I love that “What Goes On” sounds like a really basic garage rock song until 1:08, and that guitar solo that sounds like the start of drone rock. The first minute of the song, though, with the jangly guitars, Lou Reed’s growly vocals and the organ in the background… It’s as if the band had been listening to ? and The Mysterions and decided that they wanted to try that really simple, riff-based shit and see what they could get up to. As much as I appreciate a good drone every now and then, it’s that first minute that I love about this song, and everything that follows feels like a let down compared with the grimy energy of what came before.
366 Songs 296: Satellite
There’s a rawness to all of the songs on Elliott Smith, his second (of six) albums, in part because of the recording process – the songs on the album are all self-recorded onto (I think) a six-track, and you can hear the amateur quality in the hiss that surrounds the entire thing, and is most audible as the song finishes. It’s there, too, in the lyrics, though: “And for all you know you’re the only one who finds it strange/When they call it a lover’s moon/The satellite,” as if you’re listening to outsider art made mumbling beauty. This is a wonderfully simple, wonderfully intimate song, so short and unstructured that it feels more like poetry put to music, a sketch of a feeling, rather than any kind of finished music. Like most of Smith’s earliest output, that briefness is a lot of the appeal to “Satellite”; the unrehearsed, unfinished quality that makes it easier to feel as if you’re seeing inside someone’s heart, whether it was true or otherwise.
366 Songs 295: Ana Ng
They Might Be Giants are a band that’s so much an acquired taste that it feels as if they’re almost deliberately off-putting. That nasal voice! The purposefully-restricted arrangements (the cheap-sounding drum machines!)! And yet, under all that, there is a real pop sensibility; listen to the chorus of “Ana Ng” – not the vocals, as such, but the whole package – and there’s something very perfect pop about it, at least to my ears. At heart, this is a bouncy pop song about unrequited love (“And we still haven’t walked in the glow/Of each other’s majestic presence”), and what could be more mainstream pop than that? Admittedly, you have to pick your way through chainsaw guitars and tinny drums and nasal vocals to find it, but once you do, it’s like seeing the arrow in the Fed Ex logo; you’ll never be able to go back to the old ways ever again.
Something strange and wonderful about this song: The number of people performing their own covers on YouTube. Gaze upon these wonders for yourself.
I kind of love that. Clearly, TMBG fans are the performing kind (And, yes; I really think that each of these covers demonstrates the greatness of the song under the original’s production. Your Mileage May Vary, as they say).
366 Songs 294: Hot Knife
I love the many ways in which “Hot Knife” – An appalling earworm, and one I should probably apologize for right now – sounds like it’s come from outside of time to bring you messages that don’t necessarily make sense just yet: The kettledrum, sounding like some old 1940s movie serial with a jungle theme, the piano that comes in and seems intentionally out of synch with the rest of the song, the multi-tracked vocals for the second verse, or the lyrical choices (“He excites me/Must be like the genesis of rhythm/I get feisty/Whenever I’m with him”). Everything feels like an element that’s exciting and interesting and a throwback to a different time period from everything else in the song, and that it should go together properly, but somehow, it does. This is a song in 4D, working at angles that we don’t even really comprehend. One of the standout tracks on Fiona Apple’s The Idler Wheel, which was already an album that was breathtaking in all the right ways.
366 Songs 293: French Disko
I have never owned this song, but there was some period of my life – my time in art school, specifically – that this was the soundtrack to, somehow. It’s the sound of the guitars that feels as if it’s come from some old 45″, the vocals that are almost unintelligible, the way it puts its head down and just goes for it; I’d hear it on the radio, in clubs, at friends’ houses. “French Disko” brings a particular nostalgia now, for a life spent outside myself, of being with friends and belonging on some level that I normally wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend. Quite fitting for a song that starts with the lines, “Though this world’s essentially an absurd place to be living in, it doesn’t call for total withdrawal.”
La resistance, indeed.
366 Songs 292: Ghosts
There’s something sticky about this song; it’s not just the tumbling piano threading its way through the entire song, as irresistible as it is, nor the “do do do do do do do/do do do do/do do do do”s, even though you find yourself wanting to sing along almost immediately. It’s the ramshackleness of the whole thing, the fact that it sounds casual and friendly, for want of a better way to put it. There’s something warm about this song, even as it bemoans the apathy of smalltown life (“All my friends are talking about leaving/about leaving/But all my friends are sitting in their graves”) and feeling trapped in the place where you’ve always lived (“Is it any wonder that we all leave home/When people say “I knew you when you were six years old”/You say ‘But I’ve changed/I’ve changed, I’ve changed/I’ve changed'”). Or maybe because of that. After all, who hasn’t felt those things at some point in their life, and hearing them being expressed back to you in a way that sounds… comforting, I guess, is something that’s hard to say no to.
366 Songs 291: The Girl Can’t Help It
Cliff Richard was never cool. He was too square, always, too clean, too unsexy; even when he tried to get funky and sexy in the 1970s, it didn’t work because he was trying too hard. It was like a musical version of Steve Carrell describing breasts as like sandbags in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. How, then, to explain away this song…?
Well, the fact that it’s a cover probably helps. This song was originally, as far as I can see, a Little Richard “joint” –
– but that doesn’t explain the sensational arrangement here that reinvents the original’s caffeinated jitter into something with more swagger and confidence. Listen to that casual drum beat, the crouching bassline, at the start. The horns that keep everything grounded, but also provide the aural fireworks as the song continues (along with the wonderful backing vocals); it sounds like someone was listening to some awesome psych-rock and soul at the end of the sixties before coming into the recording booth, and thought no-one would really pay any attention if they played around with some of those textures on this album track. The result? Cliff’s finest hour, and then some.
Then again, this is what it has to compete with; it’s not really any contest, is it?
366 Songs 290: Joining A Fan Club
You can tell, from the Queen-esque guitar opening, that “Joining A Fan Club” has set the dial for “epic.” This is such a wonderfully overblown song, completely over-the-top at almost all times and very much in the spirit of Freddie Mercury’s old band in their prime – The harmonies at 1:14 leading into the guitar, for example – without sounding like a slavish recreation. Put this is actually a reconstruction of all manner of pop history; the bassline is McCartney from Revolver-era Beatles, the harmonies are as Beach Boys as Queen, and stealing the strings from “When You Wish Upon A Star” at 1:55 is… well, just kind of inspired, really. By the time you get to the freakout at the bridge. There’s some element of glam rock in there, too (The saxophone I read as oddly David Bowie-esque for reasons that don’t actually make sense to me, I admit), and overall the entire thing just feels like four minutes of rock opera that sum up almost everything I could possibly want in a pop song. Why this isn’t something that everyone knows and adores is constantly a bafflement to me.
Still: At least some people have covered it, where you’d least expect it.
366 Songs 289: She Said She Said
The guitars actually chime. There’s something about this song that still surprises, years after I first heard it and almost four decades after it was first recorded; the sound of the guitars, the texture they create and structure they build. This is guitar music as crystalline palace, as something to feel all around you and get lost inside. Close your eyes as you listen and follow the music as it towers up all over you, and you’ll see what I mean.
(And those vocals: “I said,” stretching the word, taking it outside of language and into pure sound. Such a great song.)
366 Songs 288: Wah-Wah
Shall we talk about the value of having more than a riff to play with, for once? Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a good riff, and George Harrison’s “Wah-Wah” has a great one, but still. Here’s Harrison’s demo for the song, with the riff firmly in place (Unlike the lyrics) –
– and here’s the finished song:
Holy crap, just listen to what the finished arrangement brings to the proceedings. The drums! The bassline! Giving the “Wah-Wah!” to the harmonies! It becomes instantly more exciting to listen to, and a complete song (The keyboard in the background! The guitar solo that almost sounds like horns for a second!) instead of a pleasant enough ditty. Clearly, there’s something to be said for leaving things to percolate in your head (and recording studio) for some time, if this is anything to go by…