"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.
My "rules" for these song-series have so far said each artist gets only one song. It makes me focus, and keeps me from being self-indulgent in one specific way. But, like any rule, it can be gamed - there can be bands that change names, or frontpeople who go solo, and so on.
So I had a one-word-title song from Kristin Hersch's band Throwing Muses last year: Sinkhole. For this year, I have a one-word-title song from Hersch's solo career, which I am claiming is something entirely different.
This week, my song is the short, folky, one-woman-and-her-guitar song Cuckoo, from Hersch's 1992 record Hips and Makers.
Oh the cuckoo she's a pretty bird
She wobbles when she flies
She don't ever holler cuckoo
Till the fourth day of July
I say "folky," but I think this is an actual, authentic, old folk song, the kind where we don't actually know who originally wrote it. And so I'm not going to try to explicate the meaning - it's an old song about a bird, and has probably been meant as symbolic in a dozen different ways by a dozen different singers over the past century or so. I'll just leave it here: a short, quirky song performed well, to mean whatever you think it means today.
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