Song Project #15
I probably use the word "underrated" too much, and I'm likely to continue doing so throughout the Song Project. Even so, I try not to use it for musicians who are great but whose natural audience is small, through abstruseness or being ahead of their time or whatever, reserving the word for musicians whose lack of recognition baffles me, because they seem to be exactly the sort who ought to be popular.
Kirsty MacColl –- Ewan MacColl's daughter -- achieved a fair measure of success in her career, but odds are you don't know her work, especially if you're American. Yet she was a terrific pop singer with a distinctive voice, and a clever songwriter with a melodic gift. Things just never aligned for her quite right, I guess, and now she's dead, killed by a speedboat in the Gulf of Mexico (owned by one of the wealthiest men in Mexico, and driven in an area off-limits to speedboats; no one was ever charged). She'd been in the middle of a creative resurgence: her last album, 2001's Latin-saturated Tropical Brainstorm, is one of her two great albums, along with 1989's Kite.
As a songwriter, you probably know her best for the Tracy Ullman hit "They Don't Know" (though if you're a Bette Midler fan, you might know "In These Shoes?" better). As a singer, you'd most easily recognize her voice from her duet with the Pogues on that bar jukebox Christmas classic, "Fairy Tale of New York". Once you know her voice, you can pick her out easily as a backing vocalist, and she did a lot of singing on other people's stuff.
Though her career never took off big-time, she did have minor hits in the U.K., and in 1995 Virgin issued a retrospective called Galore (since superseded by the three-disc set From Croydon to Cuba). Galore included two original songs, and one of them (frustratingly for fans who already had virtually everything else) was one of the best songs she ever wrote.
This is "Caroline". (This is a poorer quality mp3 than I would like, but it's all I have available.)
MacColl has said that this song is Jolene's reply (if you don't know the Dolly Parton song, it's sung from a heartbroken and resigned woman to the woman who's taking her lover). I can't think of another song with the approach of "Caroline" –- it's saturated in guilt and shame, but the narrator is as resigned as the singer of "Jolene" is; the narrator knows she's wrong, and knows she's not going to give him back (if she even could). It puts the listener in an odd position: it's hard to sympathize, hard not to empathize with Caroline done wrong; but how many of us haven't been in the narrator's position, or somewhere near? And the anguish is sincere, the conflict summed up in one fine line: "God help this selfish heart of mine."
Melodically this is one of MacColl's most inspired songs, infectious and poppy. It sure sounds like a hit to me, but the landscape of 1995 American popular music was about the least fertile ground possible for it. It's expertly crafted, too. It has one of those hard-working choruses that change the lyrics each time over four choruses. The brief intro prefigures the chorus; then the verse breaks into two parts, each of them rising to a small hook ("if I'd seen you" "news like that"), and the chorus sings a different melodic progression for each of the first three lines –- the second one raising the tension, the third dropping down -– before the two-line up-down hook, with two gorgeous harmony lines sung (I'm pretty sure) by herself. The bridge keeps the momentum, and adds the high harmony on the last line as it bursts back into the chorus. Then a brief guitar break with wordless vocals. Then an abbreviated verse ("I'm so ashamed of myself but I still want you / What a terrible thing for a friend to do") that's just the last melodic part of the first verse, and then the chorus again, then the abbreviated verse again! –- the whole verse is only there the first time -– and out on the chorus, with one extra repetition of the hook (with a little vocal wiggle thrown in), and cold stop.
To me, this is a perfect pop song, married to a lyric expressing something universal yet not said by anyone else. She did songs that were musically more adventurous, and a lot of them are great -- she'll be back multiple times before I'm through with this project -- but "Caroline" is (most days) my favorite.