My Musical Advent Calendar

"Christmastime" /
Aimee Mann

It's pouring rain here in New York City -- rain, not snow, on December 23rd -- and I couldn't get a cab to save my life.  So the last two presents I need to buy better be available still tomorrow. I couldn't sleep last night, worrying about all the things I need to get done before Friday.  Why did we think holidays were a good idea?

When I get in a funk like this, somehow I crave listening to Aimee Mann.  And here she is, with a Yuletide version of her trademark cynical melancholy.

 



From her 2006 Christmas album One More Drifter in the Snow (gotta love that ironical title), this song was written by Aimee's husband, the wonderful Michael Penn, along with Jon Brion. I love it when the morose magic of Aimee's voice is kicked up a notch by Michael's wry humor and clear-eyed perceptions.  

 

"It's Christmas again, December is here," she begins, in a diffident drawl, "Hasn't it been a wonderful year?"  Is it just me, or do I detect a note of sarcasm there?

 

It's a flawed holiday, at best. "And on the tree all the ornaments glow / Tinsel will cover where the branches don't grow."  Maybe that just because she's an outsider, looking in, but the merry streetscape sure seems like a cruel cliché. "There's lights on all the houses / Spouses with their spouses / Children playing in the snow."  I especially love that line "Spouses with their spouses," and how her voice lifts, so wistfully, on the second "spouses."  I find myself getting all tangled up in the gender politics of that innocent word, which is always relational -- you can't just be "a spouse," you have to be somebody's spouse. And right now, apparently, she isn't.  

 

I can just hear the shrug in her spirit as she muses, "Keeping on track's another matter of course /  That's the great divisor / You are now the wiser / Maybe just a bit less so." Yeah, she's holding it all together, but it's so much effort. "Touch and go 'til you stop on a dime / All alone at Christmastime."

 

And -- as always in a Michael Penn song -- you've got no one to blame but your own capacity for self-deception. In the last verse she ruefully admits, "Look at your behavior / Looking for a savior / Underneath the mistletoe."  I love the double meaning of savior here -- not Jesus, as the hymns proclaim, but the Mr. Right she's still waiting for.

 

(Yup, this is pretty much the heart-scarred Mann/Penn party line -- read here for more.)

 

A holiday downer?  I suppose it could be. But me, I see it as a compassionate reality check. Why do we feel forced to pretend that our lives are perfect when this season rolls around?  No one's life is perfect.  It's okay to feel loss and melancholy, whatever the calendar says. And if that's where you are in life right now -- well, you've got some pretty comforting company in Aimee Mann and Michael Penn.  

"Save Me" / Aimee Mann

"Pretending" / Michael Penn

And here's the scary thing: These people are married to each other.

Rabbit hole exegesis:  I just wrote about Aimee's version of Harry Nilsson's heartbreaker "One" and somehow that led me to binge-listen to her soul-shivering "Save Me" from the 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia.  Not exactly an upbeat tune, this; in fact, I have it on my iPod in a playlist called "Moody," which is a euphemism for "totally depressive: handle with care."

The title reminds me of Fontella Bass's classic "Rescue Me" -- all appetite and sassy demands -- but "Save Me" is an entirely different sort of song. It's not about physical desire so much as the head games we ladies play with ourselves, way too often. Against that loungy-yet-ominous tempo, it starts oh-so innocuously -- "You look like a perfect fit." But against that downward-loping chord sequence, how swiftly she re-adjusts this, typing herself as "The girl in need of a tourniquet." 

 

And then the chorus cycles in, diving to the crux of the matter. "Can you save me / Come on and /  Save me. / If you could save me / From the ranks / Of the freaks / Who suspect /  They could never love anyone." A-HA! There we are. Raise your hand if you have EVER counted yourself in that not-so-exclusive club. Every time that chorus repeats, I feel tagged.

  

Note that she doesn't say the expected "freaks who suspect they will never be loved." Sure, there are legions of those, too. But those "who will never love anyone"? That's an even sadder and lonelier bunch, trapped between their own inadequacy and their crippling consciousness of it.  And in a later verse, as she references sufragettes ("the long farewell of the hunger strike"), we find ourselves clinging to our split desire to be independent and yet beloved.

 

 As the bridge puts it, "You struck me down / Like radium [Marie Curie alert for us smart girls!] / Like Peter Pan / or Superman / You will come...."   We've all been programmed to believe in heroes who will swoop in and save us.  How hard it is to give up that faith. But here we are, still hoping....

 

And what do I follow it up with on that same playlist?  What else but her husband Michael Penn's equally disturbing "Pretending"?  Hello! We don't even need to change keys between these songs. (What is it that made me re-visit Wikipedia to make sure that these two are still married?  Note that I do not use the phrase "happily married....")

 



From Penn's 2005 album Mr. Hollywood Jr., this winsome track puts the hunt for love into a different context: It's a quest for affirmation that never stops. In halting rhythms he announces: "Let's say that was then / Here we go again /  All our friends are filling the room, / It's like a play / And the words that I'll say are not for you." Even after these two misfits have found each other, the wearying need to affirm each other never stops.

And does it work?  Penn's chorus is sadly pessimistic: "It's on a happy ending / But baby, I'm pretending." He HAS to be honest with her; he's a decent guy, after all. And I sense that he does love here, as much as he is capable of loving anyone. But there's the rub: the only kind of guy she could be happy is also exactly the kind of guy who can't make anyone really happy. He thinks too much, he feels too much, he's unable to live in the moment. And he is brutally honest -- an absolute prerequisite from her standpoint, and yet the fatal flaw in the whole set-up.

The delicate acoustic setting of this song underlies how fragile this state of mind is, a structure of diminished and suspended chords, sung in Penn's sweet yet underemotive tenor. "Baby, I'm pretending / Even though I know better / But I can't refuse 'cause, / Although on a ruse / You've come to me depending,  / Baby, I'm pretending..."  He genuinely wants to be there for her, he knows how much she needs him, but he's hyper-aware of his own weakness.

This song is such a gut punch. He knows she needs him to provide "anything sure that's attached and secure," "a lifeline," "something to show / That I really do know." And -- Lord, he wishes it weren't so -- that's exactly what he cannot provide.

Music for Grown-Ups, indeed. And sometimes I wish I weren't a grown-up.  

"O. K." / Michael Penn

Another song I was saving for Waltz Week, but life is conspiring against me on that front, and with Graham Parker and the Rumour heading back into town -- well, it all connects. On my end, at least.

So who is Michael Penn?  He's Aimee Mann's husband, he's Sean Penn's brother, he's Eileen Ryan's son, but get over all of that, will ya?  He's simply a wonderful singer-songwriter who has never gotten the attention he deserves. You may say you haven't heard his work, but listen to the supremely catchy chorus of 1989's "No Myth" and you'll realize you have. (And if you've seen the Paul Thomas Anderson film Boogie Nights, you've heard even more, since he did the film's score.) All the insiders, the people in the know, dig his talent, but the world at large seems to be blissfully unaware. And I'd like to change that.

What gets me most of all is the simplicity of this song. Penn is a supremely intelligent songwriter -- just listen to his lyrics -- but the mark of true intelligence is that you know when to pare things back. The acoustic arrangement, the minimal studio intervention -- it's just a guy and his electric piano, a guitarist across the room, trying to resuscitate an endangered relationship. 

"Baby calm down,," he begins, gingerly, coaxingly. "Baby come back down to the ground." Already we know that he's the stablizer in this relationship, as he begs, "Let me hold you, / Let me hold this moment a spell."  I love how he interposes a pregnant pause between each line, with just a tiny winsome curl of guitar slipped in as he inches tentatively forward, walking on eggshells.

The chorus is really the meat of this song, swelling in volume and repeated three times, with minor word changes: "There's really not a lot of options open / For another kind of aftermath. You're hoping / That there's something else that you can do to / Make it come true / Make it perfect, / Make it O.K." Notice how those long lines circle anxiously around a tight cluster of notes, getting tangled in his syntax, until the melody rises on "Make it come true" and the key changes to major, like a wave breaking on a beach. From there on, everything dissolves and relaxes into simple phrases and short lines, shifting down the scale to rest.

I love how you see him talking her down here. It's a delicate evolution, from strenuous yearning ("make it come true") to performance anxiety ("make it perfect") to restful acceptance ("make it O.K."). A lesser songwriter would have done it the other way, promising his gal that he could work wonders. And when you think about it, it's a funny sort of comfort he's offering her: He's telling her that she has no options, that she can't fix things, and he can't either. For all we know, this is their final break-up moment. But sung in that sweet, slightly husky tenor, this chorus is calming, soothing, and consoling as all get-out.    

Now that she's off the ledge, he widens his camera angle to give us some context. This whole album (Mr. Hollywood, Jr.) is very Los Angeles, and the scene he paints in verse two is pure L.A.: "Light the marquees, / Santa Anas twist through the trees" Then he narrows in on an oddly domestic detail of laundry hung out to dry: "While the line swings, / Putting all your light things with his." That last line perplexed me until I started to think of a couple doing their laundry together in a laundromat, and then it made perfect sense. All those dramatic events -- the klieg-lit movie premiere, the wild winds -- pair up with the mundane domesticity of doing laundry. Because this is the heart of making a relationship work: getting the day-to-day stuff right.

That waltz tempo, too -- that's a sneaky choice for this song. There's something romantic and yet comforting about the 3/4 lilt, even as Penn plays against it with syncopation and oddly enjambed sentence breaks. It's not a simple-minded waltz, but it's not a thrusting rocker, either. The key shifts, the tempo shifts, are all artful negotiations. You get the feeling that this guy has had to coax his partner down before, and he gets better at it every time.

And I'm sitting here listening, yearning to be so comforted. I actually feel endorphins release when he hits that last phrase. Making it O.K. isn't a compromise, isn't a sell-out -- no way, not the way Michael Penn sells it in this song. By the time the chorus lands there, it feels like a haven of peace. In a rock song. Bravo, Mr. Penn.