Song of the Day: Tracy Ullman – They Don’t Know (October 25, 2018)

This should cheer you up – an astonishingly catchy, pitch-perfect reinvention of the 60s Girl Group sound, with a melody so deliciously supple and vertical that when it came out, I was inclined to wonder whether McCartney, who shows up at the end, had something to do with it (it was actually written and recorded by Kirsty MacColl, back in 1979). The depiction of the crushingly banal aftermath of romance, as she trudges through the supermarket in her slippers, pushing her shopping cart full of mundane household goods, is priceless.

Song of the Day: The Blue Man Group – Rods and Cones (October 27, 2018)

Behold the Hellwack shiznet that happens inside your brizzle.

I first saw this performed live by the Blue Men in Las Vegas, where’d they’d taken up residence in the surreal Italianate fantasy castle called The Venetian (we were staying in the nearby surreal Parisian fantasy palace called, you guessed it, Paris. It had a 1/2 scale replica of the Eiffel Tower out front, as well as an Arc de Triomphe, and a sheet metal imitation Montgolfier hot air balloon, I mean, they really went the whole nine yards). I wasn’t sure what I expected from the troupe, but it sure wasn’t this fascinating, hard-rocking cross between something almost fit for The Who, and a perfectly accurate science documentary on the biochemical-neurological essence of human vision, as processed by the brain.

The whole show is tremendously entertaining, as it slowly dawns on you that the Blue Men are being depicted as strangers to this planet, doing all those wild things on stage just to see how we Earthlings are going to react to them. It’s an experiment, and we’re the subjects. It’s priceless during one bit when they’re visibly astounded at the sentimental “Awwwww” that issues from the audience when one of them offers half of his Twinkie to his buddy, who has nothing to eat. They stare at the crowd, wide-eyed and momentarily derailed mid-performance – they don’t know what to make of our strange emotional response, and seem to be wondering whether it’s positive or negative.

Not to worry guys, positive all the way.

Songs of the Day: Fountains of Wayne – Kid Gloves; No Better Place (November 4, 2018)

I know, here I am once again flogging New Jersey’s Fountains of Wayne, a band I pushed at you before, with their wonderful song of broken romance, Troubled Times.  I adore them, though I suppose there’s nothing revolutionary about FOW, except within the context of today’s popular music. Led by songwriters Chris Collingsworth and Adam Schlesinger, this group hewed to the old values of pop: have a hook; make the melody memorable; do the odd unexpected thing to keep ‘em interested; emphasize harmonies; tell a memorable story; be disciplined. These guys would have been right at home in the Brill Building, sitting next to Neil Diamond, Burt Bacharach and Carole King, cranking out hits for the masses. They ought to have been one of the most popular bands on the scene. They weren’t though, and now they’re no longer together.

Like everybody else in popular music, they sang often about romance and its entanglements, but there’s always something unusually poignant about FOW’s “relationship” songs. You won’t find many about the unmitigated joy of first love, or the rush of infatuation. It always seems to be about going separate ways, doubts, regrets, unrequited feelings, anything but boy meets girl and happily ever after.

A few of them, like Kid Gloves, involve one lover’s urge to get out of New York City, the light, noise and pressures of the Big Apple standing in metaphorically for the overwhelming emotions that nobody wants to confront. In that song we’re presented with a guy who doesn’t want to be treated like damaged goods any more – or is he just afraid that she can see right through him and knows that indeed, he is damaged goods? Or is he more frustrated at how she handles him with such reticent care that he can’t really talk to her about anything that smacks of honest emotion? Either way, it seems, time to bail out.

Here is what I have found


New York just gets me down


When the going got tough


I got a bus ticket


back to my home town

All the way there I dreamed

flesh wrapped in velveteen

And the road wrapped around me


The long lonely highway


gulped down by a Greyhound

Not exactly moon / June / spoon. Such lovely music, the cello, the piano, the slow swinging cadence of the verses, ach!  I love it!

No Better Place is almost the flip side of the same story, with the narrator now being the one left behind in NYC, wondering what’s so great about this other place where his girlfriend would apparently rather be. Of course, what’s so great about it is that he’s not there, a thought that one does best to suppress at such times. Again with the fabulous melody and gorgeous melancholy of the sentiments – these are lyrics that really sting:

Is that supposed to be your poker face

or was someone run over by a train?

And:

From the C Train to the shiny tower

kicked around ’til happy hour found you

where you could drink

that smirk right off your face

And:

The bourbon sits inside me

right now I am a puppet in its sway

And it may be the whiskey talking

but the whiskey says I miss you every day

So I taxi to an all night party

park me in the corner in an old chair

Sip my drink and stare off into space

 Now she’s leaving New York

for no better place

…and most moving, this little vignette in the middle eight, the narrator looking through his transparent image reflected in a shop window and feeling every bit as insubstantial as his ghostly mirror-self:

Here is your reflection in a building uptown

a ghost inside some Madison Avenue display

Like water under bridges you’re slowly passing by

as you sail between the rooftops and the sky

This hits me right in the sweet spot.

I sure do miss them.

Song of the Day: Neil Finn – She will Have Her Way (November 17, 2018)

New Zealand’s Neil Finn is among the most gifted (and comparatively unheralded) melodists of the last few decades. With brother Tim, he first came to attention around these parts as a driving force of the group Split Enz, and later had moments of great success with Crowded House, before moving on to a solo career that continues to the present. Some of his songs are probably familiar to the listener, such as Don’t Dream it’s Over, I Fall at Your Feet, and Bring the Weather With You. She Will have Her Way is a personal favourite, and starts with a wry observation about feeling like somebody’s romantic plaything that’s always tickled me:

I might be old, but I’m someone new

The lyrics are fairly cryptic, and seem to be about being out-gunned and overwhelmed in a relationship that you still can’t quit:

She’s the life I’ve been frightened of
Seems like deathly silence and especially the dark
Feels like I am heavy and my spirit has died

…but it’s so lovely that I don’t really care. The song ends with a graceful coda of strummed guitars, putting me in mind of Maggie May, which fades to black long before you’ve had enough.

Song of the Day: Cry Cry Cry – Cold Missouri Waters (November 20, 2018)

Another reprint from the archives. The wildfire apocalypse that swept  through California over the past week put me in mind of this tragic account, a true story, about forest firefighters who get overtaken by a drought-fed conflagration that chews across the landscape at a rate too fast to contain, or even escape.

I remember the first time I heard Cold Missouri Waters. It was back in the summer of 1993, in that last glorious vacation that came between being an articling student and getting called to the bar as a first year lawyer, when I, my brother, and our wives travelled together to Cape Breton. One of those happy memories, you know? All of Nova Scotia was then enjoying glorious weather, and there aren’t a lot of places on this Earth more beautiful than where we were, taking a Sunday drive down Cape Breton’s Margaree Valley (cue the homesick blubbering). I was in the back seat, CBC radio was on, and through the road noise I could just make out a song. Something about it grabbed my attention, and as the verses ticked over I got more and more fascinated with it. It was part country, part folk (in that, like traditional folk music, it told an important story), and powerfully sad, steeped in emotional devastation. There amidst all that light and beauty, I was transported for a moment to a dark, despairing place.

I heard the story of a fire fighter, whose team was trying to wrangle a blaze in the woods of northern Montana, under conditions that grew increasingly desperate. It all goes horribly wrong – the wind shifts, the fire starts moving fast, there just isn’t time or space in which to out-run it, and they’re doomed. Except – except the narrator deploys some trick, some technique, to save himself (what? I couldn’t make it out), and begs his men to do the same, but they panic, run, and die, all but two of them. Our heartbroken narrator arises to find himself and his two remaining men all by themselves in the middle of a smouldering Hellscape, and spends the night and all the next day carrying the bodies of the others to the river, where they now lie buried. End of story.

I was beside myself when it finished, and they transitioned straight to the news without saying what the song was! AAAGH! I did my best to commit the melody to memory – God knew I was never, ever going to forget the story – and often, over the years, would play it in my head, hoping some day to trip over it again. This was 1993, long before the internet worked its way into daily life, and it seemed that unless I was lucky enough to hear it at random while listening to the radio, or maybe as the backing track to something on TV, I’d never know what it was, or ever again listen to it.

About 20 years passed. Then one Saturday I was sitting at this very computer, and it occurred to me that I find stuff like this for a living, right? We now have an internet! And Google! You craft the search terms, hone the results, and get to the nuggets, I do it every day for law questions, why not this? Forehead slap! It took about three minutes for me to find the song.

Thus I finally reconnected with Cold Missouri Waters, and in looking further into it learned that it’s about a real event, and real tragedy, Montana’s Mann Gulch Fire of 1949. It was one of those infernos that rips through dessicated growth in the wake of a long stretch of hot, dry weather, and sent to fight it was what today we’d call an “elite squad” of professionals, rapid response teams who were transported by air and parachuted out of C-47s right on top of forest fires. They were known as “smoke jumpers”.

It started well, but the fire “crowned” – leapt ahead by moving quickly through the tops of tress – and it was soon dangerously out of control, putting them in grave danger. Their foreman, a man named R. Wagner Dodge, really did have a freak moment of inspiration as the fire rushed toward them all – he set his own small blaze in the tall grass around himself, an “escape fire”, which started to chew outward, using up the combustible material and forming a sort of fire break. It saved him. For whatever reason, he couldn’t convince his team to join him in the safety zone, and they did indeed perish; then, just a few years later, poor Dodge himself died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The lyrics are written from his perspective on his death bed.

Few songs boast this sort of gripping, immersive narrative:

Sky had turned red,
smoke was boiling
Two hundred yards to safety
Death was fifty yards behind
I don’t know why,
I just thought it
I struck a match to waist-high grass
running out of time
Tried to tell them
step into this fire I’ve set
We can’t make it
this is the only chance we’ll get
But they cursed me
Ran for the rocks above instead
I lay face down and prayed
above the Cold Missouri waters

Cold Missouri Waters was written by Albertan folk singer James Keelaghan, himself inspired by Norman Maclean’s book about what happened in Mann Gulch, Young Men and Fire, published in 1992. It turns out it’s been covered several times, and I don’t know for sure whose take it was that caught my ear that day in the Margaree Valley, but I think it must have been Keelaghan’s original, which would have been freshly recorded at the time. The attached, recorded many years after the version I heard in the back seat, is my favourite.

Song of the Day: The Skydiggers – The Truth About Us (November 22, 2018)

Attached is a live clip from a CTV morning show that used to be on five times a week, called “Canada AM”. This was the program that unexpectedly introduced me to one of my favourite songs, one morning during the first summer I ever worked in a suit and tie; I was striving to excel in a student position I snagged at a Bay Street firm during the months between second and third year at law school. It was my introduction to the Tower People and their frenetic ways. I won’t claim to have enjoyed that job – but the money was good. You sure didn’t earn that kind of coin painting houses.

I was just doing up my tie before trudging down to King and Bay for another long shift at the firm then known as Torys, the TV on at about 7:30 in the morning in July or August of 1991, when almost subconsciously, I started hearing words coming out of the goggle box that had very powerful associations – it stopped me dead in my tracks. What? Did I just hear that? In a popular song sung on a morning chat show?

I did. A group unknown to me then, the Skydiggers, had incorporated a slew of words and phrases of huge emotional significance, familiar to everybody of my generation, into a four minute song that was now being performed live for Dini Petty. It’s a very good piece of song writing, too, but it’s also an oblique history lesson – every line has meaning, you could use it as a teaching aid for high school kids, yet there’s nothing boring and preachy about it, nothing false. This wasn’t Billy Joel doing We Didn’t Start the Fire.*

Maybe you have to be of a certain age, and to have been a student of modern American history to boot, for this one to really grab you. For a kid growing up in the immediate reverberation of the event, pink pillbox hats, something bought from an Italian mail-order outfit, the name Marina, exhumations, and something buried deep in the leg of someone named Connelly have enormous resonance. Then there’s a ship being turned back from American shores, leaving its passengers to their fate in the death camps; the first colonists starting out hoping for more than shoot-outs at the O.K. Corral; chairs being busted over somebody’s nose; Manifest Destiny; Camelot; all of it. Wrapping all of that into four or five scant minutes of song is, truly, something of an intellectual tour de force. I’ve always found it amazing that it took a Canadian band to write what I think is the most perceptive and trenchant critique of American culture in the annals of popular music, and quite possibly political science, which I studied for seven years without hearing anything more perceptive than this.

This is the very performance I saw that morning 23 years ago.

*My bro’ Mark came up with satirical lyrics for Joel’s song, which eschewed any particular point of view in favour of simply listing things that had happened when he was young:

Harry Truman,

Chairman Mao,

Dropped the H-bomb –

Holy Cow!

Songs of the Day: Nick Drake – Pink Moon; Northern Sky (November 26, 2018)

His entry in the Rolling Stone Record Guide said it more or less like this: He was so tall, and young, and beautiful, and he’s so damned dead, that he’d be a cult figure even if he wasn’t a genius, which he was. 

Nick Drake has one of the saddest stories in modern popular music. He was like a man out of place and time, a child of relative privilege raised in the former English colonial possession of Burma, a student at Cambridge, and, as it happened, a songwriter of almost supernatural abilities. He began recording around 1969, released only three albums, the last in 1972, and was dead of an apparent suicide by 1974. In all he recorded about two hours of music, and in his brief lifetime sold virtually no records, was appreciated by virtually no one, and grew to believe himself an abject failure.

This may seem incomprehensible to modern listeners, who are almost invariably beguiled by the formal perfection of his compositions, with their flowing melodies, nuanced lyrics, and arrangements that weren’t of a piece with contemporary pop music, but with something much older, chamber music, perhaps, or maybe music that came down to us from a distant, long-forgotten past. His best songs are precise and perfect, like faceted diamonds, yet still somehow mystical and indefinable. It’s hard to believe that upon their release, they sank almost without a trace.

Something nobody could have anticipated happened in the early 1990s. An advertisement for a VW convertible appeared, which in its full version ran for about a minute to the accompaniment of one of Drake’s signature songs, Pink Moon. The commercial, now quite famous, is magical – it depicts a group of friends riding together down a lonely highway on a moonlit night, looking up at the stars, everything suffused in deep blues and blacks, until finally they arrive at a sort of frat party. They take one look at the goings-on, back out of the driveway, and keep on driving, the brilliant stars of the constellation Orion hovering overhead. The VW itself is shown only intermittently, with much of the spot filmed from the interior, as if the car’s a cocoon within which the tight-knit little group can appreciate the starry night, and each other.

Just about everybody who saw that ad, me included, immediately thought “what is that song? Who’s it by?” Pink Moon is Drake at his purest, a timeless acoustic piece that might serve as a sort of litmus test, actually – any listener unmoved by it probably has no ear for music.

The result was a minor sensation, and Drake’s records began to sell in respectable numbers, and continue to do so. He’s pretty much universally revered these days for his craft, sensitivity, and expert guitar playing, and all sorts of modern writers cite him as an influence and inspiration. If only he’d known this day would come.

If you haven’t heard him yet, Northern Sky, another of his deeply affecting ballads, should close the deal for you – it’s as close as this very sad young man ever got to a happy love song, infused with hope and a sense of wonder. It’s romantic poetry, really; in a few spare and elegant lines, the narrator portrays himself as having once been directionless and blind to life’s possibilities, but not any more, not now that she’s here. It’s such a beautiful evocation of the ideal that, as one reviewer wrote, “it makes you ashamed of the ugliness of the real world”. 

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons, knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Bright in my northern sky.

This is an allusion to Polaris, the North Star, which served for millennia as the literal guiding light to mariners navigating across trackless oceans, providing not just direction, but the invaluable peace of mind that comes from knowing that so long as it’s up there, clear and bright, you’ll never be lost.  

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do that.

Here’s the Volkswagen ad:

Song of the Day: Buffalo Springfield – On the Way Home (November 28, 2018)

Named after a manufacturer of steamrollers (thereby hangs a tale), Buffalo Springfield burned very brightly for just a couple of short years from 1966-68, showcasing the combined talents of Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay, along with successive bass players Bruce Palmer and Jim Messina, and percussionist Dewey Martin. They were, in a word, terrific. The Rolling Stone Record Guide described them in one of its editions as “potentially an American Beatles”, and their songs truly rated the comparison, but rock groups are volatile things, and this one didn’t last long enough to attain the prominence that was briefly within its grasp. 

In some ways they were like the Byrds, and their songs are now similarly evocative of their time and place, each of them practically a measured dose of the Sixties in a pretty bottle, especially For What It’s Worth, an account of the 1966 “curfew riots” on the Sunset Strip, as witnessed by Stills. Described sometimes as an “anthem”, it is in fact an almost impartial expression of dismay devoid of polemics, declaring that “nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong”, and repeating lines that would make sense in any era of unrest:

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s going down

Have a listen:

Graced with three talented songwriters, the group produced a raft of iconic songs in a very short time, Bluebird, Mr. Soul, Kind Woman, Rock and Roll Woman, Questions, Broken Arrow and Expecting to Fly, among others, which ran the gamut from country to rock to full-bore art-rock (in the best sense). Attached is my favourite, On the Way Home. Written by Young but sung here by Furay, it’s sublime in so many ways, boasting one of the great melodies of the era, and a complex yet understated arrangement of interleaved guitars, strings, and horns, with a subtle overlay of what sounds like tubular bells, or perhaps a xylophone. The tone is wistful, reflective, and philosophical, and it climaxes with a poignant little aside on how we’re likely missing the point as we fuss and bustle around:

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel

The lyrics are a little opaque, but it’s Neil Young, so it can’t be a case of the words fitting the music, but not really meaning much. In part, it seems to be about how surprising it can be to see yourself through another’s eyes:

In a strange game
I saw myself as you knew me
When the change came
And you had a chance to see through me

At its core, though, it’s a love song, tinged perhaps with traces of regret and ambivalence, but a love song. Others might have put it more simply. It’s just that sometimes, things get complicated.

Song of the Day: XTC- We’re All Light (November 29, 2018)

Right, let’s bop to a marvellous dance number that tackles the meaning of life and our place in the cosmos, giving us a bit of a science lesson while we sit here tapping our toes!

To begin, a little background (warning: vast over-simplification to follow). In the aftermath of the Big Bang, as subatomic particles coalesced and formed the first atoms, we reckon that about three quarters of the matter in the universe was hydrogen, being the simplest of all atoms, with one electron circling one proton. There was also a fair bit of helium, which is two protons, two electrons, and a couple of neutrons. To this day hydrogen remains the most common element in the Universe, but on its own, it isn’t much beyond a darned good energy source (oh boy does it burn – type “Hindenburg Lakehurst New Jersey” into Google, you don’t believe me). At first blush the early Universe therefore doesn’t really look all that promising, and it’s hard to see how any amount of time can take us from a vast cosmic soup of free-floating hydrogen and helium to a guy in a leather jacket on the corner of Bay and Adelaide buying a hotdog (as the boys in Diner would say). You and I are made out of all sorts of heavy atoms which didn’t then exist, iron, carbon, magnesium, oxygen, you get the picture. What gives?

Well, as all of you know, one of the fundamental forces of nature is gravity, the tendency of objects carrying mass to attract each other. The mutual gravity of massive gas clouds condensed ever greater amounts of the hydrogen/helium together until there were balls of the stuff all over the place, crushing themselves together with enormous force, to the point at which the hydrogen atoms started to fuse. Nuclear fusion at that scale means you’ve got a star, kids, and stars, powered by fusion, crush their atoms together into heavier and heavier elements until they start to run out of fuel. Several variables, especially size, determine how stars will end their life cycles at that point, but one common outcome is a final cataclysmic explosion called a nova, or even bigger, a super-nova, and when those things blow they spew outwards all of the complex elements they’ve been busy manufacturing for all those billions of years, flinging them straight across their local galaxies. It’s like they’re sneezing heavy atoms. The very atoms we, in the end, evolved to make use of in our biology.

Thus we are all, as Carl Sagan liked to say, made of star stuff – or, as XTC would have it, we’re all light, cast by stars in their dying gasps. Hence the lyric:

Don’t you know
’bout a zillion years ago
Some star sneezed,
now they’re paging you in reception

Yup, marvellous and miraculous is our very existence, but for all of that, we’re not here for all that long, and the times we inhabit are often pretty shitty – better live a little while we can, eh?

Don’t you know
Upon the pillion of time’s bike
We roar onto the stage
and too soon we’re dead centre

Don’t you know
Buffalo Bill-ions raised his sight
He’s picking off the whole herd
as soon as we enter

So you won’t mind if I kiss you now
And maybe come on in for the night
Don’t you know, in this new Dark Age
We’re all light

Let’s see One Direction, or whoever the hell’s top of the pops this month, come up with something like that.

Led by songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding, XTC was one of those bands – Smashing Pumpkins also comes to mind – that did well enough, and earned respect, but was never as big as they should have been, or would have been if I’d had my ‘druthers. Throughout the decades from about 1980 to 2000, they produced album after album full of complex, deeply satisfying pop music that never shied away from big thoughts or big issues, even at the risk of sounding sophomoric, which they surely were not. A prime example is one of my favourites from their earlier years, Generals and Majors, which flogged the rather unremarkable idea that war is bad, but was such an engaging, satirical romp that it feels as if it’s restating the obvious because apparently we idiots out here still don’t get it. Their albums were sprinkled with songs like that, full of insight and social commentary that might have come off as preachy and smug, except, as the Rolling Stone Record Guide once put it, “they sweated hard enough to earn their pretensions”. They weren’t smug. They were passionately, urgently concerned about how many trite notions were actually God’s truth, yet still paid only lip service as we sat punch-drunk amidst the wreckage.

This was a group that could write something like Green Man, about how the Medieval Catholic Church appropriated many of the most powerful symbols of the paganism it sought to replace as a means of seducing the masses into the new faith, and pacifying the adherents to the old ways. The song even sounds medieval, and if I knew more about music I might know why – I suspect that like Eleanor Rigby, it’s based not on modern chords, but the more ancient “modes” that go all the way back to classical Greece, but of course I can’t really say. What I can say is that it effectively evokes the age when nearly everybody was a serf subject to Canon Law, and the feudal Lords gobbled up whatever spoils the Church didn’t grab first, and that’s a little bit beyond what you could expect from the average pop combo, no? Here:

Song of the Day: The Beatles – Mother Nature’s Son (November 30, 2018)

A few years ago, a young woman who worked for me had to stay awake all night for some reason relating to a concussion her spouse had suffered. I think she had to stay up to make sure he didn’t go into some sort of sleepy death spiral (which, don’t worry, he didn’t). At the beginning of her vigil, I sent her a link to this song, describing it as something like “a gentle song for a long night”.  She’s just a wonderful person, the kind that old fogeys like me refer to as “really a great kid”, and I wanted to give her a wonderful piece of music. I wanted it to be something soothing without being cloying, and I could think of nothing better to suit the moment than Mother Nature’s Son. At four in the morning, you don’t need a witless pep talk. You need something that feels real. Something that reflects the understanding that hope is always tinged with doubt. 

Well, that’s what I thought, anyway.  Maybe mindless cheer would have been better. I don’t think so, though. She’s far too bright and savvy for that.

So I sent her Mother Nature’s Son. This is quintessential McCartney, with lyrics that tend to lead you in one direction, and music that pulls you a bit the opposite way. Much to John’s disapproval, Paul was never one to wear his heart on his sleeve, and I think that’s why so many people miss the undertones that he communicates through nuanced shifts in chords, keys, and melody, rather than extroverted confessionals in the words. Mother Nature’s Son, as obscure a track as possible for the Beatles, is among the most perfect examples of this style of composition.

It emerged out of the ill-fated sojourn to Rishikesh to commune with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, a trip that included many hangers-on, including folk-pop star Donovan, who tought Paul a finger-plucking style of guitar playing that’s used to great effect here (and in the companion piece Blackbird, both featured on the White Album). The simple joys of communing with nature in a pastoral setting were very much in tune with the message being thrust upon them by the Maharishi, and while urban sophisticate playboys like McCartney could never really adopt that way of life, it was a pleasant idea to toy with after the almost insane living conditions the Beatles had endured over the prior 5 years.

To my ears, Mother Nature’s Son is all about that rueful acknowledgement that the interlude at Rishikesh could be no more than a temporary reprieve. Yes, it’s lovely here in the grass by the stream, but listen to those distant drums – something less tranquil lurks not far over the horizon. Paul created this aural effect of something booming but distant in the simplest of ways, by moving kettle drums out of Studio 2 and down the hall for recording, creating an impression of distant thunder heading this way. There’s still time to enjoy one last perfect moment, but the storm is coming, as storms always must. Those beautifully mellow brass instruments make it plain that this is a happy song written in the shadow of coming sadness.