Is Separate Oceans a rarities comp or a bizarro-world greatest hits? The set is comprised of 19 songs from Ned Doheny’s three albums from the 1970s, seeded with demos and alternate takes featuring some of his more famous friends. There are no hits per se, but songs that should have—and likely could have—been hits. Scion of oil barons for whom L.A. streets and beaches have been named, Edward “Ned” Doheny was part of the SoCal scene of singer-songwriters couch-jumping around the canyon and dreaming of stardom. He came from extreme wealth, but that only seems to have reinforced his desire to succeed as a pop musician: to prove himself as an artist instead of an heir.
He was one of the first signees to Asylum Records, but the label spent his mastering budget to market Jackson Browne’s debut. After Doheny raided his trust fund to finish the songs, the album flopped unspectacularly. So did his follow-up, Hard Candy, in 1976. So did Prone in 1979. Still, some of his songs were hits for other performers (such as “Get It Up for Love”, which Tata Vega rode into the top 20), and his LPs are doggedly pursued by vinyl collectors and crate diggers.
Pretty much every song Doheny ever recorded or released classifies as a rarity, which means for most listeners Separate Oceans will be an introduction into his sun-drenched world. The Numero Group has certainly timed the release perfectly: these songs are summer jams from an alternate universe where the Eagles slid quietly into obscurity and Asylum had the good sense to shill for Ned Doheny instead of Jackson Browne. The music sounds like it’s been preserved in amber, so sharply redolent of the time and place of its creation. It’d be too easy to dismiss these songs as “yacht rock”, a recently coined term that sounds satirical and derisive. In the Separate Oceans liner notes, Numero co-founder Ken Shipley defers to the phrase “marina pop”, which is arguably more precise and certainly softer in tone, and "beach funk" might be an even more apt descriptor. These songs percolate casually, with spry guitars and beachball basslines cohering into superlatively breezy grooves.
It helps that Doheny is blessed with a voice like a lens flare, and his guitar playing, a style combining folky strums and classical dexterity, is nimble and creative. Even the slower tracks, like “A Love of Your Own” (co-written with Average White Band's Hamish Stuart), sound aggressively chipper, and the lyrics never tax your brain. In fact, these songs can sometimes be mesmerizingly meaningless, as Doheny crafts lyrics from stray clichés and non sequitur platitudes. “Don’t you be afraid to give your heart/ You never know until you try it!” he advises on “A Love of Your Own”. Rhyme typically takes precedence over meaning. As he explains on “When Love Hangs in the Balance”, “You can’t let it slide/ It can’t be denied.”
It’s not like Browne or the Eagles were deft wordsmiths either, so the lyrical vacuousness of Doheny’s music only identifies him as a product of his scene. An excessive headiness might weigh these songs down and rob them of their weightless quality, so it's good that Separate Oceans is aerodynamic to a fault, sequenced to emphasize the craft behind the music itself. Numero frontloads the set with finished studio takes in all their luxuriant glory, showcasing Doheny’s ear for prismatic melodies and sophisticated arrangments, so side A of this double LP doubles as a revealing SoCal pop artifact and a near-perfect summer EP for 2014.
As the comp progresses, the demos strip away some of the veneer just enough to show the creative decisions Doheny was making. The plush “Get It Up for Love” burbles with futuristic synths and a playfully jazzy piano riff, and the song’s punchline is right there in the title—the best and cleverest line written by this self-described “avatar of casual vulgarity”—but it takes on new gravity on the demo version of the song, which closes Separate Oceans. Doheny struggles to get the tone right. Is the song flippant? Serious? Both? Ultimately, all that matters is his jittery strumming, as sharp and directed as ever.
During the comp’s second half, it’s not hard to detect some rain clouds on the horizon, threatening to intrude on Doheny’s sunny-day pop. “I Know Sorrow” is exactly as blunt as its title suggests, paring complex emotions down to those three simple words. It might be too heavy, too unwieldy—at least on this collection—were it not for that high-flying piano jam on the coda, which sounds rambunctious and even joyful. That sense of creativity and musical invention staves off melancholy and self-absorption, even as it becomes clear that the music business has hurt Doheny much more than any lover ever could. “That old rock and roll will break your heart,” he sings on “Fineline”, “or make you whole.” To his considerable credit, he sounds like half a man on these songs.
