Common's "Finding Forever": The Rock Daily Preview

Rock Daily had a chance to hear Common's new record today, and while we're disappointed the artist himself wasn't at the listening session -- we wanted to talk suede hats with him -- Finding Forever sounded pretty darn good on first listen. It's a harder, slightly darker sequel to '05's lush, multi-Grammy-nominated Be, with Common maintaining his thoughtful brassiness and sharp narratives and Kanye West returning as chief producer.

Kanye produced eight tracks on the not-quite-finished version we heard, and almost all of them are great -- simultaneouly lush and bangin' in a way that compliments Common's mama-friendliness but helps cut down on his snooze factor. Standouts include "Drivin' Me Wild," a thickly detailed vignette about a young couple's vertingous love affair with hip-hop, money and each other. The song banks on Kanye's killer piano-and-snare loop and a catchy hook courtesy of Lily Allen, who sounds totally Beyonce here. Then there's the title track, which sounds something like a gospel choir directed by George Clinton -- pianos and overlapping soul voices rising toward heaven, underpinned by a deftly syncopated beat that (we think) samples Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover."

Oh, yeah, best Common line, from "Start the Show": "Twelve monkees on stage, hard to see who's a gorilla / You was better as a drug dealer." (Free lunch to anyone who tells can us who he's dissing.)

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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