Joan Armatrading - do i ever need to listen to her?

Much more sensual than Tracy Chapman (on stuff like "Love and Affection") and much looser and a little quirky ("Walk Under Ladders").

Is this really the only Joan Armatrading thread? Massively underrated. I feel like I heard Alfred speak in praise of her early/mid-80s stuff but maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, her 'Love and Affection: Joan Armatrading Classics 1975-1983' is a really wonderful Sunday evening listen.

I don't know her well but I will say that "Somebody Who Loves You" is just a wonderful song. Melody, production, lyrics-- everything about it is great. Possibly my favorite love song of all time.

"Opportunity" is another great one.

"The Weakness In Me", very nice.

my best friend maggie had lots of sisters and they ALL loved joan. so i got to love her too in the 80's. i had a great hits comp that came out in the 80's on cd, but i think it's out of print. i'm lucky, drop the pilot, me myself i, i love that 80's stuff. but the earlier years are filled with gems. show some emotion is just a flat-out great song. but she had a ton of them. i love it when you call me names!

ah, here's the one i had:

http://www.amazon.com/Joan-Armatrading-Classics-21/dp/B000056UVV/ref=m_art_pr_18

GREAT track-listing and great chronological overview. if you don't want to go all the way with the one john is talking about (which is 2cds?). there are other best-ofs out there though.

yeah the one I mention above - there's so much on it, and it's all good - really remarkable!

it's funny that jaxon mentions tracy chapman at the top there. maggie and her sisters went to wooster school in danbury with tracy and tracy would come over to their house and hang out and play guitar. don't know if she did any joan covers though.

i should get that comp. i only have a couple of the early albums.

I have these two. Pretty easy to find her records on cheap vinyl.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/11/Joan_Armatrading_%28album%29.jpg

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41FN2MKM47L._SS500_.jpg

love and affection
me myself i
willow*****this is awesome
drop the pilot (this got actual rock-radio play at the time, first place i heard her)

I love it when you call me names, classic

Listening to "Willow" right now. It is awesome!

(Not to mention a walking negation of the concept of genre in music.)

Drop the Pilot...seems like she was a lot bigger in Australia than the US. No-one I know seems to have ever heard of her. (Unless I'm fraternising idiots which is entirely possible.)

she was sort of on the verge of a us breakthough in the early 80s - me, myself and & the key were top 40 albums - but she never had that big hit to make her a household name.

Her first album 'Whatever's for us' from 1972 is outstanding... Much more in the folk-rock vein - but well worth checking out..

born and bred on this (in oz!). classic and still great to listen to. the upbeat poppy stuff very housework-improving-danceable.

search: (i love it when you) call me names - joyfully un-p.c. for nowadays

ive wanted to hear her for ages...all i really remember is that her her name seemed to be around when i was young, and she appeared with dennis the menace on the front of the beano..
so this thread has shifted my ass to exploring her work.

There's a lot of Tracy Chapman in there (or rather the opposite), but what's wrong with that. It would be better if we have more female acts sounding like Tracy Chapman or Joan Armatrading, and fewer female acts sounding like Patti Smith or Liz Phair.

speaking of which, why doesn't Tracy Chapman have her own thread?

i really adore "i'm lucky" - did she ever make a whole album of concessions to synthpop?

GEIR IS RIGHT I'M SICK OF PATTI SMITH-SOUNDING WOMEN CLOGGING UP THE CHARTS ALL THE TIME

i really adore "i'm lucky" - did she ever make a whole album of concessions to synthpop?

That's her synthiest song; Thomas Dolby plays on most of the album (Walk Under Ladders), if that helps.

Whoa. How had I missed her until now?

To me, her voice sounds like the harmonics of Christine McVie and Lindsay Buckingham. I made this observation to a classmate in grad school in 1980, and she looked at me, as with a polite a look as she could manage, as if I were insane.

Love this comment upthread, btw:

god, my wife was into her a long time ago (no lesbo).

"as"

"...with a look as polite as..."

now that we can embed i'm going to embed this, because it's one of my favorite things on youtube

I am discovering a like a bunch of her songs that I never knew were hers, and I'm a little confused about where I heard them. Did she get much commercial radio play in the U.S.? I know WXPN (Penn's radio station) used to play her a lot, but I mostly didn't listen to the type of shows that would have played her music.

Anyway, yeah, I think probably very underrated at this point, and much more interesting and musical to my ears than Tracy Chapman. I do remember that she seemed pretty popular in Philadelphia in the 80s.

"Me Myself and I" is a curious take on some sort of new wave sound mixed with characteristically bright 70s pop moments. I remember that song, though I haven't thought of it in years, and I never would have guessed it was Joan Armatrading. (The only song that had really stuck in my head in connection with her is "Love and Affection," which I do think is quite good.)

Also, a reissue of one of her 80s albums is due out shortly.

(And I don't want to turn this into a bashing Tracy Chapman thing, but it just annoys me that I see Joan Armatrading identified/explained partly as someone who made Tracy Chapman possible when there's a whole lot of reason to be interested in Joan Armatrading in her own right.)

Also, the harmonic stuff going on in "Water With Wine" is just great:

http://www.last.fm/music/Joan+Armatrading/_/Water+with+the+Wine

When she gets to "This man was. . ." whatever it is: oh man, that gives me chills.

Sounds almost like an Al Stewart song at that point, but classier if I may say so (not that I hate Al Stewart).

And "Me Myself and I" deserves to be a well-known classic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBRNfWGxBp8

Did she get much commercial radio play in the U.S.?

Me Myself I, Walk Under Ladders and The Key all got play on the big New York album rock station WNEW-FM. She was definitely going for a poppier bounce at that point--witness her dropping longtime producer Glyn Johns for Richard Gottehrer on Me (bringing the "bright '70s pop" you mentioned) and then Steve Lillywhite on the next two. The new wave influence got stronger with each of those albums--"I Love It When You Call Me Names" from The Key got a lot of play on new wave stations like WLIR (an Adrian Belew guitar solo didn't hurt in that regard).

the clip of "willow" that tipsy posted upthread is seriously wonderful (i even prefer it to the actual recorded version)

And I don't want to turn this into a bashing Tracy Chapman thing, but it just annoys me that I see Joan Armatrading identified/explained partly as someone who made Tracy Chapman possible when there's a whole lot of reason to be interested in Joan Armatrading in her own right.
Thank you. I'm not a big fan of either, but I've never gotten the connection people try to make between these two. Is it because we're talking about two black chicks with afros who play guitar? They sound very different to me.

Jazzbo your post is hilarious. They are both high quality but so different! Like someone else said, she was on the new wave stations all the time, but not everyone had access to new wave radio in the eighties.

I've been listening to her non-stop all week. Somewhat surprisingly, I'm not fond of the synth-pop concessions; the walloping arrangements force her to bray too loudly for my ears ("Temptation," "Kind Words and a Real Good Heart").

Did you get a review copy of the one that was just reissued or something?

Walk Under Ladders? I want to!

Did she get much commercial radio play in the U.S.?

I def. remember hearing "Drop the Pilot" a bunch of times when I was a kid (and only listened to commercial radio). That song has been running through my head for years, but I just recently found out that it was by JA. It didn't help that I couldn't remember any of the lyrics right. (For some reason I used to think that it was called "Shock the Monkey" until I actually heard the Peter Gabriel song.)

b/c of the monkey line?

Not sure. I just had no idea that she was saying "Drop the Pilot" and was aware that there was a song called "Shock the Monkey" so my mind filled it the blank.

I'm in love with "The Shouting Stage."

I still haven't heard her

i was playing her SO LOUD the other day. like, death metal loud. sounded awesome. me myself i cranked loud on a good stereo is heaven on earth.

horrible video sound doesn't do it justice, but anyway...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBRNfWGxBp8

haha, didn't see that rockist already posted the vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifARMmcqhD8

Given how many people (including people I'd expect to be interested) haven't heard her, or in some cases even heard of her, I think she is due for some sort of big rediscovery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyqm7cLy3RA

i have this one lying around somewhere but I dont think ive ever listened to it, i should dig it out i like the sound of her from this thread

http://991.com/newgallery/Joan-Armatrading-To-The-Limit-422772.jpg

Really like what I'm catching up on. Touring too:

http://www.joanarmatrading.com/index.asp?m=misc&n=tours&p=1

Listening to 1986's Slelight of Hand. Although it's her first entirely self-produced album, on which she plays all the electric and acoustic guitars, it's her most mechanized album: Emulators and drum machines galore.

"Killing Time" and "Russian Roulette" are my picks from that album.

and "Jesse"

I guess today was the day I became an Armatrading fanatic. Gave all the albums up thru 1985 a spin today while working.

I came away liking Me, Myself & I the most, and particularly the song "Is It Tomorrow Yet?" which is just packed to the seams with brilliant guitar parts. I'd love to get a hold of that master tape and break it down into individual tracks just so I can fully know what's going on.

The Key is a really really good album

Before even looking at the credits, I could tell it was Tony Levin all over The Key.

gonna try to get through most of her records this year bc i think walk under ladders is a masterpiece

also "the weakness in me" is the best song i've ever heard

idk what it is but her work speaks directly to me. i'm listening to her debut whatever's for us rn and i'm just like "wow all of these songs are brilliant"

"Love and Affection" is such a great song

Random discovery on Google Maps: Ma-Me-O Beach is on a lake in Edmonton, Canada.

I'm only discovering her but I'm positively awed. Her accent is more on voice than composition compared to Joni Mitchell but the music is totally comparable. What a presence.

she’s great
shit attitude in title/OP, but she’s never really been given the due she deserves

yeah lots of old threads have bummer titles

I've been listening to her a lot the last few years. Enjoyed her most recent album (2018) too, down to the "casual leaning in negative space" throwback of the cover photo.

walk under ladders is the greatest album of all time

she also has many albums that are nearly as good

I first heard her last year while listening to a 70s soft rock playlist on a plane; Love and Affection was the only song that I had never heard. On her 1976 album, her singing goes to more delicate extremes than you would expect from her "regular" voice.

Her lyrics are too prosaic and casual to compare to Joni Mitchell, but her arrangements and playing with the band are certainly more rocking. Her acoustic guitar playing in Like Fire stands out for aggression and energy.

the first song i heard by her was "down to zero" and it was like being kicked directly in the chest

still stand behind this:

Listening to 1986's Slelight of Hand. Although it's her first entirely self-produced album, on which she plays all the electric and acoustic guitars, it's her most mechanized album: Emulators and drum machines galore.

― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, January 22, 2011

the first song i heard by her was "down to zero" and it was like being kicked directly in the chest

Me too! Heard it on an episode of Homicide, Life on the Street, and it's still my favorite song by her.

Checked the thread to make sure that I have at some point expressed my love for "Willow." Back in 2008!

This is so great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl3i1GMuyeU

Drop the Pilot...seems like she was a lot bigger in Australia than the US.

I'd believe this. "Drop the Pilot", "Call Me Names" and "Me Myself I" were in sufficiently high rotation that they are -- along with "Young Turks" -- basically what early childhood sounds like in my memory.

Joan is a badass boss and her singles ruled my childhood

Still feel like I'm hearing her influence on the new Nilüfer Yanya single. Time to try coining "Armatrenaissance" again :)

Happy birthday to her.

I'm familiar with Love and Affection and Drop the Pilot but only just started listening to her albums - if there's twenty better tracks than Down to Zero off her self titled then, well I look forward to them!

"I'm Lucky" and "Woncha Come Home" should (imo) be higher, Alfred

you're right

making my way through her albums and really wondering how she went so far under the radar in the US? shocked she wasn't more popular. everything sounds great (even for the era), the singles are fantastic, and even the lesser the songs are interesting. her voice is fantastic. the bands she put together are all stacked. totally ripe for a revival/reappraisal/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

in answer to the thread's original question: yes!

“Back To The Night” has a constant for me over the last few months...a lovely warm 70’s production, superb musicianship and a great set of songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7dZ9vdHsxU

classic video

Whoa...this is fantastic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWRt6TYDIpY

the version of "Love and Affection" in that concert is just ~beautiful~

so i just made my bi-monthly browse over to pfork and i see that her self-titled got the archive review this past sunday. which one of ya'll was it?

(haven't read the review yet, btw)

(but i'm sure it's great)

now let's petition for a full week of reviews, four per day

average normie pfork reader upon seeing that:

"can i get these on vnyl?"

The Weakness in Me is so good. Her voice as she sings “make me lie” and when she sings “I mean to hold you / tightly”. Wow.

an interesting tidbit from that review:

Joan Armatrading was still adoringly received: It went gold within a year, remained on the U.S. charts for 27 weeks, and the UK music paper Sounds named it the album of the year over Bob Dylan’s Desire and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira.

no idea she that kind of impact in the uk. i always just figured she was a cult figure everywhere.

looking up that list... and Sounds were right on the money that year, because another album is in front of Desire too

1. Joan Armatrading - Joan Armatrading
2. Hejira - Joni Mitchell
3. Royal Scam - Steely Dan

(yes, the review is great btw)

she was huge in England through the mid '80s.

i was in single digits then, so my memory's hazy.

new album's out, curious if the whole thing will be as earworm-y as the singles -- only heard them once but they still run through my head at random times. didn't love the first one but "Like" is kinda rad.

Rob Sheffield interviewed her for Rolling Stone.