Rupert Guenther

Poetry Flowing into Music

American-Australian singer-songwriter, award-winning poet, celebrated chef, writer, and composer of oratorio and opera, Joe Dolce’s new pop-folk-rock album Green-Eyed Boy of the Rain is a culmination of many years, and in some cases decades, of his unique poetry and music, begun or completed at some earlier time and tucked away, bookmarked for a future occasion. The occasion, it turns out, has now arisen, with the album’s release arriving after much time in the studio sprucing up, recording some material afresh, or rerecording ideas from the vaults in a richly-produced final version as an album of twelve tracks. The result is a great listen, which grew on me each time as my senses adjusted to the moods and poetic complexities of Dolce’s musical sphere.

          We need to keep in mind when critiquing Dolce’s music that each of these songs is the work of a highly-informed and serious poet and composer in the deepest classical music sense, in fact one who has not only written oratorio and opera, but orchestrations and string quartet scores, studied the twelvetone works of Arnold Schoenberg, the Dadaism of Luciano Berio, inverted or reversed melody lines, and the mathematic intricacies of J.S. Bach, as much as being an initiate of the guitar playing of Jimi Hendrix, the Byrds and the Beatles, among other influences, and embracing the nuances of folk music and verse from Renaissance times onwards, as well

as being a well-versed practitioner of a myriad of literary styles and a keen observer of—and participant in—contemporary Australian arts and culture.

      The variety of musical influences and styles over the twelve tracks makes an engaging and highly intriguing collection, from quirky references to the wide-eyed joy of Marvel comics and 1950s rock ’n’ roll, to David Byrne-like 1980s beats, New Orleans brass bands and voodoo, topped off here and there

with some classy salutes to John Lennon vocals and George Harrison-esque chords and voicings. The album is full of deep reflections on life, sophisticated lyric stanza sequences, authentic folk fingerpicking, slide guitar, and a restrained but stylish cabaret influence in several places. The result is highly personal but never heavy, and the intensity is offset by a couple of raucous feel-good New Orleans-style numbers with lively horn sections poking their heads out in the mix.

     Each track is emotional, transparent and intimate, with great arrangements and instrumentation, sublime backing vocals, and a cast of some of the finest session musicians in the land supporting Dolce’s vocals, which range from vulnerable and reflective to outright excitable, without ever distracting from the gravitas and backstories of the songs.

      Every song had its genesis in beautifully crafted poems (most of them published in Quadrant) before being intuitively woven together with music. This conveys in the listening some of the mystical reach that poetry has as spoken word, achieved in song, akin to the unusual scope of some of the Doors’ songs. The whole album is hinged together on strong human life themes, great musicianship, and Dolce’s secret weapon (which may come as a surprise to some, as it did to me): his seriously impressive guitar playing, full of tone, sparkling melodious phrasing and great hooks and solos which reflect and complement the intent of each track. This is in no small part contributed to by the fine work of the Australian producer Robin Mai, whom Dolce wisely engaged to help record and produce the album. And as importantly to me, in the spirit of those rare great albums in pop music’s past, Green-Eyed Boy of the Rain is successful as a whole-album listening experience, not just a disc with twelve good tracks.

            The first song, “Out of Book”, with its reverse taped guitar intro, steady walking pulse, deft chord progression and John Lennon Double Fantasy-style sound, accompanies the lyrics’ strong medicine of realisation in the face of the complexity confronting the denial strategist, who forever lives in avoidance and attempts to protect himself from truth to the point of insanity. Full of acute and incisive verses, such as this one at the start:

You look at your position and you see the trap,

your clock’s running down and you can’t go back,

you’re looking for some strategy that’s sane,

you’re wondering if you sacrificed just what you’d gain

and playfully ending with the famous musical device of the tri-tone cadence known in the Middle Ages as “the devil’s interval”.

        The perfectly arranged “Mr Q” has an almost Little Richard driving pace and apparent excitement around the adventures of the Marvel comic book

superhero figures, while the complexity and confusion of childhood sexual abuse lurks in the background, with the ultimate end where predators have access to the kids they crave. It’s a true story from Dolce’s childhood about the comic book shop owner who was also the local paedophile, who for years preyed on the kids who, full of excitement, came to the shop to read the latest Marvel comics. In its blending of ideas, context and perfect idiomatic music, this is one of the tracks that makes the album great.

         The title track is set in an upbeat country-influenced, Everly Brothers style and is highly listenable in both the reflections in the story and the melodic setting. The song utilises some of the traditional themes of country music territory—loss and jealousy—where “anger and sorrow become the same thing” as Dolce sings, but he effectively brings in a more disturbing flavour of self-reflective acknowledgment of the jealousy, rather than leaning on the blame of a someone-done-me-wrong story.

        "The Ballad of the Gangster Paul Kelly” is a rollicking folkloric story set in the New York gangs at the end of the nineteenth century, with a Louis Armstrong-like trumpet-driven arrangement, and an upbeat fiesta feel. The inclusion of a cutting 1970s-style lead guitar solo strewn throughout is another example of Dolce’s tasteful use of his talents. The rapid pace of the story, with its ever-increasing string of events, episodes and facts of this New York gangster’s adventures, makes an engaging homage to the traditional folk ballad.

      "Dry Whisky Tongue” is a tongue-in-cheek fast country-blues rocker in a caricature of “why I need my whisky”, a masterfully uncluttered backing arrangement threaded with a tasteful Duane Allman-style slide guitar. Again this is an example of what I feel is an innate and instinctive feel for American music, a kind of insider view of the nuance in the music, which Dolce as an American born and bred has plenty of. It’s the kind of music alluded to in bar scenes in some movies, but here in Dolce’s hands it has an authentic feel.

      "The Murder of Alberta King” is a thoughtful and beautiful duet about the senseless murder of Martin Luther King’s mother Alberta as she knelt in prayer in her church in 1974, created in a countryblues-influenced style. It is one of three tracks using the villanelle form, with atmospheric slide playing on a resonator guitar, set with exquisitely sensitive vocal harmonies between Dolce and his daughter. The arrangement is artfully woven in with authentic New Orleans trumpet lines and patches of gospel organ adding depth and historic poignancy to the southern flavour.

     "In the Next Life” is a gentle ballad about Dolce’s mother and father, beautifully channelling George Harrison down to the diminished chord progression and the title/ chorus line, with its faith in finding peace and harmony with those departed when they are reunited. It is replete with the simplicity and space which characterises many of

Harrison’s spiritually-themed songs and which Dolce deftly uses in reference, yet still makes it his own.

      "Give Me Little Sugar with My Beer, Sylvie” shows off Dolce’s handle on vaudeville, cabaret and traditional American sideshow music, with a beat and guitar lines which the king of twang Duane Eddy himself would have approved of, in this humorous story of growing up fast in the wild old America. It is full of exaggerated characters and situations, and the fast tempo and double-time beat of the music charges along in perfect step all the way.

        "Marie Laveau La Belle Voodooienne” is a superbly crafted cabaret song in tribute to the nineteenth-century French-mulatto New Orleans voodoo queen Marie Laveau, who bridged medicine, religion, witchcraft and the poor with high society in her quest to heal and counsel. Dolce captures the atmosphere in a graceful arrangement with touches of New Orleans horns, eight-bar chord progression and traditional up-tempo marching-band beat. 

      "I Never Found Those Lips Again”, the second villanelle on the album, themed on lost love, is a strikingly beautiful song, in large part brought about by the vocal harmony and delicate delivery by Dolce and his partner Lin van Hek. The arrangement supports an unhurried vocal, where even the timbre of the voices alone could tell the story, set over steady, masterly finger-picking by Dolce on the guitar:

an almost heal but never mend

the unannounced recall of bliss

I never found those lips again

I never thought that I could bend

     "Anemone” is a tragedy of love, drawing on the Greco-Roman myth of Venus and Adonis, again with Dolce and van Hek’s sensitive harmonies, offset with reverb-drenched echoes of Hank Marvin-style guitar lines throughout. It is another example of Dolce’s ability to breathe life into a story in both delivery and music:

Venus wept over dying Adonis,

she wept for the one who was taken too soon.

Oh how fragile and brief, Anemone,

petals so lightly attached, Anemone,

oh how quickly they fall, Anemone,

blow away with the wind, Anemone.

      The last song on the album, “Shoemaker’s Moon”, the album’s third villanelle, becomes the perfect setting for the story of the aspiring astronaut Eugene Shoemaker’s lifelong passion for the stars and his desire to fly into space and walk on the moon. The main import of the story is recited in spoken word, with the rest of the song as a simple chorus line, and several sophisticated and melodic instrumental lines, all set over unusually complex chord changes for a pop song. It is set off and closed by a recitation by Dolce of his poem, and includes a reading of the powerfully moving verse from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet which was inscribed on the casket from which Shoemaker’s ashes were strewn by the Lunar Prospector onto the moon’s surface in 1999:

And, when he shall die

Take him and cut him out in little stars

And he will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with night

And pay no worship to the garish sun.

      It’s heartening to listen to an artist of such breadth, original vision and thought as Joe Dolce in the face of an AI-trending world which seems at war with simply facing the truth about itself.

Rupert Guenther is a concert violinist and composer with more than thirty-five independent album releases of his own works including five albums commissioned and recorded by ABC Classic FM. Trained in Vienna, he has performed with the Vienna Chamber Opera and the Johann Strauss Sinfonietta, Olivia Newton-John, George Martin, John Farnham, and Demis Roussos.

Review first published in Quadrant Jan-Feb 2025.