Let’s just call this a thematic choice, considering my current state of mind.
We’re veering deeply towards self-indulgent John Lennon with this song – I don’t know why, but there’s something about the vocals that give it away for me, whenever he’s trying or not – but there’s still a lot to like about “I’m So Tired,” not least of which is the fact that it’s less a song than a feeling. After all, there really is a laziness and lethargy to the opening of the track, a sense of the exhaustion that’s so haunting Lennon (“I’m going insane,” remember). That the song builds from there into something… else. I love that the entire song feels monotonous even as it builds to the sudden end (There’s a thudding repetition to the “No joke/It’s doing me harm” section, as if it really wants to rock out but just can’t get the energy); listening to this, it’s hard to not feel an apathy setting into your head. It’s music as virus, in many ways.
“Real Love” has a strange history. It started as an unfinished demo by John Lennon from a musical he planned to write that he never finished, and in that form, it always reminds me of something from the Plastic Ono Band album (Specifically, “Isolation,” which he steals from – the “I don’t expect you to understand” at 1:38 in “Real Love” is a lift from 1:28 in “Isolation”); it has a pretty melody, but it’s clearly something that unfinished and while the Lennon demos have an intimate quality to them, they’re too slight to really feel anything for, to be honest.
From there, though, the demos ended up in the hands of Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, George Harrison and producer Jeff Lynne as part of the reunion the band had to promote the Anthology project of albums and TV series; they were “completed” by the remaining band members to make a “new” Beatles song, and… Well, it just didn’t work, for many reasons.
Shall we count the ways? Yes, let’s; the way that Lennon’s voice sounds ridiculously digitized and feeble – apparently, due to the technology used to scrub away the existing instruments on the demos – for one, or the terrible effects applied to Harrison’s guitar that makes him sound more like a member of ELO than one of the greatest guitarists in pop music (That said, I still like the solo at 2:15). Or, hey! Ringo’s plodding drums! Ye Gods, Beatles. Way to flatten a promising start into two dimensions.
That would be the end of it; an oddity of one type translated into an oddity of another, and neither one really feeling complete in any substantial way. Except… Regina Spektor covered the song for a charity album a few years back, and her version is everything that I could ever want from this song – and something that actually reveals how beautiful a song this actually is, underneath everything else:
It’s got the intimacy of the original demos, with Regina and her piano, but the performance – the lower notes on the piano, especially, which add a wonderful bassline and depth to it, but also her wonderful, cautious voice (recalling Bjork at times, as she does) – lifts it up to new heights, and by the time the multi-tracked backing vocals come in, swooping like angels, it’s just drop-dead beautiful.
I first heard this version of the song by accident, in a store in Paris when Kate and I were on vacation and I was too embarrassed (and too unable to speak French) to ask the store assistant what she was listening to. What with the rest of the trip, I soon forgot about it and only rediscovered it months later, again by accident, and had that moment of “Oh! It’s that!” Spektor rescues this song, and turns it into something magical with seeming ease, and it’s hard not to imagine that Lennon would’ve thanked her for doing so, if he had the chance.
Constructed from partially-finished tapes left over after his suicide, it’s against all odds that From A Basement on The Hill would be my favorite Elliott Smith album, but it is; whether it’s the arrangements that Smith intended (Apparently unlikely, according to friends who worked on the recording) or something that was made by those assembling the recordings afterwards, the whole album has a great sound that’s surprisingly all the work of Smith himself on the different instruments. “Coast to Coast” is one of the best example of this, from the slow fade-in (Complete with half-hearted drum beats before the whole thing kicks into action) to the fade-out, with a piano – definitely originally intended for a different track, because that one’s been leaked – plays out, slowly, softly against a poet rambling in the background and a recording of Smith, satisfied with what’s just happened and defiant, says “That’s right.” It sounds not just like a full band, but like a great band, one who’ve been practicing together for years and want to sound like the great lost sixties garage band. When I say that I’m saddened for what we didn’t get from Smith because of his death, it’s stuff like this I mean. It’s one thing that he had an amazing gift for melody – and he really did – but the way he approached building song arrangements and picking and choosing from the past yet making it sound contemporary… That was something I truly found unique about him.
This was the first Elliott Smith song I ever heard, I think; definitely the first one I remember hearing, although I suspect that I might’ve seen Good Will Hunting before this and just not really noticed the music because I was too busy being bored by everything else. Nonetheless, I heard this at one of those times in your life when you need to hear someone say something that feels real to you, and you end up attaching almost mystical significance to it as a result. Here, it’s the chorus: “I’m never gonna know you now/But I’m gonna love you, anyhow.” It’s a surrender and declaration at once, of saying goodbye to someone special and yet holding onto them in your heart, something that was entirely what I was going through at the time in my own, melodramatic, way.
As much as the lyrics worked for me, though, the rest of the song more than piqued my interest. You can still hear a lot of what appealed in the live, stripped back version above, with the pretty, circular music in the verse and the raw, striving bridge – not just in the lyric (“I’m here today/And expected to stay on/And on, and on/I’m tired, I’m tired…”) but the performance, as the voice strains to hit the notes and sounds more fragile as a result (It helps that the lyrics almost immediately seek to comfort, as if embarrassed by what just happened: “XO, Mom/It’s okay, it’s alright/Nothing’s wrong”).
The recorded version, too, has an arrangement that pulled me in with echoes of Big Star and the Beatles – Ringo thudding out a waltz time beat on the drums, but a piano line that sounds straight out of Third/Sister Lovers:
The background vocals help the overall effect, as well; there was obviously a mind here that was more interested in music as a continuity, of a lengthy past instead of whatever was hip at the time – Listen to the backing “do do do“s during that bridge, or the multiple “on/And on, and on“s; the strings sneaking in at the end just added to that feeling.
It’s a beautiful song, and a beautifully complete one. When I heard it, I was hooked, and I knew I had to hear more.
To me, “Brontosaurus” is a song that points at all manner of other musical futures while staying defiantly in the “pop” space – It’s surprisingly heavy for the Move, and between that crushing bass riff and Roy Wood’s whiny screamy vocals, suggests that perhaps the band was going to move into the psych-esque space of proto heavy rock that was forming around the time this was recorded. But, then again, there’s the (very Who-esque) switch up with the acoustic chords and piano at 2:32 where things start to swing and get a little Mod-y, and the freakout that follows suggests a possibility closer to the Small Faces (or even the Faces), that odd idea of a laddish band of musos who just wanted to mess around and have fun and somehow accidentally ended up producing some great music along the way. To see a band with as much potential for greatness in 1970 as the Move turn into ELO just a year later is kind of heartbreaking, in its way.
As far as I’m concerned, this is one of those classic pop songs that people should deconstruct and try to get to the bottom of pop music DNA. Certainly, it has all the pieces that you’d expect from a late ’60s pop hit, right down to guitars that sound alternately like the Byrds and the Shadows and harmony vocals to die for (There’s also a piano somewhat down in the mix, which feels oddly particular to that era; you can hear it most clearly just after the choruses, for some strange reason). There’s also that amazing bridge – which starts at 1:36 in the video above – where the song falls down and the builds itself back up again, which is likely my favorite part of the whole thing, aside from Roy Wood’s weirdly nostalgic, neurotic lyrics about a schoolboy crush that terrorized him (“Friends all seem to laugh/I fear I’m apt to make a compromise/Try to reassure myself/My head must need some exercise/Half past ten in the morning/She just took me by surprise,” and later, “I’d love you all to meet her”).
This is an irresistible song, something that sounds hokey and throwaway and then you realize that it’s in your head and it’ll never, ever come out.
Why, yes; I am apparently amped up on electionjuice today.
I have a love-hate relationship with OK Computer, the Radiohead album that hosts this song. On the one hand, it has some great music on there – “Paranoid Android” is probably my favorite Radiohead track of all time, and “Fitter Happier” is kind of wonderful – but on the other, it’s where the band’s prog tendencies started to take wing, leading to some of their most unlistenable, pretentious output. “Electioneering,” though, is a very traditional song in terms of construction, and even “rocks out,” as the kids would say despite Thom Yorke having an attack of politically-themed Tourettes while recording the vocals. Not for the first time, I find myself wondering what Radiohead would have become with a more traditional front man…
Why, yes; this did seem a particularly appropriate choice of song for Election Day (“Vote for me and I’ll set you free!/Rap on, brother, rap on”), but beyond the cheap joke, this is just a wonderful song with an amazing arrangement; listen to the organ in the background, the bassline crouching in the background and those horns making you wish that everything could sound like this, the drummer bringing it when necessary and those vocals. If only electioneering could sound as enticing as this song, politics would be a very different thing indeed.
Monday gets a bad rap, in pop culture. Garfield hates them, as do the Boomtown Rats. And yet, the Mamas and the Papas built this deceptively simple, wonderfully hooky song about them, so they can’t be all bad. Not that this is a tribute to Mondays; it’s another “the weekend is over, and so is the fun” song, despite the zingy strings in the background and lush harmonies smothering the bad news with sunshine (“Oh Monday morning/You gave me no warning/Of what was to be”). I’m a big fan of songs where the sound and the intent seem at cross-purposes, and this is definitely a prime example of that; you listen without really paying attention, and it seems like a relaxed, mellow upbeat tune and then the lyrics tell an entirely different story. Just goes to show: Two-part harmonies counterpointed with two-part harmonies make everything better. Someone should deliver the television news like that.
A particularly melancholic song from a somewhat melancholy album – Unlike Parklife, The Great Escape is never actually fun, as such; it’s sad or its angry, and sometimes it’s both, but “fun”…? Not so much – “He Thought of Cars” is a song that continually falls out of control, the oppressive guitar riff beaten back by the choruses, but always returning, a musical migraine that threatens to overwhelm and suffocate the sadness and surrender of the lyrics (“Everybody wants to go/Up into the blue/But there’s a ten year queue”). Without the benefit of the fade in/fade out, the live versions of the song have an entirely different feel to them that, I suspect, is far closer to what was originally intended:
…It’s just more… I don’t know. More violent in the opening, more abrasive and really underscores the fragility of the verses, and the way the song concludes feels more… final, for want of a better way to put it. I wish this had been the structure (and intensity) of the recorded version. It makes for a clarity of purpose that the album version lacks. This was always a song about being trapped, in so many ways.
