Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

Nine Inch Nails “Somewhat Damaged”

The first part of “Somewhat Damaged” sounds like sharp wires and tightening screws, the second part sounds like being smashed by a dozen giant hammers. Nine Inch Nails have always been labelled as “industrial” but this song actually sounds like you’re being fed through a Pretty Hate Machine in Trent Reznor’s rage factory. The tension builds and the rhythm tightens as the song moves along, and Reznor’s voice responds by getting louder and angrier. When he finally starts screaming a chorus – “TOO FUCKED UP TO CARE ANYMORE!” – the music thwarts the catharsis by getting even more tight and oppressive. That key lyric calls back to a running theme from Reznor’s The Downward Spiral era – “nothing can stop me now because I don’t care anymore” – but this music, the first song on the follow-up record The Fragile, makes something very clear: No, you’re definitely stopped. You’re crushed. You can’t win and nothing will save you. Maybe you ought to actually care now.

The final third of the song shifts gears. The tension subsides a bit, and the perspective pulls back. Reznor sings in a softer and more vulnerable tone over clashing rhythms, and his lyrics move from self-castigation to recriminations aimed at some other person who has betrayed him. This is the part of the song that’s always gotten deep under my skin, when he sings about feeling totally abandoned at his lowest point. He seethes over the broken promise of support, and while you get the sense that maybe he’s done his part to burn this bridge, his anger over being lonely and lost in this dark moment is overwhelming. The real catharsis of the song comes at the end when he unleashes his full fury: “THEN MY HEAD FELL APART AND WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU??” It’s an impotent rage – unheard by who he’s addressing, and damaging to himself. But it’s a brutally honest response to getting stuck in this trap of his own making.

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Basement Jaxx “Where’s Your Head At?”

Whenever I hear “Where’s Your Head At” now I think of something Douglas Wolk wrote about the song in Pitchfork’s best songs of the 2000s list. He presents the song as a bad trip set to gnarly house music, and describes the vocals as “a three-dimensional array of disembodied heads screaming that something’s wrong and you’re letting everyone down.” And like… yes, I totally hear that! But at the same time, I’ve never related to the song as being particularly negative. I hear the song as a rational, empathetic message cutting through the clutter of depressed thoughts and harsh self-criticism. It’s advice on how to get out of the dark hole: “Don’t let the walls cave in on you / you get what you give, that much is true.” The screaming, accusing voices come in during the parts of the song designed to give you an adrenaline rush – it’s like you’re meant to run from those voices, like they’re chasing you down. The song is set up as an escape from the worst feelings, the music is evoking the bad vibes in order to provide catharsis. I never come out of listening to this song – usually on repeat – without feeling better than I was coming into it.

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Pearl Jam “I Got Id”

Eddie Vedder can’t help but sound heroic. There’s a strength and nobility in his baritone, and a courage in how he wields it. So it’s always a bit rattling to hear him sound entirely vulnerable, or for him to express insecurity and anxiety. He does that on “I Got Id,” a non-album single issued between Vitalogy and No Code in the mid ’90s. Vedder sings from the perspective of a lovelorn shut-in who feels so scarred by bad memories that he can’t bring himself to act on his love for someone. I’d say it was an unrequited love song, but this person seems entirely within his reach – he’s just too scared and self-pitying to actually go for it.

The line that always gets under my skin here is when he sings “I’ll just lie alone and wait for the dream where I’m not ugly and you’re looking at me.” I know this feeling a little too well, and that I relate to this as much now as when I was 15 is rather depressing for me. Vedder sounds so ragged and tired on this song, like he’s exhausting his last reserves of energy just to get this horrible, self-loathing feeling out of his head. He sounds so anguished when he yowls “if just once I could feel loved,” like if the sentiment of The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now” was utterly drained of all irony and cleverness and concentrated into just the most potent dose of loneliness and fear. The hero sounds totally defeated by his own worst impulses.

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David Bowie “Win”

“Win” is one of David Bowie’s finest love songs, though it seems he didn’t really think of it that way, describing it in 1975 as more of a message to people who lack his dedication and work ethic. “It was written about an impression left on me by people who don’t work very hard, or do anything much, or think very hard – like don’t blame me ‘cause I’m in the habit of working hard,” he told NME. “You know, it’s easy – all you got to do is win.”

But that’s just the chorus. The verses are far more interesting, with Bowie – something of an unknowable ice queen himself – prodding someone else to open up and be vulnerable with him. “Slow down, let someone love you,” he sings, sounding handsome and mildly bemused. “I’ve never touched you since I started to feel.” Their distance and reluctance is an obstacle to his desire, yes, but I think this is also him feeling like he’s opened up and is now inviting a similarly aloof person into his life. It’s a bit “come on in, the water’s fine.”

“Win” sounds light and airy even when it goes a bit bombastic and theatrical. Bowie plays it cool in vocal performance and delegates projecting warmth to his R&B back up singers and David Sanborn’s fluttering saxophone. But despite that, he’s not devoid of passion. There’s a real conviction in his voice on the chorus, a genuine belief in both himself and the person he’s addressing. The song is essentially a pep talk, but Bowie’s doing that thing where one’s advice boils down to “just do everything I did, and it’ll all go fine.” He’s urging you to love David Bowie, because he loves David Bowie. He’s telling you that all you have to do is win because he’s David Bowie in the mid 1970s, and he’s become well acquainted with that outcome. His voice, his words, the music – he’s seducing you. And of course, this is David Bowie in the mid 1970s, so it works. He wins.

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Pixies “No. 13 Baby”

If the Pixies came out today, the critical narrative would be all about how they’re “problematic.” The girl sings about a black guy with a huge dick; the guy mangles the Spanish language and flagrantly objectifies Latin women. There’s a troubling tension in the way he sings about women in general – lusty, angry, bitter, self-loathing. Maybe today we’d label it “incel rock,” and then make fun of the male singer’s pudgy body without ever thinking about how it’s crucial to the context. No one would ever consider that the musicians knew what they were doing, or were deliberate about what they were saying, or whether the tensions in their music spoke to something about their lived experience or vivid inner life. The historical and cultural allusions wouldn’t be taken seriously. It would all be flattened: This is fucked up and uncomfortable, therefore it is at best a guilty pleasure. The urgency and physicality of the music wouldn’t matter, nor would the melodies or raw charisma of the singers. It’d be “What Pixies Get Wrong About _____” or “The Pixies’ _____ Problem.”

Art is messy because humans are messy, and the Pixies reveled in that filth. But that mess could also be strangely wholesome! “No. 13 Baby” is a song about lust from the perspective of a young boy observing a woman who lives next doo. She awakens something in him. She’s an intriguing other to him – six feet tall, Mexican, strong, tattooed. He’s attracted to her in part because she’s an outlier – not white, not demure, not a normie. But it’s also just raw and physical. He’s obsessed with her tits, and the fact that she’s topless in public. It’s likely this is the first time he’s ever seen naked breasts in real life, albeit through his bedroom window or over the fence separating their yards. In the chorus, he’s praising her boobs in awkward Spanish while swearing off boring white girls. “Don’t want no blue eyes! I WANT BROWN EYES!!!” The song knows this is the declaration of a silly teenage boy. The song also knows his arousal is not a joke. Black Francis sells the horniness and the humor in equal measures, often in the same shriek.

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Lloyd Cole and the Commotions “Rattlesnakes”

“Rattlesnakes” is a sympathetic portrait of a woman Lloyd Cole appreciates but seems to barely understand. She’s cool and beautiful and intelligent, but terrified and cautious. He can glean the reasons why she’d feel anxious and under siege, but doesn’t want to presume too much. The song doesn’t indicate much in the way of lost or longing, which is part of why it’s so interesting – it’s all fascination and admiration for this lovely person who seems unknowable, untouchable, and aloof. Maybe Cole is a little bit romantically interested, but the implication is that he’d rather not be another complication in her life. The music is as prim, mannered, and careful as his subject, but also reflects repression on the part of the singer – it renders the moment as musically dramatic, but oddly inert. It’s all just observation and conjecture, and affection felt rather than expressed.

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Tori Amos “Rattlesnakes”

Tori Amos’ version of “Rattlesnakes” dives straight into the gap between Lloyd Cole’s perspective and the experience of the woman being observed. Amos does not necessarily shift the song to Jodie’s point of view, but her Rhodes electric piano arrangement and vocal performance suggest an intimacy that drastically shrinks the scope of the song. Cole’s grand arrangement with melodramatic strings made it feel like he was just watching this woman from a distance like she’s a character in a film, but Amos zooms in on her. She’s right there, a few feet away from you, living her life. Her stress feels more real, and you can see awkwardness in her affectations that just seem effortlessly stylish from a few yards away. Jodie is still something of a mystery, but Amos has a pretty good idea of who she is. There’s a weary tone in her voice, like she’s saying “yeah sister, I’ve been there.” When it comes down to it, the difference between these two versions of the same song is essentially the difference between sympathy and empathy. Both are positive qualities, but there’s just a lot more depth to the former.

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Elvis Costello “New Amsterdam”

In the New Pornographers song “Myriad Harbour,” Dan Bejar wanders around Manhattan while on a tour stop with the band. He takes in the sights, visits some shops, gets a feel for the energy of the city. In the third verse, after a clerk asks him if he needs any help, he finally says what’s really been on his mind: “All I ever wanted help with was YOU!” It doesn’t matter where he is or what he’s doing. He’s going to be distracted by someone who won’t get out of his head; this unfinished business that won’t let him be in the moment.

“New Amsterdam” is essentially the same song, but 27 years earlier, and written by someone a little less reluctant to say what’s on his mind. Elvis Costello sings about feeling lost in Manhattan, wandering around a place where he appreciates but doesn’t seem to like very much. Everything he sees seems to rhyme with something from back in England, and he can’t shake the feeling the place belongs to someone else – specifically, this woman he’s hung up on. Those feelings are complicated. He’s fixated on her enough to declare a desire to “have the possession of everything she touches,” but he’s also trying to break free from her influence. He doesn’t know what he wants, so he stumbles around the city, on a quest for nothing in particular. He’s nowhere at all in the biggest somewhere on earth.

Costello, always a consummate craftsman, is at a career peak on “New Amsterdam.” The construction is impeccable, but the presentation is casual – the melody is so smooth and easygoing that the tightness of the writing is barely apparent. This is one of the all-time best examples of Costello’s gift for writing flawless bridges which build upon the core melody and elaborate on lyrical themes before flowing gracefully back into the verse structure. In this case, it’s a digression that ends in an epiphany: “Though I look right at home I still feel like an exile.”

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Belinda Carlisle “I Get Weak”

Diane Warren originally wrote this song with Stevie Nicks in mind, and that seems totally absurd to me. I can imagine Nicks’ voice working on the verses, but the big chorus doesn’t square with her aesthetic, and there’s a naive sweetness to the lyrics that feels all wrong for the author of jaded masterpieces like “Gold Dust Woman” and “Dreams.” Belinda Carlisle on the other hand? A perfect fit. Carlisle is extremely good at conveying a very pure sort of love, untainted by cynicism or low expectations.

“I Get Weak” is about lust and a lopsided power dynamic, but there’s an innocence to it too, as Carlisle sings Warren’s words like she’s experiencing this sort of extreme infatuation for the first time. Part of the magic of this song is that the sound of it implies an adult perspective, distinctly different from the more youthful tone of previous Carlisle crush songs like “Mad About You” and “Our Lips Are Sealed.” She’s singing from the point of view of someone who has some stability and composure, enough so that she’s very aware of losing it when she’s with this overwhelmingly sexy person. She never expected this, but she’s absolutely thrilled to give into the feeling. The song is nothing but joyful surrender.

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Crossover “Extensive Care”

Vanessa Tosti has a perfect voice. Not so much in terms of technical singing ability, but in her tone and inflection – as far as I’m concerned, she’s got the perfect balance of cool, cute, charming, and clever. This vocal tone is the focal point of “Extensive Care,” one of the finest songs of the short-lived electroclash era. Tosti pays tribute to another stylish and unfathomably cool woman to the beat of a bouncy synth track, mostly calling attention to the gulf between how everyone perceives her (“she’s loved downtown for exactly what she does”) and her apparent insecurity (“you should see yourself the way I see you.”) The rest of Tosti’s line nod to the joys of creating a look and persona, and the power that comes from controlling your image and narrative, and standing out from the crowd. Tosti’s own coolness seems effortless, but “effort” is not the right word. There is effort in creating and living up to an aesthetic. What you’re hearing here and what she’s seeing in this other woman is someone who’s put in the work to be fully themselves.

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Sleater-Kinney “Sympathy”

“Sympathy” is about a painful experience that is fairly common, but rarely addressed in music: Nearly losing a child who is born prematurely. Corin Tucker is singing from experience here, and it shows. Tucker typically sings with the maximum level of emotional commitment, but she’s especially raw here as she pleads, belts, and wails. The first few verses set up the context as a prayer to God, but the most powerful bits in the song come later when she switches over to addressing her audience and passing along wisdom borne of total agony on the bridge. The dynamics shift dramatically in this section; it’s like the snap of a whip. “There is no righteousness in your darkest moment,” Tucker shouts at full intensity just before going a few steps further. “WE’RE ALL EQUAL IN THE FACE OF WHAT WE’RE MOST AFRAID OF.” That line wrecks me; it’s just too real. Anyone who’s had to confront serious loss or trauma knows this is the truth. There’s a happy ending to this song, and it ends on a note of genuine gratitude. But even with that, it’s hard to shake that lingering pain.

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Cornershop “Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III”

This is a song that makes bitterness seem fun. “Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III” is a glam rock sung from the perspective of some aggrieved music industry insider who’s spilling jaded wisdom that’s so esoteric and incoherent that you’re left wondering if he has any idea what he’s actually talking about. This is a guy who’s in love with his own bullshit and clings desperately to whatever sort of rock world privilege he can grasp onto. Cornershop lean into the ‘70s sleaze vibes here – the main guitar riff sounds like it fell off the back of a truck in 1972, and the soulful backup vocals are played so straight that Tjinder Singh’s vocal seems extra deadpan in contrast. When he sings about “the overgrown supershit” in the chorus, it’s hard to tell whether he’s dismissing other bands, or mocking himself, and that ambiguity is the spice that brings out the flavor in the song.

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The Knife “Heartbeats”

In my mind this song is essential to the story of Fluxblog, and perhaps the finest example of the international pop underground I was focused on for the first six years of the site’s existence. But I’ve never really written about it. I featured it in a post with two other tracks in April 2003, but that was back when the emphasis of the site was on sharing music more than writing about it. I didn’t figure that out for a little while. I wasn’t fully prepared to reckon with anything this deep when I was just 22, so I’m going to try to give it a go today.

“Heartbeats” has proven to be quite good in very different arrangements, but the Deep Cuts arrangement will always be my favorite. The delicacy of The Knife’s live arrangement or José González’s acoustic version is lovely, but a lot of the magic of the song for me is in the slightly awkward weight of that big chunky synth riff and in the way the keyboard accents seem to sparkle garishly in the background. The beauty of the song is in the way Karin Dreijer’s vocal melody soars gracefully in contrast with a track that’s a bit tacky and off-balance. It’s a song about falling in love, and awkwardness and corniness is part of that.

Dreijer’s lyrics are as evocative as the sound of the piece, alternating between obvious romanticism (“one night of magic rush, the start: a simple touch”) and more oblique poetry (“you kept us awake with wolves’ teeth,” “mind is a razor blade”). The tense shifts around, starting off in an uncertain present – “one night to be confused, one night to speed up truth” – but most of it is sung in the past tense. It’s hard to tell whether this is meant to be taken as nostalgia for a love that has since ended, or just the early days of something ongoing. But it doesn’t really matter because either way it’s about a special moment in time that’s behind them regardless of how things turned out.

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Kylie Minogue “Love At First Sight”

My two favorite Kylie Minogue songs are about finding a profound connection with someone via music. In “Love At First Sight,” it’s falling in love with the taste of a DJ. In “Sweet Music” it’s about the intimacy of collaborating with someone on creating music. I’ve felt different ways about this sort of thing through my life – around the time these songs came out, this was the dream. Then I went through a long phase of thinking this sort of thing was actually sort of shallow. Then I found out that from experience that was actually very false, and now bonding over a deep love of art feels incredibly important to me again, something I would never want to live without. It’s the least superficial thing, really – it’s shared values and aesthetics, it’s emotional resonance and soul.

“Love At First Sight” doesn’t need lyrics to get across this feeling. It’s built to convey a feeling of sudden clarity, and joy washing over you as complications seem to completely disappear from your mind. It’s like this simple emotional arithmetic where everything adds up to YOU no matter how you run the numbers. The best part of the song dramatizes two beautiful moments in sequence – that dawning realization, and the euphoria of KNOWING and FEELING it all. They replay it a few times as part of a standard pop structure, and just getting to feel a special moment a few times over right there reminds you of how wonderful pop music can be.

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LCD Soundsystem “Get Innocuous!” (Electric Lady Version)

Is it actually awful to be normal? Is having money inherently bad? Is being boring the worst thing you can be? Is comfort a trap? Are nice, shiny, new things devoid of soul? Is friendliness just a way of being fake and insincere? If you’re happy and content, are you really just dumb and oblivious? “Get Innocuous!” is built on the assumption that all of this is true, but that the real question is how much any of it really matters. James Murphy sounds exhausted by fighting it all, and even more tired by living the life of an artist, where everything that used to be fun is now just work.

Murphy’s arrangement starts out tight but just keeps getting tighter and more dense as it progresses. It’s a very mechanical feeling, like a complex system moving in perfect unison towards some clearly defined goal. It’s a very seductive groove, and even though Nancy Whang is chanting “you can normalize / don’t it make you feel alive?” in a sarcastic tone, it still comes across like an enticing invitation in the context of the beat. They pull you into the machine, and then you think “oh, this is not so bad.” And the rub of the song is there is no ironic twist or reveal. It’s not any more of a trap than anything else in life. It’s just another thing to do, another perspective on being alive. The hollow feeling in the song isn’t about what happens to you when you “normalize,” but rather what it feels like to have your old convictions fade away and be replaced by nothing in particular.

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Interpol “Evil”

It used to seem that Paul Banks writing lyrics as though English was his third language was a drawback to Interpol, but over the time it’s now clear this is a feature and not a bug. This man is an expert craftsman of word salads. Some lines are so odd and awkward they make a song more memorable than it would be otherwise, while other lyrics are like Rorschach blots set to music. Banks’ best lines are highly evocative phrases that pop up out of nowhere at the most dramatic moment of a song, like when he belts out “you’re making people’s lives feel less private” midway through “Not Even Jail.” Banks knows that anything sounds intense and serious when sung in his harsh nasal tone, so he has a lot of license for both strangeness and ambiguity. Nonsense sounds better with a paranoid, bug-eyed tone.

I have to say all this because I need you to know that I understand what Banks is all about but still can’t hear “Evil” without my brain trying to sort out a narrative. Like, why is he addressing two different women here? Who is Rosemary, and who is Sandy? Do they know each other? When he asks Sandy “why can’t we look the other way,” is it because he’s cheating on her with Rosemary while he’s out on tour? Or maybe it’s the other way around, and he’s being wrongly accused? He sounds like such a manipulative cad, though. He barely seems to like either woman. Pretty much every line in “Evil” is vivid, but the feelings and settings and details resist all narrative structure. It scrambles memories and chops up moments on a timeline like if Alain Resnais wrote a post-punk song.

Interpol tend to get a lot of credit for creating atmosphere, but not as much for the nuance of their craft as songwriters. “Evil” is a brilliantly composed pop song, and makes the most of the band’s sharp and uptight dynamics while giving space for a loose swing that’s generally absent from their music. This is a song that could stand up well to all sorts of arrangements – it’s not hard to hear this remade as an elegant chamber pop song, or slowed down into more of a sludgy metal dirge. Banks’ verse melody is so lovely that you could play it a lot of ways, but it’s still hard to imagine topping their carefully calibrated balance of aloofness, dumb lust, confusion, and disdain.

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Annie Lennox “Little Bird”

“Little Bird” is all endorphins and adrenaline, with Annie Lennox singing about finding a newfound strength and courage in escaping a relationship that had gone sour over an up-tempo track that’s a little bit house and a little bit rock, and sung like a gospel song. Lennox sounds excited and unencumbered, but also rather nervous. Freedom has high stakes, and every note of triumph in this song is shaded by suppressed fear and doubt.

The line in “Little Bird” that resonates most deeply is at the start of the chorus: “They always said that you knew best.” That’s the crucial bit of context, the bit that shows you that this isn’t just about breaking free, it’s about getting out of a cycle of deferring to someone else. This other person doesn’t even need to be a villain, and doesn’t need to have been wrong about everything. The point is that Lennox is singing from the point of view who’s finally decided to trust themselves, and to follow their own path. Lennox’s voice soars on this part – her confidence is rising, but not quite as high as she’d like it to get. But there she is, trying. She makes you want to try too.

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Tune-Yards “Fiya”

What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?
What if my own flesh is suburban sprawl?
What happened between us makes sense
If I am nothing, you’re all
If I’m nothing at all

Those lyrics resonate with me so deeply that it can be hard for me to listen when Merrill Garbus sings it. I know so many songs, and almost none of them express this feeling, and it’s a feeling that is so common. For a long time, I just figured “Fiya” was a rare and special song. But now it seems more like a song that should be common but is not because the music industry has done such a great job of keeping anyone remotely fat out of the spotlight. The few fat people who do make it through are either the type of people who possess a superhuman level of confidence – not exactly common among fat people – or are like me, and do everything they possibly can in life to misdirect your attention and not address this fact of their existence.

But here’s Merrill Garbus actually singing about it, and all the deep-rooted shame and insecurity that goes with it, and the way people – even good, kind people – will (often unknowingly) reduce your value and humanity because you are fat. She’s giving voice to the feeling that bothers me the most: The notion that someone could only want you out of convenience, and that every good thing about you can be cancelled out by your fatness. She’s singing about the cynicism and fear that grows inside you, the entirely justifiable suspicion that everyone you meet thinks you are disgusting unless they prove otherwise. And even then, can you really trust them? But all of that is really just the outside layer of the song. The core of it is a gnawing feeling of loneliness and yearning for affection. It’s disappointment, and resignation to the belief that you’ll never get what you need the way you are.

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My Chemical Romance “Teenagers”

I would have loved this song when it came out in the mid-00s, but I didn’t ever listen to it because I’d decided that My Chemical Romance and most of their mainstream emo MySpace rock peers were not worth my attention. I was in my mid-20s, was distancing myself from most rock music, and incredibly dismissive of the tastes of white suburban American kids. In other words, at the time “Teenagers” was released, teenagers scared the living shit out of me. But I hear it now, and I just think about what a fool I was to ignore this. This is exactly the sort of vibrant, catchy rock song I have loved at every stage of my life. Whoops.

“Teenagers” is a glam metal song in goth drag. Reduced to an elevator pitch, it’s Mötley Cüre. Gerard Way sings the song with an exuberant clarity but his lyrics are incredibly ambivalent, shifting back and forth between fear and empathy. It’s mostly the latter – Way is acutely aware of how awful being a teen can be, and his terror is mostly rooted in knowing that it only seems to get worse on kids and the kids seem to just get worse in turn. This is a song about teens in which the constant threat of mass murder is a major factor in growing up, and how the classic psychological tortures of adolescence seem quaint in that context. In Way’s mind, these kids are hardened, desensitized, and ready to snap at any moment. Who wouldn’t be scared of ‘em, even when they’re your target audience?

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Billy Joel “The Longest Time”

Billy Joel’s music was so omnipresent through my childhood that it took me a very long time to understand that his primary mode as a songwriter was pastiche. It’s pretty obvious! But you know, it’s easy to lose context when something is so foundational for you. With this in mind, it occurs to me that the contemporary artist with the most in common with Joel is actually Stuart Murdoch from Belle & Sebastian. Like Joel, Murdoch is skilled in adapting his natural gift for classic melody to a variety of pop modes from the past, but keeping it all within an immediately apparent personal aesthetic. But whereas Billy Joel’s music is rooted in bitterness and cynicism, Murdoch consistently writes from an empathetic and optimistic point of view.

“The Longest Time” is from An Innocent Man, the Billy Joel album most overtly based in pastiche. Each song on the record was written to evoke a different major influence from Joel’s youth, and this song in particular was a tribute to doo-wop. Joel is very well suited to the style, and the song is built around one of his loveliest and most elegant set of melodies. The most interesting thing about “The Longest Time” is that it’s written in the style of songs that were intended to express very sweet and naive sentiments about romance for an audience of teenagers, but he’s approaching that subject matter from the perspective of a man in his mid-30s. The guy in this song has fallen in love, but is surprised that this has happened – he’s been burned before, he’s had his defenses up for a while. But somehow he’s met someone who truly inspires him and shakes him out of a cynical, self-defeating rut. Joel’s lyrics are sincerely romantic, but cautious in its optimism. He’s absolutely smitten, and just trying extremely hard not to screw up a good thing.

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Billy Joel “Captain Jack”

The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are written in the second person, a technique that is almost always going to result in a creepy, uncomfortable feeling for the listener. You can hear this two ways: Billy Joel is either putting you in the experience of a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie, or he’s putting you in the mind of someone observing a young, privileged kid who has become a junkie and harshly judging them from a distance. Either way, the lyrics hijack your own perspective, so the seedy details and pathetic behavior come off a little more unsettling than they would if they were sung in either the first or third person. There’s an itchy feeling to the song – “ugh, get me out of here, this is gross” alternating with “ugh, get this voice out of my head.”

“Captain Jack” is a fairly early Billy Joel composition that sets the tone for a lot of the songs he would write as he progressed through his career. Musically, he’s merging the aesthetics of ’60s rock with the drama and grandeur of musical theater, and is basically on the same page as his contemporaries Andrew Lloyd Webber and Pete Townshend, and several years ahead of Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf. Lyrically, he’s 23 years old and already revealing himself to be a major curmudgeon with a defensive contempt for “cool” guys of every kind. The lyrics of “Captain Jack” are hectoring and pitiless, and seem to be written deliberately to humiliate his subjects and reveal them as pretentious frauds who are merely dabbling with a down-and-out lifestyle. In this song, and in many Joel hits, the implication is that he’s watching some guy and seething: “Oh, you think you’re better than me? YOU think you’re better than ME? Well, fuck you, buddy!”

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Coldplay “Clocks”

Chris Martin only wants to make everyone’s life feel more meaningful and romantic, and I think that’s a noble pursuit. The best Coldplay songs – and “Clocks” is the best of them all – blend the uplifting dynamics of classic U2 with the yearning and sentimentality of glossy rom-coms. It’s always cinematic and grand, because you’re supposed to hear it and feel like you’re suddenly in some beautiful moment in a movie about your life. This can be sappy, and it can be narcissistic. But in most contexts, a Coldplay song is empathetic and generous in spirit. It’s Martin and his band giving you permission to let your emotions and experiences feel important, even when everything else in the world is telling you that you’re insignificant and boring.

A song like “Clocks” is at its most powerful when you hear it unintentionally in a mundane context, like if you’re at a Panera Bread in a strip mall on an overcast Tuesday afternoon at 3 pm. You need that grandeur and romanticism to feel a little incongruous with your surroundings. That glorious piano melody tells you that you’re living something bigger and more colorful than where you happen to be in the moment. The falsetto chorus, with Martin repeating the ambiguous phrase “you are,” could be an affirmation, or maybe a declaration of love. It can be anything you need it to be as long as it makes you feel like it truly matters.

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