A Little Pain Never Hurt

Album Review

Dick Siegel, the enigmatic singer/songwriter from Ann Arbor, MI, is one of those particular artists who won't rush things. Over the last 25 years he has issued only three studio albums under his own name, a couple of live cassettes, and one album with the Leonards. The reason is evidenced by his latest — and finest — offering to date. These 11 songs represent the best sharply honed examples of Siegel's considerable gifts as both lyricist and composer. For a man who can — and does — turn a single phrase or an entire story-song as easily as Louis Jordan and write killer hummable melodies in virtually every music in the American classic popular vernacular, Siegel somehow manages to top himself this time out. Maybe it's the instrumental and vocal company he keeps on this outing: a host of Nashville's finest, including co-producer Tim O'Brien, Darrell Scott, Mark Schatz, Stuart Duncan, and Steve Conn, as well as fellow Ann Arbor/Detroit cohorts such as Jo Serrapere, Kristin Von Bernthal, and Luis Resto. Certainly musicians of this caliber help, but they don't begin to tell the whole story. On A Little Pain Never Hurts, Siegel has written a collection of songs revealing exactly what makes him so original as a songwriter, singer, and guitarist. On the title track he uses personal confession combined with warmth, humor, poignant insight, and garage rock to offer a true modern allegory. "Starlight Rodeo" features a whining dobro, ringing acoustic guitars, double bass, and mandolins in a melody that could have been written in the 19th century. Siegel paints near mythic images from America's past with the hard-won wisdom of a contemporary adult paying the price for bad choices. "Skin" is a gently swinging tango that whispers along on guitars, O'Brien's gorgeous mandolin playing, and Duncan's loping gypsy jazz fiddle. If ever there were a song that celebrated the beauty and glory of the human body and its condition this is it: "Skin/Without our skin/We'd feel hurt all the time/Everything dragging behind us/Pressed down by the sunlight and the air/Ah thank god for skin/Keeps our hearts warm and safe from the weather/Skin keeps us apart and so close together....Well I believe it's true don't you/That every heart contains a treasure/And every heart's its own heart/But all the treasure is the same...."

With its sweet, folk-country feel, "Joshua" is a stunningly beautiful love song with a gorgeous metaphor using the biblical figure of Joshua blowing his trumpet to make the walls that separate one being from another tumble and fall. Essentially, as the record progresses, there is nothing to do but become immersed in Siegel's musically sophisticated lines and prosaic verse. He doesn't write of the human experience so much as from its center, with all the acceptance, celebration, loss, and revelation available to him in the same moment he conveys it. He places himself at one end of a conversation with the listener, and humor and sadness as well as spiritual, emotional, poetic, and off-color truths all reveal themselves in that conversation as equally exchangeable ideas. In addition, in everything he composes the notion of rhythm and swing is inherently, instinctually present. Evidence pours from the album, whether it be in folk numbers like "Lay of the Land," country tracks such as "If I Could Fly Upon This Melody" and "Friends Duet" (which would make a lovely children's singalong and should replace "Auld Lang Syne" as the official New Year's Eve anthem), the "jumpin', jivin' jitterbuggin'" tomes such as "I Can Sing" and "I Wanna Be," or even jazz-pop tunes that could be sung by Diana Krall, such as "Pretty Colored Wagons," and funky, greasy, bluesed-out rockers like "The Captain's Daughter." Throughout it all, Siegel's vocabulary is the same: an encyclopedic knowledge of American pop forms and the soul to imbue them with life in song. He holds the music accountable to the lyrics and vice versa, something almost nobody does anymore. Siegel is to be congratulated for the achievement of having asked himself the hard questions before writing songs that are socially, emotionally, and spiritually instructive without preachiness or cynicism. The true beauty in this album lies in its ability to engage listeners at the heart level without sentimentality or excess, yet it conveys great tenderness with a compositional savvy that is, as the late poet Ted Berrigan once wrote, "marvelous, feminine, and tough."