Some Songs Considered

“Accidents Will Happen (Live – June 4, 1978)” – Elvis Costello and the Attractions
(Words/music: Elvis Costello, available on Armed Forces (Bonus Disc), Rhino 2002 and Live at Hollywood High, Hip-O 2010)

In the opening line of “Accidents Will Happen,” on Armed Forces, Costello declares, “Oh, I just don’t know where to begin.”  It may, somewhat ironically, be one of the more clichéd ways to begin a story, but in this case Costello uses it to immediately call attention to the perspective in the song.  If he doesn’t know the best way to tell the story, he seems willing to approach it from a few different angles.  Putting aside the song’s hook and the opening line, Costello moves through different points of view as the song progresses – telling the story as a third person narrator in the first verse, speaking directly to a second person in the second verse, and finally landing on “we” in the song’s bridge. Perhaps these are different fragments of stories put together for the big picture, but they seem like the same story from different angles.  The bits in the first person – the introduction, the hook, and the “I know” repeated at the end – frame these pieces as part of a single narrative.

On this recording, Costello and long-time keyboardist Steve Nieve give the song a slower, somber interpretation.    In particular, Costello’s slower pace and Nieve’s blue notes put Costello’s narrative upfront with a sadder tone.  It’s also interesting that he sets up the songs slightly differently, beginning with the chorus before starting.  Perhaps the arrangement tips my interpretation this way, but this version emphasizes the narrator’s involvement in the storyline, making the different shifts in perspective his attempt to find traction and start to make sense of this emotional accident. 

More on Elvis Costello and the Attractions: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Just My Imagination” - The Rolling Stones
(Words/music: Barrett Strong and Norman Whitfield, available on Some Girls, Virgin Records 1978)

For a long time, I was largely indifferent to the Rolling Stones.  I chalk this up to the two ways that I knew the band.  First, years of classic rock radio listening squeezed out the charm out of most of their singles; I had heard “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” enough times to where I could recite it in my sleep.  I also knew the Rolling Stones generally as caricatures – they were the old guys who must have named themselves when they were playing during the Flintstones’ time.  I’d see them pop up on TV from time to time – specifically, any time they started another marathon stadium tour – and jumped to the conclusion that they filled stadiums solely on nostalgia.  I didn’t doubt that they were once great, but I assumed they were a long time past their prime.

On a whim, my friend Matt and I went to go see the Martin Scorsese directed Shine a Light in an IMAX theater back when it came out.  We went in the middle of the week so we among about a half a dozen people, making it the smallest audience the Stones played to in years.  I was blown away by the band – the film (and, to be fair, the IMAX setting I’m sure) made them loud and exciting, but underneath the giant screen and booming sound system were the same two things I founnd when exploring their catalog deeper after the film.  First, this was a band that had a tremendous amount of fun on stage – the members were smiling and goofing around playfully, and it translated to their music.  I was also impressed at the range that the band (with the help of their axillary musicians) could cover. 
Their cover of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination,” one of my favorite parts of the film, showed both of these elements.  The Stones moved out of their blues-based comfort zone and made this Motown standard swing.  If a lot of their songs suited smoke filled rock clubs, this is a song for summer afternoons, with Keith Richards’ guitar sounding playful and Mick Jagger sounding like he’s having fun.  Suddenly, it dawned on me: this band still performs because they enjoy it.  As soon as I came to that realization, I understood their continued charm – when a band this good has fun, it’s easy to have fun with them.  I guess that translates to arenas of thousands and IMAX theaters of a half dozen.

More on The Rolling Stones: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“So It Goes” – Nick Lowe
(Words/music: Nick Lowe, available on Jesus of Cool, Radar Records 1978)

My experience with Nick Lowe’s catalog suggests that he’s a remarkably consistent songwriter.  I realize that this sounds like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it with a great deal of respect.  Lowe navigates different styles with the same melodic charms.  On the Jesus of Cool album, reissued by Yep Roc last year, Lowe’s songs flirt with reggae, disco, and rockabilly at different points.  “So It Goes,” a shuffling power-pop song, finds Lowe somewhere in the middle of all of these genre extremes.  While it isn’t as adventurous as some of the other songs, Lowe’s focus lies solely on his two biggest strengths – his clever way with words and his knack for spinning a melody.   He sings the song in a way that makes him sound a bit like Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy, and while “So it Goes” lacks the same muscle as a lot of the best Thin Lizzy songs, it has a similar energy.  Looking back, the connection between Lowe and Elvis Costello makes perfect sense, as Costello’s first few records (produced by Lowe) sound very similar (not to mention that the covers to Jesus of Cool and This Year’s Model strike me a similar in style).  Costello took Lowe’s melodic sensibility and genre curiosities to the masses, yet this shouldn’t diminish Lowe’s reputation as both a performer and a songwriter.  At his peak, his songs stand up with Costello’s catalog and his contemporaries as well, additionally having a hand in crafting a sound other power-pop acts would try to emulate.

More on Nick Lowe: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“What a Fool Believes” – The Doobie Brothers
(Words/music: Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, available on Minute by Minute, Warner Brothers 1978)

Liking something ironically and having a “guilty pleasure” are cousins of each other; they are both ways that we try to maintain enough distance from something that we think might sabotage our taste.  I’m not sure which one is worse – the “so bad, it’s good” argument of liking something ironically or the “I’m too cool to like this” suggestions of deeming something (like a Michael McDonald song) as a “guilty pleasure.”  In most cases, these are both excuses for liking something that other people would write off without much thought – a way to protect ourselves from our friends’ judgmental glances.  More often than not, we like these things far more than we want to let on and something inside us gives the need to qualify our decision to enjoy it.  It’s kind of absurd – we either like something or don’t like it, regardless of the reasons why.  If you like watching the kind of movies the robot puppets watch on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 then you are enjoying the movie watching experience (and, in a sense, you’re enjoying the filmmaking process even more than in a movie where the production quality isn’t the most interesting thing).  If you like a pop song that maybe doesn’t fit in with the bands that you normally tell people that you like, doesn’t that mean that the song is done so well that it overcomes your aversion to that genre?  In that sense, these are backhanded compliments that shift the focus away from the work and towards the critic; we’re not making comments on what we like, we’re trying to play damage control with our taste.

I’m not immune to this tendency, although I’ve become better about it over the past few years.  My personal relationship with “What a Fool Believes” probably started this way around the time that Michael McDonald made his pop cultural resurrection, and even its staunchest defenders must acknowledge that production tastes have changed since 1978.  Even with its slick exterior, “What a Fool Believes” boasts an immaculate arrangement.  McDonald and Loggins (hilariously parodied in the first episode of the web series Yacht Rock) take their tale of a lovesick gentleman and drape it in McDonald’s distinctive falsetto and the signature keyboard riff.  The arrangement works to maximize these two elements, in particular in the pre-chorus section.  This is where McDonald gives his best vocal performance by wringing as much as he can out of each note for a few lines.  After McDonald’s melodramatic phrase (remember, melodrama and heartbreak are frequent companions), the arrangement drops down to the bare essentials for a couple lines.  Only the piano, bass, and hi-hat accompany McDonald as he catches up the story before the main riff comes back and whisks the song into falsetto heaven.  Sure, this isn’t a challenging work of popular art, but it’s a damn good song – and the sooner we can stop feeling guilty about liking a song that has a killer medley and lends itself to hilarious amateur renditions, the sooner we’ll all be happier.

Then again, that might just be what a fool believes.

More on The Doobie Brothers: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm

“Moving in Stereo” – The Cars
(Words/music: Greg Hawkes and Ric Ocasek, available on The Cars, Elektra Records 1978)

So over the weekend I upgraded my computer’s speakers (which by my estimate, were four times older than my actual computer) to a modest yet fancy (and relatively cheap) 5.1 setup.  I remember when I got the other set of speakers, including the first subwoofer I ever had, I played Led Zeppelin’s “Communication Breakdown” and was nearly blown back by the sound rattling my computer chair.  This time, perhaps because I mentioned it in a post last week, I wanted to play “Moving in Stereo” to hear how the multi speaker setup sounded.  Whenever I think about “Moving in Stereo,” I think of a specific time in high school driving a friend home.  It was late at night and foggy, and as I was trying to retrace my steps out of an unfamiliar neighborhood in a neighboring town, the local radio station went silent for ten seconds, followed by their weekly test of the Emergency Broadcast System.  The silence followed by the distinctive piercing sound threw me off guard, but the DJ must have had a sense of humor, or at least a sense of the moment, by coming out of the EBS test and several seconds of silence with “Moving in Stereo.”  It was the first time I heard “Moving in Stereo” and paid attention to it, so I wasn’t prepared for bassist Benjamin Orr’s creepy vocals swirling around me.  With the rolling fog and eerie suburban silence as a backdrop, it almost made me feel like The Cars were haunting me.  Almost.

Still, while I immediately think of those vocals as the benign ghost of synthpop’s past, the signature keyboard part stands out even more.  If, like today, I think about the way Orr sings the word “tremolo” before listening to the song, I’m walking around whistling the melody from the keys.  As a melodic phrase, this line works because it doesn’t try to do too much.  Instead, the melody moves at the same deliberate pace as the rest of the song while still cutting through the strange ambient noises in the background.  It’s a tribute to Ric Ocasek’s commitment to efficient and effective arrangement both in his songwriting and later on in his production work.  While others might have drenched the song in eerie sounding synthesizers, Ocasek and keyboard player Greg Hawkes rely on a sort of musical agoraphobia, letting the open spaces in the arrangement linger just long enough to fall on the creepy side without becoming uncomfortably oppressive.  While many of you associate “Moving in Stereo” with Phoebe Cates moving in slow motion (and who would blame you?), I can’t shake that odd, dark moment where The Cars creeped the hell out of me.

More on The Cars: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm