Top 5 Albums of 2004

1. The Way It Really Is, Lisa Loeb. I think my lowest point in 2004 was the entire month of August. This album came out in August, and a lot of the songs really summed up where my heart was at the time. Comparatively speaking, this is a much more stripped-down album than what I’ve come to expect from Lisa. “Try” is a gorgeous piano ballad with a lovely layering of backing vocals. “Lucky Me” is a soft, sad song that moves along on a stuttering acoustic guitar part and a detached vocal that perfectly channels how numbing the initial sadness of losing someone can be. There are brighter spots here, too. “Fools Like Me” bops along with purpose, and I’ve always liked clever marriages of acoustic guitars and drum loops. But it also boasts her most dazzling vocal arrangement since the mesmerizing “Bring Me Up” from 2002’s Cake & Pie: “But I did, I can, I was, I am, only human, living, dying. Just like any fool who ever breathed. If love is blind, if love’s a drug, it always is, it always was. And love was surely made for fools like me.” And I love the part that carries it home: “Maybe it’s the sanest thing, or just the sweetest kind of dream. But love was surely made for fools like me.” Outstanding. And there’s this great, shimmery backing vocal effect on the pre-chorus that still gets me every time. Beautiful. I also like “Probably,” which is a real rocker. “The grass is probably green. The sky is probably blue. I’d probably do anything for you. I probably love you. I probably do.” The album ends with “Now I Understand,” which sounds like somebody kidnapped the Beatles, condensed them into honey, and drizzled them all over a Lisa Loeb song. If you can afford it, pony up the extra cash and buy the Japanese import, which has an extra track called “This Isn’t Happening.” Excellent song. I love this woman.

2. Back in the Circus, Jonatha Brooke. Would have grabbed the top spot, but Lisa’s album had more new songs than Jonatha’s. The two best shows I saw in 2004 were Jonatha Brooke shows; her voice is so good that I often think, “Whoa, my heart has done what her voice just did.” And it got me good in February, which was the second saddest month of 2004 after August. Or maybe the third after December. At any rate, I’ll never forget the first time I heard the bridge of “Less Than Love is Nothing.” It’s a gut-slammer: “I wish you well. I wish you mine. I wish you were alone tonight. I wish that I could leave the past behind, for once, I wish that love would last.” A lump came up in my throat and tears started streaming down my face, and I probably listened to it 10 times in a row and had one hell of a cry, and felt a hell of a lot better. Until I got to her amazing cover of “Eye in the Sky,” where she sang this line with an impossible blend of hope and grief: “The sun in your eyes made some of the lies worth believing.” Whew. “Better After All,” which bounces around on a great piano riff, is probably her best single to date. It takes everything that’s great about Jonatha Brooke and packs into two minutes and 42 glorious seconds. I also can’t get enough of “It Matters Now,” which begins thusly: “Sour, sour grapes make bitter wine. And you’re no funny Valentine.” Valentine’s Day is less than a week away. And that’s not very funny. Next!

3. Airstreams & Satellites, Garrison Starr. From the best bridge ever on the album’s opener, “Gasoline,” to the confessional hidden track (“Inside Out”) that closes it and all the gems in between like “Hey Girl,” “Wonderful Thing,” “Like a Drug,” and “Runner-up,” the universal themes of life, loss, and love on Garrison’s latest, greatest offering will leave you suspecting she knows you better than you know yourself. There’s not a recording artist alive who can boast anything remotely similar to her voice and style. Amazing.

4. The Babydoll EP, Kay Hanley. Sure, it’s only an EP, but Kay’s six songs can kick your album’s 10 songs’ asses any day of the week. At 36, Kay is a hot-rockin’ mommy of two who’s far beyond the days of bullshit. And for my money, she’s got the best voice in rock music. (I’m still trying to recover from the way she sings “my fingers on your faded blue jeans where my eyes had already been” in “Princely Ghetto” from 2002’s Cherry Marmalade album.) The songs here find Kay in top form. Her husband, fellow Letters to Cleo grad and guitar god Mike Eisenstein, produced the songs, and they rock harder here than they’ve ever rocked before. Kay’s voice just sounds so at home with all the crunchy guitars and muscular drums. “Lullaby Lucky” has one of my favorite lyrics: “I’m not your mom. I’m a fucking A-bomb.” And the ballad “Stay Stay” has a gorgeous vocal arrangement. This is a hot little collection of songs, from one of the hottest women on the planet.

5. One Love, New Edition. There are a couple of painfully sub-standard filler tracks here, like the ridiculous “All on You” and the weak “Love Again,” but the rest of this disc proves that nobody does what New Edition does better than New Edition. These guys are it, plainly and simply. And there’s no Bobby Brown on this record, meaning it’s the same lineup from the legendary Heart Break album: Ralph Tresvant, Johnny Gill, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins and Ronnie DeVoe. The guys are in their late 30s, and several of the songs reflect that. Songs about relationships that have lasted a long time, when the people in them are old enough to look back on the good times and bad times and share some perspective on it all. One of my favorites here is “Best Man.” It’s about a guy who’s forever been in love with his best female friend, but her take on the situation is, “Hey, let’s be just friends so that you’ll always be there for me, but I can do whatever I want. Won’t that be a great deal? For me?” Finally, he’s ready to lay it all out. “Now we’re getting older, and I don’t know how to act. As a matter of fact, there’s something I want to ask: Have you ever considered me as the best man for you?” Every member of the group gets to shine on this record. “Hot 2 Nite” and “Feelin’ It” are killer dance tracks. But the entire album is worth the price of admission just so you can hear “Rewrite the Memories,” which was written and produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. This is it. This is the track. It’s like someone said, “Okay, New Edition, we’re going to send you guys into a room with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and don’t come out until you have crafted the most amazing piece of music that every man in that room is capable of. Times ten.” And when they left that room hours later, they were holding “Rewrite the Memories.” This is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard from these guys and, just as “I’m Still in Love with You” did on their 1996 Home Again album, it keeps changing up the vocal arrangements as it draws to a close. The best moment happens at the 3:40 mark. Ralph sings, “Rewrite the memories,” and Ricky sings it right behind him, and then Johnny comes in behind them with, “Never meant to make you cry.” Ralph: “Get back where we used to be.” Ricky achingly adds, “Back where we used to be,” just as Johnny comes in with, “I want to turn back the hands of time.” And there’s a low, tumbling piano part, and they harmonize it all the way to the end. And it’s perfect. It does not get any better than this. Other standouts are “Newness” and “Wildest Dream.” The former is another Jam and Lewis collaboration, about a guy who’s telling his lover of many years that every time is still like the first time. “I see your face, and everything’s new again.” The latter is a fun song where the guy is telling his girl, “I can give you diamonds, baby. I can take you ’round the world. But none of that is really what you need. I just want to give you something that you can’t put a price on, and it will make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.” All you need is love. All you need is One Love.

Runner-up because I got it way late:

Happenstance, Rachael Yamagata. Like Jonatha, Rachael has one of those “my heart has done what her voice just did” voices, and the lyrics here will knock the wind out of your sails, pick you up again and send you on your way. “I Want You” is way hot and old-timey, boasting my favorite line: “The only kiss I’ve ever missed, I shared with you.” Whew. Whether the subject is pain or pleasure, this thing smolders.

Interview: David Duchovny

I interviewed David Duchovny for Impact today. Despite being extremely ill, he was really friendly and really funny. And brilliant. Here’s how it went:

JB: Hi, David. How are you today?

DD: I’m sick!

JB: You sound it.

DD: Yeah.

JB: Where are you now? New York, or L.A.?

DD: New York. I just wrapped a movie yesterday, so I’m collapsing in a heap. You get to enjoy that.

JB: That’s fine. I’m in southern Indiana, right across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky. We’re very snowed in at the moment.

DD: Oh, beautiful.

JB: I’ll probably have pneumonia myself tomorrow. What’s the movie you just wrapped?

DD: It’s called Trust the Man, with Julianne Moore, Billy Crudup and Maggie Gyllenhaal. It’s very funny, I think.

JB: That’s a big cast. It is an ensemble piece?

DD: It’s us four. We’re equal leads; I don’t know if that really makes it an ensemble. We’re like four equal leads.

JB: The interview is supposed to be about the X-Files DVD release; I’d like to start with some X-Files questions and move into some of the other things you’re doing.

DD: Sure.

JB: Does it feel strange to be promoting The X-Files again after it’s been off the air for so many years?

DD: It hasn’t really been off that long, so, no. It feels like it’s still with us.

JB: When you look at the television landscape today, with so many reality shows, do you think it would be difficult for a show like The X-Files to succeed right now?

DD: Yes and no. I think it would be impossible to ever get a network to write the kind of checks to make the show, because reality shows are so much cheaper to produce. I don’t think it would ever get made in the first place, but if it did, I think it would do well because that was always the key to the success of the show. It was good. It didn’t have anything to do with the fact that it was about aliens or this or that. It was just a really good show.

JB: My favorite episode of all time is the genie episode.

DD: Oh, yeah? [laughs]

JB: The comedies were always so good. Did you find it was sometimes more difficult to make the comedic episodes work, as opposed to the conspiracy episodes or the monster episodes?

DD: Well, comedy traditionally is always going to be harder than the other stuff because a comedy either works or it doesn’t. If people laugh, it works. If they don’t, you can’t say, “It kind of worked.” It just failed. Also, you don’t want to be caught consciously trying to be so funny. You just want it to grow out of the character and take the kind of severe landscape we would have created with the show and stretch it to accommodate a comedy without breaking the character or making him a different guy.

JB: As driven as Mulder often was, did you find it difficult to reach inside him and find those lighter places?

DD: No, because I always thought Mulder was a funny guy. Even from the beginning, the quippy stuff was coming from Mulder. I always thought sense of humor was a sign of intelligence, and I thought Mulder was intelligent, and I thought one of his driving characteristics was actually his sense of humor. What you have to remember is that Mulder is a loser. Even though we all know that he was right in all the episodes, publicly, he was always wrong. He never solved the case. He was a joke within the FBI. Losers are funny. They’ve got to be. There’s no other way to make the world square.

JB: At what point in the process of making the show did you get the bug to start directing episodes yourself?

DD: I guess it might have always been in the back of my mind, but the workload just to be the actor in that show was so intense and such a learning experience for me, because I had never had any kind of acting job with that kind responsibility before, that it probably took me until the end of the third year to even think that I could even have a cup of coffee on a Sunday afternoon and do the show at the same time. So probably around the fourth year, as I started to think about writing for the show, I started thinking about directing it, as well. The sixth year is when I finally did.

JB: There’s something I always wanted to ask you about the episode “William,” which you directed in the ninth season. Did the fact that you were a father yourself at that point make it easier or more difficult to direct a story about a child in peril?

DD: I think it made it easier, because you understand the emotions of it. You’re not just faking it. I think any kind of life experience makes you a better director, whether it’s having a baby or flying a plane or whatever. It makes you a better artist, because you have more to draw on.

JB: There were some good episodes toward the end of the eighth season, when Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish were on the show. It became a bit more of an ensemble at that point. Did you enjoy working with Robert and Annabeth as much as you did with Gillian Anderson?

DD: It was very different, because Gillian and I were like a mom-and-pop store. We made the business, you know? And at that point we were trying to hand it over to the kids while still being part of it. It’s kind of a difficult thing for the writers to do, to make Mulder and Scully part of an ensemble. If you have too many characters in a show like that that’s so plot-driven, there’s too much personal agenda that you have to service, and you’ve really got to service the story. I think Robert and Annabeth did a great job. I think it’s just hard to have that many characters in a show like that that needed to tell a scary story every week.

JB: There were a lot of unresolved threads hanging around at the end of the final episode. Are there any plans to address any of those issues in another feature film?

DD: Yes. I think next winter we’re going to try to make another movie, but I don’t know if it’s going to address the unresolved threads. It’s going to continue the frame of the show, and the characters, and the interest of the show being the paranormal and the unexplained, into a movie serial as opposed to a television serial.

JB: Would you like to do more than one film? Is Mulder somebody you’d like to get in touch with every couple of years?

DD: Yeah, every three or four years, I think it would be a wonderful opportunity. I love the show. I love the character, and I honestly think it’s a good franchise to cultivate because the shows were smart and funny and thrilling. That’s what people go to the movies for. If we can all do that again, and if people want to line up and see it, that would be fantastic.

JB: I’d like to talk about The House of D, which is a film you wrote, directed, and starred in last year. What aspects of working on The X-Files prepared you for writing and directing your first feature film?

DD: I think that all my experience as a writer, actor, and director came out of The X-Files. I’d done a lot of movies before that, but to be thrown into a crucible where you’re doing that much work every day, and to watch big-time filmmaking, that is what The X-Files was. The X-Files is much more like, from a technical and production standpoint, a movie, and it cost that much. When I was directing an episode of The X-Files, I got to make a small “big movie” for eight days or a month or whatever. That kind of experience is invaluable. How else could I ever have gotten that? I owe it all to that.

JB: How long had the idea for that film been percolating in your mind before you actually got the chance to make it?

DD: There were certain threads of what became the story that were percolating, but they didn’t all coalesce until I actually sat down to write it. I didn’t know what the story was, and as I was writing it, it became clear to me. It all kind of just came together so quickly, but since a lot of what is dealt with in the movie has to do with, geographically, places I grew up in and certain kinds of experiences I had, I guess it had been sitting there for a long time.

JB: I also wanted to ask you about My Dark Places, the film where you’re going to play James Ellroy. What’s the status of that?

DD: I don’t know. It’s a great script, it’s a great story. It’s a dark and difficult movie to finance in this climate. Small movies in the independent world, in some ways, are driven more by the dollar than in the big-budget world because people have less money. They’ve got to recoup their money. In a story like My Dark Places, where a man is investigating the 36-year-old, unsolved murder of his mother, it’s a beautiful story but it’s hard to throw it out there and say, “Hey, kids, do you want to go see that one?” I know that if and when we make it, and I’m sure we will at some point, it will be a great movie. We’re just trying to get the money together.

JB: Since you have a strong literary background yourself, has researching a film about an author inspired you to think about cranking out books of your own?

DD: I’d love to, but I’m in show business, so if I’m going to write, I’m going to write a script at this point. I’ve written another script that I want to shoot in about four or five months, and if I can crank out a script a year, and shoot and direct a movie every two years, and act in other people’s projects in between, I’ll be quite satisfied creatively. So I probably wouldn’t think about writing in any other form. But you never know. I think ideas come to you like people. They are what they are. An idea for a poem is not going to be a movie. An idea for a novel is not going to be a movie. An idea for a movie is not going to be a poem. So you can’t choose the ideas you have. They just come to you, and you figure out what the best form for that feeling or idea is.

JB: Throw me the David Duchovny philosophy of life.

DD: Go down swinging. [laughs]

JB: David, thanks so much for your time today.

DD: Sure.

JB: And as a fan of your work, thank you for that, as well.

DD: Thank you.

And that was that. One of the best 10-minute chunks of my life.

Movie Review: National Treasure

The numbers are in. The American people have spoken. How could this have happened? No, I’m not talking about the U.S. presidential election. I’m talking about the number one movie in America for two weeks in a row: National Treasure.

Our Bruckheimer-produced story begins in 1974, where a young boy named Benjamin Franklin Gates (who looks like a tiny Kurt Russell but will grow up to be Nicolas Cage) is rummaging through old family heirlooms. His grandfather (Christopher Plummer) interrupts the boy’s browsing with a tall tale about an ancient treasure “beyond all imagining.” The treasure has been accumulating since the time of the pyramids, constantly growing and constantly moving. After vanishing for 1,000 years, the treasure is found by Crusaders who take it to Europe. These men form the Knights Templar and vow to protect it, eventually becoming the Freemasons. Under their watchful eyes, the treasure eventually finds its way to the Americas. On a dark and stormy night — cue Large Marge, please — Charles Carroll, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, is racing to deliver an important message to the president. But alas, he cannot, and imparts the entire tale to a young man who happens to be the grandfather of Benjamin’s grandfather. It seems the Founding Fathers devised clues to the treasure’s whereabouts, but all the clues are lost but one. “Charlotte.” Is it a person? A place? Anyway, the Gates family passes the story all the way down to Benjamin, who becomes obsessed with finding it. Not for fortune and glory, but because it belongs in a museum. (Cue the Indiana Jones theme, please.)

Cut to the present. Benjamin has tracked “Charlotte” to the Arctic with financing from rich adventurer Ian Howe (Sean Bean). With the clue finally in hand, Benjamin deduces that the map to the treasure is on the back of the Declaration of Independence. (It’s also invisible.) Ian wants to “borrow” it. Benjamin and his sidekick Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) don’t think that’s a good idea, and barely escape with their lives. But Benjamin knows that Ian, whose past includes “a number of activities of questionable legality,” will steal the Declaration. So, to protect it, he decides he’ll have to steal it first.

And steal it he does, but now what? He must evade Ian and his goons and the full weight of the U.S. government, which wants its precious Declaration back. He gets reluctant help from historically minded Dr. Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) and his own father, Patrick Gates (Jon Voight), who has seen “six generations of fools” from his family throw away their lives and reputations on “that stupid treasure.”

If you think an invisible map on the back of the Declaration of Independence is a silly idea, just wait until you see how they read it. (I’d tell you, but if you do see the movie it’s one of those moments you just have to see for yourself.) One lame red herring after another is punctuated with dialogue like this golden, patriotic nugget: “The Declaration of Independence is not a bargaining chip!” (My favorite line is one spoken by Dr. Chase in a critical moment: “That’s dumb!” And it is. Oh, it is.) Though the film promises high adventure, there’s really not that much action. The plot consists primarily of Benjamin going from place to place, finding more clues that lead to more clues that lead to more minutes of silliness. Director Jon Turtletaub (While You Were Sleeping, Disney’s The Kid) has only one prior action credit to his name, and that’s 3 Ninjas. Though he has succeeded in making a film your whole family can enjoy, it’s never quite an action film. (The Goonies has more thrills than this.)

You’ve got to give Nicolas Cage a lot of credit for remaining earnest and cool throughout. Justin Bartha gets lots of bad material, but still manages to get some laughs. (Keep an eye on his facial hair, which tends to fluctuate throughout the movie. Now that is a mystery worth solving.) On the surface, Diane Kruger brings to mind Alison Doody’s Dr. Elsa Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but her character enjoys none of the lust or zeal that Doody wrapped herself around so wickedly. Sean Bean’s performance as Boromir remains one of the Lord of the Rings trilogy’s most noble and memorable, but here he’s reduced to another typical bad guy role. (Don’t worry. He’s awesome as always.)

As the film races to its big finale, it feels like a Disney ride. But Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was actually based on a Disney ride, and that was a fun film. Sometimes National Treasure tries too hard. Other times, it doesn’t try quite hard enough. Given the happy ending for our “treasure protectors” and the massive box office, expect a sequel. International Treasure, anyone? No matter how you shake it down, this thing’s a national disaster.