A Weblog by One Humble Bookman on Topics of Interest to Discerning Readers, Including (Though Not Limited To) Science Fiction, Books, Random Thoughts, Fanciful Family Anecdotes, Publishing, Science Fiction, The Mating Habits of Extinct Waterfowl, The Secret Arts of Marketing, Other Books, Various Attempts at Humor, The Wonders of New Jersey, the Tedious Minutiae of a Boring Life, Science Fiction, No Accounting (For Taste), And Other Weighty Matters.
Andrew Wheeler was Senior Editor of the Science Fiction Book Club and then moved into marketing. He currently works for Thomson Reuters as Manager, Content Marketing, focused on SaaS products to legal professionals. He was a judge for the 2005 World Fantasy Awards and the 2008 Eisner Awards. He also reviewed a book a day multiple times. He lives with The Wife and two mostly tame children (Thing One, born 1998; and Thing Two, born 2000) in suburban New Jersey. He has been known to drive a minivan, and nearly all of his writings are best read in a tone of bemused sarcasm. Antick Musings’s manifesto is here. All opinions expressed here are entirely those of Andrew Wheeler, and no one else. There are many Andrew Wheelers in the world; this may not be the one you expect.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
This is not a Christmas song. Today's post has nothing to do with today; it's the end of the series that I've been doing all year. Sorry to disappoint you, or maybe happy to reassure you, depending.
This is the end. But I've liked writing about music once a week, and will have something new for 2024 - the fact that last week was a two-woman duo and today is a solo artist might just be a hint as to the direction I'm taking for the new year.
For the last song of the series, for the newest one, I picked a new artist, vastly younger than me and different from me, someone I discovered randomly, with a lovely touching, deeply personal song. All of the things that are great about popular music: it's always moving, always changing, with new people and ideas and sounds and songs.
The last song is Disco Ball by Caitlin Cobb-Vialet.
I’ve never been known for my patience
I love a song that can just drop a line like that in the middle - discursive, introspective, self-aware.
To close out the series, it's - yes, you guessed it! - one last break-up song, one last singer with a head full of regrets and a mouth full of thoughts that come tumbling out.
I’m starting to think you don’t Want to be seen I’m stopping myself from believing that you might Exist on the same plane as me
There are a million ways to say "this isn't working" or "this is already broken." Cobb-Vialet has a great one here - fully fitting the talky, discursive narrator of this song, who runs around and round the same ideas, showing how restless she is at the same time she says so.
I couldn’t wait one more day But I would wait for a month For a year If I had known at the time
This is a lovely, personal, pointed song. I don't know if it's "true," but it's as true as it needs to be for the space of a four-minute song. And it's a great song by a great new talent - Cobb-Vialet was just out of college when this album was recorded, and I think that's still less than two years ago. We could be at the start of decades more music like this: I hope so.
Trust me: it's awesome. Psychedelic guitar rock meets bluesy swamp-rock. I just listened to it three times in a row across two devices: that's how awesome.
This is Raven by The Living Pins, which is two women from Austin, TX. My understanding is that they've been around the music industry for a while - maybe not quite my age, since I am old, but not kiddies - but The Living Pins was a new collaboration, and you can hear both of those things in the music: they know what they're doing, and they're having a lot of fun making it new. (They've since been putting out music semi-regularly since this initial EP - also a good sign!)
Bye bye freaky little monster children
I have no idea what any of the lyrics mean, but I love that first line of the refrain, and admit to singing along with it almost every time.
This is another song that just hits me with the sound: another chugging beat, not fast but relentless, and that bluesy guitar winding in and out and around, until we get the quick solo after the second verse.
And just remember: no one here gets...uh huh yeah. Words to live by, whatever they mean. The very best songs mean whatever you need them to mean, whatever you bring to them.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I've been really serious a lot in this series, but pop music isn't supposed to be serious all the time. So, for 2020, I have a great song that's no more serious than it has to be, a great, almost bubblegummy, bouncy song that I hope can get your toe tapping and your mouth smiling.
It's Nervous Wreck by Jeremy and the Harlequins.
I first heard them with the equally poppy and even slyer Cam Girl, a '60s-sounding song about a '20s relationship. And I think they often work in that vein: not "60s style," exactly, but modern pop deeply influenced by that era, using a lot of the familiar sounds and styles to say new things.
Nervous Wreck is a first-person song: the singer is a mess, and he's telling us about it. There's a driving beat behind it all, and a chime-like guitar sound that comes in and out. But it's mostly that voice: this is a song driven by lyrics, almost chanted, just a little fast, from beginning to end.
There's also one of those slight deliberate stammers in the chorus, which works wonderfully: it's a great sound, and it sells the story.
I don't want to analyze this one too much, so I'll leave it at that: this is a great jukebox song, the kind that pops up and makes your life just that bit sunnier for three minutes.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
A few times in this list - most recently last week - I've said something like "I knew this band would come up, and here they are, later than I expected." I'd like to think that's because I'm still listening to new things, still ready to be impressed by both entirely new people and by the new work of people I've been following for a while.
That's probably not true, in that the comforting myths we have about ourselves are inevitably untrue. But I still like to believe it.
But this is another case: my favorite song, right now, by one of my favorite bands is from their most recent record. I could have picked a bunch of earlier songs - What Do the People Want or Wave Backwards to Massachusetts or their title song or Hassle Magnet or We Are What We Say We Are - but I didn't.
Hallelujah the Hills' 2019 I'm You is a transcendently great record. I firmly believe that. I've gone back and forth on what's the "best" song on it. But the song that's the most personal, the one I want to celebrate for 2019 is Transparent Chart of the Heavens.
It's another song that starts out quietly and gets bigger: I love those, I love the power and majesty of a band that can do that slow-burn right, that can build up the heat as they go.
It's a catalog song: each short verse is about a specific thing. We think the singer is looking at them in turn, or thinking about them - has a question about each of them, a deep and existential question. Most of them are physical, with some personal importance, we think: first the title, then "index map of New England" and "anthology of American folk songs."
But then it changes. Next is "nostalgic dream of an old love," with the music keying up another notch higher, and what sounds like a chorus of other voices, down in the mix, behind the speaker, following along.
And then we get
Venn diagram of two people The overlap expanding now Venn diagram of two people Can you be sure that I’m me, you're you, and not the other way around?
And it gets quiet again, briefly - to finally hit the chorus: Once you're born that's where it starts.
And it all comes back around to the beginning, in a lovely, overwhelming crescendo that ends the song beautifully.
What I want to leave you with is one of those questions:
How can you access feelings once felt without getting caught in its net?
I don't know. I don't know the answers to most of the questions in Transparent Chart of the Heavens. That's one of the things that makes them good questions.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
Here's another band I kept trying to fit in to this list - they're showing up later than I expected. I knew Okkervil River would be here somewhere, but I first thought it would have to be the brilliant, chilly, dark, overwhelming Westfall. Or maybe The War Criminal Rises and Speaks. John Allyn Smith Sails is utterly crystalline perfection, quoting an older song - I won't spoil which one, in case you haven't heard it - in a way that transforms it amazingly. It was almost Another Radio Song. Down Down the Deep River was close, too.
Maybe those songs were all too negative, too dark. It's tempting to say so. But it was probably more that those years had other songs by other people, and Okkervil River had so many choices, that I was spoiled and could keep picking through.
There are some bands where you love one song above all - and that's the one that has to get into a project like this, so you twist other things around to make it fit. Other bands are more consistent, or you love more of what they do, so you have a choice of riches. Okkervil was one of the latter; I would have been happy with any of the songs I listed above. Maybe two or three others.
Speaking of being happy, maybe that's what did it: in the end, I did go for a happier song, something more positive, as I get towards the end of this project. Well, as happy as you can get in a song called Famous Tracheotomies.
First of all, that two-word title! So much interesting tension there, so much surprise and wonder.
A tracheotomy is a scary operation: usually done quickly to save someone's life when they can't breathe. But it's not a complicated operation, or a difficult one. It's often done in emergency situations. And you wouldn't think any of them would be famous.
This is a true story, or a collection of true stories. Singer Will Sheff had a tracheotomy as a kid, and I guess something reminded him of it many years later. The song doesn't explain why it exists; not that many songs ever do.
And I was one and a half I was my parents' only kid And they had lost two before that
The verses start with Sheff's personal story, and move on from there: Gary Coleman, Mary Wells, Dylan Thomas, Ray Davies. A verse or so about each - sometimes deliberately banal, always conversational, as if Sheff were riffing during a conversation.
But that banality, the matter-of-factness of it all, adds up to more as it goes. Maybe Sheff is borrowing an audience's interest in celebrity, maybe it's the shock of the operation, maybe a whole bunch of things. But it's a bittersweet, lovely, rambling song that's mostly about death and loss...until the end.
Davies had his trach fairly young, like Sheff did - not at the end, after fame, when bodies are declining and medical interventions are rising higher and higher to keep someone alive.
Ray Davies had a tracheotomy He was at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, aged thirteen And during his long recovery Nurses put him in a wheelchair And they'd wheel him out onto a balcony (on a balcony)
That's the frame: we start with a child, before everything, and we end with another. We end with a musical quote, too - almost as transcendent as the one I mentioned above in Will Allyn Smith Sails - as an iris out.
It's not a song with a single message. It's not a song that leaves the listener feeling just one emotion. It's a song about things jumbled, about good and bad together, about saving lives and losing lives. But it ends with a vision, and a reason for that "Famous" in the title - in the end, it's about the power of art to transcend pain and everyday life, about the way a song can make you happy.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I edited SF and Fantasy books for more than a decade: I love a good apocalypse, and a good mythological reference. My song for 2017 has both of those.
This time out, I want to talk about Ragnarok by Charming Disaster.
It is what it says it is: a musical retelling of the Norse myth of Ragnarok - familiar to my generation from the legends of Don Blake and his alter ego - in a basically straightforward and myth-appropriate way. It gets big, because it's about the end of the world.
(Close readers may have noticed that a lot of these songs "get big" - well, the songs you remember for a long time, that are important and special. are going to be the ones that demand a lot and stake out a lot of ground, aren't they?)
Charming Disaster is another one of those bands with two singers, male and female, which is something that is absolutely lightning in a bottle when it works well. (Richard and Linda Thompson, for example. Closer to now, The Indelicates. Sometimes Low. And so on.) Charming Disaster songs regularly see the two of them trading lines back and forth, and that works brilliantly here.
maybe the wolves will eat the moon and the sun and we won’t have to face the consequences of the things we’ve done
It's personal, too - this isn't just something happening, it's happening to these two characters, who have their own reasons for wanting or fearing the world to end.
go out and buy some cigarettes cause what the fuck you might as well enjoy yourself till ragnarok ragnarok
It's not my philosophy of life - oh, I appreciate it, but I never have or could live that way. But it's a great musical philosophy of life, and it rocks here. And that's all you need: a clever idea, good music, all done well.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
2015 was a scratch, like 1971 - as I was making this list, I ended with fifty-two songs, exactly matching the weeks of the year, and thought that was exactly what I wanted. So I jump forward two years this week, to 2016.
I wanted a song by Lydia Loveless on this list, and for a while I thought it would be Head, which is quietly devastating, or maybe European, which could come across as a joke to some people. (It isn't: or, rather, it's the kind of joke someone makes in the moment to play off a moment of pure emotional honesty that hits so horribly wrong.) Boy Crazy is a lot of fun; her cover of Elvis Costello's Allison is lovely; Can't Change Me and More Like Them might be more quintessential Loveless attitude.
But, instead, it came down to Same To You. I've had a lot of break-up songs this year, but this one, well - can you break something that wasn't in one piece to begin with?
Well is there nothing I could do to make you look at me that way again? I’m not gonna fall in love with you man but if that’s really it Could you just wave goodbye?
I like the tension in this song, the way it feels like the singer gives as good as she gets - both I’ll have to take a few so I don’t talk back and That’s where I almost killed you but honey give me one more chance. The relationship isn't clear - probably on purpose. This could be new and not clicking, it could be old and falling apart.
(It reminds me, a bit, of the "Alpha Couple" from a lot of Mountain Goats songs, especially the record Talahassee. This is another couple that isn't good for each other, though not as pyrotechnically.)
One last thing: I always heard the refrain as If it's the same to you, then I'm gone.
But the lyrics on the Bandcamp page have it as If it's the same to you that I'm gone, making the whole refrain a longer, more complicated question.
And that's what I love about great songs: they have further depths, more questions. As this one does, they open up instead of closing down.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I'm back to the old well again: another song of heartbreak and desolation. It's the kind of song I love best, I think.
And this is a great one, from a fine songwriter who also has a lovely voice just right for her material, especially this song: breathy and quiet, already devastated.
For 2014, I want to tell you about Let Me Go by Kate Tucker and the Sons of Sweden.
It’s my fault It’s your fault If you don’t give a damn Forget about it
It's a break-up song; it starts quietly. If you know anything about break-ups, you understand it won't stay quiet.
There's a chugging drum line that starts in right after the first verse. I want to say it picks up speed, a bit at a time, as the song goes on, but I may be mishearing power and volume for speed. This is a song that gets bigger and bigger, more and more demanding, verse by chorus by verse, as Tucker runs through this break-up moment.
It's not even a strident break-up song: Tucker isn't complaining or listing faults, just talking about this moment and how everything is broken and irreparable.
And it doesn't get that loud: just loud enough. Just clear enough. Just, precisely, to be clear how entirely over it all is, right at this moment.
Find a fire to light Go set your flares off in the night I’ll be miles out of sight Cause you just let me go like that
And it's all done in three-and-a-half minutes, that perfect pop-song length.
You go you go You go on down You dream you dream You dream out loud You eat your heart out Everytime
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
As I said the last two weeks, 2012 is a scratch, because I had two songs for 2011.
I may have done this entire series, the whole "This Year" sequence, just to put this down in words. It's been bouncing around my head for a few years now.
Songs affect us strongly, of course - every person (I hope I speak for everyone but I probably don't) has some songs that are personal or important or special, for different reasons and in different ways. We can't choose that, mostly. It happens. It hits us.
I'm not a visual thinker. My mind works in words, or concepts. But this song - it's like there's a video for it, that I could make. I don't see it - my mind just does not work that way - but I know how it would go, I know the beats, how it lines up with the music, I know the emotions and the story.
I could probably do an AV script for it - time it out to the second. If I could draw at all, I could storyboard it. It's all that clear. And it came out of nowhere, from listening to the song.
For 2013, it has to be Heat Death Infinity Splitter by 65 Days of Static. It's an instrumental. And, in my head, it's a SF story.
(Oh, I should also say, before I completely dive down my rabbit hole, that 65dos - that's the short form of their name, all internetty - is thoroughly awesome and has a bunch of other songs equally good. Radio Protector. String Loop. Weak4. Dance Parties (Distant). Come To Me. Those last two are the only ones I know with actual lyrics, if you need that to get into a band.)
You can quit here if you want; it will run long. It is hugely self-indulgent.
No one knows what is happening No one knows what is happening There is a lot of danger out there, OK?
This is spoken, to open the song. From here, I'm going to tell you the story - again, it's my story, it's not official or "real" or anything. Just what came, full-formed, into my head from listening. (You may want to start the video below, as you read.)
There are two main characters: The Engineer and The Kid. The Engineer is that speaker; The Kid is, well, her kid. Ten, eleven, something like that. Boy or girl, doesn't matter. A kid, the child of an engineer, inquisitive, daring as any tween, smart.
We're on a big old spacestation, out in the depths somewhere. Lived-in, loved, full of people and life. We open with a longshot, the camera moving in and wandering around the surface as we hear The Engineer speak, as we move into the station and see her talk to The Kid. I don't think they're in person: she's talking over some speaker or comlink, already at work keeping the old hulk running when The Kid is ready to start the day.
We think The Engineer might be in charge of maintenance or systems. We see her bustling around, quickly, giving orders, looking at things, making fixes. We know this station needs a lot of attention to keep it going.
Cut to space: a ship is approaching: shiny, angular, inhuman.
Cut again: leaders of the station, assembling. Clearly nervous, some happy some apprehensive. Ready to meet the envoys. The aliens.
Interspersed: The Kid heading through the station. Purposeful, inquisitive. Going to see the big event. Snaking through crowds, going through sneaky ways. The Kid knows this station intimately: can get anywhere and see anything. Isn't going to miss this.
The music is quietly ominous as the alien ship docks. Doors open. At 1:10 the envoys start moving through the station, to that slow drumbeat.
They float. They are not humanoid at all. I see them as something like a Grant Morrison-era Doom Patrol creation: partially drapery and partially boxy, moving slowly, at a stately pace, down the corridors of the station. There is nothing human about them. There is nothing obviously organic about them.
The assembled human leaders see a feed of the envoys; they're unnerved, shuffling. But they're committed, it's going to happen. They swallow, collect themselves, whatever. They're professionals. They can do this.
The Kid is everywhere, sneaking around to see everything. Our viewpoint, our identification character. We are The Kid, in a way. We see it all through The Kid's eyes.
As the envoys move - more slowly than seems reasonable, painfully slowly, like the procession to the headsman's axe - the station is under stress. We know the envoys are doingit even if we have no idea how. Dials slowly turn into the red. Maybe steam comes from unexpected places. The Engineer and her team is working faster, keeping it all together - this is nothing new, it's what she does every day. As the song goes on, it gets harder (especially with that discordant note starting about 3:00 and getting louder thereafter, like a warning siren), but she's the best, she can do it. It's an old station; these things happen.
This all builds for what feels like far too long. Almost three minutes of the envoy's slow procession - we see them approaching the square or plaza where the human leaders wait; from our glimpses of The Kid we understand the layout of the station and the main route. Cutting from them to the human leaders, to human crowds watching from the fringes (shocked or surprised or increasingly frightened), to The Kid, to The Engineer.
Slow build. Slow burn. For three minutes.
The envoys reach the human leaders at 3:42. Everything quiets down. They stop. The camera shows us everything one more time, during that quiet, that waiting. Then, just before 3:59, the first envoy - slightly larger or shinier or boxier; clearly the leader - makes some sort of gesture. And all the dials around The Engineer crash into the red at once; everything shakes and is pushed to the limits.
The station is falling apart. It is doomed.
Mass panic: the crowds run, trample each other. The Kid is cool but clearly amazed, keeping clear of crowds, keeping an eye on the envoys, wondering what just happened and how.
The envoys turn. They don't interact with the human leaders at all. They head back to their ship, only slightly quicker than before. Maybe we see their ship leave, somewhere in the chaos.
The cuts are quicker, the action frenzied and chaotic. Everything is going to hell.
The human leaders are just as panicked as everyone else, heading to lifeboats or whatever. Trying to save themselves. We see mass panic and destruction for about forty seconds, as the music screeches the song of the destruction of this world.
The Kid reaches some kind of escape pod about 4:40. Closes the door, ejects - that cuts the volume of the music. Looks back towards the station. Sees, through some kind of window, The Engineer, in some decaying fragment or another, still at her duty station, even though it's now far too late. She is not dead yet, but she has no way out.
They share a glance. There's no way they can communicate. There's no way The Kid can save her. And, as the song ends, the fragment of the station rotates or bounces away, and The Kid sees The Engineer disappear forever.
That's the story this song gave me. Happy Halloween.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
2011 is the second year with two choices, after 1982. Last week was 2011a, and next week will go right to 2013. I make no apologies for bending my self-imposed rules to fit my own fancies.
I could have put the two 2011 songs together into one post. There's enough thematic similarities, to my ear at least, to justify it. But the whole point of this series is to write about one song a week: why break that?
And I couldn't decide between the two of them. And I had nothing nearly as strong for 2012. So I'm here again, with another song from 2011.
This is another slow-build song, but it breaks out more directly. There's a moment where the guitar leaps forward, nearly three minutes in: almost screaming, screeching, crying out. The lyrics are over, the song has said what it has to say, and now is the time for sound. It's a magnificent moment, a great solo - I always love music willing to teeter on the edge of noise, unfazed by the possibility of falling over the edge.
My other song for 2011 is Civilian by Wye Oak. It's a love song...in the way a lot of the things I've been writing about are love songs. Which is to say: the twists and tangles of relationships, the complicated feelings and pasts we all bring to each other.
Perfectly able to hold my own hand But I still can't kiss my own neck
There are things you just need other people for, no matter how much you wish you didn't. And things you need from other people because they're just not in you.
I know my faults Can't live with them
The song doesn't explain why it's called Civilian. That's the last word of the lyrics, repeated: the first time, the only time we hear it. My guess is it's the usual thing with calling other people "civilians" - they're not part of this group, they haven't been through what we've been through.
If so...this is a song by a woman. I think it might be men who are civilians. All of us. All the time.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
2011 is the second year with two choices, after 1982. To keep things even, next week will have 2011b, and then go right to 2013.
Sometimes I quote a lot of lyrics in these posts: that won't be the case this time. This is a minimalist, slowcore song - loud, certainly (or it should be), and one that builds to a tremendous crescendo in its slow relentless way - but the lyrics are minimal. They say all they need to say.
I'm nothing but heart
My song for 2011 is Nothing But Heart by Low, an eight-minute slow boil of skittering guitars, more than a little noise, minimalist drums relentlessly keeping that slow beat in the background, and a swirl - growing slowly, oh so slowly - of catharsis and redemption.
This is another song I would play very loud in my car, driving to and from my train station, over and over in the fall of 2011. I can't tell you exactly what it means: as a song on its own, or what it meant to me at that moment. But it was a real, true thing, a mantra and method for getting through life, and it was exactly what I needed.
It's on my list because of those moments, because of what it meant then. And still can mean to me, any day I need it. Or to you. Or anyone. That's what makes it a great song.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I'm trying to be personal in this series, but not confessional. I may have said too much, some weeks - that's always the danger. And this one has that potential as well. Let's see if I can navigate that stormy sea.
Josh Ritter is one of my favorite artists: full stop. I initially thought the song I'd pick for him in this series would be To the Dogs or Whoever, an absolute barn-burner from 2007 that encapsulates everything he does well and was the first song of his I heard. From the same year, there's also The Temptation of Adam, a wonderful, deep, twisty story-song that I memorized without trying and own a T-shirt with the first line. To be hipster-y, there was also A Country Song, the early version of Golden Age of Radio, title song of his first big-label record.
But this one eventually won out. Partially because of how powerful, how loud it is live; partially because of the emotion in it. And partially because my wife and I both really like a song that is, well, about a deeply unhappy relationship on the verge of breaking up. (And that is understating the case in several ways.) I think we both love the power and the intensity and the emotion of it, especially that tat-tat-tat-tat-tat drumstick sound, over and over and over and over again [1] - but, still, it is weird for a couple to both love a song so much about a breakup.
So my song for 2010 is Rattling Locks, another song about love gone bad, frustration, and that feeling that the world doesn't fit, at all.
All along I thought I was giving you my love But you were just stealin' it, now I want it back Every single thing you took
I always like metaphors in songs, and times singers can sneak something by the audience, so this bit was particularly fun - and I wonder how many people don't get both ways it can be taken?
But something has changed, it's all wrong I'm out here in the cold with a wet face A-rattling your locks
But, again, this song is mostly about that relentless beat: unchanging, demanding, loud, pounding. Like the blood in your head as you have a not-quite-argument with the person you realize isn't special anymore. It's better live - so many of the greatest songs are, of course - but the studio version is loud and demanding enough for most purposes. And I like a spot of nihilism in my songs....
I had a dream where I was dyin' But it wasn't no nightmare I was peaceful as I fell
[1] In concert, several other members of the band would have drumsticks and hammer out that beat, as the actual drummer hit the more complicated bits. It was all beat, all staccato, all relentless. Here's a performance from Jimmy Kimmel that has some of that energy, but it hit much stronger at about the hour-twenty mark of a headliner set in a theatre.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
This may be the most obscure song in this series. [1] It's also the one I'm sure should have been a big crowd-pleasing moment in a gigantic Hollywood movie, the one that's used in all the trailers and defines that movie for a generation.
That could still happen. The wonderful thing about obscurity is that it can end at any time, and obscure things don't seem old, because they're unfamiliar. So let me have my dream.
For 2009, my favorite song is the apocalyptic We're All Gonna Die, by Mieka Pauley.
(She re-recorded it three years later for her record The Science of Making Choices - and that's a great record, don't get me wrong, with the devastating Never Fuck a Woman You Don't Love among several other killer tracks - but, as usual, I like the first, rawer version better. For me, Gonna Die is a generation-later avatar of the Psych Furs' Pretty in Pink: the second version is good, but the first version kills. So I'm specifying the version from the EP From the Mouth of Paris here.)
Gonna Die is a story-song - one of the reasons why I think it would translate to Hollywood so well. (The sound is another, of course.) The story is simple and straightforward: the title basically says it.
The part that would play over the giant expensive SFX is, of course, the chorus:
The scientists proved it: we’re all gonna die They got charts & equations, the how when & why You did not invite them, and neither did I But they’re here—drink up, we’re all gonna die
This song rocks. I don't know how better to say it. It is big and imposing and just a great rock song, the kind that takes over a room and pushes everything else happening to the side. Again, it would be awesome over expensive Dolby speakers booming in the darkness on all sides in some multiplex, with CGI eye-kicks popping on a giant screen in front of you.
Until that happens, you'll just have to listen to the song, and imagine the apocalypse. That's pretty damn good, too.
[1] Since it is obscure, and I'm choosing the less-known version of an already obscure song, here's a link to it directly on Bandcamp. Really, you need this song in your life.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I knew I'd have a song from The Indelicates on this list. I knew it would be a pretty song, filled with bile and spleen. I kept circling three songs - Savages, Mr. Punch, and this one.
In the end, I picked the song about being a song, the one from the very beginning of their career, the one that sums up all of that bile and spleen, the one that can stand in for all of the rest: We Hate the Kids.
Because Absolutely anyone can play the fucking guitar
It usually takes a band a while to get this cynical, to be this loud and negative about the industry they're in - somewhere later than the next-to-last song on their first record. But that's the secret weapon of The Indelicates: they're always disgusted.
Every generation gets fooled again And every generation is the same And its no good saying its not in your name 'cause it is in your name
Two great voices twine around that theme, cataloging this and that horrible thing about the music industry, throwing them out rapid-fire as if they could keep doing this for days.
Maybe they could.
It is a loud, demanding, driving song, making its case piece by inexorable piece about the horrors and crimes of popular music - the Indelicates have made a bunch of great songs in that mode over their career, and they're really good at it. (Let me also call out Mr. Punch (A Banishing) from the decade-later Juniverbrecher record, another rousing all-these-bastards-must-go song.)
Pop had a beginning, it grew and was tended And now it is rotten. Let it be ended.
This is a song aiming to be the very last pop song, to sum up the entire rotten edifice, to make the case that it is all rotten and unsalvageable, and then end with the very last sound of pop music.
It didn't happen, of course. How could it? But that ambition, that sweep, is what great music is all about: demanding, insistent, unshakeable in its convictions. And it sounds marvelous: as it plays, you can believe that a song could end pop music.
My song for 2007 was then, and still is, Someone to Love by Fountains of Wayne, the band that took its name from a homegoods store I used to drive by almost every single day. (The store is gone now. The band is broken up, too, I think: was even before Adam Schlesinger died.)
Fountains of Wayne was always too smart for their own good, writing pop songs that were uneasily aware that pop songs were silly and ephemeral, songs that twisted their premises one or two more twists tighter, squeezing out the casual audience as they went.
But that extra twist is what made them brilliant, at least for a relentless intellectualizer like me. All the way back at their first album, they had a song named Please Don't Rock Me Tonight. And they had doomed-love songs from the jump as well, with the lovely She's Got a Problem.
But Someone to Love takes it further, in impeccable power-pop format. We get two strong verses, each introducing a main character: Seth Shapiro and Beth Mackenzie. They're both alone in the big city, both have quirky details quickly described, both looking for someone special.
We know how this kind of song goes. We're poised for the meet-cute and the forever-after.
After each verse, we hit that super-punchy refrain:
Don't give out Don't give up One of these nights you might find someone to love
But then the short third verse just murders the whole concept of a love song, in four quick lines.
Seth Shapiro is trying in vain To hail a taxi in the morning in the pouring rain Beth Mackenzie sees one just up ahead She cuts in front of him and leaves him for dead
The entire song stops, catches its breath, and then...
We jump back to the refrain like a whipcrack, but it's almost wordless this last time. There's only one thing they can say, only one last thing left.
Someone to love
That's what we all want. But this is not a song about getting what we want. It's not the song we thought it was at all, but a colder, sadder, devastating song instead. That's probably why I like it so much.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
Some songs are demanding, even if you're not 100% sure what they're demanding. They hit you hard, overwhelm you, tell you their story. You know it's important. You know it's vital. And you make up your own reasons why, or explore what's there, trying to be sure of the truth.
Wake up you've got a lot of things to do Wake up the sun is rising without you
My song for 2006 is Quiet as a Mouse, by Margot and the Nuclear So-and-Sos.
It's the kind of song where it's clear something is wrong from the jump, but exactly what is more murky. "Tourists" are doing things - "rob you of your home," "robbed me of my child" - but is that a euphemism for foreign soldiers? Or your own nation's soldiers? Or worse?
And he said times, they gotta change, but so do we
It's urgent and dangerous, like a war or insurrection. And it's personal in some way - how the speaker feels is important, and shifts from chorus to chorus - "back was broke" to "life and love and hope" to "apathy and hate."
There's a guitar riff in the middle of the chorus that's perfect: a loud buzz saw of an interruption, bam bam bam. This is yet another song that uses that trick that always works: the verses are soft - though they get louder, each to the next - and the end of each chorus ticks up the noise and energy.
I still don't know exactly what this song is about. But I know I don't want the sun to rise without me.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
Way back at the beginning of this series, I named it from a Mountain Goats song, and said that song wasn't part of the main sequence, but they would appear, eventually.
It's that time now. For 2005, the one song I want to remember is Up the Wolves.
I almost included several Mountain Goats songs; I kept moving songs and artists around like a puzzle, to see which ones fit best where. The other MG songs - the also-rans, the ones that didn't fit as well, however I should put it - were No Children and The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton (both from 2002!) and Autoclave and Psalms 40:2.
But I love complicated metaphors, and I love emotional honesty, and I love writers who can yoke those two things together - and Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle is great at all of those things. Up the Wolves is one of his best, most personal metaphors, a cry to his mother about his abusive stepfather that, like the most resonant songs, is also universal.
There'll always be a few things Maybe several things That you're gonna find really difficult to forgive
This is a song about revenge. The whole record, The Sunset Tree, is about powerlessness and abuse, about what the speaker wants revenge for and the complicated dreams of it. Throughout the record is that thread of wanting and seeking revenge, about needing it, about the wrongs that drive that desire and the sense that trying for it is counterproductive and not wanting to give up on something so central even if it's painful - because the pain of looking for revenge is so similar to the pain of being abused.
Our mother has been absent Ever since we founded Rome But there's gonna be a party When the wolf comes home
That's the metaphor: Darnielle, and his sister, as Romulus and Remus. Their mother as if she were absent physically, as she was unable or unwilling to protect them from their stepfather.
I'm gonna bribe the officials I'm gonna kill all the judges It's gonna take you people years To recover from all of the damage
That's the part that always gets me. So many songs make me tear up these days - it doesn't seem to be the kind of emotion, just the strength and power of the emotion.
This is a song steeped in the powerlessness of a child: that raw anger and unhappiness, the deep knowledge that things just happen to you, and you can't control them. And that abuse from a parent is the worst possible thing, and that the child it happens to can do nothing.
But wait. And hope. And dream. Because there's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
Any list like this will have some gimmies - the ones you know from the beginning have to be included. This was one of them, maybe even the first song I thought of. 2004 was locked down from the beginning.
It could only have ever been Hooplas Involving Circus Tricks by Say Hi, the perfect droning epic of life on the road and life in general. I've loved this song from almost the moment I heard it, and I don't think I can tell you exactly why. Maybe because it has that great, unique sound; maybe the way it implies so much more than it says; maybe it just comes together, all of those pieces, in the way a great song has to.
It's loaded with references when the mime speaks about the biz We asked him for a glass that might be clean But he's too busy posing for fashion 'zines
Every band who lasts long enough has at least one "this is what it's like on the road" song - most of them are fairly straightforward. Say Hi - which is mostly just one guy, Eric Elbogen - is not straightforward. Hooplas instead is mostly a metaphor, or a series of interlocking metaphors, with circuses and mimes - but we know what he means.
Hooplas involving circus tricks At addresses way out in the sticks
It's that feeling of waiting for something - in this case, for the show to start, for the point of the whole trip. The band is getting ready, people are telling each other dull stories. You can't hurry it. It will happen when it happens. But you have to get through the time before. The song has that timeless, endless feeling, anticipating and prefiguring, like a wave that never strikes land.
It's crowded, and we're bored.
And what do they find to do and think and talk about and obsess about while they wait? Well, what do young men ever think about?
The pixies in tight green little skirts say it's so much better now that it hurts
I still don't know what that means, if it's profound or just a good rhyme. Maybe it was an overheard line - I can see someone saying "it's so much better now that it hurts" randomly.
And I keep coming back to the sound of it: that electronic drone to keep the beat, the rock guitar that pops in and out for big moments, the singer's almost-whispering, understated voice. This is another song, like so many, that sounds its best as loud as you can stand, that wraps around you and envelops you for the space of four awesome minutes.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
Another quiet, sad song - another one about something broken or not working right.
You're makin' a mess Is that what you do best? Is madness just a hand-me-down?
My song for 2003 is B.P.D. by Over the Rhine. The title probably refers to Borderline Personality Disorder - probably. It's plausible, at least.
The song itself isn't that specific, though. Broken-ness can always be more general and less specific, and it is here.
I'd make it alright But I wouldn't get it right I'm leavin' it alone
It's about someone else, someone specific. That person is having problems - maybe asking for help, maybe just obviously in need of it.
This is clearly not new. The singer cares, but she's hit the point of clarity, of realizing that she can't fix this person, and that trying to fix other people is futile and counter-productive. All you can do is be there. All you can do is watch.
The chorus is largely the word "Yeah" stretched out - that sound of acceptance, finally, that "OK, sure, right" feeling that you've done what you can do, and this is it.
And the sound is mostly quiet: a single strong voice over piano most of the time, repetitive, the same few plaintive chords again and again - like this person asking for help, or needing help, again and again and again.
Cryin' out loud
Cryin' out
You're cryin' out
It's a song of acceptance, another song about that moment - about being there, and knowing there's nothing you can do but just be there. But, you hope, that can be enough.
"This Year" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song from one year of my life. See the introduction for more.
I want to say this was the song of my layoff in 2007, but it wasn't, quite. [1] I got this record in December of that year, a couple of months after I started a new job. But I listened to it a lot in the car, driving to and from my new train station, trying to make sense of my new working life.
And that's a good thing: I don't know if I could have supported the weight of this when I was still unemployed.
Everyone has, I think, a few songs that are central to their conceptions of themselves. Maybe happy songs from important moments, maybe "our song," maybe something bright and happy and cheery from their teenage years. I've always been darker and more cynical that that; I mentioned Matthew Sweet's Knowing People here a few weeks back. This is another one; this one is even more stark.
And everybody thinks that we're in this together And everybody wishes "always be together" But we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone
Oh we're all in this alone And the world is all alone
I roared along with this song, especially that refrain, in my car over and over again. It was a mantra, or a talisman. This is We're All in This Alone by Mendoza Line, the band whose name was mockingly self-loathing. [2]
This is another song that starts up distinctively, with a clicking sound that I've always associated with an old-style movie projector. It's the sound of a story starting, the sound of a beginning, the sound of "let me tell you something true."
And it is just brutal in that truth.
Lately you don't mean that much to me
That is the first line of the song.
Mendoza Line had a lot of back-and-forth, war-of-the-sexes songs on their last few albums - the main singers Timothy Bracy and Shannon McArdle were first marrying and then divorcing during that time, though their interviews at the time claim (in best Richard and Linda Thompson fashion) that the songs didn't actually reflect their relationship; that this was all fictional.
A whole bunch of those songs are great - The Lethal Temptress, It'll Be the Same Without You, It Helps to Leave the House, Morbid Craving - and the bracing, spite-filled, amazing 31 Candles the most of them. (And also listen to McArdle's first solo record, from immediately afterward, Summer of the Whore.)
But Alone is the dark core of that cynicism, the darkest and deepest they ever got, as close to pure nihilism a four-minute pop song ever got.
Occasionally I question my integrity
'Cause I turn a phrase so easily
Into what you want to hear
There's a lot of loathing in Mendoza Line, especially towards the end, both self- and aimed outward. You might have to be a particular kind of person to identify so much with that, but I am, and always have been, that kind of person.
This is still one of my favorite songs. This is still one of the songs that I think of as defining me: that it says something not just true - lots of songs say true things - but something central and important.
We're all in this alone.
And the world is all alone.
[1] That was New Routine, from Fountains of Wayne. I still can't hear that song without thinking about that summer.
[2] Literally. "The Mendoza Line" is baseball-writer terminology for "the worst and/or least qualified Major League player."
