A Boolean argument was expected.

When I was in college I had the privilege of befriending an exceptional musical talent by the name of Jen Bernard. As I got to know her better — for a year we shared a house in the heart of the student ghetto — I learned that her talent came naturally, that her entire family was as richly steeped in musical tradition as she. (Jen’s current project is The Stolen Sweets, a 1930s swing jazz revival group that is a fine showcase for her ear for close, intricate harmonies. Their tasty recording debut, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, is available from CD Baby.)

One chilly winter weekend that year, several of us descended on the Bernard family homestead in northern lower Michigan, known as Earthwork Farms. It was then that I met the youngest sibling, Seth, who at the time seemed to me like your typical preteen boy, interested in sports and horseplay and hanging out with friends more than family.

Years later, I was pleased to discover that Seth, despite erstwhile appearances to the contrary, had learned well at the family hearth and has become, perhaps, the most talented Bernard musician of them all.

From his first recorded output, 2001′s Hello Fellow Travelers, Seth Bernard has demonstrated a very unique and personal songwriting style, one that understands well its myriad influences and yet chooses its own independent path. Subsequent solo releases, Constellation (2003) and Being This Being (2004), have shown growing maturity, along with a lively wit. Seth is comfortable in his music, in his voice, and in himself. I’m particularly fond of “Sassafras,” “Travel,” and “Collage,” all off the 2004 album.

All his releases are self-produced and appear on his Earthwork Music label. That name, and the fact that he has built a home studio on the farmstead, are testament to his love of family — a theme that recurs frequently in his songs. Among the members of Seth’s family is Daisy May Erlewine, who has also released solo works on the Earthwork label. Seth and Daisy May have toured and performed together for some time; for one, she lends her clarion, chiming voice to a beautifully harmonious accompaniment on “Sassafras.”

In early 2006 they released their first duet album, Seth Bernard and Daisy May. Although they don’t share songwriting credits (each track on the record is attributed to one or the other, but never both), their musical partnership is one of perfect symbiosis and playful give-and-take. Even on the sadder songs, the joy of making music together comes through in every track.

On this album Seth and May are joined by a trio of friends to form “The Copper Country Quintet,” a name that stems from the fact that the recordings were primarily made in Calumet, Michigan, way up near the tip of the Keweenaw Peninsula in the U.P. — copper mining country. Over the course of two days they recorded on the stage of the Calumet Theatre, a classic and well-preserved venue built in 1900 during the mining industry’s heyday.

This was a perfect choice. Judging from photographs, the theatre is gorgeous. Judging from the music, it has fantastic acoustics. In fact, the room has such a warm, strong presence on this album that it has its own entity, almost as if it’s an additional musician in the group. I don’t think I’ve heard a room play such an integral, positive role in a recording since the Cowboy Junkies set up shop in Toronto’s Holy Trinity Church back in 1987. And frankly, Seth Bernard and Daisy May deserves the same kind of long-term recognition as a piece of beautiful, timeless art that The Trinity Session has received over the years.

I can only hope that, some time soon, Seth and May make a trip “out west” and play a gig or two in Chicago.

The Onion AV Club has a feature called “Random Rules” where the club “asks some of its favorite people to set their MP3 players to shuffle and comment on the first few tracks that come up—no cheating or skipping embarrassing tracks allowed.” Sounds like fun fodder for a music–related babble.

“Eastern Jam” — Country Joe & The Fish

A psychedelic instrumental off of I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die that I was reminded of thanks to a decent documentary that VH1 has been rerunning like clockwork called The Drug Years. The show is rife with interesting, often obscure tracks, and the first two episodes are mainly psychedelia, apropos considering the subject matter. An excerpt of this track is also acting as my ringtone right now.

“Everybody Wants You” — Billy Squier

A classic rocker from Emotions In Motion, the second of one of the greatest back-to-back efforts ever (Don’t Say No being the first). It’s too bad that the pink satin sheets video debacle a few years later not only derailed his career, but also tends to colour all his good stuff… take for example the high falsetto he hits when singing “you never realize what you do to yourself,” a line which might now be viewed as prescient.

“The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” — Traffic

A jazzy slow-burner. I discovered as a college freshman that this album as a whole is an excellent choice for putting on repeat play for a long, pleasurable afternoon of lovemaking.

“Hello, It’s Me” — Todd Rundgren

Part of a Todd Rundgren – Meat Loaf – Jim Steinman axis I’ve been into lately. (Supposedly this song is a tribute to Carole King, which is totally on-topic… but I’m looking for a disgression here.)

Todd Rundgren produced the seminal 1978 work Bat Out Of Hell, and also played lead guitar and a number of other instruments on it. This album, which holds a distinct position within my all-time Top 10 Desert Island albums list and also happens to be the first CD I ever bought, has the odd creditation of being a Meat Loaf album, with — in much smaller print — “Songs by Jim Steinman.”

This is a weird thing, something I believe was a marketing decision by the record label. Meat and Jim were a duo, and this album is the finest example of their collaboration — Jim writing the songs and pounding the keys, Meat singing in his inimitable bombastic style and, as Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote in his allmusic.com review, “find[ing] the emotional core in each song, bringing true heartbreak to ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad’ and sly humor to ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’” But someone must have decided that an offbeat stage name like “Meat Loaf” would sell better without sharing top billing, and Steinman was relegated to the bottom tier.

This unequal billing must have contributed to their long estrangement. As Newsweek noted in a 2006 article, Bat Out Of Hell was followed by “a series of bitter disputes about how to divvy up profits and credit among collaborators.”

The pair started on a follow-up at the record company’s behest, but Meat’s voice was shot and Jim finished the record with himself at the mic, and released it as his first (and so far only) solo album, Bad For Good. A year later another Meat Loaf album was released, Dead Ringer, which some purists consider to be “the real Bat Out Of Hell II.” For a long time it was unavailable on CD in the States, but this is a solid record, highlighted by a duet track with Cher giving her all in the Ellen Foley role. But whether it’s from abuse or the recording or a little of both, Meat’s voice sounds a bit thin. This time, the “Songs by Jim Steinman” credit is nowhere to be found on the cover, and is stashed in the liner notes.

That may have been the clearest symptom of their falling out, because Dead Ringer was Meat and Jim’s last collaboration until 1993, when they put out the record with the commercially pandering title Bat Out Of Hell II: Back Into Hell. Crass title choice aside, it’s really a fun record, full of the old, grandiose fire. I’m particular to the track “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are,” which despite a title that’s a silly twist on a common modern-day cliché is really about how one’s own past can take on significance in the mind far beyond what it deserves.

More animosity may have come between Jim and Meat Loaf (even though at least Steinman’s name made the cover of the 1993 album), because thirteen years later Meat Loaf is releasing yet another album that resurrects the Bat Out Of Hell moniker: Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose, due out on Halloween 2006. Yet Jim Steinman was not involved with the production. In fact, he even tried to stop the use of the title through a lawsuit, but has since settled. Of the album’s fourteen tracks, only seven are penned by Steinman — and those appear to be rehashes, including one previously recorded by Celine Dion and another, “Bad For Good,” that was the title track for Steinman’s solo album back in 1981. It remains to be seen whether Meat Loaf’s voice has anything left to give. However, before even hearing the record the purist in me is disappointed that it’s a Bat Out Of Hell album in name only.

Unfortunately, most of the press I’ve seen is unimaginative enough to want to call part III the third of “the Bat Out Of Hell trilogy,” which implies a three-part whole. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The Monster Is Loose is just a sequel to a sequel… or, as Steinman himself put it when disdaining the re-use of the title: “one-hit wonder.”

Off on one more tangent here, and one which comes back around to tie off this little set of songs.

After Dead Ringer, during the long falling-out period with Meat Loaf, Jim Steinman wrote a couple of epic melodies for Bonnie Tyler’s Faster Than The Speed Of Night — both of them typical Steinmanesque power ballads filled with over-the-top orchestrations, wild swings in tempo and volume, and grandiose lyrics. (By the way, I’ve always loved “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and the discovery that it’s a Steinman composition was a moment of simultaneously being surprised and saying “oh, that makes sense.”)

Otherwise, Steinman kept busy as a producer and arranger. One of the albums he produced was Billy Squier’s Signs Of Life album — on which appears “Rock Me Tonite,” of the aforementioned pink sheets infamy.

“Tend My Garden” — James Gang

A great little Joe Walsh-penned woo-pitch that long ago I included on a mix tape for a new girlfriend early in our ultimately ill-fated courtship. That’s not really my primary connotation with this song — rather it makes me think of my first home ownership (“I’m home grown, growin’ my own”) — but some thirteen-plus years later I’d love to see that long-lost set list just to see what else I thought pertinent at the time.

What a wonderful show. It was so fabulous that I was unable to compile a set list. That’s saying something: ordinarily my left brain has room — while my right brain groks the music — to memorize the list, using mnemonic devices that attach a song title or verse to the song’s number in the order.

Yet all I could do at Ian’s show (Friday, 13 October 2006 at the Park West Theatre in Chicago) was watch and listen and smile until my face hurt. So many of my favourite songs, of course, and played by an extremely talented group… but moreover the music had such a depth of complexity that I found myself befuddled with amazement.

For instance, I’d always known about the influence traditional English folk music had on Jethro Tull’s music — I mean, it’s fundamental — but this was the first time I’d noticed how much jazz played a role. Combine that with an ensemble numbering nineteen (including Ian), and some brilliant arrangements, and you have one excellent show.

Ian’s voice, well… he was just getting over a cold, and of course he’s been singing for quite a while, and the result was on-key but thin… lovely yet wispy, almost ethereal. The good news is that the sound mix was geared for it, so when the band rocked out it still didn’t totally wash out the lyrics.

Backing him was a quality rock combo (guitar/keys/bass/drums), but then also a chamber orchestra of around ten strings plus a handful of winds — including the first bass clarinet I’ve seen in years. They were all from the Boston Conservatory of Music, and Ian swore that the fact that all but one were women was merely the result of the applicant pool.

To be honest, though, the star of the show was the solo violinist, Ann Marie Calhoun. Not only is she disastrously, wars-are-fought-over-less beautiful, but she is an exceptionally talented violinist. She’s also a virtuosa bluegrass fiddler, and introduced a traditional bluegrass tune by saying that before she ever met Ian she had seen a picture of him on an old Tull album sporting his beard “like clouds” I think she put it, and she said she knew right then that Ian had “a little mountain man inside him.”

Anyway, she had consummate stage presence, fearsome violin licks, and, well, to be crass, a killer bod. I couldn’t take my eyes off her as the waves of sound washed over me, smiling with glee the whole time.

Apparently, having at least as much fun as me, was the orchestra. These kids were having the time of their lives. Years of practice and performance in stodgy orchestral concerts had not prepared them for a thousand adoring Jethro Tull fans cheering and swooning and giving multiple standing ovations. Ian mentioned that they had been getting used to life on the tour bus — “a little too used to it,” he said. Whether that’s true or just a wry joke, they certainly were still awestruck at being on tour. At Park West the route from the green room to the stage is a twisted path that passes through a public hallway, so security cordons it off during performer transitions. One of the musicians was overheard to remark how cool it was to have security staff holding back the people for them. It must have been a genuine rock star moment for them — a far cry from a black-suited string quartet.

My friend (and WXRT morning man) Lin Brehmer put out a terrific/funny/astute “Lin’s Bin” this past week, about how one should never go backstage to meet one’s rock star idols. He’s so right, and not just because it’s apparent from his description of backstage itself (“backstage is a boiler room with bad furniture… backstage is the devil’s rummage sale”) that he’s had plenty of opportunity to visit the basement of the Riviera Theatre.

All too often, the chance to meet your favourite rock star will only end in disappointment. My brief meet-and-greet with the gentlemen of Hot Tuna a few years ago is a good example. I wanted to tell Jorma and Jack how godlike I think they are, how they were the musical core around which was built one of the greatest rock bands ever (the Jefferson Airplane), how their music forms so much of the soundtrack to my life. Awestruck, what I managed to blurt out was, “hi, uh, I’m a big fan.”

That’s just if you’re lucky enough to have them actually listening. Most of the time, they’re in the midst of a long tour, distracted, exhausted, moments after pouring it out on stage, and who’s to blame them if they’re barely listening to yet another fan telling them how awesome they are, how “I have all your albums.” And that’s just the nice ones. Truth be told, many of my musical idols are people I intend never to meet, because no matter how much I like their music, on a personal level I have a sense that they’re assholes.

And yet — that’s not always the case.

A couple of years ago Randy Newman came to the Park West for a solo show. It was an excellent performance, two full sets totalling some 32 songs that ranged over his entire career.

I remember hearing “Short People” on the radio as a kid, and in high school I always got a kick out of his video for “I Love L.A.” — but it wasn’t until college that I really started listening to his music, and found a masterful songwriting ability combined with a scathing satirical wit. By now, yes, I have (almost) all his albums… so when I thought maybe I’d have a chance to get his autograph on one or two of the covers, it took some thought to decide which ones. Ultimately, Sail Away and Little Criminals made the cut.

Anyway, after the show I was hanging around the manager’s office, hoping to hand my CDs off to the production manager, when Randy’s tour manager came in and, after a brief conversation, offered to have me meet the man myself. I was hesitant — knowing how these things can go. Plus, I had led myself to believe that in person he’s something of a curmudgeon.

How wrong I could be.

Randy Newman was friendly, and cheerful, and put me at ease while I tried overly hard to be deferential. As he signed my CDs, we got to talking about music, of course. I think maybe the kicker for him was when he asked if I played any instruments and, after the obligatory and self-deprecating mention of sloppy guitar, I said I’d played mellophone in the Spartan Marching Band. His eyes lit up, and suddenly mellophones and marching bands were the subject of choice.

In fact, in the midst of the discussion a couple of VIPs came in, possibly music industry types or the like, escorted by the tour manager for the standard meet-and-greet. I got up to leave, but Randy waved me back to my seat. After a very short back-and-forth with the VIPs, lasting no more than a minute or two, Randy turned back to me and picked up our conversation right where we’d left off.

In all, I was there for less than ten minutes — but it’s a memory I’ll keep forever.

Funny thing is, a friend of mine also met Randy that night. This friend is highly intelligent, has the gift of gab, and probably has ten years head start on me in terms of being a fan of Randy Newman. Yet their conversation was brief, perfunctory, and unmemorable. I suppose the fact that my friend could be considered a “music industry type” might have had something to do with it.

Or, perhaps, it’s because he never played the mellophone.