Bryan Ferry's "Loose Talk"

A daring new release from Roxy Music's creator

Discovering Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry’s music was a revelation to me. Deep in my Bob Dylan-The Band-Rod Stewart-Bruce Springsteen-The Beatles days in the mid-70’s, I had about worn those albums out.

I can still remember my thrill at hearing Roxy’s “Out Of The Blue” one afternoon on Boston’s WBCN in the warehouse at Child World where I was trying to assemble a bicycle. It was an incredible song, something truly different, challenging, unusual. They didn’t sound like anyone else.

The moment I got out of work, I zipped over to the Paperback Booksmith and bought “Country Life,” which turned out to be Roxy’s fourth album. I loved it immediately, found out there were three predecessor records that I had to get and also, if that wasn’t cool enough, learned that Bryan Ferry had done his own album and his first hit was, could you believe it, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.”!

It was like walking into a brand new bookstore and finding an entire section of fascinating, undiscovered material, a whole raft of new sounds, new songs, music that was so very different from some of the lame stuff you’d hear on current radio — except, of course, what you’d hear on WBCN.

Roxy Music’s brilliant new concoction of sound, a strange-voiced singer with very unusual lyric ideas (“In Every Dream Home A Heartache” a love song to a plastic love doll?) an elegant, innovative guitarist in Phil Manzanera, different-sounding wind instruments - sax, oboe and who knows what else from Andy Mackay, all blended into a sound that wasn’t hard rock but wasn’t soft, either. Ferry’s song stylings just weren’t like anyone else, even Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. He’d listened to Cole Porter and Lou Reed and David Bowie and was friends (for a while) with Brian Eno so there was no way he was going down the straight and narrow. He created his own sonic path, a vision that was distinctly his. His solo albums, too.

I got to see Roxy Music on their next tour, the “Siren” album at Boston’s Orpheum in 1976, a concert that wound up being simulcast on WBCN. I’d followed them all the way through the magnificent “Avalon” as well as Bryan Ferry’s music, too for all these years. Even got to see him in Boston a couple summers ago.

So when news of a brand new Ferry-connected release called “Loose Talk” trickled out, I was curious. Bryan, 79 now, hadn’t done much musically since the Roxy Music 50th reunion tour. There was an unusual single that came out last summer called “Star” a song Ferry worked on with Nine Inch Nails’ stars Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and a young lady named Amelia Barratt, who spoke these strange, disconnected lyrics. But was that a one-off?

The answer is no. The other day, I got an email from Bryanferry.com with a link to “Loose Talk,” an album where Ferry and Barratt combine their talents on a strange, somewhat unsettling but invariably interesting collection of tracks — are these songs? — where Ferry-flavored, Roxy Music-sounding music fills in the background while Barratt narrates/reads what sound like disparate sentences from a new age short story, words that may or may not be connected to the emotions evoked by Ferry’s suggestive, always emotional music.

I’ve never heard anything quite like it. And neither, I suspect, have you. There are hints of the Ferry voice on these backing tracks. The one where I hear it most is “Orchestra” as the track opens, a melody so reminiscent of one you might have heard on a Roxy Music or Bryan Ferry album. But there are, other reviews claim, additional places where there is the hint of Ferry’s voice way in the background before Barratt’s narratives begin.

The musical tapestries were tracks Ferry had hanging around, some as far back as the earliest Roxy albums. Ferry has said several times over the years that coming up with words is always difficult, a terrific challenge for him as time has passed. Meeting Barratt at an art gallery a year ago, they made a connection and Ferry found her flat, unemotional but vivid lines of description, the perfect counterpoint to his haunting music. It’s daring, in a way, for a legendary 79-year-old singer/songwriter to let his music and another’s voice do the talking for him, but that’s just what happens on “Loose Talk.”

Interviewed on NPR the other day, Ferry spoke about collaborating.

FERRY: I think as people do get older and mature, they become more reflective, and that's pretty obvious in some of the music on this album. I'm also very interested in the idea of collage with collage of sounds, and that's always been my thing. I mean, from the first beginnings of Roxy Music, I always found that exciting. And on this project, you know, having the - these great, poetic stories, which are kind of fragments of everyday life, but there's some mystery about them, and that's the kind of feeling I like to get from music, too.”

If you’re a careful reader, there may be sentences from a short story or novel that strike you a certain way, they ring in your head, even after you’ve put the book down. Or perhaps you’re in some public place and you catch just the snippet of a conversation, wondering what came before and what came after. Barratt’s phrases are well-chosen, evocative yet delivered without a hint of emotion which makes them that much more mysterious, makes you listen even harder. Then they’re gone.

Would I have rather had another Bryan Ferry album with actual lyrics from him, affixed to these Roxy-esque melodies, sure? But is it also cool that, at 79, Bryan Ferry is ready, even eager, to try something different. He and Barratt are already at work on a second album. Where will he take us now?

ROXY MUSIC LIVE AT BOSTON’S ORPHEUM, MARCH 6, 1976