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Jules Shear
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Jules Mark Shear is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist born in Pittsburgh in 1952. Although he has had only one minor hit as a performer ("Steady", which reached number 57 on the US charts in 1985), he has recorded almost twenty albums to date. He made his first appearance on vinyl with The Funky Kings; he also led the critically-acclaimed but commercially-unsuccessful pop group, Jules and the Polar Bears, along with later groups The Reckless Sleepers and Raisins in the Sun.
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Encyclopedia
Jules Mark Shear is an American singer, songwriter, and guitarist born in Pittsburgh in 1952. Although he has had only one minor hit as a performer ("Steady", which reached number 57 on the US charts in 1985), he has recorded almost twenty albums to date. He made his first appearance on vinyl with The Funky Kings; he also led the critically-acclaimed but commercially-unsuccessful pop group, Jules and the Polar Bears, along with later groups The Reckless Sleepers and Raisins in the Sun. He also conceived (and hosted the first 13 episodes of) the MTV series Unplugged.
His songs have been more commercially successful in the hands of other artists, notably Cyndi Lauper, whose recording of "All Through the Night" reached number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1984, and The Bangles, whose recording of "If She Knew What She Wants" reached number 29 in 1986. Singer/songwriter Iain Matthews (still using the spelling "Ian" for his first name at the time) recorded an album of Shear's material, Walking A Changing Line: The Songs of Jules Shear, with synthesizer-dominated arrangements (and containing some previously unreleased songs by Shear), in 1988; Matthews had earlier recorded songs by Shear on other albums.
Shear was the subject of a song by 'Til Tuesday, "J for Jules", after the end of his relationship with that band's singer, Aimee Mann. He also co-wrote the title track of that album, Everything's Different Now, with Matthew Sweet.
He described his Sayin' Hello to the Folks as a "mix tape" of his favorite songs. “I felt like recording songs that I like a lot that I didn’t write," he told Pastes Eliot Wilder in 2004.
“I thought it would be good to record songs that didn’t have a life but should’ve had a life. This is my attempt at giving them a life.” He and Stewart Lerman, the album's producer, selected 12 songs from an original list of 60. These included covers by Todd Rundgren (“Be Nice to Me”), James Brown (“Ain’t That a Groove”), and Brian Wilson (“Guess I’m Dumb”).
Shear was married to singer/songwriter Pal Shazar.
Chart singles written by Shear
The following is a list of Jules Shear compositions that have been chart hits.
| Year | Title | Artist | Chart Positions |
|---|
| US Hot 100 | Canada | UK |
|---|
| 1984 | "All Through The Night" | Cyndi Lauper | #5 | #7 | #64 | | 1985 | "Steady"
co-written with Cyndi Lauper | Jules Shear | #57 | | | | 1986 | "If She Knew What She Wants" | The Bangles | #29 | #29 | #31 | | 1988 | "If We Never Meet Again" | Reckless Sleepers | | #89 | | | 1988 | "If We Never Meet Again" | Tommy Conwell and the Young Rumblers | #48 | | | | 1989 | "(Believed You Were) Lucky"
co-written with Aimee Mann | Til Tuesday | #95 | | | | 1990 | "Til The Fever Breaks"
co-written with Blair Packham, Danny Levy and Matthew Greenberg | The Jitters | | #23 | | | 1990 | "The Bridge Is Burning"
co-written with Blair Packham, Danny Levy and Matthew Greenberg | The Jitters | | #40 | | | 1991 | "I Love Her Now"
co-written with Blair Packham, Danny Levy and Matthew Greenberg | The Jitters | | #55 | | | 1994 | "Whispering Your Name" | Alison Moyet | | | #18 |
Discography
The Funky Kings
Funky Kings (1976)
Jules and the Polar Bears
Got No Breeding (1978)Fenetiks (1979)Economy Package (EP) (1980)Bad For Business (1980) (not officially released until 1996)
Jules Shear (solo)
Studio Albums
Watch Dog (1983)Jules (EP) (1983)The Eternal Return (1985)The Third Party (1989)The Great Puzzle (1992)The Trap Door (EP) (1992)Unplug This (1992)Healing Bones (1994)Between Us (1998)Allow Me (2000)Sayin' Hello To The Folks (2004)Dreams Don't Count (2006)More (2008)
Compilation Albums
- Demo-Itis (1987)
- Horse Of A Different Color: The Jules Shear Collection (1976-1989) (1994)
Reckless Sleepers
Raisins in the Sun
- Raisins in the Sun (2001)
About the Albums
- The Funky Kings also included band member Jack Tempchin, and their album contains the original version of his song, "Slow Dancing". That number, and Shear's "So Easy To Begin", were both recorded by Olivia Newton-John for album Making a Good Thing Better (1977). "So Easy To Begin" was also covered by Art Garfunkel. As of this writing the Funky Kings album is unavailable on CD, and a second album recorded by them remains unreleased in any form.
- Jules and the Polar Bears recorded Got No Breeding in 1978 and f?netiks in 1979. (The title of the second is the phonetic spelling of "phonetic", and its lyric sheet and all credits were printed phonetically.) While the first album appeared on CD in the late 1980s, the second was not released on CD until 2006, and included the contents of the 1980 "Economy Package" EP. A third album, Bad For Business, was rejected by the label, Columbia, and the band broke up. That album was released on CD in 1995.
- Watch Dog was produced by Todd Rundgren and featured Elliot Easton on "Standing Still" (the two would later collaborate on Easton's solo album Change No Change). In addition to featuring "All Through The Night", later a hit for Cyndi Lauper, the album opened with "Whispering Your Name", was later recorded by Alison Moyet and charted in the UK.
- Jules was an EP which contained selections from Watch Dog, plus two mixes of a dance number, "When Love Surges".
- The Eternal Return was the album featuring "If She Knew What She Wants", originally written in the first person (The Bangles version is sung in the third person.) Another song, "Steady", was co-written with Cyndi Lauper and released as a single.
- Demo-Itis was a collection of home and studio demos. Most of the songs had been previously unreleased, but contained demos of "All Through The Night", "If She Knew What She Wants", and other previous album tracks.
- The Third Party was recorded entirely with one acoustic guitar, played by Marty Willson-Piper of the Australian band The Church (band), and one vocal track by Shear. The lyric sheet also included the chords to each song.
- Horse Of A Different Color was a compilation of Shear's band and solo work. It included one song from Funky Kings, "Nothing Was Exchanged".
- The Great Puzzle included a duet with wife Pal Shazar, "Dreams Dissolve in Tears".
- The Trap Door EP contained not only that song (from The Great Puzzle) but also three non-album tracks recorded at the sessions for that album.
- Healing Bones featured Shear's first recorded cover, "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" (originally a hit for The Walker Brothers), and also included a song written with Rick Danko, "Never Again Or Forever". Elliot Easton played lead guitar on all tracks.
- Unplug This, Between Us, and Dreams Don't Count are dominated by Shear's unique rhythm-guitar style, previously unheard in his work. Shear plays left-hand guitar in open tunings by reaching over the neck to fret the strings with his thumb. Unplug This collected solo performances, mostly new acoustic versions of songs Shear had previously recorded. Between Us was a collection of original duets, featuring singers Paula Cole, Rosanne Cash, Carole King, Margo Timmins, Susan Cowsill, and Angie Hart of Frente, among others.
- Allow Me was another full-band project of original material, while Saying Hello To The Folks is a collection of covers.
- Big Boss Sounds (by The Reckless Sleepers) was an original band project of collaborations; however, its only success was "If We Never Meet Again", written by Shear alone. The single version received minor airplay, and was covered first by Tommy Conwell & The Young Rumblers, and later by Roger McGuinn. Lead guitarist of the Reckless Sleepers was Jimmy Vivino currently of The Max Weinberg 7.
- Raisins in the Sun was a one-off collaboration with Harvey Brooks, Paul Q. Kolderie, Jim Dickinson, Chuck Prophet, Sean Slade, and Winston Watson, recorded in May 1999 and released by Rounder Records two years later.
- Dreams Don't Count was released on the student record label MAD Dragon Records through Drexel University. Produced by Jules and long-time friend Stewart Lerman, this album is full of melodic acoustic tracks.
- For his next solo album, More, Shear began billing himself as Jules Mark Shear, as seen in the CD's title and credits. He is also credited with playing lead guitar (as in solos) for the first time on a major release (as opposed to his home recordings on Demo-itis). The album was released on his own label, Funzalo Records.
- Shear was also a major contributor to Elliot Easton's 1985 solo album Change No Change, co-writing all songs and singing background vocals. In the liner notes, both Easton and Shear cite the closing ballad, "Wide Awake", as their favorite track from the album.
Guitar Technique
- Jules's aforementioned unique guitar playing style consists of tuning the guitar in an open-G with an E in the bass. The guitar is not left-hand style per se (with the strings installed in reverse order), but actually held upside down, with the fretting hand's thumb wrapped down over the upper edge of the neck, barring across the strings, and the low E being at the thumb's tip.
Sources
"Review/Television; With Paul Simon, MTV Slips Into Its Cardigan," John J. O'Connor
New York Times, June 3, 1992.
"Pal Shazar," Kurt B. Reighley, Seattle Weekly, March 15, 2000.
"The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Jules Shear," Jeff Giles, POPDOSE, Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
External links
- , official web site.
- , Jules Shear's MySpace Page
- - article from KyndMusic May 2006
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