Wake Up the Nation

To be continued

Famous British singer and musician Paul Weller has many times announced the readiness to finish his glorious career, yet he has always found a reason to delay it. The 2008 record, 22 Dreams, was a perfect candidate to the role of the singer’s swan song. It was an excellent work comprising most various kinds of music that Weller had worker for during his long career. If he has gone off the stage then, many would have understood this move regarding it as a beautiful end of a beautiful story. Nevertheless, Paul, who has already crossed the half-century mark, apparently, felt that he was capable of making one more worthy record. In the spring of 2010, the British performer delivered the tenth studio full-length named Wake Up The Nation. One should know that it was much more than just a stock of ideas for half a dozen short songs that the singer needed to complete this task. The thing is that recently, Weller has suffered a break up in his personal life and then endured the death of his dearly loved father. These events did not ruin the artist, yet certainly had a tangible impact on his new record.

Small songs from a big heart

Wake Up The Nation is a collection of sixteen minor songs that together last no longer than just forty minutes. The average duration of the included tracks equals barely two minutes and a half. Briefness seems to be the main feature of this work. Paul Weller did not load his new songs with extended lyrics and hard-to-get messages. Moreover, there could be grounds to believe that he spent shortest time writing them. Words seem to slip off the top of his head while the main message they bear is not found in reason or logics, but in the realm of emotions and expression. This should not be a big surprise for this album appears, arguably, the singer’s frankest and sincerest effort of all the records he has presented in the last years. The opening track, Moonshine, conveys this inside tension, tittering on the brink of one’s sanity. No Tears To Cry has the title that clearly implies the state of things when there no more tears left to cry over one’s bereavements. A beautifully named song with just an equally beautiful melody, Andromeda, is a story of a person who is tired of pretending that everything goes fine. While the purpose of the lyrics here is a simple matter, the music is much harder to define. Generally speaking, Wake Up The Nation is a return to British rock of the past decades with quite simple tunes, unsophisticated arranging and sometimes purposeful roughness and rawness of sounding. Of a great interest is the longest track, Trees, that structurally reminds an operatic piece with clearly separate fragments featuring male and female vocals.

Anything else from Paul Weller?

The musical legacy left by Paul Weller is vast and embraces not only ten solo albums, but also the material recorded by the bands he assembled: The Jam, and The Style Council. After a study of the path that Weller has trodden in the music world, you may think that his main goal was researching as many genres and styles as possible. Folk, blues and rock are only approximately set frames within which he used to work and still is working. Wake Up The Nation resembles 22 Dreams with another portion of novelties that the untiring artist introduced. If compared to history lessons, Weller’s songs give insight to old subjects of no interest that are presented in a new shape and under a new cover of a textbook that is always intriguing to read (rather to listen to, since we are talking about music). And every time the lesson is over, you think the teacher has nothing else to tell you next time; and then it turns out you were mistaken. Because the story has a continuation. Hopefully, Wake Up The Nation is not the last chapter in the musical history from Paul Weller.