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“These Days” – Nico
(Words/music: Jackson Browne, available on Chelsea Girl, Verve Records 1967)
Enough has been written about “These Days” having this melancholy cloud over it. I don’t need to tell you about its lyrically fixation on missed opportunities, or that most of the Velvet Underground played on Nico’s album, or that Jackson Browne (a criminally underrated songwriter, in my book) wrote this song as a teenager, or that Andy Warhol pulled most of the strings on this album. I don’t need to mention how Wes Anderson uses this scene to introduce Gwyneth Paltrow’s character in The Royal Tennenbaums (in a scene where Luke Wilson speaks volumes with his body language). This is the public persona of this song, and chances are that when you hear this song, you think of one of these things, and to a point rightfully so, as almost all of them are more significant than Nico, the German model turned singer.
That being said, Nico deserves more credit than she gets for this definitive version of the song. She sings the song in a dry, slightly detached way, and while that might sound like criticism in other circumstances, it’s an effective treatment for the song. Her voice fits the protagonist’s persona as someone jilted by mistakes and misfortunes in the past, and she sings that she’ll taking safer choices from now on. Rather than celebrating stability, Nico makes Browne’s words sound resigned and defeated – the youthful days of possibility are now the older days of “what if”s and “no thanks.” In the hands of a singer with a sweeter sounding voice, “These Days” would sound hollow. Instead, its Nico’s icy demeanor that makes her sound like she’s lived through the years that brought her to “These Days.”
More on Nico: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm
