Aging gracefully in the entertainment industry is a precarious tightrope walk, wherein a star must lean away from lifeless, by-the-numbers retreads of old successes without falling into fake affectations of youthfulness. The most high-profile success in recent memory was the geriatric Johnny Cash, who embraced his Christian faith more openly and restricted his booming voice to a gravelly murmur in his American I-VI recordings. Topping charts with a mournful cover of Nine-Inch Nails’ “Hurt” in 2003, spurring an Oscarbait biopic in 2005, and becoming the second biggest artist of 2006 with 5 million records sold, Cash proved that age, wisdom, and maturity are still bestselling features in music.
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Now, 70-year old pop icon Tom Jones is lifting liberally from Cash’s playbook with his new album Praise and Blame. Consisting of traditional gospel songs and covers of spiritual songs by artists such as Bob Dylan, P&B features stripped-down folk like Susan Werner’s “Did Trouble Me” and raw, stomp-rock blues like John Lee Hooker’s “Burning Hell.” The production style, eschewing overdubs and allowing Jones to hit flat notes in all the right places, reflects a desire for authenticity that the Welsh singer hasn’t indulged before in his multi-decade career.
But apparently, this new creative direction is a “sick joke.” A leaked email from Island Records’ vice president David Sharpe reads, “We did not invest a fortune in an established artist for him to deliver 12 tracks from the common book of prayer.”
It’s easy to see where he’s coming from, as Island’s market seems to be the tween to college hipster crowd. But does he really think that a gospel album won’t sell? And does he really think that an older audience wouldn’t be a boon to sales? I can’t find anything else noteworthy about Mr. Sharpe’s life, but the snark that it takes to mock an artist for being “churchy” and the laziness it takes never to have checked in on a high-profile project by a new, expensive star on your label until it was finished certainly give us a clue as to what kind of man is financing music production in the United Kingdom and can make or break aspiring artists on a whim.