Category: 366 Songs

Posted on

366 Songs 050: I’m Hip

There’s a problem with comedy songs that they outstay their welcome almost impossibly early, sometimes before the end of the first listen. The problem, really, is that all too many comedy songs forget to be songs, and instead focus on the comedy, and it’s only the truly great jokes that manage to stand up to repeated revisits in the same way that we tend to want to revisit songs over and over again. All the more credit, then, to Blossom Dearie’s “I’m Hip,” which is undoubtedly a comedy song, but one that’s entirely enjoyable as a song even if you don’t get the joke.

A lot of that is down to Dearie’s vocals, which are as light as ever; she always had a tendency to sound a little like a comedy character at the best of times with her very particular voice, but with a song like this one, that feels even more the case (Lines like “Like you notice I don’t wear a beard” gain a second meaning with her girly vocal). Here, she helps the joke go down with the fact that she sounds like she’s blissfully happy, in on the joke but with no malice behind it, which feels important for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on; maybe a more restrained, hipster detachment would be funnier on first listen, but would over-egg the comedy pudding…? Nevertheless, Dearie manages to somehow defuse whatever meanness may be inherent in the song, which goes a long way towards giving the song/joke a longer life, as well as just making it a joy to listen to; her sing-song take would be fun even if you couldn’t understand what she was actually saying.

(It also helps, I suspect, that (a) the jokes are funny, and (b) the jokes are also pretty silly; “Bobby Darin knows my friend” as a boast? One of the writers on this song was Bob Dorough, who wrote all the songs for Schoolhouse Rock, and there’s a shared goodwill between those songs and this one, a lack of teeth or desire to cause genuine upset.)

Also light, and subtly helpful in making this a repeatable pleasure; the musicians in the background, with Dearie on piano (so light, playing it as punctuation almost, letting her voice carry the majority of the melody when she’s singing) and some lovely brushwork on the drums keeping time and offering a backbone of style but, thankfully, little else right up until the big cymbal finale. In many ways, this is popcorn music, fluffy and pleasant and entirely throwaway, but done with such style that it ended up sticking around after all.

 

Posted on

366 Songs 049: We Are Sex Bob-Omb

I remember, very clearly, watching the opening scenes of the movie version of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World at San Diego Comic-Con in 2010, and being very nervous; was Michael Cera right for Scott? Didn’t everyone feel a little low energy and quiet? Didn’t this seem a little too… mannered for the all-out awesomeness that the comic seemed to offer up without fear? And then Sex Bob-Omb did their first number and everything was just fine.

There is no song in the world that makes me wish I had been in a band as a teenager, just making music and throwing ridiculous guitar shapes while doing so, kicking myself into the air Pete Townsend-style, than “We Are Sex Bob-Omb”; it’s loud and messy and exactly the kind of brash and fearless and unmissable that I wanted the movie to be, and that I wish I could’ve made when I was half my age, if that makes sense. There’s something about this song, with its stuttering bass and relentless drums that feels like a dare, or a promise: “This is what we’re doing, come with us or don’t.” It’s beautifully messy, scrappy stuff – The “Yeah Yeah”s that aren’t harmonies, almost but not quite, the scream at 1:06 that announces the closest thing the song has to a bridge as the cymbals stop and we get the vocalist (Mark Webber, I think, but it might also be Michael Cera or even Beck, who wrote/performed the basic track) essentially speaking in tongues breathlessly – that just feels like the result of energy that isn’t harnessed or focused, just excited by its own potential, and a love for music. Because of that, it feels like some lost garage anthem, which was likely the goal.

This song just sounds like happiness to me; an eager, excitable, happiness that’s entirely infectious and inexplicable. The promise of music, reduced to its basic appeal, perhaps.  How can you really say better than that?

Posted on

366 Songs 048: Returns Every Morning

Lilys’ 1996 album Can’t Make Your Life Better is one of those things that you’ll either love or just not get at all; it’s a bizarre evocation of an idea in American music rather than an era or genre, per se, all about creating psychedelic garage rock that pulls as much from shoegazing and space rock as it does bands that would’ve appeared on a Nuggets compilation. The songs on it feel very much like something you’d have heard about and been passed by a friend who thinks that “maybe you’ll y’know dig it or something,” and even though the album led to a hit in the U.K. thanks to a well-timed Levi’s ad, there’s nothing particularly fashionable or mainstream about them, as catchy and perfect as they are.

Take “Returns Every Morning,” which pushes droning guitars into Roger McGuinn guitar picking (That lead guitar between 0:58 and 1:02!), mixing high-pitched vocals and harmonies with cynical, hopeful lyrics (“And when I get back/We’ll start an acid rock band/But anyone can do the band thing, now, man”) and a structure that both peaks and builds to something that remains out of reach, thanks to a fadeout ending (The “song” ends at 2:17, but then it continues for more than a minute of riff that hints at more, mixing dronerock and pop in a different way). There’s so much here that shouldn’t work, but somehow does; it’s less a song than an experience, in a lot of ways, an injoke for people who get all the references and draw them out to whatever conclusions they want in their head.

Weirdly, following “A Nanny in Manhattan” becoming a hit in the U.K. in… 1998, maybe? I want to say that’s when it was, but maybe it was 1997, Can’t Make Your Life Better was re-released with all the tracks remixed and, in some cases, reconstructed with different arrangements that changed the songs more than a little. “Returns Every Morning” wasn’t one that was massively changed, but the addition of orchestral parts (Strings! A harp!) subtly changes the feel of what’s going on, and the fadeout riffing at the end turns out to be very different, with the fadeout gone, replaced by quiet strings rising in the background as the lead guitar finishes repeating the riff and starts going off in a crazier direction, everything building to… a sudden stop, and silence. There’s something more disturbing about this end, for me, the feeling being that we were heading towards something but suddenly prevented from reaching it, bringing the melancholy of lost opportunities and things-that-might-have-been. The song was never comforting – it was too scattered and displaced for that – but this second version makes it feel sad, with the different ending. Or maybe that’s just me.

Posted on

366 Songs 047: Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter


I always wondered what the story was behind Nina Simone’s epic “Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter,” every time I hear it; it’s a vicious song, clearly one born of anger with the lyrics just filled with invective and some of the best insults ever put to music (I’m particularly partial to “Blowing minds is a thing of the past/You blew your chance, that’s why you never last/You want to be a graduated mother/But in reality, you’re just another brother,” but the very next couplet – “You think you’re slick, but you could stand a lot of greasin’/The things you do ain’t never really pleasin'” – comes very close), which makes me curious who, exactly, the song was written about, and what was the igniting event. We’ve gotten used to diss songs in recent years/decades, I think, with rap in particular making it into enough of a common thing that it feels like a legitimate genre, but this song still feels light years ahead of everything else in this particular school, a song to play people who think that “You’re So Vain” is both mysterious and cutting.

Turns out the song wasn’t written by Simone; it’s actually the work of Alline Bullock, who turns out to be the sister of Tina Turner, the woman behind some classic Ike and Tina stuff, including “Bold Soul Sister” (Maybe my favorite Tina Turner song). The original (?) Ike and Tina version of the song is enjoyable enough, but lacks the viciousness of Simone’s; it seems more generically R’n’B in its arrangement, lacking the unnerving cruelty and detachment that drips from Simone’s voice in her version and the space present in the later arrangement.

Simone’s take on the song is, in fact, funky – Although it took me a couple of listens to really listen to the lyrics and realize that the funk of the title is the nasty funk, the kind that you don’t want to have; the idea of something being “funkier than a mosquito’s tweeter” is actually weirdly and wonderfully dirty, when you think about it – but it’s a different type of funk from Ike and Tina (Nikki Costa, who did another version that’s clearly based on Simone’s, tries for the coolness of Simone but gets it horribly wrong, sounding like a soulless remake and missing the point entirely, especially when the electric guitar comes in and flattens everything around it); it’s restrained for the most part, stripped down to the essentials (bongos, bass, vibes) so that the focus is very clearly on Simone’s voice – and when the drums come in at 2:25, it has such an impact that you sit up and take notice. The original version of this song is fun, rowdy and rude, but when Simone takes it on, it becomes a scalpel of pure spite, reminding the world that she’s something to be reckoned with.

Posted on

366 Songs 046: Pink Moon

I always feel guilty about the fact that I first heard Nick Drake’s “Pink Moon” in a car commercial; there’s something about Drake in general, and “Pink Moon” in particular that that feels like heresy, as if just by that process of discovery, I’ve somehow cheapened the music and Drake’s tortured experience in life. This is what’ll happen to future mes, when Elliott Smith is used to advertise sneakers and they hear “Needle In The Hay” for the first time. There’s a lot to connect Drake and Smith, even beyond the tortured artist stereotype; a sensitivity and serenity to their music, a preference for hushed vocals and finger-picked acoustic guitars… Smith is, in many ways, the more openly self-loathing descendant of Drake’s, but there’s a warmth to Drake that Smith sometimes misses.

(A lot of that warmth, I think, comes from Drake’s voice, which is weirdly charming in its breathiness here, and the almost comforting nature of the song, which is simple and open and has the type of chord structure that makes it feel more relaxing than others, for some reason.)

Having said all of that, my favorite version of “Pink Moon” isn’t the original; it’s Beck’s cover from a few years back, which adds a melancholy – again, I’m tempted to say that’s a vocal thing as well – to the original, a sadness and resignation that gives the entire song a strangely more affecting mood.
Clearly, I just like the sad songs.

Posted on

366 Songs 045: Let Forever Be

Another day that feels weirdly overwhelming for reasons I can’t explain – although there was an upside of seeing a friend I haven’t seen in a long, long time – and so, a song that (as much as I love it) feels as frantic as my head right now. It’s the drum beat, which feels like it’s come from some awesome jazz record in the past, and the way it doesn’t quite go with the hum of the rest of the song. Never mind all of Noel Gallagher’s Beatles-esque stylings and lyrics – This is definitely a lesser cousin to “Setting Sun” in that regard – because “Let Forever Be” is really all about the aural mismatch in the music, and the way that it sounds like the most pop dream you’ve never had.

Posted on

366 Songs 044: My Funny Valentine

So, this is what a standard sounds like:





‘Nuff said, surely? (My favorite of the versions on show here is most likely the Sinatra, which somehow manages to be both melancholy and swinging. I think there’s a depth to the vocal performance that’s at odds with the musical arrangement, but in a way that somehow works, if that makes sense…)

Posted on

366 Songs 043: Valentine’s Day


Ruth is one of those bands that you remember, but don’t remember anything about; as far as I do remember, this was the closest thing they ever had to a hit, but even then this was really a near-miss that graced a lot of radio and TV play but was pretty much ignored by the Great British Public, who hadn’t really come around to the idea of overly-produced pop that’s pretty much saved from the disaster of mediocrity by the Brian May-esque guitar solo that comes in at 1:50 from out of nowhere. But for me, this song isn’t about Valentine’s Day or the limitations of power pop but instead, a trip to London in the final year of my bachelor’s degree at art school, sleeping on a friend’s floor and thinking way too much about pop music, leafing through the CDs that he’d been given for free and discovering all these bands that I never would’ve heard of otherwise. Ruth was one of those, but a lesser one; I remember finding things on that trip that would stay with me for years afterwards, dubbed onto blank tapes until I could finally manage to track down and buy them for myself. Weird memories of the world opening up and wandering home along streets that I one day thought I might live in, listening to songs on headphones that were falling apart, trying to stitch new sounds and ideas together with every step.

Posted on

366 Songs 042: Get Some Sleep, Tiger (Plaid Remix)

Because it’s Sunday, and because I mentioned Red Snapper yesterday, and because it’s been a rough few days, and so on and so on… It’s time to “Get Some Sleep, Tiger.” In particular, this Plaid remix of said track, which makes the awesome jazziness of the original and makes it just a little weirder, taking it from the “theme song for the best spy movie you’ve never seen” to something almost postrock…

Normal service will be resumed sooner rather than later.

Posted on

366 Songs 041: It’s Not The Spotlight

I first saw Beth Orton back when she was singing with Red Snapper, way back in the mid 1990s, and I remember very, very clearly leaving the venue and she was standing outside, leaning against a car smoking and me just completely being smitten by her in that moment, as random as that may sound. It was that memory, that smittenness, that led me to pick up her first single and album and become as equally – if not more – smitten with her folk revival sound than the way she looked post-gig, grumpy and trying to ignore the crowds wandering past her in a cold Glasgow alleyway. It’s not that she was doing anything particularly special or original, but just the sound of her voice and simplicity of her arrangements that sounded especially fresh in the dying days of Britpop. “It’s Not The Spotlight” shows off what I liked best about her output at that time – the covers that stripped back brassier pop tunes and remade them as something quieter and more beautiful. Even now, years after I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to her career that closely, things like this still send slight chills up and down my spine.