"I Still Believe" / Frank Turner

Thanks to Margot for the recommend. Because that's how we do it, old school -- face to face, hand to hand --- I heard this guy and I think you'd like it -- and we value those hand-offs above all.

My first-time listen to Frank Turner's 2011 album England Keep My Bones, I knew this track was the one to blog about. Because really, isn't that what we're about in this neck of the woods? The transformative power of a rock and roll song?

Frank Turner is English -- check. A folk/punk singer/songwriter -- check. I know that sounds like another iteration of the divine Robyn  Hitchcock, but Turner is a lot more earnest and feisty. He may have gone to Eton with Prince William (congrats to the royal dad) but he's a lot  more like Billy Bragg, and Margot, I hope you're taking notes, because I'd really love to turn you on to Billy Bragg and there's only so many hours in a day.

England Keep My Bones is a deeply English album, with place names and turns of phrase that might baffle some American listeners. (But hey, I'm a Kinks fan -- the Englisher the better.) An essential part of that Englishness is the old-school folk sound on several tracks, which is apparently a departure for Turner, who started out in a post-hardcore band called Million Dead. So there was some strategic value in this lead-off single, "I Still Believe," which reassured Turner fans that he has not turned his back on rocking out. Quite the contrary. As he exuberantly declaims in the refrain, "Now who'd have thought that after all, that something as simple as rock and roll could save us all?"

What more do we need?

Screw the ironic po-mo -- Turner's not afraid to forge a bond with his listeners, not afraid to tell you straight out where he stands. He's practically grabbing you by the lapels, addressing bystanders from his soapbox: "Friends, Romans, and countrymen!" (I like a man who's not afraid of a Shakespearean reference.) He's the town crier, over and over again calling out "Hear ye, hear ye!" "Come ye, come ye!"

Yet it's hard to believe this guy comes from the loud, fast, bass-heavy world of hardcore; dig the playful skipping tempo, and the yearning quality of his chord changes. 

He name-checks  all the usual suspects -- Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny (Cash? Ray?), and "all the saints"  -- but he's no Don McLean; he insists that "anybody could take the stage."  (I particularly enjoy verse two's list of the various places a working musician fetches up -- "soulless corporate circus tops . . . the toilet circuit . . bars and bunker squats . . . ") It's the base elements -- "Guitars and drums and desperate poetry" -- that really matter.

And why does it matter?  Because rock and roll "has the power to raise a temple and tear it down." There's a 60s flashback for you, and it's invigorating to hear it.

I saw FT on one of the latenight talk shows -- oh please don't ask me which one -- and I loved his raw energy, his conviction. And yet he's dialing it back to another era, to the time when rock and roll was still controversial and fresh and new. What's not to love about that?

"The Winner Takes It All" / ABBA

What -- she's gone for six weeks and then she comes back to write about ABBA?

But you see, while I was gone I went to Sweden, and what was the first thing I heard as I entered baggage claim at the Stockholm airport?  Agnetha's and Frida's voices, blending in their inimitable way, belting out "Take a Chance on Me." Was that perfect or what?

After all, ABBA is Sweden's greatest gift to the world, right up there with Volvo, Ikea, and Pippi Longstocking. So why not pipe it into the concourse just so you know you're really in Sweden?  Okay, so it was being played for a specific purpose: to promote the new ABBA Museum that just opened on Djurgarden. But hey, it worked -- I dragged my family to see the exhibit as soon as possible.

The museum was slick and entertaining, just like ABBA, and I suspect that my kids didn't come away as converts to the ABBA sound. They grew up in the post-punk indie era; how could they possibly hear how fresh ABBA's sound was when they first hit the scene? But it struck me anew, and seeing it in Stockholm really brought home what an achievement it was for a foursome from Sweden to take the world by storm back in 1974, winning the Eurovision Song Contest with their breakout hit "Waterloo."

Don't you dig those costumes?  In 1974, Eurovision contestants were still appearing in dirndls and lederhosen; the sequins and fringes and tight satin pants blew all that away. One of the coolest things about the ABBA museum was the room full of their stage costumes.  And it wasn't just the girls, either; Benny and Bjorn styled around in jumpsuits and capes that would put Liberace to shame. Frida in particular was hugely interested in how they looked on stage. They didn't dance much, and they didn't have the kind of pyrotechnics that today's headliners are expected to have. But for 1974, they were cutting-edge.

It's not like I haven't written about ABBA before -- you may remember my fondness for "Dancing Queen" and "Knowing Me Knowing You." Both of those tracks came from the only ABBA album I actually owned, Arrival, which also included the somewhat darker "Money Money Money" -- a song that was as close to social commentary as these Swedes ever went. (It also featured Frida's throaty contralto instead of Agnetha on lead vocal, if you're keeping score.)  Considering that Frida later married a German prince and is now living with a British viscount, I'd say she knows something about the topic of marrying money. 

But over the years, the ABBA song I keep coming back to is "The Winner Takes It All."  A later track, it appeared on 1980's Super Trouper, which was released after half of the group -- Bjorn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog -- had filed for divorce. (Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Benny Andersson were still hanging in there, but they would divorce in 1981.) Bjorn was the band's lyricist, and though he denies that this song was written about their divorce, I'm not buying it. The pain of splitting from a life partner runs through every bar of this song. And you can't tell me that Agnetha's delivery doesn't reflect some genuine heartbreak.

Wistful resignation runs through this song -- "I don't want to talk / About the things we've gone through / Though it's hurting me / Now it's history." Later on, she sings fatalistically, "The gods may throw the dice / Their minds as cold as ice." The pain hasn't gone away yet, but they've both accepted the reality of the end.

Or have they?  Gone are the bright bouncy syncopation, the cheerful pop hooks; this song swells with movie-music arpeggios and yearning chord shifts. Looking back on the past, she feels blindsided: "I was in your arms / Thinking I belonged there / I figured it made sense / Building me a fence." And just for good measure -- a twist of the knife -- she carries this on in the next couplet, "Building me a home / Thinking I'd be strong there." I trusted you, buddy, and look where it's left me.

In the third verse, the Other Woman enters the picture. (Ah, betrayal and jealousy rear their ugly heads.) "But tell me does she kiss / The way I used to kiss you? / Does it feel the same / When she calls your name?"  I love how Agnetha softens her voice for this verse, drops into that intimate register to summon a memory of pillow talk. That's got to evoke a twinge of regret.

And in the last verse, she makes sure he knows how selfless she's being -- "I don't want to talk / If it makes you feel sad . . . I apologize / If it makes you feel bad." Wait -- he left you for another woman, and you're apologizing to him?  I've always been torn by this verse, wanting her to stand up for herself, and yet totally getting how wrecked she is -- "Seeing me so tense / No self-confidence." I love how she lags behind the beat, singing those lyrics almost woodenly, numbly.

The refrain reiterates that the man is the winner, walking away with everything, and the woman is the loser. (Bjorn and Agnetha insist that neither of them was the loser in their divorce; this is just a song, people.) Still, I have to wonder. If Bjorn was the winner, how did he write a song with such insight into Agnetha's pain?  I can only imagine how it felt to hear her sing it over and over again, at concert after concert. So who's the winner in the end?

"I'm Not Like Everybody Else" / Dave Davies

I can't BELIEVE I haven't written before about this most iconic Kinks song.  It's been colonizing my earwaves ever since Monday night, when I was thrilled to see Dave Davies play his first US solo show in ten years at the City Winery. Okay, so he's not quite the unbridled raver anymore that he was in his prime -- but which of us is?

And despite the public feuding between the Davies brothers, Dave didn't try to distance himself from his Kinksian past -- he charged lustily into the classics like "You Really Got Me," "Till the End of the Day," and "All Day and All of the Night," among others. "Death of a Clown," of course, the song Ray wrote for Dave (to be honest, Dave probably co-wrote it, not that Ray would ever give him credit). I still remember Dave snarling at Ray when he was introduced as "Dave 'Death of a Clown' Davies" -- who but a brother could turn your solo hit into an insult?

Ray also says he wrote "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" for Dave, often introducing it at shows by saying -- fondly, in fact -- "You know, Dave really is not like everybody else."  Kinks fans have adopted this as their mantra, proudly asserting their misfit status, and we often use it to describe Ray as well.  But watching Dave sing it the other night brought home to me that he is the original rebel that the song celebrates.

Written somewhere at the end of 1965, recorded in February 1966, and released as the B-side of "Sunny Afternoon" (June 1966 in the UK, July in the US), "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" started off as a young man's howl of dissent, with lines like "I won't take all that they hand me down," "I'm not gonna take it all lying down," and "I don't want to live my life like everybody else." (Live, as I recall, the Davies brothers both throw in lines like "I don't want to get a job like everybody else" as well.) Fist pumping in the air, Kinks fans love to sing along on the defiant call-and-response refrains, trading shouts of "Like everybody else" with Dave (or Ray, whichever you're watching).

The song's a little more complex than that, of course. It dials down to a surprisingly tender second verse: "But darling, you know that I love you true, / Do anything that you want me to, / Confess all my sins like you want me to," until he reluctantly pushes back: "But there's one thing that I will say to you."  (Ominous retard, beat, beat,  then kick it out!) "I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else..."

Those pesky women, always trying to tame a wild man!  In the last verse, he's even more willful, rejecting her efforts to get him to settle down, stop all his running around, et cetera.  It's a brilliant sleight of hand, a love song that's at the same time a cry for freedom.  Compare this to the one-note snottiness of the Rolling Stones' "Get Off My Cloud" (not a bad song on its own terms, but still) -- the emotional depth of this one is light-years beyond.

Of course, we fans love to sing it out lustily, and we love the Davies brothers for continuing to keep it in their set lists.  The young man's howl of defiance is now an older man's rage against the dying of the light -- and you know, it's even more moving in that context.  Dave Davies was nearly sidelined forever by a stroke in 2004, but he taught himself to walk, talk, sing, and play the guitar all over again. He's back, and he's still busting out of the bonds of convention.  God save Dave Davies.

"Sunny Afternoon" / The Kinks

By chance it IS a sunny day today, although a little chilly for May. Still, that's not why this song popped into my head and will not be budged.

It began a few days when, someone asked me to list my top ten favorite Kinks songs. I realized that "Sunny Afternoon" is perhaps their only genuinely big hit (#2 in the UK, #14 in the US) that still makes the list for me, no matter how much it's overplayed. Then today, posting This Day In Kinks History on the Kinks fan forum, I discovered that today is the anniversary of the day, 47 years ago, when the Kinks went into Pye Records Studio #2 to record this song.

Or rather, re-record it -- in 1966 Ray Davies was just beginning to become the studio perfectionist who would later hold up their classic album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society for months, eventually releasing it by chance on the same day as the Beatles' White Album. Ah, the history of the Kinks is full of such disastrous decisions.

But in the case of "Sunny Afternoon," Ray knew what he was doing. He brought in session keyboard whiz Nicky Hopkins to add some plinky good-time sounds, played on a Hohner Melodica. Those iconic pub-sing-along backing vocals were dubbed in by Ray, Dave, and Ray's wife Rasa. "'Sunny Afternoon' was made very quickly, in the morning," Ray recalled in a Rolling Stone interview. "It was one of our most atmospheric sessions. . . . Pete [Quaife] went off and started playing funny little classical things on the bass, more like a lead guitar, and Nicky Hopkins was playing 'Liza'. . . .Little things like that helped us get in the feeling of the song."
   
At the time, Ray recalled, he was listening almost obsessively to two other artists -- Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan (now there's an odd couple for you).  I can hear Sinatra's impact in the campy croon Ray puts on; Dylan probably accounts for the sly satire on Britain's Wilson-era tax policies.  (George Harrison's "Taxman" was written the same year.) But as always, the whole is so much more than the sum of all these parts. And the minute that great bass line begins -- two notes plopped wearily on each step of a descending minor scale -- I'm hooked.

Just watch the Kinks cavorting in the snow. But, wait -- I thought this was supposed to be a sunny afternoon? Well, the song was a summer hit, but the Kinks didn't make this video until the following February, for a Belgian TV show. The contrast just underlines the delightful irony of this song.

"The tax man's taken all my dough / And left me in my stately home..." Beneath the satire, of course, Ray Davies was as always working out his personal issues. In 1966, Ray was up to his eyeballs in lawsuits to recover withheld royalties from music publishers and former managers; no wonder he felt a stab of sympathy for the property-rich, cash-poor singer of "Sunny Afternoon." And if that felt like a betrayal of his working-class roots, even more need to work out his anxieties in satire.

No wonder Ray had suffered a nervous breakdown only two months earlier, which explains the wail of "Save me save me save me from this squeeee--eeze" in the bridge. Nothing like turning your own  existential despair into comedy. And in the second bridge, he changes it to "Help me help me help me sail awaa-aay" -- the trademark Kinksian longing for escape. When conflicts and pressures pile up, introvert geniuses like Ray Davies often long just to run away.

I suspect there's another autobiographical hint in verse two: "My girlfriend's run off with my car / And gone back to her ma and pa / Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty"?  It would be seven more years before Rasa Davies would finally move out, taking their two daughters, but there's already probably a sting of truth to this detail. I picture Rasa in the studio, listening to Ray deliver those lines with a mocking flutter in his voice, and wince on her behalf.

So here we've got a song about lazing on a sunny afternoon, living a life of luxury -- it should be a mellow blissed-out song. Instead, it's built on a minor-key bass riff, with jerky rhythms and ping-ponging melodic intervals. This guy is at the end of his rope, moaning and miserable. In a way, this is the comic bookend of "Shangri-La" -- now that he's found his paradise, his reward for working so hard, why the hell is he unhappier than ever?   

And then here's the genius part. Ray Davies managed to pack all of that psychological complexity in this song -- and STILL made it one of the most delicious singalongs ever. The tongue-in-cheek humor, the bouncy arrangement, and the cheery harmonies turn it all into tailor-made for hoisting a pint. The Kinks may be dancing in the snow, the tax exile weeping in his beer, but all I want to do is croon along with a grin on my face.  Give Ray Davies life's lemons, and he'll turn them into the most delicious lemonade ever.

"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.

"Stupefied" / Robyn Hitchcock

Listening to Robyn Hitchcock is a pretty fair way to feel high without have to smoke or snort anything. There's always something deliciously off-kilter about his music, from the Rimbaud-like imagist lyrics to the tripping syncopations to the crunchy snarls of dissonance. It never fails to give me a kick. 

With most artists, I listen to a new album hunting for themes, biographical tidbits, a new musical direction. None of those criteria matter with a new Robyn Hitchcock album. Is Love From London any more "about" London than any of his previous albums? No. It's not particularly about London at all, apart from one song -- "Strawberries Dress" (Robyn Hitchcock writes a lot about strawberries) -- that begins by mentioning the Telecom Tower. The lyrics are more stream-of-consciousness than self-expression, and the sound -- as always -- can only be described as the idiosyncratic Robyn Hitchcock sound, a freeform blend of folk and rock and jazz full of insidious melody.

Here's track three, "Stupefied." As you listen, tell me -- whom does it remind you of?

  
I've always known that Robyn Hitchcock was a huge John Lennon fan, but I never thought he sounded particularly like Lennon until this song.  I'm thinking of the later Lennon, the post-Mind Games Lennon, after he rediscovered joy and melody. (I've always given Harry Nilsson credit for that.) 

Maybe it's the piano accompaniment -- those plunky modulations -- or the light-fingered percussion skipping behind it. Then there's the chromatic melodies, the unresolved chords at the end of lines, and the way he sings just slightly against the beat.

But most of all, it's the lyrics, a series of absurdist koans that Lennon himself would have enjoyed. "Ain't no money on the ceiling / Ain't no ceiling on the floor," Robyn begins, suggesting a sense of dislocation that works perfectly with the next lines: "Got that terrifying feeling / You don't love me any more." I love how the verse's melody scrabbles around among a few close-together notes, conveying the boxed-in feeling of this beleaguered guy.

In the next verse, desperate for some comfort, he ruefully informs us, "Ain't no whisky in the Talbot," which according to Wikipedia probably means a rare brand of automobile, though it could also be a lunar crater or an obscure type of railway wagon (Robyn Hitchcock also loves trains). "Ain't no sugar in your tea," he adds, as if shaking his head morosely along with that loungy beat. "There's an answer to it all but / You're still mystifying me." Well, that makes two of us.

Perhaps the answer lies in the refrain, as he soars up into a Lennon-like nasal falsetto: "You wanna get [off beat] hi-ii-iigh." Letting loose with that sustained high note really feels like escape, doesn't it?  First time around, he continues, "But you don't know just why"; by the third refrain, he tells us, "and by now you know why." So it's the second refrain that's the heart of the song:

     You wanna get high,
     It's in the blood supply
    And time'll go by
    Like a neuron in the sky

Don't you know just what this feels like?

Verse three is my personal favorite. "Ain't no honey back in Norway / Ain't no kroner in your pants / Must have blown it in the doorway / On those sugar-coated ants." Maybe these are lazy, opportunistic rhymes, but I prefer to see them as evocative word associations -- the honey with the sugar, the Norway with the kroner, and of course ants, another of Hitchcock's insect fascinations. You've gotta love the way his voice swoops on "pants," which is of course inherently one of the funniest words there is.

All I know is, by the end of the song I'm feeling a little stupefied myself -- but in a good way.

"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.