I never took the class on Wilco. Trish has been a fan for ages, seeing them in concert bunches of times and buying every album, so I’ve gotten to hear about Wilco a lot, but never actually listened to a Wilco album all the way through. The closest I’ve come were the Mermaid Avenue records, in which Billy Bragg and Wilco set a bunch of unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to music. I like those collections a lot, and on a recent re-listen to Mermaid Avenue, Vol. II I found myself really taken with the Wilco songs, so I had the idea to assign Robby a Wilco album, mainly so I could assign myself a Wilco album.
I sought Trish’s advice on which one to choose, and she picked for me: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Based on what little I knew about the band, I guess I was expecting a nice album of vaguely folky rock songs, mostly about relationships.
That is not what I got.
I was not expecting for the first sound I heard to be freaky radio sound effects, tuning in and out. I was not expecting for the first song to completely change its mind, 45 seconds in, about what song it wanted to be — new drumbeat, new instrumentation, new feel. I was not expecting straight-up Dark Side Of The Moon homages. And I was not expecting Jeff Tweedy to start singing lyrics like:
I am an American aquarium drinker
I assassin down the avenue
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not a nice album of vaguely folky rock songs about relationships. It is so much better than that.
Here’s a recipe for this album. Start with a base of alt-country — Son Volt, Ryan Adams, Tweedy’s old band Uncle Tupelo, that kind of thing. Mix in some roots — Grateful Dead, CSNY, The Band, Buffalo Springfield. Stir until blended, and then apply a thick layer of post-Meddle Pink Floyd and latter-half Beatles (i.e. starting at Strawberry Fields and going all the way down the line.) Drench the entire mixture in wild surrealism — Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, André Breton. Then set it on fire.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot careens unpredictably from the bizarre and unparseable into the achingly heartfelt and back over and over again, so much that they almost begin to switch places. Take “I am trying to break your heart”, which starts out with the lines quoted above, then finishes them with “I’m hidin’ out in the big city blinking / What was I thinking when I let go of you?” There are five more verses just like that. One moment Tweedy is all, “Take off your Band-Aid ’cause I don’t believe in touchdowns,” and then suddenly he’s grieving, “I’d always thought that if I held you tightly / You would always love me like you did back then.” At some point in the song, you start asking yourself which of these thoughts are really the ones that don’t make sense.
Meanwhile, so many crazy things are happening musically, that I don’t even know how to describe. There’s a bunch of reverb on the guitars, and an organ that sounds like it’s practically underwater. Strums jump to the front and fade back again, rained on by tuneless glockenspiel (maybe?) and arpeggios that sound like somebody dragging a pencil along a grand piano’s strings and then looping the sound back on itself. There’s a perfect piano riff, behind which it sounds like a toddler is banging on the ivories. Zithers jump around in the stereo field. The radios hum, blinking in and out, and then over the title line all the background stuff starts to battle each other, all of it sounding dissonant and yet fitting the mood perfectly.
I listened to this album for three days. It feels like I could listen to it for three years and still keep finding new things. It’s that dense, that layered. The comparison that kept leaping to my mind is Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and yeah, Wilco lives up to the comparison. The songs themselves, the interstices between the songs, the references back and forth, the endless bold and surprising choices, the sheer variety — it’s a record that leaves you certain that you’ve just heard art, musical creativity at its best.
I don’t mean to give the impression, though, that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is some abstract, pretentious performance art piece. It is powerful and emotional, and the crazy lyrics and audio effects never seem tacked-on. On the contrary, they seem essential. More than anything, this album feels like a journey into an unusual mind. I’m not sure whether that mind belongs to Tweedy, or to his co-writer Jay Bennett, or to some kind of collective gestalt of the band itself — all I know is that I found it a fascinating, compelling place to visit.
Sometimes that mind is melancholy and contemplative, sometimes philosophical. (“You have to learn how to die / if you wanna wanna be alive.”) There are times when it seems scarily unsettled, near the edge or over it (as in the outro for “Ashes of American flags”), and then other times (like “Heavy metal drummer”) when it is as sweetly nostalgic as any Van Morrison song. There are moments where the trip churns into an eddy, as in the dirge-y “Radio cure”, or the occasional instrumental break that wanders off into the woods, but almost immediately something else comes along to captivate — a pang of melody, an arresting image, a sound you’ve never heard before.
It took me a long time to get to Wilco. I think it’ll take me a long time to really learn them. I can’t wait.
I love a slice of cheesecake. It could be topped with fruit, or chocolate, or caramel, or even nothing at all, and I will be absolutely delighted to have it in front of me. It feels like more than a dessert — it feels like an event. Every moment of eating that slice of cheesecake is bliss. If I’m feeling particularly ravenous or decadent, I might even have a second slice of cheesecake. But if you put an entire cheesecake in front of me, despite how much I love it, I would probably demur. A couple of slices is enough.
Yes, I actually do have a point here about Florence + The Machine’s second album — I haven’t accidentally started a food blog. My point is this: where many albums are like a great buffet, or a delicious meal, Ceremonials is an ENTIRE. DAMN. CHEESECAKE.
When any single track from this album comes up in the iPod shuffle, I am thrilled. The combination of powerful orchestration, tribal beats, building operatic drama, and Florence Welch’s astonishing voice makes for an epic experience. But listening to all twelve tracks in a row, especially on repeat, which is how I tend to listen to these assigned albums… it can be a little overwhelming.
The formula for all these songs is more or less the same. Let’s take one at random, how about “All This And Heaven Too.” After a few seconds of sound effects, there’s a steady beat and Welch singing pretty calmly, spinning an extended metaphor about the language of the heart. A shift into a minor key starts to ramp up the tension. Layers of Welch’s voice begin to swirl around the main vocal line, Kate Bush style, the range of the melody widening out until the chorus hits with a high note, and Welch shifts into belting out the lines, communicating emotional desperation as the drums pound and the synths swell. Now all those Kate Bush layers are in full effect, droning against and counterpointing the melody line.
Then it all drops out for another verse, just like the first. We build, and build, and burst once again into the same chorus, same layers, same grand parade of operatic feeling. Then there’s a wordless bridge, dominated by drums and vocal layers, stentorian chanting from Welch atop her own voice laying down base chords, and then that overflowing chorus again, resolving into anthemic vocalizations, all about how language can’t contain the level of emotion she’s feeling. And then the whole thing winds up quietly, as Welch sings about “screaming out a language that I never knew existed before.”
I mean, it’s awesome. It’s epic. It’s an incredible emotional ride, contained in the space of four minutes. And pretty much every song on this album is like that. But how many roller coasters can you ride in a row, before your head needs a rest? Is twelve too many?
It’s funny, I wrote a couple of months ago about how the Killers’ 2004 album came out just as the album sequencing era was winding down, and MP3s had turned people into singles enthusiasts once more. Ceremonials, released in 2011, goes even further, collecting 12 intense experiences into a set that wants to be spaced out, mixed in with less dramatic pieces so that it can tower over them in contrast.
When they’re sequenced back to back, over and over, it’s not that they become less good, it’s just that a kind of numbing sets in. You just can’t be transported again and again in the space of an hour. And yet, even when I listed to this on repeat, some songs retained their power to give me chills. “Shake It Off” is the first of these, quite justifiably a worldwide hit, and a memorable rallying cry to rid ourselves of the ghosts that haunt us. “No Light, No Light” is a close second, perhaps because its lyrics permit Welch to address a relationship directly rather than through a distancing metaphor. And finally, “Spectrum” pulls off the rather neat trick of a vivid visualization that ultimately maps back to an emotional reality: “Say my name, and every color illuminates.”
These songs are amazing songs. Every one of them feels like an event. Taken together, they are a little too rich for my palate. But when any single one of them is set in front of me, the bliss is that much more for not bludgeoning me with one high after another.
[As always, many spoilers for Watchmen lurk below.]
Yes, Chapter 2 is full of flashbacks stitched together by present-day scenes. But that’s far from the only reminiscing it contains. As usual, Moore and Gibbons’ themes run several layers deep, and this is most apparent in the scene between Laurie and Sally at the beginning of the chapter.
Aside from the fact that the long and painful history between the characters is self-evident in their every utterance, there are also a number of memory cues scattered throughout the scene. Obviously, there’s the framed picture of the Minutemen, which leads Sally into her flashback. There are also framed pictures on the walls, tantalizing in their sketchiness. There’s the Tijuana bible, Sally’s way of “being reminded that people used to slobber over me.” And of course, there’s the ever-present bottle of Nostalgia (by Veidt) on the vanity.
Finally, as we come out of the flashback, we get a closer look at one of those pictures:
Which brings us to our subject today. Here’s what the web annotations have to say about this panel:
The portrait on the wall is inscribed “To Sally Jupiter, Best Wishes Varga”. In the real world an artist named Alfredo Vargas drew portraits of naked and half-naked women which appeared regularly in Playboy magazine. He sometimes signed his work “Vargas” and sometimes “Varga”. The portrait of Sally is very much in his style.
As often occurs with these web annotations, this is a case of “almost but not quite.” Some corrections:
There was in fact a pin-up artist named Vargas in the real world, but he was Alberto Vargas, not Alfredo Vargas.
His work did indeed appear in Playboy, but much more relevant to the reference here is the fact that his work appeared in Esquire from 1940 to 1946, in gatefold images that became a salient aspect of American soldiers’ lives during those World War II years. His Playboy art occurred much later (1957 through 1974) and was more explicit during those years, i.e. more naked than half-naked. Incidentally, while Leslie Klinger does a considerably better job with his Vargas gloss, he also gets these dates wrong, suggesting that Vargas didn’t separate from Esquire until 1957, when in fact the artist suffered a long fallow and desperate period between leaving Esquire and starting for Playboy.
There’s a specific reason why his signature varied between “Varga” and “Vargas”, and it maps directly onto his history with those magazines. According to Vargas’s autobiography, Esquire editor David Smart decided to call the artist’s creations “Varga Girls”, on the notion that it was “more euphonious” than “Vargas Girls”. (pg. 28) But Vargas’s parting from Esquire was a bitter one, and by 1950, after four years of court battles, he had completly lost the rights to the “Varga” name. (pg. 43) Consequently, his work from there on out was signed “Vargas”.
These facts bear directly on the Watchmen panel. Because the portrait is signed “Varga” rather than “Vargas”, we can reasonably conclude that the fictional Varga in this world did his portrait of Sally Jupiter during the war years. That conclusion also resonates with the many other manifestations of 1940s nostalgia, including the flashback itself.
Painted Ladies
So what was “Varga” all about, and why does it matter that he painted a portrait of Sally Jupiter that now hangs on her wall in the “City of the Dead”?
Alberto Vargas was born in Peru in 1896. At 20 years old, after a European schooling and a brief apprenticeship with a photographer, he found himself in New York, and there became entranced with American women. He was supposed to return home to Peru, but he chose to stay instead, and from that moment onward made his living as an artist, never straying far from paintings of idealized female forms.
During the 1920s he painted portraits for the Ziegfeld Follies, which in turn led him to gigs illustrating for newspapers, magazines, advertisements, fashion designs, and personal commissions. Through the 1930s he continued this sort of work and also found himself employed by Hollywood studios, creating many movie posters, as well as portraits of the era’s major film stars. It was in 1940, though, that he would begin the most iconic work of his lifetime.
For seven years, George Petty had been the pin-up artist of choice in the pages of Esquire, but Smart found him tiresome and demanding to work with. Petty was altogether too shrewd a businessman, so Smart sought someone who was as good with the paintbrush but not nearly so good at interpreting contracts. He found his ideal match in Alberto Vargas, who had been suffering from quite a few lean years during the Depression, and who was ecstatic to receive not only work but appreciation for the kind of work he wanted to do.
The first Varga Girl appeared in the October 1940 issue of Esquire, a little over a year before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The feature proved immediately and immensely popular, prompting Smart to begin a program of relentless exploitation. Esquire contracted with Vargas to produce a prodigious amount of work each year, and ran a calendar of twelve Vargas paintings only two months after his debut in the magazine.
From 1942 to 1945, Smart distributed over three million copies of Esquire to domestic military installations free of charge, selling another six million copies (without advertising) to troops overseas. The Varga Girl calendar would become an annual release throughout the war years, selling in the millions. Vargas became the premier pin-up artist of the World War Two era, a cultural phenomenon intimately connected with the times, whose work appeared in barracks worldwide, as well as on the noses of American airplanes.
It was widely suggested, perhaps even widely believed, that these images raised the morale of American soldiers overseas — reminded them of what they were fighting for back home. Vargas and Esquire reinforced this notion by presenting Varga Girls as brides, or bedecked in patriotic imagery, or posed with various military props — medals, uniforms, letters from home, army instruction books, and so forth. The images were often accompanied by some bit of verse or prose about heartfelt topics like peace, love, or Christmas.
And yet, as World War Two veteran Kurt Vonnegut points out in his brilliant foreword to a catalog of Vargas’s Esquire work, the notion of these images as morale-raisers doesn’t withstand much scrutiny. They bore little resemblance to the average American wife, mother, or sweetheart, and their net effect, if not their intention, was just “to make horny youths far from home hornier — to what end we can only speculate.”
Vonnegut suggests instead that what the Varga Girls represent is more akin to images from the Sears Roebuck catalog:
If I am right, the pinups of World War Two had the generalized appeal of merchandise, implied fixed prices and order forms. The fantasy: You really could buy one if you had the bucks, and you just might have the bucks someday. The paper woman in the girdle and bra, if you were a man, seemed as much in your power as the socket-wrench set or the level-winding fishing reel.
In other words, Vargas’s art and Esquire‘s use of it contributed to the cultural commodification of women during World War Two, and here we can return to Sally Jupiter at last.
“I’m sitting ON it!”
Sally states clearly, in the supplemental material to Chapter 9, that her career as Silk Spectre “was never a sex thing. It was a money thing.” Hollis Mason concurs, in Under The Hood, saying that Sally “was probably the first of us ever to realize that there could be commercial benefits in being a masked adventurer. The Silk Spectre used her reputation as a crimefighter primarily to make the front pages and receive exposure for her lucrative modeling career…”
Sally, with the eager assistance of her agent and later husband Laurence Shexnayder, created her image in order to sell it, during the same era in which the Varga Girls rose to prominence. It’s no wonder Vargas painted her — in a way, they were both in the same line of work. They sold fantasy images of women, turning the desires of “horny youths” into cash.
Though the Esquire Varga Girls were anonymous, Vargas painted lots of portraits of living stars, especially during his studio days in the 1930s. Even in the 40s, during the height of his Esquire work, he did portraits of Jane Russell and Ava Gardner. The notion that he’d have painted Silk Spectre during that time is totally plausible. Like those movie bombshells, Sally Jupiter was an object of desire, and she and Shexnayder did their level best to rake in earnings from the people who slobbered over her.
Sally makes no bones about any of this, recounting every “bright blue gag” about herself back to Nite Owl, and joking about the moneymaker her body has been for her, as in the intermittent voice balloons that drift over to Laurie in a flashback that takes place at Sally’s house:
And so she did, though like Alberto Vargas, she and Laurence don’t always seem to have had the greatest dealmaking acumen. Though she certainly lives in a nice enough house (at least, after divorcing Shexnayder), the film deal they make devolves from a documentary, into a children’s adventure serial, into a “B” action movie, and finally into something “too awful even to be dignified with the term ‘pornography.'”
The journey taken by the Silk Spectre biopic defines a continuum, with “classy” exploitation at one end and purely crass exploitation at the other. In Sally’s apartment, those two extremes get represented by the Varga portrait on one end, and the Tijuana bible on the other. And while Sally might prefer to be on the classy end, she makes it clear that she doesn’t mind the other end so much either, because it’s not a dignity thing, it’s a money thing. (“Listen, those things are valuable, like antiques. Eighty bucks an’ up.”)
Sally learns, in her career as a “big tough super-lady”, that her value resides in her body and her sexuality. Her function, as a woman, was more or less to be a Varga Girl: erotic and innocent at once, distant and accessible at once, glamorous and vulnerable at once, and all available for sale everywhere. Merchandise.
The Essence That Was So Divine
When she turns on Laurie at the end of the scene, Sally reveals that this view extends beyond herself. “At least I don’t sleep with an H-Bomb,” she says, and when Laurie objects that Jon is not an H-Bomb, she continues: “Honey, the only difference is that they didn’t have to get the H-Bomb laid every once in a while.” In Sally’s eyes, that’s Laurie’s job, her function as a woman: get the H-Bomb laid. She’s as much a morale-raiser as any Esquire gatefold. (And though she protests that Sally is “being totally unfair”, Laurie herself is stuck in a story where her main function is to change the state of male characters.)
Sally Jupiter’s morale-raising days are in the past, though. Her world is “the city of the dead” because the thing that gave her meaning and value has departed with age. Bitterness has replaced allure, and now her refuge is in her memories, a past that gets just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
In other words, nostalgia. Or rather, perhaps, Nostalgia, because there’s someplace else in the Watchmen world where Varga-esque images appear, and that’s in Adrian Veidt’s ad campaign for his “Nostalgia line of ladies’ and men’s cosmetics.” He describes the woman in the ad, but may as well be describing a Varga Girl: “overtly erotic, yet layered with enough romantic ambiance to avoid offense.” She’s wearing more clothing than the typical Varga Girl, but the gauzy, transparent dress that hangs down from her torso, revealing and obscuring her thigh at once is pure Vargas, as is her pose and knowing stare out of the frame, returning the viewer’s gaze with amusement.
Ozymandias, while watching his bank of randomly changing screens, muses about the “erotic undercurrent not uncommon in times of war,” and notes in his ad strategy that “when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.” Vargas’s painted ladies might belong to either, smooth fantasy women adorned in furs and flowers, who all find themselves in a half-imagined climate so warm that they’re constantly shedding clothes. It’s hard to say whether they seemed nostalgic at the time of their highest popularity, but at the very least they represented a yearning for simplicity and pleasure that must have felt distant indeed for soldiers deployed throughout the globe. Vargas’s work certainly drips with nostalgia now, especially for those, like Vonnegut, who lived through the 1940s.
The primary caption for Nostalgia advertisements reaches back even further, to the 1930s. “Oh, how the ghost of you clings” is a quote from the song “These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)”, a hit song from 1936 that was covered by multiple people that year, including Leslie Hutchinson, Benny Goodman, and Billie Holiday. Here’s one of my favorite versions, from Bryan Ferry in 1973:
Once again, multiple layers of nostalgia are present here. The song itself is about the pain of lost love, when every element of your life can feel like a reminder of what’s gone out of it. “The ghost of you” here is made of all the simple little things that evoke the departed lover, including the lingering scent of perfume. Beyond that, the use of this caption in a 1985 ad campaign quite consciously hearkens back to a bygone era, that mythical “simpler time” that itself is the object of little-n nostalgia. That clinging ghost is the old songs, the old styles, the old times that feel so distant, especially when the present time is full of “global uncertainty.”
More than that, though, within the story, pertaining to the specific characters, when a bottle of Nostalgia appears, so do the clinging ghosts of the past. Obviously it takes a starring role in Chapter 9, appearing in close-up on the cover and shattering the Martian castle in the issue’s climactic moment. There, the ghost is the circumstances of Laurie’s birth, come back to haunt her after years of suppression.
In the opening scene of Chapter 2, that same ghost is at work, though we don’t know it yet. In addition, we get ghosts of other kinds. Sally gazes at her picture of the Minutemen, remembering how the dark and bright parts of the past brought her to where and who she is today. That picture, the Tijuana bible, and the Varga portrait on the wall surround her with ghosts of her former self — departed desire, eroticism, vitality. Most of all, she and Laurie are haunted by their shared past, the tension between them a product of thousands of interactions, behavior itself driven by experiences reaching back generations, like any complicated relationship between parent and child. Those ghosts do cling, and sometimes nostalgia is the optimal outcome, far better anyway than bitterness and toxicity.
Last, and deepest, is the kind of nostalgia that Watchmen itself set out to explode, the decades-long attachment of comics fans to the same superheroes and superhero tropes iterated over and over and over again. Those fanboy fantasies were as surprisingly fragile as Doctor Manhattan’s Martian castle, and this book was the bottle hurled at them. It marked a turning point, taking us to a new vantage from which we could see those Golden, Silver, and Bronze age comics as innocent and problematic in their own way as the Varga Girls seem now.
Summer’s here, and the time is right for an album like 461 Ocean Boulevard. This record has always felt like a sunny day to me, and I paid attention in this assignment to figure out why.
It helps a lot that Eric Clapton evokes the other artist who’s always felt like summer to me: Bob Marley. Clapton’s cover of “I Shot The Sheriff” is smoother and more laid-back than Marley’s original, which isn’t to say it doesn’t lilt and swing. The story in the song is a rather grim one, really, but you’d never know it from Clapton’s tone. He sounds like he’s recounting events from a long, safe distance away, much more so than Marley ever did. And he sounds like he’s having a great time retelling the story of his daring escape, all the while defending his adherence to a code of honor.
Similarly somber lyrically, but far less mellow musically, is “Motherless Children.” These lyrics return again and again to the downbeat theme: “your mother is dead.” But where the music could be a slow, sad blues, instead we get a funky and danceable beat and Clapton’s best riff on the album. I know the song is about orphans, but it is undeniably, irrepressibly joyful and fun, a strange combination that somehow works. It’s so fun, in fact, that it once served as the theme song to a comedy show, HBO’s 1980s Daily Show predecessor, Not Necessarily The News. It’s absolutely the kind of song that would blast from the speakers at a barbecue, its toe-tapping rhythm weaving around good times in the sun.
Those two songs are the most energetic on the album — much of the rest of the set is laid back, way back. Take “Let It Grow”, for example. This is more like the evening conversation after most of the party guests have left, and a few close friends sit on the deck under the warm stars. Clapton pitches his vocal so soft that he’s almost whispering in parts, and where the verses feel like musing, the choruses feel like prayer. Clapton released this album after three years in the hell of heroin addiction, and his exhortations to organic emotional roots feel heartfelt and hard-earned.
“Please Be With Me” isn’t quite so pleading (ironically) as “Let It Grow”, but it’s similarly introspective and hopeful. A glowing evocation of relationship devotion, it’s always been one of my favorites on the album. Clapton mixes nimble (but never showy) acoustic fingerpicking with lovely dobro accents, and Yvonne Elliman provides the sweetest harmonies throughout the song, especially on the chorus.
Elliman is kind of a secret weapon, or sometimes not so secret, throughout this album. She’d go on to a meteoric late-Seventies solo career in adult contemporary and disco hits, but on this album she finds a natural place in each soothing groove, managing to sound earthy and angelic by turns, or sometimes all at once. Her peak is probably in “Get Ready”, a duet with Clapton in which she upends his “I been cheated on” narrative, retorting that she’s just out for revenge following his own “sinful” actions, and taunting him with, “you’ve got a lot of nerve… waggling your piece of meat.” But again, where the music could be fierce and angry, it’s instead calm and leisurely.
I tend to respond more to lyrics most of the time, but for me it is pretty much always the music that sets the mood of 461 Ocean Boulevard. It’s not as if the album is stuffed with Beach Boy-esque lyrics about surfing, driving, and girls, but every track mixes warm instrumentation, relaxed vocals, and expansive rhythms to encompass every good mood, even when those moods stand in direct contrast to the lyrics.
The truth is, the lyrics don’t matter that much on this album. On some of the songs, like “Give Me Strength,” they reinforce the feeling of the music, but much of the time they’re more like “Mainline Florida”, which is about… I guess a relationship or something? It’s hard to say and it doesn’t make much difference, because the song isn’t really about a relationship, it’s about an easygoing riff, undergirded by smooth drums and cool harmonies, sweeping up above the waves and gliding elegantly back down.
The words could be about hand motions, for all the difference it makes. In fact, sometimes the words are about hand motions. “Willie And The Hand Jive” is maybe the summeriest song on the whole album. Clapton has a talent for making music without sounding like he’s trying, and this one sounds like it’s just wafting up into the air effortlessly. It’s the perfect emblem of 461 Ocean Boulevard — it feels good, it’s fun, it’s relaxed, and it’s the perfect accompaniment to a summer’s day.
Album sequencing is a funny thing nowadays. The MP3 era has taken us back to a world where the track is king. It’s so easy to shuffle an album, or an artist, or an entire library, be it on an iPod, Spotify, YouTube, whatever, that the notion of a meticulously structured and ordered album feels like it belongs to a bygone era. Hot Fuss came out just as the iPod’s popularity was exploding — it’s part of that era’s last gasp.
Here’s why the sequencing on Hot Fuss is important: The Killers very conveniently ordered the entire album in descending order of awesomeness, traversing a spectrum from mind-blowing to mildly annoying. “Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine” is the explosive, electrifying opener, with the most badass bass line on the album. Part of what makes the song so incredible is that it’s our first exposure to the Killers’ sound, a thrilling combination of crunchy rhythm section, towering riffs, Eighties synth flourishes, and the high-drama glam vocals of Brandon Flowers. Every line Flowers sings on this song feels like it’s being ripped out of him, careening from plea to confession to sinister threat. Robby and I have talked a lot about debut albums, but not as much about debut songs — the first track on a debut album. I would make the case for “Jenny” as one of the most intense first songs ever.
If “Mr. Brightside” isn’t quite on that level, it’s only a tiny notch below. Unlike many Killers songs, this one has a cohesive narrative, all hung around the images swirling through the head of the jealous narrator. Again, Flowers’ vocals keep the whole thing at a heightened pitch of emotion while also maintaining just a bit of ironic distance, as the urgent drums drive the track onward relentlessly. This was the Killers’ only Top Ten hit, and it absolutely deserved all the popularity it had and more.
With “Smile Like You Mean It”, the first tiny flaws begin to show. I mean, everything great is still there — a spooky synth riff, Edge-like guitar underpinnings, a hi-hatty drum part that bookends the chorus with big booms — but… “smile like you mean it”? It makes sense on its own, I guess, as a chiding reminder about sincerity, but the verses seem weirdly disconnected from the concept, or really any concept. The bridge brings back a little of Mr. Brightside’s jealousy, but it doesn’t really go anywhere.
“Somebody Told Me” goes even further into lyrical incoherence. Possibly there’s something deep going on here that I can’t find, but it sure sounds like the story of a guy whose ex(?) is going out with somebody who looks like his own ex, which bears repeating over and over again because…? Sure, musically, still incredible — Flowers has a fantastic gift for making just about anything sound like it’s the most important thing in the world, and the mix pulls off a perfect synergy between powerhouse drums, jagged guitar, and brisk synth fills, but the words just don’t hold up here.
That’s nothing, though, compared to the incomparable nonsense that comprises the thesis statement of “All These Things That I’ve Done.” The Killers would summit the peak of Bizarro Lyric Mountain a few years later with “Are we human or are we dancer?”, but repeating “I got soul but I’m not a soldier” makes for a hell of a warmup. It’s not just the repetition — the song builds and builds, literally adding a gospel choir at the end, as if to impart great meaning to the line, but really… “I got soul but I’m not a soldier”? Are soldiers known for having a lot of soul? Does having soul make somebody assume you’re a soldier? What the hell do these words have to do with each other besides phonic similarity?
Let’s think of those first five songs as Side One of Hot Fuss. From there, the record settles into a groove of good-not-great, a solid B full of songs that have their kicks along with their head-scratchers. “Change Your Mind” is the last of these, and then we drop another notch with “Believe Me Natalie” into a couple songs whose music doesn’t quite compensate for their vacuity.
Finally, “Everything Will Be Alright” delivers almost six minutes of droning, Cure-wannabe dirge, whose attempts at reassurance fall flat in the face of its seasick swirling synths and trite mantras. Flowers’ voice, which previously could at least partially redeem even the silliest words, here gets distorted out of its ability to deliver emotion. The song isn’t terrible, but boy, it wears on me.
But luckily, I listened to this album on repeat, so as this subpar song dragged on and my impatience rose, suddenly Mark Stoermer’s kick-ass bass line on “Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine” would reappear, and The Killers were awesome again.
Did you ever mishear a lyric, then find out about the real one, and still like yours better? I was all set for this post to talk about a great lyric from “Once”, the opening song on Pearl Jam’s Ten. That lyric turns out to actually be: “I’ve got a bomb in my temple that is gonna explode / I got a sixteen gauge buried under my clothes.” Still a good lyric, sure. But what I heard, and have been hearing for 27 years, is “I got a sixteen gauge buried under my nose.”
Okay, now wait, stop laughing. It does sound silly, now that I write it down. But to me it was this great poetic image, sitting uncertainly between the notion of the narrator’s mouth as a deadly weapon and an actual weapon pointed into his mouth. Though, now that I do a little research it’s clear how much I’m not a gun guy, because a sixteen gauge is a shotgun, not exactly the most convenient weapon of choice for suicide.
In any case, I believed the line wholeheartedly, despite the possible comedy, and I can chalk that up to the intensely committed singing of Eddie Vedder. Vedder is a revelation on this debut album, a voice that can start in a profound baritone register and ascend growling to intense peaks, only to lay bare moments of unexpected tenderness, such as the searching title question in “Why Go”, or the “Is something wrong” bridge of “Alive.” What shines through at every single moment is emotional truth — it is impossible to doubt that he means what he’s singing. Each line is fully, thrillingly inhabited. No wonder I didn’t bat an eye at the “nose” line I heard.
What I didn’t realize until I researched this album is how separate Vedder was from the creation of Ten‘s music. I’m used to a model where lead singers are also lead songwriters, or are at least crucial contributors to the music. But Pearl Jam on this album was more in the Elton John/Bernie Taupin mode, except backwards — where John/Taupin start with lyrics then add music, Pearl Jam’s music came first. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament had written a bunch of instrumental compositions, recorded them with Mike McCready on lead guitar and Matt Cameron on drums, then shopped the resulting tape around looking for singers. The tape made its way to Vedder, he wrote lyrics and sang, and the rest is history.
That music, though, is the other magic ingredient of Ten. As great as Vedder’s singing and lyrics are, they’re built atop an amazing foundation of melodicism, musicianship, and tunecraft. When I think of “Alive”, the first thing I hear in my head is that initial guitar riff. The bedrock of “Even Flow” is the melody Vedder sings, but its electric power comes from the hammering guitar that leads into the luminous solo. “Jeremy” is built on a bass line that opens the song like the first line of a novel — instantly intriguing, drawing us into its world.
That world feels quite a bit different now than it did in 1991. As chilling as “Jeremy” is, there are ways in which it feels a bit quaint now. School shootings (and everywhere-else shootings) have become so frequent, almost routine, that the notion of a deep character study into the mind of the shooter seems beside the point. Who has time to imagine all those troubled minds? There’s an army of Jeremys now, each with a soldier’s firepower.
Except the army isn’t really of Jeremys, because Jeremy of the song shoots only himself, at least based on Vedder’s description of his inspiration, and the unedited version of Mark Pellington’s video. Sure, it’s still shocking and horrifying, but not the way it was 27 years ago. Now, strange as it is to say, I think I’d feel a bit of relief hearing about someone carrying a gun to school and shooting only himself.
The dark places are all over this album, with very little relief. Some of it is social, as in “Even Flow”, “Why Go”, and “Jeremy”. Much of it is personal, as in “Once”, “Porch”, and “Release.” Heartbreak deeply etches “Black” and “Garden”, and “Deep” is redolent with upsetting images. There’s light at the center of “Alive” — it’s an affirmation of survival despite intense psychological trauma. Besides that, “Ocean” is really the only song with much uplift in its lyrics, as simple as they are.
It’s depressing stuff. So why does this album feel like an exultation? Again I think it’s down to that incredible alchemy of brilliantly written music and extraordinary vocal performances. Pearl Jam overflows with power as a band — tight rhythms, slashing guitars, intricate counterpoints that lift out of the record’s overall muddy production. Place Vedder’s sensational voice atop that foundation, and you’ve got a recipe to reach the stars.
This is one of those times when an album’s cover perfectly encapsulates one of its themes. We see Pearl Jam reaching for those stars, but doing it together, as a unit rather than a star and his backups. Give or take a revolving door of drummers, that unit has remained intact for almost thirty years now, and shows no sign of stopping. That’s light in the darkness too.
“One morning I woke up, and I knew you were really gone.” That’s the first line of Déjà Vu. It’s a painful image, pulling from a rich blues tradition of narrators whose lives crash down when they wake up. If you didn’t know any better, you might imagine this line sung plaintively, slowly, over mournful chords.
That’s not what Stephen Stills has in mind at all. From the first instant of “Carry On”, bright major-key acoustic guitars charge forward, and then three perfectly braided voices hit like a blast of sunshine. The lyrics, too, turn immediately away from the dolor of the first line: “A new day, a new way, and new eyes to see the dawn.”
Déjà Vu was recorded in the last half of 1969, that brief euphoric moment between Woodstock and Altamont, when it started to seem like the movement of a generation really might change the world. That sparkling optimism turns the devastation of a lover’s abandonment into an unexpected hallelujah: “Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on.”
The sunny spirit carries through both of Graham Nash’s contributions to the album, “Teach Your Children” and “Our House”. The former has to be one of the most hopeful songs ever written about the generation gap, laying out a vision in which children and parents thrive through mutual respect and unshakable love. It’s not just a beautiful song, it’s a beautiful idea, expressed with much the same forward-looking spirit as “Carry On” — “the past is just a goodbye.” This is obviously a far cry from how many families operate — then and now — but Nash seems to be saying, “This is how it could be. Don’t you want that?”
“Our House” is less bold but just as sweet, limning a gentle domestic moment in another house full of love. Nash’s dulcet voice always takes the high parts when CSN sing in harmony, and his lead vocal here embodies warmth and comfort. Listening to the song, it’s almost impossible not to feel uplifted, unless you’re the sort of person who gets enraged by other people’s bliss. The scene was apparently inspired by his real domestic situation at the time, living with Joni Mitchell and her two cats, a perfect crystalline moment of happiness at home.
We also have Mitchell to thank for the album’s biggest hit, “Woodstock.” But where her original was quiet and contemplative, Neil Young and his guitar turn this version into a jagged, soaring powerhouse. It’s probably the peak of the album’s optimism too, what with the bomber death planes turning into butterflies and all. CSNY make an excellent choice to integrate the “billion year old carbon” and “caught in the devil’s bargain” lines better into the whole song — where in Mitchell’s version they almost seem like throwaways, here they anchor the chorus every time, along with the magic harmonies swirling into the sky. But it’s Young’s guitar, skittering over Taylor & Reeves’ funky rhythm section, and Stills’ emotional vocal, that makes this cover feel so vital and unforgettable.
But for all the joy that suffuses this album, there’s a dark undertow too. Where “Carry On” and “Woodstock” give us a Stills bouncing with hope for the future, “4 + 20” tells a different story altogether — he’s so heartbroken that he wishes he was dead. That’s not somebody who feels he has no choice but to carry on. Like Adele at 25, he’s a very young person who feels very old in this song.
Young delivers a better version of this ache in his lovely standout track “Helpless.” Where Stills’ account of depression delivers a straightforward narrative of loneliness, Young combines a sweet nostalgia for the past with a deeply stricken portrait of how he feels today. Where CSN’s vocal blend often feels uplifting, in this song it amplifies the sad lyric’s poignancy into an almost sobbing despair.
But still, these two songs aside, this is an album with hope for the future, or even the past. Crosby’s title track invokes the notion of past lives as a kind of key to the present, and hopes that what he learns this time around will guide him on what to do next time. (Little did he know back then just how much he’d have to learn this time around.) “Almost Cut My Hair” casts him as a soldier in the resistance, his tresses a “freak flag” for others to rally ’round.
And finally, there’s “Everybody I Love You.” As in the beginning, those gorgeous perfect harmonies reach out to embrace the whole world, the whole future. Once the song transitions from its funky beginning to its final choir of angels, the awesome stop-start technique that works so powerfully in “Woodstock” comes back to carry us into counterculture heaven. CSNY wouldn’t always love everybody, nor in fact even each other, but for that moment I believe them, and boy does it feel good.
Postscript: Listening to this album on repeat made me revisit a couple of other favorites, and I felt so connected to them that they feel like they belong here. First, Weird Al’s absolutely note-perfect CSNY parody, which is also a perfect satire of corporate buzzwords:
And finally k.d. lang’s absolutely heartrending version of “Helpless”, used to devastating effect at the end of the movie Away From Her:
The first time I heard Rilo Kiley, it started with a gentle arpeggio on electric guitar, joined quickly by a power chord and drums. An urgent lead guitar cascade overlaid a compelling chord progression, with another guitar playing the notes from the initial arpeggio, this time thicker and a little distorted. Then five rapid strums on dead strings, and slamming back down into the power chord. And when Jenny Lewis’s vocal finally arrived, thirty-five seconds in, it was with one of the best lines she’s ever written: “There’s blood in my mouth ’cause I’ve been biting my tongue all week.”
I was hooked. Lucky for me, the rest of the verse delivered on the promise of that first line:
I keep on talkin’ trash but I never say anything
And the talking leads to touching
And the touching leads to sex
And then there is no mystery left
And again those five rapid strums, and SLAM! So begins “Portions For Foxes”, a breathtaking rock song about the struggle for true companionship. Lewis insists that she’s bad news, that her lover is bad news, and yet their togetherness offers her “another form of relief.” Her vocal is nothing short of astonishing in places, especially when she growls a fierce “C’MERE!”
The title calls back to Psalms 63:9-10, “But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth. / They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.” The implication in the psalm is of God’s benevolent protection, but Lewis has something more sinister in mind. In this song, “we’ll all be portions for foxes.” She and her lover seek each other’s soul, but each is already a “walking corpse”, and whatever their intentions, destruction ensues in the guise of damage control. These foxes may partake of the biblical symbol, but their inclusion in a dark love song is no accident — foxes in our world, in a romantic context, are the attractive and the dangerous, the bad news that we like anyway.
The song comes from their 2004 album More Adventurous, which I knew I needed once I’d fallen in love with the single. I was delighted to find that it is more adventurous indeed than your average rock album. There are several rock and roll songs in the “Portions For Foxes” vein, with similarly intense moments to that “C’MERE!” “Love and War (11/11/46)” tells the story of a girl whose grandfather fought in World War II, whose pain, trauma, and struggle she sees reflected in her broken relationship. At the end of every verse, Lewis escalates to a crescendo — not a scream, but a note that tips into distortion with its fervor.
Another stunner is “Does He Love You?”, narrated by a woman who we come to discover is betraying her friend, having an affair with her friend’s husband. The tune starts out with sweet woodwinds (well, mostly synths programmed to sound like woodwinds) and a plaintive vocal, but by the time it’s built to its revelation, Lewis’s voice is heavily processed and the guitars scream bitter recrimination around her.
Yet Rilo Kiley isn’t content to fill their album with their rock and roll prowess. Instead, the record is by turns rock, folk, country, and even soul. The title track rings with pedal steel and glockenspiel, and Lewis channels her best Emmylou Harris, no fuzz or grunge anywhere. She even breaks into a silver-toned harmonica solo before and after the final verse. “The Absence Of God” reworks the riff from Jim Croce’s “Operator” into a lovely folk tune whose lyrics offer wisdom from various corners of the narrator’s life, resolving sadly into her propensity for self-destruction despite it all. “I Never” is a heartfelt blue-eyed soul serenade, whose earnest and repetitive declarations of love would tip over into self-parody if it wasn’t sung with such total commitment.
It’s not just musical diversity on display here either — Lewis’s songwriting can be structurally daring too. At one point “I Never” repeats the word “never” 27 times in a row before finally resolving into “loved somebody the way that I love you.” “Accidntel Deth” tells an extended story in each of its long verses before returning to the chorus. Boldest of all is “A Man/Me/Then Jim”, which true to its title switches viewpoints after every chorus. The first speaker is at a funeral for what turns out to be the third speaker, and the second speaker ends up eliciting a story from yet another viewpoint, that of a sad telephone solicitor. They’re all luminously tied together by what the song calls “the slow fade of love.”
Finally, two songs meditate on the then-recent death of Elliott Smith. “Ripchord”, the only song without vocals or lyrics by Lewis, hearkens to Smith’s style with Blake Sennett’s thin vocal delivery and tinny acoustic guitar. “It Just Is” closes the album with a resigned tone — Lewis refuses to grant Smith’s violent demise “sorrow or inspiration”, calling it instead a loss that “just is”.
Death haunts much of this album — suicide shows up in “A Man/Me/Then Jim”, an executioner stalks through the multiple meanings of “It’s A Hit”, and of course “Accidntel Deth” is an extended meditation on the topic. In its totality, More Adventurous is beautiful, sad, and independent. As its narrators discover, “living is the problem”, and while there may be no solution, music like this is about as close as it comes.
Hotel California was a turning point for the Eagles. Gone was the countrifying influence of Bernie Leadon, replaced instead with the funky guitar virtuosity of Joe Walsh. Walsh proved to be a fantastic musical contributor, as was everyone else in the band, but the bottom line on this album is that it is the lyrical, vocal, and songwriting peak for Don Henley. I’ve busted on Henley in the past about his recent dismaying tendency towards super-smugness, but in the Hotel California era the guy could do no wrong. Not that he wasn’t a little on the sanctimonious side even then, but his venom a) felt completely justified, and b) included his own complicity, which makes a huge difference.
Every single song on this album with lead vocals by Henley is a stone classic. And then there are the other three. “New Kid In Town” was a huge hit for the band, and it’s certainly an infectious tune — I always find myself singing along to it — but at the same time it has a whiny feel that always gets under my skin, especially Glenn Frey’s “I don’t wanna hear it”s at the end. Walsh’s “Pretty Maids All In A Row” and Randy Meisner’s “Try And Love Again” are both adequate, middle-of-the-road tracks, pleasant enough but pretty forgettable overall.
So let’s talk about that Henley stuff. In the days of my youth, Denver’s KAZY-FM had a Memorial Day weekend tradition of compiling and playing through its “Top 500 Rock Songs Of All Time,” and the top of the list was always inhabited by the same handful of songs. “Stairway to Heaven.” “Freebird.” “A Day In The Life.” “Layla.” “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” And… “Hotel California.” What all these songs have in common is an epic scope, both musically and lyrically. “Layla” and “Freebird” are love songs, albeit Cinemascope love songs. The rest go well beyond. They’re rock and roll’s version of War and Peace or The Grapes Of Wrath or, pretty explicitly in Zeppelin’s case, The Lord Of The Rings. “Hotel California” is kind of the American “Stairway to Heaven”, less steeped in hedgerows and forests, more concerned with dark deserts, mission bells, and mirrors on the ceiling. But certainly equally alive with mystic allegory.
Henley doesn’t get all the credit for this grandeur. Apparently Don Felder wrote most of the music, and Frey came up with the central concept of a guy on a lonely road pulling into a mysterious haven. Walsh and Felder duel their way through a magnificent guitar solo at the bridge. It was Henley, though, who wrote the lyrics and sang the tune, and I would argue that it’s Henley’s persona which holds the whole thing together. The above-it-all quality he often manifests vocally works to great advantage, creating a dramatic dynamic against the narrative that keeps placing his character in further peril. And what lyrics! “Some dance to remember / Some dance to forget.” “She got the Mercedes bends.” And of course, “You can check out anytime you like / But you can never leave.”
Those lyrics are oblique enough that plenty of interpretations are available, but what’s clear is that the character has been sucked into a fantasy world that looks pretty enough on the outside, but inside is bristling with steely knives and immortal beasts. The nature of those beasts is what concerns the rest of the Henley tunes on this album. “Life In The Fast Lane” is a counterweight to “Hotel California”‘s loftiness, portraying both the glamour and the danger of life as the Eagles knew it, a literal and metaphorical freeway fueled by money, success, and cocaine. Henley contributes more brilliant images, like “terminally pretty” and “blinded by thirst”, culminating in “There were lines on the mirror / lines on her face.” Walsh provides not only a great solo but the arresting central riff of the song.
“Victim Of Love” has just as powerful a punch, and this time the beasts are illusion and delusion. Henley gets to be the whip-smart interrogator of a woman who’s trying to fool others by trying to fool herself. Thirst makes another appearance, this time as the symptom of her unhealthy craving for “dangerous boys.” Felder provides the music once again, a swinging stomp far removed from the ethereal fingerpicking of “Hotel California.”
For all the disdain he shows in “Victim Of Love”, Henley displays an equal amount of compassion in “Wasted Time.” The two songs are yin and yang to each other — both address a woman who’s been disappointed in love, but in “Victim” she’s just playing the part (according to Henley), while in “Wasted” she’s genuinely crushed. And while “Victim” ends in scornful repetition (with the occasional “I could be wrong, but I’m not”), “Wasted Time” closes on a genuinely hopeful note.
That hope is nowhere to be found in the album’s final towering masterpiece, “The Last Resort.” The title track is still the standout on Hotel California, but on most any other album (including any other Eagles album), “The Last Resort” would be the best song by far. It’s a summation of the entire album leading up to it, encompassing hubris, delusion, naivete, and humanity’s heedless consumption and self-destruction.
The lyrics paint a definitive portrait of the Eagles’ California. It’s a lure of pure beauty that brings people flocking from everywhere, heedless that the flocking itself will inevitably destroy that beauty. It’s an object of lust and greed, filled with objects of lust and greed. It’s the logical conclusion of America’s westward reach, a land cleared out by genocide, whose conquerors can safely romanticize the people they exterminated. It’s a resort town filled with pretty people who extol its marvelousness even as they systematically dismantle it. As Liz Phair would say much later: “Check out America — you’re looking at it, babe.”
After this thorough damnation and condemnation, the song pulls back into an elegiac mood. Henley’s final note on “goodbye” spirals up into the California sun, gliding higher and higher until it’s caught by the strings and carried ever onward. As the stately melody fades out, we’re left haunted by this vision, looking at paradise even as we kiss it goodbye, and realizing… It’s not just California. It’s not just America. It’s the world, and you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
Even more than in previous years, 2017’s music mix was strongly influenced by the ongoing Album Assignments project that’s happening between me and my friend Robby. Most of the songs on here come from assigned albums in one direction or another, though there are some exceptions thrown in, mostly to do with a few concerts I saw. So what that means is I’ve already written pretty extensively about most of this music. Nevertheless, a mix is a new context, so I’ve got a little bit to say about the songs as they come together here.
1. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
These mixes are an annual Christmas gift to our friends Siân and Kelly, who live in Wales. We haven’t seen them for seven years now — it’s easy to mark the time since they last visited right as we moved into our house. And we miss them terribly. So this song is pretty straightforward in that context. Not that we wish they lived here, necessarily — we know they’re happy where they are, and so are we — but I sure would love to be able to have that Star Trek transporter so that the ocean in between us didn’t have to be such an obstacle. It feels like such an awfully long time, especially as we’ve watched Dante go from 5 to 12. I hope we can come back together soon, whether that’s taking the 3 of us to Wales or them finding themselves in Colorado.
2. Indigo Girls – Fugitive
The main factor driving the inclusion of this song is the fact that Laura and I saw the Indigo Girls this April. They played on the CU campus, with the CU student orchestra, which was a unique and wonderful context for an Indigo Girls concert. They said at the time that they were recording a live album during that session, so maybe we’ll get an official document of it someday. In the meantime, we have our memories, and I remember this song in particular as being transcendent, between Amy’s impassioned vocal and the excellent orchestra arrangement. But I also associate this song with Siân and Kelly, due to our shared love of Amy and Emily.
3. Adele – River Lea
As I said when I wrote about 25, this is a fascinating song to me — such a different character than the one Adele usually takes on. Also, like the rest of her songs, it’s so well-produced. It just sounds great. And the UK connection makes me think of our friends, though I realize they’re not exactly in London.
4. Death Cab For Cutie – We Looked Like Giants
The home-rootedness of “River Lea” leads into the nostalgic tone of this song, and there’s a connection in the bitterness too, although where Adele is resigned to how she’ll hurt people, Ben Gibbard still seems angry when he sings “I’ve become what I always hated.” But even more than the lyrics, the music in this song sweeps me away. I absolutely love when the riff kicks in right after the 30-second mark, and then crashes back like raging waves throughout the song. The rhythm section in the verses is so propulsive, and then that crash comes again… transcendent.
5. The Airbone Toxic Event – Gasoline
Another great rock song reminiscing about a fiery early love. It’s not as emotionally or musically complex as “We Looked Like Giants”, and its imagery is all heat where the Death Cab song is frosty, but they feel closely linked to me. I guess part of it is the relief of knowing that there’s lots of music to love from the 21st century as well as the stuff I grew up with.
6. The Smithereens – Yesterday Girl
Speaking of songs I grew up with, okay, yes, it is another nostalgic rock song about a bygone relationship. I’m not doing a bunch of middle-aged mooning over old lovers, I promise — it’s just that for whatever reason I kept assigning or getting assigned albums that partook of the theme, and the songs themselves just stood out like gems. As I said in the review I wrote of 11, I think this is the best version of the Smithereens’ rock voice, and that is a high peak. I read this morning that Pat DiNizio died, which makes me even gladder to have spent time with this album and included this song in the year’s mix. RIP Pat — you were a true rock and roll disciple.
7. World Party – Way Down Now
This is the opener to an album that I absolutely adore, Goodbye Jumbo. Not an assignment, but just a record I revisited because I needed to hear it a bunch of times in a row. I love the entire thing, but this song really spoke to me this year, especially as I watched one disaster and disgrace after another unfold in the news. “Come on and show me anything but this.”
8. Pink Floyd – Us And Them
Robby assigned me The Dark Side Of The Moon to listen to during the week of the eclipse, which was so absolutely perfect. That record is actually perfect at a whole lot of times, and this song in particular resonated with me, embodying as it does the idea of tribal division as a deeply ingrained human trait. The gulf between me and my people versus the seemingly rock-steady 37 percent or so of people who remain Trump supporters feels enormous to me. I know there’s that othering mechanism in my brain, and I do not want to be controlled by it, but the anger and disgust that his behavior produces in me is visceral, and boy is it not interested in counterpoints.
9. Public Enemy – Fight The Power (soundtrack version)
Which brings us to this anthem, an amazing vehicle for outrage against the system. Fear Of A Black Planet was an album assignment, but the version of “Fight The Power” on that album is really disappointing, with some of the strongest lyrics censored and some of the best music — including Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet — edited out. For the definitive track, there is absolutely no alternative to the Do The Right Thing soundtrack.
10. Hirway and Miranda – What’s Next?
2017 was the year of The West Wing for me. My friends Trish and Art watched the show when it aired, and regularly rhapsodized about it, but I just wasn’t up for adopting another TV show back then. But last Christmas I was home for a while, and had some unaccustomed time to take on a little project. Trish was all excited because there was a new podcast called The West Wing Weekly, which analyzed one episode at a time in depth. So I decided to get on board, and watched the whole series between December and March. I absolutely loved it, and this was the perfect time to watch it. Visiting a world where the president is a compassionate intellectual, and his staff spent their days in genuine efforts to make the world a better place for the less powerful, was a wonderful tonic.
Then I started listening to the podcast, which is co-hosted by Josh Malina (an actor who was in the show’s cast from seasons 4-7) and Hrishikesh Hirway (a veteran podcaster). They also regularly bring in guests — people who worked on the show both in front of the camera and behind it, as well as various government officials and experts to speak about the issues the show raises. This podcast is utterly delightful — the dynamic between Hrishi and Josh is hilarious, and their insights are excellent. Spending time with it feels like hanging out with really smart, funny friends. They always sign off the show with phrases that became West Wing motifs: “Ok. Ok. What’s next?”
It turns out another huge fan of The West Wing is Lin-Manuel Miranda — you know, the Hamilton guy. In fact, for his final performance as Hamilton, he took his final curtain call to The West Wing’s theme song. It seems he is also a fan of the podcast, because in January of this year, he recorded this awesome rap, stuffed full of West Wing references, to a version of the podcast’s theme remixed by Hrishi. “The flentl” is Josh’s coined term for sound that plays after the screen has gone to black and is showing end credits. You can see how it’s a flentl in the song’s video:
11. Fountains Of Wayne – No Better Place
I got to revisit the phenomenal Welcome Interstate Managers via an assignment this year, and this time “No Better Place” was the song that jumped out at me. I already wrote about how musically fantastic it is, but did I mention the comedy? “Is that supposed to be your poker face / or was someone run over by a train?” Actually, in that line and in the others, it’s really comedy mixed with poignancy, which is wheelhouse territory for FoW, and part of the reason I love them so much. “You’re awake and trying not to be / Wrapped around your pillow like a prawn.”
12. Jonathan Coulton – I Crush Everything
Hey, did I mention that I love comedy mixed with poignancy? I saw Coulton open up for Aimee Mann this year, and as much as I loved her, I may have loved him just a little more. The two of them together were the most delightful of all, and I’m thrilled I got to be there. They both talked a lot between the songs, which is one of my favorite things at live shows. (Well, as long as the performer has something interesting and non-canned to say, which they did.) He introduced this one by saying, “Here’s a song about a giant squid who hates himself.” How many artists can uncork that leadoff line?
13. Phil Collins – It Don’t Matter To Me
Poor Phil has taken on a poignancy all his own, especially apparent in the retaken photos for the covers of his reissued solo albums — same face, different value. But how great he was in his day, and this song is from his zenith period. The contrast between the bright horns and the dark lyrics works so well for me — it’s a great recipe for a denial song.
14. Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie – Game Of Pretend
I liked this album fine, but I so wanted it to be better than it was. For that to happen, though, it would need to be balanced, meaning more McVie and a lot less Buckingham. That’s just not much of a possibility when an ego like Lindsey’s is in the mix. This song came the closest — Lindsey is still all over the place, but at least we get to hear Christine’s piano, and her best lyrics of the collection.
15. Dire Straits – Hand In Hand
Piano is the connection to this one. Dire Straits is canonically a guitar band, thanks to the artistry of Mark Knopfler, but when I assigned Making Movies what I found was that a huge part of the magic comes from Roy Bittan’s piano. It features prominently in this song, which lands in the bittersweet place that the mood from “Game Of Pretend” sometimes leads to.
16. Diana Krall – Simple Twist of Fate
Nobody does bittersweet places like Bob Dylan, especially Blood On The Tracks-era Dylan. One of the later breakers from last year’s big wave o’ Dylan was an Amnesty International collection I listened to, three discs of Dylan covers. As always in a situation like that, it’s a mixed bag, but there are some gems inside it, and this is one of them. Again, the piano is central, Krall’s gentle playing replacing the melancholy guitar strums of the original. Her voice, too, has a hushed and intimate quality that pulls out the sweet over the bitter, the reverse of Dylan’s plaintive timbre. For one of my Watchmen articles this year, I listened to an awful lot of Elvis Costello, and my rotation was full of Dylan albums. Costello’s wife covering Dylan brings them together beautifully.
17. Aretha Franklin – Dr. Feelgood (Love Is A Serious Business)
The keyboards are up to something entirely different in this song. There’s the organ in the background, sounding like it came straight from the Baptist church. A preacher ought to step out and start sermonizing the gospel, but instead we get this syncopated, swaying piano from the juke joint, an earthy sound to counterpoint the airy organ. And finally there is Aretha’s voice, the true preacher, evangelizing a love in which the sacred meets the profane, the sensual meets the spiritual. In “doctor” and “feelgood” the mind joins to the body, and the music provides the spirit. The subtitle fits perfectly — this is not frivolous love, but a profound, life-changing force. It felt fitting for a title to this collection, a prayer and wish for the love that has power to change hearts, minds, and spirits.
18. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – Even The Losers
The day Tom Petty died was one of the worst days of the year for me, on lots of levels. It bad enough that I was struggling through a difficult go-live for a critical portal feature. It was awful enough that some lunatic had opened fire on a concert, killing dozens of people. But to lose one of the guiding voices from my life so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that same day… I couldn’t even listen to his music for the first couple of days, and after that for a while I could listen to nothing else. In the midst of one of those long listening jags, this song jumped out. I’d always loved it, but the words that took me by the throat were: “You made me feel like every word you said was meant to be.” That’s exactly what I wanted to say to him.
And that’s all. 2017 was a year of one shock after another, though perhaps not as painfully as 2016 was. I was learning how to get grounded, find clarity, and keep the flame of hope burning. For me, listening to music and thinking about music was one way of doing that.
