A Pilgrimage to the Jesus of Cool

Nick Lowe Live

Nick Lowe, Aug 2, King of Prussia PA

I went to a party.

I’ve been listening to Nick Lowe, steadily, for my entire life, or at least since middle school. I’d seen him twice already: once in 1987 when he opened for Elvis Costello and then in 2008, when he played one long acoustic set at Carnegie Hall. I’ve read Will Birch’s 2019 Cruel to Be Kind: The Life and Music of Nick Lowe twice and interviewed Birch about it. I’m the guy who can wear this T-shirt, a throwback which Lowe used to sell on his website:

When I saw him included in the “Concerts Under the Stars” series at a park in King of Prussia, PA, I knew I had to go. He’s 76 and it seemed the right thing to make the 90-minute drive to see him again. This was no condescending gesture of pity for an old man: just last year he released Indoor Safari, a collection of new songs accompanied by the great Los Straightjackets—one of his best. Someone told me it was “sad” that I was going alone, but it wasn’t: I’m the only true-believing Nick Lowe fan I know and I didn’t want to be responsible for someone else’s good time. A solo concert without one’s spouse might seem like taking separate vacations (which is actually weird), but it’s just like seeing a movie alone when nobody else wants to go. I grabbed my lawn chair and hit the road.

The tickets were general admission, so I probably arrived earlier than the band. This arrive-ridiculously-early rule is one I’ve followed since 2000, when someone had an extra GA ticket to see Bob Dylan at the Princeton University gym and said that we would get in line at 10:00 that morning, taking shifts holding our place. “If you’re going to wait in line,” he said, “you might as well wait in line longer to get a great seat.” I went along with the plan and we ended up standing about thirty feet from Bob. (When I saw him open for the Dead at Giants Stadium I didn’t have to wait for my assigned seat, but he was a million miles away.) Nick Lowe didn’t draw a Dylan-sized crowd, but I still arrived three hours before the gates opened and sat in a little park next to the bigger outdoor venue, the lone barbarian at the gate. As I waited, reading a Louis L’Amour western, I heard the guys from Los Straightjackets play some chords and realized I was there for the soundcheck. A free mini-show just for me! I heard “Heart” and “Lay It On Me Baby” to no applause but I did hear Nick say, “That was pretty good.” An hour later, some guy and his wife showed up and sat on a bench. She was not buying the whole “You might as well wait” idea and scolded him for making them arrive so early. He must have loved the sound of breaking glass.

Lowe has perfected the essence of a cool performer and the four-minute song in a way that puts him in the company of some lyricists in the Great American Songbook. Nobody performing and recording today writes more perfect and satisfying pop songs—or at least the kind of songs that only Nick Lowe could pull off, and he has only grown exponentially better with age: he moved from being the Jesus of Cool in 1978 to The Convincer in 2001 to the purveyor of The Old Magic twenty years after that, and each move seemed, like a plot twist in a novel, a surprise and yet natural and inevitable. Like the older Cary Grant, with whom he shares the effortless panache, charm, shock of white hair, and big glasses, Lowe is a perfect example of how to get older (not “grow old”) with grace.

Cary and Nick

That grace, that light touch, is there in all of his best songs. No grown man, at least none of the ones I know, could sing “Lay It On Me Baby” and not feel like a doofus. Nick Lowe sings about being in love like singing is the most natural thing in the world and his lyrics always fit the music so well that the songs achieve a kind of economic perfection: lines like, “You can’t buy a day this sunny / Not for a tower of folding money” express exactly the feeling of someone giving him the eye. The subtle jokes of his rhymes keep the songs fresh in our ears. “She’s got me running back like a jet-pac boomerang” gives us “back” and “pac,” which he sings as if he just tossed it off, like Ira Gershwin’s “He may not be the man some / Girls think of as handsome.” In “A Quiet Place,” he thinks about asking a neighbor, “Lady, lady, why do you holler? / Nobody’s seen your Johnny Dollar.” “All Mean Are Liars” has, “Do you remember Rick Astley? / He had a big fat hit—it was ghastly.” The rhyme in “I went to a party: / It was like an indoor safari” is makes me smile every time I hear it.

And yet his songs aren’t all about what a cool customer he is: he’s built a terrific collection of downers that don’t approach Jason Isbell territory but still hit their mark. “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide,” is just about the best portrait of someone who’s thrown in the towel as you can find:

With a growing sense of dread
And a hammer in my head,
Fully clothed upon the bed
I wake up to the world that lately I’ve been living in.

There’s a cut upon my brow,
Must have banged myself somehow
But I can’t remember now.
And the front door’s open wide.
Lately I’ve let things slide.

This is as perfect an example of finesse as you’re going to find. It’s as good as the part in “Sunday Morning Coming Down” where he sings:

Then I crossed the empty street
And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken
And it took me back to somethin’
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

Or consider “House for Sale,” in which simple words suggest a deeper hurt:

Well the roof has given in to the weather
And the windows rattle and moan;
Paint is peeling, cracks in the ceiling—
Whatever's happened to my happy home?

House for sale: I’ve had enough.
I'll send a van to get my stuff.
House for sale: I’m leaving like I'm getting out of jail.

This is his “A Good Year for the Roses,” a song that says so much without bludgeoning the listener and being catchy at the same time. (As a kid, I sang along, thinking that George Jones was boasting of his gardening prowess.) Even his Christmas album is great and holds up to repeated listens: only he could make us want to hear another version of “Silent Night” and his originals, like “Christmas at the Airport,” have his trademark touch.

After a five-song set by Brian Seymour, Nick and Los Straightjackets walked onto the gazebo-turned-stage and began the opener, “So It Goes,” which had everyone bopping in their lawn chairs and singing along with the chorus; from there, he went into “Went to a Party” and “Heart.” He talked about the name of the series, “Concerts Under the Stars,” gently mocking the grandiosity of the title by saying he hoped to deliver just that. When he added that they would take advantage of the pause to move into a slower song and began, “Lately I’ve Let Things Slide,” I was shocked; it’s one of his best but I never thought he’d bring it into his feel-good under-the-stars setlist. Another terrific downer, “I Live on a Battlefield,” followed before moving back into the upbeat “Love Starvation,” “Jet Pac Boomerang,” and “Tokyo Bay.”

He then took a set break as Los Straightjackets played four instrumentals and returned (with a new shirt) for part two. “Trombone,” another recent winner, came first, then “House for Sale,” “Somebody Cares for Me,” “Ragin’ Eyes,” “Without Love,” “Lay It On Me Baby,” “Cruel to be Kind,” and (dedicated to a guy wearing a T-shirt reading “HALF A MAN”) “Half a Boy and Half a Man.” All of these were loud and well-mixed: you could hear each instrument perfectly and his voice never cracked. Then came the slowed-down “Peace, Love, and Understanding” before closing with “Heart of the City” and “I Knew the Bride.” Every so often I’d look around and see other people singing along, and not just to “Cruel to be Kind,” but to the songs I assumed I was the only one who knew. The encore started with Los Straightjackets playing “Venus” and everybody up and dancing before Lowe walked on, said he hoped that this was truly a “concert under the stars,” and played, “When I Write the Book.” Nineteen great songs, five instrumentals, and zero clunkers in two hours for $40—a far cry from the upper deck of an NFL stadium for five times the cost and watching a Jumbotron.

Concert Under the Stars

In his biography, Will Birch says that Lowe’s “five decades in music have been a triumph of single-minded dedication to his craft over periods of charmed nonchalance.” Lowe’s music, interviews, and live shows since 1978 (and even earlier with Brinsley Schwarz and Rockpile) bear this out: crafty nonchalance seems oxymoronic, but as with everything else, Lowe makes it work.

It was a great party.