Month: August 2012

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366 Songs 222: Ballad of Big Nothing

I’ve written elsewhere, I’m sure, that “Ballad of Big Nothing” is the first time that Elliott Smith actually wrote a song as opposed to a particularly beautiful note to someone (even if that someone was himself); there’s something particularly structured about this song from his Either/Or album that feels complete in a way that earlier efforts didn’t. Perhaps it’s the traditional structure (Is this the first solo song he did that has a separate verse and chorus? That can’t be right…), or the fact that the instrumentation seems to go beyond “Elliott and his guitar and maybe some double tracking,” but this always felt like more of a song song than I’d expected from him, and I find myself with amazing affection for it.

Lyrically, it’s as sharp as ever (“All spit and spite/You’re up all night/And down everyday” is a great description of someone filled with self-loathing, I think), and is delivered with more passion than usual; it feels like the closest Smith had come to Dylan by that point, and may have been the song that convinced some that he had it in him to become a star. He didn’t, of course, and while trying didn’t kill him, it definitely didn’t help him stave off his sadly, seemingly inevitable, end. To this day, I still miss him and wonder what else he could have gone on to do.

(This entry was initially “Between The Bars,” by Elliott Smith, until I realized I’d actually previously written about that song. What was here has been edited into the original entry I wrote, which you can find here.)

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“That Is The Real Unfairness of Fate”

For a certain period in every life, a person can do no wrong. That period may last an hour, a month, or much longer, and that is the real unfairness of fate. But length aside, there does come a moment for everyone when he is invincible, infallible, immortal. Even if it lasts only an afternoon.

– Jonathan Carroll, From The Teeth of Angels

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366 Songs 221: Dig Your Own Hole

Consider this one of those meta-entries: Deadlines and real-world events require me to be elsewhere both physically and mentally than writing for my own site today, and as a result, my head feels not unlike the non-stop “Dig Your Own Hole,” especially when it comes to the wonderfully-jittery processed-to-death bass line that bounces around the track. Give me a few more minutes before the metaphorical shit hits the fan, and then I’ll reach a particular stress level that could best be translated by this track at the 2:44 mark; I’ve never really thought of this song – One of my favorites from the Chemical Brothers’ 1997 Dig Your Own Hole album – as a weird musical metaphor for stress before, but the more the idea sits in my admittedly crazed mind, the more it appeals.

And so, a song that sounds like I feel, and is also one that I happily still listen to, a decade and a half after its original release, by which point its likely become stupidly unfashionable. Luckily, I never claimed to be hip.

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No Time, No Time At All (Special Time Edition)

It’s definitely one of those days that has definitely gotten away from me, and so instead of my usual rambunctiousness in linking to the Time piece of the week, I’ll just say that I didn’t expect to write this and come away from the experience in favor of NBC editing the hell out of its Olympics coverage, but I did. There’s more for me to work out about what the future of factual television programming is in the mental aftermath of all of this, but that’ll have to wait for another day…

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366 Songs 220: Sugar Man

The first time I heard “Sugar Man” was on David Holmes’ Come Get It I Got It mix, and I was convinced that he was doing some weirdness to the song after the 2:00 mark; all those random noises and string saws and the like couldn’t have come from the same original mostly-acoustic song from before, right? And yet, there they are in the full version. I wonder, considering the lyrical content, if they’re meant to imply a trip in some weird, quasi-soundscape way, like a really bad radio play that’s trying to scare the kids off’ve the road to crack.

Considering the precision of the arrangement earlier – Listen to those wonderful horns and that buoyant bassline, this is a song that just sounds amazing – that interlude feels particularly out of place and clumsy; everything else in the song has a clarity – even the extended fake out, with two different performances in either speaker, one echoed and fading faster but lasting longer – that is something to marvel at. I’ve never heard another of Sixto Rodriguez’ songs (It took me long enough to find a full version of “Sugarman” after the David Holmes mix; this was a decade ago, way before Rodriguez’ recent critical revival and movie), but based on this one alone, I can believe that he’s one of those forgotten geniuses that slipped through the cracks of pop culture.

Not content with putting the song on a mix, David Holmes’ then-band project, the Free Association, did a cover of “Sugar Man” that’s… good enough, I guess? But not a patch on the original:

Too much Portishead-lite, not enough of the bounce and lightness of the original, right? The Free Association was a weird thing; I should do something about them sometime.

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Greatest Banner Ad Ever?

Very possibly.

Why the freaky CGI baby? What does that have to do with being a social worker or working full-time while earning your degree? I have no idea. But am I almost tempted to click through to find out? You bet I am.

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366 Songs 219: Sub Rosa

Gene was never “my” band; they were the favorite of my best friend, who understood what they were trying to say more easily than I did. But this song was one of two that I loved, both from whenever he’d play the (second) album Drawn To The Deep End, and whenever I’d hear it on Radio 1’s “Evening Session” show or whatever. It’s the indie boy lullaby of the opening, and its contrast to the guitar wrangling that follows; it gets me everytime, and I’m not entirely sure why. The line about “a hunger to feel welcome/Out in the bedrooms of the world” helps; it’s a wonderfully poetic way of expressing what is, ultimately, sexual frustration and outsider angst, and the subtle brass band pamping away in the background as singer Martin Rossiter mouths those words helps them seem warmer, somehow.

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366 Songs 218: Sunday Sunday

Before they were POPSTARS, Blur did this. And, if you can ignore the cheesiness of the video – I know, it’s hard – then there’s a lot to be enjoyed about “Sunday Sunday,” especially if you wish there were more brass bands in pop songs like I do. But what caught my ear when listening to this recently – or, rather, “Sunday Sleep,” the earlier version that’s on the new Blur box set – was the melancholy in the second verse that’s not that easy to pick out from the performance: “You meet an old soldier and talk of the past/He fought for us in two world wars/And says the England he knew is no more.”

Maybe it’s because I’m older now, but hearing that now makes me feel sad, rather than “Yeah, up yours, Grandad!” I’m not sure which of the two the line is supposed to evoke (If either?), but I feel like it adds some… I don’t know, wistfulness to what is otherwise an intentionally throwaway, somewhat snide slice of nostalgia and the sneering at thereof. Maybe I just need some protein on a plate.

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366 Songs 217: Memory Collector

There are times when Kelley Stoltz evokes his heroes just a little too well, and this is maybe one of those; there’s an undeniably overwhelming Paul McCartney/Elvis Costello vibe to this song, but I love it despite the sense of deja vu and artifice (The line “Dinner’s ready/I hear mother call” strikes me as particularly fake, for some reason). It’s an amusingly precious thing, very short – which is nice; it doesn’t outstay its welcome – and with the integrity of something off the White Album, however you want to take that. It’s something that’ll stick in your head for awhile, and you won’t be entirely sure why.

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366 Songs 216: It’s My Party

Ah, the joys of early ’60s pop, where it was really all about the people you didn’t see, rather than the ones who sang the song. Let’s face it, Lesley Gore is the most disposable part of the original “It’s My Party,” with vocals that do the job, but don’t really impress in any way. No, instead your ear gets drawn to the amazing arrangement (and production?) by Quincy Jones: the horns, the percussion, the piano – everything adds up to make it sound like a party – Seriously, dig the horn stabs, the way the beat is relentlessly upbeat with the Latin-inflected groove, it’s a great sound that’s at odds with the vocals (Not just Gore’s lead, but the swooning “Ooohs” in the background), but in the past way possible. It’s a contradictory wall of sound, and it’s that tension that makes this such a memorable song.

Well, that and the song itself. Putting aside for a second that it’s got such a great, simple and sing-along-able melody, the lyrics are just a perfected teenage melodrama, making “Judy’s wearing his ring” sound like the ultimate betrayal, and “I’ll cry if I want to” appear more noble, more serious, than the petty childish thing that it objectively should be (After all, “you would cry to/If it happened to you”).

It’s no surprise, then, that the song has been covered by countless people through its 49 years of existence (including permanently-aged crooner Bryan Ferry and animated horrorshow Alvin and The Chipmunks), but my absolute favorite version of the song is Amy Winehouse’s, her last official release while she was alive, from 2010:

Putting aside that it’s a great vocal performance – Messy, but just so full of personality, even with that terrible spoken word bit in the middle – again, there’s just a great arrangement there, again from Quincy Jones. That bass line! The new horn arrangement! It’s kind of amazing that, more than four decades between them, Jones can come up with two such wonderful and yet different takes on the same material.