Jason Falkner's second solo album, Can You Still Feel?, begins with a tinny, piano-tinkling number that finds the pop wizard quietly incanting, "Take a chance with me and you'll find you're only dreaming." |

The thirty-year-old Los Angeleno -- who sang, co-produced, helped arrange strings and played guitar, bass, keyboards and drums on this record -- certainly worked his ass off to make this effortless-sounding album a reality.

Falkner is a control freak whose precise nature and awareness of every instrument fuels his gift for songcraft. Can You Still Feel? swirls romance, Seventies power pop, Eighties keyboards and refined production into a string of harmonious songs with well-placed punches. "I just offer a snapshot and then there's all this abstract stuff that is surrounding it that is supposed to be individualized by the listener and interpreted in their own way," Falkner says, slouching on a leather couch in Elektra Records' New York offices. "The album is very honest about how I was feeling at that particular time. It's like a little time capsule." The result is twelve near-perfect songs of potent, thinking man's rock.

Whereas the theme of his 1996 debut album, Presents Author Unknown, stemmed from the slow crumbling of a seven-year relationship with his model-actress girlfriend, this album reveals an appreciation for personal and artistic freedom. "I was really into this new-found freedom, kind of a rebirth thing," Falkner explains. "I was thinking the album was going to be more folly than the last one, but it didn't happen that way." Mind you, Falkner's recent showcase at New York's Mercury Lounge found his new girlfriend (surprise, another model) grooving in the front row.

But there's plenty to groove to. Falkner manages to convince you that he's both miserable and elated, like a manic-depressive having the time of his life, often within the same song. He creates confusing emotional dichotomies by matching melancholy lyrics with upbeat power guitars. On the first single, "Eloquence," he bellows, "I'm lost and lonely because my baby won't come back to me" in such a poppy manner it seems he never wanted her to stay in the first place.

The album title "Can You Still Feel?" is intended to pose the said question to the desensitizing media. "It's about our over-saturation of the cool imagery," Falkner says. "I think that counterculture is extremely important, but now every commercial is saying screw-your-parents. It's become like fascist individualism with everyone telling you to be weird."

Falkner may be an individualist, but he knows how to choose his allies. Despite his extensive experience, the former Jellyfish member chose to have his album engineered and co-produced by boardsman du jour Nigel Godrich, of OK Computer and Mutations fame. "I wanted to give whoever I worked with credit so they'd really come to the party," Falkner says. "So, I said 'I want you to be my brother in this even though I don't need a lot of musical input,' and he was totally in to it. He's an amazing engineer and producer, but in my case, he didn't really need to produce me."

Headstrong? He is a descendent of *the* Faulkner (the "u" was eventually dropped), after all, which may also explain his knack for beautifully poetic lyrics. Lines like, "I want to lift you out of your past because I had nothing to do with it/Say we can leave it behind" seem like something the Southern writer might have scrawled on his walls. It's that kind of emphasis on substance combined with style that just might elevate Falkner to hitherto unseen heights. Speaking of which, what of that distinguishing Jellyfish fashion sense?

"I think Jellyfish could have been a huge band if we kind of chilled out on the bell bottoms, which would have happened eventually," says Falkner, who is today sporting a red leather jacket with a black stripe around the arm. "It was a rebellion against the boring-ass thing of guys in T-shirts just getting up there like, 'Not only am I going to play for you, but I'm gonna fix your fridge!'"

Falkner may insist that his multi-tasking stays within the musical realm, but he's not bashful about his abilities and the feelings they conjure up. As he sings on the album's penultimate track," "I'm quite aware that I'm accomplished/A natural high."

LIZA GHORBANI(February 24, 1999)