“They say travel broadens the mind
so I went over the falls in a barrel”
- T. Dolby, ‘I Live In A Suitcase’
Thomas Dolby is a restless nomad. At least that’s what one might assume when tracing the circuitous path of his career choices, geographic wanderings, and the stylistic multiplicity of his songwriting. Indeed, Dolby’s wanderlust may, in fact, be the touchstone of his life’s work. It is certainly at the core of his first new album in two decades, A Map Of The Floating City.
“Some nights he’s weightless
he has to travel
his mouth is gravel
and there’s an empty feeling within his heart”
- T. Dolby, ‘Weightless’
Dolby (born Thomas Robertson) hit the ground running as a teenager, dropping out of Oxford boarding school to move to London and cut his musical chops. He toured as a sound engineer for The Fall, built his own sound equipment from reclaimed scraps, played keyboards for Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club and Lene Lovich, worked as a producer for Whodini, and busked for change in the Paris Metro to avoid his creditors.
Dolby’s ship came in when his keyboard work caught the attention of producers who brought him in to do session work on Def Leppard’s Pyromania and Foreigner’s 4 (for which he wrote one of the most iconic synthesizer parts of the 1980s). With cash in hand from these sessions, he was able to finance the recording of his first solo album, The Golden Age Of Wireless, a brooding, dark record of electronic pop that happens to contain some of the best damn songwriting of the era.
“Metal bird dip wing of fire
whose air lanes comb dark earth
whose poles were tethers we were born in”
- T. Dolby, ‘Flying North’
While the landscape of electronic music had been explored by rock musicians for a decade, Dolby was one of the first to really humanize this timbral palette through the rich story-telling in his songs. The most stylistically cohesive album in his catalog, Wireless percolated up through the fog of post-war Europe, embodying a youthful urge to move, to see the world, and to shed light on the darker corners of our environment.
“With a thousand miles of real estate to choose from
you begin to see the value of your freedom”
- T. Dolby, ‘Screen Kiss’
MTV made Thomas Dolby a video star (he served as director for many of his own videos); the music industry and his newly won fanbase waited for a sophomore effort that served up more of the same. Instead, they got the sweepingly gorgeous album, The Flat Earth. With Dolby’s second record, listeners began to get a glimpse of not only the variety of styles in which he was interested, but also the fluency with which he handled them. From the world-beat influence of the title track to the frenetic funk of ‘Hyperactive,’ and from the California cool of ‘Screen Kiss’ to the lounge-y jazz of the Dan Hicks cover, ‘I Scare Myself,’ Dolby took us someplace completely different with each song. With repeated listenings, it became clear that the multiple styles were means to an end, that end being the variety of stories that Dolby wanted to tell.
“Somewhere inside there’s a place where we can travel
a code we could unscramble
a riddle to unravel”
- T. Dolby, ‘Field Work’
Dolby’s musicianship earned him a strong reputation throughout the industry and afforded him the chance to take on a kaleidoscopic array of projects: producer for Joni Mitchell, Ofra Haza, and Prefab Sprout; collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and George Clinton; soundtrack composer for Ken Russell and, yes, George Lucas; a memorable performance at the 1985 Grammys; and even a bit of acting!
“Over pillars and palaces, I’ll hold your hand
until the fog has lifted.
Maybe better you hold me close than understand
how far away I’ve drifted”
- T. Dolby, ‘Budapest By Blimp’
Much of this divergent activity was precipitated by Dolby’s move from under the dark cultural cloud of western Europe to the sunny possibilities of Los Angeles, epicenter of the 80s entertainment industry. It was here that he re-invented himself once again. He put together a new band of LA’s hottest session musicians, The Lost Toy People (found by placing an ad in a local trade paper), and with their collective experience created his third record, the Hollywood-glossy Aliens Ate My Buick.
With tongue firmly in cheek, and reveling in his new sandbox, Dolby’s jazz-, funk-, and salsa-infused songs gave listeners whiplash with a stylistic gear-shift at every turn. The production was slick, the lyrics quirky and intensely witty, and the ensemble performances wicked tight. (The album is still considered a masterpiece by audiophiles.) While the majority of this album displayed an artist having a great time in his newly-adopted city, the record’s final song, the elegant ‘Budapest By Blimp,’ seemed like a farewell letter to Dolby’s European past and even to the darker nature of western European imperialism. It was as though he had finally found somewhere to put down roots, discovering his own New World.
“Typhoon Pierre delayed my plane ‘til morning
Let the bontemps rouler from your accordion
Under a Cajun moon I lay me open
There is a spirit here that won’t be broken
- T. Dolby, ‘I Love You Goodbye’
And so he did. Dolby got married, had kids. Musically, he contributed to several more movie soundtracks, played with Roger Waters at the Berlin Wall, and produced his fourth album, Astronauts and Heretics. Though his songwriting continued to evolve and mature, Astronauts was his least cohesive record to date. Stylistically adventurous and full of surprising artistic collaborations (Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Michael Doucet, Eddie Van Halen), the album perhaps had too many ingredients to be a successful dish. Perhaps Dolby was just a bit burned out.
In the 90s, Thomas Dolby dropped off of most listeners’ radar, retreated from the waning music industry, and rode the wave of the silicon valley gold rush. Investigating emerging technologies (virtual reality, gaming, and the internet) and how music could be involved, he founded the company Beatnik, where the software synthesizer for cell-phone ring-tones was invented. He became the musical director for the now-famous annual TED conference, organizing and often performing the musical interludes between heady talks about changing the world (or at least our perception of it).
“If a song was a road
I would ride through the night to you.
There’s a moon on the rise
And I’m drawn on the tide to you”
- T. Dolby, ‘Valley of the Minds’s Eye’
As if the arrival of the new millennium triggered an alarm in his head, Dolby began to slowly return to music. He toured as a solo act, re-interpreting songs from his back-catalog and reconnecting with those fans who always kept hope alive that they would hear from him again.
And the sirens of nomadic motion called once more, this time pulling Dolby… home. He returned to the eastern coast of the U.K., built a wind and solar-powered studio from a 1930s lifeboat, and began work on a much-anticipated fifth solo album.
“Cannonballs ricochet around the room
I hurry home to lick my wounds
I stumble home to Oceanea”
- T. Dolby, ‘Oceanea’
And so, two decades after the release of Astronauts, the new album, A Map Of The Floating City, has arrived. A lifetime of wandering from place to place, story to story, style to style, and project to project is made manifest in this suite of eleven songs. Equal parts autobiography, travelogue, and short-story collection, the songs are subdivided into three ‘continents’ (Urbanoia, Amerikana, and Oceanea), representing Dolby’s journey from London to the U.S. and back home to East Anglia. While even more stylistically omnivorous than Astronauts, Floating City holds together because it is about travel, escape(ism), and the search for new experiences. This true concept album revolving around the human (or at least Dolby’s) need for change brings a method to the madness.
Thomas Dolby re-introduces himself to the world with the album’s opener, ‘There Is Nothing New Under The Sun,’ a song about the craft and serendipity of songwriting itself. With its clever wordplay and peculiar six-bar phrases, he is fully embracing his return to music making (and in fine form). Dolby is, as the song implies, re-emerging from his chrysalis.
The remaining songs in Urbanoia all reflect a desire to escape the realities of urban existence. The D.J. protagonist of ‘Spice Train,’ an intensely infectious world-beat number, draws us in like a shady circus barker, inviting all to fill the dance floor. Flavored with Bollywood strings, throbbing synth-bass drones, and squealing trumpet solos, this is a rave-classic in the making.
‘Evil Twin Brother’ documents a late-night escape from New York City heat and insomnia, in search of snacks and club-hopping with an exotic stranger (in this case, a Russian-speaking Regina Spektor). The song oozes with urban anxiety, oscillating between the humid, back-beat driven verses of desire and the dark, dance-y chorus of regret and denial (complete with a Michael Jackson doppelgänger). This tune is weird in all the right ways.
A bossa nova breeze blows in to cool us off in ‘A Jealous Thing Called Love,’ a song about fleeing the city and the memory of betrayal, not by one’s lover so much as by the idea of love itself. Backed by the Jazz Mafia Horns, ‘Jealous Thing’s’ orchestration seamlessly transitions into Dolby’s second act.
The four songs of Amerikana are Dolby’s outsider’s-view of his adopted homeland, couched in his unique take on the styles of 60s tijuana brass, bluegrass, country, and sultry jazz. The treatment of these indigenous American styles clearly comes from a place of love and admiration. Further extending the theme of unsettled escapism, Dolby’s American characters seem to all gravitate towards the wrong side of the law: crooked lawyers and politicians, thieves, prison-breakers, and snack-stealing, toad-licking hippies. It may not be the most flattering vision of American culture, but it’s admittedly not far removed from what fills CNN every day.
‘Road To Reno’ is a David Lynch-ian road movie in song form. Its fate-stricken couple, on the run from the authorities, live life to the fullest before burning out like modern, cursed Wagnerian characters. The pair meet their tragic end in the tune’s introspective bridge, but Dolby immediately reminds us, with a jolting upwards modulation, that it’s not the destination that counts, but how you get there.
The perpetrators of mischief in ‘Toadlickers’ are a bunch of hippies, high on amphibian secretions, with cravings for snacks (which they sneak into town to steal). This may be the one song on the album that prompts most listeners’ head-scratching, puzzling over Dolby’s step into the self-proclaimed “mash of bluegrass and techno.” But, as usual, he immerses himself in the style and surrounds himself with its true practitioners to provide authenticity. And it works. In spite of itself, the song just works.
‘17 Hills’ is a love song to the San Francisco Bay area. This epic tale of a broken man’s inherited penchant for trouble, bad women, and thievery is interspersed throughout an unfolding narrative of his attempted escape from Alcatraz. In the form of a country ballad, and fleshed out by terrific guitar work by Mark Knopfler, ‘17 Hills’ adopts that style’s too-common theme of self-pity and resignation to one’s poor lot in life. Absolutely cinematic, this song-within-a-song carries us along on the same tidal waters that its anti-hero offers his life to in the final bars. Superb contributions from fretless bassist Jeffrey Wash and fiddler Natalie MacMaster should make this a contender for country single of the year (wouldn’t that be something!).
The melancholic closure of ‘17 Hills’ carries us into Amerikana’s epilogue, ‘Love Is A Loaded Pistol’, a dreamed encounter between Dolby and a time-traveling Billie Holiday. Backed by the lush strings of the quartet Ethel (who give great timbral depth to many songs on the album), Dolby’s nod to mid-century jazz standards is spot on. Like the great songs of that era, ‘Pistol’ deserves to be heard again and again.
The album’s final destination, Oceanea, the metaphor for Dolby’s recent return to the U.K., is at first glance a place of solace. But each of the three songs on this continent, perhaps the albums best, keeps one eye on the exit, ready to hit the road at the first sign of trouble.
The elegant ‘Oceanea,’ the anthem of Dolby’s homecoming, sweeps us up in its warm tones and mantra-like repeating harmonic progression. Featuring singer Eddi Reader (who’s voice takes on the role of Dolby’s mother), the song embodies the maternal call to return to an ancestral place. But just as we have succumbed to the suggested respite, Dolby closes the tune with a message via morse code (an homage the Wireless’ ‘Windpower’), a disturbing signal calling us towards a distant location.
This undermined illusion of safety and comfort is shared by the title character of the cool, Latin Jazz-flavored ‘Simone.’ An escape from the American Midwest to an imagined tropical Havana parallels Simone’s attempt to leave her old self behind and start afresh. Her self-evolution (or self-delusion) are matched by Dolby’s odd harmonic twists and frequent circuitous modulations… Donald Fagen wishes he had written this astonishingly lyrical wonder. The song also features one of the best saxophone solos to come around since the era when saxophone solos were cool, while Bruce Woolley’s theremin adds an additional intriguing layer to the mix.
The closing song of any concept album has the unenviable job of summing up the trajectory of the whole. ‘To The Lifeboats’ does so by drawing the same line between escapist fantasy and fragile reality that has woven its way through A Map Of The Floating City. The safe harbor of Oceanea is ravaged by the storms of Dolby’s thrashing rock centerpiece, his voice screaming above a howling wind of power guitar and drums. But ‘Lifeboats,’ and the album, ends on a plaintive note, a warning of impending environmental collapse. Are we drifting helplessly to our end or simply towards our next destination? Wherever we end up, Floating City repeatedly reminds us that we can never truly go home, that our travels have forever changed us and our perception of place. We must keep moving forward. With Thomas Dolby as our tour guide, the trip is always worth taking.
