The 25-year career of singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding has skyrocketed of late with the publication of no fewer than three critically acclaimed novels under his birth name, Wesley Stace. Equally amazing, the artist named for Bob Dylan’s misspelling of Texas gunfighter John Wesley Harden has just released the finest album of a career that’s seen him record at least 18 longplayers for labels ranging from high-profile majors to imprints so small the back catalog was stored in somebody’s garage between the cat box and the washing machine. Produced by old pal Scott McCaughey (Young Fresh Fellows) and fleshed out by no less than R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and the Decemberists, The Sound Of His Own Voice (Yep Roc) is a full-bore stunner with Wes (nobody calls him John) weaving his usual lyrical magic through knockout arrangements of extraordinary songs that revive the ghosts of the Kinks, David Lynch soundtrack guru Angelo Badalamenti and wall-of-sound maestro Phil Spector. For yet another career-topping milestone (gasp), JWH will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week for (yes it’s true) the second time. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Harding: Kevin Rowland may well be insane. I just don’t know. He does some very odd things. Why am I listening to Dexys? It all happened because I wrote this lyric for a new song. It’s all true, circa 1985: “I met her in my bedroom/At a party, Halloween/She was wearing a pair of dungarees/So I sang “Come On Eileen”/(I was being slightly mean)/And that just made her smile/Which made me feel childish.” And I went back to listen to “Come On Eileen,” rather than what it had become in my memory, or the wedding song cliche that it is now. And this led me back to “There There My Dear,” with its astonishing list of the pretentious things NME-type bands were pretending to be into at the time, because NME writers wanted them to be into them: “Dear Robin/Keep quoting Cabaret, Berlin, Burroughs, J.G. Ballard/Duchamp, Beauvoir, Kerouac, Kierkegaard, Michael Rennie/I don’t believe you really like Frank Sinatra.” And that reminded me there’s an even weirder list in their previous (and first) single, “Dance Stance”: “Oscar Wilde/Brendan Behan/Shaun O’Casey/George Bernard Shaw/Samuel Beckett/Gene O’Neil/Edna O’Brian/Laurence Sterne.” Edna O’Brian and Laurence Sterne? What? Genius.
Rowland went off the rails for sure. Just have a gander at some of the more recent YouTube footage: willfully weird. But I have to conclude that he made a string of the best hit singles of my youth, even though he was way too image-conscious and probably very difficult, not to mention the fact that his voice sounds close to ridiculous. If you haven’t heard his version of “Thunder Road,” with his own bonkers lyrical “improvements” (the very element that, I think, meant it could never be released) then I very cautiously recommend you do so.
Ground control to Kevin Rowland! Ground control to Kevin Rowland!
Ever wonder what will happen during the last five minutes of late-night TV talk shows? They let musicians onstage! Here are tonight’s notable performers:
The 25-year career of singer/songwriter 
