Welcome back. Today...a beautiful voice and some weird music.
I know almost nothing about who The Hollow Threads are. Their website only mentions that they are from Pasadena, California and they have an album available for whatever you want to pay on Bandcamp, and....they are odd. Part ambient, part dreampop, the song features three actual lines of lyrics which seems to have nothing to do with the title of the song (Lay out the cards/let’s see who you are/you make me unravel) repeated several times over.
But to me, what makes the song is the dreamy, breathy voice of the band’s Meesha Black--who, frustratingly enough, is not named in any of the publicity information; if it wasn't for YouTube I wouldn't know her name. This woman’s voice is just incredible. While I may be ambivalent about the melody, her I am not. I would love to hear more of in different settings. Plus...downright gorgeous. That’s gotta count for something.
I don’t know if The Hollow Threads are planning to make any more music--or, in fact, they still exist, but I’d love to hear more from this vocalist.
Johnny Cash is gleefully holding a kitten. Your argument is no longer valid.
Welcome back. Today we’ve got one of the Universal Signifiers Of Musical Excellence.
And I’m not really joking. No matter how you feel about country music--I feel it’s okay, but has lost its way in the last few decades, becoming little more than the equivilent of modern R&B for people who like to wear trucker caps and flannels--almost everyone likes Johnny Cash...and Johnny, who wore black to show his solidarity for migrant farm workers, who played concerts in prison, and who in the twilight of his life devoted several albums to proving that every genre has a country side, would have had it no other way. He was a man who used his music to espouse his Christian beliefs (primary amongst them the inherent dignity of all men) quietly and without fanfare. He’s somebody I greatly admire because he used his fame as a tool for social change, caring for it for what he could do with it rather than what it could bring him.
This is, admittedly, a piece of fluff from a compilation album of his love songs, but you can’t deny the way the arrangement just lifts you up. It’s very honkey-tonk, very upbeat (notice how the melody just keeps building and building throughout, only hitting a downbeat at the very end), and with Johnny’s unique vocalization giving it a warmth and intimacy it probably doesn’t earn. Yeah, the song’s message boils down to ‘hey, I like having you around,’ but the way Johnny gives the title line a big ol’ shout at the 1:20 mark gives the song a little extra shot of life. There’s no doubt who you’re listening to, and no doubt who he’s writing about, and you can’t not feel good listening to it. Plus--only two minutes and three seconds, which means it gets on stage, tells you its message, then gets off...and in the world of four minute pop songs that degrade into the title being repeated ninety times on the back end, there’s something to be said for that.
Preachers To The Converted, Straight Outta Georgia...
Welcome to the first This Is Your Song for 2014! Let’s go visit one of the Meccas of Modern Rock for a song that...quite frankly...I find hilarious came up right now (getting into a big ol’ fight with one’s romantic interest will do that to a person).
A bit of Googlemining reveal that The Humms are a band affiliated with the Athens. Georgia scene, although they’re originally from nearby Hartwell. Oddly enough, their homepage is inactive, but they’re still together judging by how up to date their Facebook page is (their twitter, which is @TheHumms, hasn’t been updated since July). They’ve also got an album out from bandcamp that you can download for free. It does seem like they describe themselves as a garage rock band, although the song we’re discussing today has a very poppy feel to it.
And speaking of the song....
This is a fun little number, a very upbeat song about how ambivalent those of us who are...without can be on that most cursed day amongst the perpetually single. The melody is very bright, with a structure which begins with a single guitar, with the other instruments being added gradually until we get a real hootenany feel. The vocals, which I presume are by frontman/mastermind Zeke Sawyer (there are two other members of the band, but Zeke seems to do everything save mop up the studio), have a slight Rod Anonymous feel to it, ungainly and, well, human. And the constant strain of the song is very clear--no one wants to be alone no matter what they say. And yeah, while Sawyer assures us that they might say otherwise, these people are lying (some just find it hard/to tell you how they feel/they say ‘another day, another day, another day’). And I love how the lyrics purport to be universal, but Sawyer very slyly makes it personal. Over the course of the three minutes and change of the song, we learn very clearly that it’s not ‘no one’ who doesn’t want to be alone, but him. The story starts coming out about him and his relationship with a significant other who won’t 'let me in and see what I’m missing out.’ As the song progresses, the charges get more and more specific until we get a very clear picture of what this person is putting Mr. Sawyer through, and how frustrated he is with longing, until he begins addressing the person directly.
Lord knows I sympathize right now...lol.
Anyway, a fun song--fun enough I downloaded the album. No video for this song, but here's one from the album, Lemonland...
"That's right...we're, you know, sensitive and stuff."
Well, I guess this is a pretty appropriate song for today...if it wasn’t so warm out!
No, really. This is appropriate for personal reasons.
And yes, I like Snow Patrol. Sue me.
This song originally appeared on Fallen Empires. This is a very subdued song, very much in keeping with what most people think of when they think of Snow Patrol, with its pared down near acoustic arrangement and its plaintive reading of the lyrics.
Maybe it’s where I am in my life right now, on the precipice of a decision similar to the one being explored here, but I gotta admit it speaks to me. This is a song about that moment of nervous, frightened anticipation when someone--notice that we assume that this is a man simply because the vocals are male; there’s no true indication as to the singer’s identity--commits to someone else. The reference to the island at the beginning represents not a physical place but the state of mind of the singer, that state of isolation the truly lonely get used to....and then this path to the outside world opens up, and you stumble for it, glimpsing someone who could guide you out. The question then becomes who that person is--'are you wolf or are you lamb are you too scared to choose?’ The question then becomes do you follow the person, even if his/her ‘cold hands feel good,’ even if the possibility warms you like a star that bathes you in a ‘dark red heat that burns’....do you give in, or listen to what you’ve learned in the past?
I could be reading too much into this song. For all I know, Snow Patrol is pointing at me and laughing. But given where I am right now in my life, the situation I am in, I am taken with this song. I am a strong believer in signs and portents, and I believe that somewhere, someone is trying to tell me something.
Sorry this one got kinda metaphysical. I promise I’ll do better next time.
In the darkest alley in town, he's got a story to tell...
This time out--an ultra-obscure track by a man who didn’t understand the way movies get made.
Stan Ridgway is, of course, the very distinctive voice behind Wall of Voodoo, an alt-rock band who formed from the ashes of Acme Soundtracks, a company formed by Ridgway to provide scores for horror films. However, the story goes that Ridgway didn’t understand that songs got commissioned for films waaaay before release, so the songs he wrote (like ‘The Passenger,’ a song obviously influenced by Airport ‘77) ended up being performed by Ridgway and his pals at The Masque, an L.A. punk club across the street. Their lively performances there attracted the attention of IRS Records, which led to their recording two albums, which led to the surprise hit ‘Mexican Radio’ on their second album, Call of The West.
The thing is, you could tell that Ridgway’s sensibilities--all spy movies, westerns and film noir--were different from his band mates, which is why I wasn’t surprised he split off on his own after an appearance at the US Festival in 1983. His first solo album, The Big Heat, pretty much cemented my love of him as a solo artist, as these were story songs firmly in the Warren Zevon mode. Ridgway wasn’t content writing fluffy pop songs or quirky alt anthems; no, each of his albums are little short story collections straight out of the hardboiled crime era of the 50‘s, tales full of desperate men, duplicitous women and lots and lots of alcohol. Stan Ridgway is Jim Thompson with a guitar cruising the honky tonks of the southwest. He’s Charles Woolford with a rhythm section waiting for his chance to play the Grand Ole Opry. He’s a pulp story teller at heart, and I love him for that.
Yeah, with that dress, you might forget a kick-ass song at the start...
This track was originally from the disappointing attempt by Wayne Wang to merge punk rock with film noir, 1987‘s Slam Dance (a film perhaps more well known for putting the lovely Virginia Madsen in a slinky black, low-cut dress than anything else), and it’s the first of his solo works to be done specifically for an American movie*. It’s one of my favorite tracks of his, and for a long, long, long time I couldn’t find it anywhere, as the Slam Dance soundtrack went out of print and it wasn’t represented on any of Ridgway’s albums. Luckily, he released Holidays In Dirt, a b-sides and rarities collection in 2002 that contained the track in its full glory.
And what a glorious song it is--pure Ridgway noir, a song about a really, really bad man looking for his next job and utilizing some Hollywood history to create the killer of a chorus. Right from the crunchy synth riff, ably abetted by the woodblock-y persussion (Ridgway is well known for using Latin instruments on his tracks; one night I saw him perform at Maxwell’s on my birthday, and he called me up to play do the flute riff on 'The Big Heat’, which made it one of my best birthdays ever), there’s a sense of menace to this song. And then Ridgway’s whiskey-rough voice comes in promising us that if we know somebody we want messed up, he’ll do it for us--but don’t cross him. Even if you remain friendly with him, ‘it’ll be one punch for my patience/and a drawer full of dirty shirts/we’ll find out just who hurts.’ He doesn’t let up on the menace of this song, even when we get to the lyrical bridge--a trademark of Ridgway songs of this era--and that menace is left in the air long after we get to the fade. This song crystalizes Ridgway’s hardboiled sensitivies...plus there’s that amazing image of the chorus (‘Bing can’t walk/Bob broke both his legs’), an image so strong that there’s a story rattling around inside me that I still intend on returning to one day.
Stan Ridgway, bless his soul, is still out there performing. He recently released a new collection on songs, Mr. Trouble. With my beloved Warren Zevon gone, he may very well be the primary purveyor of musical short fiction alive today.
Here’s the song:
*--Truthfully, there were two songs with Ridgway’s involvement that precedes this one. ‘Don’t Box Me In’ was a Stewart Copeland composition with Ridgway on vocals made for Rumble Fish. And he also wrote the theme song for the French science fiction film Terminus. This is the first song that’s all his own written for an American feature.
"Yep...put one over on all of them...except that Deja fella..."
I know what you’re thinking--Tom’s about to go raving about another of his songwriting heroes.
You would be wrong.
This is, of course, the single every one forgets from Squeeze’s East Side Story, and one of a number of songs done by British artists about WWII war brides (Sure, it’s great, but I still prefer Elvis Costello’s ‘American Without Tears’). The thing that makes this song remarkable is that it, like the rest of that album, reflects Difford and Tilbrook’s experimentation with American pop music styles; this is at its core a country song with a slow twangy shuffle.
I would go on, but this is not the version from East Side Story, but the version from Spot The Difference, from the latest version of Squeeze that is basically Difford, Tilbrook and whoever happens to be on tour with them at the time....and that’s why I’m pissed off by it.
Maybe it’s me, but the nostalgia-grabs that seem to pass for new albums from vintage artists--you know, where they re-record their old material either by themselves or with flavor of the month artists to give them a patina of hipness--bug the crap out of me. They’re the inverse of creativity. They represent the artist being too lazy, or too disinterested in his craft, to create new material. Every time an artist ‘revisits’ his old material, he or she is counting on our nostalgia to line their pockets because, let’s face it, we’re going to eat it up so we can relive our own glory days--and it’s a surer sales juggernaut than putting a collection of new pieces out into the aether.
And while there are a number of people who bother me with their taking this route, Squeeze is amongst the worst offenders. Since Difford and Tilbrook brought this version of the band back into existence in 2007, the only new material they’ve produced has been available only at their concerts or as bonus discs to concert DVDs available only at concerts. And what they’ve released commercially is...Spot The Difference. This is a whole record of re-recordings that are such slavish recreations of the orginal tracks it’s impossible to tell the difference. This isn’t like Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut, where she transformed the originals into new configurations; this is a K-Tel-like soundalike act that made me wonder why I needed these versions when I still have the originals.
I love Difford and Tilbrook, who are amongst the greatest songwriting duos in the history of pop music. I love their solo efforts--I frequently wonder if they’ve revived Squeeze solely as a nostalgia act to generate funds so they can pursue their solo work without interference. But this version of Squeeze, and all the tracks from Spot The Difference, can go dangle from a rope for all I care. If you want a great version of this song, find the original.
Portrait of a misanthropic crumudgeon as a misanthropic firebrand.
Sorry I’ve been quiet for so long...but I’ve brought one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists with me!
This is a live recording from 1979 Los Angeles show I got from a sadly long-gone blog devoted to archiving all those bootlegs us music fans used to get from Music Stores of Questionable Means. Here in New York, there were a number of record stores in and around Bleeker Street that would have this one cabinet in a corner somewhere with stacks upon stacks of cassette tapes with monochrome construction paper covers of badly photocopied pictures of the star contained within. While I never got this particular concert, I did get a number of Robyn Hitchcock and New Order ‘rarities’ from these stores that I listened to until the emulsion wore off. There was something about having this forbidden fruit, even if the sound levels were, well, lousy, that made them all the more special.
I love this song--I used to sing it a lot at karaoke until my good friend Vinnie Bracco started using it as an ‘icebreaker’ song (i.e. the song that a karaoke DJ uses at the top of each rotation to loosen up the crowd and convince them to participate)--and it fascinates me how the practices of the English Press that Jackson is criticizing in this song have become prescient for the American press. This performance begins with Jackson gleefully reading out random headlines from a British newspaper, and they’re no different from some of the stuff I can see being printed in The Daily News and The New York Post. This was meant as satire when Jackson wrote it, and now it’s reality for me in one of the most literate cities in this country.
This particular performance is also interesting because it gives us a glimpse of Jackson’s misanthropic nature back when, in that moment in time when punk and new wave were the king of the musical heap, it was not only acceptable but welcome. Listening to the bootleg straight through, you can’t escape that Jackson has a bit of a contempt for his audience. Oh, he appreciates them on some level and is grateful they’ve come out for his show, sure....but there’s a surliness to some of his banter that serves as a hint of some of the greater ugliness to come. Sure, this misanthropy will wax and wane with his musical periods--when I saw him live during the Big World Tour, he was positively charming--but I can’t help thinking this was one of the times he didn’t feel the need to hide the monster inside, and probably took pride in mocking his audience while basking in its praise.
It’s not my favorite song of this period; I still hold the title track for I’m The Man (another song that seems erieely prophetic here in the Age Of The Tentpole), and contend there are moments of ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ that threaten to make it the most perfect pop song ever. But it’s a great number, and a great little captured moment in the career of this man. Now he seems to have once again retreated into his jazz-o-philic tendencies, but hearing this track reminds you of how he once was one of the nastiest, surliest, pop star ever....
Here is a live performance from 1980 of the song--probably from the same tour as the one this recording is taken from.
