One of the distinguishing features that marks out Brad Mehldau’s work is the exceptionally nuanced approach he brings to his interpretations of a personalised post-sixties rock-pop song canon.
With Ride Into The Sun, pianist/composer Brad Mehldau returns to themes he introduced in the wake of his rumination on the COVID phenomenon, Suite: April 2020. That very same year’s revisitation of influence from the Beatles, Your Mother Should Know, presaged a rediscovery of his roots in progressive rock titled Jacob’s Ladder.
The latter two works set the stage for this recognition of Brad’s rapport-by-proxy with the late Elliott Smith. However, it’s not really necessary to be familiar with the source works to come away impressed by the ingenuity on display here: that surplus of inspiration lends itself to enough solo piano from Mehldau to anchor the narrative and remind us why he is so worth listening to in the first place.
His takes on The Beatles – as in his recent solo recording Your Mother Should Know (2023) – Nick Drake, Paul Simon and then through to Radiohead are instilled with the kind of attention to detail and deep reverence that a classical musician usually brings to a composer’s repertoire.
No more so than on the new recording Ride into the Sun on which he plays a series of songs written by the short-lived US singer-songwriter guitarist Elliott Smith.
Still, as is the case with some of the brilliant pianist’s work (including his self-composed liner notes on early Warner Bros. titles such as The Art of The Trio series), the intellectual approach Mehldau takes on cuts like “Satellite” can become stultifying, at least compared to the abiding spontaneity of his self-composed titles. The end result of such efforts as the former verges on the impersonal, this despite the presence of the contemplative “Sweet Adeline Fantasy” and two pieces with the album’s title.
This kind of approach though also has to be considered in the context of Mehldau’s presence on the late-1990s LA singer-songwriter scene, of which Smith was a part, based around the club Largo, the title and inspiration for Mehldau’s trailblazing 2002 release.
Mehldau employs a versatile instrumental palette with constant transitions between piano solo, trio and guitar-song formations with colourful extensions by way of the pianist’s exquisitely-arranged pastoral chamber woodwind and strings groupings.
The latter sometimes takes its cue from the poetic cult British singer-songwriter Nick Drake – Smith’s “visionary Godfather” according to Mehldau – whose folk-jazz flute-led instrumental ‘Sunday’ Mehldau is perhaps oddly yet beautifully close to replicating here.
On the other hand Chris Thile’s energetic mandolin/vocal and Mehldau’s country-blues piano on ‘Colorbars’, and Grizzly Bear vocalist-guitarist Daniel Rossen’s achingly tender rendition of ‘Tomorrow Tomorrow’ offer different perspectives.
Elsewhere Mehldau on piano, always succinctly and discerningly, succeeds to expressively expand Smith’s bittersweet harmonic language.
Instead of just being a songs collection though, the album has a persuasive narrative cohesion boosted by a few of Mehldau’s compositions which extend the dialogue with Smith: the title track lifted from the lyric of the preceding ‘Color Bars’ is the most daring original for chamber ensemble that enters an enigmatic, otherworldly dimension suggesting that to listen to Smith’s music is, as Mehldau said, like being, “in communion with somebody who is no longer in this earthly realm”.
Ride Into The Sun tracks like “Better Be Quiet Now,” featuring a chamber orchestra led by Dan Coleman, do not turn merely pretty, in part because these seventy-some minutes proceed largely without pauses between tracks. Each interlude proffers an extension of the main themes in Elliott Smith’s original material. And those sensations of alienation and dislocation become further amplified through the inclusion of material by other idiosyncratic cult figures, specifically Big Star’s “Thirteen” and Nick Drake’s “Sunday.”
Within the context of this record, the cuts with vocals, like Mehldau’s instrumental spotlights, serve the distinct purpose of alleviating potential overkill from the dense and varied arrangements. “Tomorrow Tomorrow” and “Southern Belle,” featuring singer/guitarist Daniel Rossen (Grizzly Bear), precede “Color Bars,” with singer/mandolinist Chris Thile (Punch Brothers, Nickel Creek), both carefully placed within the sixteen tracks to foster the incremental momentum of the LP.
In evidence of their prior collaborations, Thile and Mehldau engage in some spirited interplay on the latter, the sole such interval on Ride Into The Sun. Neither ambition nor his ego gets the best of the pair on that improv, even as selections such as “The White Lady Loves You More” highlight the elegance and intricacy of the latter’s acoustic piano playing.
Likewise, the presence of Brad’s four original compositions, including “Somebody Cares, Somebody Understands,” complements the outside material (and those tracks could conceivably be released as an EP separate from the LP). In the end, however, the focus almost, but not quite, ends up on that material, so their presence reaffirms how Ride Into The Sun is more of a tour-de-force than a pretentious self-indulgence.
