Bobby Jameson was a victim of hype. In the early 1960s, as the Beatles took over America, Jameson’s manager took a creative approach to promote the fledgling Los Angeles singer-songwriter. An increasingly ambitious series of ads appeared over several weeks in Billboard magazine. They began with a cryptic tease: a black-and-white silhouette of a man and a guitar, promising the “world’s next phenomenon.” When his face finally appeared, along with the announcement of his new record (“Bobby Jameson Says ‘I’m So Lonely,’” it read), he looked awkward, unprepared, frightened.
The song tanked and the world moved on. Jameson sunk into obscurity and depression. In 2003, he said he avoided returning to L.A. for fear that he’d “traded in [his] suicidal tendencies for homicidal tendencies.” He died 12 years later in San Luis Obispo, where he lived with his mother and chronicled the trajectory of his career on a blog, painstakingly, still trying to make sense of what went wrong.
Ariel Pink, who’s dedicated his new album to Bobby Jameson, has experienced his own dramatic evolution in the public eye. When we first met Ariel Rosenberg in the mid-2000s, he was an enigmatic outsider propped by Animal Collective’s in-house record label. The question circling his music was less “Who is this?” than “What is this?” Like Bobby Jameson—whose releases arrived under various guises to fool the public into thinking he was a new, emerging talent—Pink always distanced himself from his output. The pseudonym, then, worked in tandem with the constant stream of hazy, fogged-over records and the intentionally off-putting interviewee, all keeping the actual artist as far from the conversation as possible. “[T]here’s no such thing as Ariel Pink,” he recently told SPIN, “It’s kinda complicated but kinda not.”
Dedicated to Bobby Jameson is Ariel Pink’s most humble, most insular work in years. After the whirlwind collage of Pom Pom—filled with sound experiments, radio jingles, earnest balladry, and honest-to-god pop anthems—Bobby Jameson is a retreat. Its finest songs are cozier and more immediate: the gothy dream-pop of “Feels Like Heaven,” the hypnotic “Time to Live,” the jittery schmaltz of “I Wanna Be Young.” After spending a career composing music that felt siphoned from a hidden corner of your id, the reference points here are slightly more obvious. “Time to Live” swipes its refrain from the first video ever shown on MTV. “Another Weekend” bears a striking similarity to a classic rock song that compared falling in love to hearing a catchy melody. The closing solo of the title track sounds just like “Light My Fire.” Even the nod to Bobby Jameson in the title feels like a means of grounding the narrative and offering the songs some context and company in Pink’s slimy, mythologized vision of Hollywood.
While it walks a straighter line than Pink’s best albums, Bobby Jameson is equally immersive. He’s retained the higher-fidelity haze of his breakthrough studio albums on 4AD, but the atmosphere feels more like his self-recorded music from the early 2000s: dusty and haphazard, filled with subtle hooks and inside jokes. “I Wanna Be Young” actually dates back to those days. Its original version was distorted by a warping tape machine and falsetto harmonies that occasionally overpowered the cheap backdrop of keys and guitars. The novelty was in how ancient, how archaic the recording felt—the irony of a voice pining for youth as it audibly decayed. On Bobby Jameson, the cleaned-up sound brings us closer to a feeling of urgency, even regret. The older Pink’s gotten, the more his subliminal messages rise to the surface.
More than ever, Pink infuses these songs with bald stabs at wisdom. The shift suggests, if not a turn toward transparency, then at least a narrator with similar concerns to Ariel Rosenberg. In the wistful, mostly acoustic “Do Yourself a Favor,” he discusses the danger of falling into routine over music that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Rivers Cuomo’s demo collections. Many songs deal with the process of aging and cataloging memories: He repeatedly chants “Time to live” and “Time to die,” blurring the line between the two. Even the more upbeat moments seem more nuanced, like “Bubblegum Dreams,” where unnatural, echoing percussion deflates the party with lingering moments of silence. If Pom Pom was a full-stage production featuring all the gonzo characters from Pink’s catalog, Bobby Jameson is marked by solitude: one man, uninterrupted, following his thoughts wherever they wander. It’s a faded, shimmering sound, like FM radio reverberating through a quiet airport.
Bobby Jameson, of course, is no somber affair. He sings “Santa’s in the Closet” like a voice-over for a Halloween store commercial, and in “Dreamdate Narcissist,” he references Netflix, Uber, and chillwave within the first 20 seconds. But taken as a whole, the songs on Bobby Jameson play with a startling intimacy. These are among Pink’s simplest, sharpest compositions, sprawling with an intuitive charm. Its sense of ease harkens back to long ago, when Pink’s records mostly served to expand his strange universe with little outside influence. Maybe that’s what he sees in the record’s titular figure: a cautionary tale whose wasted potential loomed large until the bitter end. “Even now,” Jameson wrote, eight years before his death, “There is a part of me that still believes, ‘My name is Bobby Jameson and I am a star.’ I am also alone.”
