Category: 366 Songs

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“All I Know Is That It Won’t Let Me Be Myself”

I’ve become increasingly obsessed with Rotary Connection in the last few days, for reasons that I can’t quite explain. No, that’s not entirely true; one listen to this song, “Love Has Fallen On Me,” and it’s obvious why I’ve become obsessed with them. What I mean, I guess, is that I can’t really remember what brought me to them in the first place. There was some mention of them online, I think, and I did some Googling and Wikipedia-ing and thought, hmm, I should investigate further, and then, bam.

This song, though. The way that the very jazz intro slips into something wonderfully soul-laden — the strings, the backing vocals, the drums shuffling in the background — and then, at 1:18, it becomes something else again. Pop-esque, in some way that’s difficult to explain, and then the strings come in again, and it changes and it’s this song, it just keeps twisting and turning, trying on different genres, slipping in and out of them with ease and remaining difficult to pin down other than “it’s really, really good.”

The restlessness in terms of genre is at odds with the song itself, which even as it strives and surges, remains wonderfully relaxed and easy listening, in the best use of that term. It slips under your skin and just makes you smile. Is this a band that everyone already knows and adores and I’m the last to discover them? It feels like that should be the case. This is such a good song that I can’t believe that Rotary Connection isn’t a secret cult for everyone who’s heard them.

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This Time, We Can’t Lose

I read, awhile back, that today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Elliott Smith. I’ve written (many times) before about how much I love Smith’s music; I found it around the time that XO was released, at which point his combination of melancholy, melody and devotion to both the Beatles and Big Star seemed tailor made for me. I saw him live once, during his tour promoting Figure 8, and he was everything I wanted him to be — passionate, loud and funny, and with a band that could convincingly bring his music to life in a way that translated the things I adored so much in the recordings.

Up through his death, he was a figure that was amazingly important to me — my go-to answer if someone had asked me who my favorite musician was, and someone that I listened to constantly, much to the complaints of Kate, who didn’t like the sound of his voice. These days, I listen far less often; there was a point the other week when “Kings Crossing” from From A Basement On The Hill came on the shuffle of my iPhone, and I realized that it’d been months since I’d last listened to him. I’m not sure if it’s that I’m no longer in the kind of emotional place that he resonates so deeply, that I’ve simply moved on for other reasons, or something else, but I felt guilty when I realized how long it had been.

Nonetheless, Elliott Smith remains someone whose work is endlessly essential to me on some core level. His way around melody, harmony and lyrical ambiguity is something I treasure still, and wish that others would be able to play with as effortlessly as he made it look. If only he’d had a happier life, and was still around.

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“Listen, The Sky Will Sing this Song as it Burns Up All The Memories”

This song has been in my head ever since I saw Mirah perform it with the Portland Symphony this past weekend, for two reasons in particular. Firstly, the bridge(?) melody that starts at 0:58 and the way it acts as counter to everything around it but also manages to amp up the expectation and tension before the strings crash back in, and secondly, the lyrics “And I’m so number one that it’s a shame, a shame/That you let other numbers in the game.” I have no idea why, but those lyrics seem so perfect to me.

I don’t pay enough attention to Mirah’s lyrics, which is a shame; I’m too often smitten by her melodies and her arrangements (“The Dogs of B.A.”! “Country of the Future”! Both have such wonderfully overwhelming arrangements, can you blame me? This one, too — that bass line at 3:38 that acts like a tuba), but she has a wonderful way with words that I need to recognize, too.

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That Would Be Something

I’ve been on a “Paul McCartney’s solo career immediately after the Beatles” kick lately, after realizing just how much I’d underrated his work on those last couple of Beatles albums. There’s a lot happening in McCartney in particular that feels just weirdly important to the music that I’d grow up loving, if that makes sense — it’s both throwaway (The number of instrumentals! “Junk” appearing twice!), yet some of the arrangements (especially “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Singalong Junk”) are just perfect. It’s so much more influential than I’d realized, I think.

(It’s also one of those albums that makes me wish I had any musical talent; I wish I could something like this album, in so many ways.)

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Have We Decided If We Like Being Part of The Plan?

My favorite thing about “Flick of The Finger,” I think, is that it’s the first track of the second Beady Eye album, BE. Everything about it says that it’s a classic opening track to an album, after all; it has the right mix of excitement – provided here, almost entirely, by the horns, although I find myself weirdly drawn to Liam Gallagher’s half-assed “come on” at 2:00 – and claustrophobia, as if you get the feeling that this is the start of something, instead of a full experience in and of itself. It’s a song that, despite the musical build throughout the entire thing (and it does have an almost classic structure in that way), never quite peaks, but just teases something that remains out of reach.

(Also, again with the musical thievery – There’s Iggy and the Stooges in there, and the spoken word finale is, of course, straight out of “I Am The Walrus” by the Beatles. My favorite reference is the one to the band’s old band, though: “I see the wonder of life and look for the wall,” Liam sings at one point. Ah, was “Wonderwall” really that long ago…?)

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“How Did You Make Me Feel Like I Couldn’t Feel?”

The Portland Cello Project’s Beck Hansen’s Song Reader album has been the soundtrack to a lot of my 2013 so far; it started as something I bought/listened to as a reminder of their “Beck The Halls” Christmas concert from the end of last year (Where the above video was recorded; if you can imagine the view from the left of the audience, about midway back, that was me), but it’s unfolded into more of a delight than simply nostalgia the more I listen. Here’s another video from the December show, with the spectacular Jolie Holland providing amazing vocals (Seriously, these are vocals to die for), to give you an idea of what you missed.

Part of the appeal is hearing the music performed in such an un-Beck way; the PCP and guest vocalists give the music more of a jazzy feel, with some easy listening thrown in at times (“Just Noise” could be a Bacharach song), that manages to free the songs from what you’d expect of Beck, and makes his music into something… else, somehow. The humor is allowed to come through, in a way that his own performances tend to underplay for whatever reason. Check out “Last Night, You Were A Dream” and imagine it being performed by Beck; the joke would somehow feel flatter, somehow…?

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“Your Sister Says That I’m No Good/I’d Reassure Her If I Could”

“You and Your Sister” is, in the strangest of ways, a disco song for me.

I mean, obviously, it’s not; it’s hardly danceable, and there’s nothing as insistent about it as the best (or even the worst) disco. You could hardly call it a dancefloor filler, although you could probably imagine it clearing a dancefloor if given the chance. But what I mean by comparing it to disco is it’s a song which sounds perfect, even if its lyrically banal at best.

The opening to the song is a perfect example of its clumsiness: “They say my love for you ain’t real/But they don’t know how real it feels.” That’s just… horrible. Similarly, “All I want to do/Is to spend some time with you/So I can hold you” may have an innocent honesty to it, but it’s bordering on twee if not fully in that area already. Chris Bell may have written some great stuff for Big Star’s first album, but the lyrics of “You and Your Sister” needed a second pass.

Despite that, though… Just listen to the song. The way that Alex Chilton’s vocals come in 0:48, grounding Bell’s voice in a strange way that strengthens it without swamping it (Chilton’s “Plans fail every day/I want to hear you say” at 1:23 is just lovely, too). Not that Bell’s vocal isn’t a thing of greatness on its own – The way his voice cracks on “time” at 0:34 gets me every single time I listen.

The arrangement, which goes from just the finger-picked acoustic guitar to the addition of a gorgeous string counter-melody by the end of the song (The strings falling as the guitar rises, which is such a simple but graceful move), is also worth paying attention to. By the end of the song, when you have the strings playing against the guitar and Chilton and Bell’s vocals crossing over each other, it just seems utterly perfect. As long as you don’t try to pay attention to the lyrics.

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“It’s The Sound of Sciiiiiiiiii Ence. The Souuuuuhnd. Of. Sci. Ence.”

Being a massive Beatles fan, it’s no surprise that “The Sound of Science” is my favorite Beastie Boys track. I can actually still remember hearing it for the first time, one night in 1994 on Chris Morris’ short-lived Radio 1 show, and thinking “Wait, is that sampling The Beatles?” in surprise. The smartness of the samples – from “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (both versions, unless I’m mishearing) and “The End,” respectively – is one of the reasons that I love the song so much, the way that the first three sound at once familiar and unusual, with the looped drums from “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” giving the song more impetus and immediacy than the final version arguably has.

The sampled guitar from “The End” sounds great, too, but what I love most about the song is the placement of that guitar. There’s something just perfect to me about the juxtaposition of Mike D’s “Do whatcha like, huh?” at 1:57 with the guitar that immediately follows – It gives the guitar more attitude, somehow, and yet feels utterly appropriate for the track it’s lifted from (“The End” being a series of improvised guitar solos traded between John, George and Paul, literally them doing what they like, even as the song’s lyrics suggest that we be a little more conscientious in our actions) and the Beatles in general.

Accidentally or otherwise, that verbal shrug is something that I always attribute not to the Beasties, but to the Beatles now; somehow, it switched tracks in my brain and belongs with them. I like to think that the Beatles that were, back when, would’ve heard this track and wished they’d made it themselves.

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Rock and Roll Will Never Die

Life during Primal Scream’s druggiest period must have been a constant stream of surprises. When I tell them that it’s hard to imagine a rock’n’roll band sitting down to write certain songs on More Light (the sprawling River of Pain’s impromptu orchestral crescendo being a good example), they look unsure as to what I mean, so I illustrate the example by saying that it’s easier, for example, to picture them writing a Stonesy guitar number like 1994’s Rocks.

“Rocks?” splutters Innes. “I didn’t even know we’d written it!”

At first I assume he’s joking but it turns out he’s deadly serious.

“[Alan] McGee phoned us up going: “You’ve got a great song,” and I thought: what the fuck are you talking about?”

“I can definitely remember recording it,” adds Gillespie, as if this deserves some kind of prize.

From here.

Oh, Primal Scream. Never change.

(I am very much looking forward to the new album.)

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Truth And Lies Truth And Lies Truth And Lies

There is something weirdly retro about this new Primal Scream song – I think it’s the saxophone riff – but the nine minute full-length version of the song is far superior to the four minute radio edit, just weirder enough, and somehow relaxed enough to give Bobby Gillespie’s pop culture auto-critique lyrics the space to be heard in a way that the shorter version doesn’t. This is a truly odd song, and something to appreciate because of that. Even with that terrible chorus.

(I do find the video creepily misogynistic, though.)