Song of the Day

Song of the Day: “Want You Back” – Haim

January 15, 2018 by krisis

You can get the best out of life when you are willing to engage in forgiveness and grant an occasional second chance.

That’s a reminder I could use a little more often. Whether we’re talking about a vegetable I’ve never eaten before or a song by a new artist, I tend to treat any first encounter as an absolute litmus test without room for reassessment.

It’s a great habit when it comes to quickly whipping through a huge swath of new material (a situation more common for songs than vegetables), but not always great for tracking the evolution of an artist.

Which bring us to Haim, a band of singer-songwriter sisters.

I wasn’t a tremendous fan of Haim’s first album, 2013’s Days Are Gone. It had two of the elements of music I love most – namely, tasty guitar riffs and multi-part female harmony – but I just couldn’t connect with it. That wasn’t helped by catching a few videos of truly miserable live performances from the band where they could not reassemble the harmony from the record.

I chalked them up to a flash in the pan and considered them cancelled. On to the next thing!

That’s why it took me a little while to actually listen to any songs from their 2017 sophomore record, Something To Tell You. I thought I already knew enough of Haim’s story to tell you how my listen would end – decidedly uncharmed, mostly underwhelmed.

I was so incredibly wrong.

Something To Tell You is the work of a much surer band than Days Are Gone. While it has a slimmed down sonic palette compared to their debut, what’s left is a greatly refined blast of sunny melodies that evoke Fleetwood Mac and Wilson Phillips, with a touch of Shania Twain’s drama and a pinch of Sara Bareilles’s theatre nerd.

Nowhere is this more apparent to me than on “Want You Back,” which is a perfect blend of those four major touchtones (and, I suspect, major influences) with some of the tightest harmony I’ve heard from the band yet.

Of course, it’s one thing to record a song this tight in the studio. Can they reproduce it live?

Oh, how they can. I’m not even sure which version I love the most! This Live Lounge studio recording (with tons of mugging from the ladies); a slower, subtler version Live on Triple J; or this powerful staged version from Graham Norton – all three with stunning harmony.

I’m so happy I gave Haim another chance so I could fall in love with this song, which might have been my most-played new track of 2017. Or, in the words of the band:

And I had a fear of forgiveness
(Said it from the beginning) I was too proud to say I was wrong
(Said you’d always see me through) but all that time is gone
No more fearing control, I’m ready for the both of us now

Song of the Day: “Video” – Aimee Mann

January 8, 2018 by krisis

Do you have an artist in your collection who snuck up on you as a favorite, although you later realized they’ve been consistently amazing the entire time you’ve been listening to them?

I have a few, but none so prominent as Aimee Mann.

I can still remember my first listens to her LP I’m With Stupid. In fact, you can too, since they were a topic of one of my earliest blog posts! That places my entire Aimee Mann fandom within the life of Crushing Krisis.

Despite my early obsession with her I’m With Stupid and Bachelor No. 2, I fell off as a listener after that. I can explain exactly why in two words: “Jon Brion.” He’s now a composer of film scores, but back in 2000 he was a vintage-tinged, often-whimsical producer whose trademark sound was completely entwined in Mann’s songwriting on those two discs as well as on Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn (although you might know him better as the producer of Kanye West’s second and third full-lengths).

As much as I enjoyed Mann’s songwriting, I was convinced that it was producer Brion’s sound that made the songs stick to my brain. This was emphasized for me when I picked up Mann’s next LP, Lost In Space. It had a soft mid-section, and without Brion’s production to perk the tunes up I couldn’t really find an anchor in them. I kept buying her albums out of habit, but I would glom onto a song or two via shuffle and would be unaware of the rest.

Luckily, I am not the only consumer of my record collection. I have so much music in my library that E rarely shops for random new tunes; instead, she simply goes spelunking into my archives to try a new artist she’s never heard before. Sometimes this yields artists who I am cool on but she falls in love with, like Imogen Heap.

In the case of Aimee Mann, she had been listening each subsequent LP of hers into the ground while I had been blithely ignoring them, creating her own universe of favorite songs, dissected lyrics, and connected themes.

I had been dimly aware of her interest, but it wasn’t really until we caught wind of Aimee Mann touring last year that E’s love for her bled back into my own consumption. I bought us tickets to see Mann for E’s birthday, and all of a sudden I was exposed to an entirely new portion of her catalog that had been on my iPod for years but that I’d never heard before.

I realized that as much as I loved Jon Brion’s sound, that in some ways it had been obscuring Mann’s songwriting craft. I had been tuning in for the best guitar hooks and totally missing the devastation of her lyrics.

Now E and I have our own merged mythology of Mann, a shared constellation of stellar songs embedded in our universe of love for each other. Even EV6 has gotten in on it, with her own favorites to listen to and sing along to.

For me, this entire process is memorialized in “Video,” from 2005’s Forgotten Arm. It’s a terrific example of Mann writing about depression (as is the entirety of 2017’s Mental Illness), made memorable by its mostly single note melody above a see-sawing two-chord change.

Tell me why I feel so bad, honey
TV’s flat and nothing is funny
I get sad and stuck in a cone of silence

Like a big balloon with nothing for ballast
Labeled like a bottle for Alice
Drink me down or I’ll drown in a sea of giants

Yet, the song is about more than depression. It’s about memories, and how once we create a core memory of something we love we will play it back a thousand times until it becomes just a symbol of that love.

And tell me, “Baby, baby, I love you
It’s non-stop memories of you
It’s like a video of you playing
It’s all loops of seven-hour kisses
Cut with a couple near-misses”

There’s no more perfect a description of music for me than that, both as a consumer and a songwriter. Each song is a capsule of memories and feelings that I can play on a loop, with the song itself eventually replacing those fleeting memories and flimsy feelings, like tree sap turning to amber.

I’ll always have those two Aimee Mann albums I loved on my own, but now I treasure every other song after them, because when I hear those songs they play back videos of E and EV6 across my brain.

Song of the Day: Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Ocean”

December 11, 2017 by krisis

I am in awe of anyone who can perfectly reproduce a performance.

I’m not just talking about concert pianists or ballet dancers. Marching bands fascinate me. E spent her high school years playing clarinet in a marching band, and it just blows my mind that she not only had to reproduce intricate music with her breath and fingers, but also hit the mark on choreography at the same time.

A famous anecdote of mine is that when I auditioned for an was cast in my first play, Agatha Christie’s The Unexpected Guest, I thought that you didn’t have to learn your exact lines in theatre. I thought you learned the general semblance of them and then just sort of did some improv from there.

I’ve spent my fair amount of time on stage since that first time, but always in plays or in rock bands. I’ve repeated performances of many monologues and songs, but I’ve never been under the illusion that I am performing a note-for-note, beat-for-beat replica of an original. It’s not in my nature as a performer. Even at my most controlled I introduce many tiny deviations into every moment, both intentional and unintentional.

(This, I think, is part of my fascination with the process of film acting – not that two of your takes will ever been seen played on top of each other, but that you must be consistent enough for the performance and energy of any of your takes to match up with another one.)

I think that fascination with perfect reproduction has a lot to do with what I enjoy classical piano recordings so much. Orchestral music is beautiful, but it’s the product of dozens of people working together to create something greater. Intellectually I know each player is a highly-trained perfectionist, but the pessimist in me insists that there could be many tiny variations their performances could be masked by several others.

That’s not the case when you watch a single person seated at a piano. They are performing a high wire act with no net on an unforgiving instrument with no slurs or bends. The piano is both dynamic and impractically linear. Despite the potential for massive polyphony, you only have ten fingers and two feet to control it – and you can transform yourself in a 12-piece orchestra where each one of those appendages does its own distinct work.

I first heard Ravel’s “Une barque sur l’ocean” just a few weeks ago, in the trailer to Call Me By Your Name. I watched it because I had heard so much about the indelible performances in the film, but for the first half of it I couldn’t concentrate on the people. All I could hear was the music.

When I hear most piano music I can almost visualize the notation dancing and alive, the staffs rolling past with notes lighting up as they’re played. I couldn’t do that with “Une barque sur l’ocean.” I couldn’t picture individual notes or those twelve appendages. Even before I knew the name of the song, all I heard were great rolling waves of notes and a wash of blue green color.

Given my vivid reaction to hearing it, I wasn’t surprised to learn that the song was from the impressionist period of composing, nor didn’t come as a great surprise to learn that Ravel was a contemporary of Debussy (who I love). Yet, it wasn’t enough just to know the song and the composure. I had to see it played. How could two hands, ten fingers, and two feet create that rich, roiling sound? [Read more…] about Song of the Day: Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Ocean”

Song of the Day: “Snowman” & “The Girl You Lost To Cocaine” – Sia

December 4, 2017 by krisis

I’m so happy that everyone now recognizes the staggering genius of Sia, and every happier to hear her back to her kooky ways beyond just wearing massive wigs on her new holiday album Everyday Is Christmas.

Yes, this is me blogging positively about a holiday album. Me, the O.G. Grinch, who doesn’t even accept presents during the month of December and has a daughter who thinks all the decorations are for Solstice. So you know I really love this LP.

I also really love Sia. I loved her before she was popular (again), and even slightly after she was cool (though I didn’t realize it at the time).

For many listeners, popular Sia starts with the bomb blast of the “Chandelier” music video in May of 2014, before which they were vaguely aware of her as a popular songwriter or as the singer of “Titanium” in 2011 with David Guetta. In either case, at that point she was already several albums deep into a string of unbelievably good releases starting from 2004’s Colour The Small One.

That’s where I picked her up, though I didn’t grab it until 2006 during a little binge on European-sounding trip hop albums (that also included Instinct by Mandalay). What I didn’t realize at the time was that her “Breathe Me” on Colour was the same song that my impeccable curator surrogate aunt Maggie (and the entire internet, in retrospect) had been raving about since it was prominently featured on the finale of Six Feet Under in the summer of 2005.

(I had thought she was talking about Anna Nalick’s “Breathe (2AM),” so I promptly picked up her Wreck of the Day and wasn’t disappointed in the slightest, so I never realized my mistake.)

I had no idea Sia was so cool, but I was in love with the unpredictable vibe of the record, which went from the icy piano of “Breathe Me” to something reminiscent of Dusty Springfield on the choruses “Where I Belong.” It turned out unpredictable was Sia’s strong point, as I learned from her neon-tinged Some People Have Real Problems with the bouncy “The Girl You Lost To Cocaine” and cartoonish, repetitive “Buttons.” She brought the same bounce and oddness to 2010’s We Are Born.

(That perception that was only enhanced by seeing her in concert, where all of her amps and equipment were completely covered in bright crochet, and she mimed along to her lyrics like some sort of demented marionette.)

Then, “Titanium” aside (which was released without her consent), Sia disappeared. Intentionally! She was done being a pop singer touring clubs and moving on to writing songs for other artists, which certainly came with a much bigger payday. Suddenly she was popping up on The Voice credited as a songwriter to Christina Aguilera rather than an artist in her own right.

I was so surprised and happy when 1,000 Forms of Fear appeared out of seemingly nowhere in 2014 and got massively huge on the back of “Chandelier” and “Elastic Heart” (and a lot of interpretive dance) it didn’t quite sound like the crazy, unpredictable Sia I knew.

That made sense, since Fear was written to finish out her publishing deal and the subsequent This Is Acting contained songs Sia had ostensibly written with others in mind. These were songs written as hits rather than a personal project. Still, their thumpy, radio-ready sound really started to wear on me over the past few years of listening. It wasn’t the crocheted cartoon character I loved.

That is why I am quite suddenly obsessed with Everyday Is Christmas. It is Sia at peak weirdness, totally unpredictable, singing about damage and codependency over a melange of bright new plastic sounds in what feels like an immediate sequel to We Are Born.

It also happens to be about a vaguely sinister Santa and and how “Puppies Are Forever.” Deal with it. [Read more…] about Song of the Day: “Snowman” & “The Girl You Lost To Cocaine” – Sia

Song of the Day: “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us” – Sparks

November 27, 2017 by krisis

When was the last time a song you never heard before totally pierced your brain to become an automatic favorite?

I can tell you exactly when it was for me: July 1st, sitting in our friend Liz’s living room, listening to Sparks’ “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us.”

Research says there is a “magic age” somewhere in our 20s where our musical taste becomes more set, owing to a combination of factors ranging to hearing loss to not having as many new experiences for music to soundtrack.

While some people concern themselves with anti-aging creme and memory-extending games, I am more worried about avoiding the potential to stop liking new music. It’s terrifying to me. Even though I already have lists of thousands of favorite songs, I still want more.

Really, it’s not as though we stop appreciating songs entirely at some point. It’s about our preferences becoming locked in. If you’ve always loved Garth Brooks, chances are you might still enjoy a new Garth Brooks song when you are 42. The thing that could become more scarce is liking something that sounds entirely new.

(Perhaps that is why our interest in popular music dwindles as we age – the sound keeps evolving with out us.)

From that perspective, I don’t think me liking “This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both of Us” is as encouraging as me falling in love with the songs of Czarface on that same night, as East Coast Hip Hop is a little bit further outside of my typical preferences as the Glam Rock of Sparks.

Glam Rock was my whole life for a while there, right? The theme song of my new internet show is a song called “Glam,” wherein I state “When I was 16 I thought I was David Bowie because nobody told me there was more than life than being glam.” Liking Sparks should come as no surprise.

One way it was a surprise was just that I had never heard of Sparks. I have a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of rock history and a song collection to match, yet they were a complete stumper for me when Liz put them on the stereo.

Not only that, but the song sounded completely alien to me. I instantly recognized it as a form of Glam Rock, but it also had a galloping free time feel to it that I associate with mathier rock, like Rush. And I was convinced it was being sung by a woman, which left me completely incredulous when Liz reveal the band is comprised of a pair of brothers!

What was this sorcery!