21. Remember?

A Little Night Music (Columbia Masterworks, 1973);
composed by Stephen Sondheim

I have never been a musical theater guy, but I can carry a tune in an untrained way, so there were incidents in my student days. Yet we never went to bed together, even metaphorically, because notwithstanding the ubiquity of the form, I find musicals fundamentally harder to understand than opera – the discursive shift of extending or interrupting dialogue by breaking into song requires usages that simply weird me out. One of the reasons I esteem Stephen Sondheim apart from my belief in not arguing with wonders of nature is that all the difficulties and all the rewards of the form come in one full-strength package. This is my favorite of his musicals because it sounds the most distant from American vernacular without really sounding European. Set in Sweden around 1900 (and based on a Bergman period film from 1955), you think you hear bits of Grieg or Strauss, but it is a different music for a nether world in which ghosts break into song because that is the only way they can remember their lives. This is a quintet waltz in which singers recall trysts with each other that they may or may not have been physically present for.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

20. Could It Be I'm Falling In Love

Spinners (Atlantic, 1973);
composed by Melvin and Mervin Steals

Could it be my favoritest song of all time? Steady, now. I feel at a loss about this song, occasionally, because I constantly forget that Thom Bell did not write this like he wrote “Betcha By Golly, Wow” for the Stylistics, but he sure produced and arranged it, and that is the most sensuous of rubs. The rich orchestrations of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s production style characterized what was labelled “Philly Soul” in the ‘70s; Thom Bell was always a seeming adjunct, but sort of the way Billy Strayhorn was to Duke Ellington. Bell had plenty of hits and each of his productions always sounded just a little beyond whatever the Gamble & Huff norm might be said to be. They were almost baroque in the way Burt Bacharach’s were – the break on this song has a harpsichord solo, interpolating the sharply articulated string and horn parts – but the words set this music, not the reverse, and the combination sets an unusually anticipatory as well as seductive mood. Since the Steals brothers’ lyrics do not poop out after the first chorus like Linda Creed’s did, you really do wonder why Bobby Smith does feel so . . . funny.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

19. Lunch

Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope, 2024);
composed by Billie Eilish O'Connell and Finneas O'Connell

It was not until I heard this that I realized how fervently I had been anticipating a full on dance song and even fuller on sex song from Billie Eilish, without having the foggiest notion that I was. Not that I had any doubt she and brother Finneas had it in them, or anything else, insofar as even the relative juvenilia on Don’t Smile At Me pops almost as hard as the stuff on the debut, and without a lot of industry types getting in the way, they have not made even an ordinary record yet, let alone a bad one. “Baby I think you were made for me / Somebody write down the recipe,” she goes, and when you read it back you immediately realize that the words in your head are probably nowhere near close to the way she sings it, slipping and sliding lubriciously over what sounds like the evenest of rhythms, but is not. And while this music really is about her – Finneas’s own merely pleasant solo music barely gets out of the driveway – it is also about the way they hear each other. “She dances on my tongue,” but that is hardly all that does.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

18. Coming Together

Frederic Rzewski: Attica / Coming Together / Les Moutons De Panurge (Opus One, 1974); composed by Frederic Rzewski

Art is the accumulated body of practices by which humans combine perceivable elements in such a way that those elements store and radiate more information than they otherwise would – information of what lawyers might term an inadmissible kind. Politics is the brokering of power to withstand perceived threats. Occasionally the two overlap, and the only real difficulty with that is that when it even more occasionally works, it often induces some to believe that art always has a political dimension – or ought to. But like they say about correlation and causation. In September 1971, the state of New York suppressed a prison insurrection by storming the facility and summarily executing and sometimes torturing every prisoner involved as well as inadvertently killing many hostages who had been otherwise unharmed. One of the inmates involved was Sam Melville incarcerated for his involvement in Weatherman bombings. This composition combines recited text from some of his letters, fearful but ecstatic. The words repeat and repeat, and as events careen out of control, the chamber group Rzewski places beneath the words loses its brakes and just rolls. It is the sound of a loose floorboard nail telling the approaching hammer that life is worth living.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

17. Gateway

Henry Threadgill Sextet: Just The Facts And Pass The Bucket (About Time, 1983); composed by Henry Threadgill

No one really knows what jazz is, and the tendency (cf. Wynton, Crouch, et al.) to define the genre by extruding a set of parameters with a canon in mind just makes it harder to make sense of all the inevitable stuff that never fits. As Ornette Coleman once said, “We all know that a graveyard millions of years old is the study of archeology, not city planning.” Henry Threadgill’s ensemble music after disbanding the Air trio cut every which way on these questions. Both through-composed and improvised, antique and brand new, this album was a drily humorous rumination on death as both theme and structuring mechanism. His seven-member sextet (he counted the twin drummers as one) came on like a funeral procession that would never get to any burial site before it had explored every possible alternative. Opening with a percussion solo/soli, the horns tango in by twos, undergirded by the low strings, trading a set of rising figures, until they hit the stop-time double descending triplet that hooks the tune and cues the solo sections that follow, skating over the top of what still resembles a march but careens like a runaway boulder. No better way to die.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

16. The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil

Jefferson Airplane: After Bathing At Baxter’s (RCA Victor, 1967);
composed by Paul Kantner

LSD is an abbreviation of the original German Lysergsäure-diethylamid, an organic compound with hallucinogenic properties. This is a wonderfully silly song about IT, leading off an album with a title allusively referencing IT, following up this band‘s only top-10 singles, released just a few months before the government declared IT a verboten Schedule 1 substance. This was a single, too, notwithstanding that it had to be edited by at least two thirds from an original version containing that much more raw guitar feedback and extended bass solo. What remained was an edited blare of feedback resolving into the song’s tonic, cuing a tom-heavy four with Paul, Grace, and Marty harmonizing on quotes from A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young, willful shifts of meter, foreshortened bass solo, and à propos of nothing the spoken word “armadillo.“ This wholly self-indulgent album should have been a mess, and a lot of it is, but that first side comprises a suite of remarkable tunes by everyone in this band who wrote, and never quite cohered their energies so well again, and not just because that is what happens to bands with enough egos to make themselves happen the unlikely way this one did.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).

15. Get Out Of My House

Kate Bush: The Dreaming (EMI, 1982);
composed by Catherine Bush

Sometimes I think the dumbest word in the language is “experimental,” only because it is misapplied so often – and in art, pretty much always. An experiment tests a hypothesis; genuinely experimental music tests whether the music actually exists and requires an audience to answer that. Someone as obviously gifted as Kate Bush has already answered those existential questions as well as the practical ones, and does not need you to tell her how good her work is, gratifying as that might be. The open question of how large a paying audience it has is the record company’s problem. In the case of Bush’s fourth album, EMI shrewdly viewed this as a sunk cost, because “Running Up That Hill” was made possible by music influenced by Public Image Ltd. no less than Peter Gabriel, and far superior to both. At a time when digital technology was still overwhelming the content it was being used for, Bush simply revved up the content almost beyond her own ability to embody it personally. On this closing track, she ends a relationship by using a Fairlight sampler to turn her voice into twenty braying mules going berserk. The only real question is what must exist.

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day (on average) during Advent (or the moral equivalent).