song of the week

Van Morrison was born with sixteen red hairs damply coiled on a chest already barrel-thick. His urine smelled of peat. His father said if he ran too fast, his soul would lag behind his body, exposing him to danger in the form of timber trucks and falcons. His mother read to him from the epics of Ossian while four winds from the Baltic stirred the scraggled curtains. At school he …

This B-Side originally backed the 1982 single “Lovely Money,” but I own it on the vinyl 1985 compilation Damned But Not Forgotten.  Talking about it now feels awkward–if I focus on what The Damned meant to my fourteen-year-old self, that’s mawkish.  If I discuss the lyrics or the music, it’s redundant.   It’s too personal, like talking about my family and expecting others to experience them as I do.  Maybe that’s …

Dare yourself not to sway, ever so slowly, to the bluesy, funereal cadence of this tune. This is a death march with swagger, a black and chrome hearse hauling through mud. This is a baby grand piano roped to the trunk and snare hits so late, they nearly yank the entire procession to a halt. Cave’s self-deprecating, self-aggrandizing hero does double-duty as both the captain and cargo of this ill-fated …

The lyrics to this lo-fi German song are few. They read like a scrawled diary, wistfully observing that the seasons revolve in an endless, disorienting loop. One year can seem so very long. On a November morning, the ripple of guitar and bursts of muted cymbals reflect the whisper of the snow. Listening, I thought of everything that tendered this moment. Leaving Berlin and moving to New York to start …

The song on repeat. Not just now, always. A filter. Emotional vocabulary. The teeth in my mouth during sleep. Is this what we love?

I’m very scared for me, that I’m becoming too old to have a song, as you listen, become one of those memories that eviscerates all other memories. This song: Stipes’ trembling voice on “cry” and “very” and “eviscerate,” the undersound of mandolin strum and crickets. Like lines …

Horizontal lines and vivid blues: listening to “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” is a visual experience for me. I see shapes and colors when I listen. This song has all the elements of literary fiction — characters, setting, narrative arc — but moves like a prose poem, building and unspooling tension. The lyrics are deliciously complex. Listening once, it’s sexy in a universal way; strangers meet, passion acts as a magnet. …

After the “Wish You Were Here” homage/ entry, the song splashes down into the aural pretense that we’re swimming through the yolk of beautifully wasted lives. Pitched on the tonal tents of harmonied AAAHHH’s and aaahhhh’s, the baseline navigates trick stairs while helium powered la-la-la’s whisp into the elsewhere. It could be snowing outside, decidedly summer, either way it’s serene, though not necessarily bliss. Listening, otherworldliness and ether materialize into ends-of-seasons, …

About a year ago, I tore into a stack of old poetry, to add new layers, to return to another time in my life, and to have a dialogue with my younger self. I worked in a frenzy for several months. The result is a book Underdays, coming out in 2015 from Notre Dame University Press, and during the editing process I played songs from younger days.

One of these was …

Dear Jackie,

I’ve really had my hands full since you last wrote! I recently met this talking cat who happens to be an artist. She is making these prints of illustrations of animals that come from a bilingual children’s book. She is having all sorts of problems with these prints. You can tell by the way she scrunches up her little nose.

“One of these prints is of a frog,” she explains. …

Although newer artists like Real Estate and Arcade Fire have made their nostalgic visions of suburbia central to their songwriting, I think their musical interpretations are tame when compared to Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music’s. The sleaze and level of pure prog-rock throttle in Roxy Music is that perfect balance of pop entertainment, which makes me want to blast this song from my car while driving down the Sunset Strip …