"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.
There are songs I can write a lot about, and have deep opinions on. There are other songs I love the sound of, the way they leap and move, and the sound the words make.
This is one of the latter: Jesca Hoop's fun, bouncy Intelligentactile 101, from her 2007 debut record Kismet.
It's a song about being alive, I think: being in flesh, and glorying in all things fleshy. But Hoop is singing it from the point of view of someone coming to that fleshiness as a brand-new thing: maybe an alien, maybe a personality that will become a baby any minute now, maybe something else strange and unusual and surprising.
Can I borrow your skin, blushing to get lucky in
Lucky lucky lucky lucky with a special friend
Well I hear that on planet earth that it's a sin, big sin
Well all the more fun for me to get lucky then
Hoop is one of the great originals, a musician and songwriter who makes soundscapes that sound like nobody else and goes to unexpected lyrical places all of the time. (Tom Waits was an early mentor - she was actually a nanny for his kids for a while - and, though the sounds and styles are very different, the quirkiness and specificity of her work has some things in common with Waits.)
This was the first song of hers I ever heard - I'm not sure if it was officially the first Kismet single, or just a bouncy, energetic, zippy song that the world picked up on. But it's a fine place to start for a great musician, and a weird little ditty all on its own.
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