Crashbeats

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

My Top 100, No. 98: "Dirty Work" by Steely Dan

I don't remember a time before I knew this song, and yet I don't think I ever really gave it serious thought until a couple years ago, when it backed up the opening credits to American Hustle.

I love a well-curated movie soundtrack almost as much as I love a good slow-walk scene, and choosing "Dirty Work" placed the film immediately in a certain time and tone. Because not only is "Dirty Work" completely '70s, it's sleazy and sad and sordid, but in a way that's far too silly for you to take seriously.

My Top 100, No. 99: "Stay" by Rihanna, ft. Mikky Ekko

If you'd asked me, I'd probably tell you I'm kind of ambivalent about Rihanna, but if you asked me about any one of about five or six of her songs individually, I'd lose my shit. Which, I guess, means I like Rihanna more than I let on. This is not my favorite song whose music video primarily features a woman in a bathtub, but it did beat out Sarah McLachlan's "Fallen" for second place, which is saying something.

My Top 100, No. 100: "All You Wanted" by Michelle Branch

In case you thought I had a particularly cool or sophisticated musical sensibility, I'm punting on that right off the bat, because after having contemplated the classics, I'm going straight for juvenile turn-of-the-century chick rock. There are going to be songs on this list that I dissect in great detail, in which I'm in awe of the lyrical or musical construction, and which can be held up as objectively good. This is not one of them.

My Top 100--Introduction and Table of Contents

As you might have heard, the publication to which I'd devoted almost all of my creative energy over the past three years was shut down on Friday. This leaves me not only without my primary place of employment, but without any place to write or pressure to do so.
So, because I've got nothing better to do, and if I don't keep myself busy bad things will happen, I've decided to undertake a Large Writing Project. In this case, to list and rank my 100 favorite songs, and to write at least briefly about each--why I like it, as well as what (if any) emotional, historical or cultural significance it has.
This list is, of course, completely subjective, so you're probably going to disagree with at least some of the rankings, though that's not really the point. My goal is (apart from just staying in practice) not to be authoritative about anything, but to discuss these songs themselves, because the order will probably change by the time I finish writing, to say nothing of how I'll feel months into the future.
Right now, my plan is to finish this project by New Year's Eve, which means two posts a day most days, which could change if a big professional opportunity comes up and I get particularly busy in the near future.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading this and/or I enjoy writing it.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Why I Love This Song: "America"

Specifically, First Aid Kit's cover of Simon and Garfunkel's version.
And leaving aside the irony of the fact that one of the standards of popular American folk rock was done better by a pair of Swedes, there's plenty to unpack.

Here's the original:

Here's the First Aid Kit version:

Comparing the cover to the original--which has been nearly universally acclaimed--spares the normal discussion about the content of the song, which is about a road trip across the U.S. in which Simon, because he wrote the song in the 1960s, is trying to make a grand statement about the American Condition.
First Aid Kit's version differs largely in two ways: vocal arrangement and dynamics, and I'd argue that it's superior in both.
The first is less important, and subjective. Simon and Garfunkel sing in unison for most of the song, and it gives a haunting effect I came to love while I was listening to the doubled vocal tracks that characterize Elliott Smith. It's fine. But if you've got two people singing--particularly if one of them isn't playing an instrument--my personal philosophy is that you ought to make the most out of it. Trade off lines or verses for textural contrast, or have harmony throughout. The Soderberg sisters have built a signature sound on doing just that, so I find their drive from Canada to New York more interesting than Simon and Garfunkel's. That's a personal preference to be sure, but it does offer them an outlet Simon and Garfunkel denied themselves: unison for effect.
Unison for lack of a better idea is boring. Unison in contrast to alternating leads and/or harmony is like taking a whiff of smelling salts, and First Aid Kit breaks it out for the most important line in the song.
Which brings up the most important difference between the two versions: When we get the big crescendo in the fourth verse.
The single greatest weapon in a songwriter/composer's arsenal is the crescendo. The final crescendo is the climax, the way of highlighting that this is what the whole song's about. It's Act 5, Scene 1. It's what moves you.
So let's talk about where the crescendo comes in, and what that represents.
For Simon and Garfunkel, it comes in midway through the fourth verse, on "Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike" and climaxing on "They've all come to look for America," which is the memorable melodic and lyrical element to the song. Anyone who knows anything about Simon and Garfunkel would be able to sing that line for you.
First Aid Kit brings in the crescendo with the strings leading up the fourth verse, then climaxes at the start of the verse: " 'Kathy, I'm lost,' I said / Though I knew she was sleeping. / 'I'm empty and aching and I don't know why.' " We'd been through the verse three times before that, and each time it had been lilting and beautiful and, frankly, optimistic. But once Kathy's asleep--once we're in a place where there's nobody to look strong for--the motif turns urgent and pained and desperate.
Simon and Garfunkel's version emphasizes that Paul and Kathy have driven across the country and haven't found America, whatever that is, and neither has anyone else on the road--hence "They've all come to look for America." It's chasing an ideal that isn't there anymore, and they don't know how to continue.
First Aid Kit's version emphasizes that Paul's in deep, personal, existential pain. He can't pinpoint the source of it, and he doesn't feel comfortable talking about it, even to the person he supposedly loves and trusts the most, and even though it's destroying him. The trip across the country isn't about looking for an American ideal, it's about looking for something worth saving in himself and his relationship, and not being able to find that is an entirely different question.
The difference between the two speaks volumes. Paul Simon was born in the 1940s and wrote the song in the 1960s. It's Boomer Music, so the central problem is with how other people view something national and abstract. There's an ironic detachment to the lyrics, and for a song called "America," it says absolutely fuck-all about the country or the culture.
The Soderbergs--both born in the 1990s--take up the same text and see that the central problem is that the narrator has a vague sense that he's not whole, that he's not feeling something he was supposed to, that he was promised. That absence, though entirely emotional, is causing him deep, possibly fatal pain, and he's been conditioned not to mention it to anyone. That's a powerful, relatable internal conflict, and not mere impotent, vague, bullshit Boomer hand-waving.
Moving the crescendo up makes it a far more interesting story, and it says a hell of a lot more about America than the original.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Baumann's Top 8 Songs of 2014

Here are the eight songs from the past year that I personally liked most/thought were best/felt the most drawn to. This is a completely subjective list, though I tried to explain in more concrete terms why I liked each song. If you don't feel like reading all my bullshit, there's a Spotify playlist at the bottom of the post.

8) "Girls Chase Boys" by Ingrid Michaelson, from Lights Out

I feel like Ingrid Michaelson really ought to be in my wheelhouse--the solo female singer/songwriter aesthetic is kind of where I live musically right now, as you might guess from the rest of this list, or from my Spotify history, which I'm pretty sure at one point included 500 Brandi Carlile songs in a row. But I've never really liked Ingrid Michaelson, which I think is partly because her music doesn't get bandied about in the indie/alt-rock circles whose music tends to float my way, and partly because I never really forgave her for how bad the lyrics to "The Way I Am" are.
"Girls Chase Boys" is similarly subdued, and the lyrics paint a pretty straightforward picture of striding confidently out of a breakup. It is, however, a very meticulously-structured song that manages to spend so much of its time sparse and quiet that it builds a crescendo into the chorus without ever really raising its voice.
I'm a sucker for a good crescendo into the chorus, particularly when it builds not only in volume, but climbs melodically in steps, and I think that's what really sets this song apart for me. Or it could be the clapping in the background--I'm a sucker for background clapping too. Or maybe it's the fact that there wasn't a catchier chorus in popular music this year and I spent most of the summer whistling it to myself.
Or it could be that "Girls Chase Boys" features, in a gender-bending pastiche of Robert Palmer's "Simply Irresistible," probably the best music video of the year.
I don't know--I've got a much better handle on why I like the other seven songs on this list, so there's room to just throw my hands up and make room for something nice, fun and uncomplicated.

7) "Stay Gold" by First Aid Kit, from Stay Gold

One of the great regrets in my life is that I was born in New Jersey and not Tennessee or the Carolinas, and I've spent most of my life in various states of ersatz Southernism, from adopting "y'all" for the second-person plural to drinking bourbon to, more recently, getting really into certain strains of country music.
Because I'm only a poseur, I don't feel bamboozled in the slightest that the Soderberg sisters of First Aid Kit, who toured with Connor Oberst and fit in nicely with the latter-day Loretta Lynn-ish folk and country music I've started listening to recently, are not only not Southern or Midwestern, they're not American, and in fact, not even native English-speakers.
Nevertheless, a lot of the charm of First Aid Kit in general (and "Stay Gold" in particular) lies in the Soderbergs' voices. Most of the time, they're cruising along in persistent harmony (and with an evidently affected twang), which coincides with my view that everyone in a given band who can sing should sing for as much of the song as possible, in as many different harmonic and countermelodic parts as you can cram into the damn thing. Take a look at this studio video to fully appreciate how much music there is in a relatively quiet folk song--that's the best thing about it, particularly the line "What if I fall and can't bear to get up?" in the chorus--it fits perfectly in terms of number and stress of syllables, but it goes by very quickly, and it takes a while to physically get your mouth around all the consonants--it's exactly as much music as you can fit in the line without being inelegant or stilted, and not an ounce less.

6) "Best Friend" by Foster the People, from Supermodel

I can totally understand that, if after "Pumped Up Kicks," you never want to hear Foster the People again--I was okay with adding them to the list of bands I'd liked at first encounter, but whose music I'd grown out of by the time their second album came out, and whose first single was so inescapably overplayed as to render the band unlistenable thereafter.
But "Best Friend" won me back over. Here's why:

It sits at the precise aesthetic midpoint between Black Kids and MGMT, and while I liked both of those bands more as an undergrad than I do now, that realization amused me so much I kept listening to the song.
The song starts with the chorus, and the chorus starts with two pickup notes, which throw the entire enterprise off-balance from the start in a really fun way.
Horns. I need more horns in my life. The trumpet, plus the discoish guitar in the chorus, makes you want to do a very specific kind of dance that just involves kicking your feet out sideways and headbanging.
It includes a chorus of children, which I like because of how unabashedly cheesy it is.
The prechorus climbs the melodic hill, then comes back down the other side, which I'm always on board with on its own, but it takes a slightly dissonant path. Everything about this song confounds expectations by half a beat or half a step, and you find yourself in a groove, but one that's been carved out with a jackhammer, and one that you have to dance along with a Skip-It attached to one ankle. Like if you don't dance, they're going to cut your foot off, and if you dance improperly they're going to cut your foot off, and if you dance properly they might cut your foot off anyway, because fuck it, what's proper anymore? It's very fun and entirely unafraid of being made uneasy.

5) "A Song for Our Grandfathers" by Future Islands, from Singles

I actively disliked the now-famous Future Islands-on-Letterman performance. Sam Herring is blessed with a voice fit to turn sand into chocolate fondue, but I find a lot of his onstage antics annoying and distracting. But this song is a testament to the great things that can be accomplished when you stop fucking around and get down to producing the kind of soulgazing, neo-Springsteenian agrarian synthpop that TV on the Radio would make if TV on the Radio had grown up in Appalachia and were deeply, profoundly uncool.
I don't have much else to say on the subject, except that if this song were a movie, it'd star Robert Duvall and Matthew McConaughey and be directed by Richard Linklater and I'd see it on opening night.

4) "It Will End in Disaster" by White Sea, from In Cold Blood

So what I said earlier about liking solo female singer-songwriters...2014 featured new albums from Nickel Creek, Gaslight Anthem and TV on the Radio, all bands I'm predisposed to love, but In Cold Blood lapped the field as my album of the year. (This happened last year, when The National and Arcade Fire both put out new albums and I kind of shrugged.)
White Sea is Morgan Kibby, who plays keyboards in M83 when she's not demolishing city blocks with the power of her voice alone. I don't know what I expected from an M83 veteran, but it wasn't this.
I love power ballads. I fucking love power ballads, and Morgan Kibby has been touched by the God of Power Ballads, the deity that produced children out of wedlock by the hundreds of thousands between 1979 and 1989.
I wonder what it's like to be the person who can write and perform songs like this. I bet it sucks. I bet she gets up in the morning and makes a bowl of oatmeal, then puts it down the table, but suddenly the table turns into a piano, and when she opens up her mouth to eat it, Whitney Houston's voice comes out.
This is a seismic, balls-out record that sounds like an angel telling a story about a fire engine fucking a computer mainframe. It could've put three or four songs in the top eight. The only thing "It Will End in Disaster" has over "They Don't Know" and "Small December" is that the first half of the song is the high point in the album--I'm not sure it's the best song overall. Go listen to this album, then build a shrine in your home.

3) "Stay With Me" by Sam Smith, from In the Lonely Hour

Sam Smith has a silly haircut, but he sure can sing. This is by far the most popular song on the list, so I don't think I need to give it the hard sell. I will say that I've derived immense joy from singing along with this song in the car, the way I've done with the works of Celine Dion.

2) "Midnight Blues" by Cherlene, from Cherlene (Songs from the Series Archer)

I said earlier that White Sea's In Cold Blood was my favorite album of the year. No. 2? The joke country album from Archer. I swear to God.
When Archer had its season-long departure from espionage thriller/workplace comedy to...I don't know how to describe Season 5, but there are drugs, one of the ongoing plots was secretary/heiress Cheryl's burgeoning country music career. So the producers hired a few musicians and had them arrange covers of, among other things, Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone," and a few originals, of which the highlight was "Midnight Blues."
"Midnight Blues" is an energetic, bourbon-swilling, bird-flipping adventure that begs you to roll the windows down and sing along as loud as you can. Or it would, except I drive a small Japanese sedan, and I feel like this song is best listened to in a 30-year-old Jeep Grand Wagoneer or something. It's got a drum part out of AC/DC's "Thunderstruck," guitars that remind me of The Eagles, and, in session-violinist-turned-lead-singer Jessy Lynn Mertens vocals that can make being stoned and lonely sound like more fun than I've had in years.

1) "NYE" by Missy Higgins, from Oz

It's a cover, so I don't know if it's cheating or not, but this is my favorite song of the year. Oz is (hey, look, another female solo singer-songwriter) Missy Higgins' set of covers of songs from her native Australia. The original version of NYE, by Perry Keyes, is fine, but it sounds like the Pixies fell asleep while covering a Counting Crows song.
This version is transformative. I discovered it sometime in November, and since then I've listened to it hundreds of times, often on repeat, and every time I reflexively do a little side-to-side head-bobbing dance like those twin babies in that viral video from a couple years back.
This song gives me a very specific feeling, that of wanting to be 17 years old and skating with friends on an outdoor ice rink somewhere, when I see a girl I don't know, go up and talk to her and end up experiencing true love for the first time.
So how do you propel an okay 90s indie rock song to these heights? You do three things. First, you get Missy Higgins to sing it, because I'd rather listen to her sharp, energetic voice than Keyes' Diet Grunge drone. This arrangement plays with rhythm of the lead vocal line in parts, and when, by the end of the song, she's dragging out the line "shut your eyes and breathe" a fraction of a beat behind the instrumentals, you feel like she's earned the ability to urge you to do something.
Second, you crank the tempo to make it fast enough to be danceable, or at least foot-tappable.
Third, you Disney the shit out of it. What does that mean? Well, the original was clean electric guitar and pretty standard four-piece rock setup. But this is a song about being young and enjoying yourself when you go out on the biggest party night of the year--there's got to be a little joy to it. So it starts with tambourine and a bouncing piano behind the first verse (switching from guitar to piano allows the chorus to climb the scale with every chord change the way open-fingering guitar doesn't), then adds something each time it crosses the start-finish line: Backing vocals for the first chorus, bells for the second verse, organ (or the most disciplined woodwind section ever) on the second chorus. Brass on the bridge, saxophones on the third verse, and then everything comes together on the final repeated chorus.
It's light, it's fun, it's a little juvenile, and that's fine, because it sounds and feels like a Christmas song in the best ways, and without any of the overplayed, Korean War-vintage bullshit that usually comes from such music. It's a magnificent song, and I want to host a New Year's party just so I can play it for other people for six hours in a row.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The Top 20 Songs I'd Use to End a Movie Whose Last Shot Is a Zoom Out of a Couple Kissing on the Dance Floor at a Senior Prom

"Stolen" by Dashboard Confessional
"Never Let Me Go" by Florence + the Machine
"Heroes" by Mark Bonilla and the Front 48
"Blurry Nights" by Hayden ft. Lou Canon
"You and Me" by Lifehouse
"I'm on Fire" by Bruce Springsteen
"Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls
"Motorcycle Drive By" by Third Eye Blind
"If You Leave" by Nada Surf
"Desire" by Mates of State
"Collide" by Howie Day
"Soco Amaretto Lime" by Brand New
"Eternal Flame" by The Bangles
"Falling Slowly" by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
"Islands in the Stream" by Constantines and Feist
"Duet" by Rachael Yamagata and Ray LaMontagne
"It Will End in Disaster" by White Sea
"The Story" by Brandy Carlile
"I Won't Give Up" by Jason Mraz
"My Sundown" by Jimmy Eat World