A House Safe For Tigers ·. Lee Hazlewood. Lee Hazlewood: A House Safe For Tigers. A House Safe For Tigers![]() Music Review. · The A. V. Club. Lee Hazlewood enjoyed tremendous success as a songwriter and performer in the ’6. After penning hits for, and dueting with, Nancy Sinatra and others, Hazlewood hit the road for Europe, tired of fame and worried about his son getting drafted to serve in Vietnam. He stopped frequently in Sweden where he made friends, records, and Swedish television specials like Cowboy In Sweden. As its title suggests, it followed the Oklahoma- born singer- songwriter—and his horse—across “the land of the midnight sun.” Hazlewood found a sympathetic collaborator in the special’s director, Swedish filmmaker Torbjörn Axelman, and the two reunited for more film projects, from the self- explanatory Nancy & Lee In Las Vegas to the obscure, like the virtually impossible- to- see A House Safe For Tigers, in which Hazlewood and Axelman wander the island of Gotland, reflecting on life and encountering surreal imagery. Reissues of Hazlewood’s albums in the late ’9. U. S. and those recorded after his departure, won him a new audience while creating an even greater demand for the albums that hadn’t yet appeared. Hazlewood’s soundtrack to A House Safe For Tigers has long been one of the hardest to find, but anyone who could track it down discovered it had a lot more than scarcity going for it. Now reissued as part of an ongoing series of Hazlewood releases by Light In The Attic, it’s one of the strongest efforts in Hazlewood’s catalog, capturing his toughness, sentimentality, and oddball pop songcraft. It also captures the way Hazlewood the performer understood how to interpret Hazlewood the songwriter. The Nights,” a tale of the white man’s injustice to Native Americans, needs Hazlewood’s gravelly, speak- sung delivery to put its message across, but in his hands it packs a melodramatic wallop. Our Little Boy Blue,” a song about toys waiting for an owner who will never return, skirts kitsch but never crosses over, letting a swelling martial beat provide the unspoken explanation for the child’s absence. It’s an understated song of frustration from a man in retreat from the times. As described in the reissue’s extensive liner notes, the film features a shot of Hazlewood’s “to do” list which includes the item “Don’t Call Nixon a sonofabitch or son- of- a- bitch.”) The album is otherwise dominated by songs about the pleasures of retreat, friendship, and idyllic isolation. Souls Island” joins reflections on the nature of existence to a simple guitar line and tasteful orchestration, and on the title track Hazlewood summons up a blessing: “May your house be safe from tigers / May you always be my friend.” It’s the sound of someone who’d come to understand the value, and preciousness, of finding a little peace and quiet with someone he could trust while the rest of the world continued to tear itself apart. Lee Hazelwood - A House Safe For Tigers. Soundtrack album, from Hazlewood’s mysterious exile in Sweden…. It was apt that Lee Hazlewood chose for his own epitaph the phrase “Didn’t he ramble?” Certainly, he covered a lot of distance in an unusual career: he helped Duane Eddy invent his sound, rubbed shoulders with Phil Spector, made a career for Nancy Sinatra in which his own baritone added a note of menace. Since Hazlewood’s death in 2. Sweden. At the centre of this sojourn, in 1. Hazlewood’s standards, not least because of its unapologetic good- humour. You might even call it romantic. Article: May this house be safe from tigers. "May this house be safe from Saddam," and made up how to do that by attacking Iraq, and the people bought into it. May This House Be Safe From Tiger. $9.99; Buy It Now; Free shipping;. Follow may this house be safe from tigers to get e-mail alerts and updates on your eBay Feed. Find album release information for A House Safe for Tigers - Lee Hazlewood on AllMusic AllMusic. New Releases. Featured New Releases; Editors' Choice; All. Lee Hazlewood House Safe For Tigers Light In The Attic. Country rock, Soundtracks & Library music. CD LITA087 £13.99. Out of stock. LP LITA087 £18.99. Out of stock. A House Safe for Tigers A House Safe for Tigers. Subscribe and discover new music. Follow CD Baby on Company Info. Ostensibly, A House Safe For Tigers is the soundtrack to a 1. Hazlewood’s frequent Swedish collaborator, director and sometime artist/poet Torbjörn Axelman. The pair made numerous films together, with the images swimming loosely around the songs in a way that burnished Hazlewood’s myth. In the 1. 97. 0 film, Cowboy In Sweden, he was a lost horseman, a wandering star in a land of lovelies. A House Safe For Tigers is the product of grander ambitions, with Axelman styling it as a “semi- documentary”, set on Gotland, his island home off the South- East coast of Sweden. What happens? Well, the film’s continuing obscurity means we must refer to Wyndham Wallace’s sleevenotes, where Axelman gnomically explains, “we let situations occur, let whatever happen happen. We showed realistic scenes from daily life and made them like a diary.” More specifically, Gotland life was compared to Hazlewood’s memories of oil rigs and riding the railroad. There is footage from Hazlewood’s birthplace in Port Arthur, Texas, and 8mm film of his parents. There is also, it seems, a man dressed in women’s clothing, a witch scattering tiger repellent, and shots of Hazlewood running the Gotland marathon. You can see why it’s only a semi- documentary. But there are revealing moments. The unlikely marathon man also notes that to escape, he wrote “simple words filtered through complicated songs”. The film was barely seen, and the album sank with it. The happy news is that, strange as it is, the soundtrack works beautifully without reference to the movie. It features a funky orchestral interlude (“Las Vegas”), a reprise of The Shacklefords’ “Our Little Boy Blue” (a Hazlewood children’s song which can be viewed as a cousin of Rolf Harris’s “Two Little Boys”), and an orchestral interlude which collapses into cacophony (“Absent Friends”). Generally, the mood is playful and benign, reflecting the peace Hazlewood found in Gotland. It is dominated by the magisterial “Souls Island”, a career highlight. Often, Hazlewood talks rather than sings, but here he croons prettily, invoking a sense of peace so powerful that he might also be anticipating heaven. A House Safe For Tigers Soundtrack Lee Hazlewood. Rate It! Avg: 4.0 (4 ratings). Sand Hill Anna and the Russian House. 2:57: $0.99. 06: Lars Gunnar and Me. 2:52. Listen to music by Lee Hazlewood on Pandora. A House Safe For Tigers. Our Little Blue Boy. 4. Absent Friends. 5. Sand Hill Anna And The Russian House. 6. This being Hazlewood, the shadow of death lingers, but the mood is majestic, with cinematic orchestration. Producer/arranger Mats Olsson (a veteran of several Eurovision campaigns) was given free rein by Hazlewood, who later compared the end results to Bach or Beethoven. Certainly, in the context of a pop record they are satisfyingly grandiose, and perfectly matched to the high emotion of Hazlewood’s lyric: “Except for the dream in our mothers’ eyes, you and I would still ride the wind,” he sings, “a pair of seeds that no one needs…”. Souls Island” is later reprised with a Swedish commentary from Axelman which seems to draw parallels with the mythology of the American West. The words “Alcatraz” and “Wounded Knee” jump out from the monologue. Also worth noting are “Sand Hill Anna And The Russian Mouse” – a bizarre tale of Gotland grouse shooting, and “Lars Gunnar And Me”, a Johnny Cash- like number in which drink is taken and squirrel is eaten (Lars Gunnar being Hazlewood’s nickname for Axelman). The American Indian theme is revisited in “The Nights”, a weird little story song about hard work and sorrow, resilience and exile. EXTRAS: 7/1. 0 Essay by Wyndham Wallace.
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