I just heard the Nina Persson cover of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, and it brought me back to 1991, me as a 13 year old, a freshly minted teenager. I can’t say I grew up immediately loving indie rock music: the first album I bought, really, was Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl.

But then I entered secondary school, and nicely timed with my entry into adolescence was the coming of two albums that changed my musical tastes: R.E.M.’s Out of Time, and Nirvana’s Nevermind. And slowly it came to me, that music could be multi-layered, could be lyrically challenging, could be about despair and the whole range of human emotions.

Which is not to say that good disposable pop like the Sugababes doesn’t have a place on my iTunes list. But some songs of angst will always be the songs of my youth.

As for Persson’s version of the song itself? Persson is capable of much better singing, I think - obviously, her work with the Cardigans is excellent, and I’ve been a fan of some of the stuff she did with A Camp. But this take doesn’t have the end-of-one’s-rope hope/despair mix that the R.E.M. original does, and it’s much the poorer for it.

My previous post on Thunder Road made me realise I have 5 other versions of the song besides Springsteen’s: Badly Drawn Boy, Cowboy Junkies, Kevin Rowland, Mary Lou Lord, Tortoise & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. I also have the piano-and-harmonica version referenced by the Wily Filipino here.

So I thought I’d compile a partial list of songs I have more than 5 different artists’ cover versions of. And I realised - gosh, I’m a pack rat. Here’s the list:

• Bill Withers, “Ain’t No Sunshine”
• Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time”
• The Drifters, “Save the Last Dance For Me”
• Eddie Floyd, “Knock on Wood”
• Eddy Arnold, “You Don’t Know Me”
• Frankie Valli, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”
• John Prine, “Angel From Montgomery”
• Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee” (the Janis Joplin version for me, though, is so iconic that the fact that it was originally about a woman surprised me - here’s a few versions)
• Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”
• Lynyrd Skynyrd, “Sweet Home Alabama”
• The Mamas and Papas, “Dream a Little Dream” (including French versions)
• Mott the Hoople, “Sweet Jane”
• Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
• Roxy Music, “More Than This”
• Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin, “Je T’aime Moi Non Plus” (including English versions)
• The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?”
• Simon & Garfunkel, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”
• Simon & Garfunkel, “Mrs Robinson”
• Stevie Wonder, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours)”
• Wham, “Last Christmas”

Incidentally, one of my childhood memories is of my Dad singing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” as he bid us goodnight. Completely inappropriate lyrics, I guess, now that I think about it. But it’s a great song, one of the best Brill Building products.

On my walk from the office to the subway station today, Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” just kept playing in my head. (Okay, by the time it made an encore in my head, I whipped out my MP3 player and let it repeat in my ears.) It’s a song I like to dip into from time to time - for one, it’s got one of my favourite couplets in pop songs: “Roy Orbison singing for the lonely / Hey that’s me and I want you only”. For another, it’s a song that somehow manages to juxtapose a lot of contrasting emotions: the promise of getting out along with making the most of things right now in spite of the limitations of current options (”Hey what else can we do now? / Except roll down the window / And let the wind blow back your hair”), of faith despite the passing of time (”So you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore / Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night”). (I like mixed emotions in songs - here’s my little take on happy songs of despair.)

And I know I didn’t grow up in Jersey, and that the roads out of this town are roads right out of the country, which makes the promise of the open road that much tougher, but how can it not mean something, right, this song of hope mixed with realism (the only real kind of hope in my book)? And because I can’t really say it better, I’ll end with the words of Nick Hornby, for whom this is his favourite song:

“When it comes down to it, I suppose that I, too, believe that life is momentous and sad but not destructive of all hope, and maybe that makes me a self-dramatising depressive, or maybe it makes me a happy idiot, but either way “Thunder Road” knows who I feel and who I am, and that, in the end, is one of the consolations of art.” - Hornby, on “Thunder Road”, in 31 Songs/Songbook

A Christmas playlist, based on a mix I made for someone, but with slight modifications:

* Diana Krall, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
* Nat ‘King’ Cole, “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)”
* Eartha Kitt, “Santa Baby”
* Tom Jones and Cerys, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”
* Macy Gray, “Winter Wonderland”
* Olivia Olson, “All I Want For Christmas Is You”
* Jimmy Eat World, “Last Christmas”
* Weezer, “The Christmas Song”
* Edward Elgar, “Snow”
* Frank Sinatra, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”
* Joni Mitchell, “River”
* Harry Connick Jr., “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

And if you really want something more indie, here’s ShiSho, with “Get Behind Me Santa”

(Thanks to Indie MP3 for pointing it out…)

Or you can always go for a few dozen cover versions of “Last Christmas”.

Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” is a gem of a song, finished two years ago and shelved by Sony but finally seeing the light of day after numerous Internet leaks. The song is the soundtrack to the cracked house of mirrors that is a broken relationship - yeah, the ghost of Apple’s breakup with PT Anderson haunts the song, apparently. And Apple’s smoky-voiced defiance about criticisms match perfectly the lyrics defending her personality and who she is:

I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day
You deem me due to clean my view and be at piece and lay
I mean to prove I mean to move in my own way, and say
I’ve been getting along for long before you came into the play

Rhymes and circus chords stalk “Extraordinary Machine”, imbuing it with a menacing I’ll-show-you lilt. It’s a stunning return to recording for the kohl-eyed musician, and an extraordinary machine of a song.

My best experience of Canadian Content: sitting in the computer room of the Palais des Congres convention centre, the girl opposite me suddenly started playing local band the Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies)” on her laptop. Which I started nodding my head along to (”sleeping is giving in” is such a good line). So she goes - “oh do you like that song?”And I said yeah - I had the song with me. And then the guy next to me went, “oh I have that song on my computer too”. And then the other girl opposite me was like “oh yeah so do I”. So we tried playing the same song on 4 machines at the same time. As an effort in coordination it was a failure - seriously ugly phasing effects - but as a shared musical moment it was great. Four people, three countries, one great song.

People try and hide the light / Underneath the covers.
Come on hide your lovers / Underneath the covers…

On one of the forums I take part in, they came up with the topic of “obscure yet influential musical acts” - these were my contributions to the list…

The Dead Boys
The Dictators
Hüsker Dü
Black Flag
The Meat Puppets
Afrika Bambataa
Cabaret Voltaire
Einstürzende Neubauten
Can
Love
Last Poets
DJ Kool Herc
Larry Levan

Songs that would never have been written by American bands - it’s more than just the England-specific content, I think, it’s a certain sensibility:

Black Box Recorder, “The English Motorway System”
Divine Comedy, “National Express”
The Beatles, “Penny Lane” (McCartney’s moment of nostalgic reverie)
The Jam, “All Mod Cons”
The Jam, “A Town Called Malice”
The Kinks, “Waterloo Sunset”
The Streets, “Geezers Need Excitement”

And for albums with extremely British sensibilities:

The Jam, All Mod Cons
The Kinks, Arthur - Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire
The Kinks, Village Green Preservation Society
The Streets, Original Pirate Material

Speaking of songs I heard on the radio, the Black Eyed Peas “My Humps” is an utterly atrocious song, and continues to convince me that Fergie’s entry into the Peas may have been good for them commercially, but is slowly destroying all their cred. I remember when the Peas used to deal with socially conscious stuff in their music - heck, I remember when they did a party song that wasn’t moronic (”Request Line”, with Macy Gray). Now I have to bear with an inane tune about Fergie’s “lovely lady lumps”.

Edit: inexplicably, alumni of my college seem compelled to comment on “My Humps”. Here’s Hua Hsu’s trashing of the song and Matt Yglesias’ inexplicable defence of it.

Saw that new Alicia Keys song, “Unbreakable”, being performed on MTV Unplugged last night as I was strolling through the local HMV, which makes it the 2nd time I’ve heard the song in 24 hours. It’s really quite a terrible song. The whole conceit of comparing a relationship to a television programme just led to some cheesy lines (”Unbreakable! / Through the technical difficulties / Unbreakable! / We might have to take a break / But ya’ll know we’ll be back next week”). Man, I’ve read some of the gushing over the album, and I really don’t get the love for this song.

Keys has always been one of those singers who I know has talent - she has the vocal chops and the musical skills - and clearly the talent shows in her covers (”Wild Horses”, “Every Little Bit Hurts”) on Unplugged, but her own songs have consistently underwhelmed me.

No Rock & Roll Fun takes a dig at The Noise Next Door, some random teen punk band that changed the lyrics and title of their song “Dirty Girls” in order to get it played on the radio:

The line “I don’t want to sleep with dirty girls tonight” has been changed to “I don’t want to be with flirty girls tonight” and the opening “My libido has gone walkabout” has been cut.

The song had been called Dirty Girls. It’s now called Miss U. It’s unclear if they’ve also taken the chance to address the other issue that threatens to keep the song off TV and the radio, that of it sounding rubbish.

Link

Yeah, changing lyrics that are only vaguely risque is not very punk is it? Personally, I prefer to think of perfectly innocuous songs as containing some sort of innuendo. Such as “Come On Eileen”, everyone’s favourite bukkake song.

Sometimes songs carry with them their own internal transport, and sometimes songs are one’s own personal mental map, bringing you back to whenever you first heard them, or to times when you kissed with the tune in the background, or to car rides… so here’s some thoughts on songs, starting with the Supremes’ classic “You Can’t Hurry Love” (And yes, I know, this is sort of the territory Nick Hornby charted in 31 Songs.)

Back in college, a friend and I had an ongoing debate over the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love”: is its central message fundamentally optimistic, or melancholic? And I think ultimately it depends on the listener and how comfortable one is about having things beyond your control. If you can’t hurry love and you just have to wait - should that cause one to be upset at the vagaries of fate? Or does that mean that, well, love will happen anyway, and your present lovelorn state is just a blip of unhappiness?

Me, I’m quite accepting of things beyond my control, I think, so I think of the song in an optimistic way. All I know is, when that awesome bassline kicks in, it makes me happy

The beginning of an occasional series, featuring a grab-bag of music/film/arts pieces on the web:

Song on repeat at the moment:

I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles
In our eyes are mirror images and when
We kiss they’re perfectly aligned
And I have to speculate that God himself
Did make us into corresponding shapes like
Puzzle pieces from the clay

True, it may seem like a stretch, but
It’s thoughts like this that catch my troubled
Head when you’re away when I am missing you to death

- The Postal Service, “Such Great Heights” (Available for download on the band’s Sub Pop site)

What a song. Non-cynical, heart on sleeve, and yet perfectly balanced so that it doesn’t tip over into mawkishness.