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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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So This Is The Aftermath

Less than 24 hours after I’d attempted to make this cake, this was all that remained. In my defense – and Kate’s, for that matter – we weren’t alone in eating it as quickly as possible; we’d taken it to a neighborhood dinner pretty much as soon as it was out of the oven, with me all nervous and worried that it would taste horrible (Banana and ginger cake? With dark brown sugar? And with me making it for the first time and not having had a chance to taste it before we served it… Oh, the nerves), but it was, as you can see, a success. Thankfully, no-one reported feeling the onset of dessert-based food poisoning the next day.

(Posted because I made cookies for a friends’ get-together last night, and was worried that no-one would like them – Or that baking cookies was a lame thing to do in the first place – and, lo and behold, they were all gone within an hour.)

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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.

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“Jim, I Hope I Don’t Have To Listen To This Again”

I thought it would encounter difficulties,” says John Fry, with delicious understatement, down the phone from Ardent Studios in Memphis, which he founded in 1959. “I thought people would find it so unconventional and so unfriendly that we would have difficulties.” He’s remembering 1975, when Ardent’s promotions man, John King, and Jim Dickinson were visiting the major labels trying to sell a new album that had been recorded at Ardent and produced by Dickinson. “Jim used all his contacts – and he had some high-level ones, as did John. One of his friends at a large label said: ‘Jim, I find this music very disturbing.’ Another guy said to him: ‘Jim, I hope I don’t have to listen to this again.'” No one wanted the third album by the Memphis group Big Star, until it crept out in two markedly different versions on tiny labels in the UK and the US in 1978.

The Guardian has a great piece about Third/Sister Lovers by Big Star, one of my favorite albums in the whole wide world. Go read.

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Crowd-Sourcing and Romantic Thinking and Word-Vomit While Still in Bed

One of my major concerns about Kickstarter projects in a general sense is that I often wonder how many of the projects actually end up in the black for their creators. This is particularly the case when it comes to writers, artists and musicians, who are famously complete shit at working through their finances anyway, but who are also, through Kickstarter tiers and through encountering production costs that were previously handled by other people, wading into financial waters they often know next to nothing about. I wonder if people understand that Kickstarter isn’t a magical ATM but a storefront, and that they are committing to running this store — production and fulfillment both — for the duration. I expect a lot of Kickstarters ultimately end up in the red because the people running them haven’t built out a business plan, and have no idea what they’re getting into.

That’s John Scalzi, talking about Amanda Palmer and Kickstarter, something that caught my eye because of something that Katie Lane and George Rohac said at last weekend’s Stumptown: That the first thing someone should do before setting up a Kickstarter is talk to an accountant. And that the first thing someone should do after reaching their Kickstarter goal is… talk to an accountant. Their point was, essentially, “You’re not getting all the money that you think you’re going to get,” because of taxes and whatnot, and me being bad with money, I’d never considered that before.

I had, during the time when I didn’t have much work coming my way – Something that seems to be changing lately, thankfully, although my posting here has been seriously affected as a result, so sorry for that – considered doing some kind of Kickstarter thing to, basically, not feel as if I was becoming a financial black hole in the household. Jeff and I talked, half-heartedly, about doing one for Wait, What, but it never really amounted to anything (That may change; we keep on wondering whether we can monetize that, given the time that we both, and Jeff especially, spends on it each week), and I came this close to Kickstartering a book I was kicking around in my head at one point. But I kept remembering talking to Erika Moen about Kickstarter earlier this year, and remembering her numerous points about why it’s not, as Scalzi put it, “a magical ATM but a storefront,” and what that actually means in terms of additional man hours and costs to fulfill all the “rewards” you’ve promised backers as part of the whole process (I remember thinking, Man, she’s really thought this through so much more than I have. She’s good at this freelance shit).

There’s a lot of… romance, perhaps? Misconceptions and preconceptions, definitely, but also a weirdly “Kickstarter pushes out the middle man and lets the fans give their money to their favorite creators, yeah” vibe to the idea of Kickstarter and related patronage-based services that is very alluring, the idea of it being somehow… purer, perhaps, or somehow better than just trying the old-fashioned way of getting a publisher/label/agent and “selling out” (man). The more I look into it, though, the more it seems like the kind of thing that you have to do properly or you’ll end up crushed, and so wrapped up in debt/obligations/nofunstuff that the creative impulse decides to take a permanent vacation.