© Copyright 1995,Creative Loafing, published April 15, 1995
Where Was It Begun?" asks Simon Bonney at the start of Everyman, the singer/songwriter's ambitious second record. For Bonney, the former frontman of Australia's Crime and the City Solution, Everyman began in 1993 as a road trip across America. Bonney, joined by his pregnant wife and musical collaborator Bronwyn Adams (also formerly of Crime) and their baby daughter, drove from his newly adopted home in Los Angeles to New York to play a series of acoustic shows in support of his debut solo album, Forever. On the trip up Route 40, Bonney collected the images and characters his young family encountered in their new country and eventually used these colored memories as the basis for the recently released Everyman.
The concept album documents the literal and spiritual journey of "Everyman" with the cinematographic style in which Bonney often works. Everyman recalls the landscapes of Wim Wenders (who uses Bonney's songs in many of his movies) and Sam Shepard as much as the musical palettes of Jimmy Webb or Leonard Cohen. With producer Gareth Jones and multi-instrumentalist J.D. Foster, Bonney and Adams hashed out the tale of Everyman using a storyboard approach.
"With each record I have these few things I want to say that deal with the way I view the world," Bonney says of his writing process. "Then I want to put it against a backdrop that's recognizable and people it with characters that are composites of people I've met. Film influences me as much as listening to songs. (My) songs are a very visual thing for me. I like songs that take you on a journey."
Through the endless world of small towns and truckstops, Shoney's and honky-tonks, Greyhounds and Cadillacs, Everyman searches for a "simpler kind of life," "where what you say and what you mean are the same"; he looks for a sense of worth and purpose and community.
"I hope it's a very universal story," Bonney says. "I think everybody feels that sense of being the outsider and of trying to find a way in."
But, he admits, Everyman is really about someone very much like himself. Even a cover of the country classic "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" features a line about turning 33, Bonney's current age. Over the familiar roadside scenery Bonney paints a story very much his own -- one that tries to reconcile his early visions of America as informed by pop-culture imports in his rural Tasmanian homeland with the realities of actually living in the U.S. and raising a family here.
Bonney recalls that growing up in Australia, "We had no first-hand experience of America, yet we were listening to all this American music. So America became this very mythological place, larger than life."
With Everyman, he says, "I wanted to capture my impressions of America from first arriving; that sense I imagined and experienced as an immigrant traveling across America; that sense of newness. You come to America with these preconceptions, and they're all very true and they're all very false."
To portray the big-sky expanses of the American highways and the loneliness of traveling, Bonney and his back-up musicians employ the lap steel, acoustic guitar, dobro, and brush percussion of country music. But while Everyman evokes a rootsy Western spirit, you're not likely to find it filed next to Garth Brooks in record stores.
"The main purpose behind the instrumentations I used wasn't because I wanted to make a country record or a roots record," Bonney says. "I just wanted to use the instrumentation that best supported the lyrics. And if the lyrics are about New Mexico or Arizona, or about (open) space, then there's nothing that springs to mind more than steel and acoustic guitars."
Bonney's current immersion in country stands in sharp contrast to the music he made for over 15 years as leader of the various incarnations of Crime And the City Solution. Beginning in Sidney in the late-'70s as a traditional punk rock group, Crime eventually recruited members of Nick Cave's original band, the Birthday Party, moved to London, then Berlin, and assumed many of the dark and gloomy gothic characteristics Cave became known for.
As Bonney explains it, his first taste of contemporary country music came out of boredom with the music he'd been playing, and with the standard rock canon in general. "In Germany, people tended to hand us music similar to the stuff we were doing, and that's the last thing I wanted to hear. I reached a point where I'd heard the Stooges, I'd heard the Velvet Underground, I'd heard the good Rolling Stones records, I'd heard Van Morrison, Lou Reed. There were not going to be any more great discoveries for me."
Bonney, who's always been more of a lyricist than a musician, heard in the words of his favorite country songs a voice that echoed his own maturing perspective on life. He says, "I found that the lyrics in country music were very strong and interesting on a sociological level. They're all about fear of modernization, alienation, fear the world would change so fast there would be no place for the person in the song. It really captured a certain fear of the unknown which I could relate to quite strongly."
Now with Everyman, Bonney has adopted the songstyles and settings of his new home and crafted an album to which it seems likely every man (and woman) can relate.