I was born and raised in and around New York City, and I lived in the tri-state area for over thirty years. But I met and fell for a shiksa, and my exile began in earnest in March of 2006. Now we live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with our son and daughter.
(Once again I knew the year without looking it up. I'm beginning to think the odds of that happening are tilted extremely in my favor since most of the songs on the Top-100 list hold some kind of personal significance that I can trace to a specific era of my life. In this case, I was DJing at WHRW, the public radio station on campus at SUNY-Binghamton (now Binghamton University, puke).)
So. I've been looking forward to this song on the list. Not sure why. Maybe because it has a pretty sweet video to link to. Maybe because I feel like it's so atypically Superchunk: Yes, it does boast a pretty sweet lead guitar line whose time signature is a little wacky, but its aggression and angst levels are way below the Superchunk average, and it's SO SLOW.
Anyway, that lick and the chiming second guitar that strolls along with it and extra guitar that rings out at the end of the lick and the drunken vibe of the whole song and the falling rhythm guitar of the chorus and the one-chord chunking to close the chorus and the lonely bass line and ding-dong rhythm guitar at the end of the song. That wasn't a sentence. Here's the video:
I love this song from the Icelandic band's debut LP for three distinct reasons:
1. Bjork.
2. My brother was three years old when I was born and for at least a little while couldn't say "Baby Steven." He said, "Baby Demon," and my family, father especially, continued to call me that well into my teens.
3. The last 18 seconds, when the off-kilter drumbeat collapses into a straight back-beat as Bjork shrieks, "Delicious OH! Here he comes again! WAOHH!", is the best thing ever.
First of all, very proud of myself for knowing the release year of Graceland without having to google it. Second, it is my only slightly educated opinion that said LP is Paul Simon's best work as a songwriter. His lyrics are inventive, direct, crisp, and moving. The use of visual imagery and metaphor is above and beyond most of else I've heard from him or otherwise. (See the previous entry for the one singer-songwriter that I feel competes with this LP, and probably she wins, but I digress.)
"Crazy Love, Vol. II" begins with perhaps my favorite lyric of all time: "Fat Charlie the Archangel sloped into the room." As an author it has been my career-long dream to work "sloped into the room" into a manuscript without blowing it. I hold out hope.
Beyond that, the playful lead guitar line, the song's sense of humor, the rich cast of characters, including Fat Charlie, the narrator (probably one and the same), and their soon-to-be-ex-wife, create a song that is, at its heart, deeply unfunny, yet manages to feel like the lightest--the airiest--track on this LP. (Maybe "You Can Call Me Al" is lighter. It's certainly poppier. Lighter is debatable, but I think it's unfair to call that song lighter because Chevy Chase is in the video and I know that's what you're thinking.)
It's an odd little song. It's short at two and a half minutes, but feels much shorter, and Vega talks the lyrics like a poet, rather than sings them, and it's on her eponymous debut, which also has the minor hit "Marelene on the Wall" and the song that should be on my top-100 but for some reason isn't, "The Queen and the Soldier."
"Cracking" opens the LP, and it does it masterfully. Because it's mostly spoken instead of sung, and because it's so sparsely arranged, with almost no drums, and with a casual bass line and long-sustaining synth calls, "Cracking" brings the listener into the record carefully, like the lyrics say--walking on ice. And between each verse, Vega coos a lilting "ahh," until the last verse (there is no chorus), when the bass begins striking its fifths.
The listener has the impression that our narrator--the voice we'll listen to for the next 35 minutes--is afraid, tentative, and that mood pervades the whole album, with one major exception, which this song sets up: those lilting "ahh"'s, and that last verse, which Vega sings instead of speaks, bringing out the melody as if it had been there all the time if only she hadn't been so afraid. Throughout the LP, the melodies are either stark and jagged, or they are lilting and beautiful, and where one feels afraid, the other feels in love.
That's the theme of the song's lyrics, too, of course: finding the beauty after moving tentatively through the fear.
I could go on and on about this LP. It's one of the best ever recorded. The following track, taking its cue from "Cracking"'s ice themes, is called "Freeze Tag." That track snaps, "I will be Dietrich and you can be Dean," and is followed by that minor hit "Marlene [Dietrich] on the Wall."
One of the reasons I started this list was to see what songs my brain and body and heart really went for if all the potential embarrassment went out the window.
I was a freshman in high school when Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars came out, and I was already slipping comfortably into a neo-hippie, tie-dying wearing idiom, listening to the Dead and Pink Floyd and classic rock radio. As modern bands went, Edie Brickell and New Bohemians was a pretty easy step for me. You'll recall the guitar solo from the LPs lead single, "What I Am," was essentially a Jerry Garcia homage.
Most of that LP--and this isn't my pride talking--I can take or leave nowadays, preferably leave. But "Circle," which was everyone's favorite song on that album back in the day, still sticks with me. The LP turned up again in my life as a freshman in college, when groups of us neo-hippies would sit around listening to or singing "Circle" in particular along with our Indigo Girls favorites, and I associate the song vaguely with independence and new crushes and all that sort of freshman-in-college stuff.
Also I still really like her sultry hippie voice. So sue me.
I've already talked about Kristin Hersh in this series of posts. This song, from her band's eponymous debut in 1986, is a perfect representation of the band's sound in its earliest years: Dave Narcizo's nearly cymbal-less drumming pounds like Hersh's bipolar heart; Leslie Langston's driving bass lines guide the song from mountaintop to valley in spite of Hersh's angular and sort of formless guitar playing; and Hersh's voice and lyrics are haunting, complex, and mad.
What can you say about Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders? As far as I'm concerned, she's the first lady of rock and roll, the ultimate hard-working, ass-kicking rock vocalist and songwriter, and the only permanent member of the Pretenders. She is the Pretenders. I hear her influence in everyone from Pat Benatar to Kristin Hersh to KT Tunstall.
I might have chosen "Don't Get Me Wrong" or "Chain Gang" if I'd made this list in a different mood. In fact, Learning to Crawl and Get Close are two of my favorite LPs of all time, and any number of tracks from either record wouldn't be a huge stretch to show up on this list.
The original video for "Brass in Pocket" is a classic, and it's below, but I'm also adding a recent live performance so you can see how much ass Hynde still kicks.
[I actually thought I'd finish blogging about my top-100 songs some time in the fall. Whoops.]
I first heard this song on Tossing Seeds, the compilation of Superchunk early 7-inch and EP releases. They covered Sebadoh, as a lot of the great artists of indie rock did back in the mid 1990s. I remember my cousin saying, "Have you notice how many people cover Sebadoh?" I had not noticed. I was not a Sebadoh fan until I picked up Bakesale in 1994, and I still think of that LP as their best. (Sorry, Gaffney.)
I bought Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock years later. By then I'd heard "Brand New Love," owing to how much I'd wore down the digital grooves on my copy of Tossing Seeds, but the original Sebadoh version is an entirely different experience. It begins empty and far away, with one sad little guitar lick, and then the bass and drums that make it somehow sadder. Lou Barlow is in typical indie-emo form, his voice as emotionally low as it gets. The lyrics, too, are angry and stark, cynical and decidedly anti-love. When the snare roll and overdrive guitars come in for the chorus, with a decent pair of headphones or your speakers way up and the couch and house to yourself, the noise and melody and drone is a singular experience.
2013 was a big year, but all of it was about as personal as it comes. Some of it was awful (medical stuff; we survived), and some of it was awesome (baby girl born two days before Thanksgiving), so all in all it's a year that I can't sum up with "great" or "terrible" or even something as basic as memorable, simply because there was so much I'd like to forget. It was simply BIG.
2014 can't be as big, and that's fine. We're hoping for a basic year: a book release, a new kindergartener, a baby who will smile and walk and maybe talk--all good things, but things that won't strike us at the very marrow, that won't be life or death, that won't have us lying in bed at all hours, staring into the blackness, quiet together, wondering if the next day will bring a precipice or sturdy bridge, a guillotine or a stay of execution.
Wow, that was dramatic. I'll get back to that top-100-songs list any day now. Meanwhile here's a wish:
(First of all, I want to say how proud I am of myself when I know the year, or can figure the year, for these songs I'm blogging without having to look them up. That was the case with this one.)
So, Kittie. What can one say about Kittie? "Real" metalheads agree, for the most part, that Kittie sucked. I don't care much what "real" metalheads say, and I cared even less back in 1999. At the time, I was just starting to get into metal and post-hardcore, mostly via Helmet's best two LPs, Meantime and Betty. I don't know if it's true, but to me Page Hamilton invented stop/start post-hardcore that these girls (yeah, girl; Kittie's average age when they formed in 1996 was 13 or so) so adequately borrowed, establishing them as the silliest (to most listeners) band in the Nu-Metal (puke) scene.
I suppose because I was coming to metal and post-hardcore from the place I've mentioned before--one of fandom almost exclusively of bands with female lead singers--Kittie was an obvious entree to heavier, chunkier stuff for me. This song in particular is probably my favorite off their debut LP Spit because of the excellent screams (though many don't approve of her screams, I think they're perfect in that they're not typical Cookie Monster because she is a girl, and it makes them that much more compelling) and the ridiculous (in a good way) drum machine stuff in the final breakdown*.
*This song has been released in various remixes. The version in this video puts the drum machine breakdown in the middle someplace. The version on the CD I have has it at the end, which I prefer.
This was the first Ani song many of us heard, way back when, and many of us heard it when a female friend--one with a partially shaved head and shit-kicker boots--made us a tape and mailed it to us from Barnard. Come on, I cannot be the only person who first heard Ani under those circumstances.
I forget about Ani most of the time. In the mid-1990s or so, after I'd seen her play live a few times and memorized every word of her 1990 eponymous independent debut, she took on band members and a funkier, more polished sound that I just didn't love. But it was I think earlier this year, 2013, that I put on "Both Hands" again, for the first time in probably twenty years, and I still knew every amazing word.
I didn't grow up listening to country. Unless you count the several Grateful Dead songs that could rightly be called country, and that one Old & in the Way CD I had, I didn't like anything that was remotely country music until probably this song*.
In July of 1993, I was nineteen and living at home for the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. Three years earlier, in 1990, I--along with many, many other teenage boys of a certain cloth--fell in love with Samantha Mathis in Pump Up the Volume. It stands to reason, then, that when a little movie called The Thing Called Love, starring Mathis as a struggling singer-songwriter in Nashville, turned up on the TV after its fairly dismal theater release, I stuck with it. "Blame It on Your Heart," as performed by River Phoenix and Mathis, comes up for a couple of important scenes. It stuck with me. I found it had been released as a single by Patty Loveless, and I bought the CD, probably with my Columbia House membership.
I'll include both versions here. Loveless's is obviously insanely better.
*Okay, I liked "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," but only 'cause it was a story song about some crazy shit.
Kristin Hersh, founder and leader of Throwing Muses and solo artist, was my absolute favorite--my unhealthy obsession with Juliana Hatfield notwithstanding--for probably about seven or eight years. In compiling this list, though, I found that most of her songs, with and without Throwing Muses, just didn't hold up to my ears the way they once did. I still love them, and I still think most TM albums are as close to perfect as an LP experience can get, from their eponymous debut to Limbo. However, except for "Beestung" and one TM track (which I'll write about later, fear not), they didn't pass the crucial test the every song on this list has passed: constant listening.
"Beestung" proved different, and I don't know why. In fact, while I was listening to this list, as I whittled it down from too many to just a little too many, every single time "Beestung" was about to come on (that is, with an iTunes playlist on shuffle, when "Beestung" would pop up as the track about to start, but in the one and a half seconds before it actually did), I'd be like, "Oh, this song. This song will never make the final list. I'm sick of it already and it hasn't even started."
But every time, I was wrong. Every time, that piano would come in, with it's simple and repetitive little two-finger riff, and I could feel myself swelling. If I had a degree in neuroscience, I'd study why some songs make me swell. This one makes me swell, and I never get sick of it while it's on. For years, it wasn't a song I would ever choose to put on, and for years I'd skip it on shuffle during that one and a half second delay before the piano would begin, but once it's on, I don't want it to end.
Madder Rose, an oft-forgotten but quintessential early 90s band, significantly informed my tastes in music in college. When I first heard Madder Rose, I'd already moved away from my high school tastes--which had been very much of a late 1960s/early 1970s vibe, including predominantly the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and whatever the New York-area classic rock station would play. Along with most American teens, I'd heard and loved Nirvana's "Nevermind" in 1991. I wasn't the quickest to abandon my classic rock stuff, though, and enter the modern era, relying on bands like the Black Crowes and the Spin Doctors--both of whom had one foot (at least) firmly planted in sounds I found comfortable and familiar. But by 1993, I was getting someplace new.
In the summer of 1993, with a year of college behind me and a job delivering pizzas, I spent many late nights at Tower Records on Long Island, with a pocketful of tip cash. That tip cash, being above and beyond my hourly wage, I saw as CD money, and it was that summer that I did the most work to really grow my collection, probably more than before or since. That summer I focused on a certain type of band, though, one that became my mainstay of music for the next year at least: indie rock bands with female lead singers. If a band had a female lead singer, I'd probably buy their CD. It was a simple as that. I found Velocity Girl, Zuzu's Petals, the Sundays, Throwing Muses, Belly, Juliana Hatfield, Bettie Serveert, and Madder Rose using this method.
So, the song itself. It's an anomaly among Madder Rose songs, in that, though the lyrics are kind of dark and creepy, it's super poppy: a two-chord (one-->five) progression, if you can call that a progression, with frequent and very melodic and simple guitar solos. Much of this album is darker and more angular, implicating the heroin use the band seems to have enjoyed for so long. Melodic guitar pop was in 1993 still a very new sound to me, having come to modern music through more aggressive-sounding punk rock, and while "Beautiful John" is informed by punk rock to a degree, it has as much in common melodically with nursery rhymes as it does with CBGB.
I should say right up front that the more famous version of this song, by the Foundations in 1967, is way better. It's WAY better. I just learned this moment by reading a little of the band's entry on Wikipedia that the Foundations were not an American soul group, as I always assumed. In fact they formed in London. Somehow they managed to craft this perfect little pop-soul tune that to me has always sounded like a bridge between the doo-wop vocal groups of the previous decade and the rousing horn-blast soul to come. So yeah. I've always loved this song. On its own, though, it wouldn't make my Top 100. It took a pop bluegrass group and a toddler on my lap for that to happen.
When my son was about two, I used to sit down with him at the computer and bring up the songs I thought his toddler ears might especially enjoy, typically ones I liked a lot as a small child. (Not that I remember toddlerhood. But I do remember being four, five, et cetera, and I remember the songs I especially enjoyed. Most of them were from the 1950s and 1960s.) One song I tried out was "Baby, Now That I've Found You."
Upon clicking once on a link, though, I found myself watching the Alison Krauss version. I watched it once with Sam, mainly because he seemed a little interested, and then found the Foundations version. He didn't care at all for that one, but over the next few months, whenever he caught me sitting at the laptop, would say, "Baby song. Listen baby song."
I'm pretty slow, but I did figure out that "baby song" meant this song, and for about a year it was the boy's favorite and the one we'd listen to together most often. I think my son prefers Krauss's soothing and slow arrangement, making the song actually sound like a song sung to a baby, rather than to a lover.
I'm not the biggest Jayhawks fan ever. I got very into the alt-country/No Depression sound right after college, though, particularly via Wilco's A.M. and Son Volt and those bands' respective leaders' shared history in Uncle Tupelo. Of the Jayhawks, I only knew "Blue," so I bought Tomorrow the Green Grass, and I liked it a lot. But it was not an everyday listen, and lots of the deeper cuts didn't leap out at me as fantastic right away. It took years. It took nearly two decades now for "Ann Jane" to present itself as my favorite track on the LP. This is odd to Jayhawks fans, who apparently regard the second half of Tomorrow the Green Grass as something of a throwaway. Apparently.
It's something of a dirge, with a persistent hi-hat that gives the song a marching feel, as if accompanying a funeral. I don't know exactly what the song is about, if I'm honest, but it feels to me like a big brother doing a shitty but touching job of comforting his little sister, though their father is dead or dying. If I'm wrong, I don't want to know. (I have a suspicion that the narrator here could be a man of God, or God Himself. I don't know. Like I said, don't wanna.)
We'll take a short break from my Top-100 Songs posts (sorry those are taking so long, by the way; I had several deadlines this summer, and I had to make those my priority) to focus on my writing for a change.
If you follow my Twitter or like my Facebook, or if you keep up with the Epic Reads blog, you probably saw this already: the cover for GUY IN REAL LIFE (May, 2014 from Balzer+Bray) has been unveiled. If you missed it at any of those places, or if you just loved it so much and want to see it again, here it is!
First, the description from Epic Reads:
Lesh and Svetlana, two teens from St. Paul, Minnesota, are adrift in a
sea of social coterie, desperate for something to change. When they
crash into one another in a drunken bicycle accident at two am, they
don’t yet know how close they are to finding it. For now, Svetlana is
simply looking for a fifth member to legitimize the Central High School
Gaming Club, and Lesh is looking to escape his being grounded for said
drunkenness by entering, reluctantly, the world of online role playing
games.
Lesh’s gaming life takes an interesting turn as, unable to figure out
how to speak to Svetlana, he “becomes” her in-game. When real life and
in-game life inevitably become entwined, Lesh and Svetlana both start to
realize that the lines they draw to keep their lives in order are not
so easy to maintain. Especially when you no longer understand why you
drew them in the first place.
Choosing a favorite trumpet player is tricky business, especially probably for a trumpet player. For most of my high school years as a player, I would have said Miles Davis, despite the fact that I often had trouble listening to him. I suppose I thought Miles, like much jazz and like all the new drinks I was trying at the time, was an acquired taste. Perhaps he is; I certainly like him more now than I did then. However, choosing him as a favorite was dishonest and an affectation. I discovered Clifford Brown my first year of college, and I loved his tone and his solo style and his pace, and I was like, "Ohhhh. This is way better."
I still think that about Clifford Brown, but in recent years I've remember how much I loved Dizzy's music even before I affectedly chose Miles Davis. (There was a brief period in which I worshipped Wynton Marsalis, for his exquisite tone and technical ability, and for his willingness to move, and skill at moving, from jazz to classical and back effortlessly. But he was rarely any fun.) I'd abandoned Dizzy as a fan probably because I knew he flared his cheeks, something every novice trumpet player is taught not to do. Also he kept showing up on the Cosby Show, which didn't seem disdainful of popular culture to a degree sufficient for a jazz musician. Miles Davis wouldn't even look at the audience, never mind appear on a sitcom.
Much in the way we can often as adults return to childhood favorites in movies and books, I returned to Dizzy only recently. Dizzy Gillespie composed and performed music that possessed all the qualities of bebop that I loved then and now. Maybe especially the Afro-Cuban stuff from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, like "Manteca" and "A Night in Tunisia" (I could just as easily have included either of those two on this list) and this piece, "And Then She Stopped," Dizzy's music had the wit and technical showmanship of most great jazz, but it was also eminently danceable and possessed a kind of musical humor. Jazz often cracks jokes, usually with brief musical allusions during solos, but I mean something more than that--Dizzy's compositions are inherently good natured and fun. Dizzy also played in the highest register of the instrument to a point that often seems a little absurd, setting off tiny musical fireworks. I love that.
A little of all of this is apparent in the video herewith, from a live performance of "And Then She Stopped" from 1965, the year of its initial release.
This song is particularly special to me for two reasons.
1) They Might Be Giants are distinct among bands that I like a lot, and not just because they're such freaky weirdos: I first liked them by seeing them live. When they toured in 1992 (I think) to promote Apollo 18, I had never heard them. Still, they came to SUNY Binghamton, where I was a freshman, and lots of my friends were going. The show was right in the student union. Of course I went. And it was fantastic. I can't remember another time I went to see a band live whom I'd never seen or heard before and fell so thoroughly in love. I in particular loved this song, which had me (and everyone else) bouncing around the room like crazy people.
2) Like a lot of my favorite songs,"Ana Ng" is a perfect little self-contained story, though a weird one, I'll grant you. In this case, our narrator is in love with a woman who leaves clear on the other side of the planet, and he's never met her. Maybe they're pen pals, but I prefer to think it's some other kind of connection that is conceivably in the narrator's imagination. That idea, added with the lines "Who was at the Dupont Pavillion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?" inspired me to take on perhaps the most challenging book idea I've ever had. I'll probably never finish it.
There aren't all that many Elvis C. songs more famous than "Alison," his very first single, recorded even pre-Attractions. I guess "Pump It Up" gets more radio play. Maybe "Radio Radio" and "Watching the Detectives" come close. And now and then he records something new, which gets a lot of airplay but then vanishes in to obscurity, where frankly it probably belongs. (Case in point, this new one with the Roots. I think it's horrible.) I'm not actually sure "Alison" is the Elvis song I'd call the best. Not by a long shot. "Beyond Belief." "Shipbuilding." "Big Sister's Clothes." But they didn't make my list. Who can explain these things?
But back to "Alison." I had a dear friend during and after high school by the same name, with that extra common "l," and often, when I was bored, I'd call her up and sing this song into her answering machine. (Sometimes I'd sing "Alison's Starting to Happen" by the Lemonheads, but that didn't make the top-100 list.) When I think about it now--the song, that is--it makes me a bit uncomfortable, but it fits right in with Elvis and his Angry Young Man aesthetic: there's something vaguely misogynistic about these lyrics. While the narrator claims his aim is true, and seems to love Alison, he also wishes she would just shut her silly mouth. He also casts a dark eye on her former loves in a manner not entirely becoming, I'd imagine, to a woman being wooed.
Still it's a fine and brief pop song, deceptively simple, with really strong lyrics.
Next time, another love song, sort of, and a whole lot weirder. Think 1964 World's Fair.
|-1|:The Absolute Value of -1 YA: young adult MS: manuscript TKB:Teens Know Best SAB: Stone Arch Books WYAOD: Write Your A## Off Day FTM: Field Trip Mysteries MG: middle grade AE:Aforementioned Editor ENIV: Edward Necarsulmer IV BIC: Butt in chair PB: picture book WIP: work in progress _IL: ______-in-law TK: to come (don't ask)
GUY IN REAL LIFE will be out summer 2014 from Balzer + Bray. BROOKLYN, BURNING and THE ABSOLUTE VALUE OF -1 come from the good people at Carolrhoda Lab.
