Category: 366 Songs

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366 Songs 214: Up With People

The mish-mash of genres in “Up With People” is something that kind of fascinates me; the gospel-inflected backing vocals, the ska guitar, the soul horns, all covered with Kurt Wagner’s fragile (weak) indie lead vocal. It’s a confusion that works, something that pushes an inclusive agenda suggested by the title of the song, if not necessarily its lyrics (Although, maybe those lyrics are inclusive as well, in a different fashion; maybe we’re all “screwing up our lives today”). That everything goes together so well in this song is a surprise, but a pleasant one. With so many ingredients, it wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch to see the whole thing fall apart.

Oddly, I hadn’t heard the original version of this song before; I know it from the Zero 7 dub mix, which I’d discovered via some compilation or another, more than a decade ago:

Even stranger, it turns out that Zero 7 covered the song using its own arrangement rather than the original, with Sia as vocalist, and it turns it into a different experience altogether:

It’s more of a… performance, perhaps, than the Lambchop original; Sia works the whole thing more than Wagner’s relaxed take, but it’s not in an unpleasant way. There’re important stories about the differences in musical genre to be found in the comparison, I feel…

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366 Songs 213: Love Interruption

“Love Interruption” is more a sketch than a song; it’s essentially a riff with a slight attempt at a chorus that feels as much like an afterthought as anything or everything else. Despite that, though, this is a great track. The repetition is enough to make it sound complete, especially with the arrangement it’s given with the organ and the wonderfully, almost wistful backing vocals throughout the whole thing (“I want love to…” over again, not coming to a conclusion; I kind of love that); it sounds short and a little lacking, yes, but not necessarily in a bad way. It finishes and you want to listen again, hear more. If only more songs had that going for them.

(That said, if someone wants to write a bridge for this song, I wouldn’t say no.)

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366 Songs 212: You & Me

For everyone who’s always wished for a blend of 1970s solo John Lennon and early 2000s Super Furry Animals, may I introduce you to the beautiful solo debut of the latter’s Cian Ciaran:

I love that melancholy comedy, the opening “Whatever happened to all the people/That gave a fuck?” is one of those lines that’s both funny and hopelessly sad, especially when matched to that beautiful string line (The sadness isn’t just there for that first line; by the time you get to the chorus, the wonderfully double-tracked vocal of “You and me,” it’s almost swoon-worthy in its lush lostness). The slow, delayed drums, thudding along in the background, are the Lennon touchstone here for me, although the sparseness and emptiness in the arrangement as the song opens definitely helps. By the end, as everything’s built with the guitar, strings and harmony vocals, it’s pretty much turned into a Super Furry Animals track, but that’s nowhere near a bad thing.

My soundtrack for today, even though I’m hoping the day is more upbeat than this song. Just lovely, really.

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366 Songs 211: Where Do I Begin?

This song – Something that feels so incredibly 1990s and 1960s to me at the same time, with Beth Orton’s vocals feeling like something from a random, half-remembered folk act in the New Folk movement of the latter decade, playing against the psychedelia-influenced “Big Beat” of the Chemical Brothers – reminds me of the final year of my BA degree, the fact that Dig Your Own Hole (the album this came from) was playing in all of the studios, all of us feeding our heads with the same noises and the same influences as we tried to finish our work and find inspiration to be ourselves on paper and canvas and clay and whatever. This and Oasis’ (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?; echoing out from different doorways at different stages as you’d walk down the corridors. One of those sense memories that you find yourself suddenly transported by, without meaning to be.

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366 Songs 210: Brianstorm

I love the energy of “Brianstorm,” the way that it just doesn’t drop below “intense” on the scale at any point throughout the whole thing. It’s such a young person’s song, in the best ways; the snarkiness in lines like “Brian/Top marks for not tryin'” – and what a rhyme that is – or “We can’t take our eyes off/Your t-shirt and tie combination,” the weird sloganeering of “See you later, elevator.” Or the jitteriness of the song, the restlessness that propels it through the just-under-three minutes that it lasts. This is what it feels like to be young.

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366 Songs 209: Shame

I’m sure there are people who’d make fun of me for liking this song, and I can see why; there’s little original about it (The first time I heard it, the opening actually made me think “Oh, it’s like ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles, but less new”), and it’s over-produced to a degree that almost feels impossible past the 1980s, and yet… And yet, it’s very sing-along-able, and it’s funny. It’s that last part that really makes it work for me – I’m not sure how much of the song is actually meant to be funny (The “So I got busy throwing everybody underneath the bus/And with your poster thirty foot high at the back of Toys’R’Us” part, definitely), but there’s some comedy for me in lines like “My tears could fill the Albert Hall/Is this the sound of sweet surrender?” nonetheless.

And, dammit, even though the vocals are weirdly transAtlantically flattened and the instruments over-produced, I still like the melody of this, deep down. No matter how much it owes to “Blackbird.” Which is, admittedly, a lot.

(Points to both Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow for the “Brokeback Boyband” video, too.)

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366 Songs 208: Circle Sky

There’s a lot to love about “Circle Sky.” Where to start…?

Let’s go with the bassline, Peter Tork happily bobbing up and down the scale and keeping the whole thing grounded – There are times when it’s the clearest thing in the mix by far, weirdly enough – while Mike Nesmith outjangles the best of them and Mickey Dolenz drums his little heart out in the background (Davy Jones, as you can see in the video, doesn’t contribute that much, all told). Or Nesmith’s epic, half-yodel vocals as he sings about some kind of 1960s psychopolis that is “a very extraordinary scene to those who don’t understand” and yet, somehow, seems quite appealing the way he puts it.

It’s a song from Head, which for my money is the best ’60s band movie – Yes, better than any of the Beatles’ efforts – and one of the most interesting counterculture movies ever made, but also something that’s home to some of my favorite Monkees music; “As We Go Along,” “Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again),” even the version of “Daddy’s Song” – They’re all really good songs, and examples of the weird music hall psych pop(corn) that the Monkees offered at their best. None of the above, however, is why I chose this song for #208 in this series. No, instead, I chose it because – after something like three months of running behind, this entry finally means that I have caught up with the number of days in the year to date, meaning that I am – for the first time since February, I think – back on track for a “One Song A Day” plan for this series. “It looks like we’ve made it once again,” as Nesmith sings. Let’s see if I can keep up this pace so that I can get to the next line, “It looks like we’ve made it to the end!”

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366 Songs 207: Dirty Harry

There are so many reasons why “Dirty Harry” shouldn’t work: It has a child’s choir, it’s lyrically very simplistic outside of the Bootie Brown rap, which itself has a political reference that was already dated by the time the song appeared (“So said the speaker/With the flight suit on/Maybe to him I’m just a pawn,” referencing George Bush’s Mission Accomplished speech from 2003). And yet… It’s kind of a great song. What happened?

It’s tempting to put it down the the production; Danger Mouse and Damon Albarn have definitely created a great backing for the vocals here, with the phased organ, funk guitars, horror movie strings and the wonderfully vacuum-ish swoop and dive as Bootie does his stuff (Listen to this version of the song without the rap to see what I mean; skip to the 2:10 mark:

It’s great, isn’t it?)

What’s fascinating to me is to hear the original demo for this song, which was released under an entirely different name (“I Need A Gun”) on Damon Albarn’s Democrazy album. It’s recognizable for the vocal hook, but nothing else:

Somewhere in the Gorillaz vaults, there are works-in-progress that show how this song went from that barebones demo to the final version; I’d love to hear them, and find out how the whole thing was built, piece by piece, with every new ingredient just seeming like a bad idea that somehow comes together.

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366 Songs 206: The Statue Got Me High

Even though Flood was the big hit album, Apollo 18, the follow-up, is the one that I still think is the best of the They Might Be Giants albums, filled with pop songs that just… worked, for want of a better way of putting it. “The Statue Got Me High” is an example of that; if you can look beyond the production – with the drum machine making it sound, weirdly, far cheaper and tackier than it actually is – there’s a great little psychedelic song at the heart of this one, with – again – some great harmonies despite their appalling singing voices. Much like my love of Billy Bragg, I suspect that my love of They Might Be Giants is based upon some strange notion of adoring the idea of the song, rather than the song itself.

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366 Songs 205: Dead

Not for the first time, I find myself wishing that They Might Be Giants wrote songs for other people to perform while listening to “Dead,” from their 1990 album Flood (It’s the closest they had to a crossover album; it’s the one with “Birdhouse In Your Soul” and “Instanbul (Not Constantinople)” on it). The flat-vowelled accents of Johns Linnell and Flansburgh do this song no favors, which is a real shame; it has a lovely structure, especially in the call-and-response bridge that starts at 1:33, and the arrangement that has both Johns harmonizing for the majority of the song feels like it deserves singers with less nasal voices, to be brutally honest. Despite that (because of that?), this is an earworm of a song that nestles into your brain sneakily, distracting you with the vocals and letting the wonderful piano that underpins the whole thing quietly slip into your head and decide to stay for awhile.