Steve Reynolds Program - Good Fortune
Watched the first episode of season three of The Mandalorian. There better be a big twist coming up, because if the whole season is this side quest to go get something from under the mines of Mandalore so he can have his Official Member Card back (or something like that— my brain does not retain science fiction plot points well) I’m gonna be annoyed. What has made the show work is Din Djarin’s protecting a sweet little 50 year old baby from harm. It gives the show emotional stakes. Grogu was just used for comic relief the whole episode. He needs to grow too. I bet they right this spaceship soon — they do have story conferences and whatnot over there at Lucasfilm, but now I sound like the nitpicking fanboy I don’t like.
Song #27
Good Fortune
by PJ Harvey
In 2000, PJ Harvey put out Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, sometimes called her “New York album” with its references to NYC, the place she lived for nine months before recording it. Polly Jean protests it really isn’t that; she lived in Dorset for part of the time she made the album (those must be the songs with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke moaning on them). Hey, she doesn’t reference Dorchester or Corfe Castle in any songs on this. She refers to Brooklyn and the Empire State Building so a New York album it is.
Its release coincides with my time in pre-9/11 New York City. I felt (or imagined) her newcomer’s love of that city at that same time. One facet of life in New York is the fact that your cramped, tiny apartment compels you to go out and do things in the world, along with a lot of other people in the same situation as you. So when you are out on the street, in the bars, or on rooftops, you sense a hum of energy created by everybody around you, along with a storied past and promising future for all.
Harvey captures that feeling in the title of Stories’ first single “Good Fortune” and with the music too. The main guitar progression, two simple chords briskly strummed, prefigure the Strokes’ album Is This It, released the year after this, but takes its own identity with PJ Harvey’s incredibly powerful voice. The melody and phrasing evokes Chrissie Hynde and that’s a good thing, especially combined with her repetition of syllables at the end of each line (“Fay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ace”)
The song’s lyrics are a dramatic change of pace from songs off her earlier albums. Gone are the intense and violent mix of infatuation of violence. No reworking of dark blues here. This starts with throwing her “bad fortune off a tall building” and being with someone new in Chinatown. The lines “And I was really in love/in Chinatown/hungover/You just showed me what I could do” belie that city magic where even a hangover is celebrated, because it reminds you of the ecstatic night before.
The chorus enlarges on this fairy tale from the city. “And I feel like some bird of paradise/My bad fortune slipping away.” The city becomes her source of fortune here. She feels belonging. “And I feel the innocence of a child/Everybody's got something good to say” for me shows the true joy you get when you see people around you getting along with each other. The satisfication of function.
The second verse moves from Chinatown to Little Italy (“leetle IDD-alee”) and her admiration for the guy with her gets even more intense. Saying he’s “too beautiful for words.” Then in the outro she imagines themselves as Bonnie and Clyde, wanting to keep the intensity of her joy going.
I’m sure that intensity waned, but that moment is now documented in song. As she sang the feeling I had felt in a city not yet impacted by a bizarre and then-unthinkable act by zealots, we all can feel some of that good fortune recorded onto tape. We’re lucky it was captured.
the in conclusions
This issue’s Song I’m Mad I Forgot To Put On The List is “Phantom of My Own Opera” by Daniel Johnston. I played the cassette More Songs of Pain until it was demagnetized. This opening track always got me.
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