My Great Escape
Mark Elliott
Cub Creek Records
2001
12 tracks
I'll say up front that I had some difficulty with this release and it took me a while to figure out what it was I didn't like. More on that later.
Mark Elliott is clearly a journeyman songwriter. He writes his stories in tight, expressive lyrics that touch on themes that are both personal and universal. His simple pop-country melodies are made to carry a good story forward. For this release, Elliott has put together a band of musicians at the top of their profession who perform with the tight sound of a band that's been together for years. Everything on My Great Escape has been done with confident, competent professionalism.
Producer Doug Wayne has achieved a sound that is ultra-clean yet preserves a fullness of sound often lacking in releases of this digital age. The arrangements are mixed and balanced to perfection, with just the right relationship between the backing instruments and the vocals. The high quality of Wayne's production only serves to enhance a set of songs that are already well-written and well-performed.
Unlike many singer-songwriter types, Elliott has an excellent voice well-suited to the songs he writes. His style ranges through a variety of soft-country modes to a type of folk-jazz made popular a few decades ago by artists such as Van Morrison and Cat Stevens. In fact, when Elliott slips into this latter mode backed by complementary instrumentation, his songs and his vocals tend to sound very like the best work of Morrison.
As a lyricist, Elliott has an excellent sense of poetic structure and how that adapts to make a song lyric. His lyrics are tightly structured with few, if any, wasted words. This compactness allows him to tell short stories in the length of a popular song, to paint pictures of American life in a span less than five minutes long. Some of his stories are prose-like narratives that might be told as conversation in some bus stop cafe or the corner bar. Others are more poetic, building on brief images that evoke the bigger picture like the flicker of a television screen. His craftsmanship is unmistakable throughout his lyrics
Tom Paxton joins Elliott for a duet on the final song. "Stars in Their Eyes" is one of those motivational songs like "High Hopes" or "Swinging on a Star" but features some brief anecdotes of historical men and women who had faced adversity but achieved success. The performance has a very "Piano Man" feel that would make it more comfortable in a piano bar than a folk club or country bar. The song ends with almost two minutes of the title phrase repeated, initially by Elliott backed by simple instrumentation and a vocal chorus then, for about ten seconds, a capella by the chorus alone. While lacking the wonderful circular lyric that ends Donovan's song, the effect is very much like the extended fade-out of "Atlantis."
With its slow rolling rhythm, Wurlitzer-voiced accordion and saxophone, and soulful vocals, "I Just Had to Ask" is the song that reminds me most of Van Morrison. In fact, coming cold to this song, a casual listener could believe that the singer is Morrison. Although the connection is tenuous, even the lyric is suggestive of Morrison lyrics like "Why Must I Always Explain" and the music is reminiscent of the more jazz oriented Morrison recordings.
Like a well-programmed radio show, My Great Escape features a selection of songs in styles slightly different yet related enough to each other to be a comfortable fit. Like a songwriter's sampler, this release presents a variety of styles in its lyrics and music that paint in broad strokes a picture of what this artist does best. In every aspect, this release is all about craftsmanship and quality at the highest level.
The high quality of Mark Elliott's work was apparent at first listen, yet something kept bothering me about this release. Remember that kid in school who was always well dressed, got top marks, and was perfect in just about every way, and you wanted to hate him or her but the kid was, well, just too nice not to love? I think that was my reaction here. In the right hands, every song in this set could become a hit. Elliott has found the hit-maker's formula. That's the problem. Excellent as they may be in every way, these songs still feel as though they were made from a recipe, a formula for the perfect hit song. There's nothing wrong with that, but it still gave me misgivings from the first time I listened. I suspect this is a personal thing and most listeners will just be enthralled with how great these songs are.
My Great Escape will make excellent listening for those who enjoy pop-oriented middle of the road music, will provide the perfect touch for that afternoon drivetime radio show, and will be a great resource for performers looking for well-written songs to add to their own sets. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Anyone interested in learning more about award-winning songwriter Mark Elliott and his music can go to the Mark Elliott Music website. Listen to clips of five songs from My Great Escape (with a somewhat different track list) at CD Baby
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Review written: April 7, 2005
Page modified: April 7, 2005
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