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.  

"One"

Harry Nilsson / Al Kooper / Three Dog Night / Aimee Mann

Don't you just hate it / love it / go CRAZY when you find out that a song you know like the back of your hand is really another song by another artist who has even more of a claim to it?

Well, this particular tune keeps upping the ante for me.  First of all, like everybody else in my generation, I knew the Three Dog Night mega-hit from 1969.

What a great song, I thought. It may be the only Three Dog Night song I ever really liked -- no, wait, that's not fair.  I also liked "Eli's Coming" (until I discovered the Laura Nyro original).  In later years I'd also find out that "Try a Little Tenderness" was infinitely better when Sam Cooke sang it, and that "Mama Told Me Not To Come" should only have ever been sung by its original author, the incomparable Randy Newman. Sigh.

But I digress. The Three Dog Night "One" hit the charts in 1969 and it seemed so cool, those opening lines with their intriguing circular logic: "One is the loneliest number that you'll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It's the loneliest number since the number one." Heavy, man, like a Zen koan. But then  three years later when I hit my Al Kooper phase (a short but not negligible chapter of my fangirl story), I fell in love with Al's baroque and haunting 1968 version. It forever wiped the 3DNite single from my memory.

Now is that a thing of beauty or is it not?  I love those sawing strings, the sweet clarinet (or is it an oboe?) weaving in and out, the triple-tracked overlapped vocals -- even the (at the time not yet hokey) rainfall and thunder effects at the end.  For a song that's all about loneliness and disconnection, this elaborately concocted studio montage layers on the borderline schizophrenia, doesn't it?  Stay alone for too long and you too will go stark staring mad.

Delicious.

So anyway...the years pass, and DECADES later I encounter this existential version by the way-too-underrated Aimee Mann, used in the soundtrack of the seriously disturbing 1999 Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia.

(There are other YouTube versions. I picked this one because I still need to see images of Philip Seymour Hoffman whenever I can. RIP PSH, you genius.)

If Al Kooper's highly-wrought version was haunting, Aimee Mann's stripped-down version is equally haunting. Every bar of this song expresses existential loneliness.  How relentless is that electric piano, tapping out the repeated chords? And I love how Aimee's affectless yet melismatic voice curls knowingly around the phrase ends. Oh, yes, she is a lady in pain, and IT IS OUR COMMON PAIN TO WITNESS.

Now, we need to fast-forward just a few years to, okay, 2013.  Here I am, blogging away, and I dig up a tribute album called For the Love of Harry  -- the very same album for which Aimee Mann's "One" was originally recorded. For me, this album becomes a rabbit hole worthy of Alice in Wonderland, wherein I at last truly discover Harry Nilsson -- an artist of whom I had always been aware, through a handful of hit records and the fact that he was with John Lennon and May Pang on the Kotex Night. But now I REALLY discover Harry Nilsson, he of the glorious God-given voice and a songwriting sensibility that marries Beatlesque pop with Summer of Love California Dreaming and the American standard playbook.

A genius, pure and simple. And yet I NEVER BEFORE REALLY REGISTERED THAT HE WROTE "ONE."

And yet here it is, the one and only original "One," from Nilsson's 1968 album Aerial Ballet.

The story goes that Harry wrote this after phoning someone and getting a busy signal -- remember the obnoxious beep-beep-beep of a busy signal, back in the days before answer machines and call waiting and cell phones?  The whole song is underlaid with that off-putting busy signal, counterpointed with a yearning cello line that speaks volumes about the human desire for connection. But more than anything, it's Harry's pure and sincere vocal that sells this song.  I am here alone, it says, trying so hard to make a connection, and the technology won't let me in. And his heart is hurting -- "it's just no good anymore since you went away / Now I spend my time / Just making rhymes / Of yesterday." Major and minor and suspended chords overlap, and this poor schmuck is wading through it all, heartsore and hapless.

Is this a killer song or what?

So what's a girl to do? I'm willing to throw Three Dog Night under the bus, but how can I betray my decades-long loyalty to Al and my sister bond with Aimee?  But oh, Harry, my lost dark prince, how could I not love your original best?

I know, I know -- we don't have to choose, we can simply love them all. But for me, loving them all entails being hyper-aware of how Al and Aimee were nested in Harry's original.  A great song -- a truly great song -- enables great cover versions. So be it if my personal history ran through the cover versions first. Harry, you were worth waiting for.

"Coconut" / Fred Schneider

It must be fun to be a B-52.

Trawling around iTunes trying to find more songs by Victoria Williams, I discovered this adorable Harry Nilsson tribute album. So many artists on here that I love -- Marshall Crenshaw, Ron Sexsmith, Al Kooper, Aimee Mann, Randy Newman, Bill Lloyd, both Brian and Carl Wilson -- and smack dab in the middle of it is our very own Love Shack sherpa Fred Schneider of the B-52s. Now, if you'd asked me which Harry Nilsson song would be perfect for Fred Schneider to cover, I don't know if I would have come up with this one. But the minute I heard it, I realized it was PERFECT.

It's a raucously fun song even when Harry himself sang it, but Fred pushes it to a whole new level. "Coconut" was just a hair shy of a novelty tune; I've always imagined that Nilsson began singing it to himself in the middle of a colossal tropical-drink bender, and luckily remembered enough of it the next day to capture the lightning in a bottle. (So to speak.) There's not much to it lyrically -- mostly just the repeated mantra "you put the lime in the coconut / And drink 'em both up." To tell you the truth, sometimes I forget and think this song was written by Jimmy Buffett. Not that there's anything wrong with that, for all my Parrothead friends out there.

I have one major criterion for a great cover version: It has to bring something new to the song. And on that score, Fred Schneider succeeds brilliantly. (It was first recorded for his 1996 solo album Just Fred.) In the great B-52s tradition, he takes this amiable little tune and sends it off into outer space, with dissonant snarls of guitar, frantic drum smacks, and buzzy little synth riffs that sound like transmissions from Mars.

Besides putting the lime in the coconut, we're also supposed to call a doctor and ask him what to do -- and this is the motif that Fred really goes to town on. His voice comes out of one speaker, frantically begging the doctor to tell him what to do about his bellyache; out of the other speaker, he plays a particularly snide doctor, advising his patient to put the lime in the coconut and call him in the morning.  In true Rock Lobster-style, he unleashes layers of wails, growls, and shouts, weaving in and out of those messy instrumentals.  (Really, has anybody ever done more with less vocal talent than Fred Schneider?)  It's truly a party gone out of bounds.

Well, it's spring vacation and I have NOT gone to the Caribbean. In fact, the landscape outside my window is six inches deep in crusty snow and slush. But Fred Schneider has just delivered an umbrella drink to my lounge chair, and I'm lovin' it.

"Save Me" / Aimee Mann

I have an exercise playlist called, simply, "Chicks." Hitting the gym this weekend (thank you, New Year's resolution), I was struck anew by this track, which drifted into my iTunes library, sent to me on a compilation disc by my friend Jim S. from Seattle. It's dwelled there quietly for a while. 

And then, the other day, it took over my brain. Which is a good thing.

 

 

I'm told that this song was a musical highlight of the film Magnolia. Having never seen Magnolia, I couldn't say -- as directors go, I'm more of a Wes Anderson fan than a Paul Thomas Anderson fan. So I come to the table with no movie-programmed reaction to this song. Nevertheless, I adore it.

 

Aimee Mann has already won a spot on my roster of Chicks Who Tell It Like It Is. But for some reason -- even though she once opened for the Kinks -- I have resisted making her one of my Home Girls. Time to change that.

 

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. Check out the backdoor way Aimee delineates why this woman has become so needful of this man. Against that loungy-yet-ominous tempo, it starts oh-so innocuously -- "You look like a perfect fit." But really, how romantic is that? And she quickly types herself as "The girl in need of a tourniquet." First-aid alert!  

 

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.  

 

Mind you, she's still on the brink of this relationship, still checking things out, testing the waters. Is he a worthy candidate? And note that it's less about him and his personal attractions than it is about her and her need. Really, anybody reasonably available would do.

 

Dig how brilliantly she uses key changes to signal the tentativeness of all this. The darkly cynical tone of the verses morphs uneasily to the tentative hope of the chorus, with its short, faltering phrases of lyrics. That transition from the freaks to the beloved is SO HUGE. Some of us are still working on it.

 

But here we are, still hoping. And 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.

 

Sometimes I resent a song for recycling the chorus over and over. Not this time. Every time Aimee mentions "the ranks of the freaks" my heart leaps up. Because I am in those ranks, I harbor those suspicions, I deal with that self-doubting reflex every day. And I do not think that I am alone in this.

 

I know that I'm still waiting to be saved. How about you?

Stupid Thing / Aimee Mann

HELL HATH NO FURY WEEK

Don't know about you, but about this time of year I've had it up to here with Valentine's Day marketing.  All that pink-and-red, hearts and cupids crap -- who needs it?  No doubt there are a few dutiful couples who really do buy each other lavish gifts for this holiday and have a special night out -- but for the rest of us, Valentine's Day is just another day to feel guilty and unloved and lonely.  So here's my Valentine overload antidote:  Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Scorned Week.

You gotta love the chicks that kick back. I've already blogged about some of my favorites -- Jill Sobule's whimsical "Guy Who Doesn't Get It," Amy Rigby's feisty "20 Questions," or Thea Gilmore's savage "Things We Never Said."  Get me in a bad mood and I could play just those three tunes on a continual loop.

So here's another for your Valentine Eve's listening pleasure:

I really should listen more to Aimee Mann -- every song of hers that's drifted into my personal jukebox is fantastic.  I like her spiky intelligence, her don't-mess-with-me spirit, and the snarky  insinuations of her throaty vocals.  This one's from her 1993 album Whatever, her first solo album after leaving the band 'Til Tuesday (remember "Voices Carry"?) which gave her her start. It's a fearless declaration of independence indeed.

We're definitely in post-break-up mode here -- the withering scorn tells you there's no going back for this girl.  "Nothing was saving our day / There was nothing to say / But you said something anyway."  And what does this clown say?  He claims she "stepped out of line" (hunh? since when was there a line?) "Which forced you to leave me / As if that idea were mine." Ah, the weaselly logic of love. 

In verse two, the guy's even more passive-aggressive: "That's just like you, to sit back and just play it dumb / One word of warning would help / But that sacrifice was made trying to save yourself." Yep, he'd rather let her go on on her merry way than communicate with her. While she's assuming everything's a-okay, he's critiquing her from inside his self-protective shell.  By the time she knows, he's already written her off.  Case closed.

Yeah, sure, they're finito.  But our girl Aimee gets the final word.  "Oh you stupid thing," she scoffs wearily in the chorus. She has so little respect for him left, he's not a person anymore, just a thing.  "It wasn't me that you outsmarted / Oh,you stupid thing / Stopping it all before it started." Because the guy would rather feel justified, secure in his timid unimaginative armor, than take a risk and give love a chance.  Isn't that just like men?

Aimee's no victim here.  She's not wailing her fate or anguishing over the guy she's lost.  Self-doubt? Regret?  Not in her feminist vocabulary. She likes herself just as she is, and she's not about to let a man mess with that. 

She knows she's better off without him; she wouldn't take him back even if he did change (like that would happen). She's got nothing to lose -- might as well fire off this parting salvo.  The wrung-out tempo, the scolding slap of the drums, even the wry exhale of that semi-cheesy organ intro -- the message is clear:  this chick is DONE.

WEDNESDAY SHUFFLE

A few songs to be thankful for as you gobble your turkey tomorrow!

1. "Save Me" / Aimee Mann
From the Magnolia soundtrack (1999)
I never saw this movie -- Tom Cruise really puts me off -- but I know I should.  Any movie with Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Al Molina, AND William H. Macy has to be worth watching; all the Aimee Mann songs on the soundtrack are the icing on the cake. Talk about spiky emotions? This chick wrote the book.


2. "Kansas" / Fred Eaglesmith
From Milly's Cafe (2007)
"It's always Kansas, that's where I always break down" -- could be a touring musician, could be a trucker, could be a traveling salesman, but in the dead-center of the country, his still-raw heartbreak trips him up, every time.  For grit and twang, it's hard to beat Fred Eaglesmith; he puts the folk right back in alt.country.

3. "Warming Up to the Ice Age" / John Hiatt
From Warming Up to the Ice Age  (1985)
John Hiatt before he properly found his own grit and twang. My shuffle sure does love this song. 

4. "A Little Bit of Sunlight" / The Kinks
From Picture Book (box set compilation)
Here's a little mono gem -- an early Kinks demo for a Ray Davies composition that would be a modest hit for the Majority, way back in the Swinging 60s. "A little bit of sunlight is all that I want from you" -- I've always thought Ray was channeling the Beach Boys when he wrote this one.   

5.  "Have Another Drink" / The Kinks
From Soap Opera (1975)
Fast-forward another 10 years to the middle of the Kinks' "theatrical period." A perfect pub singalong -- "if you're feeling down and you're under the weather / Have another drink and you'll feel all right." It's the missing link between "Have a Cuppa Tea" and "Alcohol," all summed up in that gullible refrain: "Don't stop and think / Have another drink."

6. "Lola" (live) / The Kinks
From Everybody's in Showbiz (1972)
A Kinks trifecta!  But only a snippet, really, a rowdy crowd singalong of the obligatory hit song from Disc 2, the live concert half of this quixotic double album. (The first disc being all about the hell of touring.)  Everybody put your hands together! PS If I never hear Ray sing "Lola" again I won't be disappointed. 

7. "I Don't Want To Do Wrong" / Gladys Knight and the Pips
From The Ultimate Collection (compilation)
Ah, one of the Queens of Motown Soul -- the fiery, passionate Gladys Knight. Her man's been gone a while, and  . . . well, the flesh is weak. "I don't wanna do what my heart keeps telling me to / I know I'm trying with all of my might / I think I've lost this fight." Dig the Ray Charles-esque strings.

8. "I'm In Love With You" / Georgie Fame
From History of British Pop #5 (compilation)
Not Georgie's usual thing -- a pitch-perfect retro R&B number, back-up singers and horns and all. No link, as I converted this off an old vinyl compilation.  Obscure, but tasty indeed -- take my word for it.   

9. "Birdhouse in Your Soul" / They Might Be Giants
From Flood  (1990)
Hey, this song cropped up the other night on one of my favorite TV shows, HBO's Bored to Death (starring the ever-adorable Jason Schwartzman). Quirky Brooklyn comedy, quirky Brooklyn band: a perfect match. "Blue canary in the outlet by the light switch / Who watches over you / Make a little birdhouse in your soul" -- if it were any other rock band, I think this was a metaphor, but TMBG? It really IS about a bird nightlight.

10. "Never Been Done" / Ron Sexsmith
From Blue Boy (2001)
From blue canary to Blue Boy -- here's another plucky, bouncy bit of uplift from one of my favorite Canadian troubadors.  (Notice, Scott, I said "one of my favorites" -- there's still room for you).