"These Foolish Things"

A favourite film sequence of mine occurs in the film "Diva", when the protagonist (the young postman) and the diva walk around Paris through the night and into the early hours of the morning - a silent, aimless stroll that takes in all the beauty and atmosphere of one of the world's truly great cities.
The sequence is set to an absolutely gorgeous, if derivative, piece of music -- go find "Sentimental Walk" by Vladimir Cosma and play it back-to-back with "Trois Gymnopaedies" by Erik Satie -- which draws out all the romance, all the elegance of a place and a moment in time.
But I bet, I just bet, that if the postman were to look back on this moment in his life from a distance of about twenty years, if he were to watch a grainy, jumpy silent black-and-white film of that night, he'd reach for this song to play as an accompaniment.
It's difficult to imagine how a song as wistful, as rose-tinted and gently bruised as this one, can exist among the clash and clamour of those chest-beating, wailing self-indulgent songs of loss. Many of which I love to bits, of course...
Just as Paul McCartney has an obsession with the old music-hall tradition, Bryan Ferry has a fixation with the era of Noel Coward, Irving Berlin and slightly louche smoothies in impeccable dinner jackets, men who wooed a girl rather than took her up to their penthouse apartment. Ferry's lounge-lizard image steps on stage intact here, before it slowly crumples beneath the perfect, crystalline memories of an old affair: "And still those little things remain/That bring me happiness or pain."
It's the casual brilliance and sharpness of the observations that takes this song beyond the mundane: "A cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces/An airline ticket to romantic places/A tinkling piano in the next apartment/Those stumbling words that told you what my heart meant/A fairgound's painted swings/These foolish things/Remind me of you."
There ain't nothing foolish about them things.

"Father and Daughter"

I heard this song recently for the first time. It's not often that a song makes me sit down and bawl like a baby, but this one did, and still does whenever I play it. This morning I was on the train to work, and this song suddenly popped up on my iPod. I had to find a dark corner of the train to go and plug the waterworks. By the time I got to work, things had calmed a little but I still needed to wheel out the old excuse about hay-fever....
I suppose there are few things more powerful than the conversion from a lifelong obsession with one's self to an obsession with one's children and the utterly irresistible imperative to see that they grow up strong and happy. The transfer of priorities just happens, bang, like that and your life, which has been running full speed in one direction, suddenly shoots off in another and you hang on for grim death until you get a handle on what it is that's suddenly hijacked your life.
Having said that, what also arises is something that sustains us for the rest of our lives: the huge, all-conquering love for our progeny that will not be derailed or mellowed by any mistake, event, mishap or distance.
"I'm going to watch you shine/Gonna watch you grow/Gonna paint a sign, so you'll always know/As long as one and one is two/There could never be a father that loves his daughter more than I love you." That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

"10538 Overture"

In brief: This song is the bastard child of the Beatles' White Album and Sergeant Pepper, with a guitar riff so good that Paul Weller stole it.
Less brief: It's no secret that Jeff Lynne was the mystery musical heir to the Beatles, and there can't have been many songs that were more obviously hommages to John Lennon than this one. The closing coda, with its French horns and deep scrapes from the cello, is straight out of "I Am the Walrus", while the vocals have been thinned out to resemble Lennon's voice.
The guitar riff is almost like something Radiohead might have cooked up, but this song is 35 years old and just adds to the theory that all the best songs have already been written - though we know that isn't true, don't we? But Paul Weller must have thought so, because he lifted the riff straight off this record and made it the core of his terrific single "The Changingman." This song is like a borrowers' daisy-chain.
10538 was the first, and probably the best, example of the ELO experiment to marry strings and the more traditional rock ensemble. Before Lynne became a devotee of the producer-as-musician school, he laid down this plain, unvarnished gem, where the strings are front and centre rather than buried in the mix as they were to become.
Truly revolutionary.

"The Great Gig in the Sky"

When I first blogged this song, I said it shows how sex and death are opposite sides of same coin - I might have been wrong.
This song is The Passion, like something the classical composers of old would write, where they'd detail their passion as a kind of ecstatic liturgical trance - I remember seeing once a painting of Johann Sebastian Bach, sitting back at his desk and laying down his pen, eyes closed as if savouring the last vestiges of the Passion as it ebbs away.
And like those Passions from centuries ago, this music emerges from the ether into some cavernous cathedral filled with all the longing humanity can muster, channeled through Clare Torry's other-worldly voice, from the whispering, faltering huskiness at its weakest moment through to its raw, bleeding climax when her instrument touches the very limit of expression as if it were being stretched and crucified.
At times she seems to be searching, feeling in the darkness, as if terrified of the animal she's unleashed. Her sobbing, faltering howl seems to repeat itself momentarily as she waits for the next jolt of celestial electricity to transport her.
What scares me about this song is what it creates, what it generates within me; a visceral reaction that not only raises the hairs on my neck, but that almost convinces me that I could transcend this earthly plane. Almost. You can hear the song take over Clare Torry like some swirling witch-doctor's spell, hear as it pulls her away from earth, and imagine it doing the same to you.
The best part? This song doesn't have to be about anything in particular. It's about everything and nothing at the same time - the all-consuming love of a parent for his or her child, a feeling of superhuman power that comes from fulfilment, a celebration of life after death, or merely an acknowledgement that Life, the Universe and Everything is just so massively huge and wonderful that sometimes our efforts to understand it crash all our circuits and turn us into drooling, raging nerve-endings. And when we can't form the words, we have to resort to forming the sounds, just as Clare Torry does so beautifully here.
There aren't many songs that take us outside ourselves, somewhere pure and powerful. Treasure them when you find them.

"Centerfield"

Here we go, sports fans. A month of football heaven, replete with "the joy of victory and the agony of defeat", to quote a famous American sportscaster. We're going nuts for the next four weeks. There'll be statistics, debate, complaints about referees and in-depth medical discussions about metatarsals, hamstrings and adductors.
The shame of it is, I've already blogged what I believe is the best football song yet written. I realize that worthy musicians from New Order to Rod Stewart have made their own contributions to this genre, but when it comes to a song that will lift the hairs on the back of your neck when it's sung by 50,000 fans I'm sorry, but Ian Broudie has already been there with "Three Lions."
So instead, I'm casting the net a bit wider today. Boxing, for example. Here we have two contenders: Bob Dylan's epic "The Hurricane" (which admittedly isn't totally about boxing) and Warren Zevon's "Boom Boom Mancini", where the chorus urges us to "Hurry home early/Hurry on home/Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon." It's also the only song I know of to deal with the risks that some sports entail: "When they asked him who was responsible/For the death of Du Koo Kim/He said, "Someone should have stopped the fight/And told me it was him."/They made hypocrite judgments after the fact/But the name of the game is be hit and hit back." No apologies, then.
There are no end of what our American cousins call "fight" songs: team- or college-oriented songs of encouragement, but these aren't necessarily about sports. Equally, there are no end of songs that have been appropriated by sports fans: Queen's "We Are the Champions" or "We Will Rock You" are just two.
But when it comes to songs about the love of sport, the fan's true dedication, there are only two that stand out: the aforementioned "Three Lions" and John Fogerty's "Centerfield".
"Well, beat the drum and hold the phone - the sun came out today!/We’re born again, there’s new grass on the field/A-roundin’ third, and headed for home, it’s a brown-eyed handsome man/Anyone can understand the way I feel."
See? I bet you're already feeling that itch of anticipation, that first quickening of the heart as you settle down to live and breathe your team's agony and ecstasy. I'll just bet Wayne Rooney is humming the chorus: "Oh, put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today/Put me in, coach - I’m ready to play today/Look at me, I can be centerfield." Sshhhhh! Don't tell him it's a baseball song!
It needs a special song to be adopted by all fans of a sport, one that transcends the tribal associations or even national ones. You can bet you're bottom dollar that we'll hear more than one chorus from "Three Lions" in Germany this summer, just as right now, across the US, fans are raising their voices to sing Fogerty's song: "Got a beat-up glove, a homemade bat, and brand-new pair of shoes/You know I think it’s time to give this game a ride/Just to hit the ball and touch ’em all - a moment in the sun/It’s gone and you can tell that one goodbye!"

"Roberta"

Prostitution isn't an easy subject to discuss at the best of times, much less write a song about. Let's stand as far away from the subject as possible, and sidestep for a moment the argument that it exploits and objectifies woman. Wearing our most rose-tinted glasses and with our romantic hearts pinned firmly to our sleeves, there is something about the lonely, shamefaced man and the beautiful, remote woman that stirs the soul. Yes, the man can be an object of pity, disgust or censure. Yes, the woman can be an object of pity, disgust or censure as well. But for every encounter there's a back-story, and I ask you to suspend your cynicism for just four minutes and thirty-three seconds.
Why can't a man fall for a prostitute? Why can't he see in her something akin to fulfilment, happiness or even pride? And anyway, how many men do in the real world? Ask yourself: how did they meet? How did they manage to transcend the dark shadows of the netherworld in which prostitution is forced to exist?
Maybe they listened to this song. "Roberta, you say you know me/But I see only what you're paid to show me," sings Billy Joel. "Roberta, how I've adored you/I'd ask you over but I can't afford you/It's tough for me/It's tough for you."
Maybe Joel believes in something that's so powerful, so ultimately redeeming, that the circumstances in which it flourishes aren't relevant. But maybe he also believes in the Real World, the one that comes crashing through the door at the end of the night. How else could he have written a love song so tender, so confused but still so doomed? "Roberta, I really need you/But I suppose that my small change won't see you through."
The wretchedness of a man trapped by his own heart to follow a path that leads only to disappointment was never captured so sweetly as here. In between the verses, Joel conjures a requiem, a lament for something damned to fail, and as his desperation and disappointment grow the song gently sheds some of the sweetness so that by the end, you're almost tasting the bitterness of loss. Sheer magic in the real world.

"Exodus"

It's hard to think of reggae as being a form of music that either rouses passionate emotions, or one that can serve up apocalyptic visions in the same way that, say, the Stones did on "Sympathy for the Devil". Think of reggae and you can't help but be seduced by that sexual, insistent beat that suggests a humid midday spent in the shade with something to drink and of course something to smoke too. And there's plenty of reggae that fills that stereotype. Just not this one.
"Exodus" winds itself up into a tight ball before it sets off for the promised land. From its delicate, dangerous opening as the various components take their place, to its steady, marching fade, this is a campaigning song, a determined vision set to music that brooks no opposition, that insists and demands, just like the urgent shouts of "Move!" that recur throughout.
Of course it helps that you can dance just about any way you like to this song. It's tailor-made for anything from waving your arms like a spastic scarecrow to the tightest dance-floor choreography. You don't even notice that the song never breaks step - not once. The rhythm is set in stone, the beat never lets up for a second.
What this song has that so few other songs do is inclusiveness. You can't resist it and hell, you don't even want to.

"Mr. Blue Sky"

Hey, check out that weather today! While I was away getting rained on in foreign parts, it looks like someone had a word with the people in charge of these things, and now that I'm back, all is brightness and warmth. So, time for something upbeat and meteorological, methinks.
I can think of a hundred people I know who'd scoff and snicker, saying how immensely naff and wrong this song is, but when you get up and pull those curtains back to reveal a clear blue sky and the first inklings of that warmth that will go right through to your bones, then there is No Finer Song to play while you're scrubbing and exfoliating in the shower.
Yes, this is pop. It doesn't have any pretensions to street credibility, to hipness or even to pushing the boundaries of popular music. It's also ab-so-bloody-lutely perfect. I challenge anyone to find any note out of place, any piece of production that isn't utterly essential to the whole song.
I love the luxurious layers of voices soaring and dipping all around the lead vocal, the slightly preposterous operatic harmonies towards the end, and the fact that this song never, ever ends.... each time you think it's winding towards a big finish, it just sits back, lays the ball off to the winger who's storming up the sideline on the overlap (gratuitous World Cup reference there, folks) and then watches as the song lopes along another fifty yards or so.
It doesn't even matter that the words are pretty lame: this is a song about mood and feeling. It's the first ray of sun peeking out from behind the clouds, the shaft of light that touches you on the shoulder as you're walking your own particular line. In fact, it's like a dog shaking itself free of the accumulated drizzle and scampering off to set about the neighbourhood cats.

"The Best of Everything"

Growing up, even for old crusties like me, isn't always fun or even desirable. There's a degree of "tempus fugit", the nasty whizzing sound that time makes as it rushes past, and it's not always in the faces of other people that we see it. Bonnie Raitt describes the sensation beautifully here, but today I'm talking about the feeling that comes from within, the realisation that today is a day that you won't ever recapture, the people you met one shining will never be the same as they were for those few moments that you were together. "Yeah it's over before you know it/It all goes by so fast/The bad times take forever and the good times/Don't ever seem to last."
And it's hard to say goodbye to places, to people or even to the old self as we knew it. This weekend I've said goodbye to one close, loved relative, I've celebrated my daughter's birthday and I've started coming to terms that people I've known and been close to - dare I say, even loved in my effervescent youth - have moved on. That hissing sound, that kiss of rubber on tarmac, it can be a little unsettling at times.
This is a handy song for moments like the last weekend. Tom Petty has written and performed so many songs that speak to the passionate, youthful nature that to come across a song of gentle acceptance, of grateful valediction comes as a real, warm treat.
"So listen honey, Wherever you are tonight/I wish you the best of everything, in the world/And honey I hope you found/Whatever you were looking for."

"Whispers and Moans"

And while this title may sound like a song that could just possibly be about sex, it isn't. This is a song about escape, about running away and getting off the production line: "Dull, dull grey/The colour of our times/Cool, cool space/That I still hope to find." Or even "Slow, time bomb/The clamour of the street/I hear this town/It never goes to sleep." The sort of life, the sort of time and space where "I will catch the taxi driver/Weeping like a wounded beast." Doesn't that give you chills? The idea that our world can be so hurtful, even in its inert, deadening weight, that it reduces us to our innermost instinctual response?
What a song, what a simple, elegant expression of the storm within. It's an ackowledgement of the hammering sameness of most of our days, very similar to the one that Del Amitri sing about here.
This is simply a gentle call for release, a plea for freedom. And if that freedom comes from within, from the exalted state that we clamber into when we meet our match, our soul's mate, then we don't have to really *go* anywhere: "Then I wake up in your room/To share one piece of your life/When tomorrow comes we may not be here at all/Without your whispers and moans."
I like the idea that we can fashion our own little piece of space out of time, out of place, where we can just be, where the rest of the world falls away like a melting piece of film. Or, as Crowded House put it so much better: "We are the mirrors/Are the mirrors of each other in a lifetime of suspicion/Cleansed in a moment of recognition/You gave your life for it/Worth it's weight in gold/And growing empires and art collectors/And Alan's sound investments/Will one day be forgotten/One day be forgotten, yeah."

"Must Get Out"

Where has the time gone? The last week has passed like a needle skipping over a record (gratuitous vinyl reference for the over 35s, there), with snatches of reality blaring out in between bursts of static and ear-numbing scrapes. And all the time, the sensation of time ticking away, a gentle but insistent ticking to remind me of the things I promised myself I'd do, of the plans I'd made for this afternoon, or that weekend.
And on the subject of ticking, I've been listening to a gentle, insistent song that has spent the last year slowly winding its way around my gut, like an indestructible garden weed. It starts with a ticking clock, a single piano note, a thrumming bass drum, slowly gathering strength, until "I’ve been the needle and the thread/Weaving figure eights and circles round your head/I try to laugh but cry instead/Patiently wait to hear the words you’ve never said."
In contrast to the many, many songs that bleed passion, conviction or desire that I've written about before, this is a song of shoulder-shrugged, almost bland acceptance. Yes, the singer knows, as he says, "I’m letting you down," but then again, "There’s only so much I can do for you/After all of the things you put me through." You get the sense this is a transactional relationship that's finally broken down due to a lack of credit.
I like, I mean LIKE, this song. Maroon 7 are as tight as any band Stevie Wonder put together and Adam Levine sings like a god. Anyone who saw them perform at the Live 8 concert can attest to the fact that they can do it live, too.
It's a slow, gently-charged song that forsakes the medieval passion and grandiloquent gestures of another time for, effectively, a shrug and a mutter of "whatever." And sometimes that's about as much as we can muster.

"Do You Wanna Touch Me"

Music has always had a pretty adversarial relationship with the straight and narrow. I'm talking about things like censorship, political correctness and from time to time, even plain old good taste. Anyone that remembers the Judas Priest court case in 1985, or the sight of Frank Zappa, Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister and, get this, John Denver all speaking out in front of a Senate Committee against the labelling of records in the US, will know the sort of thing I'm talking about. Or the sad spectacle of James Brown being led away by the police on suspicion of transporting a minor across state lines. Or Whitney Houston's crack-fuelled meltdown.
A lot of folks argue that musicians and artists in general are special cases, that we might want to make allowances for their oddness, for their weakness, for the fact that they don't live by the same code that we, the general public, do.
Music doesn't like to be harnessed and wrangled, told what to say and what it can't say. And nor should it. But what's often more problematic is the sort of musician that comes along with that freedom of speech. Often it's simple human frailty that leaves a once-great musician washed up, broken on the wheel of addiction. Other times it's a lack of judgement that leads them astray. Other times it's just greed. The music business has the power to confer great influence and great wealth on individuals. And while it doesn't necessarily take that wealth away, it can just turn off the tap when it chooses to.
I'm not sure where this post is going except to say that today's SongWithoutWhich is, sadly, an example of a fantastic tune that's almost unplayable these days because of who its writer was, and has become. I can see all the various ironies here, believe me!
I've chosen Joan Jett's version for that reason, but also for the fact that Joan knows what this song needs: a proper, full-throated kick in the guts. This is music written from the pit of the stomach rather than the heart, or the head or even the groin. Yes, the lyric is about sex and yes, it's one of those panting-teenage-horniness songs, but listen to Joan's version and marvel at the sheer energy and power here.
This isn't so much a song about "lurve" as a chant from the football terraces, a romping, stomping declaration of intent. And no matter what's happened in the years since this was first written, you can't erase the sheer excitement, the adrenalin rush, that this song produces.

42 songs - Intermission

Over on Music to Grow Old To, they're listing favourite songs to match ages.... seemed like a decent challenge when I started to make my list, but it's turned into a bit of a brain-twister. In any case, here are 42 songs that do things to me.

I Saw the Light - Todd Rundgren
The Great Gig In The Sky - Pink Floyd
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight - Richard & Linda Thompson
Sweet Jane - The Cowboy Junkies
Say It Ain't So Joe - Murray Head
One of Those Days in England Pts 1-10 - Roy Harper
Desperadoes Under the Eaves - Warren Zevon
All Is Forgiven - Jellyfish
Come Back! (The Story of the Reds) - The Mighty Wah!
Me In Honey - REM
All or Nothing - The Small Faces
Don't Come Around Here No More - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
White Punks On Dope - The Tubes
I Ain't Ever Satisfied - Steve Earle & The Dukes
The Needle & the Damage Done - Pete Wylie & The Icicle Works
Smile - The Supernaturals
Sylvia - Focus
Wear It Like a Cape - Del Fuegos
Hurt - Johnny Cash
No Surprises - Radiohead
Movin' On Up - Primal Scream
A Design For Life - Manic Street Preachers
Rough Boy - ZZ Top
Pink - Aerosmith
Darling It Hurts - Paul Kelly & the Messengers
Political Science - Randy Newman
Sheep - Pink Floyd
Second Rendezvous - Jean-Michel Jarre
"Heroes" - David Bowie
No Matter What - Badfinger
Ezy Ryder - Jimi Hendrix
Will We Be Lovers? - Deacon Blue
Wrecking Ball - Emmylou Harris
Renegade - Warren Zevon
La Grange - ZZ Top
I'm In Love With a German Film Star - The Passions
Go - Steriogram
Caroline, No - The Beach Boys
Rollin' Over - The Small Faces
Keep on Rocking in the Free World - Neil Young
Teardrop - Massive Attack
State Trooper - Bruce Springsteen

"My Iron lung"

I'm obsessed with this song. From the very moment the eastern-influenced guitar leads you into a swirling George Harrison moment, to the whiny, moaning voice of Thom Yorke, to the cataclysmic (and I do use that word in the fullest sense) guitar wig-out that draws the song towards its close, this is an addictive, seductive song about frailty. Be it mental, physical or spiritual, we are all frail in some way, and we all need an iron lung sometimes, a device to help us out, to take over for a little while. And sometimes this need to release our hold on responsibility angers us, makes us frustrated and bitter, and that's exactly where I think this song is coming from.
Towards the end Thom Yorke sings "And if you're frightened/You can be frightened/You can be, it's OK." And it comes like a release, an exhalation, the realisation that we are all just dumb animals sometimes and we can give in to our instinct.

"Physical (You're So)"

A Big Day here a SongsWithoutWhich, folks. Break out the milk, let joy be unconfined. According to the technologists at Sitemeter, this blog has racked up 5,000 visitors and 10,000 page views. Sadly, the lucky persons who took us over the line didn't stop to say hi or anything, so I don't know where to send the money, but in any case I've a hot tune to share with y'all in celebration.
Adam Ant always seemed to me to be some sort of confection for the girls, a sort of tasty morsel they could consume and sigh over while waiting for a regular boy to prance up to their door wearing warpaint and tight trousers. As history recalls, that fashion came and went in a hurry, so a lot of us boys never quite got round to the make-up. Shame.
But if you care to delve a little deeper than the patented Adam & the Ants tribal drums and the ooh-matron videos, you come across some real gems. I've already been through the "Deutscher Girls" earlier, but recently I came across this track again and it really knocked me out.
For a start, any song title with the word "physical" makes me think of Olivia Newton-John, for some vague reason which we shouldn't go into here. But then I wonder what it would sound like if Olivia were to sing this song: "I want the touch of your charms/The heat of your breath/I want to say all those things (those dirty things)/That would be better unsaid." Songs about sex is a recurring theme through SongsWithoutWhich, I know, but then music is often just the tonal expression of a horizontal desire; something like this: "I want you hard in my arms/So soft in my bed", as Adam sings.
This is just a terrific piece of raw, throbbing desire, and when you listen to the song you'll agree, I hope, that the word "throbbing" is pretty accurate. Marco Pirroni makes his guitar grind like a good old fashioned eight-cylinder engine, the feedback fades in and out like your senses when you're in the grip of something animal, and the steady, pounding rhythm suggests more than dirty dancing. It's half-way between Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" and something Black Sabbath might have knocked together when they were taking downers. A real treat.

"Teardrop"

We don't always have enough time in our lives to sit back, empty our heads and just drink in the moment - whether it's a sunlit field a million miles from anywhere, a dark rainy evening at home, or standing still in the midst of a sea of hurrying, hassled people. We all seem to have too much to do, too many tasks to complete before the day ends. Or, as the saying goes, "I'll sleep when I'm dead."
Here's a song that can stop you dead in your tracks, bring your senses down from their constantly-heightened state of alert, a song that just says "repose". Listening to this is like pressing the "pause" button. From the moment the lazy beat gently gives way to Liz Fraser's gorgeous folksy voice, and the gentle chord progression wraps you up in a blanket of calm, you're in another place.
This isn't the sort of peace you find when you're lying in the arms of a loved one, or the sort of peace that comes from comfort and safety. This is the peace that comes from the lifting of a heavy burden, the loss of the hundred little stresses that make up each day, when you leave this world behind for just a few moments. The music is simple and minimal enough to let you wander off; it doesn't demand your full attention - instead, it's a gentle spell, cast upon a furrowed brow. And that's just about the most precious thing we can ask for sometimes.

How perfect is this. Stately, elegant and achingly gorgeous all at once yet there's hurt, I mean real wide-eyed pain, beneath everything. If you listen to this and Johnny Cash's "Hurt" together you're going to need therapy, but I recommend the experience. A big shout-out to Neil Young for his songwriting genius and his backing vocal. Just shows how the old folks can still teach the young dogs a thing or two.

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"Joining a Fan Club"

"She turned the nightlight on and blew him a kiss/He stared back through his green Crayola eyes/She traced his likeness from off the back of a disc/Next to the boxtop promise of the biggest prize."
Hero worship...we've all been there. At that certain age, music becomes an all-consuming religion. We've paid for the records, posters, magazines, so we pray, we wait for the song to come on the radio, we literally consume our heroes like little pieces of popcorn... "Shake that woody/Shake it for me Saint Pinocchio/We've paid our money, now watch that money grow."
Eventually, we move on. It's a wrench, turning our back on that piece of innocent heaven, but we're older, wiser, more sophisticated, and we don't "do" posters and hot longing glances any more. Now we're more cynical, hard-bitten, and we expect our heroes to really put out for us, not just promise it.
"Joining a fan club, big mistake/I still get heartburn when I think about all of the stamps I ate/I wished I'd loved him before fate crashed his car/Say a prayer for the fallen star."
But it's still a piece of innocent pleasure to pull out that old record, see that faded, much-thumbed cover and remember how our entire life revolved around it for such a long time, such a long time ago.

"I Feel Love"

I've got two things to say about this song.
From time to time I listen to drum 'n bass music, that frantic thudding stuff you can often hear emanating from low-rider cars with blacked-out windows. The car slowly cruises by andd you stare at it, wondering how the occupants can hear themselves think, talk, shout with that killing beat shaking their innards and those of anyone nearby. To quote Garry Trudeau, this is music that "could sterilise tree frogs at a hundred paces." What I get out of it is the utter relentlessness, the constant wash of air over you as the speakers judder in and out at something like four hundred beats per minute. Once in a while it's fun to get yourself pressed up against the wall by sheer volume and physics.
Think back, oh, thirty odd years to the late 70s and the summer of disco, when this piece of heaven came bursting out of the ground like a Jules Verne mining machine. It's drum 'n bass! It's Donna Summer! Immediately you're whisked into an alternate universe with this song, somewhere where spaceships, silk capes, platform heels, glitter balls, strobes and ecstasy all seem to come together for a moment when you're lifted out of your body. It's breathless, heady stuff.
And then, on another level, this song is pure unadulterated erotic science-fantasy. It's speaking to your hands, lips, fingers, throwing your body onto an enormous bed where the rest of the world disappears and you're left, two of you, together in some sort of timeless moment of discovery. It's laughter, silence, roaring noises in your head as you are taken from one world to another. And all the time, Donna Summer, the high priestess of music-as-sex, stands over you with an arm raised in benediction, urging you on to higher planes of knowledge. Or, as you might say as the song winds down after its interminable journey, "fuck".

One of the earliest SongsWithoutWhich, Nick Lowe's "Tonight" is a simple, gorgeous love song that says everything a guy has ever needed to say to a girl. You wouldn't catch any of today's pre-fab music stars trying to sing a song this simple, without adding a busload of trills, false vibrato and other such aural gymnastics. A song this simple sorts out who can sing and who can't. Now I'll admit Nick Lowe isn't what you'd call a great singer, but when you're singing your own song, putting your own life up there for general consumption, it's something special.

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"When I'm Dead and Gone"

I'm a fan of pick-up bands, street-corner improvisation, jamming. A song doesn't have to be perfect to be great. It doesn't have to be polished and produced to within an inch of its life, and to be honest, it doesn't even have to be rehearsed to be great.
Tom McGuinness played with the likes Eric Clapton, Brian Jones and Manfred Mann before he got together with Hugh Flint. The pair of them then hooked up with Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle, and they cut this terrific piece of jug-band folk gumbo. I can't think what kind of style exactly to call this - it's a little like the Band's "Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in that it's slightly loose, relaxed and more concerned with musicianship than with presentation.
There's a great trick in the production of this song, and I can't work out how they did it, but you feel like you're in the kitchen while these guys are working out in the front room. Maybe it's the really flat drum sound, but it sounds properly "live".
Simple pleasures...

"Effloresce and Deliquesce" by The Chills.
This is downright spooky. As I said at the time, you've got fantastic echoed guitars, a hurry-up beat, coupled to sharp, observant lyrics....a winning combination. I came across this record when another of the tracks on the album was catching some college airplay in the US. I bet you didn't think they could do stuff this good in New Zealand.

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"Pretty Vacant"

History plays funny tricks on us all. From the safe distance of a decade or two, our perspective seems to slip sideways, so that we view major events a little from the side, rather than seeing them as they were at the time - up front, wide and tall and long, in full relief.
This is why I think the era of punk rock has slipped from being, as it was seen at the time, a threat to civilization as we know it and a disgusting boil on the face of the entertainment industry, to a charming little sideshow when young people played at being snotty-nosed dropouts.
But anyone who remembers the newspaper headlines at the time will have no problem remembering the shock, the confidence, the blast of fresh air, the extravagance, the clearing away of the old debris, that punk represented.
This song for me encapsulates the moment when punk first arrived on our doorstep. Oh yes, it had been breeding for a while in places like CBGB's in New York or the 101 Club in London, but "Pretty Vacant" brought punk to the masses.
The song begins like a crackling Tannoy announcement, a clearing of the throat - the distorted guitar intro, the tribal drums (later used to such good effect by Adam & the Ants) kick in, before we're held up against a wall by John Lydon's bored, sneering voice. His voice was the real aural image of the Pistols: despite their best efforts, Cook and Jones were not much more than your average pub rock band, but Lydon's voice was another thing altogether.
And the lyrics! When had we ever heard a song using lines like: "There’s no point in asking us you’ll get no reply", "Oh don’t pretend cos I don’t care", "I got no reason it's too all much"... and the immortal shout of "And we don't care!"
It was a manifesto for the bored, the disenchanted and the pissed-off. A lot of punk bands -- the Sex Pistols included -- tried deliberately to shock, but very few of them (The Clash, the Stranglers) had the wit to write songs that shocked but that also actually described things as they were at the arse-end of the 1970s.
Seen from the safe distance of 27 years, punk may not seem like a lot compared to the thugocracy of rap or the pubescent porn of Cristina Aguilera et al, but at the time it was an earthquake, and nothing since then has moved the goalposts with quite the same deliberate, violent determination.

Today's TasterWithoutWhich is Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis. Another SongWithoutWhich from way back, this is a mellow yet spooky piece of ambient-before-ambient-was-invented. The voice is terrific, the atmosphere is suitably space age and you're left feeling a little weightless at the end

"No Surprises"

I've spent the last two weeks on jury duty, spending long hours in a crowded room waiting for a case, and then sitting in airless rooms listening to barristers loving the sound of their own voices. I spent a good deal of time getting to know my iPod again and hanging out with some of my very favourite songs; hence Johnny Cash last week.
This week I sat in on a case that involved a young black girl. She'd been accused of nothing really bad -- she'd made some mistakes in the heat of the moment and got herself into a position she really shouldn't have. She was only 21 years old, had managed to pull herself up and out of a tough childhood and was -- it seemed -- making her way in the world. So being dragged into court must have been both a shock and a depressing backward slip towards some distant childhood memories she thought she'd left behind.
For three days she sat in the dock listening to her character being blackened by one smug middle-class white guy, while the other tried to blacken the character of her accuser. Nobody really rode to her rescue, nobody thought for a moment that she might feel like a great trapdoor was opening beneath her. No family sat nearby to boost her.
This song quite precisely describes the look on her face for those three days. A mixture of helplessness, resignation, sadness, fleeting fear but most of all, utter despair.
The quiet, childhood-singalong guitar notes at the intro let you know you're in for something special here: what's so good about this song is that it once again proves the maxim that less is more. Everything about it is restrained, tasteful and muted. This is a song that's almost completely bereft of hope. And yet it's a song that you'll listen to again and again, marveling at Thom Yorke's ability to create such a completely hopeless picture but marveling even more at how seductive it is.
"A heart that's full up like a landfill/A job that slowly kills you/Bruises that won't heal/You look so tired and unhappy/Bring down the government/They don't, they don't speak for us/I'll take a quiet life/A handshake of carbon monoxide/No alarms and no surprises." Yorke's voice doesn't soar, doesn't reach almost beyond the stars here as it so often has but instead just caresses us, consoles us and persuades us to accept our fate with whatever shreds of dignity and resignation we can muster -- just like the girl did, sitting desolate in court.

"Hurt"

I'm in awe of this song.
"I hurt myself today/To see if I still feel/I focus on the pain/The only thing that's real/The needle tears a hole/The old familiar sting/Try to kill it all away/But I remember everything."
Everything about this song speaks of the end. It's like King Lear: a man abandoned, persecuted, resigned; a man that fought all the wars that he had to and came out the other side old and tired, raising his head one more time, remembering the force of his youth and channeling it one last time. "What have I become?/My sweetest friend/Everyone I know/Goes away in the end/And you could have it all/My empire of dirt/I will let you down/I will make you hurt."
This is utterly hypnotic. At times, the song itself takes over from Johnny Cash's voice and builds up into a raging, clanging crescendo of noise, as if he's engaged nature itself as an ally for his last battle.
A few songs don't need much of an entry here, just a listing: they do their own talking.

"A Hazy Shade of Winter"

This could be a crime. As if it weren't bad enough to prefer a cover version of a song to the original, but to prefer a version by The Bangles over an original performed by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel will, in certain parts of Massachussetts, mark me down for instant death.
Well, whatever, folks. I'm here to say this song, along with "Head Over Heels" by Alanis Morissette, has just about the greatest drum sound ever, the best guitar riff and a terrific mood. With a Simon & Garfunkel song, you know what you're getting in terms of lyrics: coats buttoned up against the autumn chill, monochrome shadows somewhere near Harvard Yard, pessimism and bags of portentious ambience.
As I said, well, whatever. The Bangles take this song around the back of the bike shed, kick a few whiny lumps out of it, mess up the overcoat and then drag it back to the front for a top-fuel burnout. Why they ditched a sound like this for dreck like "Eternal Flame" I'll never understand, but then the same thing happened to the Go-Gos so it must be some unwritten rule in the music biz that great girl bands must sell out no later than the third album.
Anyway, play this back-to-back with the original and I hope you'll agree there's no comparison.

"Are Friends Electric?"

Remember this? Back in 1979, when we were just wiping the dust of the punk revolution off our clothes, wondering what the hell was goin to come along and top THAT, along came this. Imagine, right after punk - the second era of the three-minute single - comes a slow, leaden-paced piece of electronica that clocked in at five minutes 22 seconds. A song about students, bedsits, shoegazing loners and pretentious arty references. And it made number one.
It was like punk had never bloody happened!
What this song did do, though, was usher in possibly the most sartorially-challenged decade of the last two hundred years. After Gary Numan came Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Ultravox and a whole cosmetics counter's worth of floppy-haired, tight-trousered, transistor-plucking art-school dropouts. Hey-ho.
It's hard to describe exactly what makes this a SongWithoutWhich: there's the industrial instrumentation, which comes over like a cross between a steam train and an air-raid siren, the narcoleptic beat - I believe only Black Sabbath have ever performed songs with fewer beats per minute - but most of all, it's the utterly impenetrable lyric, which you'll have to fathom for yourself. twenty-seven years on, I'm still working on this one.

"New Sensation"

We're all watching the Winter Olympics at ChateauWithoutWhich, marveling at the tiny fractions of seconds that separate the greats from the also-rans, the feats of derring-do by those certified lunatics on the luge/skeleton/bob run and the unfeasible aerodynamic properties of Finnish ski jumpers.
What is also evident from these and all other Olympic games is how important it is to peak at just the right time, to ensure that you're working at your maximum output at exactly the right time. And this is equally true of music.
For example, how else would music writers talk about "the difficult second album" syndrome, and how do some musicians escape it? My theory is that inevitably, a band's first album will include songs that have grown over time, matured, been honed, while a second album will be rushed out in time to cash in on the exposure.
But over time, bands do learn how to manage the process, and here's an utterly fantastic tune to demonstrate. INXS spent years slogging around Australia, building a solid fanbase at home and refining their unique brand of danceable rock. By the time they got to "Listen Like Thieves", you can hear the sound is almost perfected. But then came "Kick" and the roof blew off.
This is probably INXS' finest moment - the performances are tight, the blasts of synth as good as any Memphis brass section, and the drums drive the song along as surely as a V8. Michael Hutchence tones down the fey heterosexuality of some earlier performances and instead concentrates on giving the lyric a proper, red-blooded kick in the pants. Everything just clicks into place, as if years of training and practicing have suddenly paid off in the Olympic final. This is the sound of a band that are at the very top of their game, and they know it.

"Tubular Bells Part 1"

Occasionally, in my moments of weakness and nostalgia, I revisit my teenage ambitions and dredge up what little musical talent I have. A tinkle of piano, a strum or two on the guitar, even - hey! rock and roll! - a toot on the flute. I play a pretty convincing air-piano and I've been known to knock out a mean drum solo on my desk.
But despite teenage dreams of stardom, chicks and gold discs, I ran up against my lack of talent, of ambition in that particular direction, and the of confidence to put it all on show. But I also blame people like Mike Oldfield.
I mean, listen to this record! No content with having talent for one particular instrument, Mike had to go and be a whiz at something like 30 different ones. And what's worse, he had to write an intriguing, beguiling mix of folk and rock, in a classical format; and in doing so, created two of the more memorable tunes of the last 30 years. You could quite reasonably give Mike credit for writing the first ambient album.
Another thought: this is the record that launched (Sir) Richard Branson's career.
Pah.
Seriously, though, this is amazing stuff. It ebbs, it flows, it grows and develops, pulls you in different directions and makes you actually think about what you're hearing. From the menacing opening -- maybe it's menacing only because it was picked up and used as the theme for "The Exorcist" -- through the pastoral middle section, all mandolins and flowing keyboards, and onto the majestic, titanic finale, listening to this is like being put through a wringer. Again I say that just because a piece of music has no lyrics, doesn't mean that it can't be involving.
Having said that, the punk generation had no time for this kind of music. Intellectual, they called it, which I think was some sort of code for "boring". But listen to the last eight minutes of this and there's no way on earth you can call it boring. A simple theme, played first on one guitar; then, one by one, more instruments are piled on top, each one introduced by the late, great Vivian Stanshall, until the whole juddering, top-heavy construction casts loose and floats away into the ether.
It's not often that you have to consciously separate a piece of music from the effort involved in making it: music should be easy, we think. But when the music is as inspiring as this, then the effort, however much it was, was clearly worthwhile.

"Run Baby Run"

There's something so ineffably romantic, so attractive, seductive and yet so utterly heartbreaking about the image of a child of the 60s left to its own devices in the harsh, neon unforgiving reality of the 90s and 00s. That naive idealism that came to the fore on the road to Birmingham, Alabama, at the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC where Martin Luther King had his dream and at Woodstock just seems so expensive, so indulgent and so misplaced in this age of go-faster, market-driven entrepreneurship. Sometimes it's almost as if the 60s were a confession and an apology for what went before and what was to come.
Here's a song with a back-story, a timeline born in 1963, "the day Aldous Huxley died." It's a memorial, an elegy that lives on in every child who's turned 45 and who can't reconcile their 21st century struggle with the values their 60s parents brought them up with.
"And her mama believed/That every man could be free/So her mama got high, high, high/And her daddy marched on Birmingham/Singing mighty protest songs/And he pictured all the places/That he knew that she belonged/But he failed and taught her young/The only thing she's need to carry on/He taught her how to/Run baby, run baby, run baby, run."
How many are out there still, holding desperately onto the belief in the essential goodness of man despite reams and reams of evidence to the contrary, hoping against hope that one day we'll all realize that all we need, as the Beatles sang, is love. Not romantic love, but respect, kindness, trust.
"She counts out all her money/In the taxi on the way to meet her plane/Stares hopeful out the window/At the workers fighting/Through the pouring rain/She's searching through the stations/For an unfamiliar song/And she pictures all the places/Where she knows she still belongs/And she smiles the secret smile/Because she knows exactly how/To carry on."
Where is that place she's picturing? How can she hold onto that hope? And why does she keep running? Just how much pain and heartbreak does it take for an entire generation to realise it's been chasing a dream that we're not smart enough to earn?

"Beautiful Love"

Sometimes I have to spend a long time flipping through my music collection before some song jumps out at me and demands to know why it hasn't been written up. Days, weeks sometimes... either I've been too distracted to really listen to whatever is playing, or I simply can't harness the feeling and wrestle it onto the keyboard. Hence the last two weeks or so. But never fear, Julian's here.
I've got absolutely no idea what to make of Julian Cope. He's a genius, a madman, a child, a wispy cosmic flower child and a frothing anarchist all at once. I get the idea that he lives life on his terms, or rather, on Nature's terms, and from that life come occasional statements from the margins, records that have only a passing acquaintance with the rest of the music business.
What I can't for the life of me understand is how such a gentle, happy, optimistic and generous song as this could ever have got lost in the shuffle of radio executive playlists and marketing departments' brainstorming sessions. It's so simple, so elegant and yet so fresh at the same time. It's the song you'd sing halfway through a rustic getaway holiday, bounding out of bed into the fresh air, leaping into the clear river at the bottom of the garden, hearing the laughter of children and the whisper of a warm breeze through the trees. This is a song for that moment when you say to yourself "Life just doesn't get any better." And, for most of us, even three minutes of feeling like that is going to do us a power of good.

"Days"

Saying goodbye is one of those things that we have to do. All of us. Whether we get to say it in person or not really doesn't matter: we either say it in person or in spirit.
What's hard to do is to prepare yourself to say goodbye. No matter how you try to steel yourself, it's impossible to come to that moment and remember what you promised yourself you'd do or say.
And so it all comes out wrong, or inappropriate, or you break down when you swore you'd stay strong.
Ray Davies clearly kept his promise to himself at some point, if this song is anything to go by: "Thank you for the days/Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me/I’m thinking of the days/I won’t forget a single day, believe me/I bless the light/I bless the light that lights on you, believe me/And though you’re gone/You’re with me every single day, believe me."
It's graceful, loving, calm and celebratory, a sort of "Perfect Day" for the departed; a song that pushes us gently towards reflecting on the good times, the happiness, rather than dwell on anything negative.
But sadly it still doesn't stop you breaking down at the key moment....

"Wild Side of Life"

'Cos I'm going to be away for a few days, and because I'm a generous soul, I thought I'd throw another log on the fire here and make sure things keep ticking over till I get back. Ahem. Scratch that. What I mean to say is that I've been short of boogie of late and this song came along to pick me out of the slump.
There's not a lot I can say about Status Quo to anyone from the UK that hasn't already been said, laughed at, dismissed out of hand and generally ignored. As of 2006 the Quo are half national institution, half national joke, four guys who wear denim 24/7, play battered old Fender Strats and, incredibly, haven't learned any new chords since 1971. They're a bit like the Queen Mother used to be; someone who you tend to forget about most of the time, but when the call goes out for a particular kind of atmosphere they're there, lending their own particular charm.
Status Quo songs aren't demanding, aren't new and they aren't necessarily clever, but they are good at what they do. Solid, driving rhythms, decent harmonies and some pretty decent guitar. A lot of people make the joke that their songs are repetitive, but they're missing the point. A lot of what Quo did was pretty damn solid. This particular song never appeared on a studio album, but I remember listening to it during the summer of 78 (or thereabouts) and enjoying its unapologetic 12-bar simplicity. This is a great song to drive to, sing along to, potter to, you name it. It fits in so neatly to the pattern of our lives. It doesn't demand the earth, but if you care to pay some attention, you can have a whale of a time with it.

"Sylvia"

Time for a cliche. Time for a visit to the Natural History Museum, to the dinosaur room. Look! There's the fossilised skeleton of Diplodocus. Huge, lumbering, slow, ponderous. What's that sign say? "Progressive rock musician. Believed to have roamed the surface of the earth in the late 20th century. This specimen has been dated to 1971."
If you ever feel the need to jump into the deep end of prog rock, you could do worse than start here. Focus was a Dutch band made up of some rather talented individuals with jazz and classical training: pretty much the starting point for all prog rock, as it happens. Before the genre became obsessed with classical scope, volume and scale (see Emerson Lake and Palmer), people were trying to cross-match rhythms and styles and see what they could cook up.
"Sylvia" is a triumph of good taste, utterly crammed with what later became cliches; gorgeous great washes of Hammond organ, jittery minor-chord riffs that sound like they could have been culled from later prog-pop epics like "Pinball Wizard", smooth guitar passages that rear up and shout "virtuoso" -- and this in the day before guitarists became stars in their own right -- neo-classical flourishes and vaguely insane operatic background vocals.
It's hard to dislike an innocent, involving and ambitious song like this, despite the self-indulgent bastard child it created. Be kind, be generous to this song, because it really did help to start a whole new sound.

"I'm Sorry"

Here's a lesson in how to make an apology. Doesn't matter what you may have done, who you did it to, why you did it, this song covers it all: "I didn't know when I hurt you/I didn't know when you cried/I didn't know when you screamed Lord/I didn't know when you stopped to cry/I didn't know when you called/I didn't know when you hurt/I didn't know sweet Mama/I didn't know I should." See? It's all there.
And what's better, it's a song that doesn't hunker down in a dark place or a crouch in a corner of the room and rock back and forth in misery. This is a song that takes it to the streets, that makes a joyous noise unto the Lord, that kicks butt from here till next Sunday. It's got great big ladle-fulls of gospel, a rakish charm that only an Irishman would know how to conjure. It's infectious, it's irresistible.
This song puts me in mind of "Try a Little Tenderness": the same sea of humanity surging back and forth, borne on a tide of utterly unstoppable rhythm, real, honest soul-baring emotion and sheer exuberance. You cannot ignore this song. And maybe that's the best way to make an apology.

"I Wanna be a Boss"

So another working week comes to an end and we drag our tired asses back home to start the process of intensive recovery. I've been very lucky in that the jobs I've had have all been really enjoyable, challenging and almost well-paid. Yet that in itself doesn't always take care of the nagging feeling that someone, somewhere is having an even better time than I am. And more often than not, it's the boss who's in clover: "Well, I've been doodling on this notepad/And I've been taking telephone calls/I can tell that this job's at the end of line/And I'm ready for the fall/But I've been watching the boss carefully/And he always seems to be having a ball/Then I scratch my head and wonder why I'm down here and he's up the hall."
And so we all develop the focus of our discontent (real or perceived) on the poor sap who happened to float to the top. We can construct lazy daydreams about being a world dominating uber-boss, a magnate, a Master of the Universe, where we can live out the dream of perfection and power.
Thank you to Stan Ridgway for crystallizing the whole thing in one neat song... this is a fairly straightforward bit of wish-fulfilment, but it covers EVERYTHING, dammit. From riding in a limo with tinted windows, to handing out thousand-dollar bills, to building executive amusement parks, to watching "Ice Station Zebra" in the nude (a big shout-out to Howard Hughes there), to buying the planet Mars...it's all here. Thanks, Stan: I don't think you missed anything off MY list, anyway.
Happily though, he remembers the little folks too, and urges us to follow our own ambitions: "I want to take a two-week vacation/26 times a year."

"Wear It Like a Cape"

I've waited a long time to blog this song.

Back at the tail-end of the sixties, Country Joe MacDonald claimed to have invented something he called "rock and soul music" which was, to be frank, an amalgam of rock and soul. All well and good, and a fine sub-sub-sub-genre it was too. However, one day, while trawling through the radio station's record library during a stint as a DJ, I happened upon an album by the Del Fuegos called "Stand Up", and pretty much there and then the genre was completed re-invented for me.
This is proper soul music. In fact, you wouldn't credit four ugly white guys from Boston with coming up with a sound as downright soulful and funky as this. Nasty blasts of brass, one of those weird keyboards that sounds like it's being played underwater, a slow, sensual rhythm and a very dirty vocal. People called them garage rock, but they're about a million miles wide of the mark. There's real grass-roots soul at work here, a proper guitar- and bass-based groove but it's not quite rock either.
In fact, it's another one of those songs about sex, I suspect. I've already been through that here and here, and this is another take on the same thing, only ... only different. And maybe better: "Everybody needs someone/To help them get in the groove/Yes and I believe I found the one/Honey when I found you/Seems to be a reason why we try so hard/Try to keep it showing/In between the sheets we keep the heat/We keep it going." Like Aerosmith's "Pink", there's a salacious element and like the Eurythmics' "Regrets" there's the hint of something kinky going on, but unlike both of those, there's an emotion here too.
And as the song winds up, there's some utterly fantastic backing harmonies, a deep, deep baritone and some sharp female cat-calls from the back of the studio, just to bring Detroit a little closer to your bedroom. This is a song for a lazy Sunday in bed and out, a day when there's nothing more to do than get lost in each other.

"Life's What You Make It"

Inspiration can be hard to find in daily life. The paradigm in the western world seems to be to flatten out the curves, to smooth those sharp edges and file down the interesting little imperfections that make our individual lives so unique. Which is why the blog world is often so attractive: we can all peek through each others' curtains and find solace, take joy in, and inspiration from the fact that there really are a lot of folks out there who are bucking against the deadening weight of 21st century culture and society. We all want to be treated as individuals, as someone special in our own right, and if we can't force the institutions out there to do so, well, we'll just have to make it so in our own lives. Blogs are our way of proving to ourselves and to the world that we really are more than just a set of demographic data on some corporation's database.
Somehow, this is meant to bring me to Talk Talk and "Life's What You Make It." I'm sure you follow the connection. It's a simple enough song: a lovely stop-start beat, mechanical almost, like an industrial process, over which Mark Hollis sings in the sort of voice that suggests he's got a lump in his throat. "Baby, life's what you make it/Can't escape it/Baby, yesterday's favorite/Don't you hate it/Baby, life's what you make it/Don't backdate it/Baby, life's what you make it/Beauty is naked." The background refrain of "Everything's alright" soothes and calms, while the guitar makes liquid, oval shapes, like comforting pillows. It's OK to be yourself, the song seems to be saying, it's OK to forge your own path.

"Tenderness on the Block"

Throughout my single life I really, really had no idea what having a child was going to be like. Yeah, yeah, I know none of us really do, but I'm talking with the benefit of hindsight here. So take it from me: I knew nothing.
So when my daughter arrived I did that goofy thing that guys do when a daughter comes along - I fell totally, irretrievably and utterly in love with her. Now I can speak with authority on the reasons why girls are always Daddy's Little Princess, believe me.
When my son came along, I did exactly the same thing -- sheesh, you'd have thought I'd have learnt by then. And don't let anyone try and convince you that guys can't love their sons with the same fierce, angry passion that they do their daughters. Bullshit.
But I digress.
Soon after my daughter came along, I listened to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, and found myself in tears after hearing "She's Leaving Home"... I still find it hard to listen to that song today, ten years later. Because, as any fool knows, our children are only loaned to us: we'll have to watch them go one day.
Later still, I heard Shawn Colvin sing this old Warren Zevon song and, dammit, it did the same thing to me: "Mama, where's your pretty little girl tonight/Trying to run before she can walk - that's right/She's growing up/She has a young man waiting/She's growing up/She has a young man waiting/Wide eyes/She'll be street-wise/To the lies/And the jive talk/She'll find true love/And tenderness on the block."
There's something optimistic in the whole idea of having children that this song manages to express in exactly the way that "She's Leaving Home" doesn't. And for that we parents can be grateful.

"Paris, Texas"

One of the miracles about music is how a single sound from an instrument can evoke such powerful responses in us. For example, I happen to think the drum sound in Alanis Morrisette's "Head Over Heels" is perfect, a dry, flat "pow" that gets me right in the pit of my stomach. If I could make my heart beat with that sort of sound, I'd be a lot more sporty....
For evocative sounds though, I suspect there's nothing quite like a steel guitar, played with a slide by Mr Ryland Cooder. No matter how you slice it, slide guitar conveys America. A flat, tinny sound will speak of bleached wooden shacks in Mississippi, thick undergrowth and rusting cars by the side of the road.
But hit the "echo" button and all of a sudden the sound opens up, the vegetation vanishes and you're trying to thumb a lift on a single lane of blacktop somewhere in northern Texas. The blaring sky reaches down to slowly draw the strength out of you, a puff of wind bowls tumbleweed across the parched ground and you're not sure if that shimmering blob of darkness on the horizon is a car or a cow.
Ry Cooder's instrumental music is for closing your eyes and taking a trip. Let the walking-pace melody lead you, let each mournful yet menacing note build you a character from a John Ford western or a Jim Jarmusch fable. Whatever happens in your daydream, you'll not be wanting for atmosphere.

Shameless Plug

It's not often that we all, as individuals, hold firmly in our hands the reins of democracy.

Equally, it's even less often that when we do hold those reins, we feel the temptation to crack the whip a little and gee those horses up to gallop a little faster than they otherwise would do.

So look upon this post as an anabolic steroid in the body of democracy.

You may or may not know that SongsWithoutWhich has been nominated -- and shortlisted for -- an award at The Best of Blogs!! Yes!

So that I can add a cute little icon to this page that says "Award-Winning Content" or some such thing, I'm encouraging you to vote for this li'l ol' website in the category "Best Music Blog." Vote once a day!

I urge you to look at the other excellent nominees for the various awards on offer (at least three of which are linked from here) and see if, indeed, my site is worthy of being in their august company. You may eventually decide to vote for someone else; I'm sure I don't mind.

But I'm trusting to the inherent goodness, generosity and -- let's face it -- downright corruptibility of man in hoping you'll vote for this site.

Why? Because I need to get a life, and if I win this award, I promise to get one.

"Heartattack and Vine"

There are only a few voices that can be considered to be really unique. That's unique: u·nique (adj.) (1) Being the only one of its kind. (2) Without an equal or equivalent; unparalleled. And perhaps the most idiosyncratic (that's idiosyncratic: idi·o·syn·cratic (adj.) peculiar to the individual.) voice out there must be Tom Waits'.
Most of the time it's not so much a voice as a gargling, scraping, sandpapered howl. It sounds like a 4 a.m. bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, the 400th cigarette of the day, Rod Stewart's worst nightmare and the gurgle of sewers all rolled into one. If Charles Bukowski wrote the book on the underbelly of the American Dream, then Tom Waits was meant to read it.
Just sample some of the lyrics: "See that little Jersey girl in the see-through top/With the pedal-pushers sucking on a soda pop/Well I bet she's still a virgin/But it's only twenty-five 'til nine." Or: "Better off in Iowa against your scrambled eggs/Than crawling down Cahuenga on a broken pair of legs/You'll find your ignorance is blissful/Every goddamn time." And the king-daddy line of all: "Don't you know there ain't no devil/There's just God when he's drunk." Priceless.... it's like watching the staging shots in an urban police drama but not catching the main storyline: the camera pans swiftly over a tramp here, a domestic argument there, a break-in at the end of an alley and a knifing in a dark doorway.
The tune is every bit as off-the-wall as the lyric: a narcoleptic strolling blues that operates like a broken-down old merry-go-round, coming around again just in time to catch the next set of jaundiced observations. You can almost imagine this song being performed on stage by a pick-up band of tramps and hobos - rarely has a song inhabited a world as completely as this one does.

"Time"

I've just finished reading Nick Mason's entertaining history of Pink Floyd. Despite being an international rock superstar, he's so quintessentially English in his modesty, his brushing aside of any plaudits for what he has achieved.
And reading his account of the creation of the "Dark Side of the Moon" album, I hope I began to understand a little about the dynamics of this most unusual group: the Floyd was always a one-man show, whether it was Syd Barrett in the early days, or Roger Waters latterly. Their respective creative visions, be they lyrical or musical or both, really drove the group.
After Syd was sacked, Roger Waters' concerns and visions began to take over -- culminating eventually in the pseudo-solo album "The Final Cut" -- and the first sign that he really had assumed control was the "Dark Side" album, where the entire work has the sort of wholeness that can only be achieved when one person's thought processes are determining the content.
What this album achieved, however, was a perfect balance between Waters' lyrical thrust and the brilliant musicianship of David Gilmour and Richard Wright. I've already written about what is to me the finest track on this record, but "Time" comes a close second.
The simplicity of the opening minutes -- a wonderful combination of clock and heartbeat as a drumbeat, simple guitar notes and Mason's clear, spare drums -- takes some beating, but the lyric is what matters here. It's simple, almost schoolboyish in fact, but it's inescapable and that's what I like: "And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking/Racing around to come up behind you again/The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older/Shorter of breath and one day closer to death."
Sometimes it's the simple things that make the biggest noise. This song's one of them.

"Slave to the Rhythm"

It's not often a song appears that just reeks of money. You know, the song that wears a big neon sign above its head that says: "no expense was spared in the making of this record." The kind of song written by the most A-List writers, performed by the most in-demand hired guns in session-land, produced by the most talented bods ever to sit behind the console and drenched in effects, orchestration and an enormous blizzard of top-quality cocaine.
When Grace Jones made the transition from model to singer, I'm pretty sure the conversations between her manager and the record company bosses involved the words "money", "no" and "object". This record is utterly loaded, obscenely wealthy. Even the echo chamber sounds like it was coated in some rare metal in order to achieve exactly that effect.
But hell, it's a terrific tune, comparable in some ways to Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Welcome to the Pleasuredome" - the slow-burning groove, the luxurious effects and well-dressed synth effects and the crystal-clear voice, enunciated to the last degree. Jones' voice is quite something - it occupies some no-man's-land between male and female, yet here it's as pure, clear and unsexy as can be. Maybe all that money couldn't buy her soul.

"The Promised Land"

Looking back through the 300-odd SongsWithoutWhich I've amassed here so far, I'm amazed I didn't get around to Chuck Berry two years ago. Similarly, I wrote just a couple of days ago about the Beatles and was trying to list five bands who've changed music forever. I'm going to have to revisit that list and expand it, oh, just a little.
Every time I hear Chuck Berry I'm reminded of the scene in "Back to the Future" where Michael J. Fox plays "Johnny B Goode" to a stunned high-school 1950s audience and Chuck Berry's cousin has an idea.... Perhaps Chuck had that sort of impact when he first arrived on the radio; I guess you had to be there. But he's a hugely under-appreciated influence on rock and roll music these days.
I could blog any one of twenty of his songs, but I like this the best - it's the alternative version of "Route 66", a road-song in which the names come thick and fast and conjure up images of silver Greyhound buses, propeller-driven airplanes and men who wore hats and dressed sharp: "We had motor trouble, it turned into a struggle/Half way 'cross Alabam'/And that hound broke down and left us all stranded/In downtown Birmingham/Right away I bought me a through train ticket/Right cross Mississippi clean/And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham/Smoking into New Orleans."
The sound is sheer nostalgia as well: the opening riff is the entire history of rock and roll in three seconds, the honky-tonk piano pounds the chords with sheer abandon, and the guitar sounds just like guitars used to sound before the technicians discovered bass and sustain - tinny, twangy and infinitely precious.
Bear in mind this is a guy who was one of the very first to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who's had Bruce Springsteen and Steve Miller play for him and who was voted 6th best guitarist of all time in 2003. Not bad for a guy who'd written his best stuff before 1959. Respect is due.

"Planet Claire"

I love this. It's as if Kraftwerk had discovered guitars and cheap science-fiction novels while watching a crime series on American TV. As I've described elsewhere, there are two different groups called the B 52s: this is from their first incarnation as a trashy, beehived suburban punk dance band. It's a stripped-down, bare sound that suggests jerky, geeky dancing at a frat party. As with most of the B 52s' early stuff, it's got this fixation with outer space: "Planet Claire has pink air/All the trees are red/No one ever dies there/No one has a head." Clearly we're not talking Neil Young here, but it's got bags of atmosphere and it just sounds so damn good - it's like you've wandered into the sound effects studio while they're putting the final touches to a Hammer horror film.

"Spooky"

Ain't love grand? You're in a permanent state of nerves, you're paranoid-obsessive, your moods shift wildly, in short, you're unstable. And that's what this song is all about: "You always keep me guessing/And I never seem to know what you are thinking/And if some fella looks at you/It's for sure your little eye will be a-winking/I get confused cause I don't know where I stand/But then you smile, and hold my hand/Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little girl like you."
What I enjoy most is the laid-back groove that accompanies the plaintive, disturbed yet uncomplaining lyric. It's as if the guy doesn't mind his torment, and to prove it, he lays down a jazzy, easy-listening, West Coast tune, the sort of song you might see folks dancing to, but in a very relaxed, swaying sort of way, rather than a dedicated, concentrated frugging.
To be sure, this song is California writ large: it's gently waving palm trees, the scent of sensimilla in the air and a rum punch in your hand. Even the instrumental solo wears dark glasses and too laid-back to hog the spotlight - this is a mood song, pure and simple. I'm not sure it's a love song, though...I'm not sure there's room for that in a song like this.

"Two Princes"

New Year, new crisp, clean sheet to write on. There has been the odd moment when I wonder when I'll run out of SongsWithoutWhich - after all, they do say that all the great tunes have already been written and what's going on now is merely re-arranging the order in which the notes are played.
But having been away for a swift break in Uncle Sam's backyard, I've returned with a head full of songs culled from the hours spent listening to the radio while tooling along President Eisenhower's fine interstate highway system. Let me tell you, sitting in a well-upholstered car while letting I-95 unroll beneath you is a great way to unwind. Kudos to the guy that invented cruise control.
To kick off the year, this is an irrepressible piece of swagger and rhythm that's guaranteed to get your heartrate boosted. The Spin Doctors have sort of come and gone, sadly, but they were a sort of bluesy, rootsy version of the Hothouse Flowers - the same abandoned, freestyle, raucous vocal, the same excellent musicianship and the same heart on the sleeve. You can't help but dance to this song: it's got a serious backbeat, a terrific stop-start rhythm that sucks you right in, and the lyric is all about laying your worldly goods to one side and just opening your heart. The fun part about the lyric is that the alternate lines are just plain old scat, just throwaway lines to emphasize the previous one: "Said one, two princes kneel before you/That what I said now/Princes, princes who adore you/Just go ahead now/One has diamonds in his pockets/That's some bread, now/This one said he wants to buy you rockets/Ain't in his head, now." They kick the song along, give it some weight and give it all its attitude. Happy New Year, y'all.

"Pretty in Pink"

When the film "Pretty in Pink" came out I thought it was just about the coolest thing going - to see kids my age or so having the confidence to follow their own muse, listen to their own music and not follow the fashions. Having endured the fairly rapid succession of fashion fads that swept through the country in the 70s and 80s, I took from the film a sense of validation that it was OK to be somewhat off-beat and have one's own personal style... which has stood me in pretty good stead ever since, right down to the motley collection of songs on this here blog.
For some reason I tend to think of this song as a pair to "I'm in Love with a German Film Star" which appears elsewhere here -- and which, by the way, is probably the most-searched song that leads to SongsWithoutWhich. There's the same sense of vague ennui, aching hipness and worldly unconcern: "All of her lovers all talk of her notes/And the flowers that they never sent/And wasn't she easy/And isn't she pretty in pink/The one who insists he was first in the line/Is the last to remember her name."
It's about posing, about fastening onto an image that you want to project and working towards it, just like the line in "German Film Star" - "sitting in a corner in a perfect pose/Trying not to pose". I like the idea that we all, as kids, had to work so hard to achieve the appearance of what we all come to have naturally much later. I'm not for a moment suggesting we're cooler now than we were back then - most of us probably were cool at some point... but that air of ennui, of world-weariness that we wanted so much back then, comes so easily to us now. And with that, Happy New Year.

"The Green Manalishi"

Before the days of "Rumours" and Stevie Nicks' witchy-woman fetish, Fleetwood Mac was a sharp, sharp blues group with just the faintest trace of psychedelia going on, Peter Green was a thinking fan's guitar hero on a par with Syd Barrett, and songs like "Albatross" were a million miles away from "Don't Stop" or "Go Your Own Way".
I love the barely-contained menace and unsettling paranoid feel of this song. The riff is crunchy, steady, plodding even, like an unstoppable force stalking you up the blind alley of a waking nightmare, there's a cackling echo to add to the Halloween vibe, and an otherworldly howling ever so far down in the mix to make you feel just that little bit more unsettled.
It's a song for obsessives, for depressives, for repressives - chock-full of dysfunction: "Cause you're the Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown/All my trying is up - all your bringing is down/Just taking my love then slipping away/Leaving me here just trying to keep from following you."
And it's a song that isn't afraid to take on those devils - the extended, spooked instrumental at the end just eats itself up in a frenzy of slow-burning mania, revels in its evils, if you like. You say you've had a bad day? You don't need Daniel Powter, you need this.

"Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End"

There's not nearly enough Beatles in this blog.

If you have a spare afternoon, write a list down of those artists that have substantially, irrevocably and completely changed the nature of popular music. I can come up with about five: Robert Johnson - the touchstone and the source, Elvis - the first taste of the social impact of music and its performers, Hendrix - for bringing the counter-culture into the fold, Eminem - for making music that cut across all manner of social divides, and the Beatles - the ultimate marriage of songwriting and musicianship.
I'm sure that most of us of a certain age can name more Beatles songs than we can songs by any other artist. Most of us can hum or sing along to each one of those songs as well. And for the generation that grew up in the 60s and 70s I don't think you really need to say much more than that. The Beatles redefined songwriting, stretched the boundaries of what was possible more than anyone else. If you think Pink Floyd's tape loops were something new, listen to Revolution No 9. If you think heavy metal was Hendrix's love-child, listen to Helter Skelter. Etc etc.
I'm blogging this suite of songs off the Abbey Road album because it has just about everything in five short minutes. Golden Slumbers is as gorgeous a melody as you could hope to find, a lullaby to moisten the eye and bring a lump to the throat. Carry That Weight is a curious two-part invention that starts off as a football chant, morphs back into Golden Slumbers for a moment and then -- I think -- rocks out before it turns into The End. I say "I think" because I've never owned the CD and so can't tell when one track ends and the other starts...
I'm constantly amazed by the inventiveness, the sheer other-worldiness of the talent involved here. To be able to turn from heart-melting sweetness into downright funk and then, as if it were a throwaway moment, to write one of the greatest lyrics ever: "And in the end/The love you take/Is equal to the love/You make," just takes the breath away.
I know it's not an obvious choice for a Beatles blog, but it's the one that always sits at the back of my mind. Comforting, really.

"I Believe in Father Christmas"

With the music channels all showing variants on the theme of "The Best Christmas Album....Ever!" I've had a good opportunity to review the evidence - from David Bowie and Bing Crosby's "Little Drummer Boy" right through to The Darkness' bit of seasonal Queen-U-Like. And I was right - there is such a tidal wave of tosh released each year. Which means my other top Christmas tune is still this wonderful piece of overblown hymnery by Greg Lake.
I've blogged Emerson, Lake and Palmer already. And this isn't a whole lot different, except that this time the music doesn't drown the vocals. The lyric is what really grabs me.... "They said there'll be snow at Christmas/They said there'll be peace on earth/But instead it just kept on raining/A veil of tears for the virgin's birth." As the song progresses, the pomposity gets ratcheted up until there are two or three full choirs, a phalanx of percussionists, a few orchestras. But at the start, it's a delicate, very seasonal tune.
I like the idea of a song that questions our motives, our cultural habits and our ability to gloss over the unpleasantness that pervades life. I don't always mind being reminded that things aren't wonderful, especially at a time like Christmas, when we're all suddenly bathed in a family-values golden glow. "They said there'll be snow at Christmas/They said there'll be peace on earth/Hallelujah, Noel be it heaven or hell/The Christmas you get you deserve."

"A Fairytale of New York"

It's that time of year. The TV advertisements are reaching deep into our pockets, shaking loose our spare change and selling us images of happiness and enjoyment. We're encouraged to overreach ourselves when it comes to hospitality, generosity and credit, we're subtly told that if we don't indulge ourselves and others to the utmost, we're somehow not taking part in this carnival.
Even the music tries to boost our morale. This is the time of year when the record companies traditionally reach to the very bottom of the barrel for that lowest common denominator that's going to connect with teens and grannies alike. Everything is presented as crisp, clean, shiny and somehow new, as if we hadn't come across this or that particular collection of songs before. I mean, just how many times is Island Records going to repackage Bob Marley's greatest hits?
Christmas songs, too, are insufferable in the main. Each year, we're guaranteed to get any combination of: a pink-cheeked choirboy singing something traditional in an impossibly high, pure voice; a hoary old rock group reaching into their back catalogue; a boy-band or five with something vaguely festive; some teenage apprentice diva; and Cliff Richard.
But once every decade comes along a song that subverts the genre, that transcends the immense pile of crap we have to wade through in search of a decent tune. For me, there are two Christmas songs that rise head, shoulders and torso above the rest. Here's the first.
Who would have thought it? Shane McGowan, a shambling hangover of a man, blessed with the ability to write immense, rabble-rousing yet sweet music; Kirsty MacColl, the unheralded first voice of British song; and the only song that McGowan could have written for Christmas. It's a bitter, bitter sweet argument of a song, remembered through the soft-focus of nostalgia. McGowan's sodden, wandering mumbling contrasts with MacColl's sweet, pure folk tones, like peanut butter with mayonnaise, but together they conjure up romance, sadness, fleeting moments of joy. The lyric time-travels through a doomed relationship: from "When you first took my hand on the cold Christmas Eve/You promised me Broadway was waiting for me" through "You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap lousy faggot/Happy Christmas your arse/I pray God it's our last" to "You took my dreams from me/When I first found you/I kept them with me babe/I put them with my own/Can't make it all alone/I built my dreams around you."
Why does this song lift us? The sweet, sweet music, MacColl's wondrous voice, the rambling, helpless and romantic lyric, they all come together for one eternal moment of sadness that smiles through the pain, the heartbreak, and finds something good to hold onto. And it's the kind of performance that could, in another world, have gone so horribly wrong but here, it simply, beautifully soars.
No bah, no humbug. Just perfect.

"Born in the U.S.A."

I've mentioned this song elsewhere as the great example of how misunderstood a song can be. But for anyone who doesn't remember or wasn't there, this song came out in the middle of the Reagan presidency in the US and was immediately co-opted by all sorts of companies, causes and interests. Even a large part of the general public in America took this song to their hearts as some sort of statement that "We're Number One" - you know, the my-country-right-or-wrong crowd, who stick the finger up to the rest of the world and continue to confuse France with Australia on world maps.
This song is as angry as any I can remember hearing. It was the first really sharp look at the downside of life in the Promised Land: "I got in a little hometown jam/So they put a rifle in my hands/Sent me off to a foreign land/To go and kill the yellow man." So far, this is a story that's been told many times before, but the next verse goes somewhere totally new: "Come back home to the refinery/Hiring man says "Son, if it was up to me"/I go down to see the VA man/He said "Son, don't you understand?" To anyone who remembers how America reacted to Vietnam, there's confusion, pain, heartache, rejection, anger and bewilderment in them there words.
Right there, Springsteen draws a knife along the scar that split America for so many years, and draws a picture of the abandonment of an entire generation. His chorus of "Born in the USA" is ironic, sure, but it's also a cry of pain from the men and women who came home and were rejected by their country: "Down in the shadow of the penitentiary/Out by the gas fires of the refinery/I'm ten years down the road/Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go." We were born here, they're saying, we were just doing our duty. To this day, some Vietnam veterans have never been able to come to terms with being insulted, spat on and abandoned.
And the wicked cynicism of the political class that tried to adopt this song as a statement of pride, as a badge of values, should never be forgotten. Nor, for that matter, should the blind ignorance of those individuals who did the same.

"Walk the Dinosaur"

OK, this is ridiculous. From the very first "Boom, boom, acka-lacka-lacka boom", through the idea of watching cars drive by while on a prehistoric date, right through to the chorus "Open the door/Get on the floor/Everybody walk the dinosaur", this is just plain silly.
But the beat is completely addictive, the song is as tight as a drum, the band are playing their asses off, and it's a total joy to throw yourself around the dancefloor to this song. But I've never managed to reach the same heights of abandon with anything else by Was (Not Was)....
Why is it that you can take two songs with almost identical beats, the same tight musicianship, the same sense of joy and silliness, and one will lift you up to a better place while the other will just leave you cold and flat? Makes no sense.

"Sparks"

Back when rock music was still finding itself, when artists were still stretching their arms and not yet touching the walls of limitation, Pete Townshend dreamed up "Tommy", a rock opera that touched on all manner of subjects but seemed most at home when it was dealing with fame, fortune, acclaim and the isolation that comes with it. Call it the original text for Pink Floyd's "The Wall", if you like.
This is an instrumental track from the album, something that sounds so unlike The Who that when you first hear it you spend an age racking your brains to work out who it could be. After a while, though, it becomes very familiar, that Who guitar sound coming to the fore and Keith Moon's loose, circular drumming driving it all along.
The opening minute, the intro, though, is where this track really does it for me - simple chords, with an echo of screeching feedback in the background: as if someone's just opened a door into a parallel universe and you can't quite take in the magnificence of what's laid before you. Anyone who remembers their first discovery of rock and roll will remember the slightly breathless feeling, the churning in the stomach and the instinctive rsponse to a new rhythm.
And that's the joy of rock's huge history - there's always a new discovery around the corner.

"Find the Cost of Freedom"

Sometimes it's good to strip away the layers of production that go into the making of a song and see what lies beneath - what the components are. Take away the echo, the EQ, the strings, the various washy keyboards that make sure you're not listening to anything like dead air, and what do you have left?
Voices. Maybe a guitar or two as well, to add some counterpoint. But really, there doesn't have to be a lot more.
Here, for example, we have a two-minute song, the first of which is a delicate, intricate dance between two acoustic guitars, two hands picking their way across a bed of thorny roses, the melodies winding in and out of each other.
The second minute is a quite fantastic piece of harmony singing by three guys who probably define close-harmony singing. David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash bring three separate instruments together, lay them one next to the other and create an other-worldly blanket of comfort and strength such that all that you're left with after their voices fade is an aching, echoing silence.
"Find the cost of freedom/Buried in the ground/Mother Earth will swallow you/Lay your body down."
This is the song to play at the end of along day, your personal valediction to the trials and tribulations of the last 24 hours, your shrugging off of the cloak of care.