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Michael Franks VibeZ

Thirty-two tracks from a Californian songwriter who has spent fifty years making the same record, extremely well, and never once raised his voice.

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Michael Franks

Michael Franks is a genuinely unusual figure: an American songwriter with a background in literature who has built a five-decade career on a very quiet, very dry singing voice and lyrics full of wordplay, puns and literary reference.

The music sits in a category of its own — jazz-inflected pop with Brazilian rhythms underneath, played by first-rate session musicians, arranged with real care. He has worked with an extraordinary cast over the years, including Michael Brecker, Larry Carlton and the Crusaders, and the playing on his records is consistently better than the easy-listening shelf they get filed on.

His voice is the entry barrier. It is small, conversational and entirely without projection, which some listeners find unbearable and others find the whole point — it is the voice of someone telling you something rather than performing at you.

What to listen for

"The Lady Wants to Know" is the best song here and the best introduction to what he does — a small domestic story with a jazz chord sequence, and a lyric that is funny and sad in the same line.

"Down in Brazil" is where the Brazilian influence is most explicit, and it is the most rhythmically alive thing on the list.

"Popsicle Toes" aside, "Mr. Smooth" and "Eggplant" are the funniest, and the wordplay is genuinely clever rather than merely whimsical.

"Tiger in the Rain" and "Vincent's Ear" are the ones about painters, and the second is about exactly who you think.

"Now Love Has No End" with Valerie Simpson and "When I Give My Love to You" with Brenda Russell are the duets, and both singers give him something his own voice cannot.

"Blue Pacific", "Abandoned Garden" and "Dragonfly Summer" are the later albums' title tracks and show how little the formula needed to change.

"Long Slow Distance" is the deep cut for the devoted.

Go deeper

The Art of Tea (1975) is the essential album — recorded with members of the Crusaders and the record that established everything that followed. Sleeping Gypsy (1977) is the Brazilian one.

For the wider field of literate jazz-pop songwriting: Steely Dan, Donald Fagen's The Nightfly, Ben Sidran and Antonio Carlos Jobim, who is the ancestor of the whole Brazilian half of this.

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