25. “Remember (Christmas)”

Harry Nilsson: Son of Schmilsson (RCA, 1972);
composed by Harry Nilsson

This album’s predecessor, Schmilsson, was a great one because it instantly made tangible the frank desperation that powered what had often seemed like overly whimsical craftsmanship in his previous music, but never was. This self-mocking sequel took this process further, which is why some of it makes no sense, in both good and less good ways. Unlike the tracks this album is best known for - “You’re Breakin’ My Heart” (response in the chorus: “So, fuck you!”), and “Joy” (which makes “Far Away Eyes” sound like “Sister Morphine”) – “Remember (Christmas),” a piano-with-strings ballad, would have fit on Schmilsson, but only the way that “Que Será Será” would have fit on There’s A Riot Goin’ On. It figures that Randy Newman performed this on a tribute album, because it is unequivocally pretty the way some of Newman’s darkest songs are. Over a lustrous cadence, Harry croons “remember” over and over at the beginning of each line, until he hits the bridge and croons “dre-ee-eeam!” so cheerfully that you instantly know how sad it actually is: “Love is only in a dream.” Happiness is what we make it, and one of the things we make it out of is sadness.

Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

24. “Lush Life”

Composed by Billy Strayhorn; first performed publicly in 1948

“Lush Life” is one of the most beautiful songs in the American “standard” canon, and not coincidentally it contains a rhyming couplet so abysmal (“awful” paired with “trough full” – full "of hearts," no less) that one has to assume that Strayhorn, who composed the song over a period of years starting when he was sixteen (sixteen!) and well before he had even met Duke Ellington, had to have known what a bummer it was and left it in, deliberately. It sits there like a pill any singer just has to choke down quickly, except its taste never quite gets past you. Neil Young once claimed he originally wrote over a hundred verses for “Sugar Mountain” and left in the very worst of them, “just to show what can happen.” “Lush Life” is entirely about that, and it is also about that pill. The original title, “Life Is Lonely,” thankfully gave way to a title with the truest of double meanings, insofar as it runs in two directions: not just happiness and romance leading to a despairing alcoholic aftermath but - more problematic – back again. And again. His happiness and despair seem interchangeable, but what they are is all of a piece.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

23. “Can’t Hide Love”

Earth, Wind & Fire: Gratitude (Columbia, 1975);
composed by Clarence Scarborough

I have loved this group to pieces ever since “Shining Star” hit and never once worried about whether they were just all too smooth and cosmic. Sure – pretty heavy on the astrology and other such Reasons for playing the Love Game – but their sound was unique and that is even more obvious now. Their groove was The Funk the way Count Basie’s 1930s band had it if you hear it right – not just the horns, but a top-to-bottom interlock keyed as much to Maurice White and Philip Bailey’s vocal trade-offs up top as to the White Brothers’ rhythm change-ups down below. Even when they slowed down, they sounded like an idling dirigible. I would not say this track is typical of anything, but as one of the rare hits they did not write, the inscrutability of its construction raises all the right questions. The horn part that opens it sounds as if a first half has been deliberately omitted, while almost the entire second half of the track is fade-out. The song itself is great, but the fade is the charm: repeating the same four-bar cadence with different inversions until the substitutions take over completely.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

22. “Jo To Se Ti To Spí”

The Plastic People of the Universe: Egon Bondy’s Happy Hearts Club Banned (S.C.O.P.A.-Invisible/Boži Mlýn, 1978 [recorded 1973-74]);
composed by Egon Bondy, Vratislav Brabenec, Milan Hlavsa, Josef Janiček, Jiří Kabeš, and Jaroslav Vožniak

This first album by the rol-a-rok heroes of the post-Prague Spring crackdown has never been more than barely available since it was secretly recorded in an abandoned Bohemian castle in late 1973, and it is even currently out of print in Česká Republika. But Václav Havel did not revere them just because they were Velvet Underground and Zappa fans, since they sounded like neither. They barely sounded like rock and roll, for that matter (only one song on this album even has a backbeat), but rock they did in a strange, clamorous way wholly appropriate to culture mavens who went to jail for expressing themselves, sounded like they knew it was coming any minute, and did not give a flaming fuck. This song is atypical of them only insofar as the only instrument is an out-of-tune piano playing a folk dance rhythm accompanying a chorus of croaky voices, and preceded by weird echoey claps that sound like someone looking for a pilot light. As Paul Wilson's English trot provides: “Look at you, all sound asleep; And you haven’t the remotest notion; How, high on alcohol and beer; I shine like a jewel of the universe.”


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

21. “Strange Young Girls”

The Mamas & the Papas: The Mamas & the Papas (Dunhill, 1966);
composed by John Phillips

This song used to scare the bejeezus out of me when I was about six, well before I could make out the words, and only slightly less so years later when I did. Most of this group’s hits were on its first album and this second album was painfully pieced together amidst affairs, break-ups, business hassles, and way too much dope. They got some interesting music out of it (despite a dogshit version of “My Heart Stood Still”), but these songs are just swimming in bad vibes and recrimination, making the overall effect something like an alternate version of Rumours dosed with heroin rather than cocaine. Close harmonies are recorded just a microtone off for effect (like they were on Revolver), and some of the parts were written so high you can tell that they had to be shouted in pitch and mixed down. This song is a somber chorale explicitly about acid – one year before “White Rabbit” – and it contains no rhetoric about “frontiers” or “consciousness.” The “girls” in this song are “offering their youth” and “hiding their madness,” all for the sake of The Trip. Where? Anywhere else but here. Unsentimental, but – most unsettlingly – not at all cautionary.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

20. “Green Eyes”

Erykah Badu: Mama’s Gun (Motown, 2000);
composed by Erykah Badu, Vikter Duplaix, and James Poyser

Despite the lengths she and her collaborators went to make this album sound like a throwback of sorts (not counting the scratchy-78 put-on that opens this track), Badu’s second album is very much the opposite, and one of its great pleasures is how it unassumingly obliges you to catch up to it well before you realize the effort was necessary. Another pleasure is the way the ambition of this ten-minute closing opus is validated by its modesty. Her ex hooks up with a "new friend," and familiarly she suddenly finds her rational thought entirely non-responsive. "I'm insecure," she admits, but not so much that she cannot get across what her inability to know what she feels actually feels like. Her voice rises only to cue structural transitions within the three discrete, rhythmically distinct (and equally gorgeous) songs that are interlaced together here. Although there are no words in this song that you have not heard before (or lived through), not excluding the lines that directly contradict what she has just said, this song - wrapped around her own vocal idiosyncrasies - is just about unique in making it possible to have all of these words in one place.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.

19. “Today I Started Loving You Again”

Merle Haggard & The Strangers: The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde (Capitol, 1968); composed by Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens

In a market where singles were everything, it is remarkable that what may be Merle Haggard’s best song was never released as one, which has allowed it to escape too many anthologies. “Today I Started Loving You Again” occasionally gets confused with George Jones’ baroque-by-comparison “He Stopped Loving Her Today” – a hit twelve years later (and which tellingly took George two sessions months apart to get in the can) – but the comparison is still illuminating. Jones describes someone who had to die to get over a broken relationship; Haggard’s ostensibly still-living first person describes getting over a broken relationship all too thoroughly such that all of the jerry-rigged sanity-saving rationales evaporate without warning and leave him with all the same feelings he thought he had talked himself out of having. The backup is minimal, co-composer (and ex-wife) Bonnie Owens chimes in only on the last chorus, and Merle’s naked voice sounds ten years older than it was when he recorded it. It communicates that the truth he woke up to is one he can live with, but it also conveys the certainty that it is a truth he will now have to take to the grave.


Note: 25 secular essays (each one exactly 200 words long) about 25 songs, to appear one per day during Advent (or so) from Nov. 27 through Dec. 21.