Archives : all posts by Jordan

Willy DeVille - "Assassin of Love"

Engaged to a well-bred blonde beauty and with a promising career in science before him, Andrew McCarthy forsakes everything, crossing the tracks (and, in the process, his best friend, Ben Stiller) to pursue an impossible affair with Molly Ringwald, a married, unrefined sixteen-year-old. Emilio Estevez drives hours in a blizzard to track down Dr. Andie MacDowell, only to find her at a ski lodge with her boyfriend; he accepts that his romantic obsession is doomed, but kisses her anyway, and she, in her white cable-knit sweater, nearly invisible in the falling snow, kisses him back. In the back seat of his car, John Cusack lies next to the perfect, porcelain Ione Skye, naked, post-coital, shaking.

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Nina Simone - "Turn Me On"

I've gone to bed at midnight, at 2 a.m. and 4. I've dozed off at 9 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, hit the sack at dinnertime and woken up at dawn. I've seen the remotest hours, those at the farthest reaches of time, when the radio plays silence and the tv test patterns, the internet is down and all the books blank, hours when real aloneness is possible, when there's nothing to do but wait for the world's return. In those times, the mind's wont to wonder and on a recent such morning mine turned to the creation of a list of songs likely composed in temporal isolation. But tired as I was I didn't get past the first item -- this song of similes, as simple as ... And before I'd finished playing it, I heard through my bedroom window the soporific swell and decay of the morning's first passing car.

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John Martyn - "Head and Heart"

"Head and Heart" is a sad song. Or, at least, though the evidence is inconclusive, that's how I hear it. Is it because of the context in which I discovered it -- during the scene in The Rachel Papers, the 1989 film adaptation of Martin Amis's first novel, in which the young British protagonist first starts to doubt his feelings for the beautiful American who, with great effort and against the odds, he successfully wooed? (I hope so - I hope it's nothing more than that, no indication of a growing cynicism.) Though "Head and Heart" could just as easily be a song about a man scared of his love not being reciprocated, I hear in the restless sentiment of the second verse and in the ache between chords a desire to be both loved and free from love, to run toward and more quickly away. [Buy]

Daryl Hall (with Robert Fripp) - "Babs and Babs"

Babs and Babs lie in bed together, "arm in arm, head to head." They are as different as can be, these two Barbaras, and each is unable to compromise, but they stick together - they have no choice, they occupy the same body. Babs is the thinking Babs and Babs the feeling Babs and their interactions yield a third Babs, the one we might have access to. Think of it this way: Babs is to Daryl Hall, the great purveyor of blue-eyed soul, as Babs is to Robert Fripp, the technical master of progressive rock guitar; only the union of Babs and Babs, of head and heart, can produce something as whole as "Babs and Babs." [Buy]

Sam Prekop - "The Silhouettes"

This post was begun one month ago, nearly to the day, immediately after I first heard Sam Prekop's surprising new single, "The Silhouettes."

At the time, I wrote:

"Sometimes it's hard to tell haze from smoke, on a campsite near a lake for instance.

Similarly, in a mental space, we often think we're about to set fire, when really we're just confused.

Haze is not merely an intermediary - a lens through which we see other objects - but a thing too in itself, one that can be seen clearly or otherwise."

Weeks later, when I returned to these words and to the song that inspired them, the relevance of each to the other escaped me. I had no idea what my idea had been. And thus, like Augustine in the twilight of his life, I became a question for myself.

What had I been trying to say? Was I alluding to the layers of semi-permeable synthesizer sounds - the fuzz through which one can hear the ascending lead or the looping arpeggios beyond looping arpeggios? But then what might I have meant by the comparison between haze and smoke? Could I have been trying to call attention to the subtle constitutional differences between the song's many similar tones?

All of this questioning - what did it yield? Only one discovery in the end: a new-found appreciation for you, the reader. If I can't understand my own prose, how can I ask that you do? My apologies, my friends, and thank you for indulging me lo these many years.

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Genesis - "Aisle of Plenty"

When Peter Gabriel's Genesis warns of proliferating poisonous plant-life, it behooves you to listen. Their song "Return of the Giant Hogweed" is a disquietingly prescient example: the titular tree-like weed, which resembles a giant's white umbrella, and which emits a sap that is more allergenic than poison ivy, is aggressively spreading throughout Ontario this summer after sixty years of relative inactivity. As promised, the giant hogweed has returned. In "Aisle of Plenty," Gabriel urges us to "see the deadly nightshade grow," and though we can't see it, we shouldn't doubt its existence. After all, he's earned our trust, and anyway, we can hear the truth of it in the song's sinister last minute, its sonic creeping and multiplying. It doesn't take a botanist to hear what's going on: there's a plant growing out there, one you don't want to tangle with.

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Kris Kristofferson - "Epitaph (Black and Blue)"

1. For ten years I have wrongly believed, in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary, that I enjoy the music of Kris Kristofferson. I own most of his records, bought one at a time, perversely, though in truth I like none of them. Kristofferson's plain country can be cold, his lyrics masterful but his sound dated.

2. It's a misconception that first took shape around 1 a.m. on some late-nineties weeknight during an episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Quiet and intelligent, his voice stained by whiskey and cigarettes, Kristofferson spoke of the lyric (not his own) he planned to have inscribed on his tombstone: "Like a bird on the wire / like a drunk in a midnight choir / I have tried / in my way / to be free."

3. If F. Scott Fitzgerald was right that a first-class intellect is one that can hold two contradictory views at once and continue to function, then I'm a genius. If not, I'm an idiot. Although, in my defence, "Epitaph (Black and Blue)" has grown on me over the last decade; it can be wearying to learn to like something, but pleasure is a fine reward.

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Clark The Band - "Tonight I Belong in This Cell"

The obvious didn't dawn on me until the third listen - this song is not sung from the perspective of a number well placed in an Excel spreadsheet. Then I thought of Frege, who asked how or whether we can know that the number 3 is not Julius Caesar, a question that had never resonated with me until that moment, for I always thought it must be easy to distinguish between the emperor and the number, one being a man, the other being ... what? But then I thought, What if I've been duped?! So I listened as if Caesar was singing and I liked that until I deemed it implausible. But then what else could belong in a cell? A nucleus?

There are at least two mutually inclusive reasons why a person might belong in a cell: he has done something wrong and deserves to be punished, or he has done something wrong and is likely to do something wrong again. And yet for a song that arises out of either the singer's guilt or fear of self or both, it is incongruously uplifting. When you belong in a cell, it seems, prison can be liberating.

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Tim Hardin - "Reason to Believe"

Of the 120 seconds, each a gift, that comprise Tim Hardin's original version of "Reason to Believe," the fourteen that fall between the seventeenth and the thirty-second are my favourites. Never have fourteen seconds better exemplified the power of building a song atom by atom, each revealing unheard aspects of the ones that came before, and of the musical molecules they together form. Or, put another way, the revelation contained in those fourteen seconds, the song's careful unfolding, is a masterpiece within a masterpiece.

Of those fourteen seconds, my favourite three are the 18th, in which the drummer's brush first hits the snare, the 25th, in which the horseman's spurs first jangle, and the 27th, in which the bass first sounds deeply. (If only I could marry three separate seconds! But I'm not a polygamist, and anyway, each would always be jealous of the other two.)

"Reason to Believe" was made famous by Rod Stewart's typically hoarse rendition. And yet the perfect simplicity of this arrangement, the fact that the wounded words are the singer's own, and the quality of his teetering vibrato make Hardin's version roughly one thousand times more potent.