I Was Thinking Of You The Whole Time

They Say...

Review by Stewart Mason, All Music Guide

Concept albums about love are absolutely nothing new. Heck, even concept albums about lost love and broken hearts go all the way back to Frank Sinatra's epic downers for Capitol Records back in the late '50s. Concept albums about being the deliverer of broken hearts instead of the recipient? OK, that's a furrow less plowed. Neil Cleary's second solo album, I Was Thinking of You the Whole Time, is a song cycle written from the persona of a man lacking even the dash and rapscallion charm to be called a cad or a scoundrel: the central character of these songs is more like an uncommonly self-aware jerk. (In the reconciliation song "Sucker," he addresses the woman who's about to take him back with the casually cruel line "Even I know that you shouldn't, but I guess that's not my problem.") Look at it this way: y'know that guy that all of Aimee Mann and Liz Phair's breakup songs are about? OK, imagine if he wrote those songs about himself, but he didn't quite get what they were so ticked off about: that's a fair approximation of the lyrical thrust of this album. John Hiatt, Nick Lowe, and Randy Newman have all toyed with this persona as well, and echoes of all three waft through these dozen rootsy power pop tunes. Cleary, whose career as an in-demand sideman has tended to take precedence over his solo projects, has most recently been working as fellow New Englander Erin McKeown's drummer, which perhaps helps account for the bits of blues and country twang that crop up throughout the album, but the most bracing songs here are rattling pop/rockers like "The Go-Ahead Girl" (a song hugely indebted to Lowe circa Labour of Lust) and the "Norwegian Wood" pastiche "I Once Knew a Girl." Perhaps the ultimate in breakup albums, since it conveniently provides an object for the freshly dumped to vent their rage towards instead of facilitating self-pitying wallows, I Was Thinking of You the Whole Time is undeniably unique.