Music – Page 19

Midweek Music Break: The Coup (and Patton Oswalt), “The Magic Clap”

June 5, 2013 by John 3 Comments

I have a “real” Midweek Music Break in the pipeline, but it’ll have to wait another week; it’s taking (to my surprise) way too much time in the research for me to finish today. In the meanwhile, here’s a hilarious video in which comedian Patton Oswalt acts out the lyrics to The Coup’s new single “The Magic Clap.” Paste, where I saw it, describes this as “an awesomely spastic video” — which says pretty much all there is to say about it. (No lyrics provided, for what will be obvious reasons.)

I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anything by The Coup before, and probably will find excuses not to do so again. But this was too entertaining to keep to myself. I’ve always thought of Patton Oswalt as one of the most interesting and consistently watchable comedians in the business — the video sort of cements that impression in my mind.

Story Up My Sleeve #29 / Midweek Music Break: “Golden Ring,” by Tammy Wynette and George Jones

May 29, 2013 by John 2 Comments

Yeah: our hands and our cake. And our golden rings. [Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background page. Today’s selection also serves as the final weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]

I don’t listen to a lot of country music. But even I know this: story songs lie as thick on the ground in Nashville as in any other musical landscape, and more thickly there than anywhere except over the ancient wooded hills and valleys of folk music. (The latter probably wins only because of a thousand-year head start.) You have no doubt seen those mind-boggling lists of country-music song titles, real and imagined; if you scan through any of them you’ll find entire story lines suggested in just the titles of, who knows, 90% of them.

I’ve never seen this phenomenon explained anywhere. (I’d like to believe it signifies something artsy and profound like “the powerful universal, cross-genre appeal of story-telling,” but who knows?) Whatever the reason, selecting a country song to feature during this month of story songs felt at first as though it might be almost too easy — so easy that I almost stayed away from country altogether. But today’s selection, “Golden Ring,” just — no pun intended — fit.

It fits, obviously, with the whole “month of stories” theme. George Jones, the male half of the original duet, died just a week or two ago. Its history suggests current events here in the US: as first conceived by the songwriter, Bobby Braddock, it was about the effects of a gun — not a wedding band — on the lives of a series of owners. Heck, the song even came out during the month of May, in 1976. (Wikipedia helpfully notes in a gossipy aside that this was 14 months after Wynette and Jones’s own real-life divorce.)

But it carries a hidden subtext, as well — at least for today, and at least for me. None of the lyrics are relevant for this purpose except the chorus’s last line, the one that suggests the twining of love around that simple bit of jewelry. About that line, I’ll just say: happy anniversary, Baby.

[Lyrics]

Getting Around

May 24, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Rocket dog

[Image: well, that’s one way to do it. I’m not really sure what this represents, but it got my attention.]

From whiskey river:

The Meadow

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

(Marie Howe, The Good Thief [source])

…and:

Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall in the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.

(Tomas Tranströmer [source])

[Read more…]

Story Up My Sleeve #22 / Midweek Music Break: “Stan,” by Eminem

May 22, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

[Don’t know what this is? See the Story Up My Sleeve background post. It’s also the third weekly Midweek Music Break featuring a “story song,” in keeping with the “May is National Short Story Month” theme.]

I admit it: I know almost nothing about rap. So much of the content seems to be about issues I can’t connect to, for one reason or another, and I’ve possibly just spent too much time listening to melody to care that much about rhythm exclusively. (After a moment’s pause, I realize that you can lump these two “reasons” together as the Geezer Defense.)

Anyhow, as little as I know about rap in general, so much less do I know about any given rap performer. Eminem has certainly made himself hard to ignore, though. And as I worked through various online lists of story songs (it’s a popular blog and Q-and-A forum topic), I kept coming across references to this number. The title character is not just a fan of the narrator, Eminem, but a fan ultimately obsessed to the point of danger: to himself, to his girlfriend, to his baby she’s carrying. From his room, wallpapered with Eminem’s concert and publicity photos, he keeps composing rambling bipolar letters to his idol, growing ever more frustrated that he never gets a reply. The tale ends (as story songs tend to) in tragedy and irony, as Eminem finally sits down to write a return letter — only to realize that the guy he’s writing to is the very fan who’d recently driven off a bridge (with his pregnant girlfriend locked screaming in the trunk of the car), leaving behind for Eminem a melodramatic, delusional taped message.

Omitting some of the more violent imagery and language, this sanitized version of the song and video clocks in at around 25% shorter than the full eight-minute epic. (That version is also on YouTube; I haven’t watched it, but apparently — judging from the comments there — the audio in the longer one, too, is bleeped no less heavy-handedly than this one.) The lyrics I’ve linked to below, though, are as far as I know the full and unedited ones. Favorite moment: when Stan, speaking into the tape recorder while he drives, suddenly realizes that if he dies in a crash he won’t be able to mail the thing to Eminem. (To me, this hints that he doesn’t really mean to kill himself and his girlfriend, and maybe just drives off the bridge in panicky indecision rather than deliberation.)

The video takes the tell-the-story-literally approach, with some artful touches in photography, lighting, and effects, but nothing very much like moody symbolism or implication. Actor Devon Sawa plays the Stan character; British singer-songwriter Dido, whose song “Thank You” is sampled for the chorus, takes the role of Stan’s girlfriend.

[Lyrics] (explicit)

Story Up My Sleeve #15 / Midweek Music Break: “Cell Block Tango,” by John Kander and Fred Ebb

May 15, 2013 by John 2 Comments

[Continuing to combine the Story Up My Sleeve and Midweek Music Break series for Wednesdays in May…]

Doing this Story Up My Sleeve series has reminded me of a forgotten pleasure: the reading of short-story anthologies. I’ve never been able to read, cover-to-cover, an entire anthology of stories by a single writer (although I came close with John Cheever); but I’ve read the entirety of many anthologies of stories by multiple writers. I just haven’t done so in a long time.

So when casting about for a song to feature today, I was delighted to suddenly think of this number, from the Kander & Ebb musical Chicago. The lyrics present an anthology of six short-short stories, each with a different first-person narrator; while the stories are spoken rather than sung, each has a certain built-in crescendo-to-climax as the “murderesses” take turns describing their ~~crimes~~ murders, and as each story is told the other women sing the background refrain: He had it coming.

[Lyrics]

(Those lyrics are a little squirrely, so to speak. I began with lyrics commonly found around the Internet, but must’ve spent at least 45 minutes stopping the song, adjusting the lyrics, re-starting and backing up in the song to make sure I had it right so far, continuing, stopping again… (The lyrics I had obviously came from some production other than the film. Maybe they were the original lyrics as published, I don’t know. They sure didn’t fit flush with the lyrics as sung.) Finally I just said the hell with it and posted what I had to that point. :))

Story Up My Sleeve #8 / Midweek Music Break: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” by Gordon Lightfoot

May 8, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

Trackline (estimated) of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975

I thought I’d take liberties with both of these ongoing series’ themes in order to combine them. This may continue for the next few Wednesdays, as well — creating, in effect, a weekly post on story songs.

Gordon Lightfoot’s rambling, rolling ballad doesn’t recount the real-life facts 100% exactly as they happened — at least as far as we know of those facts. Indeed, Lightfoot himself recast a portion of the lyrics (in live performances, anyhow) to reflect more recent research. Yet considering that he wrote the song within months after the event in question, and that we still — almost 40 years later — don’t know-know what happened, he didn’t do a bad job at all.

In general outline, here’s what we do (more or less) know:

[Read more…]

RAMH@5: Cherchez les Femmes (A Playlist)

April 20, 2013 by John 8 Comments

[Image: Fifty-Three Stations of Tokaido: 44 (Yokkaichi), color woodblock print (1841-34), by Utagawa Hiroshige. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

Well, damn. I just couldn’t quite make it to a thousand posts by today: I’m still a couple dozen short. (On the other hand, if you count all the auxiliary not-actual-posts-as-such pages — the About stuff, and the Propagational Library series, story excerpts and so on — they put me easily over the top.)

If you challenged me on the point, I’m not sure I could answer coherently why I’m still blogging (however fitfully these days), in addition to Facebooking and posting to Twitter. On the face of it, the whole blogging transaction model is upside-down (especially relative to those other platforms): the blogger can spend an hour, several hours, sometimes days of work thinking about, possibly researching and writing-and-editing a given post — for close to zero reward. Post provocatively or hilariously (however briefly) on FB or Twitter, though, and you get a dozen acknowledgments of one kind or another, from simple “Like”s to full-blown dialogue on the subject. It’s… well, I don’t know. It’s weird. Unless you’ve got dozens of followers and regular commenters (a circumstance which I’ve frankly never aspired to), and hence something like conversation, blogging may just be one of those aimless pursuits which some humans follow. You go for Sunday drives in the country; I blog.

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Linda Ronstadt, “Trouble Again”

April 17, 2013 by John Leave a Comment

For reasons which may (if I’m lucky!) become obvious in a few days, I recently combed through RAMH to see when I’d featured this song here. I couldn’t believe what my eyes (via the Search feature here, or via our Google overlords) insisted to be true: never. I’d never even mentioned it in a comment. It appears in not a single draft post. The absence didn’t just defy expectations; it defied explanation — seemingly defied reality itself.*

I mean, seriously: I love this song.

When the album on which it appears came out, in 1989, I pretty much bought it automatically, knowing very little in advance: it was Linda Ronstadt, after all. And (look at that cover photo!) it clearly had nothing to do with her several previous albums — the Nelson Riddle collaborations on old standards, and so on — all of which I’d respected and listened to, even repeatedly, and even really, really liked… without ever falling in love with any of them.

So Cry Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like the Wind, unheard, seemed on the face of it a return to form.

Which turned out to be, well, not quite true. Don’t get me wrong: much of it sits very pleasantly in the ears, and Ronstadt is joined on several numbers by the silken-voiced Aaron Neville. (That collaboration seemed to draw the most commentary and praise from critics, and resulted in the album’s biggest hit singles… and not one but two Grammies for duet performances, in 1990 and ’91.) Brian Wilson (Ronstadt told one reviewer) added fifteen parts just to one song.

But wowie, when I heard this number — as far as I can tell, just Ronstadt and the musicians — I think I almost passed out. I’d bought the album on cassette tape back then, of course; and I was single at the time, so spent a lot of time in the car by myself, to and from work, on road trips and family visits, simply to the store and back. I listened to the whole thing — this number in particular — over, and over, and over. I listened to “Trouble Again” so many times that I knew exactly how many internally-clocked seconds it took to rewind to the beginning. Nothing else quite like it appears on that album. I don’t know why it was never released as a single.

Aside from the music, from the start I very much liked the meaning — the story — in this song. “I’d be so pure if it hadn’t been for YOU” isn’t a unique theme, by any stretch. But every other example I can think of features a man singing of or to a woman who (he claims) led him astray: that “Trouble Again” stands the standard narrative on its head makes it worth hearing on its own, specific performance aside. Its protagonist even shares all those guys’ defensive self-delusion.

(Lest you think that Ronstadt’s simply covering a male-written song: nope. It’s a cover of a song by Karla Bonoff, who also penned a good number of other songs which have marked Ronstadt’s career.)

One note in particular really lingers in the mind — It. Is. Amazing — but I’ll let you discover it for yourselves:

[Lyrics]

The note in question was one of two which imprinted themselves on my brain around the same time. The other I already discussed a good while back, down towards the end of this post; there, Carly Simon rounded off “I Get Along Without You Very Well” with a lingering (and lingering, and lingering…) tug on the heart. But Ronstadt here powers through with a furious, sustained outburst of bitterness which — in the lyrics’ context — means above all not to let “you” get a word in edgewise.

For the record, here’s Karla Bonoff’s own version. Obvious differences between Ronstadt’s and Bonoff’s voices aside, all the essential elements are in place (including, not least, the storyline). The note here, however — at around the 1:30 mark — lasts for only couple of seconds (vs. Ronstadt’s ten-second blast). It’s missing the righteous fury:

_____________________________________

* Actually, I have shared it off the board with a couple of long-time RAMH readers. Yeah. That had to be what I was thinking of — because of course it couldn’t possibly be ascribed to a hiccup of memory…

Mysteries of Potential

March 29, 2013 by John 5 Comments

[Image: a “mood board” generated by a team brainstorming the design of an alternate-reality game (ARG). Found it here. Click to enlarge.]

From whiskey river:

We don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We don’t know.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

The Unwritten

Inside this pencil
crouch words that have never been written
never been spoken
never been taught

they’re hiding

they’re awake in there
dark in the dark
hearing us
but they won’t come out
not for love not for time not for fire

even when the dark has worn away
they’ll still be there
hiding in the air
multitudes in days to come may walk through them
breathe them
be none the wiser

what script can it be
that they won’t unroll
in what language
would I recognize it
would I be able to follow it

to make out the real names
of everything

maybe there aren’t
many
it could be that there’s only one word
and it’s all we need
it’s here in this pencil

every pencil in the world
is like this

(W.S. Merwin [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Melodía Pegadiza, Part 1 (1951-52)

March 27, 2013 by John 4 Comments

For weeks recently, intermittently, I had been musically fixated on a song which I’d known for, well, decades. And I probably hadn’t heard it in decades, either. Even worse: my normal solution to the problem of an earworm is to simply listen to the song several times. Couldn’t do that in this case because… well, I didn’t know the name of the song, or on what album (if any) I might have heard it. I didn’t know who performed it. It was an instrumental, so I couldn’t seize on the lyrics to simply do a search. All I knew, apparently intimately, was the sound.

Which really made me crazy. The melody and rhythm and performance were not unpleasant, by any means; in fact, they swung smoothly, sweet-dreamily, with heavy doses of strings and woodwinds accented here and there by percussion and horn. They felt… Latin.

Yes, I know: whole Web sites and smartphone apps exist to help in cases like this. You hold an iPod or MP3 player up to a microphone, say, and the software analyzes the tune to guess at the song (and sometimes the artist). Or you can play a piano, guitar, or harmonica (or — I guess — a trumpet! even a Mellotron, or a Novachord!) into the mike. In some cases, you can simply sing into the mike, or hum, or even just plain whistle; this would require one of those rare solutions (since I didn’t actually have a copy of the song to play). But I’ve gone the perform-it-yourself route before. Maybe your singing, humming, whistling is up to snuff. Mine? Put it this way: Can you imagine the humiliation of running software which all but stares at you, gimlet-eyed, in disbelief and frank confusion?

So then one Monday night a few weeks ago The Missus and I succumbed to the allure of a PBS pledge drive. We’ve donated before, separately and together, but never at the level required to get one of their premium “gifts”: a DVD, say, or a large-format coffee-table book, or a collection of CDs. On this occasion, what pushed us over the edge was a sort of vicarious nostalgia for music of some other generation: we sprang for a six-CD collection of pop and “easy listening” music of the 1950s. Back then, we were both too young really to know this music. But the gods knew we’d heard plenty of it, coming from the speakers of record player, transistor radio, and hi-fi system…

Think Patti Page and Perry Como, Mantovani and the McGuire Sisters, all the guy-group vocalists (many of them named to identify their number, usually four: the Four Lads, the Four Aces, the Four Coins).

Think, oh, say, Leroy Anderson, and “Blue Tango.”

[Read more…]