As you could likely tell from my silence yesterday, my schedule hasn’t exactly settled down just yet. To be fair, I was absent because I was watching the first episode of the new Doctor Who season (It’s very fun), but still. I’m back now and will try to stay on top of stuff a bit more, apart from when I’m on vacation for a couple days in the near future, but that should be vacation and that’s good and and and… Hey! Go read my Time piece from this week instead of me rambling here. That’ll be so much better.
366 Songs 240: Gimme Some
First off, I apologize for the video. Scroll down and ignore its terrible flashing.
Secondly: Holy crap. This is Nina channeling Ray Charles, isn’t it? The call-and-response, the freak-out at 0:59, the arrangement that sees horns and electric guitars in the background, the vamping in the background at 1:51, the breathless vocal in general… It’s all weirdly Ray Charles-esque, whether intentional or not.
Not that that’s a bad thing, and yet… There’s something weirdly off about Simone doing this; she was enough of an individual that such imitation seems beneath her, somehow. It’s like when you hear her “Revolution” from 1969 and feeling as if it’s just ripping off the Beatles song of the same name the year before:
I feel like a bad pop fan, thinking such things. One of the things I genuinely love about pop music is that everyone steals, and then twists things and turns them into something else, and so seeing Nina obviously take on some influence or another should feel like something to approve of. Maybe my problem is that I can see the original all too clearly in each of these two cases…?
366 Songs 239: I’ve Been Trying
DJ Shadow is someone whom I continually find frustratingly uneven; so much of his work feels self-indulgent and lacking the presence and beat that I want from it, and then he’ll turn out something like this, one of the lead-in tracks from his 2011 album The Less You Know, The Better. There’s a freshness and simplicity to this song that always appeals, a sound that sounds under-produced and almost live-to-tape despite being constructed entirely from samples, combined with a lyric that’s at once lovelorn and funny. “I’ve been trying/To get you to love me/I’ve been trying/To get you to care/Put forth a lot of effort,” the unnamed vocalist complains, sounding as if it’s been a chore trying to woo his unrequited beloved, the unspoken sense of “C’mon, you owe me” just under the surface.
Add to that the more produced parts of the song – By the time the flute enters around 1:51, I am always inexplicably reminded of Hall and Oates; I wish I could understand why – and this becomes a wonderfully unexpected comedy track of sorts, set off with the “Hi, kitten. This one’s for you” smarmy sample that comes in just before the vocal begins. When Shadow is on – and it feels as if he’s definitely on in this song, which works on multiple levels – he can be fantastic. I just wish he was on more often.
366 Songs 328: Ain’t Got No, I Got Life
Purely because the last track reminded me how powerful the piano/fucking awesome singer combo could be, here’s Nina Simone singing the hell out of a song from Hair, backed by a band that is apparently 100% in tune with what she wanted to do with the track. Sadly, this video lacks the coda to the track that’s available on some releases, where post-song, Nina comments “That should be good,” and the producer can be heard, raving over the intercom, “That’s groovy.”
It really is, and in a way that feels timeless, as opposed to forever linked to the 1960s or ’70s.
366 Songs 237: The Truth
As wonderful as Roisin Murphy’s vocal is on this track from the first Handsome Boy Modeling School album may be – and it is, haunted and fragile and knowing all at once, alternatively icey and pleading, sometimes switching between the two in a single line (Her “But in your present state/You may as well not be here at all” is a line that makes me wish that Murphy got better material than she normally does; it’s just an amazing reading, as is her “Baby, I’ll die/Without you by side” at 3:50) – there’s almost no way to hear this without just wanting to bow down to the sampled, looped piano, the way that it continually builds tension by ramping up the performance and then returns to the beginning of the sample, over and over again, jittery and uneven in all the best ways. It’s a beautifully simple loop to build the song around, and deceptively dramatic at the same time. There’s no real release in the song, it just builds and drops and builds and drops. Add to that the messy drums, and even such a spectacular vocal as Murphy’s finds itself eclipsed by the music surrounding it.
(I’m not ignoring the J-Live rap, as much as not having much to say about it; it’s relatively dull by comparison to the Murphy vocal or the sample, which is a shame. It has an important and necessary place in the song, but it doesn’t really do anything worthwhile with it, I think.)
Borag Thungg And All That
Okay, so apparently I took an extra day off from this blog than intended. That’s because yesterday’s return to the day job was slightly more hectic than I’d hoped, after a weekend that was much more hectic than I’d hoped, and to be honest, by the time I’d finished work at 10pm, the thought of writing some more just made me want to collapse onto a fainting couch with the back of my hand to my head. “Why, I do declayah!”
Back to fighting fit status soon, I hope. Stay tuned, Earthlets.
10,000+
Not boasting, just explaining: I’ve written somewhere in the region of 10,000 words today for various things. No wonder my brain is quietly crying at me right now. It’s also the reason that the blog is going to go quiet through the weekend; I’ll catch up with 366 Songs on Monday, or at least try to. Right now? I need to not write things for awhile.
“NO! It Is Truly — HOPELESS!”
As I said on Twitter today, it’s been one of those days where work can expand to fill any free time around it. Realistically, it’s been a few weeks like that now, and between that and a couple other things in the real world, it’s been a completely exhausting period in general. I’m nowhere near caught up with where I want to be, either – I’m literally just in front of deadlines, and hoping that tomorrow will bring some kind of massively creative outburst that will allow me to jump ahead of everything else in my way and just get shit done enough for the weekend to bring something resembling relaxation. Quite how August turned out this weird, I have no idea, but I’ll be honest with you: I’m kind of over it already.
366 Songs 326: Sunflower
It’s unsubtle, unoriginal and overproduced, but I love Paul Weller’s “Sunflower.” Honestly, I’m not sure if I could really explain why, beyond the fact that I always find myself singing along to the chorus, and that I like the way it sounds – by which I mean, the actual sound of the instruments, the gruffness of the guitar at points, the thud of the drums in the chorus, the way the flute sounds and producer Brendan Lynch’s random beeps – but it’s a song that I always find creeping up on me when I hear it, overpowering my intent to sneer because it so blatantly rips off not just one, but two of Weller’s major influences during this period of his career. I mean, anyone with a passing similarity with the Beatles will think that “Dear Prudence” lives on in the draped guitar of this song –
– and, it does, I guess, but really, the guitar really comes from ELO’s “10538 Overture,” which took “Dear Prudence” and made it a little heavier. I mean, listen to that riff:
It’s a riff so nice that Weller used it again on his next album, even more shamelessly:
Suuuuuure you’re the changing man, Paul (I still love that video, though).
366 Songs 235: Goodbye Mr. A
This song always translates into the death of my father, in my head; it was on constant rotation on the music television channels in the UK at the time I was there as he was getting sicker, getting worse and not coming back, and I had those channels on a lot for some reason. Background noise that didn’t talk to me too much, I guess.
It’s weird, because musically the song is about something else entirely; it’s Britpop if Britpop had worshipped ELO instead of the Kinks and the Beatles – Listen to that organ, or those swooning backing vocals, and you’ll know it’s true. There’s something very generic about the song despite that, though – outside of those two touches, it could be anything or come from anywhere; it’s as if the band had listened to “Mr. Blue Sky” on repeat for a day before recording this, but not learned enough about what made that song so worthwhile – There’s not enough worth remembering in this song beyond the particularly ELO-influenced sections, as if the Hoosiers could only make the catchiness work when they weren’t thieving the life out’ve Jeff Lynne’s most-well-known song.
Somehow, I’ve ended up having a deeper appreciation of ELO as a result of revisiting this song. I have no idea if that’s a good thing or not.