Song of the Day

35-for-35: 1998 – “Baby Britain” by Elliott Smith

November 16, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]A long, long time ago, I wrote about how Built To Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret was the first crack in the dam I had constructed against enjoying music performed by men.

My 90s record collection was like a personal Affirmative Action policy on music. At the time, I didn’t even have the excuse of being a musical artist who was wielding judgement and harboring jealousy when it came to my male peers. Aside from Tom Petty’s Greatest Hits and the requisite Nevermind and Unplugged, I had nary a dude in my collection. The sound of the male voice didn’t please me, even if their songs weren’t of the dull “get the girl” variety.

If picking up the Built to Spill record in February of 1999 was a crack in my dam, Elliott Smith’s XO was the flood that followed.Rarely in my life have I been so sucker-punched by a record as I was by XO, released the prior August. I first heard them both from the same source – my friend Anastasia, whose musical taste subsumed my own for a few months that year, transforming it completely for the rest of my life.

While the quaver of Smith’s voice and his delicate songs of defeat would worm their way into my brain over time, but it was when I hit track four that I knew I was in love with this album.

There is something about a song that starts abruptly with a vocal and clanging piano chords that makes me love it. Perhaps it’s a genetic disposition towards anything reminiscent of “Penny Lane.”

While “Baby Britain” doesn’t necessarily call back to that song, there’s an unmistakably 70s McCartney vibe to the bounciest of Smith’s songs from XO (which namechecks Revolver in its third verse). It helps that it straight up nicks the tiny, high guitar stabs from “Getting Better.”

The song is so relentlessly cheerful and major key that it takes several listens before you realize how tragic it is. (This is one of Smith’s singular talents.) It’s a song for a friend in a downward spiral – one Smith recognizes but doesn’t know how to steer out of. All that cheer is the good humor of someone halfway through the evening’s bottle of vodka; it won’t last until the bottom, and she’ll need another the next day to recover.

baby-britain-elliott-smith I’ve always adored the puzzle of the chorus – two incomplete thoughts that change the lens of the rest of the song depending on how you read them.

For someone half as smart
You’d be a work of art
You put yourself apart
And I can’t help until you start

Is the “someone half as smart” the Baby Britain Smith is singing to? If you read it that way, the entire song is a kiss off or a put down. I don’t. Nothing else in the song casts her as dim.

I’ve always read that first line as Smith’s dig at himself. If he didn’t know all of her destructive behavior so well he’d swear she was a work of art – an alchoholic manic pixie dream girl sailing across a sea of vodka. Sadly, he knows better than that. What’s charming to a man half as smart is a honeycomb of character flaws to Elliott.

It’s easy to hear the next line as “You pull yourself apart,” which entirely makes sense within the world of the song, but the lyric is “you put yourself apart” (calling back to “separated from the rest” in the first verse). Can Baby Britain’s problems be character flaws if some of them are so intentional? We’ve all met that person who creates their own tidal waves of conflict. It’s easy not to pity them when they’re the ones putting themselves apart from everyone else and the helping hands offered by that crowd, but that doesn’t mean you don’t feel sorry for the choices they make.

The final line is one of those perfect Elliott Smith lines. It’s a sentence of infinite density. If we were reading this grammatically, the “until you start” would seem to apply to the prior phrase. It doesn’t. It’s self contained. Smith applies so much compression to “And I can’t help you until you start to help yourself” that he’s stripped out every extraneous word. The chorus could just be this single elegant line repeated four times, but that would draw too much attention to it. Better a a the final line, a summation but also tossed away as the swell of the song crests into another verse.

Also, I humbly submit that this is one of the best lyrics ever written.

We knocked another couple back
The dead soldiers lined up on the table
Still prepared for an attack
They didn’t know they’d been disabled

Yet, with retrospect, the truly cutting lyric is the final line of the final verse. It’s another of Smith’s trademark compressed phrases, with a double negative obscuring the meaning until you squint at it closely.

Nothing’s gonna drag me down
To a death that’s not worth cheating

Who is Smith to pull Baby Britain out of her spiral of misery when it would be an admission that he could pull out of his own? That death is a fate that’s not worth cheating – either because it’s inevitable or because on some level he believes he might deserves it. Nothing can drag him down to that level or away from it because he’s already a permanent inhabitant.

I’ll always remember stepping into my mother’s car a few days after October 21, 2003 and saying, “I’ve got some awful news to tell you.” Elliott Smith’s music was something so intelligent and perfect, and to this day I mourn that there’s a finite amount of it in this work because he finally reached the end he couldn’t cheat his way out of.

35-for-35: 1997 – “Shame On You” by The Indigo Girls

November 15, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I do this thing where a band floats around on the periphery of my world for many years until, finally, one of their later singles becomes my touchtone and doorway back through their catalog.

I did it with Ani DiFranco, with Tori Amos, with Radiohead, and in 1997 I unknowingly did it with The Indigo Girls – it just took another five years for me to really feel the impact.

I had heard of the Indigo Girls before, in passing. My friends sang “Closer to Fine” in a talent show and I had to have heard “Least Complicated” at some point to explain my later familiarity with it. Yet, it was “Shame On You” that clicked in my adolescent brain in the fleeting years of when alternative rock radio that would still play an acoustic song by a female singer.

Even before I was a guitar player I appreciated the utter simplicity of this three-chord tune with it simple I-IV-V progression. It reminds me of Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” and every time Amy Ray says “la la la, shame on you” I always want to shout back, “sha la-la la-la la-la la, la ti da!”

(I swear, I had no thoughts of how politically relevant this pick would be when I made it a few weeks ago. That’s folk music for you.)

Despite hitting all the right Lilith Fair influences to make me love it, the song resonated with teenaged me on another level because it was one of the few songs on the radio at the time aside from Rage Against The Machine that was making a statement about anything. The song starts with Ray relating the story of her friends the window washers.

My friends they wash the windows and they shine in the sun
They tell me wake up early in the morning sometime
See what a beautiful job we done
I say let’s put on some tunes sing along do little all day
Go down to the riverside take off our shoes wash these sins away

The river said, “la la la,” it said shame on you

This was a different sort of blue collar nod than you’d expect to hear in a Springsteen tune. Ray wasn’t saying she was an every-woman, or bemoaning the plight of an underclass. She says “my friends” as she introduces these people who hang from the sides of tall buildings while she’s on the road as a rock star.

Her friends want her to appreciate their windows like they appreciates her music. She wants to take off her shoes with them and head down to the river, where they’re all the same and they can hear the water burble “shame on you” as their sins wash past downstream.

In retrospect, is this sort of romanticism of blue collar ideals from someone far outside their sphere more of a downward punch than Springsteen similar everyman vibe? Usually I’d say “yes,” but Ray continues…

I go down to Chicano city park because it makes me feel so fine
When the weeds go down you can see up close in the dead of the winter time
But when the summer comes everything’s in bloom and you wouldn’t know it’s there
The white folks like to pretend it’s not but their music’s in the air

And you can hear ’em singing, “la la la,” they say shame on you
And you can feel them dancing, “la la la,” they say shame on you

She has now identified herself, the narrator, as an outsider to all of the beauty that she witnesses. Is that patronizing or is it acceptance and affection for the other?

I was particularly struck at the the time at the gently accusatory way she says, “the white folks like to pretend.” Isn’t she a white folk, too? Or, maybe that’s only a label for those pretenders, and everyone else are just people.

And who is now admonishing “shame on you”? Is it the white folks, clucking at the Chicano culture? Or, the Chicano clucking in response that the white folks refuse to enjoy it even when it puts a smile on their face.

Or both?

My friend Tanner she says you know me and Jesus we’re of the same heart
The only thing that keeps us distant is that I keep fuckin’ up
I said come on down to Chicano city park wash your blues away
The beautiful ladies walk on by
You know I never know what to say

And they’ll be singing,” oo la-la-la-la-la, shame on you”
They’ll be dancin’, “la la la,” they say shame on you, shame on you

Wow. Had I heard anyone on the radio before so casually state their attraction to someone of the same gender? Who’s the shame on now? Ray for being attracted to them, or Ray for never knowing what to say?

That’s why I am so convinced this song isn’t punching down, not even punching up at the white folks. It’s not about punching. It’s about dancing, and finding those shared little moments of humanity with people who aren’t like you in the slightest. It’s about the shame in not admitting how much you just want to kick off your shoes and dance along.

Oh, wait, there is the one punch…

Let’s go road block trippin’ in the
Middle of the night up in Gainesville town
There’ll be blue lights flashing down the long dirt road
When they ask me to step out
They say, “We be looking for illegal immigrants can we check your car?”
I say, “You know it’s funny I think we were on the same boat back in 1694.”

And I said, “oo la-la-la-la-la, shame on you”

That line has always stuck with me, and it has never before felt so relevant as it has this year. Or this past week.

How can you turn your nose up and close your doors completely to the immigrants who want to forge a life in America when that’s how all of us got here … except for our indigenous people, to whom we all owe a debt that we can’t ever repay for destroying their land, their people, and their culture? Who are we to want to build a wall between us and Mexico when they have an actual, persistent culture to bring into our melting pot of customs imported from afar?

I wasn’t ready to really love The Indigo Girls until I borrowed their older CDs from my first boss, Laura, back in 2003, but as soon as I heard those records I realized that I already loved this band, and I probably always will.

(And, in a fun tie-in to yesterday’s post: E and I walked up the aisle together to a cello version of “Least Complicated!”)

35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

November 14, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]How do you remember the moments that changed the course of your life? Can you replay them perfectly over and over in digital crispness? Did time stand still? Do you feel like you were standing outside of yourself, watching, so you can rotate the entire scene around you like a panorama?

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the first time I saw Peter Mulvey play it altered the course of my life. There’s some other timeline where young Peter stayed at dinner at Serrano’s a little bit longer and skipped seeing the unknown opening act for Susan Werner and missed him entirely.

If you have Amazon Prime you can stream this AMAZING record for free! Just click!

Would I have still heard his music down the line? Maybe, but it would not have had the megaton impact on me as seeing Peter Mulvey at the height of his youthful powers from less than ten feet away.

At the time, male singers comprised approximately 1% of my CD collection, so seeing his name on the bill had no special meaning for me. My friend Rachel and I took our reserved seats at a table in the front of the house and waited for the opening act to take the stage.

He was everything I loved on guitar and something more – all of the DiFranco tunings, all of the percussive, staccato strumming, plus other things – partial capos and half barres over open strings. My songs like “Icy Cold,” “Lost,” and “Relief” could never exist without him.

One of the less show-y songs in his set was “On The Way Up,” a song from his seminal album Rapture. It didn’t have the pyrotechnics of his half-capo, mega-detuned “Love Is Not Enough” but it still left its mark. It’s a simple tune in three, a song about constantly rising but never feeling like you’re enough – not for yourself or for the partner you love.

I think it was the song that won my mother over to Peter later, listening in our tiny red kitchen, so that she became my companion for future shows. And, later, it became one amongst E’s many favorites. We used to refer to it as “our hypothetical, eventual first dance,” for an equally hypothetical, eventual wedding we weren’t discussing seriously.

Which brings me back to Serrano’s and The Tin Angel, 11 years later. Peter Mulvey was playing there on a Friday night, and E and I were attending with both of our mothers for their birthdays, which were 11 years apart. I had reached out to Peter earlier in the week to see if I could stop by during his soundcheck and have him finally teach me the proper way to play his song “The Wings of the Ragman,” which I had approximated here on CK in Trio but never quite could get the hang of.

E did not want to join me, but I insisted. “He’s my guitar idol,” I pleaded with her. “This would be like if you got to sing with…” I sputtered, “I don’t know. Pat Benatar. What if you were going to sing with Pat Benatar? I would come and witness that moment, and maybe snap a photo for you.”

E finally acquiesced, and so we found ourselves upstairs in the Tin Angel just after 6pm on a Friday, the room empty save for the two of us, Peter, and the sound man. Peter came back and said hi, shook our hands, and asked me if I wanted to get out my guitar and run through “Ragman.” I complied, just barely, my hands shaking so much I could barely get into the right tuning. He started walking me through the song, explaining in his easy way why certain voicings were different and why he was using the dominant and so forth before eventually realizing I was ready to faint and saying, “You know what, maybe I should write this down for you.”

And that is how I sat and watched while Peter Mulvey tabbed out his own song for me.

That is not the end of the story.

After we were through with my lesson, he said, “You know, you ought to stick around while I sound check. I might play a few things I won’t be doing during the show.” E and I found ourself seated in the first row of chairs behind the door of the Tin while Peter walked up on stage and began working with the sound guy to get his guitar EQ just right. After playing the portions of a few songs, he began to play “On The Way Up.”

I leaned over to E.

“We should dance,” I said, in a husky whisper.

“Dance?” she replied, incredulously. “You want to dance?”

It took some coaxing, but I convinced her to get up out of her seat and waltz subtly with me at the back of the club.

“You know, while we’re here and he’s playing this song, maybe we should ask him to play our hypothetical, eventual wedding.”

“Peter,” she hissed into my ear while we waltzed, “that is crazy.”

“You’re right,” I said, slipping my hand into my pocket to draw out a tiny black box, “that why I asked him to play our engagement instead.”

And that is how E and I became engaged. You see, I had been trading emails all week, first with Peter’s management, and then with Peter himself, to arrange this setup, having already obtained a ring which was proverbially burning a hole in my pocket. To his eternal credit, Peter tried mightily to talk me out of my plan to make sure I wasn’t doing something silly or fannish, but I eventually prevailed upon him how much the Tin Angel and his song meant to me and to us, and so he agreed to play along.

Also to his eternal credit, when Peter saw that the deed was done, he effortlessly segued into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Here is Peter Mulvey playing “On The Way Up” during his set that evening: [Read more…] about 35-for-35: 1996 – “On The Way Up” by Peter Mulvey

35-for-35: 1995 – “Lump” by Presidents of the United States of America

November 14, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Strap in for a story, folks. In fact, both songs today come with lengthy stories, but that makes sense – we’re really into my formative years at this point.

This isn’t necessarily my favorite song from 1995, but sometimes art reflects life, and when it comes to the songs of 1995 this is the one I wound up with all those years ago.

presidents-of-the-united-states-lump My burgeoning rock fandom really exploded in my Freshman year of high school as Gina and my loose cadre of middle school nerds coalesced into a group of rocking teenagers. Though I had the claim to fame of having seen Madonna as my first rock concert, I was growing jealous of our peers and their live music escapades.

I remember seeing Gina in her first play at Masterman sitting behind an entire row of kids from our class who had just been to an Offspring concert – the height of cool.

After what I’m sure was some amount of campaigning to my mother, she lamented and for my birthday purchased me a pair of concert tickets (one for me and one for Gina, of course – we weren’t quite inseparable yet, but quite a music-loving pair). Since my prohibitive favorite LP of 1995 was Garbage, my new favorite band, and since Garbage would be in Philly playing one block from Gina’s house, obviously that would be my mother’s selection.

Right?

Well, apparently I sang “Lump” at the top of my lungs out the car window one too many times, because the tickets were to see Presidents of the United States of America one night before Garbage.

I begged. I pleaded. I would find someone to buy the PUSA tickets. I would pay for the Garbage tickets, too! Please, for the love of Bowie, would she relent and let me see Garbage.

The Mother of Krisis was unyielding. She had done me a solid and not only granted me permission to go to a concert but bought the darn tickets and there were no takesies backsies going to happen. I would go and see “Lump” and like it.

(Let it be known that Mother of Krisis has never lived this down and still is reminded at least annually (plus whenever Garbage releases an album or I see them live, again) that it was her biggest parenting mistake of all time.)

(Which, credit where due, if this is your parent’s worst mistake of all time they are probably a slightly better than average parent, at minimum.)

the-presidents-of-the-united-states-of-america-4fd31761f15c2 I might have looked that gift horse in the mouth when offered the tickets, but when it came to the show – my first rock show – I was fully committed. We were in line early and in the second row of bodies from the stage. Gina and I still talk about the insane opening act, Supernova, and their gum-chewing, pogoing set that included the ridiculous tune “Chewbacca,” which we can still shout at you on command.

The Presidents were great. Honestly, as first rock shows go, you couldn’t do much better. It was a group of young, energetic dudes who played their instruments well and wrote inane songs about kitties and peaches – yes, another early influence on our totally weirdball songwriting.

As for “Lump” – what is she? A dead body? A stupid girl? A Gen Xer sleeping her way through life in more ways than one unless there’s an awesome band on stage? I tend to subscribe to that last one – Lump as a metaphor for someone stuck in the mud of life, circled by piranhas of bad decisions.

(“Totally emotionless except for her heart,” is the right answer, by the way.)

35-for-35: 1994 – “Closer” by Nine In Nails

November 13, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]There are a lot of amazing songs from 1994, but come on. There is only one choice.

No, not “Black Hole Sun.” Or “Stay (I Missed You).” The other one.

“Closer” is a perfect song.

It would be amazing even without the f-bomb chorus and the deeply unsettling video, because it shows Trent Reznor in the height of his early powers. He effortlessly fuzed industrial rock with funk influences in a song that is always building, never retreating.

nine-inch-nails-closer (Yes, funk – go and listen to the synth bass on verse and tell me that’s not influenced by funk. It’s a totally 70s bassline. Then close your eyes and let your booty shake to that chorus and try to tell me this isn’t a totally queer disco cut.)

It starts as simple as possible – kick and snare – though the kick is muffled so it sounds like the heartbeat coming from within your chest while the snare sounds like the sudden exhalation of air. It goes on uncomfortably long – 20 seconds, with no interruption.

Finally, just when the tension is getting to be to much, three new elements appear: the funk bassline, a 16th note ticking of a clock, and Trent’s soothing, almost too-pretty baritone voice singing “you let me violate you.” He sounds so close to us. Not only can we hear his inhales, but the messy little tatters of air that slip out at the end of his words.

Again, just as it’s getting almost too personal having Reznor slinking that far into your ear, more elements are piled on top – a sighing duo of Trents singing “help me” with sour harmony and a hi-hat riding every upbeat. Altogether it feels like a strange parade, and that’s before the debauched thrum of bass and spiral of synth that springs up beneath the guttural “I want to fuck you like an animal” that announces the chorus.

And then, another layer – what sounds like a pounded harpsichord plus the sci-fi warble of a theremin. They in turn are joined by the reemergence of the hi hat ride and a vibrating synthesizer that rises with the harpsichord, oozing into the cracks of its hammered strings. Trent is not so handsome-sounding now. trent-reznor-1994 He sounds desperate. Not desperate to fuck – just desperate for anything he can get, and he’ll offer everything he has – all the good and bad:

You can have my isolation
You can have the hate that it brings
You can have my absence of faith
You can have my everything

The second chorus sounds the same, or at least you think so given the cacophony that now surrounds Reznor’s voice, but there is another element – an overblown low flute which occasionally rings dissonantly against the other elements. Finally, the bridge brings some relief, one chance to breathe, stripping everything away except the vibrating synthesizer, the heartbeat-exhale one-two of the drums, and a nasty synth bass hit. But, crawling from the depths of that comes a burning electric guitar, more synthesizers, obscured voices, and random stabs of brutal electronic noise, all heaving and panting towards a climax, that rising harpsichord with the synth entwined, the signature synthesizer, and finally the great chiming descending riff – really, the first riff that has done anything but climb the entire song.

Then, just as hard as it was pressed up against you, it’s all gone, leaving just a warbly electronic piano on its wake and you catching your breath.

And that says nothing of the masterful Mark Romanek video, which can speak for itself. It’s held by many as the best music video of all time. In fact, Reznor himself once said, “The rarest of things occurred: where the song sounded better to me, seeing it with the video. And it’s my song.” Its creepy vibe has always felt inextricably tied to the disturbing imagery in David Fincher’s Se7en, released the following year.

There was a certain adolescent glee in pumping this song up on the radio, even with its omitted carnal word, but I think we all understood: it’s not a song about sex. It’s a song about sex being something you hope you’ll be able to feel. Even a horny teenager can understand the difference, because they know they biologically want and need both.

“Closer” is a perfect song.