Platinum status
Good evening—hope things are getting better. Going by the top YouTube comments on every single song, people are digging up a lot of old favourites lately. I don't stop to smell the roses too lightly, but when I do I spend longer with them than I used to, and I've been face-deep in this thicket of ambivalent songs for ages now. I made a playlist too, if you wanna follow along: Apple Music | Spotify.
Burt Bacharach and Hal David – Something Big (Living Together, 1973)
Easy listening this century feels like a promise that one day there’ll be such a thing as easy living. I wish there were more music that entertained that possibility. Alas, “Something Big” isn’t it. Between its breezy major-sevenths is the sad truism that 'making it' isn’t real but culture is structurally dependent on you thinking otherwise. Like most people growing up between late capitalism and hyper-late capitalism, Jim O’Rourke’s perfect 1999 album Eureka introduced me to this song. I slightly prefer Burt and Hal’s version if only for the slight rubato on the horn stabs at the end, although Edith Frost’s performance on Jim’s version is atom-splitting.
David Sylvian – Silver Moon (Gone to Earth, 1986)
David should be mentioned more often alongside Scott Walker, Mark Hollis, Enya, et al., as top-shelf artists with good looks, good hooks and perfect pipes, packing in their saleable attributes to service a dogged commitment to idiosyncrasy. As a low-key rock star with the new wave group Japan, David's trajectory skewed left after falling in with Robert Fripp and Ryuichi Sakamoto etc. and putting out four solo albums through Virgin Records. Gone to Earth, the third and best, is very eclectic, tied together by David’s penchants for gothic romance and turning the reverb sends a little too clockwise. His work ever since has been patient, exploratory, and melancholic, e.g. his collaboration with Fennesz on the 2004 record Venice, which always felt to me like the sound of a future that could’ve been.
Tori Amos – Blood Roses (Boys for Pele, 1996)
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’ve been writing songs, in tandem with my cruel and usual experimental tilts, and it’s fun taking earnest pot-shots at a discipline I assumed couldn’t be pried from the skid marks where a music industry used to be. I last wrote songs when I was like 19, and thankfully no one ever heard them because they had lyrics like “born to disappear, who was I to interfere with the sky.” But the rhythm and metre of a lyric made more sense than my wonky serotonin, so I wrote the stresses and consonants first, then filled in the gaps with words that seldom made sense. Trisyllabic metres were and are a favourite, so perhaps you'll know how I felt when I heard Tori’s lyric “You’ve cut out the flute from the throat of a loon,” or “I shaved every place where you been, boy.” The way the tubular bells start when she sings that last line is devastating; Lana Del Rey does the same funereal lament thing in “Video Games” to similarly ambivalent effect, which I’ve written about before. Tori is wildly inspiring, and I urge any holdouts to dive into the firenado that is her early discography.
Donna Lewis – Simone (Now in a Minute, 1996)
The Welsh artist’s most popular song, “I Love You Always Forever,” has the dubious accolade of spending the longest period at No. 2 on the Billboard 100 without ever reaching top spot (nine weeks). It split the difference between adult contemporary and bubblegum pop, with just enough muted electric guitar (and over-exposed fisheye cinematography) to signify alt-rock edge, inadvertently laying the groundwork for twenty four years of daytime life insurance ad soundtracks. The merits of Now in a Minute are a bit more nuanced, but it all comes back to her generously textured, soft-soft-loud voice. “Simone” has the vibe of being an obligatory ballad on an album predetermined to float to platinum status exclusively on the coattails of its lead single, but for me it somehow captures the directionless hiraeth I've felt for a few years now.
Van Morrison – Wild Honey (Common One, 1980)
Christians have nice silences in their music, as if God resided between the notes. Christians also venerate dying on a hill, and so it seems that Sir Van, after 55 years of music at the mystic Christian precipice, has found his hill to die on: lockdown is tantamount to enslavement. A few days ago, yelling over his gilded cross, he announced three anti-lockdown songs that gratify every caricature of the self-oppressing knight/right/white. You have to go back forty years to find a time when silence was virtuous for him. “Wild Honey” not only has the third sax solo in this playlist but some precious moments where he breathes the quietude. At a crucial moment just before the chorus, the snare cracks, and for one shimmering beat, the trap door opens and the band fall away, and over the next bar they climb back out and explode. Simplest trick in the book, and yet. (Exhibit B: the final couple of choruses in the Eagles’ “Take it to the Limit.”)
Van has called Common One his personal favourite album. He has a tantric harmonica solo (really) in “When Heart is Open,” and a cringey stream-of-consciousness section in “Summertime in England,” grunting the names of all the white male writers he likes. It’s still pretty fun. Half the appeal of mid-career Van is that his many flaws make the effort of untangling the lurid weirdness of his songwriting more rewarding, like a Rubik’s cube painted by Kinkade.
Sandro Perri – Wrong About the Rain (Soft Landing, 2019)
Idk I just think he’d give really nice hugs.
xx