One of these nights, I'm going to realize that I have become an Eagles fan. It will be easy to blame modern practitioners like Wilco, Will Oldham, or Calexico for getting me infatuated with that country-rock sound, slightly fried in the sun, yet mellow enough for the most Cuervo and Columbian-shriveled mind, but the biggest culprit will be Ian Matthews. He alone has made that peaceful, easy feeling of loathsome So-Cal sound palatable to my ears by masticating songs that Frey & Co. would one day cop and make more famous on their own.
A player on the first two Fairport Convention albums, Matthews saw the similarity between the folk revival in England and the emerging singer/songwriter scene in L.A., and after a few group efforts as Plainsong and Matthews Southern Comfort, he left the UK's clammy chill for good to reside in the eternally sunny clime of California, hooking up with producer Michael Nesmith to record his fifth solo album, Valley Hi. Nesmith, of course, is better known as the lanky, wool-capped Monkee, but his career also took turns into weird film/television projects like Popclips (which would one day morph into the behemoth known as MTV) and Elephant Parts, as well as a modest stake in that gilded-country sound of his solo career (his greatest success still being the pen behind Linda Ronstadt's "Different Drum").
Fans of Being There or The Royal Tennenbaums soundtrack can imagine a mashing of the two for Ian Matthews' exquisite, swooping country-take of "These Days", his reedy voice replacing Nico's morphine drip. As a collector of songs, his ear was excellent, with many of his covers being turned into gold for other MOR artists. Without the help of the songwriter credits, it'd be hard to glean what songs are the traditional folk standards and which are 50s country two-step. Then there's the rare Richard Thompson song and the rare Randy Newman one. Not to mention that Matthews' is an adept writer, too, slipping his originals into the running order. He commingles the disparate strands effortlessly, infusing them with his laidback pacing and quivering, gentle voice until they're all of a piece. His take on Nesmith's concise friendship-into-love song "Propinquity" gets delivered with a tender lilt, while his cover of Steve Young's "7 Bridges Road" was lifted wholesale by the Eagles in the early 80s.
They also made a hit out of Tom Waits' "Ol' 55", a song which opens Ian Matthews' sixth album, Some Days You Eat the Bear and Some Days the Bear Eats You, released a year later. Without Nesmith's Texas twang touch behind the board, the album hangs a little more precariously, less cohesive than its predecessor. Matthews' "Keep on Sailing" (which opened Valley Hi) gets slowed to a sluggish, sax-stuffed pace. The covers still stun, though. Crazy Horse's heartbreaking "I Don't Wanna Talk About It" (Rod Stewart hit with it) and Gene Clark's "Tried So Hard" (covered back in his days with Fairport Convention) are delivered with a mastery that stands along with the originals while also sounding refreshed in Matthews' throat. The second side of the album, however, falls off with the Steely Dan and Jesse Winchester covers lost under that ever-increasing smog of adult contemporary radio. Still, for a good part of this two-fer collection of his Elektra solo albums, Matthews' recasts the future hits with effortless grace, reaching into his English past and his American country present to amalgamate something distinct, never once sounding like he's just out riding fences.
