Song of the Day: The Songs We’ll Never Hear (Eulogy for Adam Schlesinger) (April 2, 2020)
My brother called me last evening with dreadful news he figured I needed to hear, and better from him than from Facebook or Twitter. He must have picked up the phone reluctantly, dispirited himself, and knowing how I was going to take it, but there was nothing for it; I had to know. Adam Schlesinger was dead. Covid-19 took him down. That’s terrible in the same way that all the premature deaths that’ve been piling up lately are terrible, but this one is a particular loss to me, and feels personal, like the death of a good friend. He was somebody I’d long admired – a gifted songwriter, I’d argue one of the very best of the past three or four decades, whose work has always been, for me and a legion of discerning listeners, a reliable source of deep aesthetic satisfaction. Perhaps you’ve heard of him, though his was never a household name, as it would have been if fame was always commensurate to merit.
It can’t be right that the possession of special talent made his life any more valuable than others, or his demise any more tragic than the rest of the thousands upon thousands to which we’ve already grown far too inured, not in any absolute moral sense, but maybe I can be forgiven if that’s how it feels to me. Schlesinger was dear to my heart because he was one of those rare people whose work had the capacity to improve my quality of life. His music did the trick, time and again.
His songs, always clever, disciplined, full of wordplay, and instantly memorable, would perhaps have been better received in the 1960s, when Top 40 radio put a premium on such things. One can easily imagine him toiling away in the Brill Building, cranking out hits for the girl groups. In interviews he often cited The Kinks and Ray Davies as an important influence, but to me, perhaps predictably on account of my own preferences, he always sounded more like the young Paul McCartney. Like McCartney, he played bass, and like McCartney, he had an intuitive appreciation of the classic elements of songcraft, what writer Adam Gopnik once referred to as Paul’s “grasp of the materials of music”, empowering him to repeatedly produce little gems that often exhibited a certain formal perfection. Again like McCartney, he was a natural collaborator, but perfectly competent when working on his own, writing for the movies and TV. He had three Emmys to his credit, two for songs he wrote for telecasts of the Tony Awards, and one for a number he composed for the CW series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, called Antidepressants Are So Not A Big Deal – none of which I’ve heard, or even knew about before today – and he should have won an Oscar for That Thing You Do, the snappy, eminently listenable, marvellously Beatle-esque title song to the charming 1996 movie written and directed by Tom Hanks.
It’s worth dwelling for a few moments upon this special little masterwork, which exemplified so many of Schlesinger’s particular gifts. Few could have risen to the daunting challenge this period film posed for the songwriter: he was tasked to compose a tune so pleasing that the viewer would be happy to hear it again and again, as the story followed its budding pop star protagonists (the “Wonders”) from garage band obscurity to fleeting fame as the latest ephemeral top-of-the-pops hitmakers. Moreover, it had to sound like an authentic artifact of the early 1960s. Adam pulled it off with an ebullient gem that didn’t so much copy the early Fab Four as channel them, right down to the trademark closing notes lifted from I Saw Her Standing There. It really does sound as if it could have been a hit in the British Invasion era, and would have slotted in perfectly in an AM radio playlist, right between I Wanna Hold Your Hand and Fun, Fun, Fun. Throughout the film, the boys play it repeatedly, at home, in bars, in clubs. They’re still performing it at the movie’s climax, as the main attraction in a big Hollywood variety show (which looks a lot like Ed Sullivan circa February, 1964), and it’s still exhilarating, even though by now you’ve listened to it six or seven times. If you’ve never heard it, really, you have to. Here:
Isn’t it magical, the way he captured the essence of that moment in pop music history?
His best work, though, was not as a solo artist but as part of a woefully under-appreciated power pop combo named, idiosyncratically, after a New Jersey lawn and garden accessories emporium: Fountains of Wayne, whose songs have popped up a number of times in this blog’s Songs of the Day series. Composing in a team with bandmate (and lead singer) Chris Collingwood, with whom he always shared equal songwriting credit, he and his partner repeatedly caught lighting in a bottle, with Radiation Vibe, No Better Place, All Kinds of Time, Hat and Feet, Kid Gloves, I’ll Do the Driving, Hey Julie, and numerous others, including my particular favourite, Troubled Times, a wistful, sadly hopeful tale of a guy who split up with his girlfriend and now desperately wants her back, even though he knows he doesn’t deserve a second chance, not after how he treated her. If you like, you can read what I had to say about a few of these tracks here:
Songs of the Day: Fountains of Wayne – No Better Place; Kid Gloves
and here:
Song of the Day – Fountains of Wayne, Troubled Times
Fountains of Wayne were critical darlings, but never as popular as they should have been (this seems to be a theme with the artists featured in Songs of the Day). In the way of such things, they had their biggest hit with one of their least inspired songs, Stacy’s Mom, which was for them almost a throwaway, written to sound a lot like the Cars à la Just What I Needed, I suspect in order to have a big seller that would get the record label off their backs.
Much better (and thus not a big hit) was another of my favourites, Someone’s Gonna Break Your Heart, a deceptively subtle and complex rocker that drives pretty hard without sacrificing any of the melodicism characteristic of their most satisfying songs:
This one was bound to have shown up as a Song of the Day at some point. I’ve always loved the chorus (which has a tricky time signature difficult to get right when you’re trying to sing it in the shower), the change of pace that occurs in the unexpectedly sombre middle eight, and the thoughtful lyrics so typical of their authors, as was often overlooked:
And the traffic goes round and round
swallowing the road and spitting out clouds
and the spirit she hides
on a damp path of moss and stone
from a fear we are born with and never outgrow
As I said in a prior post, not exactly moon/June/spoon.
Like everybody else in popular music, Schlesinger wrote a lot about romance and its entanglements, but there was always something unusually poignant about his “relationship” songs. You won’t find many about the unmitigated joy of first love, or the rush of infatuation. They were far more likely to be about going separate ways, doubts, regrets, unrequited feelings, anything but standard boy-meets-girl and happily ever after. The focus was always upon regular people, and always with sympathy and uncommon humanity, with a keen attention to the mundane little details that fill ordinary people’s lives – the boredom of watching the cruddy stores and diners that line the interstate roll by, the misery of toiling away in a dead-end office job under unkind supervision, the agony of waiting in line at the DMV to get your licence renewed, the dismal feeling of being alone and lonely at a party, or longing for that girl who doesn’t know you exist. They were often terribly sad yet wry and even genuinely funny at the same time.
They also veered off in unexpected directions. In the beautiful All Kinds of Time we get inside the head of a high school quarterback destined for greatness, everything moving in slow motion around his swift, observant mind as he assesses the evolving play, and finds the open man right where he’s supposed to be, as if illuminated in a shaft of light. With this going on he has time to daydream about the warm comforts of the home and family he’ll no doubt soon be leaving, college football scholarship in pocket; he can see them there in his imagination, clustered around the big screen TV in the rec. room, and he’s utterly calm and at peace. This is an eerily precise depiction of what athletes and fighter pilots call “situational awareness”, the cool, dispassionate ability to rise above the moment and plot the trajectories of dozens of moving objects in the mind’s eye, seeing not just where they all are, but far more important, where they’re all going to be. Wayne Gretzky has talked about it, as have Joe Montana and Chuck Yeager. I remember wondering, when I first heard it, how a guy in some alt-rock guitar outfit could possibly understand something like that so thoroughly, and how it occurred to him to turn it into a song.
So often, it was like watching Orr skate, or Koufax pitch: how does he do that?
I was heartbroken when Fountains of Wayne broke up. Their split shattered a rare and precious Lennon/McCartney sort of alchemy, though at least, like John and Paul, Schlesinger and Collingwood parted ways when they were still at the top of their game. I suppose I was wishing, in the back of mind, that one day they’d get back together.
Now there are songs we’ll never hear, lovely, melodic, well-crafted little pop masterpieces that Adam surely would have gifted us, but for this damnable virus – truly sublime popular music that should have been, but now won’t exist when I need it to shine its light into the gloom of all of those grey, rainy days to come. This is a very great pity. It’s miserable when an artist dies too soon, and Adam wasn’t finished.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A good career retrospective can be found at this link, to a Rolling Stone site at which the writers favour a whole heap of songs not mentioned above:
Song of the Day: John Southworth – Life is Unbelievable (May 20, 2020)
A succinct, spooky, almost unsettling little number with DNA derived partly from the songs of Leonard Cohen, and partly, perhaps, from something played after hours by a performer in some decadent underground Berlin nightclub, circa 1927. For some reason, I always see in my mind’s eye a lonely figure on stage in a darkened room, singing to nobody save the janitor as he mops up the night’s mess. The delivery is detached, dispassionate, almost bemused in a way; the singer might just as well be an entomologist serenading an anthill.
Like we’re all just bugs. Bugs are Unbelievable.
Song of the Day: Blue Rodeo – Outskirts (August 6, 2020)
The title song from their very first album, back when Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister, and I had yet to go to law school. Outskirts is a chronicle of the Kennedy Curse, as manifested in the life and torment of David Kennedy, son of Bobby. What must it be like to be the son of a famous assassinated father, living in the public eye, weighed down by expectations to pick up the torch, heartbroken and harried? Where are you going to hide when everybody knows your name? How can you suppress the memory of that picture we’ve all seen, taken in the L.A. Ambassador Hotel, his father shot and already dead, with a busboy kneeling down beside him; how do you stop projecting that over and over in your head? “On to Chicago” said Bobby to his supporters, having just won the California primary, and looking forward to being nominated as the Democratic candidate for President at the upcoming convention. The last words any of us heard from him.
Bobby Kennedy was maybe the last hope for a whole generation that wanted to believe that the political process might yet provide answers, and positive change. And everybody knows California wasn’t going to be the end.
We got Nixon instead.
Bobby’s body was taken home from California, across the continent, by rail in June 1968. All along the tracks, whenever any sort of station was passed, people stood to watch the train go by and pay their respects. Mile after mile, station after station, there they were, some saluting, some standing at attention, some with signs, people of all ages, many of them children, as parents assembled their families to attend and bear witness. That day, no matter what your politics were, you stood in silence and paid your respects.
Son David was 13 years old when his father was shot. Sixteen years later, having developed the almost inevitable substance abuse problems, he died of a heroin overdose in his room at the Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Springs.
Song of the Day: Jimmy Eat World – The Middle (August 16, 2020)
I’m reminded of this song whenever I watch Almost Famous, Cameron Crowe’s poignant, hilarious love letter to early Seventies Rock, and watch the scene in which our aspiring teenage journalist has a conversation with the legendary writer and music critic Lester Bangs, editor of Creem Magazine.
Bangs: So how do they like you in school?
William Miller: They hate me.
Bangs: {Nods} Yeah. You’ll meet them all again on their long journey to the Middle.
This is my kind of youth protest song, which rails not against authority but the oppressive idiocy of one’s fellow youths, and all their cliquish taunts. Hey kid, don’t write yourself off yet, this is just the middle of the ride. You’ll meet them all again ten years from now, tending door at the Walmart. It sounds a lot like Blink 182, which may or may not be a bad thing, but to my ears it has discipline, drives not just hard but with infectious joy, and has a tune going on beneath the power chords to boot, and if that don’t get yer toes a’tappin, well, be that way then, but you’re just a big poo.
Note how the reluctant partiers at the end seem to see through walls to lock eyes, and decide it’d actually be more fun to blow this ridiculous underwear party and go off somewhere to get to know each other – just like the kids in the classic VW commercial, who arrive at the drunken party and reckon it’d actually be much better to just keep driving under the stars with the top down.
This one goes out to everybody in my INFJ support group, wherever you may be.
Song of the Day: Lorde – Royals (August 16 2020)
Being perhaps less than maximally hip to what those crazy kids are listening to these days, I didn’t catch this one when it was top of the pops a few years back, and encountered it only recently in the wonderful J.Lo vehicle Hustlers, playing behind the climactic sequence when everything unravels and the cops roll up to toss everybody into the paddy wagons. I don’t know what I expected to discover about the artist, but I’ll tell you what I didn’t expect, upon launching Shazam on the iPad, which was to find it performed by a sixteen year old waif of a girl from New Zealand. That’s not a typo: the girl was only sixteen when she made this, and I don’t know what you were doing when you were in grade 10, but I sure as hell wasn’t penning massive hit songs and staring frankly into the camera for a video that became popular to the tune of well over 800 million views, last time I checked on YouTube. Some people are just more inspired than others, I guess. The story goes that the lyrics poured out of her in under thirty minutes, while thinking about the conspicuously consumptive lifestyle of contemporary pop stars, as exemplified in particular by the crass luxury bling items so many of them tend to flaunt. She found her title when she happened upon, of all things, a 1976 photo of Kansas City superstar George Brett signing baseballs. Figuring kids her age didn’t have credit cards, she made the tune downloadable for free, initially, and before long it busted out of New Zealand and Australia to become a global sensation, after which I hope it ended up making her a fortune.
Like so many performers, Lorde came to dislike her crowd-pleasing “signature” hit, which she once referred to derisively as sounding like an advertising jingle (maybe owing to what might be misinterpreted to be mere product placements). Generally unimpressed with herself, she also didn’t see why she even needed to be in the video, which was meant to portray how boring and empty teenaged existence can be, a sort of limbo within which disaffected kids mark time waiting to be old enough for life to start happening: “I’m not all ‘OOOH, look at me’ “, she said.
When the song started topping charts all over the place, there followed a spate of wholly unwarranted controversy around the idea that she meant the song to be racist, as it was perceived to be making fun of some of the more ludicrous excesses of Rap culture – which maybe it is, in part, but so what? It’s also clearly about the antics of Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift. It’s about pop idols carrying on like they have street cred, during those moments when they aren’t too busy talking investment strategy with their wealth managers at Goldman Sachs. More generally, it’s about the yawning chasm between the rich and the poor, the ones with the diamond-studded Rolexes and the ones who only drive Cadillacs in their dreams. It seems a strange thing for liberals to get all upset about, but then, everything these days gets somebody all worked up into a righteous lather.
All I hear, seven years on, is a strangely haunting, curiously compelling little minimalist pop gem that emerged, somehow, from a kid who cooked it up in something like half an hour, and was never that thrilled with it herself. In my book, that makes it a minor miracle.
Song of the Day: Pete Townshend – Heartache Following Me (August 20, 2020)
A sad song for a sad day. Godspeed, Harry.
Next time somebody tells you that country music sucks, play them this one while reminding them that no, the ten gallon all-hat-and-no-cattle cowboy antics of Lee Greenwood and Garth Brooks suck; real country music can be authentic, sublime, and almost as pained as the Delta Blues, while the best of it provides ample proof that haunting melody was never the sole province of urban sophisticates like Gershwin and Porter, or latter-day pop geniuses like Messrs. Lennon and McCartney.
If you’re fine with country, but inclined to the view that covering an old Jim Reeves classic is an odd choice for somebody like Pete Townshend, you don’t know Pete, and you should give a listen to the unplugged acoustic versions he’s recorded of ostensibly raucous tunes like The Kids Are All Right and I’m One (Pete pretty much invented the unplugged movement), and tap into the deep fount of melancholy from which those and so many of his other songs have sprung. For that matter, Heartache Following Me is by no means out of place where it sits on the solo album Who Came First, nestled among such gems as Pete’s own (and greatly superior) version of the Who’s Let’s See Action, the magnificent Pure and Easy, the surprisingly tranquil I Am Content (a deeply affecting hymn of hoped-for spiritual enlightenment), and the sweetly philosophical Time Is Passing, in which Pete takes in the wonders of the world around us and catches a fleeting glimpse of the eternal, and of a promised resurrection to come:
There’s something in the whisper of the trees
Millions hear it, still they can’t believe
There are echoes of it splashing in the waves
As an empire of dead men leave their graves
There’s a hell of a lot more to Townshend than hope I die before I get old.
It may come as a surprise to learn that Heartache Following Me was a favourite of Meher Baba, the Indian mystic and spiritual leader of whom Townshend, ever the seeker, was a long time devotee. What on earth does an old Country and Western lament to lost love have to do with cosmic truth? Maybe everything – maybe a vital step down the path to enlightenment is to accept that opening oneself to love is necessarily to risk pain. Or maybe Baba just took solace from a sad song the same way any of us would. Maybe all you need is half a heart, whether you’re nursing a beer in a dive bar somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon, or wandering the dusty roads of South Asia in a quest for the meaning of life, to respond to the sort of loneliness that brings a strong man to tears.
Song of the Day: Jackson Browne – Take it Easy (August 26, 2020)
No, we don’t owe this terrific tune to the Eagles, it was written mainly by Browne, which is why it’s the best frickin’ song the frickin’ Eagles ever did (though some would argue Glenn Frey deserved his generous writing co-credit for what’s said to have been the small but crucial contribution of the lines Well I’m a-standin’ on a corner / in Winslow Arizona ). While more musically upbeat than a lot of his classics, Take it Easy has Browne’s musical and lyrical fingerprints all over it, with its soaring melody and overarching sentiment that you’d better lighten up while you still can, because you’re only going round once, and as Ferris Bueller once admonished us, life goes by so fast you could miss it. Don’t obsess over meaning! Feeling lost? In a jam? Then take to the highways, and follow the setting sun. In later years Browne returned often to the theme of finding some sort of solace out there on the road, under the vast Western sky.
With the strange exception of the early hit Doctor My Eyes, which likewise was nowhere near as cheerful as that first casual listen might lead you to imagine, Browne never had a lot of action in the Billboard Hot 100. The Eagles, for all their many sins, took this one close to the top, and it’s been popular ever since, which is almost enough to atone for Hotel California (almost). I hope its principal composer is still dining out on the royalties.
Song of the Day: Great Big Sea – Lukey (August 29, 2020)
Ahhh, fer Chrissakes ya sissy, have a rum and listen to this will ya?
You can damned near taste the screech, can’t you? This video version, more up-tempo than the cut included on the 1995 album Up, features the accompaniment of Irish Celtic music legends The Chieftains, with whom anyone steeped in the folk songs of Newfoundland would have a natural and inevitable affinity.
For you land-lubbers out there, a fore cuddy, a fine example of which is sported by Lukey’s beautiful boat, is the small cabin at the bow of a fishing craft, and copper nails are a traditional feature of boat building because copper doesn’t rust. You use putty as caulking because wooden boats are made of planks that have otherwise leaky seams, and split pea soup is a traditional sailor’s delicacy, particular when salt pork is in the mix, though Lukey here only offers one little pea at the bottom of his ten pound tub.
Here’s a hell of a thing: I’ve never been to Newfoundland, even though I have dear friends there who might even put me and Kathy up for a couple nights. That’s a sad situation that cries out for a remedy.
Meanwhile, having a crappy day? Feeling low energy? A couple of listens to Lukey ought to set you straight.
Here’s the album version, which is more tightly arranged and well worth a listen:
the needlefish 