The Garden EP & Rise Options

[tarduk]

I didnt like so much. It's not different from Alive. What do you think?

[FishOutaWater]

Thanks, I chose just to go to the facebook page and listen to the versions streaming there. Here's my handful of cents:

• I still hear the faintest of echoes of the Ed of old. I still think it's there.
• As for these EPs, I think he's very stuck creatively. Instead of being led by creativity, he's forcing it into a pigeon-hole. He's saying "here is my message, and I'm going to say it a thousand different ways - but it's the same message".
• Too much re-use of metaphors such water, dirty water, deserts, people being thirsty, people down on their luck, etc. Same theme, same metaphor. It feels very limited and I think the music illustrates that.

I would still put money on the fact that Ed can still produce great music (I don't think this EP is it). He's stuck - his creative "river" (ha! Another overused metaphor) is blocked. I'm happy to wait patiently for the day he gets flowing again. I think he still can.

It's just that this music feels so forced, it feels so produced. It doesn't at all feel authentic. I almost feel like Ed needs to reconnect with himself so he can let his real creativity come forth.

I am not sure he ever had a broad range of creativity - at least not after Throwing Copper. If you go back and read the lyrics to the entire Live catalog, it is not unreasonable to conclude that Ed always had limited abilities after he got Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper out of his system.

In fact, maybe it is being too generous to give him Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper. The ideas on Mental Jewelry were not his own - they belonged to Krishnamurti. Ed read a bunch of his books and tried to regurgitate the exact same concepts in lyrics on that album. I could have easily done that too. Throwing Copper is a little different and has a more socially subversive message, but it is not necessarily the most brilliant set of lyrics in the world. "The Weavers live up the street from me. The crack heads live down the street from me." "Come on baby leave some change behind. She was a bitch, but I don't care.... wore a funky barret in her hair." I mean seriously... what is that really?!?! How would "Everybody's here, puke stinks like beer" be received if it wasn't encapsulated in a decent song?

And it is clearly the music that saves some of that marginal stuff from suffering under its own mediocrity. And who can we credit for that? What happened to the msuic when CCP no longer had a hand in it? We got songs like: " In the country the farms and the orchards swell, with oranges and peaches, a little bit of truth as well" without the protection of any good music to help it out.

And now look at Ed. Left to his own devices, he writes redundant songs that all sound alike about Jesus and water and his urgent conversion message to non-believers. Meanwhile, CCP are writing diverse and interesting rock songs, as they always have, and now Kevin Martin and Chris Shinn are providing the vocals and the creative collaboration.

Was Ed always overrated in our mind? Helped out by the inflated opinion he received due to CCP's stellar contribution?

Maybe Ed was never all that we thought he was. I am not saying that is necessarily true. It is a reasonable thesis, though.

This post has been edited by FishOutaWater: Nov 7 2012, 1:15 pm