Amos Lee's 'Lodge' is open to all

By Adam Mazmanian | Tuesday, June 24, 2008

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The career of singer-songwriter Amos Lee has benefited from more than a bit of luck.

According to one story, Norah Jones overheard his demo on a visit to the Blue Note label and signed him to open for her on tour. Not bad for someone who first picked up guitar as a college student.

Mr. Lee also spent a summer opening for Bob Dylan, and the experience shows on his third studio album, "Last Days at the Lodge." Cleverly, Mr. Lee hooks into a Dylanesque sound that has yet to be adapted for popular use - the mid-1980s period that saw the release of the albums "Empire Burlesque," "Knocked Out Loaded" and "Down in the Groove" along with the memorable season of touring with the Grateful Dead.

The Dylan influence comes through most powerfully on Mr. Lee's opening track, "Listen," and on "Street Corner Preacher." The second of these probably is the coolest track of the album, mixing a New Orleans guitar-and-piano riff backed with syncopated hand clapping.

The concept builds on the strength of Mr. Lee's powerful, rangy voice, which is equally comfortable assaying deep, soulful shouts; smooth flights of falsetto; and earnest folkie hymns. Mr. Lee's cadences on these two tracks are especially Dylanesque. On "Baby I Want You," he credibly channels Otis Redding, while on "Jails and Bombs," he borrows Tracy Chapman's signature phrasing.

Like Mr. Dylan, Mr. Lee sops up a catholicity of influence, unconcerned with genre limitations.

Yet it would be a mistake to get carried away with the Dylan comparison. Mr. Lee does not diffract these varied influences through a unique prism, pushing the frontiers of the American idiom. Instead, he stays true to the material he mines: refining and mediating twangy country, shimmering soul, walking blues and roots rock into smooth, radio-friendly grooves.

There's a phrase for this: "easy listening." It's not a knock — not exactly. It's just a way of saying that Mr. Lee is a synthesizer, not an innovator.

The true knock on him would be that he's the new model Darius Rucker or Dave Matthews or Ben Harper - the latest in a line of Bill Withers wannabes to take their bar-band vibe to a national stage. Mr. Lee beats this rap, in my view, because of his sophistication as a songwriter and arranger.

So while the track "What's Been Going On" has an unmistakable debt to both James Taylor and Marvin Gaye, the way Mr. Lee's honeyed vocals ride over the simple acoustic guitar line is so pretty that it feels more like an homage than highway robbery. The funky, mellow keyboard sound on the track "Kid" might be a default effect on music software Garage Band, but it's so gently and sparingly deployed that it sounds almost novel.

Most of the album runs like this. If you love the music Mr. Lee appropriates, you'll enjoy his respectful, well-intentioned renderings.

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