August 3rd, 2022 12:54am
“Don’t Tell Me” is the result of three waves of creativity from wildly different perspectives – an initial burst of inspiration in Joe Henry’s original demo recording, Madonna applying her pop instincts to refine that into a tighter and more immediately potent tune, and French electronic producer Mirwais pushing the arrangement far beyond a singer-songwriter milieu to create an odd hybrid of spliced-up guitar and jittery beats that still sounds fresh and futuristic 22 years after its release. The songwriting is strong enough that the song works well in any presentation – Madonna playing it as a fully acoustic ballad, Henry’s own recording of the song as tango by way of Tom Waits – but the studio recording stands out as something special because it triangulates these aesthetics so seamlessly into a song that sounds both timeless in its structure and sentiment and novel in its textures and rhythms.
The lyrics, mostly written by Henry, are about someone trying to negotiate their way through a relationship that feels fraught with tensions around boundaries and limitations. It’s easy to see why the notoriously strong-willed Madonna resonated with what Henry wrote here – so much of this song is basically saying “you can’t control me, you can’t reshape me” while also presenting a vulnerability and willingness to meet them halfway out of true affection and respect. It’s a very adult and grounded love song, but it’s not at all cynical. The most powerful bit of the song – “don’t tell me love isn’t true, it’s just something that we do” – fully rejects this pessimistic and unromantic thought. Joe Henry’s version of the song plays those lyrics very casually but Madonna makes it a major hook and focus point of “Don’t Tell Me,” with Mirwais essentially moving other sounds out of the way to put a musical spotlight on the line. Her voice, presented plainly in the recording and mix, sounds weary in this moment. She’s not angry enough to project a “how dare you feel that way” feeling, but she does sound like someone who is losing her patience with trying to argue against a cold and pragmatic notion of love.
August 2nd, 2022 6:24pm
What do you do when you pour every bit of your life into seeking fame, fortune, artistic achievement, romantic possibilities, and you get all of it but still feel like something essential is missing? “Drowned World/Substitute for Love” is a song about course correcting from this point, of attempting to reorient one’s desires towards deeper connections – family, faith, intimacy, placing an emphasis on giving love over receiving it. This could easily be a song about renouncing one way of being to embrace another path, but it’s more complicated and interesting than that. She openly acknowledges the excitement and pleasures she’s experienced and how much happiness she can feel in the spotlight. She’s not a person who is telling you all of that was totally empty and worthless, she’s telling you she wants all of that and something more. This is a woman who 20 years from writing this song would write another in which she sings the words “finally, enough love” with a bit of a wink to the audience. There is never enough love for Madonna.
“Drowned World/Substitute for Love” was composed with William Orbit, a British musician who by this point in his career had established himself as a sort of musical shape-shifter fluent in various strains of dance music, ambient compositions, and electronic-adjacent folk rock in his production work with Beth Orton and Caroline Lavelle. Those two records in retrospect seem like a dry run for what he did with Madonna on Ray of Light, particularly on this song which despite its atmospheric and extremely late 90s arrangement is an acoustic ballad at its core.
Madonna would perform the song as such 8 years later on her Confessions tour, but while that version is quite lovely it simply doesn’t match the drama of Orbit’s arrangement. The album version moves through moments of zoned-out calm, gentle sentimentality, and pangs of regret before arriving at a more emphatic feelings of rejecting loneliness, redefining desires, reclaiming the self, and finally accepting some measure of peace. It’s an emotional journey that sets the stage for the rest of the Ray of Light record, in which she can digger deeper into some of the themes or simply express joy in connecting with something bigger than herself, or at least in finding some new facet of her identity.
August 1st, 2022 3:32pm
“Borderline” was written by Reggie Lucas, a guitarist who’d played with Billy Paul, Miles Davis, and Roberta Flack through the 1970s before shifting over to songwriting and production for Warner Bros in the early 80s. Most of Madonna’s early collaborators, like Jellybean Benitez and Stephen Bray, were people from her social circles, but Lucas was selected to work on her debut record in a work-for-hire capacity. He was basically a steady professional brought in to work with a green talent, and while he provided excellent raw material as a songwriter his aesthetics didn’t quite match up with what the fashion-forward Madonna was looking for, and so Benitez reworked several of the song including “Borderline” after he left the project. A messy situation, but one that worked out very well in that “Borderline” could have the musical sophistication of a composer steeped in jazz and R&B as well as the synth-heavy strut of early ‘80s NYC club music.
Like a lot of synthpop and freestyle classics, the keyboard-heavy surface gloss of “Borderline” somewhat obscures a composition firmly rooted in Motown song structures. As far as I can tell from what I’ve read, “Borderline” was not written specifically for Madonna, but was rather just a song Lucas was working on at the time he was tapped for the project. She took an immediate liking to the song – how could anyone with a pop instinct and good taste not? – and essentially worked with Lucas to tailor the song to her strengths. To run with this metaphor, Lucas’ fit was a little baggy and he insisted on a few too many accessories, and Benitez styled it to make it work. Madonna’s role was essentially similar to that of an actor – she inhabits the character written by Lucas and makes it all feel urgent and real.
Madonna has a bunch of songs about unrequited or thwarted love, but the perspective of “Borderline” doesn’t feel like one that would naturally be hers. If anything the lyrics come across like someone singing about someone like her at the time, a fascinating force of nature burning through the affections of a lot of different people who want more from her than she had time to give. But that’s conjecture, and the raw sentiment of Lucas’ lyrics would be relatable to most anyone with some dating experience or even if they’ve ever felt powerless to a crush. The lyrics are very plainly written but one thing I really like about them is how the protagonist can’t really articulate why they’re so attracted to and enthralled by this other person, it’s just this mysterious gravitational pull. The lyrics plead with the other person to take control of this, to either commit to the situation or cut her loose as an act of mercy, but she’s mistaken. She’s the one whose fixation has made this an unbreakable trap, and she’s the only one who can free herself from it.
But the prisons we make for ourselves are always so cozy, aren’t they? “Borderline” feels bright and loose, and its many keyboard hooks move with an elegance that doesn’t sound remotely oppressive. It’s not a “luxuriate in sadness” song like “Take A Bow,” it’s more like existing in a very lovely limbo that’s pleasant enough until you realize you’re stuck there. She’s just trying to talk her way out of it, the song is basically a negotiation. And as such, it’s not exactly an accident that the song’s most indelible vocal hook is “just try to understand, I’ve given all I can.”
August 1st, 2022 12:15am
Madonna has been a pop star for four decades and at every point in her history it has been common for people to casually dismiss her vocals on the basis that she does not possess a powerful big belter voice rooted in either rock power balladry or R&B/gospel music. It’s always a very smug take and comes from people who are too self-satisfied to consider for a moment that it’s like saying that Whitney Houston sucks because she couldn’t do a good John Lydon sneer or that Dolly Parton is a weak vocalist because she can’t rap as well as anyone in the Wu-Tang Clan. Madonna’s music may frequently draw upon disco and R&B influences but she never presented herself as a run-happy diva. Her comfort zone has always been an intriguing middle ground between spunky new wave rock and musical theater, two very different styles that nevertheless share an emphasis on melody, clarity, and attitude.
And when I say “musical theater,” for the most part I mean the kind that come from Hollywood, not Broadway. Madonna is a cinephile to her core and her love of the movies has guided her music as well as her visual presentation, most often in her taste for wistful melodramatic balladry well suited to the big screen. “Take A Bow” is her greatest song in this mode, and so innately theatrical in its swelling strings and grand yearning that Madonna went and made the lyrics about a failed love affair between two actors.
Co-written with Babyface at his mid-90s pinnacle, “Take A Bow” may be the most elegantly composed track in the entire Madonna discography. The song highlights two of Babyface’s greatest skills as a songwriter – he’s great at making his harmonic sophistication seem totally natural and unfussy, and in writing songs that burn with intense passion but maintain a cool composure. When Babyface worked with R&B singers like Boyz II Men or Toni Braxton that usually worked as a contrast with their big hot voices, but with Madonna it only emphasizes the cinematic quality of the song in the sense that screen actors are meant to perform with small gestures intended for the camera, whereas a stage actor has to err on the side of bigger, bolder decisions that play to a live audience. Madonna inhabits “Take A Bow” like a screen actor; she hits her marks for the melodramatic peak of the bridge but the most devastating moments are in the quieter, more nuances lines.
“Take A Bow” is a song that absolutely luxuriates in sadness, and invites you to join it as though it’s some kind of elaborate gala of loneliness and misery. But of course it is! This is a song sung from the perspective of an actor, and a song that’s essentially a tribute to the grandiose melancholy of classic Hollywood. Madonna lifts her central metaphor from Shakespeare (“all the world’s a stage”) but playing roles and living out a performance in this context is more tragic than pithy. She’s singing as someone who felt something earnest and true – “I’ve always been in love with you…” – and is finding out it’s always just been playing out a script, stock roles in a clichéd plot. Above all else, she’s disappointed to find out that she hasn’t been living out the movie she had in mind.
July 29th, 2022 3:25pm
“The Dealer” sounds like trying to feel calm and rational in a chaotic situation and mostly succeeding on a mental front but not really accounting for the body still feeling the effects of anxiety. Nilüfer Yanya sings from the perspective of someone attempting to make sense of a relationship that’s suddenly become confusing – why are they seemingly acting out of character? What happened to the person I could rely on? She’s rethinking everything she knows about them and recalibrating her expectations in the moment. I like that this song is set in a moment where it’s unclear whether or not the relationship is actually doomed, the possibility that this is something that can be dealt with reasonably gives the music interesting emotional stakes. Can this be fixed, and if so, is it worth it?
July 28th, 2022 5:56pm
“Duke of Anxiety” is a cover of a Swearing At Motorists song from the mid-90s, but if you’ve heard this recording by Scout Niblett I do not recommend seeking it out as everything about it will sound totally wrong and half-assed in comparison to what she did with it. Niblett clearly heard the diamond in the rough and basically edited their song into something tighter and more refined, mostly cutting out all the ways Swearing At Motorists were sabotaging their own work. Crucially she removed everything about the original recording that served as a protective barrier for the singer and sang it with an unguarded, unapologetically wounded intensity that makes sense for a song sung from the perspective of an alcoholic at a low. Niblett sounds raw in her frustration and self-pity, see-sawing between defensiveness over her vices and eagerness to succumb to them. She sings like someone who’s lost hope in herself but is singing with some vague and possibly vain hope that in communicating all this to someone else they may intervene. It’s a rock bottom, and she sounds like she’s raising her hand up half-heartedly and waiting for someone to lift her up.
July 27th, 2022 9:57pm
Clementine Creevy’s voice is typically paired with crunchy alt guitars in her band Cherry Glazerr but more recently she’s been singing in more of a pop context – newer Cherry Glazerr originals that lean more on synths, covers of “Steal My Sunshine” and “Call Me,” and this perky bop with dance producer Moon Boots. A lot of the older Cherry Glazerr songs were good but I think Creevy just sounds better in these sort of songs – her vocal timbre and breathy delivery just sits well with keyboards, so it’s a little like someone figuring out what kinds of outfits suit their form and coloring. She’s perfect for this particular Moon Boots arrangement, keying into something essentially flirtatious about the groove and singing lines “had a daydream that would make you blush” and “stay with me boy, if you know what’s up” with a coy, teasing tone. It’s a very playful and cute song, but there’s just enough intensity to it and light tensions layered into the groove that it feels like there’s some real emotional stakes.
July 26th, 2022 5:26pm
“I Love Every Little Thing About You” is a Stevie Wonder song, a cover produced by Wonder himself and released only a few months after his own recording of the song on Music of My Mind in 1972. Syreeta was married to Wonder at the time the song was written and recorded, but their marriage had ended before either recording was released. This is tremendously ironic, as both versions radiate such a pure feeling of warmth and love that it’s very hard to imagine the spell these two people were under would break so soon after making this music together.
I strongly prefer Syreeta’s version of “I Love Every Little Thing About You.” Wonder’s is fine but for my taste the arrangement is a little too airy and the hooks don’t land quite as well. The Syreeta recording has a funkier groove and sounds very grounded, which works well for the song when her vocal is the part of the song that feels lighter. The contrast makes her sound like she’s rising up and transcending her physical being through this love, or at least feeling the intoxicating rush of chemicals that go along with love. The other major difference between the two recordings is that the Syreeta version sounds far more modern, to the point that it’s actually kind of amazing to think this was released 50 years ago. Some of it is in Wonder’s relatively minimal arrangement and tonal palette, but a lot of it is just that this music feels like it’s staking out a middle ground between traditional R&B sounds and more electronic textures that simply became a default territory for this music down the line.
July 22nd, 2022 2:53pm
The answer to your question is NO, I will NEVER be sick of cold synth pop stuff with vocals by cool European women who sound kinda mean and extremely bored. Ella Harris speak-sings “Hero Man” with a tone that suggests a contempt that was once scalding has been chilled over time into something closer to frustrated cynicism. She sounds hardened, but also trapped and powerless, and full of resentment for the men who can move more freely through the world. The music plays up a sense of claustrophobic tension but the constant movement in the percussion makes the song feel agitated and wily, as though Harris is not far off from busting her way out of confinement.
July 21st, 2022 4:01pm
There’s a time jump in the lyrics of “Give You the World,” with the first verse coming from the perspective of trying to get closer to someone and start a relationship, and the second verse zooming ahead to the point where the relationship has run its course. The music stays placid and lovey dovey throughout, you have to listen closely to even pick up on the shift of perspective. There’s certainly another way of doing this song in which Steve Lacy pushes the second half towards a darker, more depressive tone but that would defeat the purpose and the beauty of a song in which the desire for intimacy and overwhelming generosity is the entire point. I don’t think Lacy wants us to focus on the end of things so much as a pure feeling that carries beyond conclusions and disappointments. This is a song where love, however fleeting, is never a failure.
July 21st, 2022 12:30am
It took me a few listens to notice that a lot of “Love, Try Not to Let Go” is essentially the melody of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” merged with the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” It could be entirely unintentional but I appreciate the way Julia Jacklin seems to place herself between these two beloved classics that both contrast grand romanticism and bone-deep cynicism and still come out declaring “love is all that I want now.” She knows the risks, and has decided the potential reward is worth the likelihood of eventually wondering why the bedroom has become so cold and listening carefully to the sound of your loneliness.
Jacklin gives us some glimpses into a life – a long abandoned home town, a memory of a party, a lingering fear of losing a sense of self – and it all points in the general direction of why she’s so ready to open her heart. In this song love isn’t a cure all, but it’s something that grounds you in the support you get and the support you give. But it’s so slippery, so elusive. When the song hits a louder staccato section – TRY NOT TO LET GO! TRY NOT TO LET GO! – it’s less like a catharsis and more like the song is flying through some severe turbulence.
July 18th, 2022 7:01pm
I’ve been meaning to write about this song for weeks and I think on a subconscious level I was just waiting for a day that was stiflingly humid to do so since the atmosphere of this song is very much “getting a fresh blast of air conditioning on a day when the air feels like soup.” The sound is warm and sensual but a little aloof – even with lyrics that are pretty open and direct about attraction it feels like both singers are avoiding eye contact by wearing extremely nice sunglasses. Lava La Rue’s vocals have a bit more depth and soul, but I appreciate how incredibly casual Biig Piig sounds here even when singing something as wonderfully hyperbolic as “I’d steal the moon for you.”
July 14th, 2022 4:43pm
“Creepy Crawlers” is a satire of terminal conspiracy brain that’s played straight enough that I think there are some people who could hear it, not notice the wink, and assume that Viagra Boys are totally Q-pilled. Sebastian Murphy’s vocal performance is silly and unhinged, but also conveys enough frazzled terror to make this character seem genuinely upset and concerned about little kids growing up with animal hair and creepy crawlers being put in the vaccines. This intensity is matched by music that merges the antsy claustrophobia of Suicide with the bug-eyed manic energy of Dead Kennedys to make something that sounds sickly but gets kinda fun once they’re chanting “they’re turning kids into adrenochrome.” While this is 100% a song brutally mocking actual people who believe in this stuff there’s also a bit of empathy for these people in that their emotional reality is taken seriously. It’s left unspoken, but the message is basically “imagine making yourself this upset because you need a complicated answer to why the world feels so bad right now, when the truth is actually pretty simple.”
July 14th, 2022 4:14pm
Quelle Chris is a rapper and is technically rapping through this song but his vocal performance registers more as some ambiguous combination of conversational speech and very low key soul singing, occasionally making his voice go very flat for a sort of an implied italics effect. The feel of the track is loose enough to seem as though he just happened to stroll by the melancholy piano loop on the street and felt compelled to casually monologue about his philosophy of life. This makes the content of his writing go down easier – there’s nothing self-aggrandizing or overbearing about this, just a weary guy acknowledging just how difficult life can be and coming away with the conclusion that simply being alive with only occasional moments of satisfaction is still far better than the alternative.
July 11th, 2022 3:34pm
“I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)” is for a lot of obvious reasons associated with disco but the bulk of the song doesn’t quite fit the genre, coming closer in style and tone to an Al Green slow burn R&B number. The verses establish context and stakes for the carefree chorus as Alicia Bridges sings from the perspective of some exhausted woman in a fading relationship who’s sick of all the arguing and appeasing and just wants to have some fun. It’s not a break up song but it’s certainly a song about being on the verge of a break up, particularly as it’s clear that a lot of her hope for going out is meeting someone a lot more exciting. Bridges’ voice swivels from solid Green emulation in the verses to a more flamboyant style on the bridge and chorus, over-annunciating the word “action” as “ACK-SHUNNN!” in a way that’s so gloriously silly it pushes the whole song over into the realm of the sublime.
“I Love the Nightlife” rejects seriousness but is rendered as a sort of emotional realism in which every line carries the weight of a full life experience, a high defined by the lowest lows. Bridges is trying to shake off the tedious details of “this broken romance” but everything she sings is a reaction against it whether she’s resentful of being strung along by someone with “women all over town,” or declaring that she doesn’t just want to give some action – she wants to get some too! The pettiness in the song doesn’t run too deep, it’s more like using dissatisfaction as a starting point for determining what would actually make you feel satisfied. The whole song blooms when the chorus hits, it’s the sound of someone making an active choice to prioritize pleasure and become who they want to be. A lot of disco in the 70s and dance music ever since has been about this promise of escape, but few songs have dramatized it so well with this graceful genre switch-up from verse to chorus.
July 8th, 2022 2:41pm
“Oakland” is a fairly tight 3:30 pop song that moves with a very light touch and an unhurried feel, perfectly evoking both a relaxed and natural dynamic with someone and a strong gravitational pull towards them. Satya’s vocal is very low-key in her cadences but there’s a fire in her phrasing, making her sound like someone who feels calm and controlled in the moment but is on the verge of being overwhelmed by passion at any moment. The more rhythmic vocal parts are the hook here but the soul of this is in the melodic nuances – lead guitar parts that move between hesitance and eloquence, a warm bass groove that tightens up for an unexpected bridge, vocal harmonies towards the end that leave the song feeling open-ended. There’s not a lot of tension in this song, but that feeling of “what happens next…” is so potent.
July 7th, 2022 4:05pm
Devin Tracy sings about unrequited love in “You Don’t Know” as though he’s plagued by intrusive and involuntary thoughts, totally passive to a strong attraction to an indifferent person that may as well be like the moon’s affect on tides. This could easily be an anxious or angry song but he and Flying Lotus convey the feeling with a delicate grace, letting the feeling of love be central to the song rather than the frustration. It certainly gives the listener a sense of why this is so hard to pull away from – there’s a lovely sway and warmth to this music that seems more likely to elevate a person than pull them down.
July 6th, 2022 2:50am
The novel conceit of Fresh Pepper’s debut record is that all the songs are in some way set behind the scenes in restaurants. There’s a lot of ways to approach this subject matter in music that would explore the stress and tensions that come up in a restaurant – consider the way the music supervisors of The Bear edited a live recording of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” into a setpiece depicting a kitchen falling into chaos – but Fresh Pepper instead aim for a lite jazzy vibe so serene and relaxed that it comes across as surreal or sarcastic. A lot of the record feels like an odd dream with a very specific setting, with odd details about “new ways of chopping onions” and “mushrooms in the frying pan” floating by without much context. The aesthetics of this record are heavily indebted to Destroyer’s Kaputt and so Dan Bejar’s presence on “Seahorse Tranquilizer” feels totally natural, maybe even inevitable. Bejar doesn’t quite play along with the album concept but that actually works just fine in the context – he basically sounds like an interesting patron at a fine dining establishment, and the two other voices seem to respond to his presence like servers. They gush to him about how they “harvest insane roses” for the tables, and he seems to humor them while basically lost on his own trip.
July 1st, 2022 2:20am
“Doo Wop” sounds like it’s rather pointedly adjacent to a lot of genres and styles but actually exists in some undefined space between them all, and this strikes me as much a set of interesting musical choices as an expression of displacement. And I want you to know that I arrived at this impression before I learned that Anna Butterss is an Australian who’s been living in the US for a long time! There’s just something about the sort of interstitial limbo she’s conveying here that feels like moving through surroundings that are interesting and pleasant but feeling disconnected on some deep level, as though your body is trying to tell you that you’re not where you belong. Butterss’ bass carries a lot of the feeling here, rumbling through little melodic runs in a way that sounds almost conversational. You can glean some meaning, but it’s like listening to someone speak another language and pulling meaning from the cadences.
June 29th, 2022 7:13pm
“Solid” has a very ‘80s shoulder pads energy to it, the sort of pop song you might expect to find buried on the second side of a Sheena Easton record. Muna really lean into the aesthetic but stick to a more contemporary type of studio gloss, enough so that a younger listener might not even realize there’s any throwback quality to it at all. The hooks are strong but the lyrics are what make this one – they start by announcing the object of their affection is a woman who refuses to be projected upon, but then spend the rest of the song idealizing her as a superhumanly capable person who’s “using her hands, she’s pulling the levers.” It’s funny but also just really sweet to have this song that’s just like “damn, my girl gets things DONE.”
