song of the week

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 …

One of the best moments of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” is easily missed.  With her I-mean-it head-shake framed by those perfect immobile curls, Gore gives us the elongated “Hoss” (0:38) just after the first chorus. “Hoss”– this whole song is addressed to you. Used as slang for a horse-like man with bravado, “Hoss,” reminds those beasts— you don’t own much.  A horse can be tamed, and those that …

This song does not let me feel at ease about living in an era addicted to war.

Woodkid’s portrayal of a solider echoes a changing approach to the tragic jubilees of nationalism. We are cast from home, cold, fighting, but, “I want to feel the pain and the bitter taste / of the blood on my lips … again.” The determined voice carries the listener into the psyche that “wants” these …

What is more seductive than an illusion? Reality is for bills and dryer lint. The part of us that once turned mud into baking delicacies and passing cars into monsters doesn’t want to be quieted. Maybe we can’t always Peter Pan our way through life but how we view the world is sometimes a conscious choice. Who wouldn’t choose a happy illusion over a painful reality? Seeing beyond the actual …

This song follows me from November to mid-February.  California’s winter is really autumn, a season that misunderstands itself as much as Lekman’s speaker misunderstands his lover.  Sunlight persists, a wan, desperate gold if not overcast into glacial blue.  There’s a taste of frost but everything is only damp.  Seeking warmer climates or oblivion, a bird flies into your window and gives itself a concussion.

This is the winking, openly melodramatic universe …

Appropriately, I’d just spent an afternoon sorting a spreadsheet when I found Joni Mitchell’s “Electricity” coming in through my headphones. “Electricity” is on the same album as “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” but here I think Joni captures the human-as-machine more precisely. It is a love song with mechanical logic, and it turns two people into the Plus and Minus in a broken electrical circuit. Throughout, Joni is …

You sing a song and you tell them when it is over. You are very gentle in the beginning and then there is the dance. It is a melting; a snowstorm. It is a fucking hurricane. It is a swell that is love and then the thrashing. There is a theory of tango I cannot recall the reference to, where the strong(er) is pursuant and the gentle is always in …