When he's lusty, he's still monogamous, as when he plays a truck driver speeding home in "Hauling One Thing" or tries to rekindle desire with his wife in "Let's Do That Again," over a steadfast soul beat by way of Al Green and the Eagles.
The close harmonies and steadfast reggae beats of Steel Pulse have carried righteous sentiments about topics including revolution, dancing, Rastafarianism and racist taxi drivers.
Ms. Rodriguez chose collaborators well: she wrote with Mary Gauthier, Gary Louris from the Jayhawks, Dan Wilson from Semisonic and the producer Malcolm Burn, who enfolds her Americana with resonant electric guitars and steadfast march beats.
The music maintains the E Street Band's reassuring solidity, built on the drummer Max Weinberg's steadfast march beats, Garry Tallent's bass lines and the heft of three guitars and two keyboards, along with Clarence Clemons's soul-band saxophone.
Despite all the young professionals and affluent retirees who have arrived in the decades since, and notwithstanding all the other issues the left has rallied around along the way, like gay rights, steadfast support for labor has been the beating heart of this city's progressive politics.
In a pop era of pile-driver dance beats, Mr. Ocean is a steadfast ballad man, with open echoes of self-guided, innovative R&B songwriters like Prince, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Maxwell, Erykah Badu and particularly R. Kelly and his way of writing melodies that hover between speech and song, asymmetrical and syncopated.
It's as if Saint Etienne are guarding against the tendency of ardent, fortysomething music fans to cleave to a kind of combative nostalgia, the steadfast, sneering belief that your past automatically beats anyone's present, that everything was better in your youth.
Within backdrops that change with every song -- steadfast rock, hypnotic electronica, a twitchy drum-and-bass beat -- her voice hovers, airy and introspective, until suddenly it sharpens to a siren wail about lonely nights.
