Midweek/Weekend Music Break

Always Surprised

June 13, 2012 by John 2 Comments

The Missus has told me on numerous occasions that my astrological character — Gemini, born in the Year of the Rabbit — has doomed me to an intense, lifelong hatred of being bored… and a desperation to be otherwise, even unwisely so.*

Assuming that she’s right (generally a safe assumption), then a corollary to that proposition, of course, must be that I like nothing more than not being bored. Indeed, that’s one of my favorite things — maybe my single most-favorite thing — about writing fiction: how reliably the result catches me by surprise. (I’m no longer surprised to be surprised, which isn’t quite the same thing as saying the surprise has become boring.) It almost never ends up quite as I’d imagined when I first set out on the project, and the surprising element(s) almost always seem improvements.

(To qualify: I don’t make everything up as I go along. I do plan, some. I just try to… how you say…? to stay alert to the possibility of sudden changes in direction.)

When I started working on The Propagational Library, here’s what I had in mind:

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Dr. John, “Iko Iko”

June 6, 2012 by John 3 Comments

At the time this post goes up, The Missus and I will be in or awfully darned close to New Orleans. For an occasion like this, who could be better to Midweek-Music-Break with than Dr. John — practically the latter-day musical voice of the Crescent City?

As quoted on Wikipedia, here’s Dr. John’s description of today’s selection:

The song was written and recorded back in the early 1950s by a New Orleans singer named James Crawford [JES: photo at right] who worked under the name of Sugar Boy & the Cane Cutters… Also in the group were Professor Longhair on piano, Jake Myles, Big Boy Myles, Irv Bannister on guitar, and Eugene ‘Bones’ Jones on drums. The group was also known as the Chipaka Shaweez. The song was originally called “Jockamo,” and it has a lot of Creole patois in it. Jockamo means “jester” in the old myth. It is Mardi Gras music, and the Shaweez was one of many Mardi Gras groups who dressed up in far out Indian costumes and came on as Indian tribes. The tribes used to hang out on Claiborne Avenue and used to get juiced up there getting ready to perform and “second line” in their own special style during Mardi Gras. That’s dead and gone because there’s a freeway where those grounds used to be. The tribes were like social clubs who lived all year for Mardi Gras, getting their costumes together. Many of them were musicians, gamblers, hustlers and pimps.

(Regarding that “second line” reference: you might want to refer back to a post from about a year ago, on Old Crow Medicine Show’s “Down Home Girl”; it uses the phrase, in a context which I completely misunderstood… until Froog set me straight in a comment.)

The spelling of the word “Iko” seems consistent across various interpretations of the lyrics. More troublesome is “Jockamo,” which sometimes appears that way, sometimes as “Jockomo,” sometimes with and sometimes without hyphens… I don’t know what’s right.

We are, however, considering eating at Wednesday night at a restaurant in the Uptown district of New Orleans, called… Jacques Imo’s. Clever, wot?

[Lyrics (in a transcription which doesn’t quite correspond with Dr. John’s rendition above)]

“Iko Iko” also provided the ’60s girl group The Dixie Cups (“Chapel of Love”) with a minor hit, in 1965:

[Below, click Play button to begin Iko Iko. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:04 long.]

[audio:ikoiko_dixiecups.mp3|titles=’Iko Iko’|artists=The Dixie Cups]

Wikipedia, again, on the way this recording came together:

[Group member] Barbara Hawkins had heard her grandmother sing the song… “We were just clowning around with it during a session using drumsticks on ashtrays. We didn’t realize that Jerry and Mike had the tapes running”. Leiber and Stoller overdubbed a bassline and percussion, and released it. It was The Dixie Cups’ fifth and last hit.

One kind soul has posted a rare (?) clip of The Dixie Cups performing “Iko Iko” on a TV show… yes, complete with clicky-clicky drumsticks.

Midweek Music Break: Deana Carter, “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”

May 23, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: Deana Carter, circa 1995]

A bit of urban folklore which I sort of remember (and sort of don’t) from years ago, regarding a difference between the sexes: Boys roll; girls fold. The rolling-and-folding in question was (supposedly) of paper programs for events like football games, concerts, and church services. (I may have mixed up the verbs and subjects — I can see it either way — but I think I’ve got it right.) Whether or not the folklore is true is almost beside the point: it’s so simply expressed, and it’s such a… such an interesting — outright weird — idea, that we instinctively feel it should be true.

Another such formulation I’ve heard has probably a bit more common experience behind it, and it’s certainly got the popular-songwriter vote sewn up: Guys use love to get sex; women use sex to get love. Because, y’know, guys are lying heels and women are shameless vamps; as soon as either side gets what they want, they show their true colors.

Accounts (often weepy) of evidence for that general truism — and the sense of betrayal which follows — may litter the pop-music landscape. But I can’t think of another song* with a premise quite like today’s Midweek Music Break selection, the title track from Deana Carter‘s debut album; it sings not of heartbreak, but of annoyance at a partner far too boneheaded to know the rules of the game, let alone to play along:

[Lyrics]

I’m definitely not a fan of the video for the song; if I’d seen it before hearing the song, you’d probably never be reading this post. From all evidence, Deana Carter is a very good-looking woman, with something of Naomi Watts about her. But in that video, she shines not at all as an actress. She’s dressed and made up — and acts — way too cutesy (almost winking), as though we need her help to get the joke. (And if we still don’t get it, at least we’ll think she’s adorable.) At any rate, she treats the role that way right up until the closing shot. Finally, in that moment, she seems to become the narrator, at last capturing a genuine sense of disbelief in her own naivete (and yes, the guy’s ignorance).

The song does make me wonder about the counterpart from a male point of view… Maybe just, “I said that I loved you, for this?”

___________________

* Nominees gratefully received, though!

Midweek Music Break: David Byrne and Brian Eno, “Home”

May 16, 2012 by John 9 Comments

Several of Running After My Hat‘s regular commenthood are overhauling what “home” means to them:

Nance — and Mr. Mature, of course — are caught up in readying their house for a (dearly longed-for) sale. Marta — amongst writing a flash-fiction story every day this month, and competitive skating, and teaching, and the gods know what else — has moved with her family into their first house, with all the attendant packing and unpacking, inspections, signings of documents, painting, arranging and re-arranging, and re-assessment of what counts (and how much). And in a turn almost unimaginable, at least to me — having followed his blog for four years — Brit ex-pat Froog prepares to leave China altogether, bound for… Lithuania? Uruguay? parts unknown (but presumably with no shortage of watering holes)?

From At Home: A Short History of Private Life, by Bill Bryson:

Houses are amazingly complex repositories. What I found, to my great surprise, is that whatever happens in the world — whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over — eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house. Wars, famines, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment — they are all there in your sofas and chests of drawers, tucked into the folds of your curtains, in the downy softness of your pillows, in the paint on your walls and the water in your pipes. So the history of household life isn’t just a history of beds and sofas and kitchen stoves, as I had vaguely supposed it would be, but of scurvy and guano and the Eiffel Tower and bedbugs and body-snatching and just about everything else that has happened. Houses aren’t refuges from history. They are where history ends up.

From Brian Eno, writing on davidbyrne.com (speaking of 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today album):

This record was born as a dinner conversation. While dining in New York with David and some other friends, I mentioned that I had accumulated a lot of music, which, despite my intentions, I had never formed into songs. David volunteered to give them a try…

Upon starting this project, we quickly realized we were making something like electronic gospel, music in which singing becomes the central event, but whose sonic landscapes are atypical of such vocal-centered tracks.

David Byrne himself adds:

The challenge was more emotional than technical: to write simple, heartfelt tunes without drawing on cliché. The results, in many cases, are uplifting, hopeful, and positive, even though some lyrics describe cars exploding, war, and similarly dark scenarios.

These songs have elements of our previous work — no surprise there — but something new has emerged here as well. Where does the sanguine and heartening tone come from, particularly in these troubled times? …some of my lyrics and melodies were a response to what I sensed lay buried in the music. My task was to bring forth into language what was originally non-verbal. In the end, we have made something together that neither of us could have made on our own.

This particular number, I think, doesn’t fall quite into the “electronic gospel” genre. There’s a nearly martial, rolling-snare-drum effect which plays well behind Byrne’s vocals, and that voice verges on strident. But the lyrics speak of both the universal and the deeply personal meanings of home. Especially when the song is overlaid (as here) by dozens of still photos of dozens of types of houses, it’s easy to imagine an utterly different performance: solo, acoustic, nothing at all electronic — a plucked string fastened at one end in the present day and at the other, deep in history.

[Lyrics]

Midweek Music Break: Cowboy Junkies, “Angels in the Wilderness”

May 9, 2012 by John 6 Comments

[Image: Cowboy Junkies (from top: Alan Anton, bass; Margo Timmins, vocals; Peter Timmins, drums; and Michael Timmins, guitar)]

Cowboy Junkies was the first band I ever listened two who’d been dubbed “alt”-anything. (It may have been alt-country, but I’m pretty sure it was plain old alternative rock.) This made me feel all, y’know, not quite dangerous, more like adventurous — life on the edge! — because I tend toward the plain-brown-wrapper end of most spectra. For starters, I couldn’t imagine ever talking to anyone I knew about a band with the word “junkies” in its name. My family and friends would wonder with whom I’d been hanging out.

In truth, I don’t remember. I may have first heard of the Junkies from a magazine, Rolling Stone maybe, in a review of their great Trinity Session album. (I’ve featured one song from that album here, a good while ago, as one of the selections in the first What’s in a Song post, about “Blue Moon.”)

Well, whatever the circumstances in which they first crossed my radar screen, Cowboy Junkies have continued for around twenty-five years to crank out whatever music they want to make, and to tour widely in its support. And they still consist of the same four members (two brothers, a sister, and a childhood friend). Most recently, they challenged themselves: write, produce, and release a series of four interconnected albums… in eighteen months. It actually took them a couple-three months longer than that, but the final piece of the Nomad Series, the album called Wilderness, finally dropped a few weeks ago.

Here’s one number from the new release, which (to me) feels very comfortably both familiar and, yes, alternative.

[Below, click Play button to begin Angels in the Wilderness. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:42 long.]

[audio:angelsinthewilderness_cowboyjunkies.mp3|titles=’Angels in the Wildernss’|artists=Cowboy Junkies]

[Lyrics]

If you’re a Cowboy Junkies fan, you’ll almost certainly want to see their Tiny Desk Concert recorded at the NPR offices recently. It’s a fourteen-plus-minute session, featuring both “Angels in the Wilderness” and “Fairytale” from the new album, bracketing the one number which has come closest to a hit for them, from that Trinity Session album: “Misguided Angel.”

Midweek Music Break: Water Liars, “Dog Eaten”

May 2, 2012 by John 2 Comments

[Image(s): Water Liars. You’d never imagine that a couple of guys who look like this would
write, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]

I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, 1978’s Airships. You can read the story here or here; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first. (In short order, he remembers that she wasn’t his, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)

Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys — Justin Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town, with a single microphone, their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:

Lyrics (if anyone can fill in the gap for me, I’d be grateful!):

Dog Eaten
(by Water Liars)

The smallest hours of the morning,
When I was busy dreaming
Of tender-hearted girls
And the world without end
Forever and ever amen

My father was quietly takin’
The money I was makin’
From the dog-eaten wallet
He gave me that year

Our blood is our own but it does what it pleases and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrival and that’s no way to live this life

We lay on a Mexican blanket
~~[…inaudible…]~~ by a carillon and some roses
And I was an owl’s ghost
And died on the side of the road

She laid her head on my shoulder
She nibbled on my ear lobe
And that was about all

My blood was my own, it done what it pleased to, and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrivin’ and that’s no way to live this life

Whether or not Water Liars intended the connection, it’s not hard to trace a dotted line from Hannah’s story of broken, childish illusions to the sorry tale told by this song’s protagonist.

____________________________

P.S. From a good interview at No Depression (the speaker is Andrew Bryant):

Lately, my biggest influences have been writers. We all love music of all kinds. That’s should go without saying. But I’ve been really into stories and poetry lately. My favorite writer at the moment is a Mississippi writer named Barry Hannah. He wrote this book called Airships and it really shook me. He did his own thing, and he did from his gut. I’d never read anything like it.

I guess the connection between the band’s name and Hannah’s story isn’t so coincidental!

Update 2012-05-05: I’ve received a genial email from one of the members of Water Liars to “de-mystify a couple areas you touched on.” First up was a clarification of the lyrics (I’ve made that correction above). Second, no need to wonder further about the band’s name:

…we did in fact name ourselves after Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”. It’s one of the best book-opening stories of all time, not to mention one of our favorite stories in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers of all time.

Thanks, Pete!

Midweek Music Break: The Band, “Rockin’ Chair”

April 25, 2012 by John 6 Comments

[The Band (circa 1969), left to right: Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson]

I‘ve posted about The Band exactly once, and barely then — tacking “All La Glory” onto the end of a whiskey river Friday post in December, 2008. I’ve not been ignoring them offline; in fact, as with (to take one example from a whole ‘nother musical universe) Madeleine Peyroux, I sometimes go for weeks listening to no one else. Artists like these (whatever “like these” means!) just sort of tingle in resonant sympathy with something inside me. But personal taste isn’t always something you can expect others to share, and I try hard not to overplay them here.

The death last week of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and probably its signature vocalist, gave a lot of casual (and otherwise) listeners an excuse to dust off the group’s albums for a listen. And this does seem like a good occasion to mention The Band again.

Whether the work of the moment is writing, editing, Web work, or software, I’ve always found their music difficult to work to; its drive and its characteristic electrified-hillbilly sound make it push to the forefront of my conscious mind — especially in rollicking favorites like “Rag Mama Rag” and “Time to Kill.” (Helm’s voice in particular punches through, very hard not to attend to.) So when I’m working, you won’t usually find those numbers in rotation. What you’ll find instead is the quieter ballads, for which the lead singer was often Richard Manuel or Rick Danko. “All La Glory,” from that long-ago post here, was one such. Right up there with it is today’s choice, “Rockin’ Chair.”

The title apparently name-checks both a Hoagy Carmichael tune from 1929 and — more of a stretch if you ask me — the (common but unofficial) title of a 1962 blues album by Howlin’ Wolf. The Band’s song (written, like most of their music, by Robbie Robertson) is deceptively simple: an old-timer looks back, wistfully, on his life. Apparently a sailor, he drifts back and forth between being at sea and wishing he were home, and being at home and wishing he were aboard again.

But the confusion between where the narrator is and where he wants to be masks a deep subtlety — a shifting chiaroscuro of metaphor overlaid on statements of apparent fact. The old sailor (with his companion “Ragtime” Willie Boy) is gripped by confusion himself, fading in and out between past and present; he seems almost to trail off into frightened, hallucinatory dementia, as though babbling I’m dying! I’m not ready to die! I’m so ready to die! Willie! Willie!, the Flying Dutchman, Willie!…

Levon Helm didn’t sing lead on this song, simply providing harmony (with the others) for Richard Manuel’s voice at its most wistful. Even in photos in which he’s smiling (like the one on this page), Manuel seemed to me to bear a mantle of sadness on his shoulders. In the photo which tops this post, that’s him on the left — the only one not dressed in dark clothing, but that doesn’t make him “lighter”; his demeanor appears almost fearful. This is just 20-20 hindsight conjecture, though: he spent much of his offstage life plagued by depression and substance-abuse problems, especially with alcohol. (His drink of choice: Grand Marnier. Wikipedia says that he maxed out at an average of about eight bottles a day. And reportedly, when he left one residence in 1976 the people who cleaned up afterwards had two thousand empty Grand Marnier bottles to dispose of. One doubts that these were the 50-ml “minis.”) By the time The Band filmed their farewell concert for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, in 1978, Manuel could barely sustain his sweet but heartbreaking voice through more than a few songs. He committed suicide in 1986. He was then on tour with The Band, reunited (without Robertson), and had just left Levon Helm’s motel room; indeed, Helm and Danko had to lift him down from the bathtub shower rod where he’d hanged himself (I can’t even imagine the horror).

Band members and others always insisted it had to have been an accident, or maybe a bad joke gone wrong. (According to People Magazine, Helm told police, “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his own bathroom.”) But it’s hard for an outsider, at least, not to picture him asea and drifting, pushin’ age forty-three, suddenly dashed on some reef rearing up out of the fog.

Here’s “Rockin’ Chair”:

[Lyrics]

Addendum: A 1997 BBC documentary, an hour-plus in length, explored the making of The Band, the album on which “Rockin’ Chair” first appeared. The entire documentary (first released in the UK, in partnership with the VH1 music channel) was for a time available at YouTube in a single clip. Speakers included Levon Helm, John Simon (one of the album’s producers), Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko. It’s not on YouTube anymore, alas, but here in the US — at least as of August, 2023 — you can find it on DVD, or streaming via various services (Amazon Prime, Pluto, Tubi, et.).

____________________________________

Minor gripe: the only thing marring this song, I believe, is the way it ends. Others (including many other fans) have commented that The Band’s songs often don’t conclude, so much as plain-old stop; and this is particularly egregious in “Rockin’ Chair.” Compounding the weird abruptness of the close is the mandolin (wielded by Helm, I think), which plucks out something very much like a playful Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits! rhythm completely at odds with the elegiac melody and loose, ropy lyrics which preceded it. (In the BBC/VH1 documentary I described above, Helm asks producer John Simon, How’d we come up with that Chinese ending?!? Simon replies, I don’t know. Makes at least three of us then!

Midweek Music Break: Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, with Warren Haynes, “I’d Rather Go Blind”

April 18, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Video from In Performance at the White House: Red, Hot, and Blues]

[Video above not working for you? In its place, I offer you the audio only:]

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_tedeschitruckshaynes.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Tedeschi Trucks Band w/ Warren Haynes”]

[Original lyrics, by Etta James]

I first encountered the name Derek Trucks within a few years after I’d moved down here. Some kid was doing a show at a club in town — an amazing blues guitarist, said the newspaper preview, and only a teenager: 14 years old or so. How amazing? He’d toured with Buddy Guy. He’d performed with the Allman Brothers. The kid was hot.

[Aside: I’ve got something like a third- or fourth-order connection to him, too. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the drummer for the Allmans. When Butch was in elementary school, he attended a dance with my Missus-to-Be on his arm — his very first date.]

Susan Tedeschi has had some kind of career of her own, dating back to her childhood. She grew up listening to blues and gospel music, and eventually played Austin City Limits and Lilith Fair. (Her voice, says Wikipedia, has been described as a blend of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. I don’t believe even that does it justice.) She also toured with the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and, well, the Allman Brothers.

Trucks and Tedeschi married in 2001, and continued their separate careers. Recently, wanting to minimize their kids’ exposure a typical touring-musician family’s lifestyle, they set up a studio in Jacksonville, FL, and formed their own band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Their first album, Revelator, came out last June; it’s a killer, and I’d intended with this post to cover a couple of tracks from it for you.

But in doing a little research about it I stumbled on the above recent performance on the PBS special In Performance at the White House: Red, White, and Blues. Tedeschi and Warren Haynes share the vocals while Trucks’s slide guitar tears up the instrumental lead, on “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

The song itself, co-written and first recorded by Etta James in 1968, holds legendary status as one of the best, most successful B-side recordings in pop-music history. The A side was an even bigger hit, “Tell Mama.” In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James says that she never liked “Tell Mama.” (“I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the one you come to for comfort and easy sex.”) But about “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she relates this story of label executive Leonard Chess:

When Leonard heard the song the first time, he got up and left the room ’cause he started crying. That touched my heart. Other cats I know would have wanted me to see them cry, just to show me how soulful they were. I liked that Leonard did his weeping in private. […] When he came back in the room, he said, “Etta, it’s a mother… it’s a mother.”

It does no disservice to James’s memory — she died shortly before the above video was recorded — nor to the talents of Tedeschi, Trucks, and Haynes, to say that this performance lives up to the song.

Just for completeness, here’s the reference version — Etta James’s mother of a performance:

[mp3-jplayer title=”I’d Rather Go Blind” tracks=”idrathergoblind_ettajames.mp3″ captions=”I’d Rather Go Blind / Etta James”]

____________________________

Note: Hat tip (and a deep bow) to my little brother for introducing me to Revelator.

Midweek Music Break: The Ramsey Lewis Trio, “The ‘In’ Crowd” and “Wade in the Water”

April 11, 2012 by John 4 Comments

[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod’s blog of “music-themed ink drawings” called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this “straight to ink,” without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to Lewis himself.]

When we hear people refer to the 1960s, we think of upheaval: the remaking of music and politics, the overturning of what we thought we knew about family and art. But the ’60s had another side, and it’s one of the reasons why (I think) the TV show Mad Men has been such a hit: under the surface of frothing water swam small schools of fast, sleek, and, well, non-splashy fish, making their way through the culture without apparent effort…

Reportedly, it was a coffee-shop waitress who suggested that the Ramsey Lewis Trio add to their repertoire a tune called “The ‘In’ Crowd.” (It had been a recent hit for singer Dobie Gray.) The song’s chorus pretty much summed up its theme:

I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes
(Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd
(Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows

Lewis and his group did an instrumental take on the song while recording an album at Washington DC’s Bohemian Caverns nightclub in 1965. (None of the trio sang, really. But I understand that you can hear bassist Eldee Young vocalizing here and there as he’s transported by the music and rhythm. Can’t hear it myself, but you may be able to pick it up.) That recording, nearly six minutes long, became Lewis’s first gold record:

With the same personnel, he followed up with another pair of gold records a year later. The first covered The McCoys’ 1965 hit, “Hang On Sloopy.” The second took the spiritual classic “Wade in the Water” and turned it inside out — from an assertion of the blessings of baptism, to one of the blessings of moving through water in general: the blessings of cool:

Note: You can find another cool-jazz take on “Wade in the Water” in a whiskey river Friday post a few years ago, in a video by “Barefoot Contessa” singer-organist Rhoda Scott.

Midweek Music Break Playlist: Windows to the Soul

April 4, 2012 by John 5 Comments

[Image: girl, dancing, in giant eye costume. Note the hands: one giving “thumbs-up!” sign,
one holding a cocktail. I have no idea if this is an advertising image or what; found it at a couple
of places, never with any explanation.]

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the Play button. Total playlist length: around 31 minutes.

Though most of us don’t hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, you have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes… It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes’ elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body’s sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn’t, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.

(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)

Windows to the soul, right. That’s what they say about eyes, anyhow. Which, if true, is good news for everybody but (poor) liars.

I poked around to see if anyone knew, definitively (or even convincingly) who first came up with the “windows to [or of] the soul” metaphor. Best guess, as far as I can tell, seems to be that it came from Cicero, in his Tusculan Disputations. I’ve found a translation of that work (by Andrew Peabody, in an 1886 edition) at the Internet Archive. The passage there (in a chapter called “On the Contempt of Death”) reads as follows:

Therefore it is that often, when hindered by being absorbed in thought or by some morbid affection, we neither see nor hear, though both the eyes and the ears are open and in a healthy state, so that it may be readily inferred that it is the soul that sees and hears, and not those parts which are like windows of the soul, but through which the mind can perceive nothing unless it be actively present.

When you pick this apart, it’s actually pretty plain that he’s lumping the eyes in with the ears as windows of the soul. But let it pass, let it pass, and give the guy the benefit of the doubt: after all, windows are predominantly an architectural feature which serves the eyes.

Whether they’re good or bad for people facing interrogation, eyes are without question a godsend to songwriters. If, as Diane Ackerman says, 70% of our sensory wiring is given over to support of vision, it’s easy to imagine that at least 70% of our music deals with it in some form or another. It (haha) focuses on the orbs themselves, or on the things the orbs perceive; the songs are full of color, light, shadow, and of course blindness. (Let’s not forget Talking Heads’ “Cross-Eyed and Painless.”) And given the other pop-music preoccupation — love, et all the cetera that goes with it — songs often deal with the color the lover sees when he sees the beloved’s eyes. Indeed, try to substitute in a song title any other sensory organ or its sense in place of the eyes and vision and you wind up with ridiculously Daliesque imagery: “Doctor My Ears”; “I Only Have Sniffs for You”; “Taste Bud of the Tiger”…

(As a thought experiment, I turned it around: pick some other art form, and some other sense, and try to think of examples of that art’s preoccupation with that sense. It’s not easy — although I suspect you, clever readers that you are, could run off a dozen examples.)

This was a difficult mix to put together — way too many choices. We take vision very, very seriously, and the eyes are everywhere in our songs.