Phoebe Snow: Everything at Once

The all-encompassing artistry of an uncategorizable singer-songwriter

Welcome music lovers to a new edition of ‘Listening Sessions’! I’m back a bit later than planned due to a shift in my publication schedule for the next few weeks. After today (May 24), I will be next in touch on June 4 with a round-up of some new and upcoming jazz releases that are worth your attention. After that (and teased a few weeks ago), I will be teaming up with

Tim Riley

of the ‘riley rock report’ for a back-and-forth on the Eagles’ Hotel California. That will be dropping on June 14. To make sure you get both my contribution and Tim’s, be sure to subscribe to Tim’s Substack if you haven’t already.

This time around, I’ve written an essay about Phoebe Snow. Known best for her hit ‘Poetry Man,’ there is so much more to enjoy in her music and I focus on her great sophomore release, Second Childhood. It’s not available for streaming but easy to find in the wild. I hope you enjoy the essay and will let me know your thoughts.

Until next time, may good listening be with you all!

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One of the interesting things in the many tributes given to tenor saxophonist David Sanborn on the news of his passing earlier this month was a reminder of just how ubiquitous he was in the seventies. The unmistakable sound of his horn animated records by James Taylor, Stevie Wonder and everybody in between. If the sixties were a triumph of the studio ensembles that powered a sizable chunk of the music that defined the decade, the seventies brought the focus in to the individual musician. Cast a glance at the back cover of an album from that decade and there will likely be a list of players, numbering into the tens and twenties. Second Childhood, Phoebe Snow’s sophomore album, numbers 23, Sanborn included.

Phoebe Snow is the kind of artist who was a big deal in the seventies but is now rarely heard, if at all, and largely defined by the hit she had right out of the gate. That song, ‘Poetry Man,’ is a moody, smoky tale of an affair and is indeed unforgettable. There is a sophistication in the modulation of the primary refrain and an intoxicating solo by tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims that invites the listener to lend an ear and exhale slowly. Snow’s vocal is unadorned yet close. It is also dreamy—the way she prolongs “oooo yeah,” for one example.

If the measure of an artist is to carve out a niche and a sound that is individual, ‘Poetry Man,’ which arrived in the middle of the first side of her debut album, was ample proof that Phoebe Snow already had that necessity down pat. Part of that was a nagging sense that that stricture of genre would be utterly hapless in trying to pigeonhole her music. How could these categories be applied to someone who proceeded ‘Poetry Man’ with ‘Harpo’s Blues’ on which pianist Teddy Wilson, the great lion of the keys, accompanied Snow and played a short improvisation with his characteristic élan. After hearing that, you don’t sit and puzzle over whether what you’ve just heard is jazz or blues or folk or pop or soul, you simply get up to lift the needle and play it again.

In 1975, when ‘Poetry Man’ made it way up the charts, there was a bevy of incisive female singers, both songwriters and song interpreters. What distinguished Snow was that she was both and equally accomplished at both. A signifier that Snow’s artistry could and would astonish was Paul Simon’s early championing of her. On the unforgettable chorus of his chart-topping ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,’ her voice—a sly drawl, somewhat unexpected from someone who was New York-born and Teaneck, New Jersey raised—punches through. Once you hear it, it becomes part of the joy that attends each hearing. When Simon hosted the second episode of the upstart Saturday Night Live, Snow was among those he invited to appear with him. In addition to singing ‘No Regrets’ which Billie Holiday recorded in 1936, she appeared with Simon and the Jessy Dixon Singers on his proto-gospel ‘Gone At Last.’

Not surprisingly, Snow’s musical education ran deep. Growing up, her home was described as one in which music played constantly. Her aspiration at one point was to be the female Jimi Hendrix. That dream receded once she was introduced to Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Holiday. She also made the rounds of the Greenwich Village clubs. Once proper due was paid her, that need to lock her in to a simple descriptor would be an albatross that would loom over much of her career.

A song that illustrates how short-sighted such thinking was is from her third album, It Looks Like Snow. ‘Stand Up on the Rock,’ written by Snow, has the upbeat, vibrant sheen of Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees, especially in the brass blasts that ring out throughout. The lyrics celebrate resiliency, a reminder that “you come from solid stock” among other affirmations. In lesser hands, ‘Stand Up on the Rock’ is in danger of being a cloying, faux Up With People commercial. In Snow’s, it is invigorating and empowering no matter how one takes the references to praying and raising one’s hands. It is also revelatory of the very real life Snow was leading, newly married with a daughter, Valerie, whom Snow raised without flinching once it was clear that her daughter was born with severe brain damage.

One of the most interesting things to me about Snow is something which is simply speculation on my part. Now, I’m not talking conspiracy theories or anything else like that. I’m instead thinking about influences. I hear Snow sing—let’s say her solo verse on Simon’s ‘Gone at Last’—with her mid-range register, conversational phrasing and a timbre that never draws undue attention to her gifts. These would be qualities I would also use to describe a vocal by Doris Akers, a highly influential gospel songwriter (two of her best-known songs would be ‘Lead Me, Guide Me’ and ‘Sweet, Sweet Spirit’). In 1964, she recorded an album for RCA with the Statesmen Quartet and Hovie Lister on piano. One of the highlights is ‘Wanna Go to Heaven,’ a lazy, jazzy finger-snapper. Akers’ phrasing just glides. It’s a secular sound on sacred ground. Listen to it and hear what I think is a foundational aspect of Snow’s sound. There’s neither quotation nor scholarship that links these two artists but even the possibility that there night have been is tantalizing, and another reason to give Phoebe Snow all the laurels that she should be due.

Of the five albums she recorded in the seventies, the first for Shelter Records, a label co-owned by Leon Russell and Denny Cordell, who signed Snow after seeing her live at The Bitter End, and the rest for Columbia after Snow had a falling out with Shelter, Second Childhood is particularly arresting. It is, inexplicably, unavailable for streaming.

The album captures some of the spirit of the aforementioned Saturday Night Live. It’s a spirit of possibility and of unfettered possibility. It’s an association that comes through strongest on ‘Sweet Disposition.’ Over the kind of groove—not quite soul, not quite jazz, just a little disco—that decorated many a release on Creed Taylor’s CTI label starting in 1972 and anchored here by drummer Grady Tate and electric pianist Richard Tee, there’s the ingenious insertion on the bridge of a tuba choir arranged by a master of the instrument, Howard Johnson, who was conductor of the show’s original house band. It adds an urban edge to a song that skirts the edge, though pleasantly so, of what may be derided as soft rock. Also not to be missed is a reference to Snoopy’s alter ego, Joe Cool, and Snow’s ascent on the fade out to a sustained high note.

It’s a sign that Snow’s dynamism was not based on volume but on timing and improvisation. Her cover of Holland - Dozier - Holland’s ‘Going Down for the Third Time’ funks up the Supremes’ original recording. She latches right onto the beat, moving in lockstep with the musicians on the track, including Tee on organ, Hugh McCracken and John Tropea on guitar, Tony Levin on bass and Tate. The studio version of ‘No Regrets’ is a glorious duet with Don Grolnick on electric piano, Snow switches her approach to trail the beat and then some, bending notes and stretching them out. Check out the extended line she makes of the song title at the start of the second and last chorus. At times, she pinches her voice and exaggerates her slight drawl. In short, she puts on a clinic.

The album closer of ‘There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York’ is similarly elastic. The tempo—a sweet spot between ballad and a swinger—places her version equidistant of the celebratory air of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ version on their reimagining of Porgy and Bess and the song’s actual placement in the opera, and the fact that is sung by Sportin’ Life.

The originals that Snow penned for Second Childhood, including ‘Sweet Disposition,’ are often constructed in fragments than when put together flow differently than traditional pop songwriting. ‘All Over’ is a prime example. It begins with an opening section that floats and then moves into a breezy tempo with Snow’s vocal cushioned by herself and Phil Kearns, her husband at the time. The song’s refrain, which follows, is a mix of the two sections.

Other compositions eschew this kind of obliquely modular construction for forms that are less beholden to recognizable song structures. ‘Inspired Insanity’ is anchored by a recurring, light hook but otherwise, the song resides in mid-air. ‘Pre-Dawn Imagination’ is even more untethered—more stream-of-consciousness than anything else.

Other songs rest on both the music and the lyrics. The album opener, ‘Two-Fisted Love,’ has that typically seamless transition from verse to chorus plus the siren sound of David Sanborn’s tenor saxophone. It also boasts of intriguing, cinematic imagery: the protagonist’s lover travelling in a spaceship when not out in the night with only a lantern as a guide, calls out to “Mary Jane,” and the song's couple staggering thirsty in the desert. What exactly is “two-fisted love” is unclear. Is it a violent act or a pornographic one or something else? Snow leaves the listener guessing.

‘Cash In,’ which follows, features everything that makes Second Childhood an album-length jewel. The journey from verse to chorus is as rich as any jazz composition; the bridge’s incredible modulation is as sophisticated as any too. The sound is slick and seventies—Tee’s electric piano and Levin’s bass especially. Song’s lyrics are partially cynical of the ceaseless chasing of commerce (“money can’t be worthless / when your music’s mirthless”) and celebratory of something substantial beyond dollars and cents (“the stars can always go walking with me / oh, what loyalty in the shine”).

The song also touches on one of the essential dilemmas of life for those called to artistic expression. Does one seek to be fulfilled creatively and in so doing, cultivate the luck required through hard work to build a living off of it or does one attend to building a fulfilling family life or can one do both? Today, it’s more about choosing to pursue what one loves and a livelihood separately as the former rarely results in the latter.

The seventies may have been the last gasp for a music business that could deliver both. The struggles that Phoebe Snow endured were both a warning of what has come and a reminder that we would be remiss in continuing to celebrate Carole King and Joni Mitchell and Roberta Flock and Linda Ronstadt, etc. while also not toasting Maria Muldaur and Melissa Manchester and Judee Sill and Wendy Waldman, etc. Phoebe Snow too.