Chris Stamey is a music scene long-hauler if there’s ever been one. He’s been making records for nearly half a century, and his new one, Anything Is Possible, is amongst his best work. Taking inspiration from lush 1960s pop, Stamey avoids the formalist nature of homage while being clearly indebted to the brilliance of Brian Wilson, whose “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)” is covered. Stamey’s originals have an unstrained, timeless quality, and the production basks in classicism without faltering into the overly labored. The guests include the Wild Honey Orchestra, the Lemon Twigs, Marshall Crenshaw, Pat Sansone, and Jennifer Curtis. The record is out July 11 on LP, CD, and digital.
As a member of the guitar pop elite of the Southeastern USA (but with time spent in NYC), Chris Stamey’s peers include the members of R.E.M., Don Dixon, and Mitch Easter, with the latter two contributing to this record. Perhaps most famous as a member of the seminal pop-rock outfit The dB’s alongside Peter Holsapple, Will Rigby, and Gene Holder, Stamey has also played with Jody Stephens and the late Alex Chilton of Big Star. In 1976, Stamey’s band Sneakers, very much under the influence of Big Star, released a 7-inch (since given an expanded reissue) with contributions from Rigby, Easter, and Dixon as producer.
Stamey has helped keep the post-Big Star power pop flame alive while releasing a bunch of solo records with an ever-increasing yet cohesive stylistic reach and working as a producer for a wide range of acts. Anything Is Possible’s opener “I’d Be Lost Without You,” a bold ’60s production pop nugget with clear ties to the Beach Boys and the Wrecking Crew, underscores Stamey’s continued ambition and the steadiness of his ideas.
The title track and “In a Lonely Place” represent the album’s grittier side, with the guitar amps turned up, but with the songwriting maintaining a high pop standard. Stamey might’ve been a young moth drawn to the undying light of hooky simplicity, but like Arthur Lee or Todd Rundgren or his contemporaries in Yo La Tengo, he’s undergone striking compositional development.
A big selling point here is the aforementioned rendering of a well-loved Beach Boys tune, but it’s striking that an original like “After All This Time” sounds like it was pulled from the Great American Songbook. Stamey’s songwriting here branches far out from the standard pop-rock avenues, a quality he shares with Wilson, McCartney, Lennon, Harry Nilsson, and post-Big Star Chilton. “Meet Me in Midtown” hits like Bacharach and has a sax solo of the type that established a template for both Gamble and Huff and Fagen and Becker.
“When My Ship Comes In” taps again into that Tin Pan Alley thing, but the lushness of the orchestration suggests the sophistication of Van Dyke Parks without aping the maestro’s moves. Plus, the horn at the beginning of the song sounds like it could be floating out from the single speaker of a transistor radio hanging on a hook in a falafel cart in Greenwich Village in 1966. Tasty. “Once, on a Summer’s Day” strolls more slowly down the jazz-pop lane, and minus the organ injections and the strummed guitar, “Done with Love” could be a mid-20th-century Broadway showstopper.
Anything Is Possible winds down with two more leisurely paced songs with rich arrangements. Altogether, the album is well named, as it reveals Stamey as a diligent student of pop history and an inspired extender of the form’s possibilities.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
