There are guitar players, and then there is Richard Thompson, and the distance between those two categories is not always appreciated until you sit down with Rumour and Sigh at eleven o’clock on a night when you’ve got nowhere to be.
Recorded at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles through the summer of 1990, this is the record where Thompson finally got the production to match the songs. Mitchell Froom — who’d already been reshaping the sonic landscape for Crowded House and Los Lobos — sat behind the board with engineer Tchad Blake, and the two of them had developed a kind of shared language: close-miked drums, slightly warped low end, a sense that the air in the room is doing something. Blake, who’d go on to develop that distinctive “binaural” technique he used all through the decade, gave Thompson’s electric guitar exactly the right amount of grit and presence. It sounds expensive and handmade at the same time.
The Players
The rhythm section matters enormously here. Dave Mattacks, the Fairport Convention veteran who’d been playing with Thompson on and off for twenty years, handles drums with the kind of economical authority that session drummers spend their whole careers trying to fake. He doesn’t need the extra beat. Pete Thomas — yes, Elvis Costello’s Pete Thomas — sits in on a few tracks, and the contrast between the two is something a drummer nerd could write a dissertation about.
Phil Pickett and Aly Bain are around the edges on various tracks, and there are moments where the arrangement breathes just enough Celtic air to remind you where Thompson came from, before the song turns dark and American again.
That tension is the whole album, really.
The Songs
“Read About Love” opens things with a locked-in riff and a kind of cheerful fury that is entirely a Thompson invention — he can write a pop song that’s also a critique of pop songs, simultaneously, without the seams showing. “I Feel So Good” has been covered by everyone since and still nobody gets it quite right, because what sounds like a straightforward shuffle is built on an implied threat that most singers can’t find in themselves.
But the record’s emotional center might be “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” a ballad told in the third person about a motorcyclist and a redheaded girl, and it runs nearly five minutes on just Thompson’s acoustic guitar and his voice, and it is — I’ll just say it plainly — one of the finest songs written in the English language in the second half of the twentieth century. No hedge on that. The melody climbs and the story turns and by the end you’re not entirely sure how you ended up caring this much about people you just met ninety seconds ago.
The second half of the record dips into Thompson’s weirder registers: “God Loves a Drunk,” “Psycho Street,” the bitter comedy of “You Dream Too Much.” These aren’t filler — they’re proof that the man has a complete worldview, not just a guitar style.
Capitol, his American label at the time, didn’t quite know what to do with any of this. The record got respectable reviews, a few festival appearances, and then largely disappeared from the commercial conversation. Which is more or less what happens to most genuinely grown-up music.
It found its people anyway. It always does.