Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

The Verve “Drive You Home”

The Verve defaulted to an extremely high level of drama and romanticism in their songs, but even by that standard the emotion in “Drive You Home” is so potent and undiluted that it can be taxing as a listener. You can’t listen to a song like this casually; you have to go into it understanding that you’re probably going to have your heartstrings ripped right out of you. Even if you tune out the vocals and lyrics, Nick McCabe’s lead guitar is so saturated with feeling that you can’t escape its gravitational pull. He makes you feel every little ache, as well as a heartbreak so sweeping and grandiose that it’s almost majestic. And he does this while making every move sound loose and improvised.
 
“Drive You Home” is a song from the perspective of the losing corner of a love triangle. Richard Ashcroft is the other man in this scenario, and he’s hopelessly in love with someone he feels he’s made a profound connection with, but he doesn’t seem willing to fully act on it out of respect to her existing relationship. There’s a nobility in his point of view through the song, but also a deep frustration. He’s not angry or bitter, and his jealously only comes through in a few moments. But he is overwhelmed by the enormity of his feelings for her, and the reality that he can’t have what he wants so badly without potentially blowing up the lives of everyone involved. This is a song where it’d be easier if his feelings were unrequited, if it was all just one-sided infatuation. But the agony of this music is in this incredible romance they’re sharing, what sounds like an intense emotional affair. It feels like he’s trying to pour out all this love in the hope that he runs out of it, to get it out of his system before they can move on with their lives. And while the song does seem to taper off at the end, his passion is present until the last note rings out.

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Tricky & Martina Topley-Bird “Feed Me”

“Feed Me” has an odd sense of gravity to it. There’s a solid bass groove at the center, but the looped chimes sample seems as though it’s always drifting out of frame. It’s like being gently pulled in two different directions, with no sense of which of the two opposing forces is better. There’s a lot of implied distance between the musical elements here, so you feel this vast empty middle space where the vocals sit.

The music establishes a theme that’s further developed in the lyrics, of feeling unable to reconcile contradictions and ultimately embracing the incongruities. Creation and destruction, chaos and order, belonging and estrangement, love and hate, clarity and confusion – life is mostly lived somewhere along the spectrum between these binaries. “Feed Me” exists in some constantly shifting space between these poles, and that weird non-place feels like home.

Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird both seem serene in this song, as though they’ve unburdened themselves of the conflicts that informed all the preceding tracks on Maxinquaye. The primary tension through the record is the question of who’s the seducer and who’s the seduced, but here they come across like equals in a state of equilibrium. Martina recorded her lead vocal when she was still a teenager but she sounds remarkably lucid and sanguine while Tricky hangs in the back, mostly whisper-rapping but fully singing towards the end. She sounds weary but hopeful, wise yet uncertain. She sounds like someone who has figured out how to feel whole.

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TLC “Waterfalls”

I am confident that if you put on TLC’s “Waterfalls” and focused all of your attention on LeMarquis Jefferson’s bass line, you will fall in love. But what would you fall in love with?
 
Maybe you’d fall in love with the character of the bass part and anthropomorphize it a bit: a suave, slick, highly expressive and unpredictable character at the center of the song, seemingly flirting with all the more rigidly defined parts surrounding it. I imagine the bass line as this charismatic and curious figure in conversation with everything else in the song – the beat, those horns, that ultra-juicy wah guitar, the TLC girls themselves. Listen to how the bass seems to slink up to some parts, or back away to give others some space, like when Left Eye starts to rap. This bass line is a funky gentleman.
 
Maybe you’d fall for Jefferson himself, and whatever it is about his mind, body, and soul that manifested this performance in the studio. His bass line was reportedly improvised in the studio, so we’re truly listening to someone stepping into an already brilliant pop composition and infusing it with his personality. Who is this guy? How did he come to be so articulate with this instrument? What is he trying to communicate here? He seems to be operating on pure instinct here and it’s beautiful.
 
Maybe you’ll tap into the vibe of the bass part and fall in love with someone in your real life, emboldened by its loose grace, assured sensuality, and playful spirit. It could unlock your body, brighten your soul, and make the whole world feel more alive to you. It could make you feel a vibrant sort of love that draws others to you.

Could be all three.

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Mariah Carey “Vision of Love”

“Vision of Love” may be the best debut single of all time. It introduces Mariah Carey as a fully-formed artist – a vocal powerhouse who can sing with a lot of nuance, a songwriter with an exceptional gift for melody, a lyricist with a distinct intelligence and clever vocabulary. It’s one of the most consequential songs in pop history, not simply for launching one of the most successful singers ever, but in how it established melisma and multi-octave range as the dominant vocal style of mainstream pop. Whitney Houston put this trend in motion, but it was Carey who set the bar for pop singers at “superhuman.”

Many singers have tried to emulate her, but most have failed. That’s mostly because Carey’s remarkable vocal prowess is always just a means to achieving her ends as a songwriter. A mediocre singer only hears the theatricality, and the flex of hitting the whistle register. It becomes an athletic thing, or an equivalent of how amateur guitarists could get obsessed with Eddie Van Halen’s finger-tapping technique without ever picking up on his skill for writing hooky riffs.

“Vision of Love” isn’t ground breaking in form. It’s a ballad rooted in soul and gospel, somewhat old-fashioned in the context of pop at the dawn of the 1990s. But it’s a masterful composition, dialed-in at every level. Carey wrote the song around the time she was 18 with her early collaborator Ben Margulies, and I can’t imagine they had any idea they were writing something that could become a massive hit at the time. It reaches multiple bombastic crescendoes but is nevertheless a slow burner, and it’s far more musically ambitious than a majority of what was crushing the charts in 1989. Carey and Margulies were nobodies, but were approaching songwriting like they were making luxury products.

“Vision of Love” is a love song, but that aspect of the lyrics is almost secondary to how it expresses Carey’s will to triumph over her difficult and largely unhappy youth. The lyrics are very direct, but also noticeably wordy. Not in the sense that it ever sounds clumsy, but in that you can find yourself surprised by how smooth the phrase “now I know I’ve succeeded in finding the place I conceived” can sound in a song. This is one of the most charming aspects of Carey as an artist – she’s a woman who hears the melodic possibilities in prosaic words like “eventually,” “desperation,” “visualized,” and “alienation.” Pop songs typically land on universality with vague language, but Carey gets there with precision.

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The Field “From Here We Go Sublime”

Axel Willner isn’t the only electronic music producer who has messed around with glitchy samples, but I think he’s the only one who’s ever made the sound of a CD skipping feel like a symphony. “From Here We Go Sublime” is mostly comprised of choppy, staccato sounds that somehow feel soft and hazy rather than sharp and thudding. Willner focuses on tone and texture, giving you the sound of a voice but no indication of what’s being sung, and extends brief quiet moments into lingering ambient hums.

The amazing magic trick of this song, aside from making a simulation of the sound of malfunctioning playback feel incredibly romantic, is in how Willner reveals the source of that romanticism. Halfway through the track the song builds to a moment when you finally hear a bit of the unobstructed source material: The Flamingos’ 1959 recording of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” one of the most distinct-sounding pop hits of all time.

The moment at 2:14 when you finally hear that heavily reverbed “sha-bop sha-bop” gives me goosebumps every time I play it; it’s like clouds suddenly parting in the night sky so you can get a clear shot of a bright full moon. Willner only gives you a few moments of the original song before altering it again, bringing in the “sha-bop sha-bop” a little faster than your ear expects it, and then slowly pushes the composition back into abstraction before it seems to dissolve in your headphones. The title is accurate – the sound is truly sublime.

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The Cranberries “Linger”

I’ve heard “Linger” countless times since I was 14 years old, and though I’ve always liked the song a lot, I’ve passively heard it out in the world far more often than I’ve deliberately put it on. It’s the kind of song that’s always out there in cafes, bars, and shops, and it while you can always feel it shift the air in the room, it sits very comfortably in the background. It’s a song that’s very easy to take for granted. But it’s also the kind of song that will hit you very hard when you’re raw, especially if you’re not expecting it. And it will open up when you listen closely.

The thing about “Linger” is that while the bones of the song are incredibly strong, there is a precise balance of elements in the studio recording produced by Stephen Street that elevates the song from “very good alt-folk ballad” to something that elegantly captures an extremely specific feeling, or more accurately, swirl of conflicting emotions. The studio version renders the drama with remarkable nuance, and creates an atmosphere that immediately conveys a distinctive mix of melancholy and anguish that most anyone will recognize from some moment in their life.

The Cranberries have released many recordings of “Linger” through the years – an early demo, radio sessions, alternative mixes, live performances, acoustic iterations. All of them reach a certain threshold of quality just because it’s “Linger,” but none of them feel right. Mostly, they sound sort of clumsy. The acoustic guitar strum is too loud, parts get shortened or removed, the rhythm feels off. The song is good, but the magic isn’t there.

So what is it about the version produced by Street, the version we’ve mostly been hearing for all this time? There’s something about how delicate and bright the opening guitar notes sound, somehow signaling both fragility and youth. The string arrangement is dynamic; gentle and nearly subliminal in some moments, and overwhelming in others. I like that it’s hard to tell whether particular parts of that arrangement are an actual orchestra or a keyboard setting – it varies the tonality and keeps it from sounding too stuffy. There’s the slide guitar solo, so understated but vaguely heroic. There’s also some tremolo guitar a little low in the mix, adding a subtle shimmer to the piece. Everything is calibrated perfectly; every instrument serving its purpose and disappearing when that purpose is served so the full composition moves through moments of lightness and density.

And then there’s Dolores O’Riordan. She was very young when she wrote this, and only a little older when The Cranberries recorded the song with Stephen Street. She’s captured on tape at a moment when she’s honed her craft to an impressive degree, but she still sounds very raw. She’s singing incredibly direct lyrics, but she sounds so genuinely wounded that even the most banal phrase is saturated with feeling. It’s a stunning combination of instinct and emotional intelligence, rooted in Irish vocal tradition.

“Linger” is a song about a girl knowing her boyfriend is cheating on her and deeply resenting his betrayal, but still feeling hopelessly infatuated with him and invested in their fledgling relationship. You hear the angst so clearly, but also that undiluted affection, which comes through so evocatively in the chorus that you could mistake it for a straight-ahead love song. But ultimately, this is a song about a hurt, humiliated, and lovelorn girl begging for this guy to end things with her because she doesn’t have the strength to end it herself.

It’s very much from the point of view of a young girl who’s experiencing this sort of thing for the first time, and confronting her passivity and disillusionment, but it’s a scenario that can happen at any point in your life. There are plenty of songs that approach these feelings, but it could be that no one could nail this feeling better than a sensitive teenager who can’t grasp the scale of their experience so it all seems overwhelming and massive. You can still feel this way as an adult, but the song gives you direct access to that powerful young emotion.

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The Beach Boys “Do It Again”

“Do It Again” is a Beach Boys single from 1968, at the tail end of the most critically celebrated and commercially successful period of the act’s career. I’ve never gone too deep on The Beach Boys, so even in spite of it being a modest hit that appears on a lot of their greatest hits compilations, I never heard it before a few weeks ago. I encountered it while listening to a recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and the experience of hearing it for the first time was a little profound. It’s not just that “Do It Again” is a great song, but that it feels like a Beach Boys song made to my exact specifications. I have no idea how I avoided this song for so long, but finding it now felt like a miraculous little gift.

“Do It Again” is essentially the result of a post-Pet Sounds/“Good Vibrations” studio wizard version of The Beach Boys self-consciously trying to reconnect with the carefree surf music that was their bread and butter in the first phase of their career. It’s basically the best of both worlds – simple, innocent joy rendered a little bit strange by studio experimentation. (Check out the severe delay effect on the drums!) It’s everything I like about The Beach Boys compressed into a little over 2 minutes – unusual sounds, sweet harmonies, earnest happiness tinged with vague melancholy.

Mike Love’s lyrics are extremely direct and openly nostalgic for aimless days spent at the beach with beautiful girls. I don’t think Love had anything to say besides “Remember how fun that was? Let’s get back together and do it again.” But even if he sounds optimistic, there’s a sense in the music that it may not be so easy to get back, and that recreating happy moments from the past isn’t as satisfying as just finding new happy moments.

The song feels more poignant now, nearly 60 years after its initial release. Sure, people still hang out on the beach in California and there’s plenty of surfers, but Love’s utopian vision of the Southern California coast is particular to the mid 20th century. It’s post-war boom time USA, not too far out from the cultural creation of the teenager. It’s a vision of California as the promised land, a triumphant paradise at the end of Manifest Destiny. It’s kids goofing off at the edge of the continent, looking to the horizon and expecting even more. I think if I could have experienced something like that – a triumph you can feel but don’t think too deeply about to consciously understand – I would only dream of getting back to it too.

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Father John Misty “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose”

Talking Heads may have written the most popular song about snapping out of a fugue state and having an existential crisis, but Josh Tillman has spent most of his career exploring this lyrical territory in-depth without ever getting a good answer to the question “how did I get here?”

“Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose” is played as dark comedy, with our hapless hero tripping out in a terrible “set and setting” situation – accompanied by a woman he can’t trust and her collection of clown portraits, plus “a publicist and a celibate.” The verses, which roll around a winding piano melody, are funny, but the depiction of ego death is no joke. It plays out like a devil’s bargain over sporadic orchestra stabs, a direct view of “bare reality” in exchange for feeling permanently broken. The string arrangement sounds like dark clouds rolling in over a vast landscape, with Tillman feeling smaller and smaller as the words “you may never be whole again” are repeated and he starts to accept it as truth.

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Father John Misty “Real Love Baby” (Live in Pioneertown, CA 2024)

This is what Josh Tillman said about “Real Love Baby” just after performing it in this show from a few months ago:

“I had this realization about this song recently. Y’know, I was pretty ambivalent about it for a long time, and then it started making me a lot of money. No, I’m just kidding. Not really, not much. But I’ve got all these songs that are just about these humiliating debased scenarios I find myself in on psychedelic drugs and stuff. I was like, this song is an actually really nice thing that came out of taking psychedelic drugs. It’s a little bit of an ego death to have…that’s the only song that will last. If any of these songs has a chance of pollinating the world after I’m gone, it’s that one. And it’s just an incredible cosmic joke that this one song, which in no way fortifies my egoic perception of myself, that I’m this dark cool guy. And I like that, so now I really enjoy playing it.”

The thing is, as sweet as it is, “Real Love Baby” is not that different from his other songs. There’s a lot of lines in it that deliberately undermine that sweetness, just as there’s a lot of earnest feelings that soften the more cynical sentiments. The reason the song works and is so resonant for so many – including Cher! – is because these contradicting feelings about love coexist and overlap. This is most apparent in the later choruses, in which layers of conflicting thoughts and emotions swirl around in the vocal harmonies. It’s a battle between the head and the heart, and given that the most tender and open-hearted lyrics ring the most true as it’s sung, I think it’s a W for the heart.

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Father John Misty “The Ideal Husband” (Live in Pioneertown, CA 2024)

“The Ideal Husband” opens with Josh Tillman in a panic, terrified that Julian Assange is “gonna take my files” and reveal his scandals to the world. Is this character a politician, a celebrity, some kind of captain of industry? Maybe, but as Tillman lays out all his sins and regrets, the guy sounds more like a garden variety loser. Actually, a lot of the lines just make him sound ordinary. That only makes the terror in the song hit harder, because it prods you to imagine everything you’re privately ashamed of becoming public knowledge against your will. And like, would it change how people see you? They might already have a low opinion of you. But keeping these things private allows for a sense of security and some hope that you can actually control what other people think of you.

The final verse of the song is the punchline. It follows through on the premise that this guy is ruined, and he shows up at a girlfriend’s place at 7 in the morning, saying melodramatic things like “I’m finally succumbing” and “I’m tired of running,” and deciding he wants to settle down with her. The “7 in the morning” detail is so funny to me – Tillman probably initially landed on 7 to fit the meter, but this scene happening around when most people wake up is much funnier than if it was in the middle of the night.

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Bob Dylan “The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar”

“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar,” written and recorded in the tail end of Dylan’s Christian era, is a chugging, manic blues rock song with scattered images and anecdotes that add up to a sense of impending apocalypse. And not “apocalypse” as we tend to think of that word today, but more in the original sense – apocalypse as the revelation, and the arrival of a new order. The song doesn’t convey dread so much as anxious excitement for what’s about to go down. Amidst the violence and chaos, Dylan tracks his character’s relationship with a woman named Claudette. He can’t make up his mind about her, and she seems just as indecisive about him – “finally had to give her up ’bout the time she began to want me.” By the end of the song he’s lost track of her completely, and in context, pondering whatever had become of her is a stray thought as he’s observing Judgment Day.

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Bob Dylan “Mississippi” (Outtake from ‘Time Out Of Mind’ Sessions, Version 3)

A lot of great songs have a very defined architecture, and are specific to a particular palette, arrangement, and production style. A lot of the music I love the most is like that. But then there’s other types of songs that are more like a floating set of alluring lyrical and musical ideas that resist a permanent shape or strict form; ideas that are open to endless interpretation. This is Bob Dylan’s lane, and it’s a lot of why his music has lent itself to being covered by a wide range of artists from the start of his career in the early 1960s. But it’s also how he’s approached his own body of work – songs going through many revisions before he settled on a studio arrangement, songs being reinvented for the stage, songs taking different shapes as his voice has changed through his life.

Bob Dylan worked on “Mississippi” for a long time before landing on the version that appears on “Love and Theft” in 2001. This means there’s a lot of recordings of the song at different stages of Dylan’s writing and arranging process, and this one from the Time Out of Mind sessions is my favorite. Other iterations of “Mississippi” lean more folk or country, but this one feels lighter and sweeter than the others. Of the three recordings of the song from the Time Out of Mind sessions, it’s the one that’s most obviously the work of producer Daniel Lanois. You can hear the Lanois-ness in the sharp tonal contrasts – warm, womb-y bass offset with a crisp, bright tone in the lead guitar and a trebly organ part that guides a few dynamic shifts as the song moves through a long series of verses.

Simply put, this recording feels amazing. It’s the kind of track that can immediately change the atmosphere of a room or cleanse your mood. I figure Dylan thought this version was too Lanois-ish and not quite what he was reaching for, but I think it’s one of the finest recordings in his massive body of work. Or maybe he just wasn’t set on what the song was yet, as about 40% of the lyrics are different from the final studio recording for “Love and Theft.” But I think I prefer the lyrics in this form too.

“Mississippi,” like “Tangled Up in Blue” before it, is essentially a love song that exists on a very long timeline in which the lives of the protagonist and the object of his affection only seem to sporadically intersect. It’s a portrait of a guy who’s been through a lot of turmoil, and has spent a lot of time alone. You don’t really get a sense of this woman, only just that she’s been a safe port in a storm and something for him to hold on to as he makes his way through the world. The beautiful and sad thing about this song for me is that his love for her seems to be more important to him than having a proper relationship with her. But he’s yearning for that, and by the end of the song he’s practically begging her for the stability.

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The KLF featuring Tammy Wynette “Justified & Ancient (Stand By the JAMs)”

I would love to read an audio transcript of the call The KLF made to Tammy Wynette in Tennessee to say “Tammy, stand by the JAMs.” What kind of pitch do you have to make circa 1991 to get a country star to jump on a pop-house song with surreal lyrics about the KLF’s mythology about the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu largely pulled from The Illuminatus Trilogy? How do you explain the concept, or why these weirdos from the UK would specifically want Tammy Wynette to sing it?
 
We have answers to some of these questions. For one thing, we know Wynette sang it mainly because she just liked the song and was game for some silliness. ”I fell for the track the moment I heard it,” Wynette told Entertainment Weekly in 1992. ”It had a perfect melody, but I didn’t really understand what they were talking about.”
 
That’s the point of the song, really. It does have a perfect melody and it’s immaculately composed and produced. All the weirdness is there mostly so The KLF could find out what they could get away with, in a semi-academic way. Is being catchy and fun really enough? Is pop music more exciting or rewarding when there are incomprehensible or confusing aspects of it? If a song is powerful enough, can a nonsensical mythology become as compelling as existing religions?
 
My own answer to all of those questions is YES. It might be YES in part because of this song, which was a big hit around the time I started taking music very seriously as a kid. I had no context for Tammy Wynette when I was 12, I only knew from the song itself that it was sorta weird that this twangy soulful country lady was singing about going to “Mu Mu Land.” The KLF were playing a game that invites the listener to play along, to fill in the gaps, to imagine a whole secret arcane culture centered on the untrammeled creativity and hedonism of raves. For a few minutes, they pull you away from the mundane and offer you some magic.

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Richard Marx “Don’t Mean Nothing”

You listen to music as a kid with very few reference points. Whatever you hear early on ends up becoming the beginning of musical history as you know it, and songs that anyone with even a little context would clock as derivative exist entirely on their own merits even if you hear it side by side with whatever they’re emulating. This is why it took me decades to notice this Richard Marx song, a big radio hit when I was a kid, is basically the young Marx writing his own version of a Don Henley song, right on down to the recording featuring Eagles alumni Joe Walsh on guitar and Randy Meisner and Timothy B Schmidt on backing vocals.

“Don’t Mean Nothing” specifically feels like the final Eagles album The Long Run, or Henley’s solo stuff from the 80s, like “Dirty Laundry” or “All She Wants to Do Is Dance.” It’s in the studio gloss, the way every part of the song sounds like it’s very brightly lit, and how the guitar sounds as though it’s being played with sarcastic airquotes.

But most of all it’s in the lyrics, which aim for very Henley-esque sort of cynicism. It’s written from the perspective of a Hollywood insider who’s telling some up and comer about how it all really works. A lot of it sounds like the truth, but just enough of it sounds like an agent buttering up a fresh-faced talent to make you get that we’re listening to an unreliable narrator. If everyone has an angle and wants a piece of you, surely he must as well? He seems pretty eager for you to sign that dotted line.

This is Marx’s debut single and it was written well before he was famous, so it seems safe to say he was probably writing about his own experience of entering an industry full of people he can’t really trust. You hear Marx’s youth and drive to be a star in his voice, so much so that it’s at odds with the snarkier aspects of the song, though not in a bad way. It’s a complication that adds depth in any interpretation. Is the earnest vocal performance indicating that we’re hearing the advice from the singer’s perspective and sensing his skepticism? Is it more about this agent guy putting on a sunny public persona to soften a harsh message? The truth spoken by a living lie.

The bridge is what really makes this song click, both musically and lyrically. The first half of it is as overtly melancholy as this otherwise very cheery song gets – “Hollywood can be so lonely, make you the winner of a losing fight.” But then it shifts back into brightness and optimism very abruptly – “but the party is never over because the stars are always shining, doesn’t matter if it’s day or night.” You could take it as the punchline of the lyrics, but Marx sounds so sincere that it plays like the heart of the song. Whether you’re hearing that from the young talent or the agent or Marx’s personal perspective, it’s the part of the song where you really get that this song is coming from a love of Los Angeles and a real excitement about getting a chance to play this game.

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The Doobie Brothers “Minute By Minute”

“Minute By Minute” opens with a keyboard intro that moves frantically but has a very chill tone, an appropriate overture for a song about trying to play it cool despite very fraught emotions. Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers aim for a classic Motown feel and structure but filtered through their style and the cutting edge studio technology of the late ’70s the music takes on a slightly stiff and neurotic vibe. It still swings, but only so much. It’s perfect for getting across the mood of the guy in this song, who’s struggling with a lot of contradictions.

Hey, don’t worry, I’ve been lied to
I’ve been here many times before

He’s putting on armor from the start. He’s trying to tell you that he’s hardened by his past experience and has a lot of options, that the stakes are actually pretty low and he doesn’t have a lot of expectations. But what you really hear in McDonald’s phrasing is a guy who’s been hurt before and is hurting right now, but he’s playing it off as no big deal but not doing a great job of it.

Girl, don’t you worry, I know where I stand
I don’t need this love, I don’t need your hand

He’s trying to make it sound like he’s not a sucker, and that he’s not broken the rules by catching real feelings. It’s very “doth protest too much.”

I know I could turn, blink, and you’d be gone
Then I must be prepared any time to carry on
But minute by minute by minute
I’ll keep holding on

And there it is. He knows he’s playing a game he can’t win, but he loves to play it and is just trying to prolong this game for as long as she’ll allow it. He can’t have what he really wants with her, but what he has in the moment is close enough. He can imagine a better situation, but he can’t imagine someone better than her.

You will stay just to watch me, darlin’
Wilt away on lies from you

Here’s where the bitterness comes through. He’s playing the victim, but also swearing that he won’t give her the satisfaction of getting one over on him. He’s trying to get any kind of upper hand in the situation. McDonald’s phrasing gets a little more strained here, making him sound kinda pissy in the most soulful way possible.

Can’t stop the habit of livin’ on the run
I take it all for granted like you’re the only one

This ties back to “It Keeps You Runnin’,” a previous song with The Doobie Brothers that sounds like it’s written about the same situationship from earlier on the timeline. It’s pretty much the same emotional dynamic, but written with more hope that he can persuade her to settle down. Not a lot more hope, though – as much as he’s exasperated by her willingness to be lonely, there’s no end to her “running” in sight.

Livin’ on my own
Somehow that sounds nice

I love the way McDonald sings “somehow that sounds nice” like he’s muttering an aside to himself, as though he’s just in that moment considering something that might be good for him.

You think I’m your fool
Well, you may just be right

These days you’d probably call yourself a simp instead of a fool, but it’s all the same. He’s so enamored of her that he can’t make any sort of good decision despite knowing better. If this is what a simp believes, how do the simps survive?

Call my name and I’ll be gone
You’ll reach out and I won’t be there

The key changes on the bridge, pushing McDonald towards a higher pitch and more strident tone and he imagines a consequence to her stringing him along. It’s a spiteful fantasy of withholding the thing he wants so much once she decides she wants it too.

Just my luck, you’ll realize
You should spend your life with someone
You could spend spend your life with someone

Oh, did you have someone in mind?

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U2 “Dirty Day” (Songs of Surrender)

U2 are among the artists I have the longest and deepest relationship with, going back to pretty much day one of my life as a music obsessive. There are some artists I have this sort of relationship where I can endorse pretty much everything they’ve ever made, artists who’ve rarely if ever been embarrassing or pursued creative directions that didn’t suit them at all. U2 don’t make it easy. U2 have created some of the best music I’ve heard and some of the most cringe, and even at their best they’re more likely to make a goofy decision than a cool decision.

This is a long way of saying if you’ve wondered who their new record of 40 remakes of songs throughout their catalog is for, it is for people like me. I’m invested enough in The Edge in particular to be fascinated by how he approaches translating his own style, especially when he’s trying to drastically reduce things crucial to his aesthetic – implied scale, odd electronic textures, density of sound. I’m interested enough in Bono to want to him compensate for his reduced vocal range with different approaches to phrasing, and taking his tendency to rewrite lyrics on the spot in shows back into the studio. While I’m sure some of the new versions of old songs will take on lives of their own, particularly through use in television and film, Songs of Surrender is for hardcore fans. The revisions here are meant to be additive, a new way of hearing something familiar. Nothing is being replaced, and at best the songs are enhanced with a new perspective on their musical and lyrical character. (That said, the material from Innocence and Experience is mostly greatly improved by scraping off all the “this has to be a radio hit” gloss of producers like Ryan Tedder and Paul Epworth.)

“Dirty Day” is one of my all-time favorite U2 songs. It’s a song about how complicated relationships between fathers and sons can be, especially when the son is old enough to be a father too. Bono has written a fair number of songs about his relationship with his father ­– “Kite” is about Bono’s experience of preparing for his dad’s death while he was dying, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own” one album later reflects on their strained relationship after he passed. In all of these songs Bono’s father is portrayed as stern and stubborn, emotionally distant but affectionate in unexpected ways, and a man who offered wisdom in ways that were often blunt and abrasive. The power of the songs is in how much Bono yearns for this man’s love and approval, and how frustrated he is that the things that make them alike are what pushed them apart.

“Dirty Day,” written many years before either of those songs, focuses on the tension. In the context of Zooropa the song is in sharp contrast with “Lemon,” one of several U2 songs in which Bono tries to connect with his mother, who died when he was very young. She exists mainly as an idealized memory; in that song he’s extrapolating as much as he can from a bit of video footage from when she was alive. “Dirty Day” is largely about familiarity breeding contempt, and too much messy history getting in the way of important things. Many of the lyrics are adapted from things Bono’s father had said to him, and I think Bono was trying to understand something about him by singing from his perspective. A lot of these words were clearly meant to deflate Bono, to force him into recognizing how futile some things are, how there’s no satisfying explanation for a lot of things. The most haunting line is somewhere between a promise and a threat – “I’m in you, more so when they put me in the ground.”

The Edge’s new arrangement for “Dirty Day” cuts out all the ambience and weight of the original version, and transposes the main bass part to cello much like the Garbage remix of the song from the “Please” single. The recording is unusually raw for U2, so minimal and closely mic’d that you can hear hands pressing down on strings and squeaking on fretboards, or what sounds like Bono adjusting his body in his chair as he sings. It’s almost uncomfortably intimate, and Bono’s voice is low and sometimes a little whispery, like he’s doing U2 ASMR. The additional strings bring a mournful quality to the music, trading the passive-aggressive antagonism in the original for lamentation. This arrangement reorients everything in the song around lingering regret for how life was actually lived, and Bono inhabiting his father’s perspective now seems more like proof that his father is with him more in death than he ever was in his life.

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Erasure “Stop!”

“Stop!” is a song about being separated from the one you love, but the music isn’t even slightly melancholic in the way you’d expect with that subject matter. Vince Clarke’s arrangement is extremely bright, bubbly, and full of pep. It’s three minutes of undiluted joy and enthusiasm, with Andy Bell vowing that he and his partner will be reunited and then nothing will ever tear them apart. The energy of the song is in this defiance of circumstance, and in the anticipation of them being together again, which he takes to be a foregone conclusion. He’s basing everything on faith, which makes some contextual sense – given that this is a song by a gay artist in the late 80s, I think there’s a pretty good chance this is really about being separated by death. I’m not sure if Bell intended that – the lyrics nod more in the direction of something less morbid – but I’m sure plenty of his audience interpreted it that way in the moment.

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Babyface “Whip Appeal”

Babyface’s chord structure in “Whip Appeal” is fairly sophisticated but the main trick of it is in gliding effortlessly between mostly minor chords in the verse to mostly major chords for the chorus. The minor chords don’t signal melancholy in this context, it’s more like moving between an unresolved or complicated feeling into something straightforwardly pleasurable and relaxing. The lyrics basically tell the story of the chords as Babyface sings about a love affair that’s a safe harbor from the stresses and boredoms of ordinary life. He describes this as “the strangest kind of relationship” because their communication is almost entirely sexual, but he’s not complaining. There’s no conflict in this song outside of what he imagines this situation might look like to other people, but he’s just confusing himself. He’s already got it figured out – this affection, this sex, this connection? That’s the important part of his days. Everything else is just filler time. His elation in this song isn’t just about who he’s singing about, it’s the joy and relief of being lucky enough to have this in his life.

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Lana Del Rey “Buddy’s Rendezvous”

I’m at Buddy’s Rendezvous
Telling the losers and old timers
How good I did with you
They almost believe me, too

I knew this song for the better part of a year before finding out that Buddy’s Rendezvous is a pizzeria in Michigan and not some miserable dive bar in Los Angeles as I had assumed given the context and the song already mentioning Canter’s, which is in LA. This detail changes the song for me. It’s funny but also amps up the pathos, picturing this guy chatting up some old guys eating pizza stings a lot more than if he’s just doing the same thing at a bar after his third well whiskey.

The other thing I didn’t quite pick up on for a while is that this isn’t about a failed romance but rather a song from the perspective of an absent father who’s been released from prison and is trying to reconnect with his daughter who has had some measure of success as a singer in Los Angeles. It’s not some big ironic switcheroo, as Father John Misty’s arrangement, lyrics, and vocal all play the scenario exactly the same as if it was addressed to a long-lost ex, which I don’t think is necessarily meant to be taken as some incestuous thing but more that his regret, lingering possessiveness, and nostalgic affection for her is probably not that different from a bunch of actual exes he could be singing about in other songs. He’s not reaching out because they have a genuine connection – he’s been out of the picture way too long for that – but because he needs her success to validate his existence. At least something good came from him being alive, and he wants to get as close to that feeling of having value as he can.

It was an inspired choice to have Lana Del Rey sing a version of this song. Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty, born only a few years apart, are kindred spirits as songwriters. Their music largely draws on mid 20th century sounds and archetypes but their lyrics are squarely focused on the present tense, and everything in their lyrics that look back to the past is presented with irony as it’s always from someone living in America’s decline reaching for something they think was probably better and more pure. They’re both bitter and damaged but mostly because as romantics they’re always setting themselves up for disappointment. They’re each other’s truest peer and so it’s a treat to hear her interpret one of his songs.

Lana’s presence changes the implied perspective – is this now Lana inhabiting the voice of the daughter, is this her impression of her father’s words? The way she plays it feels more like this is her father imagining his daughter singing his words, but in any case there’s some cold disconnection. It’s only just “her.” I think this might have worked better as a duet with Father John Misty singing the parts that she sings a little too low in her range. Her vocal performance is very good, particularly on the choruses, but I do get the sense that this song was a challenge for her, and the variations in her phrasing were made in large part to just stay in tune and not push her to an uncomfortably high register on the chorus. Misty shows up for backing vocals in the final third of the song and I love hearing them together, particularly as it sounds like he’s the one singing with a ghost, just trying to soothe himself with this idea of her.

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Fiona Apple “Paper Bag”

Fiona Apple repeats the chorus of “Paper Bag” three times at the end of the song, each time with significantly different phrasing that maintains the shape of the melody but changes all the emotional emphasis. I doubt she’s ever sung this song the same way twice – she’s the kind of singer who really lives in the moment of any song she’s singing, and that presence in the moment makes all the little instinctive decisions captured in this studio recording all the more precious. She takes on a conversational tone through the verses in large part to sell the ironic humor in the lyrics, but by the time she’s running through these choruses she’s mostly riding the wave of the melody and arrangement, or in some moments ducking it or moving to the side of it. She speeds up, she slows down, she builds to little crescendos but climaxes by delivering the most crucial line as an understated and conspiratorial aside – “but starving…it works.”

“Paper Bag” is a song about having an unrequited crush and knowing in the moment that the person who’s taking up so much space in your mind is a mythologized and romanticized figure who’s only partly the actual person who exists in the world. She’s in love with a story she’s telling herself, and part of that story is in the failure to connect, the distance between them, the inevitability of this not becoming anything real. She gets the drama and excitement of the feeling, but none of the risk of being vulnerable with someone else. You could call it self-sabotage, but she knows what she’s doing and everything is going according to plan. This a lot of why the song feels light and comedic – she’s in on the joke, and knows that the joke is on her.

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Tori Amos “She’s Your Cocaine”

“She’s Your Cocaine” is a very late ‘90s sort of love triangle song in which Tori Amos sings from the perspective of a woman totally exasperated by her ex going off with some seemingly toxic woman who’s pushing him towards what she interprets as tacky self-destruction but to me just sounds like a cool androgynous goth vibe. The song revels in her pettiness without any apologies, the point isn’t that we’re supposed to side with her in this but rather that most anyone can relate to feeling like this burning “oh fuck them” resentment. This is an atypically heavy song for Amos, one that churns with an industrial glam aesthetic not too far off from what The Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson were up to around this time. She throws herself into the sound, playing up the spite of its relatively normie POV character while embodying the sexy menace of this other woman she finds so threatening. By the end of the song she shifts to just roasting this dude – “you sign ‘Prince of Darkness’ / try ’Squire of Dimness’” – and that seems like a healthy place to leave it. He’s fully removed from the pedestal she put him on, and he’s just something she can laugh at now.

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PJ Harvey “Angelene”

Polly Jean Harvey excels at writing character sketch songs but tends to shy away from implying a full narrative. “Angelene” in particular feels more like an informal portrait, like the musical equivalent of a raw candid Nan Goldin photograph. The lyrics are written in blunt, direct language from Angelene’s perspective – she’s a sex worker, she’s jaded, she imagines escape in the broad abstraction of a place two thousand miles away. The vagueness of her idea of a better life adds a lot of pathos to a song with a lot already built in, she seems so worn down by her low expectations and unsatisfying experiences that it’s dulled her imagination and limited her hopes. The music sounds grey and desolate, Harvey sings the verses with a weathered tone and the choruses like wind blowing on a cold beach. The song cycles back to the opening line at the end and trails off, ending ambiguously but also giving you some reason to believe poor Angelene is never getting two thousand miles away.

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