Kip Hanrahan
Love is Like a Cigarette
By John L. Walters
(December 2010)
My first encounter with Kip Hanrahan was when someone at Pangaea, his record company, handed me a copy of Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted. Listening provoked a mixture of emotions: admiration, curiosity, jealousy... maybe disbelief that someone could make a record like this and get it released, and even get paid for it. The album fascinated me and bugged me, because it was such a glorious jumble of the stuff I like (and wanted to make myself), yet it was far from perfect, like the uncut soundtrack to an art-house movie where the music budget ran out before completion. Even the titles sound like film cues: "Lisbon / Blue Request," "A Poker Game / Luck Inverts Itself / Four Swimmers" and the sublime Astor Piazzolla composition "Ah, Intruder! (Female)."
Some tracks display great musicianship... others cling desperately to lame drum machine patterns. There are unfinished fragments, brilliant solos, chattering rhythms, a weird hybrid of Afro-Cuban grooves and downtown angst, and a pervading aura – was it psychological or erotic tension? – that you couldn't quite pin down. It wasn't always clear what Hanrahan did on his records, and many of the songs were co-compositions, yet there was a kind of authorship. Most thrilling of all, the album opened with its most atypical track – a stunning two-part version of "Love Is Like A Cigarette," a song by Richard Jerome and Walter Kent, once covered in the 1930's by Duke Ellington with singer Ivie Anderson.
These days I listen to that album as an "outsider," since I now make magazines rather than records. Over the past two decades, Hanrahan has refined his recording methods and found intermittently successful ways to distribute and promote his products. He's widened his network and worked with better collaborators, but Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted contains the blueprint for much of his career, which I'd compare to that of an art director.
A magazine or advertising art director (sometimes called a 'creative director') doesn't take the photographs, draw the illustrations, write the copy or design the typefaces, but he or she decides how these elements go together. Look at the work of Cipe Pineles, Fabien Baron or Thomas Lenthal. Great art directors take risks, find talent, make unexpected juxtapositions and change their minds – the buck stops with them. They get the praise and blame. The art director decides when the work is done.
Hanrahan's version of "Love is Like a Cigarette" opens with a mid-tempo, Ellingtonian arrangement for small jazz ensemble – resonant bass, brushes, expressive horns, a relaxed performance that moves easily between improvised and written parts. As the final, gorgeous chord dies away, Carmen Lundy enters, and sings the chorus lyrics unaccompanied: 'Love is like a cigarette. You know you had my heart aglow between your fingertips. And, just like a cigarette. I never know the thrill of life until I touched your lips. Then, just like a cigarette. Love seemed to fade away and leave behind, ashes of regret. And with a flick of your fingertip. It was easy to forget. Oh, love is like a cigarette.'
The song ends, and there's a slight pause before the edgy "A Poker Game" hustles us down into Hanrahan's troubled world. The confidence of opening with "Cigarette" reminds me of the way great art director might suddenly change everything; maybe lose the type and just use a full bleed picture; or let a great piece of writing speak for itself without imagery. "Love is Like a Cigarette" is a stunning audio 'front cover,' an extraordinary moment in a remarkable career.
John L. Walters, editor, composer, record producer. Co-founder of Landscape and Unknown Public, editor and co-owner of Eye magazine, also Guardian music writer and can be found on Twitter too.