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| Featured Artist Link REALLYMUSICRADIO presentsBEAVER NELSON
Talk is cheap, and actions speak louder than words ...
As wrong as it may seem to resort to such hoary clichés on the topic of an artist as singular as the endearingly scruffy and frightfully talented Beaver Nelson and his fifth and undeniably most poetic batch of songs to date, when the shoe fits ... well, wear the damn thing. And run with it.
So let's talk about Motion, a word that summed up Beaver Nelson long before he made it official by choosing it as the title of his latest record. It was another Texas songwriter by the name of Nelson--this one Willie--who penned a song called "Still Is Still Moving To Me," a notion that neatly describes the kind of moving Beaver did for most of the '90s, all hyped-up (by Rolling Stone, no less) with nowhere to go, thanks to not one but two major label deals in his early 20s that resulted in ... nothing. For better or worse (and the grateful artist in him leans mostly towards the former), Beaver's Sony album--written while he was still in his late teens--never saw the light of day, and any number of little obstacles kept him from striking out on his own until the 1998 release of his real debut, The Last Hurrah. From that point on though, he's made up for lost time with a vengeance: to date, the score is now five albums in six years, which averages out to an album a year with time out for daddy (to 3 1/2 year old son Jack) duty. Funny thing is, though, it wasn't until Motion that this very busy Beaver got around to really writing about doing things. "It's not like there weren't any verbs on my first four records," laughs Nelson on a recent afternoon while sitting in the kitchen of the house on the outskirts of Austin that he shares with Jack and his wife, Stephanie. "But the songs on this record are much more pro-active and less reflective than a lot of my songs in the past. There were a lot of theories and observations on my first four records: I think this; I feel this. But observation only gets you so far. There finally comes a point where it's like, 'Well, OK, what are you going to do about it?' I don't think the words got any simpler on this record, but what those words are about is the fact that words are not enough. We can sit around and drink beer and smoke cigarettes all night about how this or that should be different, but it's in the clear light of day in the morning when we wake up that we either do or do not do. And I've gone through a lot more of that on a personal level in the last two years--just attempting to do rather than attempting to imagine. "I've been reading a lot of books about old, old things," Nelson explains. "So there's a lot of use of ancient imagery that runs through the whole record, which ties into the notion of exhorting people to remember that they can do something worthwhile. They can create and do, and they're making choices constantly with their lives. Every day, we're making decisions that are creating obviously tangible results, but we're also making decisions that are creating intangible monuments that are just as meaningful in our effect on other people's lives." That, in the proverbial nutshell, is Motion: something meaningful, something wonderful. But enough with words and explanations already. Just play it. And, if the music and spirit moves you, take a cue from Beaver and go out and do something grand yourself. It really shouldn't be so hard ... and it isn't. |
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