Happy 30th Anniversary to Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ second studio album Ghost of a Dog, originally released October 19, 1990.
Having a hit single right out of the gate in a band’s fledgling recording career can be both a blessing and a curse. Such was arguably the case with Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, the Dallas based group whose instantly memorable “What I Am”—from their 1988 debut album Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars—proved ubiquitous on the airwaves, charts and MTV in the early months of 1989. The song’s irresistible, enduring appeal eventually—and somewhat incredulously—was embraced not just by rock and pop audiences, but by the hip-hop and R&B communities as well, with Brand Nubian lifting a sample of the song’s earworm of a guitar riff for their 1990 single “Slow Down” and the soul trio Intro leveraging the song for their 1993 track “Love Thang.”
To some extent, however, the inescapable success of “What I Am” cast too long of a shadow over the rest of the excellent songs that comprised the breadth of Shooting Rubberbands, which ultimately went double-platinum on the strength of 2 million units sold. In the 32 years since the album’s arrival, the band has far too often been assigned the dubious label of “one-hit wonder,” primarily by listeners and journalists too lazy to explore and recognize that the rest of their recorded repertoire—including Brickell’s solo offerings—possesses many charms beyond their most familiar single.
Expectations for their second studio effort were likely high considering the commercial windfall of its precursor, but Ghost of a Dog ended up selling a mere fraction of Shooting Rubberbands’ haul, while also being greeted by more critical scrutiny. Despite this disparity though, Ghost of a Dog is just as strong—if not a smidgen stronger—of an album overall.
"It was way too much, too soon," Brickell reflected to the Dallas Morning News in 2003. "It's been a long road to recover from all that." Indeed, Brickell’s discomfort with the band’s newfound fame can be heard throughout Ghost of a Dog, beginning with the album-opening “Mama Help Me.” Following a percussion-rich intro, Brickell alludes to her irresolution and restlessness, confessing, “I've taken giant steps, I've walked far away from home / But I need a little help, can I make it on my own? / Some days I can and some days I can't / And some days I just don't know where it is I'm at.”
The next track, “Black and Blue,” also offers evidence of her growing weariness, albeit with an uplifting melody reminiscent of Shooting Rubberbands’ buoyant single “Love Like We Do.” Four songs later, “10,000 Angels” unfolds as an existential rumination about one’s sense of purpose and lack of direction, with Brickell singing, “I'm feeling feelings like I never felt before / My head is reeling when I used to be so sure / Of why I'm here and why it is I'm going there / But now I fear I'm not getting anywhere.”
The album’s standout moments, for me, surface in the form of the lovelorn musings captured in a pair of downtempo songs: “He Said” and “Stwisted.” The former is a wistful, heartbreaking tale of lost love between two partners with divergent visions of their future together, an impassioned Brickell singing, “But he had a mind of his own / And he did not mind being alone / Left me there in our little world / Left me there like a little girl,” later confiding, paradoxically, that “Oh it's hard to love / Oh it's hard not to love.”
The latter song is a hauntingly beautiful anthem of emotional defiance, with Brickell offering a glimmer of hope that she can carry on amidst the pain of acknowledging someone who doesn’t reciprocate her affection (“I ain't gonna kill myself loving you / I ain't gonna break my own heart / I ain't gonna kill myself wanting you / When you don't seem to want any part of my love / And I know I'll be fine just as soon as I let go / Yes I know I'll be alright as soon as I let go”).
Also notable is the soaring, shapeshifting “Strings of Love,” in which Brickell expresses an openness to embracing love once again, despite the vulnerability one must reconcile in doing so.
Ghost of a Dog’s handful of shorter, acoustic compositions dispense—for the most part—with the themes of uncertainty and heartache, while elevating Brickell’s reassuring voice to the forefront. Exuding an aura of contentment, the blissful “Times Like This” and whimsical “Oak Cliff Bra,” an ode to observing the world around you, serve as stark contrasts to the album’s more melancholic fare. Likewise, the title track offers hope in Brickell’s summoning of a close companion’s spirit. “I was writing a lot of the lyrics to my songs in my apartment with my door open at night, and I could hear dogs barking, I guess,” Brickell explained to the Los Angeles Times in November 1990, offering additional context around the album’s title. “Maybe they just kinda subconsciously slipped through.”
While many of the introspective songs contained within Ghost of a Dog can rightfully be interpreted as reflections of Brickell’s personal experiences, she has also insisted that she wrote these songs with more universal meaning behind them, rooted within a fundamental empathy for the human condition. “I don’t feel vulnerable, really,” she admitted to the Los Angeles Times. “It feels good to express things that I feel like everybody feels. I don’t think these songs are overly personal or show anything but human feelings. I don’t feel exposed or anything. I don’t think I’m that different from anybody else.”
Increasingly fatigued by the spotlight, dividing her life between home and the road, and all of the other associated—and often superficial—demands of being ensconced within the music industry machine, Brickell and her band of brothers decided to take a break after Ghost of a Dog arrived. “We didn't know what was in store for us—photo shoots and a lot of that kind of thing,” Brickell reflected to the New York Times in 2003. “Maybe it was too much all at once. That was a lesson to be learned that we need to not be in the public eye so much, but to withdraw, get a new sense of life, get a new sense of music.” Brickell married Paul Simon in the spring of 1992 and their first of three children was born later that year, further fueling her desire to focus on her life away from music for a while.
Ghost of a Dog proved to be the last album the collective would record together for nearly sixteen years, an extended hiatus that would temporarily pause for 2000’s The Live Montauk Sessions LP and formally conclude with the arrival of 2006’s Stranger Things. Thankfully, the band have been considerably more active in recent years, releasing their latest album Rocket in late 2018 and touring periodically.
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