Category: 366 Songs

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366 Songs 111: Baby Blue

I can remember seeing Tricky at some festival – T-in-the-Park, probably – back in the ’90s, just after the first album had come out and being just completely transfixed by Martina Topley-Bird, her stage presence and voice and the fact that there seemed something unworldly about her. She was, in many ways, the heart of Tricky 1.0, and as that act/performer/group/whatever fell apart (Seriously, that third album? Not so good), she was what I found myself missing the most. Cut to years later, and this song from her second solo album: There’s a lightness on it that betrays the touch of producer Danger Mouse, but the retro girlband sound works here – There’s something suitably dreamy about the way it shimmies around Topley-Bird’s vocal, all handclaps and tinkling synthetic ivories, disguising the sadness at the heart of the lyrics (“Baby blue/I don’t know what you do when you call to me,” she sings, apparently about a boy who’s oblivious to what’s really going on in her heart and her mind).

Topley-Bird’s solo stuff is disappointing in its unevenness, but when it’s like this, I find myself wanting more.

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366 Songs 110: Stayin’ Alive

I was reading an obituary for Robin Gibb yesterday that talked about his sense of humor, and that came as little surprise; I’ve long considered “Staying Alive” home to one of the funniest – and, let’s be honest, one of the downright greatest – opening lines in popular music: “Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk, I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk.”

There’s so much to unpack there, whether it’s the weird (unintentional?) double entendre of being “a woman’s man” (Sure, a man who likes women, obviously, but if a “man’s man” denotes masculinity and machoness in society, what does a woman’s man denote – especially when you’re singing in such a falsetto?), the idea that you can tell that from the way he walks (Bowlegged from so much sex? Is it a particular wiggle in his butt? Is he just walking fast to go please more women? WHAT?), or the spectacular “No time to talk.” Why not? Maybe he is walking fast and that’s how you can tell that he’s a woman’s man. Maybe being a woman’s man is all about not having any time to hang around. It’s just such a wonderful opening that makes you want to know more, find out what he’s going to say next. Put it up against the spectacular guitar riff and hi-hat-crazy beat and it literally becomes an irresistible piece of pop. Stardom was guaranteed – and well deserved – for the Bee Gees as soon as they’d come up with this, let’s face it.

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366 Songs 109: I Feel Love

The death of Donna Summer last week was something that was sad in the abstract; a “Oh, I never paid so much attention to her, but she’s dead and that’s a shame for her friends and family” kind of thing, but nothing beyond that, really. And then, the other day, I was in a store and “I Feel Love” was playing and… It sounded like music from now. It sounded contemporary, or – no, it sounded like something a few months from now, if that makes sense. Maybe it’s the snake-eating-its-own-tail nature of pop’s retro sound, but the thirty-plus year disco hit genuinely sounds more modern than half of the pop music that’s been created in the last couple of years.

It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, indeed.

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366 Songs 108: Out Of The Game

I’m not the world’s biggest Rufus Wainwright fan by any stretch of the imagination – He’s always been a marvelous performer in search of material that’s worth his attention, to me, with his own songs constantly falling short of that mark – but the vocal hook of his comeback single “Out of The Game” is another of those earworms that works where the rest of the song just doesn’t. Up until the “Look at you/Look at you/Look at you/[Unintelligible]” bit (Seriously, does he say “Sometimes”? “Sundance”? I can’t make it out, but that doesn’t matter, it’s the sound of the word, the feeling of release it brings after that build) at 0:51, this is an astoundingly generic song, but then that hook comes in and decides it likes the look of your inner brain and might just move in. Good job, Mr. Wainwright; here’s hoping there’s a song that has that stickiness all the way through on your new album.

What’s really interesting about the song to me, though, is the sound of it. It’s Mark Ronson producing and he’s apparently moved from the retro-60s of his Amy Winehouse and Version period (and the retro-80s of his Record Collection album, for that matter) to something very firmly 1970s and Californian. Listen to the sound of the guitars here; you can almost imagine syrupy-album cover photo the song would’ve had had it been released in 1976 and fighting with Elton John to top the sales charts. There’s something seductive about such fidelity to the original aural experience, but it leaves me wondering where Ronson will go next. Surely ’90s retro would just sound like ’60s retro again…?

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366 Songs 107: Marvelous Dream

A quick jump back to things Albarn for this song off his just-out Dr. Dee album/soundtrack/opera/whatever. I heard an earlier version of this back when it was being called “Clacton” and leaked as a bootleg with a much different arrangement, and it barely floated by without notice. This version, though, has been stuck in my head since first hearing it, much to the amusement/annoyance of my wife who is probably sick of me playing it and replaying it over and over again. It’s the handclaps and backing vocals that start at 1:14, though; there’s something about those that are entirely hypnotic to me, barely there but making all the difference and sounding both contemporary and timeless at the same time. They make it impossible to get the song out of my head.

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366 Songs 106: Train Song

I found this song via a compilation on iTunes that I can’t even remember anymore, where it appeared as a cover version by Ben Gibbard and Feist that’s actually far superior to the original, for me. What makes the latter work and the former not in my eyes (in my ears?) is the vocal; Vashti Bunyan may have been the first person to sing this song, but her vocal has that awkward, strained precious quality of a lot of 1960s female folk singers, where their range sounds as if they’re desperately trying to avoid the lower notes as if that would somehow undercut their gender even if it makes them sound breathless and weepy as a result (Is this just me? Mary Hopkins has the same thing). Compare Vashti’s vocal with the Gibbard/Feist version, and the latter just sounds more natural, with a sadness that fits the lyrics:

Besides the gentle melancholy of the instrumentation and melody, the lyrics explain why I love this song as much as I do: “What will I do if there’s someone there with you?” is a great line for a song about returning to a former lover, but it’s somehow eclipsed by the implications of the follow-up, “Maybe someone you’ve always known?” The insecurity there is just beautiful in its honesty, humanity and vulnerability. There’s an entire world in those two lines, everything inside them and left unsaid.

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366 Songs 105: Under The Westway


There are all manner of reasons why this song shouldn’t work – A piano that sounds like “Let It Be” (or, if you’re me, the opening of “That’s The Way God Planned It” by Billy Preston), lyrics that are too full and shoe-horned into spaces where they don’t quite fit – but this solo, piano-only preview of the already-mythical last Blur song “Under The Westway” sends shivers down my fanboy spine nonetheless. What makes it so thrilling for me is that the melody is so astonishingly pretty, something I don’t tend to think about Blur songs (To be fair, maybe the finished version won’t sound anything like this, the way that “Strange News From Another Star” differs between the keyboard-only version and the full-band version on Blur), and the lyrics are… well, more than I was expecting.

“Under The Westway,” you see, seems at first verse listen, to follow on from “Fool’s Day,” the reunion song the band did in 2010 that’s almost the very definition of “okay, I guess”; what was most disappointing to me about that song were Damon’s lyrics, which were pretty much a shopping list of what he’d been up to that day (“Porridge done/I take my kid to school” goes one particularly memorable couplet), and to begin with “Westway” sounds the same with Damon singing about “It was the bright sky in my city today/Everything was sinking, said snow would come on Sunday.” But, midway through this snippet, it… expands, and becomes something much more beautiful despite the awkwardness of the scanning:

Bring us a day that they switch off the machines
Cause men in yellow jackets putting adverts inside my dreams
A automated song, a whole world gone, fallen under the spell of
The distance between us when we communicate

It’s something akin to the old-man concern of “Out of Time,” but even more melancholic, somehow. Watching a live version from February whets my appetite even more:

I can’t really imagine what the finished song will sound like, but I know that I’m eagerly awaiting the discovery, if only to hear the “Hallelujah!” part at the end properly, and feeling the release that comes with that moment with the clarity and peace of actually knowing what is being said beforehand.

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366 Songs 104: Some Glad Morning

This is the song that’s been living in my head for the past few days, the last officially-released Blur song before their reunion in 2010 and – from what I can gather – an unfinished demo from the Think Tank sessions before Graham Coxon left the band in 2002. Beyond the fact that it’s just ridiculously catchy (Seriously, that “Nigh-igh-igh-igh-ightingale” part will stick in your head for a long time if you let it), what really appeals to me about the whole thing is that it sounds so unfinished; it meanders, it feints, it’s mumbly and messy and shambolic, and yet all for the good. There aren’t enough songs like that, that sound like the inside of your head after a particularly busy, particularly successful day. You’re tired and can’t think straight never mind imagine what happens next, but you’re quietly happy, if that makes sense? That’s what this song sounds like, to me.

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366 Songs 103: Tender

I have, in the past, described “Tender” as a hug in the shape of a song, and it’s a description I’ll stand behind; there’s something comforting and emotional about this song for me every time I hear it. Everything about it feels… I don’t know, welcome, maybe? It’s not just that I’ve spent so many times listening to it that I know it inside and out (although I have, and I do; even the bit where there’s a really sloppy edit and you can hear the beginnings of the chorus before the guitar solo starts), but the very structure of the song, from the uplifting choir singing “Come on, come on, come on/Get through it” like they want you to succeed to the lovely and fragile backing vocals in the verses as Graham Coxon backs up Damon Albarn in what can only be described as the sweetest way imaginable (Coxon also contributed the “Oh my baby/Oh my baby/Oh why?/Oh my” bit, which I have a love-hate relationship with but make the song what it is, ultimately).

“Tender” is the aftermath of “No Distance Left to Run,” the recovery that follows the heartbreak. “Are you okay?” I once asked a friend who’d had a relationship crash into the rocks in a ridiculously spectacular fashion, and he looked at me and said “No, but I will be.” That’s this song; the hope that things will get better even though they’re terrible right now, set to a musical backing that is ramshackle and lilting (You can easily sing along with the guitar line for this song by going “Do-be-do-be-doo”) and all the more affecting for its lack of polish and sheen.

The end of the song, for years, confused me. I was convinced that Damon was singing “Kill me!” and thought, often, “That’s completely at odds with the rest of the song, it’s so depressing.” Years and years later, watching the Blur: No Distance Left To Run documentary, I realized that he was actually singing “Heal me!” which is, of course, so much more appropriate. That’s what the song is, a plea and a magic spell to heal broken hearts and find something to stop you being alone when faced with the ghosts you love the most. Come on come on come on.

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366 Songs 102: No Distance Left To Run

Continuing the recent trend of “songs about the break-up of Damon Albarn and Justine Frischmann,” here’s the ground zero of that particular genre, the song in which Albarn offers up “It’s over/You don’t need to tell me” and the hearts of a million listeners who’ve never met either participant break as a result. Maybe it’s just because I first heard this track when I was going through my own horrible, protracted break-up – 13, the album this song closes, was the soundtrack of a terrible year or so of my life back then – but this song has always seemed devastatingly sad to me. There’s a sparseness, an emptiness to the instrumentation, and the music sprawls downwards prettily as Albarn sings his heart out in such blunt terms that it feels like evesdropping.

There’s such a sense of finality to the song (It finishes, “It’s over/It’s over,” after all) that it seems both fitting and uncomfortable to be placed as the last song (But not the last track; “Optigan 1” follows, an instrumental that floats in and out, dreamlike) on 13; it almost forces the listener to start the album all over again, considering that the song that starts the album comes, theoretically, after this one in terms of chronology and emotion (“Tender,” which is all about getting over a lover and rediscovering faith in love, or at least wanting to). To place “Tender” after this song would’ve made a lie of the title “No Distance Left To Run,” sure, but it would’ve been more honest in the grand scheme of things.