Standing on the Rooftop [CD]

Funny old album, I saw Madeleine years ago when she was busking in Paris - there was a magic offbeat quality that had slightly sliped away on her albums BUT this shows signs off a getting that spirit back while still showing off that wonderful voice. Love in Vain is a superb version...... The only thing she needs to tighten up on is the the standard of her song writing. It's nice to hear/see a talented young(ish) singer doing it the way they want to. Listen with an open mind and you'll be pleasently surprised

Oh dear. By the sound of some of these reviews I might think that Peyroux was on a downward spiral. Nothing like. This CD is intelligent, inventive and has variety. For me, Peyroux has improved with each issue. I can impress my blues-rock friends with 'The Kind You Can't Afford', my sentimental ones with 'Lay Your Sleeping Head'. She creates something new with 'Love In Vain' and 'I Threw It All Away' and her own songs are up to Bare Bones standard. What's more, the production and sound are top quality. 'Don't Pick A Fight With A Poet'. Good advice. One caveat (and I agree with some of the grumps) - it was a mistake to start with 'Martha My Dear'. It won't catch the ears of the uncommitted.

In 2009, Madeleine Peyroux issued "Bare Bones", her first recording of all-original material with producer Larry Klein and a small group of jazz musicians and co-composers.
"Standing on the Rooftop" is her debut recording for Decca with producer Craig Street.
The group of players here is a diverse lot: drummer Charlie Drayton, guitarists Christopher Bruce and Marc Ribot, bassist Me'Shell Ndegeocello; John Kirby, Glenn Patscha, and Patrick Warren alternate on keyboards, percussionist Mauro Refosco, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and Allen Toussaint guests on piano.
The program is richly and elegantly painted with modern production touches even as its songs are rooted in the historical past of classic Americana: pop songs, blues, jazz, and sitting room tunes.
It includes eight originals and four covers, among them a poem by W.H. Auden set to music by Ribot entitled "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love". The music is summery and laid-back.
The languid parlor-room reading of "Martha My Dear" by Lennon & McCartney has a deliberate old-timey feel and twins well with "Fickle Dove" (one of two Peyroux tunes written with Scheinman). Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain", with its strange pump organ backdrop and studio echo, indulges the kinds of production tricks Tom Waits might employ in disguising a blues. That said, this song too has a twin of sorts in the sonically similar title track; a clattering rag blues with ambient electronics held in check by Peyroux's elegantly earthy vocal. Ribot's acoustic guitar and Toussaint's upright on the Auden poem give the singer a perfectly loose frame to create a song inside.
The thin, lean, funky blues on "The Kind You Can't Afford" (co-written with former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman) and Bob Dylan's "I Threw It All Away" are both slow shuffles and high points. In the latter, Peyroux's voice shifts the lyric's meaning to where the implied bitterness gives way to bewilderment.
The album's final three cuts, "Meet Me in Rio", "Ophelia", and "The Way of All Things" make fine use of Peyroux's jazz chops; and because of Street's production, make an exact time-space continuum wonderfully imprecise.
As an album, "Standing on the Rooftop" may not be as striking as its predecessor, but perhaps it wasn't meant to be.
It is a seemingly effort that pushes the familiar toward an uncertain future where pop genres cease to need to exist at all. T. Jurek