A St. Patrick's Shuffle

A day late. Ah, well, the Irish will forgive me. Click on the links to go to videos.

1. "Be Good Or Be Gone" / Fionn Regan
From End of History (2006)
Cool indie-folk acoustic. This young guy from Bray is quite a poet, with an especially winsome, tentative tenor. This debut album is still one of my faves. "I have become an aerial view / Of a coastal town / That you once knew."  Well, now that you put it that way...

2. "Ireland" / Greg Trooper
From Everywhere (1992)
It's not about the country, it's about a woman, a woman he loves. And yeah, so what, Greg Trooper isn't Irish (he's from New Jersey, via Nashville) and this song has his usual folk-country twang--but it's extra jiggy, with a delicious fiddle. "When I'm with you it feels so right, / My wallet's full on Friday night / My ship has docked, my kingdom's come / And my heart's on fire and over-run...."  Love this song.

3.  "Better Not Wake the Baby" / The Decemberists 
From What a Terrible World, What a Wonderful World (2015)
Another of my "honorary" Irish tunes. Lead singer and songwriter Colin Meloy must have suckled on some Celtic teat in his Montana childhood, because most everything his band does has a half-demented tragi-folk quality, like as not loaded up with fiddle and squeezebox. This song is a tasty brew, half Brecht and half The Honeymooners, as a warring couple square off at each other. Another of the great Irish themes. 

4. "The Lowlands of Holland" / Natalie Merchant and the Chieftains
From Tears of Stone (1999)
Yes, that Natalie Merchant, from 10,000 Maniacs, but she sure sounds Irish, right down to the yelpy flutter in her voice, when backed by the Chieftains, the most Irishest band of all. It's one of those traditional songs that everyone's given a spin, but a poignant one, as a young solider's widow grieves his death fighting another country's war far away.  (Love, loss, and homesickness -- they say this song was originally British, but how could the Irish not have appropriated it?). Penny whistle and concertina and all,

5. "Mo Ghile Mear" / Sting and the Chieftains
From The Wide World Over (2002)
Sting sure does get all emotional about Celtic folk stuff -- he's even singing Gaelic in the chorus. ("My Gallant Darling" -- it's meant to be the goddess Eire grieving for Bonnie Prince Charlie.) It's easy to make fun of Sting, he takes himself so seriously, but I have to admit this is a pretty fine vocal. And of course the bodhrans help.

6. "Star of the County Down" / Van Morrison 
From Irish Heartbeat (1988)
Well, here's the real deal -- Sir Van Morrison of Belfast. It's another of those songs that everyone sings, but really, who ever could sing it better than Van the Man? The chorus to this runs through my head whenever I look at a map of Ireland: "From Bantry Bay up to Derry quay / And from Galway to Dublin town, /  Not a lass I've seen like a brown colleen that I met in the County Down."

7. "Living in America" / Black 47
From Fire of Freedom (1992)
Ah, Larry Kirwan -- the great transplanted Celtic rocker and bard of the pre-Celtic Tiger Irish immigrant experience.  The life he describes in this thrashing anthem (still with fiddles and penny whistles!) is just what I've heard from all the nannies and construction guys I know here in New York. "In the cold daylight, I feel like shite / And I can't remember last night's fun / Then the foreman says, "Come on now boys, / Stick your fingers down your throats and get to work" . . .  Oh mammy dear, we're all mad over here / Living in America."

8. "Erin Gra Mo Chroi" / Cherish the Ladies
From The Girls Won't Leave Boys Behind (2001)
That yelpy flutter Natalie Merchant had? This is what she was aiming for. Deidre Connally is the lead singer here, but all the women of Cherish the Ladies go for the most authentic Irish sound they can get (even though they're mostly Irish-Americans). And this is one of the homesickest songs you'll ever hear. "When St. Patrick's Day has come / My thoughts will carry me home / To that dear little isle so far away" -- well, it may sound mawkish, but that fiddle is irresistible. Go see the movie Brooklyn already.

9. "We Are Everywhere" / Pugwash
From Play This Intimately (As If Among Friends) (2015)
One of my great discoveries of this past year, this lovely power-pop band from Dublin. Here they get their psychedelic "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" thing on, all woozily melodic with shape-shifting chords. FYI: Recorded at the Kinks' Konk.

10. "Sayonara" / The Pogues
From Hell's Ditch (1990)
Dig Shane MacGowan's slurred vocals, perfect for this Celtic punk drunkard's lament, whether faked or real. (This was his last album with the band.) I think it's set in Asia, but those pennywhistles give it away -- that and the mournful sitting in a bar, looking across the sea, feeling sorry for himself.  One more Irish rover....

My Musical Advent Calendar

"Please Daddy (Don't Get
Drunk This Christmas)" /
The Decemberists

One last dysfunctional Christmas tune -- and this one's a beaut.

You'll find this gem on the 2007 compilation An Alternative Rock X-Mas (accept no substitutions).

It's a cover, actually, of a 1973 John Denver song -- who knew John Denver could go this dark? -- and it was written by Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert of the Starland Vocal Band, whose big hit was "Afternoon Delight." So, yeah, we're bucking the odds here. But this delicious holiday anti-classic is squarely in the camp of  Robert Earl Keen's "Merry Christmas to the Family," a trailer-trash anthem to the holiday season as way more people than we'd like to admit know it.

When the Decemberists sing it, of course, it sounds like a sea shanty. But then, most everything the Decemberists do ends up sounding like a sea shanty.

Due to some conspiracy between YouTube and BlogSpot, I couldn't upload the otherwise-available-to-all-users YouTube video of this song, so I made my own. (Which took AGES.) And I stole a picture of the Decemberists on The Simpsons because it makes my heart happy to think that the Decemberists were featured on an episode of The Simpsons.

I love the Decemberists. An alt band out of Portland that's addicted to old-school British folk? Naturally that hits all my hot buttons. You got your post-modern irony, but you've also got a healthy dose of loving respect for the music that went before.

One of my favorite Christmas tunes when I was a tot was "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," a kids-view version of Christmas with an ironic adult twist. We all know that Santa Claus is Daddy in a cotton-floss beard, but the kiddo hasn't a clue. This gorgeous little number takes the same kid-centric view, but Daddy isn't just giving Mommy a peck on the cheek -- he's staggering into the house drunk as a skunk, and Mommy's pissed as hell.

I love the specificity here. "Last year when I was only seven / Now I'm almost eight as you can see / You came in at quarter past eleven / Fell down underneath the Christmas tree." (The difference between seven and eight is so important when you're eight.) The kid has scars, I tell you, scars.  And his Christmas joy is seriously compromised.

Last year, Mommy sent him upstairs, but the kid's seen enough. And naturally he takes her side. "I don't wanna see my momma cry," he urgently repeats. (Kids siding with their moms? Hellyeah.)

Well, we're not eight -- we are older than that -- and personally I'm siding with Mommy. And worrying about the kid. And maybe phoning my lawyer.

Ah, Christmas.

"The Wanting Comes in Waves" / The Decemberists

Way too trendy, I know. The Decemberists are everybody's indie darlings -- heck, they live in totally-PC Portland, Oregon, and their mock sparring with Stephen Colbert on TV's The Colbert Report is the last word in wink-wink knowingness. (They're supposed to be on again tonight, singing this very song, a blurb about which appearance triggered today's aural tic.) And, talk about indie creds, they even lined up Robyn Hitchcock for their latest album, The Hazards of Love, a concept album-cum-rock-opera that's practically Colin Meloy's PhD thesis on archaic English folk ballads. All they let Robyn do was play guitar on one track, but still, they got to name-check him in the liner notes.

Still, their last album The Crane Wife worked its way under my skin, and Hazards of Love shows every promise of doing the same. I ended up giving this album a thumbs-up in my review for Blogcritics and I got tickets to see them at Radio City in June (I found out later that Robyn and the Venus 3 are the opening act, so really, there must be a God).

The fact that I get hooked on their music still baffles me, though. Usually I look for classic song structure, neatly turned lyrics, and catchy melodic lines, and Colin Meloy's compositions don't do very well on any of those scores -- his stuff is more symphonic, with recurring leitmotifs, lushly textured arrangements, and words that are little too Poetry-With-A-Capital-P for my tastes. I don't know what the guy is like personally, but there's a distinct lack of humor in this album, and that is usually the kiss of death for me. And yet.
I should point out that this track on the album isn't just "The Wanting Comes in Waves" -- it's medlied up with another song, "Repaid," sung by the opera's villainess, The Queen. That half of the track is delivered with shivering blues-rock intensity by guest singer Shara Worden, who apparently is in a band called My Brightest Diamond (no, I'd never heard of them either). The way she swaggers through "Repaid" is impressive, but that's not the song that's stuck in my head.

No, I'm stuck only on "The Wanting Comes in Waves" half, which is sung by Colin in his earnest folky vocals. It starts off at a solemn, tentative pace, accompanied by harpsichord (yes, they do get away with it), a doleful minor-key recitatif in which our hero William -- who is, get this, a sort of silkie foundling (yes, they get away with that too) -- recounts how his mother rescued his cradle from the reeds when he was just a wee babe. Honest.

But then the song blossoms and swells, picking up pace, adding drums and electric guitar; as it shifts into a major key, back-up singers pitch in with ooohs, until it reaches almost cinematic grandeur. "But the wanting comes in waves," William wails over and over, and you've got to feel sorry for the guy, sorta like I felt sorry for that cute little David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London, totally at the mercy of his animal impulses. I hate to put it so crudely -- this is such a twee project, after all -- but William is getting the musical equivalent of a hard-on. Within the story line, that is actually exactly the point. And as it morphs into the the Queen's hot-mama rendition of "Repaid," this story plumbs its own Freudian depths. "And I want this night," William begs, passionately, in the first movement; when he takes over the stage again, after the first go-round of "Repaid," his plea has changed to "And you owe me life!" The Queen gives in, no doubt with a testy swish of her black skirt -- but you just know this is not going to end well for poor William. Fade out and dissolve.

You know, it's taken me years to work past my old English major pretensions, and now here's Colin Meloy pulling me right back in. Still, I gotta admire him for even trying this kind of sophomoric artsy crap. The fact that it's actually listenable -- no, make that compelling -- is pretty amazing. If he can get past the defenses of a skeptic like me, he must be doing something right.

The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid

“Perfect Crime #2” / The Decemberists

Any group that names themselves after a group of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries gets my vote. I’ve only heard the Decemberists’ most recent album, The Crane Wife, but it was clear from the first listen that it was gonna grow on me. True, I detect a smidgeon of art-student pretension to this Portland, Oregon, band, but so long as the music holds up, that’s okay by me. They seem to have a droll sense of humor that saves them from getting too caught up in their own literary construct.

The Crane Wife definitely tells a story, though I haven’t yet pieced it together in detail – songwriter Colin Meloy says it was inspired by a Japanese folk tale, but several of the songs (including this one) are tangential to that narrative. Still, you instantly pick up its haunting folk ballad quality, full of battlefields and ghosts and dire omens and tragically parted lovers, and they pull it off with real conviction.

“The Perfect Crime” is prime Decemberist material: dark minor-key melody married to a driving pop beat; cryptic, poetic lyrics in the verse, returning to a chorus with a mesmerizing hook. In this case, the refrain is simply “It was a perfect, a perfect, a perfect, a perfect crime,” with “perfect” hopping around to different intervals as the chords shift darkly around it. (The last time around, “perfect” is teasingly repeated 32 times before they finally end the sentence.) If this song were a silent movie – and it practically is already – it’d be in sepia and white, with lots of close-ups and very few title cards.

If you’re an English major geek like me, you’ll get the classical reference in the first line, an echo of Homer’s Odyssey – “Sing muse of the passion of the pistol / Sing muse of the warning by the whistle / On a night so dark in the waning / A dawn obscured by slate sky raining, oh oh.” I’m already looking warily over my shoulder. Now we get suspenseful quick-cut shots of danger: “Five and twenty burglars by the reservoir / A teenage lookout on the signal tower / The mogul’s daughter in hog ties . . . The bagman's quaking at the fingers / The hand-off glance a little lingers / A well-dressed man in the crosshairs / A shot rings out from somewhere upstairs.” Alfred Hitchcock would have loved this.

No matter how perfect this crime is, you just know they’ll get caught in the end, thanks to that minor key, the reverberating echoes of the vocals, the downward spiral of the melody, and the relentless rhythm. Sure, there’s a guitar solo between verses that breaks free like a getaway car – but let’s face it, getting caught in the end is required film noir tradition, isn’t it?

So it’s not about teenage love, or the war in Iraq, or how the lead singer gets depressed on Sunday mornings. I believe we have plenty of other songs about those things. The only other number that even remotely reminds me of this delicious track is Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” and you know how much I love that song. Bravo, Decemberists!

Perfect Crime #2 sample