Continued from page 26
In the '90s, Numan says, he was
plagued by debilitating bouts of writer's
block. He experimented with soundtrack
work, tried unsuccessfully to pen hooky
hits ('92's Machine + Soul failure), then
threw the rulebook out
the window for more dissonant late '90s experiments like Exile. He
thought he would whip
out a rapid-fire followup
to his 2006 effort Jagged.
But – even with Reznor
inviting him onstage and
covering his song "Metal,"
plus a 30th Anniversary
Pleasure Principle tour –
Numan was sinking into
clinical depression. And
he couldn't hop in a plane
and fly away from it.
"It wasn't so much
writer's block with "Splinter" – it was more
like life itself was getting in the way,"
Numan recalls. "When I did try to write, it
was there, but everything else was wrong.
Life itself was wrong. It just wasn't the
time to be taking on a big project like an
album. From the early '90s on, each album,
compared to the one before, has always
been much more difficult to make for me.
Each album was becoming like a mountain
to climb, and I know that there's going to
be an emotional rollercoaster that goes
with them."
Numan is nothing if not candid. With
scientific precision, he sketches a diagram
Continued from page 18
until 1982, when Scottie died and the
band broke up. A few years later, the
blues claimed Nora Jean in the form of
the late, legendary guitarist Jimmy
Dawkins, who recruited her to sing with
his band and record on his label, Leric.
"My friend told me about a new club
that had opened on
Roosevelt. I went and
Jimmy Dawkins said,
'ain't you that girl
who
sang
with
Scottie?' He asked
me if I had made a
record. I told him no
and he said if I wrote
a song, he'd record it
for me. I went right
home and started
writing. It was a soul
Floyd Taylor: 1954-2014
blues song called
"Untrue Love." "
Jimmy Dawkins
helped
kick
off
Nora's blues recording career with her
own single and appearances on his Feel
The Blues (JSP) and Can't Shake These
Blues (Earwig). After touring Europe
with Jimmy for years, Nora took a hiatus
to raise her sons in 1992. She returned in
2002 with her first album, Nora Jean Sings
The Blues (Red Hurricane). An
enthralling offering of straight ahead
blues that inspired several Blues Music
Award nominations and a "Keeping The
Blues Alive" award, the CD represented
of what he went through. "I was massively
depressed, and I was on medication for
that," he says, matter-of-factly. "I was having anxiety attacks, and my wife was experiencing post-natal depression, and she
was in big trouble. So our marriage went a
bit rocky for awhile – we never spli Ё