So let's get to what would have been yesterday's pick, an original number by Inara George. I first became enamored of her thanks to Brian Ibbot's Coverville. Brian played her sublime cover of Joe Jackson's "Fools In Love," and I was hooked. She's definitely taking her cues from the easy listening lounge revival that threatened to blow pop culture wide open in the 90's--her songs are low-key, her melodies laid back and her vocals have the steamy class worthy of a Bachrach woman. Incidentally, she's also extremely busy--in addition to her solo work, she's one half of The Bird and The Bee, one half of Merrick and one third of the Living Sisters.
And this song? It's pretty cool. The Q in the title stands for questions...namely, the questions Inara asks the listener that never get answered. As the song goes on its own mellow way, we learn more about the question and what Inara paints is a strange tableau of someone climbing into her bedroom window and sleeping in her bed, where she finds him/her. We never learn what the question is (although we can certainly infer it from the circumstances), but we do learn the results...the breaker-in says nothing, and our heroine is stunned into silence.
For me, what makes this song so charming is what happens at the end--namely, we get a false stop, a pause...and then we get a strange, atonal, hypnotic humming and whistling that ushers in the real ending...I don't know why, but I love this affect, as it's the songwriting equivalent of those little scenes that filmmakers have been tucking away in the middle of the credits as an incentive to stay in the theater until the very end.
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