RELEASES
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"More than anything, I think that these songs represent the end of my youth," Justin Currie says of What Is Love For, his first solo album and his Rykodisc debut. "I wanted to allow my world-weariness to roam unchecked. And I wanted to be straight about love-about how I can't explain it, control it or figure it out. I thought, 'This is how I feel, so let's see if any other folk out there feel the same thing.'"
As lead singer and main songwriter of Scottish popsters Del Amitri, Currie established an enviable reputation for sterling melodic craftsmanship and pithy, forthright lyrics. What Is Love For maintains those qualities, while achieving impressive new levels of musical and emotional immediacy.
What Is Love For features 11 Currie compositions whose pensive meditations on love's darker margins are supported by spare, organic arrangements. Such numbers as "Not So Sentimental Now," "Walking Through You," "Out of My Control" and the haunting title track confront their thorny subject matter with a compelling blend of hard-won insight and pointed humor. The self-produced album features Currie on various instruments, along with an assortment of players including Currie's longtime Del Amitri partner Iain Harvie and fellow Del Amitri alumnus Andy Alston.
Currie co-founded Del Amitri in his hometown of Glasgow while still a teenager. Between 1982 and 2002, the band evolved from scrappy D.I.Y. indie combo to international hitmakers, releasing six widely acclaimed albums that showcased frontman/bassist Currie's effortlessly expressive vocals and ever-evolving songwriting skills.
Currie says that becoming a solo artist was a matter of circumstance rather than design. "When Del Amitri were dropped by Universal in 2002," he explains, "Iain and I looked at what we'd achieved over the past twenty years, and we decided that we had no desire to keep making those records over and over again. I took a holiday in Spain, where I ended up getting stoned and listening to the Italian singer Lucio Battisti's '70s albums and suddenly decided that that's what I should do-big romantic songs with lots of strings. I had this vision, and I had a whole host of songs that I thought I could make work in that manner, so I came home and started recording. Then it morphed into something different, as things do."
What it morphed into was a subtly powerful set of songs whose deeply felt performances accentuate the personal nature of the material. "I don't think it's a radical departure from the way I've written in the past, and the themes are the same as ever," Currie observes. "But unlike a Del Amitri album, it's not designed to showcase a band or to work as a live show. It's just an attempt to express myself openly and simply."
Because he was between record deals at the time, Currie took advantage of the opportunity to write and record What Is Love For on his own terms. Cutting tracks over the course of two years, both in his living room and at two local studios within spitting distance of his front door, the artist worked at his own pace, with a minimum of outside interference.
"I was under no commercial pressure, so there were no compromises to be made," Currie notes. "I wanted the songs to arrive in their own natural time, and not force anything just to meet a deadline. I wanted every song to be about a real feeling or event that I felt I owned. I must have dumped twenty songs because they didn't feel true enough. I played every part I could to keep it primitive, and then brought in musicians of actual talent to color in the spaces."
In keeping with his new songs' intimate focus, Currie looked to some of his favorite personally charged classics for inspiration. "I had four major reference points," he explains. "Curtis Mayfield's Curtis, John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, and Nina Simone and Piano. Of course, I didn't expect to make an album anywhere near those masterpieces. I just hope that it's honest and truthful."
With nearly a quarter-century of music-making under his belt, Justin Currie is eagerly embracing new creative challenges with What Is Love For. "For me," he states, "the song 'What Love Is For?' sums up this record, in that it's ostensibly bleak, but underneath, there's a Morse code melody that's telling you something else. It's my Scottish romanticism, heavily clothed in a shrug of resignation. The Scots believe that life is pitiless and harsh, but that deep inside us all, there's a churning sea of desire and optimism that's usually suppressed by drink, stoicism and bravado.
"I'm more hedonistic, cynical and corrupt than I was when I started, and less idealistic and nakedly ambitious," Currie concludes. "But I still want to be heard, I still crave the attention of the crowd, and I'm still a self-obsessed megalomaniac. And I still desperately want to move people; that's the whole point."