Like a Sondheim Virgin

I'm no Sondheim virgin. My first experience was the LP of A Little Night Music 50 years ago (thanks to Paul Ford who became Sondheim's go-to pianist ). You might call me a "Sondheimite," but I prefer another term I read recently, "Steveadore."

Still, I do sometimes wonder, if I were to encounter Sondheim's songs for the first time now (as I "discovered" Joni Mitchell some years ago), would their qualities be apparent without my knowing the stories and thematic connections, without the actors who "sell" them? Must you have "been there" to "get" a Sondheim song?

Eleri Ward's album A Perfect Little Death gave me a perfect little opportunity to find out. Ward recorded 13 Sondheim songs in her closet during the COVID lockdown with an acoustic guitar and her laptop. She labels it "indie-folk Sondheim." Hearing just a few seconds of Ward and her guitar, you might mistake her for early Joni Mitchell.

Ward sings the melodies straight. Her accompaniment might be called "stripped down," but what I hear is Ward building up each song the way Sondheim himself did, with a "vamp," a repeated musical pattern. Ward's vamps are just enough to provide a steady beat and an outline of harmony, leaving space for Sondheim's unexpected turns into different keys.

All that said, I'm now going to imagine that I'm hearing these songs for the first time.

First Listens

With the first lines of the first song, I'm disoriented:

And are you beautiful and pale
with yellow hair, like her?
I'd want you beautiful and pale,
the way I've dreamed you were,
Johanna.

The initial word "And" drops us into someone's interior monologue. The woman (or man?) who sings of this Johanna has evidently not seen her recently (if ever), and we haven't a clue who the "her" is that Johanna might be "like," except for the hint that they might be family, expected to resemble each other. The same voice, overdubbed, sings "I feel you, Johanna" and, later, "City on fire." It's all very weird, but intriguing. The voices and images express a strong yearning for both Johanna and "her," a regret for time lost, and resignation to thinking "less and less" of Johanna as "we learn to say 'good-bye.'" Some conflict -- a city on fire? -- is preventing a reunion. You don't have to know the details to know those feelings.

Three songs evoke the domestic life of women (presumably). While these women sing of buttons, bread, the coffee cup, tending the flowers, they all seem to be preoccupied by someone absent. Yet each song has a different character.

• "Every Day a Little Death" perks along like a children's song, before the lines "I would murder him right there, / but first I die." We get the sense that someone who seems in control is letting her mask slip -- just a little.
• "Losing My Mind" starts as a cheerful love note about how "I think about you" all day long, addressed to someone who may be away at work. But then he doesn't come home during her "sleepless nights," and, in a recap of earlier stanzas, frustration replaces cheerfulness. She raises her voice. "Does no one know?" she asks. "You said you loved me," she sings, mournfully, "or were you just being kind?" When she sings "Am I losing my mind?" at the end, almost in a whisper, I think she means it.
• "In Buddy's Eyes" the singer tells us that "life is slow, but it seems exciting 'cause Buddy's there." When she sings of Buddy, her voice warms up: "I'm so lucky, I feel like crying." When she concludes, "the best I ever thought of me / is every minute there to see / in Buddy's eyes," she sounds ecstatic. She has doubts about herself, but she's grateful to the man who doesn't doubt her, climbing to a note high above the range of the rest of the song, but soft, when she sings of his "eyes."

"Pretty Women" is another look at women going about their daily activities, a reverie about how "something in them cheers the air." It's a lovely melody. But something's wrong. I thought Ward was singing in the character of a man, and a line later confirms it: "How [pretty women] make a man sing!" But as the images pile up about women observed from a cool distance -- at their mirrors, in their gardens, silhouetted -- and we hear how women "stay within you, breathing lightly," we get a stalker vibe incongruous with the lovely melody.

Ward's lilting "Ballad of Sweeney Todd" sounds like a Victorian murder ballad. The vocabulary is Dickensian: "He shaved the faces of gentlemen / who never thereafter were heard of again." Rhymes are playful: "Inconspicuous, Sweeney was, / quick and quiet and clean 'e was." Except for the complications of an eerie overdubbed vocal obligato and elaborate middle section about how the title character "heard music that nobody heard," it's a song you might learn around a campfire. I love how Ward's voice dips low to ominous effect for the refrain, "the demon barber of Fleet Street."

Intimacy is worth all the inconveniences of living with someone. That's the message you get from "Being Alive." She sings first how she has to put up with "Someone to hold me too close, someone to know me too well... someone to sit in my chair..." But soon she's singing the same phrases as a prayer: "Somebody hold me too close, Somebody know me too well." She drives the point home with the biggest vocal climax of the album.

The final song "Sunday" is strangely compelling. There's no "you" or "me" in it, only a description of "a perfect park" where people are "strolling through the trees... forever." The park is described in terms of colors and abstract shapes: "blue-purple-yellow-red water" and "the verticals of trees," for two examples. Several overdubbed voices sing harmony, creating a sense that a community is sharing this experience "on an ordinary Sunday." I'm intrigued enough to wish I had someone to connect the dots.

The Sequel Eleri Ward's second Sondheim album is available for download. Her producer's addition of strings has not diluted the strength of her straightforward vocals. It's called Keep a Tender Distance. Every Steveadore knows that phrase from "Marry Me A Little" cut from Company and later restored. I'm waiting for the CD.

[For a curated list of articles about Sondheim, his work and his colleagues, see My Sondheim Page]