Wednesday April 28, 1999

By KAREN BLISS -- Jam! Music

Vancouver singer-songwriter Tal Bachman, son of consummate rock 'n' roller Randy, may be wry and witty, but he is also something few modern men would admit -- a romantic.

His self-titled album contains that very thing, a love song so obvious that it must be tongue in cheek.

"No, not at all," he says, "Just pure pop romantic shamelessness."

"You're My Everything" contains such shamelessness as "oh baby", the mention of "cupid", the cliche "love is blind" and a sweeping string section.

"I wanted to write a big love song," says Bachman. "I didn't think of it as going for a cliche, but I heard the Van Morrison 'Have I Told You Lately That I Love You' and it's this simple, beautiful grandiose thing."

Of course, the majority of Bachman's lyrics deals with topics less tangible than the love he's found with The Perfect Woman, as he calls her in the album liner notes, from fate ("If You Sleep") to fame ("Darker Side Of Blue") to fantasy (the single "She's So High") and there's nary a cliche line in the lot.

"You can't write lyrics like 'You're My Everything' to a 'Strong Enough'," explains Bachman. 'Strong Enough' sounds kind of cool and mature. It wouldn't make sense. The mood that you're trying to create and the melodies of the music will dictate what type of rhymes you can use."

He pauses, then gets more philosophical about his reason for writing "You're My Everything".

"We have a great history of the love song. 400 years. And now we have the sex song, the intercourse song. Every love song is like sooner or later, they're grunting and moaning. (Sings in falsetto) 'Ooh baby, when I'm inside you.' It's like the triumph of the male fantasy, love completely devoid of consequence or that's entirely obsessed with the actual act of sexual intercourse.

He pauses again. "I'm not trying to cerebralize this into oblivion," he says, realizing he might be onto something -- perhaps the seed for another song.