Well no, of course not. Love songs, to the best of my knowledge, do not exacerbate an already suicidal peso nor do they cause nation-wide crises of faith. Love songs do the opposite: while they have been known to rub wounds on the already lost and lovelorn, they prefer to dwell on the sunnier, imaginary side. Without love songs, we wouldn’t have the words to fall in love with. We wouldn’t even know if these crazy symptoms are the reckonings of love, or just the effects of a bad empanada. We’d be strapped for ideas on what to text, what to say, what cliché.
And while the world should be full of love in infinitely minute variations, its expression in popular song does tend to correlate love with insanity, or at least some form of pukeyness. The chemical and physiological reactions that first infatuation produces – rickety knees, paranoid thoughts, underarm wetness – are fairly standard processes that happens to everyone who falls prey to love’s dis-ease, to the point of seeming almost mechanical and trite. Yet, being human, we persist in making our tiny declarations heard, as if they were incontrovertibly unique, a crazy diamond in a very rough sea. The word love is the most overused in song titles, but "crazy" must be its close second. Patsy Cline, Britney, Aerosmith, Dave Matthews and KC & Jojo have all had their crazy hits, while Beyonce went crazy in love, Madonna went crazy for you, Queen had a crazy little thing, NSync drove themselves crazy, and even Van Morrison felt the stirrings of crazy love.
Javier, a new singer raised in the old school of funky soul, offers his own personal take on love and mental instability. His debut single Crazy has slowly but assuredly been making waves in many charts and is looking to be a lovely low-key hit, if not one already. It is slick, yet charming and incredibly likeable at the same time – like a boy you can take home to mom but still show off at the clubs. Clearly a pop tune with R&B tones, but beneath its happy sing-ability lies a wide-ranging musicality that gives Javier’s songs their depth, swings him just a little bit off of the mainstream, and keeps him from being just another neo-soul crooner.
He has a rather interesting story about how his musical influences came to be. Growing up Hispanic in a seaside Connecticut town, his house was filled with Latin sounds from the old country (his father is Domincian and mother is Puerto Rican). The dad owned a Spanish radio station. Before he bought it, it was tuned to the oldies and so Javier’s summer job one summer was to erase all the old tapes to get them ready to record Spanish songs on. But his mother, a big oldies fan, told him to copy the stuff for her on tape before he deleted them. "So I was listening to a lot of Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding that summer," Javier says. He and his mom would trade these bootlegs back and forth, and thus was the start of his musical education (I know what he would say now of unauthorized copying, however! I couldn’t find the entire album on LimeWire so you might as well go buy the CD, which is already available in stores).
In school, he was a shy kid but always liked to sing. After being pushed for a couple of years he got over his stage fright, performed in school musicals, and went to the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music, where he formed an R&B based a cappella quintet that performed at Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater. This led to that, and he ended up singing for the Derek Trucks band – led by the Allman Brothers guitarist Derek Trucks – a wide departure from R&B but many points of exploration into rock, soul, blues and jazz. Of the experience he says, "It was pretty different, but it was wonderful, my first job right out of college. It was a dream come true to be in that band, I had always wanted to be considered a musician, and do it for a living. They travel all over the country, all over the world just playing music, and that’s what I wanted to do, and so I quit my day job and went on the road. It was pretty hard work – the first year I was with them we did 180 shows – but all that has prepared me for this." He spent a year and a half touring with Trucks, but the music that had been swirling around in his head finally demanded a solo album.
His self-titled debut is a reflection of his diverse tastes and a showcase of his multi-instrument virtuosity. "There’s some contemporary R&B, old school sounding R&B, there’s a little jazz, there’s Latino flavor – all of those things that make up who I am. I wanted to make sure this album showed who I was as a person and musician." And this person includes being the dreamy little lover. "I didn’t have too much of a racial problem growing up in Connecticut. A lot of it I kinda brushed off, so it never really affected me. My parents always told me there’s more than I was seeing, but I always looked for the best in people," he says, smiling. "I wasn’t tortured as a child."
His songs, however, are not always above the realm of the social. "She’ll Never Know is about social issues, depending on where you live. Like Romeo and Juliet, not necessarily families, but entire cultures that don’t get along can get in the way of a romance. It’s not necessarily a black and white thing or Hispanic and white – it could be a racial or religious barrier you’re trying to get over as well. It’s any situation where there are things that come in between a love."
I got a taste of what a live performance of his would be like at the EMI party in Singapore during the Valentine weekend. It was stripped down, with only one other guitarist, but as he predicted, it was a sexy set. He sang Crazy, a lushly sad, non-Valentiney song called Song for Your Tears, and an energized rendition of the jammy Hey Little Sister, which was a delightful anachronism in the beats and bass driven world of R&B. Javier is definitely a performer best live, and it was amazing to see this unassuming, no-fronting guy (who dresses like an urbane and classy Jay-R) be transformed into the confident and captivating performer whose shows have been raved about.
What gives his album and his performance that added edge, aside from his true musical ability, is the emotion behind the singing. This is not your average bump-and-grinder, no cheese and no sleaze. Love song lyrics may be meaningless, but you can actually hear the feeling fueling his smooth vocals. Javier first picked up a guitar and started writing songs so that he could woo the girls. Lucky girls, you think. I get the feeling that Javier is a guy who is in love with love songs more than the loved one. Lucky songs.