Rilo Kiley - "Go Ahead"

"Go Ahead" is a brave face. Wide open eyes and twisted mouth. At first we're met with crisp, jaunty finger-picking and a courageous voice. She wants no longer to have to put up with the vacillations and threats, inconsistent love and chimerical stability. She seems confident, the keyboard backing her up. But then, something happens. A window opens - the sound is soft and tender - and she admits that if he (or she) wants to stay and settle down, she would like that too (especially, it seems).

Then she gets mad again, I think. I hope, for her sake, that she is being sarcastic when she sings "if you want to have your cake and eat it too, and if you want to have other people watch you while you eat it, go ahead." Because the frightening truth is that sometimes we are alienated from ourselves by the strength of our love, and so we become compromised into impossible situations.

This song either comes from within or from just beyond one of those situations. [Buy]

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Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Charles Ives - "Song Without (Good) Words"

Charles Ives was the great American Transcendentalist composer - the musical counterpart of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is no surprise then, that Ives favoured repetition and contradiction in his work.

"Song Without (Good) Words" is a slow motion rainstorm. It is at the same time airy and violent, exquisitely consonant and jarringly dissonant. The staggered pacing and the epiphanic unveiling of its unpredictable course add a sublime beauty.

Of course, the song is not only without good lyrics, but also without a human language with words to express its meaning. [Buy]