"No Matter What"

*REWRITE ALERT* This SongWithoutWhich was first blogged December 3 2004

If you were looking for some sort of guide, a textbook on how to write the perfect pop song, you'd have to have a chapter on Badfinger. This is alarmingly simple stuff: the production is as flat as you can get, no washes of sound, no echo, no nothing, just guitar, bass, drums and voice. But the song itself is what comes steaming through, the casual brilliance of the tune, the open-goal opportunities for soaring harmonies, and then, half way through, the oh-so-clever trick of making a guitar sound like a Hammond organ and the descending staircase of background harmony that hangs like a sumptuous velvet curtain behind the chorus. It's low-rent simple, but high-life perfect.