Customer Reviews

I Want You to Live One Hundred Years

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

 

 

First, let me say that the two star review is for the album's lack of appeal to many people, not due to its musical quality.

I WANT YOU TO LIVE A HUNDRED YEARS is Warren Defever's "first" solo album, that is if you ignore the 15 years of his essentially one-man songwriting team His Name is Alive.

Recorded in a single day in November of 1998, most of the tracks were recorded on an old wire-loop recorder out of the first half of the century, making them sound truly....well, "good" definitely isn't the adjective. The later tracks are recorded with more modern equipment, although they are essentially two-chord musings.

Listening to this album, a person familiar with Warren's idiosyncracies would guess the album was something of a joke. Not meant to sell a billion copies, not meant to change the face of music, 100 YEARS was recorded because Warren felt like it.

And whether or not you should buy it depends on what you think of Warren's quirkiness.

This listens like one of those Library of Congress recordings Alan Lomax made in the 1930s, driving around rural America with a prototype recording device, documenting the country and blues music of the American Working Class. Defever has utilized a crackly, lo-fi sonic palette and snippets of period dialog to frame a handful of songs that were recorded in a simple guitar-and-voice setting in a single afternoon. Some of the songs, like "One Year," will be familiar to His Name Is Alive fans despite their radically minimal reworking. Some, like the cover of Willie Nelson's "Sad Songs" that begins the album, will be more universally familiar.

In a lot of ways, this album succeeds even moreso than the (relatively) more polished HNIA catalog -- presenting Defever's songwriting in a completely ornament-free setting that reveals their often timeless qualities. For children of the digital age it may seem too lo-fi, however if you have an affinity for historical recordings, Defever has done a great job of recreating the atmosphere. And more importantly, I Want You To Live For 100 Years is a strong collection of songs. It's a warm and organic record.