Customer Reviews

Havana

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Compared to other things I've heard lately, I'd give this album 10 stars, if possible. The voice fits the music, which is grand. The images are extremely compelling. Stewart always has a strong grip on the human condition, and his songs are mature and honest.

It has been, most informed observers would agree, a long, dry spell for John Stewart, whose music only recently came back to mind when I happened to purchase a retrospective (Earth Rider, documenting what an Australian label judges to have been Stewart's best solo work up till 1979). Before that, I'd heard just enough of some less than inspired albums to think of him, to the extent that I thought of him at all, as no more than another exhausted talent. So the new album surprises, even startles, with its consistent brilliance.

Havana is a long way from the young's man romantic American visions of the 1970s classics California Bloodlines and Willard. This is an aging man's dark meditations on a Bush-era America in spiritual free fall. It's a geezer voice, haunted and haunter, disturbed and disturbing, singing and reciting in a sonic atmosphere of stark, 21st-Century folk music. More sorrowful than angry, Stewart isn't Richard Thompson, but the mood is the same, and Havana measures up to Thompson's best work, minus the lashing humor.

The key song is "Waiting for Castro to Die," on one level a stunning evocation of the psychic deadening that comes from living too long in a closed, static state, on another a clear-eyed look at the closing circle of cruel time and the faint hope of something beyond a vacuous, barely endurable present. (Predictably, the Stalinists who still lurk in the more fossilized corners of the folk realm have blanched at this not-reverent use of the aging tyrant. Not to his credit, liner-note writer Tom DeLisle offers them a semi-apology.) Another particularly striking moment comes in "Rally Down the Night," inspired -- according to the liner notes -- by a UFO sighting; few songs speak so well to the enigmas that gnaw at us from our grain of sand's perspective on the cosmic ocean. "Cowboy in the Distance" sounds a little like one of California Bloodlines' slower, more reflective songs, only older and wiser. "One-Eyed Joe," the closest of anything here to a more traditional kind of folk, nonetheless manages to reinvent the country-blues form for a new time and place.

Stewart is at the peak of powers in this deep, affecting recording, as good as any Americana release that's appeared so far this year. No best-of-2003 list that matters will be without it.

Don't give any mind to the negitive reviews of this CD. John Stewart still writes and sings from the heart. People slamming this CD don't understand John Stewart or his music, they also wouldn't Tom Waits. If you KNOW John Stewart music you will enjoy Havana.

John Stewart can still pen a lyric better than 99.99% of the songwriters out there. He has the ability to take simple concepts and turn it into profundity. Star in the Black Sky Shinning is a perfect example. Only someone with pure talent, ability and instictively heart wrenching phrasing can turn out a CD like this. The vioce may have changed, but that doesn't detract from this CD, but rather adds to it.

It is sad to see how much the voice has disintegrated
I have seen John in concert 8 times over the last 20 years.
the last time, the first half of the show was weakly sung, then the last half, as if by miracle was very strong.
on this, the whole album suffers from a voice that is now gone
Some of these songs, waiting for Castro to die, Davey, Who stole the soul of Johhny dreams,I want to be elvis, are among his best, but we will never heard them sung as John could once sing them.
A Vocal tragedy

There was never anyone better than John Stewart. From the first album he did with the Kingston Trio until his voice began to desert him on "Rough Sketches," he wrote passionate, poetic, creative songs and delivered them with a voice that I would have given everything I have ever owned, hope to own, and could dream of owning, to possess. I waited for each new album with more anticipation than I felt at Christmas.

Then I bought and played "Havana." I cried whan Kennedy was shot. I cried when my high school girlfriend said it was over. I cried when each of my parents died. And I cried when I played this CD.
He can't sing anymore. He doesn't even come close to singing. The people who praise this album are worshipping a fallen god, whose fall from greatness they cannot accept. Stay away from this CD. It hurts. IT HURTS!!!!

Please don't buy this CD. The voice on it is so bad. It is sad to hear what use to be a great voice. Listen to his earlier stuff before buying this.

Time to hang up the saddle, Cowboy.