Well, it's official. Steven Delopoulos's solo career has now outlasted that of his former band, the legendary Greek and Latin-infused acoustic rock outfit Burlap to Cashmere. I loved Burlap something fierce back in the late 90's, but they never followed up on their single studio album due to label issues and member changes and whatnot. I suppose they never technically broke up (there are still rumors of the group reuniting for an album next year, but then, those same rumors were floating around last year, too), but when lead singer Steven Delopoulos's first solo album Me Died Blue appeared in 2003, I ceased to worry about it. Because this stuff was even better than Burlap's. And then he took a similarly excruciating amount of time to follow that up with another album. Clearly this guy works on a timetable almost as slow as Sarah McLachlan's.

And if you thought that Me Died Blue, being a little-recognized release from the lead singer of a niche Christian band on a fledgling record label, was a bit of an obscure project, then Straightjacket is even more so. Far as I can tell, Steven released the thing as an entirely independent venture. Shoot, up until last month or so, there wasn't even a physical Straightjacket CD available for sale. Perhaps part of this was because the project didn't really start out with the intent of it being a full album - Steven was simply happy to take the songs he'd worked out so far and pass them along to his small but devoted fandom as a digital download, for a reasonable fee of $10. This later turned into a physical CD with a bonus track tacked on, available exclusively at his concerts for $15. So there's still no widespread release for Straightjacket. And while I can understand that from a budgetary perspective, it's a bummer to not have this music available to a wider audience, because it's almost as good as the songwriting and performance that Delopoulos exhibited on Me Died Blue, and that was an album I awarded five stars to with no hesitation. Straightjacket is certainly worthy of four and a half.

And that's not to say that there's been a decline in quality. Far from it. Steven's deft finger-picking skills and his unique songwriting persona - part troubadour, part prophet, and part madman - have only improved with time. He still has an amazing ability to paint a diffuse picture of a situation that you know is highly emotionally charged, but that is described in an oblique, stream-of-poetic-consciousness sort of way that causes a song to turn many unexpected corners, from personal to devotional to political and back again, even though it was only the angle that your mind chose to view the song from that made any of those interpretations actually work. The one problem with Steven's approach this time is that it's natural for a collection of songs originally intended for release on an EP, that came out of a long season of songwriting without a definite theme or musical genre tying them all together, to sound a bit scattered. "Folk" is the obvious genre tag that one could apply to the entire album, but there are flashes of country music, Gospel music, and even chanting monks on a few tracks. One song could even be described as "street theater". Whether this all fits together well is up to the listener. To me, it's a bit disjointed, and that's honestly the only reason that I still prefer Me Died Blue. But that doesn't stop me from recommending Straightjacket to fans of literate music without hesitation - it displays a diversity of skill that sets Steven very far apart from your typical "guy with a guitar" type musician.

Ruin of the Beast
The lawyers and statesmen shook hands and agreed
Smiled for the photo and planted a seed
Crammed in some tears, said a quick prayer
Mumbled some lines like, "We'll clean up the air
We'll blow up some stars, and detox the tar!"
The soft hum of chanting monks opens the album, and it's enough to make any Christian music fan get flashbacks to the first Jars of Clay album, but as Steven's nimble-fingered guitar picking starts up and his lyrics begin to tell a story, it's clear that there are more insidious forces at work here. This is a shifty-eyed story about fame, politics, global warming, and the Antichrist, and not necessarily in that order. And it's far from being easy to interpret, as most of Delopoulos's work is - if the "beast" is really the Antichrist character playing the role of a charismatic hero, why does the song speak of him being defeated, brutally murdered, and forgotten about as humankind carries on with their folly? It's a brilliant introduction into a lyrical world where not everything is as it seems.

She Held My Hand
I met her at a show, her hand slipped through her hair
She listened to my story, said "I've heard all about you"
It seems she was sincere, but the conversation fled...
An equally brilliant song follows that stunning opener, keeping the same intricate, flowing acoustic guitar style, but mellowing the mood a tad so that Steven can tell a bit of a love story. But is it really a love story? Steven's thoughts seem to turn corners as he (possibly playing a fictional role; I can't tell if the song is autobiographical) sings about he woman he met at a show once, and stumbling into an awkward situation when he realizes that she's a bit of a Jesus freak, earnestly trying to win him over to Christianity, while he's just trying to do whatever he can to impress the girl and make her fall in love with him. So this woman's simple Gospel tale is mixed in with Steven's rich "stuff of life" metaphors as finds himself trapped between the "deal with the devil" that got him into showbiz, and the offer of grace paradoxically being extended to him by a groupie. Beautiful song.

May I Always Keep My Feet Upon the Ground
Tricked the mind, burned the floor
Babies dancing, die no more
March through the desert, pray for the rain
Crucify, no more pain...
The Gospel influence works its way into this song, which surprisingly features no acoustic guitar, or any other instrument that makes a melody, for that matter. It's all a bunch of percussive noises - a triangle, the creaking of a chair, finger snaps, hand claps, that sort of stuff - and a rather enthusiastic choir of voices that play call-and-response with Steven. The song is brief and almost doesn't seem to fit with the style of the songs that surround it, taking a repetitive lyrical approach as Steven happily sings of the figurative crucifixion of our struggles and our shame, always coming back around to that mantra, "May I always keep my feet upon the ground". They slow it down for one last vocal crescendo, and then that's the whole song, wrapped up after a nice, neat, two-minute performance.

The Great Conductor
Well, I bought a cup of coffee when I asked her for her hand
She was checking me for Egypt, she was shaking me for sand
But I, I've been resurrected years ago...
Musically speaking, it's very easy to confuse this song with "Ruin of the Beast" - it's got that same nimble guitar playing and the monks even come in again at the tail end of it. But this song seems to revolve a bit less around a typical verse/chorus structure, opting instead to run through several rambling verses that feel like a stream of consciousness. I love how the percussion, soft and light but persistent, chugs along like a train in the background, while the guitar playing ebbs and flows, from delicate to vigorous and back again. There's more than five minutes of this, all of it rich with metaphors that I haven't even begun to unpack yet. I'm sure that its meaning must be tied to that of the album's first song, and I have the vague idea that the song's about some sort of struggle to be in control, perhaps speaking to mankind's misguided attempts to play God, but I haven't really gotten much further with it than that.

Interlude
Just a brief minute or so of hand claps or knee slaps or whatever's making that percussive sound, coupled with a muted trumpet blaring away, playing an indistinct melody that echoes off into the distance. It's got a "Walking through a crowded farmer's market in New York City on a Saturday morning" sort of vibe to it.

Fire Away
I had a vision
You were sailing toward the holy land
But shadows hovered, covered my dream
Slipped right through my hand...
One of the most spare and delicate songs on the record appears next - this one has confounded me for many months with its gentle but emotional delivery, as Steven pleads for some sort of internal purification process that only he knows the particulars of - "Burn the bridge, burn the gold, fire away". It's subtle, but the cavernous space around Steven causes his voice to really echo through the night during the vulnerable chorus, and the soft hum of strings in the background adds a slightly wistful touch - I honestly didn't even realize the strings were there until about a week ago. Some producers might have overdone that element of the song, but well, here's how Delopoulos himself described the production on Straightjacket: "With the help of the great Monroe Jones (Eb+Flo Records) who kindly let me in his backyard to document and produce this project with a budget of lint, Monroe gently sculpted and colored this project with great intuition and subtle magic that is easily overlooked." It's like the incidental music on your favorite TV show - it heightens the emotion without you even realizing it's there.

Wallfly
I was grounded, then grunted, then bunted and buried
With silver responses and chocolate mixed cherries
I thought I'd be cool to buy a front row cry
But the first man wins, the last man dies...
This cute little rant, which manages to be quite upbeat despite being comprised of little but Steven's voice and some lively guitar strumming, is my favorite track on the album. It's a recognition of his place as a misfit artist living in a corner of a fraction of a sub-niche, whose attempts to poke and prod and challenge minds with his music have been met with a lot of polite but vacuous smiles and kind letters essentially saying, "Thanks, but no thanks" from The Powers That Be in the music industry. So Steven does what any good misfit would do - he celebrates his quirky nature, affirming that the good old Holy Ghost still has a place and a plan for him despite how he might have slipped through the cracks in a world that struggles to classify him. Some lively handclaps and a rousing, quick round of "Lalalala"s from Steven send this song into folk/rock overdrive, Cat Stevens style.

Work to Be Done
He couldn't see it, but he heard it
She saw him struggling with the symbols, so she wrote it down
She looked right through him, and saw the shadows of the risen Son
Cast your nets unto the ocean...
This one, along with "She Held My Hand", actually leaked out ahead of time due to the Work to Be Done EP, released earlier last year to show a little bit of Steven's work in progress (and to revisit some old tunes from Me Died Blue with a few rambunctious live tracks from Burlap to Cashmere thrown in). So it's the track that I've actually had the most time to get used to, but paradoxically, it's the one that seems to have grown on me the least. Nothing wrong with it - it's a serviceable story of a woman who seems to be helping a man work out his salvation with fear and trembling, so to speak - being patient with his struggles and worries and doubts and all that. It's likely tied to the story from "She Held My Hand". The melody and the style of guitar playing (there's a little bit of piano, too) are a little more plainspoken, giving the song more of a workmanlike tone. (Pun intended, but not 'cause I'm trying to be funny - it's just how my mind does the whole word association thing.) Sandra McCracken's background vocals perk things up a bit, but there's still something about this song that could use a little more oomph.

As If Love Was a Sword
All the wandering sheep will be found
And the mountains will tumble away
The dreamers that fly, they'll return to the ground
As the sorrow returns, the colors will stray...
This odd little ballad is bit deceptive with its bare-bones strum in 3/4 time at the beginning - you simply have no idea that midway through that it's going to suddenly erupt into a mad chorus of voices, and start sounding like some sort of weird collision between a royal coronation ceremony and a three-ring circus act. Such is the exuberance of the devoted subjects who all "bowed to the throne as if love was a sword". Does that mean that battles will be won with love that can't be won with conventional weaponry, or does it mean that the concept of love is being twisted around and misused as a blunt object to manipulate people? Whose side is this "love" on, anyway? (For an interesting corollary to this idea, see Barenaked Ladies' "Rule the World with Love".)

Open Your Eyes
Nothing left but fear, let's wash it white as snow
You can take the bed, I'll keep my radio
Nothing left to say, I guess its time to go...
A piano takes the lead for this stunning, melancholy ballad, which seems to be about a tragedy so painful that Steven can only hint at it from several different angles instead of directly explaining the situation. It's one of those songs where, if you knew what he was talking about, there might not be a dry eye in the house, but because you don't, there's this quiet devastation that just sort of gnaws at you. The song reaches its most poignant moment when Steven gets to a snippet of the lyrics that he seemingly can't bear to finish singing - the liner notes read, "Highways being bought, children being sold", but he just leaves it hanging at "Children being..." It's as if the horrible reality of the "ruin of the land" has him all choked up. I normally don't like it when singers let sentences trail off like that, but in this case it's one of those little details that speaks volumes. At least, in my overactive imagination, it does.

Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound
I had a little girl one time, she had lips like Sherry wine
I loved her 'til my head went plumb insane
But I was too blind to see, she was drifting away from me
And my good gal went off on the morning train...
Well, after that last tune, a downbeat country song about your woman up and leavin' you sounds positively easygoing. Steven's actually covering folk singer Tom Paxton here, and this is actually a bonus track for those who bought the physical CD at one of his shows (or had a friend buy it and mail it to them, in my case) - it bumps the original track 11 back to track 13, and we'll get to that one in a minute. This is one of those classic "hapless traveler" song, and Steven's tone of voice here almost seems to hint at a bit of humorous irony in his observations of a life that keeps hitting wrong turns and dead ends. Throw in a low, lazy steel guitar solo, and you've got the perfect song for a lazy ride into the sunset.

The Dancer
I've seen the side of the ocean wide
And the answer was written as the sun went down
She came to me in hope, and she threw down her rope
And led me to the garden, lost and found...
Steven's own decidedly less Western folk style takes over again for a final hushed ballad, which seems to be an ode to grace, a quiet celebration of the moment when a patient woman's prayers paid off and the lost and confused man she had been praying for finally came to his senses and stumbled back home. Sandra McCracken provides a lovely duet vocal, sort of serving as the figurative guardian angel calling him home. It's a brief enough song that it's easy to let it be an after thought after all of the twists and turns that this album winds through, but it's worth paying closer attention (though when is that ever not the case with one of this guy's songs)?

Halt
And though my heart still loves the pride
Though my eyes still love the size
And my dried-up bones just love to dry
But I'm gonna keep on flyin' with my sneakers on...
The official album ends on "The Dancer", and what was track 11 on the digital release is now placed as a "bonus tracks", which perhaps helps it to not be as jarring of an interruption as it once was, but man, it's a hell of a weird note to end on. You actually won't hear Steven's voice on this one (unless we assume that he's shouting in the background), nor will you hear his guitar or any instrument that isn't banged on. This is the track that I would describe as "street theater", and it's essentially an urban poem that, if not for the oddball lyrics, I'd sooner assume might be found on a Kirk Franklin album. Except that Kirk Franklin just kind of shouts stuff while other people sing, and here, everybody's shouting with only the occasional vocal melody in the background. First everyone cries out in defiant unison at some unnamed oppressor, and then a pair of voices (one male, one female, both of them sounding distinctly African-American, but who knows, you can never tell what someone looks like just by hearing their voice) shouting some rather strange proclamations, most notably being the repeated line at the end, "I'm gonna keep on flying with my sneakers on!" It's a strange enough concoction that I'm sure about 90% of listeners will be tempted to skip it, as I myself once was. Now that I've gotten used to the pandemonium, I think it's kind of catchy, in a primal sort of way.

Well, that little bit of craziness at the end might offer some sort of clue as to why the album is called Straightjacket. But then, there's another sense in which Straightjacket is a completely inappropriate title for this album, because it's anything but restrained. Delopoulos clearly let his imagination run wild, perhaps even purposefully throwing musical cohesion to the wind, and despite whatever drawbacks might come along with that, I have to applaud him for painting such rich and vivid portraits of life as he best understands it.

ALBUM WORTH:
Ruin of the Beast $2
She Held My Hand $2
May I Always Keep my Feet Upon the Ground $1
The Great Conductor $1.50
Interlude $.50
Fire Away $1
Wallfly $2
Work to Be Done $1
As If Love Was a Sword $1.50
Open Your Eyes $1.50
Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound $1
The Dancer $1
Halt $1
TOTAL: $17

Websites:
http://www.stevendelopoulos.com
http://www.myspace.com/stevendelopoulos

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Listening