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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
(March 1, 1999)