O’Rourke is always clever and funny, but the driving force in his music
is the art of the arrangement. Many of the greatest pleasures on
Simple Songs
come from how certain instruments are layered together, how the chords
are voiced and the harmonic progressions unfold. The songs, played by
O’Rourke and a cast of Tokyo-based musicians, are generally driven by
guitar and piano, but strings, pedal steel, mandolin, horns, and
woodwinds are all featured prominently. All of which is to say that
Simple Songs is a subtle record that
avoids extremes, which also makes it a record out of time.
It’s a record
that asks you to come to it. If O’Rourke ever felt the need to keep up
with every development in music, that time has passed. After moving to
Tokyo in the last decade, O’Rourke has been a less central figure. He
stays busy in music, art, and film, but much of his work doesn’t travel
beyond Japan. He has his handful of obsessions, his rules, his
limitations, and once in a while he returns and gives us a record like
this, something that will be sounding good five or 10 or 15 years from
now, or whenever the next solo record comes along.
