![]() ![]() (Or, as he puts it bluntly at end of the track, “The songs are too weird.”) Moore rarely keeps things simple for an entire tune, and while that’s made his music hard to sell, it’s also made it interesting. ![]() Maybe what Moore really is asking is, “Why can’t I write a simple hit?” Because on that song and many of his others, his melodies can include bracing time-changes, bizarre left turns, hard cuts to dissonance, and stirring moments of reflection. His music is so full of them sometimes you wonder if they’re the only thing in his brain. It’s called “Why Can’t I Write a Hit?”, which Moore must mean as at least half a joke- he clearly can write catchy hooks and choruses, and he knows it. One example opens Personal Appeal, a compilation culled from three decades of his mail-order “Cassette Club” series. In fact, his music often struggles with the temptations and frustrations of chasing success and fame. Not that Moore wouldn’t welcome popularity. His work reveres the history of American popular music, yet his methods prove you can make an original contribution to that canon without bending to commercial conventions. Maybe it’s best to think of him as an outsider looking in. Born in Nashville to a session-musician father, he has long explored many established genres, including pop, rock, classical, funk, metal, even hip-hop. On one hand, Moore is the prototypical outsider, mostly home-recording his idiosyncratic tunes since the early 1970’s. But there’s a simple contradiction running through all of it. One estimate put his discography at over 400 releases, and that was a decade ago. Stevie Moore’s body of work is unmanageably vast. ![]()
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