Moody Bluegrass Two … Much Love is a followup to the Grammy nominated 2004 Moody Bluegrass. I haven’t heard the original release, but I suspect this one is much the same, and fans of the first should find much to like here. Original Moodys fans might be attracted to this one, too, because all five members of the classic lineup are on board.
There have been a lot of bluegrass tributes to various rock bands in the past decade, and this one’s no odder a concept than most. The Moody Blues pioneered orchestral progressive rock, first with an actual symphony orchestra and then through use of the mellotron, which synthesized the sounds of an orchestra. And their lyrics were the stuff of 1960s Oxford undergrads, blending Eastern mysticism with stolid Britishisms such as “bed-sitters” and “Sunday roast,” plus a heaping helping of hippie dippy peace-love-and-groovy sentiment.
This project, helmed by executive producers Bradley Craig, and Cindyrae and Randey Faulkner, and produced by David and Jan Harvey, enlists some of the top names in bluegrass, country, progressive country and folk. It’s due to the solid core band of Andy Hall on dobro, Andy Todd on bass, Tim May on guitar, David Harvey on mandolin, Barry Crabtree and Alison Brown on banjo, and fiddler Stuart Duncan that the music on this album takes flight. And the impressive list of guest artists – singers Vince Gill, Carl Jackson, Tim O’Brien, Peter Rowan, Ricky Skaggs, Ronnie Bowman, John Cowan, Sam Bush and Larry Cordle, several of whom also play instruments with some prowess – is the reason I signed on to review it.
And the musicians do not disappoint. Nor do the arrangements, for the most part. “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” the Moodys’ last big hit and one of my least favorite of their songs, has a somewhat saccharine string-laden arrangement for about the first two-thirds of the track before it kicks into a nice bluegrass romp. And Vince Gill does a fine job on the vocals.
The Moodys themselves acquit themselves well. Justin Hayward’s and John Lodge’s voices are a little shaky at times, and Ray Thomas doesn’t blow the flute with quite the power he once did, but these guys are getting along in years. Lodge doesn’t sound particularly English on his lead vocal turn on “Send Me No Wine,” and neither does Hayward as he turns “It’s Cold Outside of Your Heart” (from The Present, 1983) into a beautiful country song, with a big assist from Patty Mitchell and Jan Harvey on harmony vocals.
I could go track by track and say something nice about nearly every one. Some of the highlights for me are: Tim O’Brien’s wryly funny spoken outro on “Dear Diary,” in which he pokes fun at himself for coming up short at awards time (yet again) to the bluegrass darlings The Cherryholmes Family; the great progressive bluegrass song, melodically speaking, the musicians made of “The Story In Your Eyes”; the charming rendition of “Voices In The Sky” by then 8-year-old Emma Harvey, and Andy Hall’s lovely Weissenborn playing on it; Mike Pinder’s glorious mellotron swoops on “Have You Heard,” which also has great baritone vocals from Larry Cordle and nice fiddling from Stuart Duncan; the moving choral work on “Highway”; and Duncan’s fabulous quasi-Middle Eastern score for “Higher And Higher,” turning it into a groovy prog bluegrass number, complete with Graeme Edge’s mystical spoken-word versifying. And the final track is a perfect bluegrass instrumental, “Lost Chord,” written by Tim May and David Harvey for this project.
But as many good things as I can come up with to say about the songs, I can come up with almost as many criticisms. Chief among them is a jarring sense of disconnect between the songs and the performances. In several of the songs – “Dear Diary,” “Nice To Be Here,” “Send Me No Wine,” “Tuesday Afternoon” – the melodic line or the lyrics or both just don’t fit the country setting. In the first three, the lyrics are veddy, veddy English, don’t you know old chap? No amount of bluegrass swing is going to make “Dear Diary” sound like anything but an English soft-rock song. It’s unintentionally (I think) comical to hear Ronnie Bowman sing “I’ve been thinking about our for-choon” in his Tennessee drawl on “The Story In Your Eyes.” I’ve never been able to envision “Nice To Be Here” as anything but an acid trip taken by someone who’s just read “The Wind In The Willows,” and hearing Sam Bush sing it just doesn’t cut it for me. That song’s melody, with its octave jumps, smacks more of English Music Hall than Grand Ol’ Opry, too.
The earliest songs make the roughest transitions. To me, songs like “Have You Heard,” “Dawn Is A Feeling,” and “Tuesday Afternoon” are very much of their time, which was the mid- to late-1960s. The element of sophomoric poetry mingled with half-baked mysticism fit with the progressive, orchestral rock in the original context, but sounds silly in a bluegrass arrangement.
That factor isn’t helped by the album’s graphic design, which is bafflingly amateurish and embarrassingly sentimental.
I hate having to be a nay-sayer. Moody Bluegrass Two … Much Love was obviously a labor of love, and I have great respect for all the musicians involved. The performances are top-notch and for the most part the individual songs are fun and enjoyable. But in the end I didn’t find it to be a perfect fit. If you’re a big fan of the Moody Blues and of modern bluegrass, you should check it out, because you may not have my particular biases.
(Bunny Rae, 2011)
