UMC.org Music Review
Amos Lee: Supply and Demand
Label: Blue Note/EMI
Sound/Style: rootsy acoustic soul and folk
By Steve Morley
UMC.org—Pop music, despite the corporate hands that control it, has a reactionary nature. Youth-targeted musical trends like alienation, stimulation and the cult of celebrity seem to have spurred a counter-wave of lower-key artists, the prime example being Norah Jones. Her most recent songs aren’t all sweetness and light, but they’re wrapped in a warm, organic style in which millions are finding simple pleasures. Jones had a hand in the signing of Amos Lee to her adult-oriented home label, Blue Note, which recently released his second album, Supply and Demand. Lee is an introspective type, writing songs that resemble Jones’ easygoing jazz- and blues-tinged work. But his music, sung in a reedy voice, is less emotionally inviting than that of his labelmate. Lee carries a few banners of social consciousness, but they never quite override the album’s feeling of ambivalence.
“Freedom” has the ring of a protest song, with a chorus that speaks out against martial law and abuse of power.
Lee also makes it clear he isn’t interested in being martyred for a cause, and his lyrics sift through potential causes for widespread strife. He rules out socio-economic factors as the scapegoats, saying he doesn’t want to pin blame on the haves or the have-nots. In the end, he sees the responsibility as a collective thing, a notion he then announces to figures of power in the Church and the government. “To the politician and a priest/ We’re in the belly of the beast because we fed it/ Freedom is seldom found by beating someone to the ground…”
The outspoken nature of this track isn’t representative of the record, though Lee does look at values in the title track, weighing economic goals against relational ones. He initially takes himself to task, but widens his aim later in the song, exhorting anyone who might find that the shoe fits: "Life ain’t easy...Well, your wife and your baby/ You tell them yeah, well maybe 'I’ll meet y’all at a weekend resort'/ But your eye's on the prize/ And you can’t realize/ That your little girl’s life’s so short/ Brother, you need a plan/ Oh, to understand/ That life ain’t only supply and demand."
While he makes provocative statements here, he generally prefers to explore inner worlds, even as he questions the condition of social detachment. The down-on-his-luck character in “The Wind” relates to the desolation of the street beggar he browses past, but no human connection is made. On “Sympathy,” he’s almost a voyeur, watching the solitary struggles of a young woman whose relationship to the observer is left strangely unclear: "Her head’s by the door/ Her Bible is by her side/ Heaven is callin,’ the new world is fallin’/ And she ain’t got a single person left to confide/ No one to confide/ I sympathize."
His compassion for her elicits only a distant empathy, noticeable in the emotional anemia that often robs his songs of the power they might otherwise wield. Lee sounds unusually convicted on “Shout It Out,” wondering aloud who’s behind the low-lit houses and late-night headlights in his neighborhood. Midway into the song, Lee reaches an emotional peak and defines the contradiction behind the album’s unrealized longing for meaningful union: namely, we’re all in this alone together: "'Cause everybody’s got a part in the game/ And everybody’s got a cross they can claim/ Everybody’s got somebody to blame/ But we all must find our own way.”
Lyrically, Lee is prone to meandering as he seeks to understand the world and his place in it. His ambling and lightweight folk-and-soul sound and his sideline perspective often stop short of igniting passion. Still, his limited success at pinning down absolutes isn’t necessarily the mark of failure. If he offers little tangible hope on Supply and Demand, he reminds us that a modern world sometimes requires us to look for safety behind walls of our own design.
Audio Clips
"Shout Out Loud"
"Sympathize"
"Freedom"
"Careless"
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