began trading out the heavy primitivism of their first album for arrangements built more on the foundations of early rock ’n’ roll. Richman’s songwriting lost none of its energy in this shift. He went back to basics in a different sense and channeled rock through its purest, most fundamental elements. In the process he constructed an entirely new experience out of those building blocks. As he underwent this sonic transformation, his perspective changed as well. The early Modern Lovers often approached their songs from a joyous, but sometimes bemused, distance. On subsequent albums, Richman started writing eccentric joke songs and covering classic children’s songs. With Jonathan Sings!, Richman retains that innocent sense of humor but approaches the songs by entrenching himself into his own humanity. He’s no longer so aloof but delighted with all the possibilities that the world has to offer.
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Richman’s music has always celebrated the human spirit and its simplest joys. The phrase “childlike wonder” will come up in nearly any description of Richman’s work immediately and then incessantly. On Jonathan Sings! this childlike wonder is expressed quite literally. In “Not Yet Three,” Richman takes on the perspective of a toddler. He sings of his excitement with the world that he has barely had time to discover and expresses his frustration towards the adults who put him to bed before he is ready. “You don’t love twilight as much as me / Why don’t you take the nap and let the baby be?” he chastises. The song is inherently funny, yet Richman derives more than humor from his performance. There is great sincerity in his ardent and almost aggressive delivery. The song captures the baby’s awestruck worldview with a paralleled excitement for the days and late nights that the baby will one day be more free to explore in the future.
Jonathan Sings! is a celebration of music and communal experience. Much of “Give Paris One More Chance” finds Richman experiencing the city through its musical exports. In “This Kind of Music” and “These Conga Drums,” he revels in the mere existence of music and finds purpose in the simplicity of the songs and the urgent need for musical expression — no matter what tools the musicians have at their disposal. “Stop This Car” cedes control to backing vocalists Beth Harrington and Ellie Marshall. Taking the form of a comedy skit, with Richman as a nervous passenger, the singers pressure him to relax, their interplay driving the song. In the album’s closer, “When I’m Walking,” Richman goes so far as to quickly recite the entire lyric before the song begins, inviting his listeners to participate in a singalong. The band ushers the listener in and explains the joke so they can be a collaborator.
Amid the relentless wonder of Jonathan Sings! there is one real moment of poignancy, and it opens the album. “That Summer Feeling,” a song Richman would return to on 1992’s I, Jonathan, is perhaps Richman’s best song lyrically. “Do you long for her or the way you were? / That summer feeling’s gonna haunt you the rest of your life,” Richman sighs. There is a bittersweet irony that only Richman can deliver on here — he makes a song about crushing nostalgia and desperation to reclaim idealized versions of the past sound joyous. The song toes the line between melancholy and exuberance. The instrumentals are light and bouncy, feeling like lilting hits made for lazy summer afternoons, exactly the kind Richman is singing about being unable to recreate. It evokes the same sort of feeling musically as “summer” songs like that of earlier, lighter Beach Boys work, especially songs like “Girls on the Beach,” but provides a completely different experience. The music and lyrics are at odds with each other emotionally, evoking that same disconnect between the real and imagined past that fuels the desperate yearning and nostalgia for a time that can never be reclaimed.
Through all the joy and melancholy, Richman accepts humanity in all of its complexity and beauty, and he does so with a smile. “I love the world, so why sit still?” he exclaims, bursting with exuberance at the close of the album. If Jonathan Sings! is anything, it is a promise that if we open our hearts to indulge in just a little bit of Jonathan Richman’s worldview, we may just start to discover a little of that magic he has been seeking and singing about for almost five decades.
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