You’ll meet a lot of people who, to put it simply, don’t know what they’re talking about. In 1970 a CBS executive famously said that there were four things that we would never, ever see on television: a divorced person, a Jewish person, a person living in New York City and a man with a moustache. By 1980, every show on television was about a divorced Jew who lives in New York City and goes on a blind date with Tom Selleck.
Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt.
I’m not the world’s biggest Rufus Wainwright fan by any stretch of the imagination – He’s always been a marvelous performer in search of material that’s worth his attention, to me, with his own songs constantly falling short of that mark – but the vocal hook of his comeback single “Out of The Game” is another of those earworms that works where the rest of the song just doesn’t. Up until the “Look at you/Look at you/Look at you/[Unintelligible]” bit (Seriously, does he say “Sometimes”? “Sundance”? I can’t make it out, but that doesn’t matter, it’s the sound of the word, the feeling of release it brings after that build) at 0:51, this is an astoundingly generic song, but then that hook comes in and decides it likes the look of your inner brain and might just move in. Good job, Mr. Wainwright; here’s hoping there’s a song that has that stickiness all the way through on your new album.
What’s really interesting about the song to me, though, is the sound of it. It’s Mark Ronson producing and he’s apparently moved from the retro-60s of his Amy Winehouse and Version period (and the retro-80s of his Record Collection album, for that matter) to something very firmly 1970s and Californian. Listen to the sound of the guitars here; you can almost imagine syrupy-album cover photo the song would’ve had had it been released in 1976 and fighting with Elton John to top the sales charts. There’s something seductive about such fidelity to the original aural experience, but it leaves me wondering where Ronson will go next. Surely ’90s retro would just sound like ’60s retro again…?
A quick jump back to things Albarn for this song off his just-out Dr. Dee album/soundtrack/opera/whatever. I heard an earlier version of this back when it was being called “Clacton” and leaked as a bootleg with a much different arrangement, and it barely floated by without notice. This version, though, has been stuck in my head since first hearing it, much to the amusement/annoyance of my wife who is probably sick of me playing it and replaying it over and over again. It’s the handclaps and backing vocals that start at 1:14, though; there’s something about those that are entirely hypnotic to me, barely there but making all the difference and sounding both contemporary and timeless at the same time. They make it impossible to get the song out of my head.
I found this song via a compilation on iTunes that I can’t even remember anymore, where it appeared as a cover version by Ben Gibbard and Feist that’s actually far superior to the original, for me. What makes the latter work and the former not in my eyes (in my ears?) is the vocal; Vashti Bunyan may have been the first person to sing this song, but her vocal has that awkward, strained precious quality of a lot of 1960s female folk singers, where their range sounds as if they’re desperately trying to avoid the lower notes as if that would somehow undercut their gender even if it makes them sound breathless and weepy as a result (Is this just me? Mary Hopkins has the same thing). Compare Vashti’s vocal with the Gibbard/Feist version, and the latter just sounds more natural, with a sadness that fits the lyrics:
Besides the gentle melancholy of the instrumentation and melody, the lyrics explain why I love this song as much as I do: “What will I do if there’s someone there with you?” is a great line for a song about returning to a former lover, but it’s somehow eclipsed by the implications of the follow-up, “Maybe someone you’ve always known?” The insecurity there is just beautiful in its honesty, humanity and vulnerability. There’s an entire world in those two lines, everything inside them and left unsaid.
I’m in a period of work where I feel like I’m continually beginning new gigs and taking nervous first steps with new clients or outlets, which is… continually nervewracking? I was having a conversation the other day about the fact that I’m not even finding the time to enjoy the fact of my new outlets (and one of them in particular is very sweet, considering), because I’m too busy feeling nervous about whether or not what I’m doing is going to be liked by the people footing the bills and the wider audience beyond that. It’s the opposite of familiarity breeding contempt; the lack of familiarity breeding anxiety, over and over again.
(This update brought to you by getting really good notes on a story for a new outlet that I think is going live tomorrow, and the resultant relief quickly followed by “Okay, so how do I actually make those changes?” and “Is ‘that was a fun read’ code for ‘It sucks’?”)
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.
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.
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.)
Apropos of nothing: A sketch from… shit, 1996, maybe? 1997? More often than not, I wish that I’d kept all of the sketchbooks from my art school period.
