Posted on March 3rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Cartoons.
One of the many appealing things about the way Animaniacs was approached was the adherence to the Warner Brothers tradition of cartoon music. The music for Animaniacs was played by a 40-piece orchestra, coloring the cartoons in the old style, with many specific references for those who know the old stuff; it was even recorded in the same old soundstage, with the same piano.
Carl Stalling wrote most of the old Warner Brothers music, but of course a lot of it was borrowed from other sources, famous and otherwise; it's well known among aficionados that one of the best sources was the once obscure but now less so music of Raymond Scott. In particular, "Powerhouse" propelled many frenetic scenes.
But I don't think any of the old cartoons used "Powerhouse" for a whole cartoon. In volume two of the complete Animaniacs, at the very end of episode 50 (the second Christmas episode) there's a piece called "The Toy Terror" that is deliberately animated in the 1930s style, consisting almost entirely of a manic chase & destruction of a toy store by the Warners. The music throughout, with the exception of a few bars at a time of other musical references, is "Powerhouse": the whole song, in order, the first theme followed by the second theme (both of them would be familiar to old cartoon watchers whether they know Scott or not) and back to the first theme. (Here's a brief clip of both themes.) I thought it was terrific, but then I'm delighted just to see (and hear) it done at all.
Posted on February 24th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #13
I am unqualified to write about jazz or classical music, even more than I am unqualified to write about pop music. I am an uneducated enthusiast. I don't play an instrument, and can't speak of the technical details of music in any but the most vague and general terms. I can, of course, speak of the effect of music on me, but that's what most music writing does, and most of it is bad -- and the harder it tries, the worse it is. So tackling this at all is intimidating to me. But I love jazz (and classical, though that is outside the purview of the Song Project), and I have to try. I have no idea whether my approach is coherent. I hope that I improve as I learn to articulate why I like what I like.
Everyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about Henry Threadgill. I try not to express my tastes in music objectively, even the positive opinions that are unlikely to offend anyone, but in Threadgill's case I abandon all pretense of subjectivity. Henry Threadgill is the greatest figure in post-1970 jazz. He ought to be famous. That he is obscure, even among people with a fair knowledge of the history of jazz, is a testament not to a decline of jazz itself but to its decline in importance in American culture. He is the third in my personal triumvirate of jazz: Ellington, Mingus, Threadgill. They represent (to me) jazz that is compositional, complex, adventurous but melodic, the middle ground between the tradition and the avant garde. Each of them explore a wide range of styles, yet each of them has an unmistakable individual voice. When I unexpectedly hear music by them I don't know, I recognize the voice in an instant. In Threadgill's case, this can happen even when the music he's playing is not his own; I heard a piece from Hal Willner's Weird Nightmare Mingus tribute on the radio, and knew immediately that it had to be Threadgill.
Threadgill emerged from Chicago's avant garde scene in the 1970s; his best known work in that decade was leading the free-jazz trio Air (not the French pop electronica outfit). I like that stuff okay, but it's a bit loose and shaggy for my taste. He came into his own with his Sextet (or Sextett), which was actually a septet; I gather that he variously explained that the Sextet was the members who were not him, or that the two drummers constituted one instrument. The band was always Threadgill (saxophones and flute), two horns, two drummers, bass and cello (except on the first album, on which the cello was a piccolo bass). Their first three albums were on the tiny About Time label; the two great ones (When Was That? [1982] and Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket [1983]) were finally issued on cd a few years ago. He was then signed to RCA's Novus imprint, and recorded three albums, the first two (again) of which are great: You Know the Number [1987] and Easily Slip into Another World [1988]. BMG has allowed the albums to languish out of print for so long that Allmusic doesn't even have a picture for You Know the Number. It is (goddamnit) appalling that these albums are out of print. They are, or ought to be, touchstones for where jazz has been for the last thirty years. At any rate, "Spotted Dick Is Pudding" is the last track on side one of Easily Slip into Another World.
This is "Spotted Dick Is Pudding".
This song is like bursts of joy for me. From the beginning, it reminds me of the best parts of being in New Orleans jazz clubs -- or rather, since I loved this before I ever went to New Orleans, the joyful music I was lucky enough to find in New Orleans reminded me of this. I can scarcely point to all the moments of pleasure. A few that make me grin crazily: Frank Lacy's trombone jumping in with a huge growl at 1:33, Threadgill's solo beginning at 4:21, but especially the quick tootles at 4:51 ending with high bleats and the screams at 5:00, and the beautiful run of notes down and back up at 5:24. The alternating low and high bleats at 5:46, while the band stomps away behind him, Deidre Murray making long appreciative whoooaaaaa notes with her cello, makes me laugh out loud. I love the backing horns and bass going into double time at 6:10.
There is a musical theme that runs through the entire piece, but the band does so much more than comp over a set of changes. After the statement of the theme, trumpeter Rasul Siddik takes the lead at 0:30, but he doesn't really solo; he plays the theme, while the band varies behind him. Listen to what each of the other instruments is doing behind him for the next minute, sometimes chiming in for big climactic notes, sometimes spreading out into weird harmonies, while the melody remains straightforward (albeit through key changes).
Even once Lacy and Threadgill begin soloing away from the main melody (while the melody can always be heard in their soloing by implication), you can listen to the rest of the band this way. There is no turn-waiting; everyone is coloring every part of the song. I think Deidre Murray on cello and Fred Hopkins on bass are one of the most amazing combos in jazz history -- they led a few hard-to-find albums on their own -- and listening to them here is like a song in itself; yet it fits perfectly. The drums, too -- Pheeroan akLaff and Reggie Nicholson -- relentlessly play the rhythm while decorating the edges. They never do that tiresome cymbal-bashing that seems to be the default timekeeping for so many jazz drummers, nor do they ever leave the song without a solid rhythm. Through the double-time section they get further out; as they move toward the 6:50 point they are playing wildly around the rhythm, but it's still there in the interstices; they never leave the song unanchored. The drummers only get really unleashed at the end, starting at about 8:23, and by themselves for only about ten seconds, then pushing the song to its triumphant ascendant unison through the horns' climactic outburst, topped by Threadgill's exuberant final blast.
Every second of this piece is exciting to me. I never tire of the melody, the variations on it, the passion with which it's played by Threadgill and Lacy and Siddik. Everyone else is supportive but not merely so; you can follow any instrument through the song with interest. All of Threadgill's best compositions, like Mingus's, are assembled from fascinating pieces that somehow meld into something greater; I often can't hear how the pieces can logically fit together, but they do. In fact, this is truer on many other Threadgill pieces than it is here; the shape of this piece is inferable from most of the bits, while many of Threadgill's other pieces sound like they couldn't be rebuilt if somehow the pieces were to lose each other and need to be reassembled.
Which is to say, I confess that not all Threadgill sounds like this; this is his most accessible period, and possibly his most accessible song. I didn't choose it for that reason -- it is my favorite Threadgill song -- but those inclined to investigate further will find his subsequent work, with the Very Very Circus (in which the deep end is held down by two tubas) and beyond, to be thornier, less obviously melodic. But, I hasten to add, not irrationally or unmusically so; most of Threadgill's music has a logic unlike anyone else's, is all. And this is how much his music means to me: if I can introduce one person who ends up loving his music, I will consider the whole Song Project justified.
Posted on February 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Here are still longer clips for all the unguessed songs. The songs correctly identified thus far:
[update: done!]
A - Adam Ant, Goody Two Shoes (misha) B - Foghat, Slowride (krome) C - Devo, Satisfaction (unquietmind) D - Elvis Costello, New Lace Sleeves (krome) E - Fiona Apple, Fast As You Can (almanac) F - Gladys Knight & the Pips, Midnight Train to Georgia (ethan) G - Brian Eno, Dead Finks Don’t Talk (krome) H - Joe Jackson, Look Sharp (gavin) I - Spoon, Take the Fifth (cleek) J - Toto, Africa (riffraff) K - Steely Dan, Do It Again (richard) L - Siouxsie & the Banshees, Peekaboo (ethan) M - Heaven 17, Let Me Go (ethan) N - Flying Lizards, Money (misha) O - Boz Scaggs, Lowdown (artlife) P - Beach Boys, Caroline No (moody) Q - XTC, Making Plans for Nigel (riffraff) R - Stevie Wonder, Master Blaster (artlife) S - Men At Work, Who Can It Be Now (unquietmind) T - Hall & Oates, Kiss on My List (gavin) U - Simon & Garfunkel. Cecelia (kipw) V - Madness, Grey Day (riffraff) W - Huey Lewis & the News, If This Is It (unquietmind) X - Gang of Four, I Love a Man in a Uniform (gavin) Y - Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, Whipped Cream (shunn) Z - Orchestral Maneouvres in the Dark, Enola Gay (krome)
Posted on February 18th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
It's been a long time since I've uploaded a name that tune game anywhere, and the first time I've done so here. This is how it works:
I have uploaded 26 song snippets to a compressed file. (It's small, about 672k.) Each snippet is named with a letter of the alphabet. You guess the songs. No more than three guesses between answers, please.
None of the songs are obscure. Some of them are famous. I'm pretty sure that every person reading this will be familiar with a majority of the songs, and there are probably people here who know all of them.
If songs remain unidentified, I will upload longer snippets.
Have fun!
Posted on February 16th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #12
The 1980 Rough Trade singles compilation Wanna Buy a Bridge? had a bigger impact on my musical taste than any album ever. I still think it's the greatest single-disc compilation I've ever heard, both because of the greatness of the songs and because it captured a revolution while it was happening: no historical compilation can have the same impact. The sounds of a dozen popular bands and a hundred indie bands find at least part of their roots in one or two or five songs on Wanna Buy a Bridge? So far as I know, it was only ever released in the U.S.*, and has never appeared on cd, though virtually every band on it has been reissued, albeit in some cases after languishing out of print for more than twenty years.
* (When, at eighteen, I became the import buyer at the chain record store I worked at -- because no one else cared -- I scored Rough Trade compilations from Germany, Italy, and Japan, with (so far as I can remember) no overlap. They had This Heat and Zounds and Red Krayola and Pere Ubu and three different songs by the Fall and.... Well, those albums are gone now, never to be recovered. Sigh.)
Wanna Buy a Bridge? would be dear to me if all it had done was introduce me to Young Marble Giants; but there was also Swell Maps, the Raincoats, Robert Wyatt, Delta 5, Essential Logic, Kleenex (aka Liliput), Television Personalities, Stiff Little Fingers, Cabaret Voltaire, the Slits. There was no uniformity of sound or style -- the ramshackle clatter of Swell Maps and the eerily beautiful clockwork of Young Marble Giants barely sound like they come from the same culture, let alone the same scene and time -- just a similarity of approach to the forms of pop music that never acquired any more precise name than "post-punk".
Scritti Politti would in time become more popular than any other band on Wanna Buy a Bridge? I don't care for the slick mid-eighties pop they made their (brief) mark with, though there are those who swear by their influence. There's certainly no other band on the album whose subsequent work would move so far from where it started. I read somewhere that Green Gartside, the songwriter who basically is Scritti Politti, later disowned "Skank Bloc Bologna" and his other work from this time. Too bad.
This is Skank Bloc Bologna.
The harsh chop-chop-chop guitar that opens the song and carries the chords through the verse and chorus parts is one of the stylistic markers of the Gang of Four style of post-punk, and is probably post-punk's most enduring legacy to rock music. I love that kind of face-scrunching sound. In the chorus (which I'm identifying as the part that begins at 1:09), the guitar just chops once to identify each chord; from 1:38 to 2:05 -- which I guess is a bridge, though you could hear it as a second part to the chorus -- is the only time the guitar carries the melody (this part comes by again at 3:29 and 5:20, where the song goes out). And the first time through this part is the only time the guitar does so by itself. The choppy chords played through the sung verse are even more scrunchy than the instrumental part that precedes it: those chords are one of the first things I would point to as an example of the things that opened up the possbilities of rock music for me.
The bass carries the melody through most of the song (along with the vocal when it comes in), through the instrumental verse (which opens the song) and the verse proper. When the guitar grabs the melody, the bass drops back to play the chords with one deep rolling note each; then the bass joins the melody for the transition (at 1:50 and 3:40) before the guitar starts chopping the chords again at the top of the instrumental verse.
But the best thing about the song is the percussion. It's dominated by cymbals, with the rhythm being kept by high hats. The high hats come in a beat early at 0:45, leading into the sung verse; now periodically the high hats start playing around the beat, along with sticks (or blocks?). (Just one little detail I love among many: the half-beat early block hit at 1:23.) With the bridge, the guitar keeps the beat as well as the melody while the percussion, starting with a quick block-bass drum hit (I think) is hitting on the unemphasized parts of the beat, coloring their rhythm, and at 1:45 they double up, just before the glockenspiel (I think) appears for the first time at 1:50. This paragraph needs help! The unresolved rising progression the glockenspiel plays is a gorgeous counterpoint to the abrasiveness of the guitar and the tension of the chords; that transition comes by for the third time at the end but doesn't go back into the verse, just lets the glockenspiel lift the song into the aether. If I could change anything about the song, it would be to let that figure repeat about eight more times while fading.
Incidentally, while I like the vocals, I've never been able to decipher some of it and I have no idea what the song's about.
Posted on February 11th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Top five songs about waiting:
5 Pere Ubu, "I Will Wait"
4 Pretenders, "The Wait"
3 Velvet Underground, "Waiting for My Man"
2 Ed's Redeeming Qualities, "I Will Wait"
1 Matthew Sweet, "I've Been Waiting"
Top five songs about waitressing:
5 Tori Amos, "Waitress"
4 Jane Siberry, "Waitress"
3 Heavens to Betsy, "Waitress Hell"
2 Suzy Bogguss, "Eat at Joe's"
1 "It's an Art," from Working
Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I had few friends in high school. Jay Drumheller was the smartest, I think. After our freshman year, his family moved to Hawaii. We corresponded for a couple of years, mostly via cassette tape, rambling monologues interspersed with songs. I am dreadfully sorry I fell out of touch with him, and I've never been able to track him down on the net. He had more adventurous taste in music than I did; at fourteen or so, while I was sending him "Angry Young Man" by Billy Joel, he was introducing me to Steve Forbert.
One of his tapes had two songs by Don McLean -- "Color TV Blues" and "Building My Body" -- both from the 1977 album Prime Time, long after "American Pie" and well before "Crying", in the interregnum when McLean had disappeared from the radio. I loved both "Color TV Blues" and "Building My Body", and they stuck in my head long after I'd lost the tape they'd been on. I had a hard time choosing which of them to write about first.
"American Pie" is a freak hit. It's been said of McLean, in explanation of his quick return to obscurity after "American Pie", that he deliberately avoided recreating his smash hit. But he didn't really do anything differently than he ever had; he flitted from style to style, and his subject matter was eccentric, but "American Pie" is itself different from standard smash hits. There is no formula there to duplicate. It is what it is, a piece of McLean that struck a common chord out of nowhere.
Prime Time, his first and last album for Arista after four commercial failures with United Artists, is stubbornly insular. It's not completely off in late-70s Harry Nilsson self-indulgent twaddle territory, but it's evident that McLean either didn't give much of a damn about redicovering a mass audience or hadn't a clue how to go about it. Even the songs I haven't connected with aren't ordinary disposable singer-songwriter filler, and the best songs are articulate, sometimes acerbic, sometimes po-faced.
This is "Building My Body".
Remember Larry Groce's novelty hit "Junk Food Junkie"? I think of "Building My Body" as a less yuk-yuk take on 1970s health trendiness. This kind of delicate humor is easy to push over the line, and I'm not going to defend the "ouch!" and "let me out!" (though they make me laugh). In fact the whole thing makes me smile, all the little interpolated sounds and the simple piano-acoustic guitar verses that remind me of Greg Brown's goofier songs (or Randy Newman's -- the opening piano figure sounds like Newman to me), swelling with strings and drums and backing vocals in the chorus to a silly crescendo, pulling back after the "and I know that it won't be long!" peak to the "until I gotta quit smoooooooooooo, king" comic anticlimax.
I love all the little changes in the acoustic guitar playing -- try listening to just the guitar through the first verse -- and the commentary of the strings through the second verse, and all the little bits of novelty percussion, including a fair bit of nice shaker egg playing. In a way it's overproduced -- I'll bet it's a funny live number with just the guitar -- but all the overproduction suits the song. And the ending of the song suggests a whole new disturbing song inside the song -- it's prefigured early in the song with "I know I feel the pain of birth" -- and reinforces the suggestion by leaving the melody open and unresolved, like something's been chopped off.
And McLean is a terrific singer. Of course he can belt, as he does on the chorus, but he also does a great job selling the verses with a dry tone and subtle held notes and changes of vibrato and the little tightening of the throat on "baaaahhh-dy" (and I love the drop to the low note on the second "building" in each verse). And he has good lines to sell; "I'm tired of fighting, let's make friends" and "I'm sweating out mistakes I've made" and "I'm gaining a rapport with my body" are beyond novelty: they're funny.
Posted on February 7th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Lists.
Phil Ford at Dial M for Musicology issued an Ipod Random Challenge a while back that has resulted in several interesting posts. The lists are supposed to be annotated. I'm going to stick to one observation per song, which may have very little to do with the actual song. A few of these are songs I'll be writing about eventually in the Song Project.
Here are the first twelve songs my ipod (a Zen microphoto, actually, but i hate the name Zen) served up:
top five science fiction songs:
5. Devo, "Jocko Homo"
4. Gary Numan, "Are 'Friends' Electric?"
3. the Pixies, "The Happening"
2. the Dismemberment Plan, "Memory Machine"
1. Quasi, "Our Happiness Is Guaranteed"
My player is heavily weighted to the pop song side of my taste; I do most of my listening while commuting, and I enjoy having (mostly) songs I've known long and well.
That was fun.
Posted on February 2nd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
If Sun Ra and his Arkestra are the great mystical goofballs of modern music, then George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic are the great secular goofballs, high concept with a capital High. By the time of 1978's One Nation Under a Groove, the early serious side of Clinton had long since been sublimated within the goofy. When he had something to say -- "Chocolate City", for example -- he said it with a grin and a groove. "Free Your Mind and Your Ass Will Follow", but he might have said Free your ass and your mind will follow, too.
And so Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The DooDoo Chasers).
This is a groove not for dancing but swaying, and listening to the preaching of Overlord George Clinton, the Ultimate Liberator of Constipated Notions (as he styles himself in the liner notes). It's laid down by a steady bass and drums, a low guitar carrying the basic melody, and a high guitar punctuating the melody. As the song goes on, changing chords but not the groove for over ten minutes, that high guitar begins to stretch out until for the last several minutes it's squawling. There's a singer singing a standard ballad melody, with words that can't be made out much of the time (and aren't in the lyric sheet), and sometimes he (she?) too builds to a squawling crescendo, but what would ordinarily be a lead vocal is here just melodic coloring, background for George Clinton's Sunday service: this week, the "prune juice of the mind".
The rope that pulls the song all the way through is the interplay between Clinton and his congregation, every assertion echoed and amplified. And the concept is wonderful: the mind as a mass of shit to be cleaned out with funk ("the band in the tidy bowl of your brain"). In lesser hands this would be an exercise in mere scatology; for Clinton it's a sermon, beginning with "The world is a toll-free toilet", built with delightful metaphor upon metaphor. Interspersed in the call and response are other vocal interpolations by a guy with a Peter Lorre voice ("What was that 'pro' word again? 'Promental--'?" "Clean! Sparkly!"), while George preaches: "And what is the cause of all this shit? . . . Ego-munchies! Me burger with I sauce on it!" "Count the calories of your thoughts!"
Funkadelic have many great songs, but for me this is the peak, even higher than "Maggot Brain". It's amazing that they can play this groove, without fundamental change, for ten solid minutes and it doesn't drag for an instant -- it doesn't even feel long. (There's an instrumental version, and it works, too.) This is Funkadelic at their most seriously playful; who else could repeat and have you repeat with them, and have it sound like an anthem: "Fried ice cream is a reality!"
Posted on January 31st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Ween make themselves deceptively easy to dismiss. They are juvenile and vulgar, not just as a matter of course -- not entirely juvenile and vulgar -- but gleefully so, deliberately. They invite you to think they're stupid; if you do, the joke's on you. It's not a new approach to humor, nor (to me) a very interesting one; yet Ween are a great band. If it isn't because they write songs called "Flies on My Dick" and "Hey Fat Boy (Asshole)", why is it?
Not because they are great musicians (though they are); you can't swing a cat in this world without scratching out the eyes of three great guitar players who have nothing to say. Ween are great because they love music, all kinds, and are serious students of song. No band has tried on more styles than Ween, and everything they play sounds like they've been playing it their whole life. When Ween decided to make a country album, they made an excellent trad country album with old Nashville pros, an album good enough to demonstrate that they could make country their entire career if they wanted (notwithstanding the likely resistance of the country market to songs called "Piss Up a Rope" and "Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain").
My favorite trick of Ween's is their unparalleled skill at pastiche. Not Weird Al-style straight song parodies, but writing an entirely new song in an unmistakable style. They've done innumerable knockoffs -- Prince, Funkadelic, Motorhead, wifty prog rock, Gamble & Huff Philly soul -- but this is the one I love most:
Listen to Pandy Fackler
This is just superb. Tell me if you can't figure out exactly who they're doing in the first ten seconds, before the vocals start (and ideally before reading further). It has the perfect polished sheen of its model; it bounces and lilts and is always under complete control; the chords are pop jazz, the vocals cynical, the vocabulary advanced (rhyming "facade" and "promenade" is a precisely right detail); even the crudity ("sucking dicks under the promenade") is only taking the genteel decadence of the original model one step further, exchanging one kind of bad boy for another.
I love the partial hook that opens the song, which isn't expanded to its full form until we've had verse-break-verse (at 1:31); and it's the hook the song goes out on, too. The solo that follows the full hook (at 1:59) could be lifted right out of the original model's songbook; in particular, the changes at 2:40 and 2:49 make me smile, and the descent back into the hook at 3:22. Other touches that are spot on: the break at 0:40, and the coloring guitar beginning at 1:05. I hadn't noticed till I sat down to write this: all the vocals are in the first minute and a half, with no singing for the last 2:20 of the song.
Of all the great bands in rock history, Steely Dan may have had the least influence. Not only does no one sound like them, their compositional tricks don't seem to have entered the rock toolbox at all. Except here.
Posted on January 30th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Quotes.
Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis aka Frank Black) on the Pixies playing their songs in alphabetical order:
You're going to play all these songs tonight. At the end of the day, does it really matter, the order of the songs? All that matters is the one song you're playing at that time. Because the song begins here and ends here. And it's three minutes long. And while that song is going on, it's the center of the universe. Nothing else matters.
I have my favorite albums and whatnot, but in the religion of rock music, the most holy sacrament is the song. More than the bands. More than the solos. And more than the albums. It's the song. That's the experience. That's why it's like, "Eh, let's do it in alphabetical order." Because it doesn't matter what order we play it in. If we're a good band, get out there and prove it. I'd rather not prove it by all this kind of like showbizzy, Now we're going to finish with our big anthem! Let's just do the anthem now. They better all be anthems, right? They better all be amazing.
(from the 33 1/3 book on Doolittle, by Ben Sisario. I've edited the quote down a bit, removing repetitions and some talkinesses from what seems to be verbatim transcript.)
Posted on January 23rd, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #8
Discussion of Captain Beefheart usually begins -- and often ends -- with Trout Mask Replica, a weird-rock touchstone that overshadowed everything else he did. I love Beefheart, and I like Trout Mask Replica, but it's about sixth or seventh on my list of favorite Beefheart albums.
Top five albums often or even usually cited as the artist's best that aren't even near their best:
- Elvis Costello, My Aim Is True
- the Pixies, Surfer Rosa
- Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica
- the Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- R.E.M., Automatic for the People
Trout Mask Replica refines the mutant blues style that Beefheart began exploring with Safe As Milk. Though that style would remain an important part of his musical palette for the rest of his too-brief career, his next proper album, 1970's Lick My Decals Off, Baby, was his real breakthrough, in my opinion. All the sloppy virtues of Trout Mask Replica were snapped into tight focus, and Decals had new virtues: in particular, a sense of rhythmic structure that was like no one else. If there is an earlier album that has a claim to being the first art-punk album, I don't know what it is.
Beefheart's next few albums alternated between consolidating these gains (Clear Spot and The Spotlight Kid) and appearing to forget them altogether (Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans and Moonbeams). About the time people had stopped expecting much, he re-emerged with a new Magic Band for 1978's Shiny Beast (Bat Chain Puller): not the most consistent album of his career, but the album with the most astonishing high points, and hence my favorite; it begins the final and best stage of his recording career, three excellent and strange albums that more than held their own with the punk and post-punk revolution.
The title track: Bat Chain Puller
Now that is a creepy groove. The song sounds like it's stalking you. Each added instrument in the opening of the song adds to the interlocking groove, and to the menace; and when Beefheart wails "Baaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaa-aaaat! chain puller!" I grab the sides of my chair. This is one of Beefheart's greatest vocal performances. Never has a song served his growls and howls so well, and never has he infused them with such passion and nuance. He sings like a crazy old coot trying to warn us what's waiting in the night, a monstrous parade of imagery: "A chain with yellow lights that glistens like oil beads . . . Bulbs shoot from its snoot and vanish into darkness . . . It whistles like a root snatched from dry earth . . . This train with grey tubes that houses people’s thoughts, their very remains and belongings . . . Pumpkins span the hills with orange crayola patches. Green inflated trees balloon up into marshmallow soot."
I'll just point out one thing in the music (the ominous groove running through the song either grabs you or it doesn't): the thick guitar -- is it a guitar? -- that acts as a kind of bridge starting at 1:58, with an off-kilter rhythmic relationship to the rest of the groove that is fundamental Beefheart. Most of the song you can more or less bop along to, but that part of the song turns into a face-scruncher; for the duration of that guitar I feel like big robotic arms have reached out of the song and seized me and are shaking me spasmodically, and when they release me back into the groove I'm gone. All I can do is stomp into the distance with the bulbs and the roots and the tubes, hypnotized and lost in the otherworldly parade. The old coot was right.
Posted on January 19th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #6 and 7
I didn't grow up with jazz -- not even Brubeck. My parents were not huge music fans, though I was raised on a few staples: Simon & Garfunkel, the Tijuana Brass, Roger Miller, the Beatles. We didn't stray far from mainstream pop. I didn't knowingly hear jazz till I was looking for music on my own as a teenager, and what I heard I didn't much like. I can't honestly say that I tried to like it.
In the early 1980s I worked in a chain record store (Peaches) for a few years, and I thoroughly burnt out on popular music. That's the only time since I was twelve that I've deliberately avoided hearing new music. Consequently I missed a lot of the late 1980s, and have had to approach the music of that time -- particularly the rise of popular hiphop -- almost as historically as I approach the music made before I was born.
But I still wanted to hear music -- I just wanted something else. Country was anathema (that one took a long time to get over), classical was interesting but hard; jazz was still largely a great unknown. I asked a friend, Ted White, who was passionate about jazz and had interested me with stories of the 1950s Greenwich Village jazz scene, to point me toward a good entry point. He recommended Mingus Ah Um.
I don't know whether Ted guessed well based on what he knew of my taste, or based on what had worked for others before, or whether he simply chose his favorite. I don't know whether I would have been knocked out by it any time I heard it, or if I had to wait till I was ready. Mingus Ah Um didn't open the door to jazz for me; it blew the door down. It was intricate and melodic and shifted from mood to mood; it was adventurous and unexpected and it never noodled; the songs were like human personalities, the intruments like voices.
For the next few years I listened to almost nothing but jazz, a crash course. It was exciting, sometimes thrilling, and I'm still learning and exploring jazz and doubtless will be for the rest of my life. But I had started at the peak. I don't know whether it's because it was the first great jazz album I had heard, but I don't think so: Mingus Ah Um remains my favorite jazz album of all time, and my favorite album, period. I know every note, but I haven't wearied of one second of it. From the start, I had two favorites: the melancholy "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" (also known as "Theme for Lester Young"), which is certainly his best known composition, covered by dozens of folks, including pop and folk musicians like Joni Mitchell and Bert Jansch & John Renbourn. My other favorite was "Fables of Faubus", which was a composition Mingus returned to often in live performance.
This is the Mingus Ah Um version of "Fables of Faubus".
It's the first version of "Fables" I heard, and it's the first version most people heard; it was the first version recorded. I think it's beautiful, with a complex tone: quizzical, questioning, and (as with so many of Mingus's songs) often like a conversation, particularly after the first time the song's main themes have been stated (for example, the passages beginning at 1:30 and 2:37). But it's a thoughtful conversation, calm; the song is more contemplative than rousing; its pleasures don't shake the listener, they insinuate, put down roots and grow inside.
"Original Faubus Fables" is something else again.
It's called "Original" because this is the way Mingus meant the song to be heard (and the way it was subsequently played live -- it's not live in this version, despite the introductory patter, which was meant to re-create the atmosphere of a live Mingus set). What I didn't know when I was memorizing Mingus Ah Um was that it is (along with its Columbia Records companion, Mingus Dynasty) something of an anomaly. It is an undisputed great Mingus recording -- everything he was doing around 1959 is amazing, for at least four different labels -- but it doesn't sound like other Mingus records. It's polished, clean, beautiful, perfect. Mingus generally preferred to leave the rough edges on.
Not only that, but Columbia made Mingus leave out the vocal parts. No wonder: they are racially political, an attack on segregationists, and Columbia doubtless feared the effect on sales to the genteel white jazz audience. I'll speculate that this was responsible for Columbia's smooth recording approach, too; they were Brubeck's label, and it wouldn't surprise me if that's how they conceived their jazz audience.
"Original Faubus Fables" was recorded for the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus on Nat Hentoff's great Candid label, which existed to record jazz records the way the musicians wanted. About "Fables", Hentoff writes, "I was disappointed when I heard an earlier recorded version . . . In the club, the mood of the caricature was much more bitingly sardonic and there was a great deal more tension." This version is a quartet -- the Mingus Ah Um version was an octet -- with Eric Dolphy on saxophone, Ted Curson on trumpet, and Dannie Richmond on drums (as he was on Mingus Ah Um and virtually everything that Mingus recorded from the late 1950s on).
Even without the lyrics, you'd know this was an angry, sarcastic, frustrated song. It isn't faster; it isn't louder. It's harsher. Everything is blown and plucked stridently; it all sounds like feelings held barely in check, with control sometimes lost; like people who've been putting up with shit for a long time and have had enough. Listen to the squawling and growling of Curson and Dolphy at 1:46 and 1:51, for example, the way even the trill at 2:15 sounds like someone trembling; the mocking tone of even the non-verbal vocals that first appear at 3:26 (and Danny Richmond's non-verbal outbursts at 2:32); the saxophone losing its temper at 5:48.
"Fables of Faubus" and Mingus Ah Um remain perfect to me. But the harsh emotional power of "Original Faubus Fables" is undeniable, and no doubt it is more what "Fables" is supposed to be. Together they are a marvel -- like a photograph and its negative -- the most compact example I know of the ingenuity and the great emotional range of Mingus and his musicians.
Posted on January 10th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #4 & 5
Since the previous Song Project entry was the song that's most frequently concluded my mix cds in the last several years, I figured this entry would be the song that's most frequently opened my mixes -- in this case, two songs.
One of the drawbacks of being an obsessive music collecter is there is always more stuff around than I can possibly listen to and get to know. (The corresponding virtue is there is always tons of new stuff around to listen to when I want to.) Sometimes I'll have an album for years with only the vaguest idea of what it sounds like, then will be prompted to give it another try and will discover it's amazing and how could I have missed it the first time?
I can't remember why I bought Chisel's Set You Free [Gern Blandsten 1997] around the time it came out. It languished in my collection as an okay pop-punk album, until a few years later when Velma and I heard Ted Leo & the Pharmacists open for someone -- I think it was the Dismemberment Plan, but it might have been Spoon -- and were impressed with his biting, witty songs and catchy but hard-edged pop hooks. I researched Ted Leo, discovered he'd fronted a band called Chisel, and realized, hey, I've had that for years. So I put it on and of course it was great, immediately arresting, exciting and inventive almost from start to finish, an overlooked gem of the 1990s, and how had I overlooked it right in front of me?
Given what I've said about how I use them on mix cds, I guess it hardly needs saying that "On Warmer Music" and "All My Kin" is one of the best one-two punches to lead off any album ever. (The uninterrupted excellence continues for the first five songs, and there are only a couple clunkers among the album's seventeen tracks.) When you listen to them, get "All My Kin" to play immediately after "On Warmer Music", if you can, ideally with a space of perhaps a third of a second between them.
Listen:
On Warmer Music
All My Kin
"On Warmer Music" is dead simple. It's just two parts: verse verse verse verse verse verse until 1:30, then chorus chorus chorus chorus chorus till the end. (Anyone know other songs built this way?) The verse part strides along on the bass and guitar hitting all the beats together, the electric guitar held in check, playing a straightforward repeated sequence of four chords, eight notes to each chord. Leo sings a series of paired couplets; the rhythm is 1, 2-3-4, 1, 2, 3, 4 for the first couplet, with the 2-3-4 being a triplet, while the second couplet goes 1, 2-3-4-5, 6 rest rest rest.
After you've been lulled by this, the chorus kicks in. My god, I love it so much. First, the lyric is great (as is Leo's delivery): "Get ready for the invasion / self-satisfied smug-rock nation / cheers for the young idea! / so glad that you're all here!" Three (or four) chords, one guitar chord for each of the first two lines and one for the second two together while the bass continues to swing between two chords, the instruments played at the same rhythm as the verse but with all the restrained energy now released, the melody up a step, an one-note ahhhhhhhh backing vocal added to the second four bars of the chorus: the whole thing makes me bounce around the room, till everything cuts out on "get ready for".... and stops.
And "All My Kin" begins, with a squalling guitar hinting at a Gang of Four sound; but Leo asks, "Hey top ten?" -- at least, I think that's what he says -- and the central guitar hook of the song announces itself, the figure played through three different chords, once on the first two chords, with the rest of the band joining on the third chord and playing it four times. It's such a neat hook that the band just chugs through the verses with the guitar providing little decoration, mostly choppy little rhythm markers (reminiscent of ska), confident that that the return of that guitar figure at the beginning of each verse will propel the song. The first chorus is a half chorus, a trick I love and another one that shows the band has enough confidence in the song to delay the chorus payoff till the second time through. And when it comes, it's horns! It's as though Paul Weller integrated his Style Council inclinations into the Jam instad of breaking up the band.
A couple of little things I love in this song: I love the way the beginning of each verse is bridged by a quick up-down up-down bass then four loud guitar chops between the opening guitar figure and the verse proper. Those four guitar chops set off the bare verse. And I love the almost yowling female backing vocals on the chorus, sung by Chris and May Leo. And why not go out at the end with a reprise of that guitar figure, suggesting the beginning of another verse but instead stopping cold? Yeah. So glad to be here in the end with all my kin.
Posted on January 4th, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #3
Rob Crow, the restlessly inventive leader of Heavy Vegetable, has led or co-led an absurd variety of musical projects in the last dozen years. Thingy, Optiganally Yours, and Pinback are just the most prominent ones. I have fifteen cds featuring his music, and my collection isn't close to complete. Unlike many hyper-prolific songwriters -- Robert Pollard, say -- Crow's music has many different styles. Heavy Vegetable was his first band of importance, and they sounded like nobody else.
Crow has an oddly geeky songwriting personality. He has a few obsessions he repeatedly returns to, most notably Star Wars, and his fan-geekery seems more sincere than ironic. Sometimes his songwriting is charmingly mundane: "You'll never guess what happened to me. I got fired again. It's so fucking hard to find a job when you don't drive. I don't even fucking know how. My rent is way overdue." Sometimes it's honest: "Looking dumb is exactly what I'm doing right now, but I've got this illusion that I want to keep my integrity." Sometimes it's contemplative: "It doesn't help to admit that I get sad. But I get sad." Often it's just incoherent: "Lemon sells despite itself. And kicking all the tires. Lemon smells. Citrus smells. Put my dogs up, I'm tired. Get it on. Rise." I get the sense that words, for Crow, are just a skeleton to hang a song on. His titles reinforce that impression. Some Rob Crow song titles: "Listen to This Song, Kill Pigs, and Try To Sue Me", "Krishna on the Ledge", "Who Takes My Recyclables?", "Stop Touching Me", "Destroy All Music" (a great song), and "The Long Song at the End of the Record".
Frisbie was the second Heavy Vegetable album; it was also unfortunately their last proper album: they dissolved and re-formed (more or less) as Thingy. After Heavy Vegetable's somewhat scattered debut, Frisbie was startlingly focused, especially for an album with twenty-eight songs; it doesn't flag at any point, and ends with its best song. Frisbie was one of the high points of 1995, and has held up for me since as one of the best couple dozen albums of the 1990s, despite its aggressively original style: originality is often a virtue of the moment, and doesn't always wear well over time.
"Going Steady with the Limes" was the last song on Frisbie. After a twenty-second intro that prefigures the coda, the next forty seconds demonstrate Heavy Vegetable's basic sound: short, choppy riffs strung together in a seeming unwillingness to stay in one place for more than a couple bars. The melodic progessions are common to much post-Gang of Four art-punk; it's the fecund profusion of musical phrases that marks Heavy Vegetable. "Going Steady with the Limes" is in this respect somewhat restrained; some Heavy Vegetable songs have passages that jerk from phrase to phrase every bar or even every couple of notes. (They are not an easy band to dance to.) Most of their songs clock in between a minute and a minute and a half, but they have as much structure as songs twice as long despite not playing any faster.
Heavy Vegetable had another mode, though: slow, brooding, and spooky. Those songs were just as short, but stayed in the same place longer. At the 1:10 point of "Going Steady with the Limes" -- about when most of their songs would be ending -- it shifts gears, laying down a slow steady 3/4 beat, the first two beats emphasized by the drums and guitar, punctuated by a double-time guitar run that alternates between seven and nine notes, the second one adding two notes and a rest to the beginning of the run (and those three beats interrupt the steady rhythm, too). The drummer throws in an increasing variety of fills over these runs. Two vocal lines join the mix: Elea Tenuta and Travis Nelson singing one of Heavy Vegetable's broody melodies, precisely following the basic rhythm laid down by the drums and guitar (one two pause, one two pause, one two pause, one two three four five pause, one two pause, one two three four five pause), while Crow sings along with the double-time guitar. They are throwing together the two basic building blocks of their songs, and the effect is otherworldly. They do this for four and a half minutes -- one of the most coda-weighted songs I've ever heard, right up there with "Hey Jude" -- and so far as I'm concerned they could keep doing this for half of forever.
That coda is one of the great pop music achievements of the 1990s. "Going Steady with the Limes" has a permanent spot in my favorite ten songs of the 1990s -- close to the top, usually -- and I've used it to end more mixes than any other song of the last twenty years.
Posted on January 1st, 2007 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
Song Project #2
Joan Armatrading's eponymous album was her third album -- is there a list of non-debut eponymous albums out there anywhere? -- and it towers above the rest of her work. Her subsequent albums aren't bad, and a few of them are quite good, but none of them approach Joan Armatrading's consistent inspiration. But then, Joan Armatrading is one of the best singer-songwriter albums ever made -- it has a firm place in my favorite twenty albums of all time, any genre, period -- and of all the great albums made by major-label singer-songwriters, it is the most underrated.
I'm not sure why. Possibly because it stands out so much that nothing in her career since has supported the idea that she had a great album in her. Possibly because an album by a black Caribbean woman in 1976 that wasn't soul, reggae, or even folk -- it's just a straight pop-rock album -- was bound to fall between the cracks. There's nothing arresting about it, nothing eccentric or groundbreaking; there's nothing special about it, except ten straight excellent songs; there's nothing notable about it, except that it's perfect.
"Like Fire" is the ninth of the ten songs. There are greater songs on the album: "Love and Affection" and "Help Yourself", especially, but both of them are in a sensitive singer-songwriter style, and great as they are -- I'll get around to writing about them -- I didn't want to give the idea that that sound was all Armatrading was about. "Like Fire" shows off two aspects of Armatrading that have never got the attention they should: her guitar playing and her arrangements.
Give it a listen: Joan Armatrading, "Like Fire"
The acoustic guitar opening is breathtaking. The progression is odd: the first four bars end in a weird chord, then the four bars are repeated, followed by a shorter progression repeated three times -- it's hard for me to count the beat here, because she's messing with which beats she's emphasizing, but it sounds to me like she switches from straight 4/4 at the beginning to a 1-2 1-2-3-4 beat, or maybe just 2/4 -- then a tension-building held chord that seems as though it's about to break into the song, but she throws in a few weirder tension-building notes before the drums carry us into the main groove of the song -- where her acoustic chords remain strange and tense, the laid-back groove carried by the electric guitar and pushed forward by the cool but propulsive drumming -- that's Dave Mattacks, by the way -- like a bubbling electric current being barely held in check. The bass marks the bars with a quizzical slid note. Even in the chorus, Armatrading's chords are tense -- can anyone tell me what these chords are? -- and only after the chorus ends, and the song gathers itself for a couple of bars before plunging into the bridge, does the tension bloom into a harmonically uncomplicated major-key (I think) release, the drums settling down to relaxed timekeeping. But she pulls the song tight again as the bridge ends -- "I'll only leave you if you leave me" -- and again the song stops, gathers itself, and winds back up, with a few more bars of acoustic tension-building, into a reprise of the intro. From here she goes back into verse and chorus, the goes out on a slow fade of the verse, leaving the tension unresolved, keying the listener up for the last song on the album.
This song has the melodic and rhythmic virtues and the stamp of individuality of mid-70s Joni Mitchell, and to me that's damned high praise. The songs on Joan Armatrading are in a variety of moods, but every one of them, without exception, shows the same inspired invention and intricate craft of "Like Fire"; and "Like Fire", for all its excellence, only hints at the greatness of her thick, rich voice, one of those sopranos that doesn't sound like soprano till you try to sing along. If you like this song, I can't believe you wouldn't like the whole album. It's in print; it's probably midlist. (Okay, I will end the evangelism here.)
Posted on December 10th, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
(song #1 in the Song Project)
Sometimes a great song dies for no good reason. Not weird, not eclectic, not difficult, not offensive, not even ahead of its time; just unlucky. "The God Sheila" by Nervus Rex is such a song. Of all my favorite poppy pop songs in the world, this is the most obscure, and I don't know why. Perhaps because Nervus Rex were a lighthearted pop band who wore silly costumes in New York in 1980 when everyone was Very Very Serious. "The God Sheila" has a bouncy "Walking on Sunshine"-type beat, an incredibly catchy melodic progression with a couple of oddball minor-key (I think) changes and cold, machine-like (until the sultry singing on the bridge) female backing vocals, and a general approach that sounds straight out of the early B-52s songbook. To my ears, it should have been a hit, and should be played on nostalgia stations with affection today. I've never tired of it.
I haven't even had the chance to tire of it since our turntable died. It's never been released on cd or on any compilation, it's never turned up on a file-sharing network or on the web; it vanished from the world, for all I could tell. So thoroughly had I given up on ever finding it that it took me three weeks after Velma showed me the existence of a huge network of websites devoted to uploading out-of-print vinyl for it to occur to me that of course there would be obsessive power pop fans uploading stuff; within an hour of that realization last night, I found it (on Powerpoplovers, naturally).
Listening to it again: Man, this song has great drumming.
And now for the overanalytical part of the post:
My friend Donald Keller and I have been arguing cheerfully about music as long as we've known each other, which is about twenty-three years. We've lived in the same place a few times, and are both passionate about music and cross over on perhaps twenty percent of it, so there's been a lot of opportunity for argument. Donald is good at provoking me into writing more than I had intended to.
rmjwell over on Livejournal said that "The God Sheila" didn't resolve to his ears. I wondered what he meant by that. Here's Donald, and my response:
I understand the objection: the song doesn't either progress or resolve in the sense that it starts at one point and pretty much stays there the whole time, then just stops. This is a description, not an objection; the Smiths' great "How Soon Is Now?" does the same thing.
I'm not much struck by "The God Sheila": the fast 2/4 beat (which =never= alters) is not my favorite, and though the main part of the song is in the minor and there are some interesting changes to the major in the other parts, I don't find the progressions or harmonies that catchy.
However, I love "How Soon Is Now?"—the slower, more syncopated beat never palls, and the guitar slide and chorus are delicious no matter how often repeated.
Another vote for the single-song idea.
Good to see you, Donald!
You're wrong about the song not changing, though. First, yes, the fast two-four doesn't change its absolute rhythm -- the beat underlying everything -- or its tempo, but few songs do. It's nice when they do -- I'll go so far as to say I almost always like it when songs do that -- but is not something I count as a demerit when it isn't there. But the rhythm around the rhythm changes quite a bit: listen to the differences in the beats the drummer is playing from part to part.
Also, the quick call-and-response vocals are a nice use of the fast two-four beat, and I think you'd have difficulty pointing to many other songs that have used that trick at this rhythm and tempo.
But also, Donald, the song isn't the same from beginning to end, not remotely the way "How Soon Is Now" is, unless you're talking about mood (in both cases). (And "How Soon Is Now" isn't the same from beginning to end, either. Sure it repeats that guitar figure over and over, but it has a chorus.) "The God Sheila" is oddly enough structured that it's difficult to say what the chorus or bridge might be, but there a bunch of different parts. Here's the way it sounds to me:
intro, guitar playing same figure over ascending keyboard chords, first 33 seconds.
0:33 - 0:50 full verse A part
0:50 - 0:57 b part ("but I like Sheila") with response vocals
0:57 - 1:13 full verse A part adding response vocals
1:13 - 1:29 chorus
1:30 - 1:36 half verse A part
1:37 - 1:44 bridge, sliding into intro reprise ("I believe in herrrrr")
1:44 - 2:00 intro reprise
2:00 - 2:16 full verse A part
2:16 - 2:24 b part
2:24 - 2:40 chorus, more spare, with spoken response vocals
2:40 - 2:48 half verse A part
2:48 - 2:58 bridge, sliding into intro reprise
2:58 - 3:30 intro reprise, with snares on the 2 in the second half propelling the song to a closing guitar chord at 3:30 that I don't know if it occurs previously in the song; it's an odd resolution, an unexpected one but not attention-grabbingly dissonant, either.
Now, that looks like an admirably built song to me. Not just not the same all the way through, but not precisely like any common pop song model. Whether the listener finds it catchy or not is of course a matter of personal taste; but it's an excellent piece of craftsmanship.
I agree that the whole song is in the same mood/style/feel, and that it's easy to hear it as variations on a theme. But to me, that's a strength, if you like the theme. And if you like the theme, of course the variations separate themselves the more often you listen to the song. I am so used to admiring the way this song is put together that I admit my initial emotional reaction to "it starts at one point and pretty much stays there the whole time, then just stops" is a stuttering, "but- but- !" There is so much in that song for the pattern and variation lover in me that I could write a couple more pages on specific things changing from part to part. I resist doing so because it would look like a dry technical analysis -- I'm afraid what I've written above already looks that way -- when in fact all those changes and pattern and variation give me great emotional pleasure, and the analysis follows (I know you, Donald, understand that). Those pleasures are different in kind but not in strength from the pleasures I get from swings of mood or style in a song. (And both pleasures are visceral -- different in what kind of emotional response they generate in me, but still, both are pre-conscious reactions.)
Posted on July 3rd, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs.
I think various of you, especially those of a kinky nature, will find Belle and Sebastian's Meat & Potatoes amusing.
Beyond the amusement value, I think it's a great song, my favorite of theirs since at least "Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It". Which reminds me: is there any other band as inclined to put their best songs on EPs instead of albums? Since If You're Feeling Sinister, I'd say about three quarters of the best Belle and Sebastian songs have been on EPs rather than the five albums they've released since then.
Posted on March 31st, 2006 by Scraps.
Categories: Music, Songs, Musicians.
We finally got Illinoise. The John Wayne Gacy song is heart-achingly beautiful. I was moved so strongly by it the first time that I couldn't listen to it again for an hour till I recovered. The moment when his voice jumps up to the "oh my god" brings me near weeping every time.
This is the second time Sufjan Stevens has done this to me; the first time was also a vocal jump ("lord" in "Seven Swans").