OFORD TOWN
October 19 - 25, 2006

CD Review
By Luke Kellum

FRIEDMAN’S TAKEN MAN BLURS LINES BETWEEN ART AND MUSIC

On October 17, New Yorker cartoonist Andy Friedman released his first studio album since turning in his slideshow for a guitar pick and launching a musical career. Taken Man is a collection of acoustic songs that fall into it’s own Friedman-conceived genre known as “Art-Country.” The album features Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor and other guests. In Taken Man, Friedman utilizes the same straightforward approach to his music as he incorporates into his art.

In 2002, Friedman began performing songs with visual art and spoken word slideshows that combined his two passions: art and music. In recent years, Friedman has concentrated primarily on his music and has learned that writing songs - like drawing - is a perpetual battle between imaginative and stagnant forces. If this is true, Taken Man is proof that Friedman is currently winning the battle.

“Self-Portrait In White-Knuckle Death Grip” is a starving artist tale that chronicles the struggle for creativity and recognition amid seeming obscurity. Friedman states that he understands why artists such as Van Gogh are driven to madness in pursuit of their craft: “When I feel like a song, I can paint the blues all day / And when I feel like drawing, I sing the night away / I understand we all have to walk alone / With that stone in our shoe.” The tortured artist sentiment is also the premise of a later track, “Guys Like Me Don’t Get Grants.”

In “David Berman,” Friedman recounts how a heckler once called him (Silver Jews’ frontman) David Berman during a show. After a friend let him listen to a Silver Jews album, Friedman was unable to see any likeness to Berman but was nonetheless flattered by the heckler’s comparison. A few months later, Friedman met Berman before one of his shows in Nashville and Berman jokingly heckled him throughout the show. To tell the story, Friedman cleverly applies a candid writing style that ironically sounds more like a Silver Jews song than any other track on the album.

The appeal of Friedman’s songwriting is his ability to write simple and evocative songs in an age where vague, abstract themes often dominate the singer-songwriter trade. Friedman employs a vocal delivery that is slurred and strategically phrased much like Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen. Although it may be too early to make these types of comparisons, Taken Man shows a great deal of promise and could propel Friedman from the depths of musical obscurity into the annals of American songwriting.