Author: Jernej Vene
Artist: Jones, Tom
Label: Island Records
Release: 2012
Length: 46,33
Rating: 4.2/5
They say old wine only gets better with age, and that’s dead right. Thomas John Woodward, stage name Tom Jones, can boast an impressive career. How much of it was adapting, bowing to label bosses and taking advice on how to sing a song so it grabs you on the first listen and ends up a hit, only he knows. As musical fashions shifted over the decades, Tom Jones matured too, hunting for something extra in the material he was handed, trying to give listeners the most and enjoy himself as best he could. It didn’t always work out, and he reached for compromises forced on him by the fact that music has to be a product sold on the market. That’s sadly how the industry looks at the musical world. It has to recoup production costs and turn a profit first; only then can us listeners go looking for a deeper note or meaning in the notes on the record. After his huge pop success in the sixties, seventies and first half of the eighties, Tom Jones hit catastrophic black holes when it came to chart positions. More than ten records from that period never even saw the bottom of the charts, either at home in the UK or in the US. But the Tiger from Wales wasn’t about to quit. With a cover of Prince’s Kiss, with a little help from Art Of Noise, he rose from the ashes in 1988. Ever since, he’s been a regular co-creator of the musical landscape and a role model for plenty of young musical fighters. In 1998 he surprised everyone with the excellent duets record Reload, and in the new millennium he put out solid records roughly every two years, looking for new ways of expressing himself with new collaborators. Since 1965 he has racked up almost forty studio albums.
In 2012 he celebrated his seventy-second birthday, and he couldn’t have given himself a nicer present. Spirit In The Room is the mature work of an experienced singer, someone who uses his musical gift honestly and, despite the fame, without pretension. As we’ve already seen, the formula of a young producer and a solo artist from the old guard works a treat. Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond got a new lease on life under Rick Rubin, a metal producer by trade. Tom Jones already recorded his previous record Praise And Blame under Ethan Johns and scored some nice successes with it. Of course, we remember Johns as the producer of the hugely successful Kings Of Leon. He’s the son of Glyn Johns, the famous producer who worked with The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, The Who and others. Ethan obviously saw how things are done. Talent for building a musical atmosphere was in his genes, and over the years he’s honed his approach to musical ideas and how to realize them. So, in a similar way to Rubin, though maybe a touch more subtly, he brought Tom Jones into the studio as a completely unburdened singer.
Unlike the songs on Praise And Blame, which ventured into bluesy and gospel covers, most of the covers on Spirit In The Room come from rock waters. Or maybe better said, singer-songwriter ones. They draw on impulses from elementary musical forms, carefully chosen so there’s no mistake. So, a step toward younger material. Besides them, there’s only one original on the record, penned by the two main players, Jones and Johns. Approaching existing musical facts in the original songs was a welcome field of exploration for Tom Jones. Given the extraordinarily rich musical history of the 20th century, picking the songs to cover was quite a grind. On Spirit In The Room, Tom Jones breathes new life into familiar and lesser-known songs and paints fresh perspectives on them. The almost stripped-to-the-bone music gives Jones plenty of room for a heartfelt interpretation. Cohen’s Tower Of Song and Waits’ Bad As Me in particular get a new, bright life on Spirit In The Room. That’s exactly why he picks atypical, non-hit material. Among the songwriters you’ll find Paul McCartney, Odetta Gordon and Paul Simon, among others.
In his old and mature years, Tom Jones comes across like a polished diamond. He’s probably one of the few who recognized the strong message in the songs of his contemporaries and some younger writers. What gives a song weight and value isn’t always tied to sales figures. Much more important is whether it reaches its final goal, namely the audience. With the new Spirit In The Room, Tom Jones is widening his circle of listeners again. He won over the old ones long ago, and the serious treatment of some important songs from music history shows he’s not just a crooner who can only belt out half-shallow, slightly syrupy love lyrics over light tunes.
Line-up
Tom Jones – vocals
Ethan Johns – keyboards, guitars, vocals
Richard Causon – keyboards
Ian Jennings, Sam Dixon – bass guitar
Stella Wazgawa – drums
Production
Ethan Johns
Track list
01. Tower Of Song
02. (I Want To) Come Home
03. Hit Or Miss
04. Love And Blessings
05. Soul Of A Man
06. Bad As Me
07. Dimming Of The Day
08. Traveling Shoes
09. All Blues Hail Mary
10. Charlie Darwin
11. Just Dropped In
12. Lone Pilgrim
13. When The Deal Goes Down
