Around the Year in 20 Songs

This Christmas, my folks got me Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (thanks, mom and dad). It’s a carefully culled collection of eighty-four “folk” songs recorded between 1927 and 1932. Cracking open the record-sized booklet and reading Greil Marcus’s essay about the tunes included within and Smith’s alchemical methods of compiling them, I couldn’t help but think of John Crowley’s Little, Big, a novel that manages to similarly conjure mysterious wonder from apparent ordinariness.

In Smith’s original notes for the anthology, he writes about each song in headline prose. It’s a little-big way of introducing these timeless tunes, and I thought it might be a fun exercise to apply to some favorite tunes of 2011. Here are twenty of the songs I played over and over and over this year.

Arctic Monkeys “Black Treacle”– PLAYING AT REGAL PACE OF COLD MOLASSES, BAND CONFECTS SICKLY SWEET BRIT-ROCK

Coldplay “Every Teardrop is a Waterfall” – GO AHEAD, TURN UP WORLD BEATER’S LATEST AD FOR YOUR EMOTIONS

Cults “Abducted” – GUY/GAL DUO CAPTURES SIXTIES GIRL-GROUP SOUNDS

Cut Copy “Take Me Over” – AUSSIE DANCE-EROOS CONJURE GHOSTS OF MEN AT WORK

Destroyer “Savage Night at the Opera” – SLOW MOTION DRIVE THROUGH EIGHTIES TAKES RIGHT TURN INTO POP MAJESTY

The Drums “Money” – DESTITUTE SINGER WANTS TO BUY YOU SOMETHING, BUT THERE’S A CATCH

Eleanor Friedberger “My Mistakes” – FIERY FURNACE GOES SOLO, RECALLS BIKE CRASH, LEARNS A LESSON

The Horrors “Still Life” – SHIMMERY, ENTRANCING CATHEDRAL ROCK FOR SIMPLE MINDS FANS

Jay-Z/Kanye West “Why I Love You” – OVER CAESAR-KILLER HOOK, RAP KINGS MUSE ON POWER, PARANOIA, AND PAYBACK

Jens Lekman “An Argument With Myself” – SWEDE HAS LATE-NIGHT BICKER WITH SELF; INTERNAL CONFLICT HAS NEVER SOUNDED SO CATCHY

M83 “Midnight City” – HOLY S#%$!

Stephen Malkmus “Senator” – OCCUPY YOUR EARS WITH CAUTIONARY TUNE ON WHERE WE’RE HEADED AND WHAT OUR LEADERS WANT

Neon Indian “Polish Girl”– MORE VIDEO GAME PSYCHEDELIA FROM INDIGENOUS TEXAN: LET’S PLAY!

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart “My Terrible Friend” – CURE-LIKE TUNE JUST, LIKE, HEAVENLY GOOD

Paul Simon “The Afterlife” – ICON’S TAKE ON GREAT BEYOND IS GRACEFUL RETURN TO FORM

Kurt Vile “Jesus Fever”– ESCHEW THE FLU-SHOTS, JESUS FEVER LIFTS HEAVY LIDS TO DREAMY SKIES

The War on Drugs “Baby Missiles” – GET YOUR MOTOR RUNNING WITH JERSEY MASH-UP OF BRUCE AND YO LA TENGO

Washed Out “Amor Fati”– CHILLWAVE PIONEER DESTINED TO CALM LISTENER’S NERVES WITH WARM SYNTH BATH

Wilco “Standing O” – ROUND APPLAUSE FOR CHUGGING ROCKER FROM NO DEPRESSION STALWARTS

Wild Flag “Romance” – PUNKY PAEAN TO MUSIC’S POWER IS POP PERFECTION

Sunny Sides Up

The solo/side project is as old as mythology itself. Back in the day, the Greeks peppered their tales of gods and heroes with thrilling cameos, digressions, and spin-offs. Who among us can forget good old Herakles popping into Hades to rescue Theseus? It’s like back in the fifties when Miles Davis rescued a young John Coltrane from relative obscurity! Of course, the ancients didn’t always need demigods or even the House (band) of Atreus (a clear corollary to Motown) for a worthy solo effort or side project. Sometimes a guy like Ajax grabbed some time in the spotlight. Maybe he wasn’t as epic or timeless as his better-known peers, but he offered a solid diversion nonetheless (not unlike Ringo’s Blast From Your Past).

As far as music goes, this sort of mixing is de rigueur in the jazz world, but not as common – or successful – in the pop scene. Damon Albarn’s brilliant Gorillaz offers an exception here, while his interesting but hardly classic project the Good, the Bad and the Queen supplies the rule. The solo/side project is more sidereal than stellar, more fleeting than Fleetwood Mac. Often, it fills in a gap between bigger releases by the whole band or suggests a testing of the waters. And so it came as a pleasant surprise to me that three of my favorite albums of 2011 were solo/side projects.

In the indie-rock pantheon, it doesn’t get much more Olympian than the Super Furry Animals, Fiery Furnaces, and Sleater-Kinney. Members of these divine bands – Gruff Rhys of SFA, Eleanor Friedberger of FF, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss of S-K (who team up with Mary Timony of Helium to form Wild Flag) – have dropped their more familiar epithets to walk disguised among the mortals. Despite their distinct sonic palettes, Rhys’s Hotel Shampoo, Friedberger’s Last Summer, and Wild Flag’s eponymous debut all share a vacation vibe. Fortunate enough to have caught the tours behind each release, I’d like to briefly describe the results.

On their self-titled debut, Wild Flag play an angular yet poppy brand of rock that evokes both Wire and the Go-Go’s. When M and I saw them at the Paradise, the one extra piece of stage equipment was a fan aimed at Janet Weiss’s raven locks. Apparently, its sole purpose was to provide the beloved 80’s video effect of the slow-motion stiff breeze. No one called attention to this Aeolian touch, but it managed to convey the group’s sense of humor and their ability to play with rock tropes. More importantly, the band played a consistently tight and highly energetic set. Standouts included party anthems “Romance” and “Boom,” which feature handclaps, shout-along choruses, and thundering Zeus-ical drums. The band played the album in its entirety and closed with a bonus cover of Television’s classic “See No Evil.”

As the Fates would have it, the opener for Wild Flag was Eleanor Friedberger. Her solo effort Last Summer is as breezy and ever-so-slightly melancholic as its title. The set itself had a casual groove that matched the velvet jeans Friedberger had donned for the evening. Playing album tracks and even newer songs, she toned down the rapid-fire delivery often showcased in her Fiery Furnaces performances. While highlights “My Mistakes” and “Roosevelt Island” lacked the keyboard fuzz that sounds so dizzyingly pleasant on record, they still worked well because Friedberger packs such great narratives into her lyrics. The former tune wonders, “why keep time traveling / if it doesn’t get better on the second time around?” The latter re-imagines the Velvet Underground’s ominously frenetic “I’m Waiting for the Man” as a spacey romp.

     Finally, the latest Gruff Rhys solo album Hotel Shampoo plays up the singer’s appreciation for the Beach Boys and his openness to . When we saw Rhys at the Brighton Music Hall, he was backed by a great Welsh surf-rock outfit called Y Niwl (pronounced ‘Uh Nule’). Upon taking the stage, Rhys first played a 45 of The Cyrkle’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” a Bacharach/David composition sampled on Hotel Shampoo’s catchy lead track “Shark Ridden Waters.” Other strong showings from the new album included the mod-sounding “Christopher Columbus” and the sweet “If We Were Words (We Would Rhyme).” 

The Whole Album

I was recently talking to my brother about new music, and he happened to mention Wilco. Or maybe I did. At any rate, he said he hadn’t picked up their latest album (The Whole Love). He admitted that after a few spins of their prior effort Wilco (the album), he simply did not listen to it. I concurred. It’s a weak album. Even the band seemed to concede the record’s dullness by giving it such an unimaginative title and lead single (“Wilco (the song)”). So why – Chris rightly wondered – should he bother with another Wilco album after that dry offering? Without providing a compelling argument or any evidence, I told him that The Whole Love is an effort worth hearing. I’ll elaborate on why below.

     Marching in like an uncaged Krautrock lion and stepping out like a folksy prodigal son, The Whole Love derives its integrity from a seemingly disparate jumble of songs and sounds that touch on the many phases of Wilco’s two-decade tenure. I don’t mean to imply that we’re on a trip down memory lane. Rather, the record’s breadth serves as a testament to the band’s versatility; they manage to conjure such incongruent influences as Pere Ubu and Gram Parsons without stretching credibility or sacrificing their own tuneful identity.

Thankfully dropping the self-parody shtick that sunk Wilco (the album), Jeff Tweedy returns to what he does best: delivering crypto-poetic meditations on failed relationships in a voice that both sneers and soothes. Lead track “The Art of Almost” evokes the abstract, multi-colored contraption on the record cover. Over nearly eight minutes, the music’s fits and starts and eventual tumble into chaos echo the “Misunderstood” formula that Wilco so often revisits. This compositional return-to-form is followed by “I Might’s” lyrical one. There are lines hearkening back to those on Summerteeth that made my dad think maybe he didn’t like these guys after all (e.g., the hints of domestic violence on “She’s a Jar” or the murderous dreams of “Via Chicago”). Despite "piss and blood" sno-cones, setting "the kids on fire," and other ominous nonsense, Tweedy insists throughout the rumblingly groovy “I Might” that “it’s alright.” The glockenspiel and roller-rink organ agree.  

The album then slows down and smoothes out with Tweedy’s comfort food vocalizing on tracks like “Sunloathe” and “Open Mind.” The former is ultimately more positive than its downer title suggests. That song title evokes the Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun?” but the guitars and synths sound more like the Beatles’s “Here Comes the Sun.” Obliquely about battling depression, the lyrics ultimately promise, “I don’t want to lose this fight / I don’t want to end this fight.” “Standing O,” a welcome return to the joyous rock of Being There’s “Monday” and “I Got You,” abruptly interrupts all of the mellowness.

Epic closer “One Sunday Morning (Song For Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)” provides the hypnotic yin to the motorik yang of “The Art of Almost.” The song somehow manages to seem shorter than its twelve minutes. Its “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” narration traces a defiant son who grows contrite as the song progresses and who ponders, “how much more I owe than I can give.” It’s a meditatively great ending to a meanderingly great album that embraces the whole of Wilco’s love for music that both challenges and consoles.

Played-Out

How closely does your play-frequency (i.e., how often you play a song in its entirety on iTunes) correlate to your actual favorite tunes? Unless you’re either a musical masochist or don’t really have control over your iTunes account, there’s got to be a connection here. But does that simply mean the most frequently played tracks are likely to be your favorites? I don’t think so.

When I look at iTunes for my top five most played tracks, I get a very narrow window of what I actually listen to. Partly, this aberration is due to how I listen to music. Not always satisfied with the never-ending shuffle of the iPod (a device that – let’s face it – paradoxically promises and then annihilates personal choice from music-listening), I often prefer a record or a cd. When the iPod is on, I might be playing an album, but more likely there’s a playlist going. These playlists are seldom just tailored for M and me, but for larger audiences like family gatherings or friends over for dinner. The top five (with number of plays in parentheses) are as follows:

5. “Steppin’ Out” by Joe Jackson (51)

4. “England” by The National (52)

3. “I Can’t Tell You Why” by Chromeo (54)

2. “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” by Peter Sarstedt (55)

1. “Hey” by Elvis Perkins (57)

Are these my favorite songs of all-time? Are they even representative of my favorite bands or genres? They are not. Rather, they’re indicative of how I listen to music on the iPod. I make playlists that go well with dinner or enjoying a cocktail. Certainly, I love all of these tunes. They’re all part of my “Smooth” playlist, where I’ve tried to generate a mix of songs that I would play if had the unlikely job as a deejay for the notoriously soporific (and dentist’s waiting-room staple) Magic 106.7. This kind of stuff is versatile. It’s easy to ignore if you have no interest in pop music or find it grating (I’m convinced that this description fairly pegs many of the listeners who willfully tune into Magic 106.7 and other such smooth format stations), but it’s also sonically, lyrically, and trivially compelling enough for those who do enjoy a good tune.

     Of the five, Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out” is the big hit. In fact, it’s a bona fide staple of smooth radio. In the tongue-in-cheek liner notes to their DJKicks set, Hot Chip describe the song as a “fun pop workout with sequenced bass line and catchy, melodic male vocal.” That “sequenced bass line” is entrancing and so is “England” by The National. The stately, heavy-lidded composition builds to a percussive crescendo with a minute left and almost always makes me want to play it all over again. Okay, I guess that’s a favorite.

Chromeo’s cover of The Eagles’ “I Can’t Tell You Why” ups the ante on the kitschiness of the original by adding swirling 10CC synths and – most ingeniously – a vocoder for the falsetto chorus. It’s pure fun, while Peter Sarstedt’s rag-to-riches-to-repulsion story of “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)” is stolen taste from Wes Anderson’s Hotel Chevalier. That leaves Elvis Perkins’s “Hey.” This one’s actually another favorite. Somehow both old and new, jaunty and nonchalant, the song’s tone is perhaps best summed up in its chorus: “If it were up to me / I would leave it up to you.”

That makes forty percent of the top-five faves. It might seem like a crummy showing, but if extrapolated for my whole collection the numbers aren’t paltry at all. Statistically speaking, however, I guess there’s a weak to moderate correlation for play-frequency predicting favorites. What are your top five most played tunes?

Sacred Profanity

I was recently compiling a playlist for a friend’s pre-Thanksgiving party. I love making playlists for other people’s parties. It’s a hobby that many may (rightly) consider not only a colossal waste of time and effort, but also a presumptuous and ultimately self-serving favor. No matter, I was doing my best to cater to the audience of mostly thirty-something couples, the majority of whom have kids in tow, without offending anyone’s delicate sensibilities. Last year, that meant scratching Cee Lo’s big hit, whereas this year I was facing the unwelcome charge of avoiding anything from the great Jay-Z/Kanye West collaboration Watch the Throne. All of the album’s dozen tracks are playlist-worthy (a good indicator of classic status). Limiting my options, however, was the not-so-kid-friendly language that is just as consistent as the record’s topicality, brilliant wordplay, sly humor, and undeniable hooks.

Referencing tear-spattered “mausoleum floors” and fallen empires, the album begins ominously and seldom relents from this tainted atmosphere. Forty-five minutes later, the final track “Why I Love You” drops out abruptly after Jay-Z and Kanye quote JC from the Gospel of Luke. In between, the listener travels through musings on fame, success, power, decadence, racism, media, America, faith, and duty. All this heaviness is leavened with the music – at turns urgent and joyful – and the messengers, who acknowledge that though there’s “nothin’ on the news but the blues” (“Murder to Excellence”) they’re here to “bring you out of the darkness” (“Made in America”).

This mix of resignation and inspiration is a delicate balancing act that largely succeeds because of the two artists’ willingness to not only cast a critical eye on the world, but also on themselves. On “That’s My Bitch,” they evoke (and maybe somewhat perpetuate) the stereotype that hip-hop is misogynistic, but deftly turn the cliché on its head by exposing how venerable institutions perpetuate racism; Jay-Z demands, “put some colored girls in the MOMA!”

Nowhere is the dynamic more touchingly demonstrated than in “New Day,” which finds Jay-Z and Kanye offering apologies and advice to their future sons. While the track largely lampoons the media’s tendencies to generalize and amplify negativity, it does not shy away from self-deprecation. Family also figures into "Made in America" where Jay-Z declares, "I pledge allegiance / to my grandma" before later echoing the line with the autobiographical note, "I got my liberty / choppin' grams up." In these moments of sincere vulnerability, the album makes good of its second track’s promise to “Lift Off.”

Ultimately, I decided to include “New Day” on the playlist. There would be plenty of fathers and sons at the party who could hypothetically appreciate its exploration of that relationship. Also, my concerns about offensiveness struck me as a bit narrow-minded. Realistically, no one would pay much attention to what was playing at the party; it's unlikely that those explicit lyrics would penetrate the din of conversation. My deeming the album as potentially offensive suggested a far more disagreeable notion that unjustly plagues hip-hop (and so many movements in the arts): the idea that as a genre it is merely capable of crudely shocking audiences, rather than challenging assumptions and provoking thought. In the effort to not offend one group, I was temporarily blind to how unintentionally offensive I was being to another. 

As for the pre-Thanksgiving party, the playlist never made it on to the stereo. I was not offended. 

Music, Memory, Destroyer

Whenever I hear the Clash's first album, I'm transported back to the summer of 1995 and the passenger seat of a 1983 Volvo sedan. My brother Chris, my friend Paul and I are aimlessly tearing down Route 6 and are suddenly stunned to realize that the police sirens just barely audible over "I'm So Bored With the U.S.A." are screaming for us; we fought the law, the law won. 

Everyone knows music is a potent trigger of memory, but do we ever consider how imprecise its aim is? I’m listening to a guitar fill in “Savage Night at the Opera” from the latest Destroyer album and wondering for the umpteenth time from which New Order song it’s borrowed. Memory tells me it’s from one of the hits on the Substance compilation, so I decide to put it on and get the connection once and for all.

Unfortunately, those high school and college days when I could offer up my attention in sacrifice to the uninterrupted immersion in an album are gone. These days, it is so easy to ignore the music I put on. While I keep an ear perked for that matching sound, the computer or other thoughts distract me. Not surprisingly, that past era of devotion is what forged the strongest bonds to my favorite bands, albums, or songs. So does its passing signal the end of favorites? Is there no more room for a classic to come along and establish itself?

Fortunately, the answer is no on both counts. Since its early 2011 release, Destroyer's Kaputt has become a favorite. It sounds old and new (for me, that’s one of the key criteria when bestowing classic status), and the collection of songs coheres like the chapters of a breezy novella dealing with eavesdropping and being that outsider looking in, passing or withholding detached judgments. An admittedly nonsensical description, but it’s what comes to mind when I hear this elegantly sleazy album.

Kaputt has the sort of smooth sound I reach for to ease into a weekend morning or to send me off to sleep. The album – any album with Dan Bejar, the brains behind Destroyer – is decidedly strange (another good criteria when identifying classics). For one thing, there’s Bejar’s high, expressive voice. It’s a voice that whispers, judges, concedes, and cajoles, while conjuring the distinct tones of Katherine Hepburn (I view the connection as a compliment to both of them). Then there’s the music, which shimmers like an impressionist late-night taxi drive through some beautifully seedy cityscape. It’s a lush combination of Miles Davis’s You’re Under Arrest and the Style Council’s  Café Bleu.

I've searched for that elusive guitar bit for a while now – it's been great to recline on the floor by the speakers and listen to New Order – but I've not found what I'm listening for. My memory got the band right, but the part of the song I so vividly recalled never existed. I can’t help thinking of a favorite Philip Roth line: “Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.” At the risk of romanticizing this unreliability too much, I will say that memory's inaccuracy - imaginative or not - is a great part of what makes everyone's listening experiences so varied and unique. You might hate Kaputt for some of the very reasons I like it. That's fine with me. 


Check out "Savage Night at the Opera" here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_z9vwQLX90&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL (Listen for the New Order guitar part at 3:04-3:30)