Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

Liz Phair “Perfect World”

“Perfect World” is a song about low-grade envy, a “grass is always greener on the other side” sort of feeling that makes you feel like there’s always something better than what you have and who you are. And like, there is? There’s no “having it all” so there’s always something someone else has that you just can’t have. Liz Phair embodies that feeling in this song, but then puts a twist on it at the end of the chorus – I’d like to be this and that, but even if I changed everything I’d still want to be with you. The “you” of it doesn’t even seem like a factor through a lot of this, it’s like she’s carried away in the thought but get pulled back to reality by a real life love. Even in the bridge when she imagines the women in his world – “just sitting next to a mortal makes their skin crawl” – there’s still the sense that those women don’t matter as much to him as she does, and she’s loved for exactly who she is. (And surely those women have entered the thought of being cool and talented like her.) Phair’s melodies and harmony parts in this song are gorgeous, particularly on that bridge, but it’s a low key sort of loveliness. The song is beautiful but doesn’t strain to be pretty, there’s little bits of darkness and unsanded edges to it. She wishes to be cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious in the hook, and I think she attains three of the four in the song.

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Cat Power “American Flag”

Chan Marshall spends most of her time in “American Flag” singing about drummers, marveling at some magic power they have – playing rhythm, sure, but it seems more like she’s amazed by people who can be so steady and locked into objective time. They’re held up as a standard by which she falls short, and so she trails off at the end of verses: “If I could stand to be less difficult…” Marshall’s phrasing – in both senses of the word – cuts deep in this recording, you can extrapolate so much complicated history and self-torment from how she utters “be less difficult.” She sings it with a mixture of shame and resignation and resentment, like it’s something she’s been told too many times and it got under her skin enough for it to become internalized. The song seems to begin and end with ellipses, like she’s just trapped in this feeling and that makes a lot of sense since it’s basically a song about recognizing you’re trapped in a narrative and haven’t figured out a way to write yourself out of it.

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Madonna “Live to Tell”

I was a child in the 1980s and as I gradually came to understand pop music through the radio Madonna was like a fact of life, a pillar of existence, a figure whose domination was respected but not questioned. It’s funny to think of this now, as by the time I would have this awareness Madonna would only have been around for at most three or four years. But I was a kid without a sense of chronology, and my memory of this is so blurry that I can as an adult be totally surprised to learn that “Live to Tell” was the first single from True Blue in 1986.

This was a crazy gamble at the time and you can hear the song’s composer Patrick Leonard get into that in this interview – sure, “Crazy for You” was a big hit, but at this time Madonna was known for her danceable smashes like “Into the Groove,” “Material Girl,” and “Like A Virgin.” But it wasn’t just that “Live to Tell” was a ballad, it was a very harmonically ambitious one with a peculiar structure. Leonard originally wrote the music to be an instrumental for a soundtrack and that certainly accounts for its atmosphere and busy melodies that don’t quite necessitate a vocal lead. Madonna wrote a vocal melody and lyrics as a favor to Leonard and it was immediately clear that they’d made something quite special. Something so special Madonna would lobby for it to open her comeback campaign and get her way. (It all worked out well, as the song is incredible and Madonna was an unquestioned dominating presence in pop.)

“Live to Tell” really got to me as a kid. It’s a song I clearly remember bumming me out in the backseat of my mom’s car, Leonard’s dramatic keyboard harmonies evoking some grand cosmic sadness I couldn’t imagine but could feel. Madonna sings the song with a solemnity that made lines like “a man can tell a thousand lies” and “hope I live to tell the secret I have learned, til then it will burn inside of me” register as the most important things ever sung. These secrets and lies, these intense vows! There’s no context to any of this, no implication of what the secret could be but that only makes the song seem darker. Why would you hold on to something and feel this deeply about it unless it would cause chaos and destruction? It’s specific enough to be a recognizable drama but vague enough to fit it into whatever story you need it to be, and I suspect for a lot of people it gets very bleak and traumatic.

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Madonna “Like A Prayer”

A lot of art about growing up Catholic tends to be about related trauma or being indoctrinated into a culture of guilt so young that it becomes unshakeable whether you stick with the Church or not. You can find some of that in the subtext of “Like A Prayer” but the lyrical focus of the song is more on how aspects of Catholicism can imprint on you in a way that leads to interpreting all kinds of heavy emotional experiences through its profound iconography and mysticism. You can take the song to be a love song to a man or a love song to God, I hear both at the same time. She transubstantiates this man through her lust, she’s experiencing communion through sex. She’s allowing herself to feel everything on a deeper and more profound level by exalting him and submitting to his will. To paraphrase another brilliant pop provocateur a few years down the line – her whole existence is flawed but he brings her closer to God.

Madonna wrote “Like A Prayer” with Patrick Leonard, one of her all-time best collaborators. Leonard, a jazz and prog guy when left to his own devices, came to work with Madonna on a work-for-hire songwriter. They were a bit of an odd couple but had an incredible chemistry as a songwriting duo, their respective tastes and tendencies resulting in very accessible but subtly sophisticated songwriting. Leonard’s taste for interesting chords and complex harmony made songs like “Live to Tell,” “La Isla Bonita,” and “Cherish” sound totally unlike anything else on the radio at the time, and even if people weren’t consciously registering the elegance of his compositions people could intuit a certain prestige in this music which indicated that Madonna was a cut above her direct competition.

The structural genius of “Like A Prayer” is that it moves between verses rooted in the dour musicality of Catholic psalms and choruses in the tradition of ecstatic Black gospel music, both parts rendered with the rich tones of jazz chords. The melding of two very different approaches to Christian church music makes the song wildly dynamic and thematically dense, opening up discourse on the differences between these expressions of faith while allowing Madonna to indulge in the best of both worlds. The Catholic parts of the song are full of loneliness and melancholic longing, the gospel parts emphasize joy and connection with others. It’s a continuum of feeling, a personal emotional and intellectual journey leading to a collective catharsis.

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Madonna “Don’t Tell Me”

“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.

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Madonna “Drowned World / Substitute for Love”

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.

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Madonna “Borderline”

“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.”

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Scout Niblett “Duke of Anxiety”

“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.

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Syreeta “I Love Every Little Thing About You”

“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.

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Alicia Bridges “I Love the Nightlife (Disco Round)”

“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.

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Pavement “You Are A Light” (Live in NYC 1999)

Pavement was a restlessly creative band through the majority of their existence between 1989 and 1999, so the previous four deluxe reissues of their albums were stacked with non-album songs and unreleased material that was mostly of very high quality. Stephen Malkmus was moving so fast and with so much confidence that a lot of songs that would be the best thing a lot of bands could ever hope to write were relegated to b-sides or totally cast aside and left unfinished. But with Terror Twilight there’s really not a lot of extra songs and so the extra material on this reissue is very focused on charting the progress of the songwriting from demo to rehearsal to revision, and ultimately how some of the songs changed on stage. It’s very interesting but not tremendously listenable, and certainly not for anyone but the most obsessive fans.

Listening in on process is demystifying, and Pavement is a band that really thrives on mystique. There’s one demo in this set for “Billie” that actually kinda wrecks something I’ve cherished for a long time, a live recording of that song in St. Louis in which Malkmus seems to freestyle an entire perfectly formed verse off the top of his head. But no, it wasn’t off the top of his head, it was just a verse from the original draft that he’d replaced. I guess it’s cool to know that, but the idea that he could improvise so well was both rooted in plenty of other evidence supporting this and also just a fun thing to hold on to. It’s like finding out that sometimes Michael Jordan was getting lifted up on wires to slam dunk.

One of the most interesting songwriting journeys documented on this reissue is the gradual evolution of “You Are A Light” culminating in a live recording from a show I actually attended at Irving Plaza in Manhattan. As a tape collector it’s never been news to me that “You Are A Light” is best as a live song, nor has its origins been a mystery to me – there’s other early versions of the song that are not included here, including one that has the line variation “you..are a Sprite drinker…” that I always sorta anticipate in any version of the song. This set fills in a lot of steps along the way, including an extra long rendition laid down at Larry Crane’s Jackpot studio. I appreciate the lyrical variations as Malkmus improvises his way through rehearsal, particularly “I opened up my mouth, out came the words you despised.” But the magic doesn’t really happen for the song until Malkmus fully works out how the guitar parts fit together and how to really land the solo. By the time they lay it down with Nigel Godrich the song is perfectly formed, but on stage it gets a little more room to breathe. The song truly has some of the most beautiful guitar parts he’s ever written.

“You Are A Light” is one of a few songs on Terror Twilight where Malkmus is obviously sabotaging his lyrics a bit because he can sense the music wants to be more overtly sentimental than he was comfortable being at the time. You can hear him struggling with this in all the variations as he gradually edits out everything that seems like a song about a relationship in favor of telling a story about a weird senior trip abroad and nudging the chorus away from the far more romantic “you are the light becoming the day.” Since this song exists in many forms I don’t really mind that he ran away from the more open-hearted lines even if I actually favor them, and I think shrinking away from sentimentality was very honest and as a relatable impulse in and of itself. He wouldn’t be as afraid of it today, and hearing him be more open in later material is part of what makes having a long term fascination with an artist a fulfilling experience. They grow, you grow, and perspective shifts. I feel like I’ve been on all sides of this song at this point, and I’ve got a lot out of every version of it. I hope they play it on the tour this year so maybe I can get some new variations on it.

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Broadcast “Lights Out” (Evening Session 1997)

The studio recording of “Lights Out” on Work and Non Work is lovely but relative to this live session recording it feels colder and more distant. To put in terms from the song’s lyrics the studio version feels as though you’re the stranger on the other side of the glass as Trish Keenan waves to you, and this Evening Session version feels like you’re right there with her in her lonely little room. The recording implies intimacy, but only in terms of proximity as Keenan still seems aloof and unknowable as she sings about a loneliness and boredom so pervasive in her character’s life that it hardly even sounds melancholy. It’s more like an emotional equilibrium in which circumstances don’t seem likely to improve, but they’re tolerable enough as far as available options go. Keenan sings as though vague disappointment was simply the baseline of all feeling, and the music somehow conveys a drab existence while also sounding quite fascinating and stylish in the approximate musical equivalent of mid-century modern furnishings.

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Talking Heads “Don’t Worry About the Government”

My listening habits naturally cycle familiar catalogs in and out of rotation, and in some cases I can go a very long time before coming back around to particular artists. A lot of what brings me back to an artist is based on whim or chance, I think in the case of David Byrne and Talking Heads just recently it was sparked by Byrne drastically changing the setlist of his Broadway show and including a few songs from Look Into the Eyeball, which is basically tied with Remain In Light as my favorite record in his body of work. (I know this is an uncommon take.)

I’ve spent a lot of the past few weeks moving to a new apartment, to the point that I found myself walking around the other day trying to get my head into ideas for writing but finding I didn’t really have many active emotions to engage with. I’d been so focused on tasks that I wasn’t really feeling much, or at least not much that would connect to art. And then in a moment of perfect coincidence I heard “Don’t Worry About the Government,” a song that expressed my actual thoughts: “my building has every convenience, it’s gonna make life easy for me, it’s gonna be easy to get things done.”

There’s often a tension in David Byrne’s lyrics between a guileless banality and the insinuation of ironic distance. If you want to hear “Don’t Worry About the Government” as snidely judgmental of a conformist character who does not question his lifestyle it would make a lot of sense, but I think the song works because what he’s saying about the routines of working and living in the world are things most people actually relate to. The character isn’t judging this, everything just is. He feels lucky and blessed to live in a good building, he acknowledges tensions in the world but focuses on the elements of infrastructure that work, and the civil servants who do their jobs well. The music feels like a pleasant equilibrium, the sentiment is all benign neutrality. It’s tremendously effective as a compelling piece of music that approaches feelings and ideas most would consider too dull for music.

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Talking Heads “Stay Up Late”

Byrne has spent a lot of his career essentially figuring out how to make unlikely sentiments and ideas work in music, and in subverting the tropes of popular music. In “Stay Up Late,” an up tempo tune from Little Creatures in 1985, seems to start from the premise of approaching the ubiquity of the word “baby” in pop music and taking it very literally. From a bit of distance “Stay Up Late” sounds like it’s about the usual stuff of pop music – flirtation, partying, sex – but the lyrics are actually about a kid who is excited to have a new baby sibling and thinks of him as a “plaything.” The idea of keeping the baby up all night is a weirdly transgressive thought, it’s a child’s notion of hedonism. Byrne embraces the innocence of the character while suggesting the parallels to adult behavior, a fundamental urge for fun that’s shaped by the context of childhood in the 20th century.

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David Byrne “Everyone’s In Love With You”

“Everyone’s In Love With You” has a very rom-com tone but approaches a romantic relationship from an unexpected angle: it’s a song about a guy who has noticed that since he’s been with this person, everyone he knows is also totally smitten with her too. His emotional response is interesting – he’s jealous, he’s proud, he feels a bit left out, he feels like the lesser half of the couple. (“I’m introduced to so-and-so but you’re the one they want to know.”) It’s a very sweet song, one that expresses a deep admiration for this person and the humility of understanding that he’s just got to share her with the world rather than keeping her his “big secret.”

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U2 “Ultra Violet (Light My Way)”

Bono is a hopeless romantic, which serves him well when writing love songs and even better when he wants to tell his own story. “Ultra Violet” is a bit of both, an ode to his wife Ali that starts before there was a Bono or U2, when he was just a broke guy called Paul in a room with one dangling light bulb hanging over his bed. It’s an incredible image, so economical in evoking both squalor and distant hope that the band would recycle it as central visual iconography for the autobiographical narrative played out on their Innocence + Experience tours. In that context it’s a theatrical element that’s unabashedly sentimental but in “Ultra Violet” it’s a matter of setting the stakes – “when I was all messed up and I had opera in my head, your love was a light bulb hanging over my bed.” This is basically Bono’s way of saying she’s his day one, his ride or die.

But there’s more to “Ultra Violet” than simply saying this woman has been his guiding light since before he was anyone. The lines I’m quoting are from the climax of the song and the lyrics start off in a moment of severe crisis in the present before moving backwards in time to that foundation of pure love. The opening verse, which is sung nearly a cappella before The Edge’s guitar riff kicks in, is about as abject as Bono ever gets in his music. This is a distinctly non-suicidal type of guy in a “I don’t even want to be around anymore” moment. He admits that he cannot always be strong, which is totally fine. He then tells her that he needs her to be strong, which is hypocritical but emotionally honest in a song that’s essentially about depending on someone in your lowest moments.

There are other tensions in the song, matters of secrets and lies and whisper and moans, the sort of things that bring “silence to a house where no one can sleep.” He’s setting dramatic stakes but also acknowledging the complications and clashes and detentes of long-running adult relationships. Bono was very good at this in his prime, grounding his most earnest yearnings in the grime and grit of a real life.

The Edge’s guitar in “Ultra Violet” sounds as though he’s trying to play a Motown-ish funk rhythm but somehow getting closer to the sound of church bells. Everything that should signal something earthy and groovy gets shifted into more spiritual and orchestral sort of drama – Larry Mullen Jr’s drums pound like timpani, Adam Clayton’s bass drones more like a cello. They arrive at a similar aesthetic on “Until the End of the World,” this music that’s technically quite jaunty but conveys none of the mood you’d typically associate with that word. But you hear this music, this piece that conveys an odd holiness and bright ambiance, and it’s not hard to get how Bono got to where he did lyrically from that starting point.

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Taylor Swift “State of Grace” (Acoustic Version) (Taylor’s Version)

Taylor Swift is beloved for her break up songs but as good as she is at articulating the anguish and disappointment of falling out of love, I think she’s even better at writing about being in love. “State of Grace” and “All Too Well” are widely understood to be written about the same relationship, and for me the latter song is made more potent by existing in the context of the former, which seems to be written midway through the happy early phase when she’s still riding the high of infatuation but has enough perspective to identify what is special to her about this connection. A lot of that is the surprise of it all, of having a vision of what she wanted and then finding something that’s actually better than she could have imagined for herself.

The primary version of “State of Grace” is a rock song with an arrangement heavily indebted to U2. The music charges forward like she’s confidently zooming into the future, she sings with an earnestness that makes the song feel like a devotional. The acoustic version strips out the rock and drastically slows the momentum, making the listener hang on every chord change. This arrangement makes the song come across like more of a meditation, but also like someone desperately trying to hold on to every moment before it passes, acutely aware that something precious and finite is slipping away. The original arrangement sounds like someone memorializing their life in the moment, but the acoustic version implies a more retrospective view in which the phrase “and I never saw you coming” feels like the sentiment most firmly rooted in the moment it is being sung.

Swift seems blown away by the clarity of her own emotions in “State of Grace” and chalks it up to meeting this person – it’s very “once I was blind, but now I see.” It’s like they’re a key unlocking something in her, and the expansion of her perspective is so overwhelming that she gives them credit when in truth it’s probably more to do with herself naturally maturing. Hearing her evoke this feeling she’s ascribed to this other person makes sense of the betrayal that came out in “All Too Well” and the pettiness given voice in “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” “State of Grace” is an expression of her investment of faith, and it’s so pure and beautiful that who can blame her for resenting having that faith broken and having to come back down to reality. She made someone her religion, and they left her forsaken.

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Oasis “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” (Live at Knebworth, 8/11/1996)

Oasis’ shows at Knebworth in 1996 are a crucial part of the band’s legend, an event that is demonstrably the apex of the band’s success. Over the course of two nights they played for around 250,000 people, with the capacity for each show roughly amounting to playing two stadiums at once (or about 7 simultaneous Madison Square Gardens.) The show itself is basically a greatest hits – almost everything from (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, about half of Definitely Maybe, a bunch of non-album tracks that may as well have been A-sides, and two songs that would later end up on Be Here Now, the famously bloated album that brought their level of success down to merely “quite popular.”

“It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” is one of those Be Here Now songs, clearly written from the perspective of someone riding high on an extraordinary hot streak. It would be easy to snark on this song for how its “I’ve only just begun, I will NEVER FAIL!” bravado ended up on a record that sorta flopped out, but it would miss the point that this sort of defiant optimism is really just Oasis in their default setting. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!)” was basically Noel Gallagher moving back into Definitely Maybe sun-sheee-iiiine mode, but whereas songs like “Rock N Roll Star” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol” were written from the POV of aspiring rock stars, he was at this point the real deal and was now giving advice on how others can live their own dream. The verses are very “believe in yourself and just do it, mate!” but Liam Gallagher sings it with the reassuring conviction of someone who knows for a fact that this kind of thing can actually work out sometimes. Noel can’t help but slip in a few lines that suggest how fleeting success can be, but that just adds to the YOLO spirit of the music.

The Knebworth shows have been bootlegged in radio broadcast quality audio for many years now, but it was wise for the band to officially make it part of their discography. It’s useful for lore, but even beyond that there’s a real spark to these recordings. The sheer magnitude of the audience stokes the band’s ego but also puts them in a sort of do-or-die position of needing to bring the goods. You can hear tensions between Liam and Noel throughout the set, but that’s part of the performance – if they don’t do a bit of that, a quarter million people would go home feeling a little cheated. And you definitely want to hear it here, on a live document of a band at their absolute pinnacle. It may be all downhill from this moment on, but this moment was like the summit of Everest.

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U2 featuring the Sun Ra Arkestra “When Love Comes to Town” (Live at the Apollo)

The original version of “When Love Comes to Town” was written entirely by U2 but performed as a duet with B.B. King, a move that displayed the band’s incredible clout at the time as well as their good sense to realize that they’d written a legit blues rock song that might sound like a cheap affectation if they’d recorded it by themselves. It’s not just that King lended authenticity to the sound, but that his voice – and his co-sign – made it easier to hear what U2 had written. Nothing was going to stop anyone from thinking U2 were indulgent and hubristic in this moment of their career, but anyone with generous ears would hear a song with fully realized potential that made the most of Bono’s earthy poet sensibility and King’s soulful howl.

This version of “When Love Comes to Town,” recorded live with the Sun Ra Arkestra at the Apollo in Manhattan thirty years after the release of Rattle & Hum, maintains the core of the song while taking it to another place entirely. U2 bring the temperature of the song down a bit, letting Bono’s voice simmer at the lower end of his register before letting him cut loose a bit more towards the end. This decision probably came from Bono’s vocal range diminishing a bit with age, but it does the song a lot of favors in terms of dramatic tension and emphasizing the more sensual qualities of his voice. It also gives a lot of space for the Arkestra to carry a lot of the expressive weight of the song, punctuating the song with strutting fanfare, trilling leads, and unexpected bursts of treble. The Sun Arkestra was an inspired choice for this occasion – it’s easy to imagine a more pedestrian horn arrangement for this song, but their accompaniment is more colorful and sophisticated than it strictly needs to be and brings out a character in the song beyond what U2 or King ever had in mind.

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10,000 Maniacs “Hey Jack Keruoac” (Live in Los Angeles 1993)

“Hey Jack Kerouac” was written in an era when the Beats were most revered, since by the mid 1980s they had transcended mere personhood to become mythic figures representing ideals of artistry and freedom. Natalie Merchant approaches Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg in this song from a place of sympathetic critique – she does not seek to diminish their works, but she’s not blind to their ego and destructive tendencies or how that tended to impact people in their orbit more than themselves. Her goal here is simply to look at these writers as just men – to demystify them, to reveal their flaws, and in doing that, to approach them with empathy rather than awe. Merchant’s lyrics directly address them as though she’s a concerned peer asking difficult questions about what they took from others and what debts they’ve left unpaid.

Merchant’s vocal is bold and strident but has a touch of softness, a little tough love mixed with some joyful abandon at the end of the chorus when she evokes Ginsberg’s “Howl.” The music sounds as though 10,000 Maniacs were attempting to merge the strengths of The Smiths and R.E.M., like they were specifically trying to merge the best elements of “This Charming Man” and “Life and How to Live It.” It can be hard not to see this band as essentially the precocious younger sibling of those two, but a song like “Hey Jack Kerouac” works in part for the way it approaches their sensibilities and dynamics from a different angle. In a sense, Merchant and her band are examining their contemporary influences in the music as much as the lyrics reexamine influences from the not-too-distant past.

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Interpol “Mammoth”

The sections of “Mammoth” sound as though they’re being played out of order, as though all the standard parts of a rock song – verses, choruses, refrains, instrumental breaks – were shuffled around in a bag and then tossed out, with the parts played in the order that they hit the floor. But despite the scrambled feeling, there’s an internal logic here and it’s all based on momentum. The song bursts forward at top speed from the start before seeming to crash into a wall, then stumble around in a daze, and then go back into a full sprint. The music feels drunk and belligerent, forceful and unrelenting. It seems lacking in grace, but only a band with a strong command of their own dynamics could pull this off without it sounding like a mess.

Paul Banks always sounds cranky and surly to some extent but on “Mammoth” he sounds incredibly peevish, which is kind of a funny thing to express in music. He doesn’t come across as angry, just very impatient and annoyed and aggrieved as he whines “spare me the suspense” or spits out the line “enough with this fucking incense.” He sounds like a goth dandy throwing a fit, and it’s hard to get a sense of the actual scale of his negative feelings here.

“Mammoth” is a very pure example of Banks’ lyrical aesthetics in that you get emotionally charged lines without any sense of context contrasted with weirdly specific lines that will make you wonder “…why would anyone sing that??” In this case you get the seemingly disconnected aside “there are seven ancient pawn shops along the road / and I know seven aching daddies you may want to know,” sung in a softer tone of voice in the delirious post-wall-crash refrains. It’s hard to piece together any kind of narrative here but the way the bits and pieces of this song do and do not click together seems to be the larger point of the piece, like it’s meant to be this thing that confounds your mind while compelling your body to move. You know you’re not supposed to know about the aching daddies, but you’re always going to want to try to figure it out anyway.

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Stone Temple Pilots “And So I Know”

Even in the context of Tiny Music…Songs From the Vatican Gift Shop, an album in which the Stone Temple Pilots used the leverage of the major success of their first two albums to indulge their muses, “And So I Know” is a major outlier. It’s a gentle lounge ballad built upon guitars that sound like sunlight shimmering on swimming pool water with everything else in the mix seeming to float around aimlessly like inflatable pool furniture. Scott Weiland sings a lot of cryptically fatalistic lyrics but sounds totally at peace here, emphasizing the prettiest and most elegant parts of his voice and embracing lounge singer irony just enough so that his performance comes through as a charming wink rather than a smarmy grin. (Even with the creepy “campfire girls make me feel alright” refrain!)

The most remarkable thing about “And So I Know” is the low-key but highly expressive lead guitar part that comes in over the middle eight. I’m not sure whether this is Dean or Robert DeLeo playing – I suspect it’s the former, though Robert is the primary author of the song and also plays bass, vibraphone, and electric harpsichord on the track. It’s a gorgeous solo based in the main melodic themes of the piece while elaborating on the emotion conveyed in Weiland’s vocal. It feels as though the song itself is giving up on trying to convey its feeling through his words, like it’s recognizing the limitations of phrases like “never ever be this way again” and just pushing you to ~feel~ this reluctant but gracious acceptance of loss and futility.

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