#428 The Best Album of 2001, Round 1 Match #7: Cake vs. Margo Guryan
Hey folks!
Today’s Best Album of 2001 match is:
#17 Cake, COMFORT EAGLE
vs.
#112 Margo Guryan, 25 DEMOS
To vote, follow this link to the Google Form. You will need a Google login to vote. If you can’t or won’t have one, let me know ASAP (either through this newsletter, my email [kentmbeeson@hey.com] or on the Best Album Brackets Bluesky account) and I’ll see what I can do.
We have one Designated Cheerleader today, it’s for 25 DEMOS, and it’s from @somejerkoff.bsky.social. Take it away, SJ!
When given carte blanche to choose an album to be included in the 2001 tournament, I opted for a compilation of demos from the 1960s and 1970s that will almost certainly lose to Cake. Why? Because I can. And also, my only other chance to submit a Margo Guryan album—her sole studio LP, Take a Picture—would be during the 1968 tournament. If we follow the current pattern and don’t skip around, this would occur around 2046, right after the Best Album of 2021 Tournament. Some of you will be dead.
While Take a Picture is one of my absolute favorite albums, my selection is not simply a backdoor way to get people to listen to that one. (Though, if you like 25—or 27, or 29, or 28—Demos, by all means, please listen to that album.) While seven of these tracks had more fleshed-out studio takes included on that record, the rest of these songs had never been released until 25 Demos. It’s a shame that her debut didn’t move units and a follow-up studio album never happened, but the miracle of 25 Demos is that, thanks in large part to Guryan’s voice and piano playing, these never-before-heard demos don’t need any additional frills to shine. There’s a beautiful simplicity to these tracks that need no improvement.
Guryan came to pop music in a roundabout manner. By the time she penned her first pop song (“Think of Rain”), she had already studied classical and jazz piano at Boston University and written for and/or played with such jazz greats as Chris Connor, Dizzy Gillespie, Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. One listen (and then, in her words, about a million more) to Pet Sounds, particularly “God Only Knows,” rewired her perceptions of what pop music can do. Her jazz and classical background now had a home in pop music, and her sophisticated arrangements could now take flight. (Highlighting this classical connection, her music is often subcategorized as Baroque Pop.) Fancying herself still more songwriter than singer at this point, Guryan wrote and recorded a number of demos to shop to other recording artists. The likes of Claudine Longet, Julie London, Spanky & Our Gang, Glen Campbell and Bobbie Gentry—and even Harry Nilsson, though sadly his recording has never seen the light of day—sang her tracks, but even in their demo versions, the Guryan cuts supersede them. Just compare Longet’s version of “I Don’t Intend to Spend Christmas without You” with the one on 25 Demos—it’s Guryan’s I want to hear every December.
Fitting for commercial pop music at the time, Guryan’s lyrics were typically about love (or in one lovely case, love songs themselves). In her liner note for the standout “Most of My Life,” she states plainly: “Love songs were once my ‘thing.’ This was one of them.” She’d occasionally stray a bit—“The 8:17 Northbound Success Merry-Go-Round” feels like an outlier in the first half—but one of the great joys of this album is hearing the direction her songwriting took after the 1960s. It’s a delightful jolt when “The Hum” kicks off a quartet of songs that directly or indirectly reference the Watergate scandal. (You won’t hear it here, but she clearly enjoyed this mode of songwriting, as one of the only tracks she released following 25 Demos was explicitly critical of George W. Bush.)
The release of 25 Demos in 2001 was the result of the Take a Picture LP becoming a highly sought-after collector’s item, especially in Japan, in the 1990s. Reissue labels continued to adjust and amend 25 Demos in the 25 years since. And the last couple years have seen a Numero Group box set and a Sub Pop tribute album devoted to Guryan. I’m just doing my part to keep the appreciation train rolling.
Thank you, @somejerkoff!
Click here to see the current results for the entire tournament, and click here to see the current results for the prediction bracket contest.
Yesterday, #80 Roots Manuva, RUN COME SAVE ME defeated #49 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, NO MORE SHALL WE PART, 127-88-1.
Thanks,
Kent
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