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“When Words Don’t Do The Trick Anymore”

A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing— when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. In the pilot of The Newsroom, a new series for HBO, TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) emotionally checked out years ago, and now he’s sitting on a college panel, hearing the same shouting match between right and left he’s been hearing forever, and the arguments have become noise. A student asks what makes America the world’s greatest country, and Will dodges the question with glib answers. But the moderator keeps needling him until…snap.

I really like this breakdown of a speech in the new Sorkin show, by Sorkin. The idea of the dialogue as music appeals to me, especially seeing how it affects Sorkin’s construction of said speech. “To resolve a melody, you have to end on either the tonic or the dominant. (Try humming ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ right now, but leave off ‘snow.’ You’ll feel like you need to sneeze.) So Will ends where he started.” Makes me want to try and get better at everything I write; I want to claim music in my writing, even though it’s just words.

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366 Songs 156: Son of Sam

Also from Elliott Smith’s Figure 8, also great: Son of Sam, which ends up with a lovely piano line but apparently started as something entirely guitar-based; this was originally released as a “demo version” of the song:

And here’s the final, album version with the piano taking the place of the guitar:

First off: The finished version really gains something from the piano, doesn’t it? Not that it wasn’t a great song before – It clearly was/is, not least of all because of the lyrics, which feature amongst some of Smith’s best; I’ll get back to that in a second – but the piano adds not just a fragility and variation in aural color, but also the greatness of the honky-tonk piano moment that happens after “King for a day” at 1:42.

Secondly, back to those lyrics: I love the creepiness inherent in the song, embedded deep in lines like “I’m not uncomfortable being weird/Long revered options disappear/But I know what to do” and “Acting under orders from above,” but the surrender as the song closes is a lovely piece of taking one common thing and turning it into something much less comfortable (As if naming the song after a serial killer wasn’t hint enough): “I may talk in my sleep tonight/Cause I don’t know what I am/I’m a little like you/More like the son of Sam,” followed by a “ahhhhh,ahhhh, ahhhh” breath out/pop note moment that’s just a little bit more unsettling because of where it ended up.

Here’s to being not uncomfortable, being weird.

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366 Songs 155: Stupidity Tries

This just in from the “Lovely little pop songs that sometimes get lost in the reputation of their creators” department. 2000’s Figure 8 is, looking back on it, a strange album for Elliott Smith; it’s the only one, for example, that doesn’t include a cuss word anywhere on it, and also the one where he’s at his most obviously “produced,” for want of a better way to put it. Because of that, I’ve tended to think of it in my head as his “pop” album, which both is – It was created with the intent of “crossing over” and building on the success of XO, after all – and isn’t – Smith was never really not pop, if you listen to his music and hear his influences and obvious gift for melody – true.

Nonetheless, “Stupidity Tries” is a great pop song, one that mixes subtle arrangement (At 1:11, the lovely use of horns, softening the moment even though there aren’t any horns anywhere else in the song, and get replaced with pedal steel when the moment recurs at 2:21; the strings that provide structure and grace, lifting from the guitars at 3:23 and take the song home from there) and wonderfully… Smithian lyrics (“The enemy/is within/Don’t confuse/me with him”) to come up with something that could only be more delicious if it didn’t fade out at the end. I mean, seriously people: You can even hear it finish really quietly before the fade’s done. You couldn’t just have let that happen…?

Also lovely: Smith’s live versions of the song, which ditch the more elaborate orchestration for something more Beatles-rocking-out-y:

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Recently Read, Prose (6/22/12)

Apparently, I take more time to read good books than trashy books; the Rucka novels took a few days each – part of that, though, was also that the start of the week is heavier workwise and leaves me with less time to read – but the Star Trek book I ripped through in a couple of evenings despite it being longer than either Finder or Smoker. Go figure.

I will, at some point, write something about the trilogy of Keeper, Finder and Smoker; re-reading them this time, one right after the other, I realized that there’s a really clear narrative arc in the three books that I hadn’t realized before, with Rucka playing with expectations in the last of the three after shaping them in the first two – Plus, I had forgotten about Erika, one of the Kodiak series’ main characters, almost entirely until this re-read, and now I’m weirdly obsessed with her. So, when I have more time and/or brainspace, that’ll happen for sure.

The Trek book was… eh, pretty crappy, really; I would’ve given up more than once, but had nothing else to read and saw it through to an end that was, indeed, bitter. Normally, Peter David’s Trek books have more pace and humor to them, but this was a leaden, self-important thing that trudged on and made the reader earn every chapter up until the last third or so.

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366 Songs 154: Bad Ambassador

It sounds like an odd thing to say, but what I love most about “Bad Ambassador” by the Divine Comedy – probably my favorite song from the band, although I suspect I’m almost alone in that – is the tension between all the moving parts; the rising piano and strings as Neil Hannon’s voice sinks, singing “I wanna hold your hand/Hey, what’s your favorite band, honey?” or the way that the piano’s four notes at 2:19 act as a period, ending the tentative “Maybe some other time” (Notice the short rises and falls of the instruments in the background, as if it’s hopes rising and being pushed down by nerves, before those notes, and then everything swells amazingly, incredibly).

It’s such an unashamedly emotional song, so dramatic and aching with unrequited passion (Think of the way that the song is just a list of what Hannon wants to do, including “Play with the big boys/I wanna ride with the tough guys/On a Japanese motorbike,” but, as he goes on say, “Maybe some other time…”). The song even ends with a long fade that makes you think of ellipses, unfulfilled promise. It’s a song where the music is the text as much as the lyrics, one that tells a story in under four minutes and in that short time make you want the best for the character singing. Good job, Neil Hannon.

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366 Songs 153: Lonely At The Top

Written, it’s said, for Frank Sinatra – who apparently didn’t get the joke, and turned it down – “Lonely At The Top” remains one of the greatest missed opportunities in music from the last few decades. It’s one thing for the Randy Newman of the 1970s to sing “All the applause/And all the fame/And all the money/That I have made” because, well, at the time he wasn’t getting a lot of any of those, so it can be taken as sarcastic commentary on celebrity, but if it’d been Sinatra singing those words at the time… Well, that’d take things at least one stage more meta, wouldn’t it? How would his audiences have taken the line “Listen, all you fools out there/Go on and love me/I don’t care”?

(Missing in that video is the spectacular arrangement from the original version, which uses the orchestra to create something that’s both very Newman-esque and also, somehow, fit for Sinatra:

…I think, weirdly, it’s the horns that make it feel Sinatra-esque, although I can’t really think of any songs of his where the oompah thing happened often; Nelson Riddle was normally more subtle than that. But that banjo in the background feels wonderfully disrespectful, out of place and comedic, doesn’t it…?)

Of course, the song has been covered many times since its appearance; I think the Divine Comedy version gets the decadent, sad glamor of the idea best, for me:

Robbie Williams has, I’ve been told, performed the song live a couple of times, which seems particularly fitting; he has the fame, the humor and the sadness to “get” what Newman was trying to say in the first place. Maybe, one day, we’ll see a Justin Beiber version when he finally gets around to his big band album…

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366 Songs 152: O Lucky Man!

What’s that you say? The best theme song for any movie ever made? It’s not something that I’d necessarily argue too much against, I have to admit (Just listen to that guitar; the production on this song just makes me smile so broadly, it’s crazy. Plus, the line about “If knowledge hangs around your neck like pearls instead of chains, then you’re a lucky man” is just the right side of 1970s indulgence and faux wisdom for me). Considering the exhausting marathon of work that today has ended up being, this seems like a good one to leave the internet with for the day. Time to go searching for the meaning of the truth in this whole world…

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No Time, No Time At All

Most of us journalists have one great idea every few months, maybe two if we drink industrial levels of caffeine. For professional thinkers like Gladwell and Lehrer, the key to maintaining a remunerative career is to milk your best ideas until there’s no liquid left and pray you’ve bought yourself enough time to conjure up new ones.

Given that continuous cycle of creation and reuse, blogging seems to have been a bad idea for Jonah Lehrer. A blog is merciless, requiring constant bursts of insight. In populating his New Yorker blog with large swaths of his old work, Lehrer didn’t just break a rule of journalism. By repurposing an old post on why we don’t believe in science, he also unscrewed the cap on his brain, revealing that it’s currently running on the fumes emitted by back issues of Wired.

– From Josh Levin’s Slate piece about Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagarism coming to light.

I’m too filled with deadlines (Blogging deadlines, of course) to respond to this story the way I want right now, and my brain is too scattered to come up with the coherence that I’d need anyway, but I wanted to pull out that above quote nonetheless. I find it particularly compelling because it points out the weird unforgiving cycle of blogging versus fresh ideas, and how exhausting it is; talking to Kate this morning about everything that lay ahead today, I told her that I owe Time a new set of pitches for next week’s essay, even though this week’s only went live this morning. “You need to do that already?” she asked. It is, admittedly, a strange and exhausting rhythm to find yourself in.

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“Streets Bunched Like Fists, Treacherous with Brutal Youth and the Trembling Old…”

This may be the greatest opening page to a comic that I’ve seen in years, both in terms of writing and visuals. Just wonderfully ambitious and evocative; you know immediately whether you’re in or out for the whole thing from this one page alone (It’s the first page of Zaucer of Zilk by Brendan McCarthy and Al Ewing, which ran in 2000AD recently and hopefully will get a collected edition sooner rather than later).

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366 Songs 151: What’s The #?

There’s something in Robert Schneider’s vocals in every The Apples in Stereo song that feels as if it turns what could be a classic, sparkly and sparky pop song into something far sleepier. Listen to the rifftastic opening to “What’s The #?” and keep going until Schneider starts singing, and you can feel the energy in the song shift downwards. It’s a weird and wonderful gift; even when he starts screaming “‘Bout you and me!” at 1:28, there’s still something really laidback happening.

Robert Schneider, then: Power-pop’s most lethargic frontman.