San Francisco (Little Daylight Remix) – The Mowgli’s
This is such an exuberant song. I’ve probably listened to it 30 times or more in the last week. I just can’t get over how good it feels to hear “Do you feel the love? I feel the love” over the sound of fireworks and sunshine. This is one of those songs that sounds like chorus layered on top of chorus on top of chorus. It’s big and bright and joyous and too much fun to even describe.
Last weekend I was at the Midwest Political Science Association conference in Chicago. While there I attended a neat roundtable on the 2012 election, featuring blog-stars Nate Silver and Ezra Klein, as well as some political science folks with pretty prominent online presences (Larry Bartels, John Sides, Drew Linzer, Simon Jackman, Lynn Vavreck).
One interesting question was posed: was the result of the presidential election inevitable? Now, you can think about this a few different ways. Obviously, there’s always a possibility of radical changes. I mean, if there had been a terrorist attack that was clearly Obama’s fault and did significant damage, you’d have to think Romney wins. That is, of course, what the Right wanted Benghazi to be.
But assuming all external conditions remain the same, was there a pathway to Republican victory?
One panelist (Jackman, I think) suggested that Romney could have got it done if he had a better message. Basically: “Obama’s a nice guy but he’s out of his depth. Bring me in and I’ll get things done.” Another panelist responded (I think quite rightly): we should be deeply skeptical of any argument that says the election would have gone differently if a politician had said something different.
I think that’s true for a couple of reasons. First, you’ll almost always find that whatever language they’re ‘supposed’ to use is already IN USE. If it doesn’t become the meta-narrative of the campaign it’s usually because it simply doesn’t have the stickiness that the pundit thinks it does.
Second, while I’m intrinsically skeptical of this argument, it nevertheless seems like we should assume that the pros know what they’re doing. If they are not using a certain argument front and center, it’s most likely because they have good poll-data or good reasons to think it won’t sell well. Of course, simple deference on stuff like this would be crazy. Political science certainly can play the role of sabermetrics to the traditionalism of political institutions. But the political campaigns have SO MUCH more data to work with than political scientists. These are not fly-by-night operations, Mark Penn notwithstanding. All of which is to say: our impulse should be to assume that the campaigns are doing a pretty good job.
Third, while it’s very easy to see how certain kinds of appeals could garner new votes, it’s often harder to see how the sort of campaign that would be necessary to get those votes will erode their base of support. But, of course, if you gain one new vote and lose an existing one then you haven’t actually gained anything.
And that’s the real rub of it. Romney in retrospect looks like a somewhat weak candidate to some people, for a variety of reasons. But almost all of those reasons stem from the basic obligations imposed by his potential voter pool. He lost a lot of Hispanic voters due to his support for ‘self deportation’ but it’s not like he could have simply adopted a pro-immigration stance. The party wouldn’t have allowed it. Lots of people lamented that the Romney of the first debate wasn’t the Romney of the whole campaign. But if that guy was front and center, his support from the right would likely have plummeted. And so on.
None of which is to say that it’s impossible to imagine a Republican winning the election, but it really is difficult to figure out where the extra 4% of votes could have come from, without eroding the 47% he did get. Which also helps to explain why Romney was pretty much the ‘inevitable’ nominee – at least after Perry imploded, Pawlenty backed out, and the other viable names (Jeb Bush, Christie, Mitch Daniels, etc.) didn’t pursue campaigns. It’s not that Romney was a perfect candidate; it’s just that no one else was going to be able to construct a coalition of voters that could hold together for any length of time.
One Thing Real – Dan Bern
Matt Yglesias is unhappy that a Diet Coke ad is not properly representing the division of labor in the production of pop music. Yes really.
Apparently the ad depicts Taylor Swift writing the lyrics to a song, when in fact someone else wrote it; she merely performs it. Except, in fact, she is credited as a co-writer on the song. But nevertheless, he wants to insist, he’s got a larger point here. Which is: “there’s a kind of odd convention arising out of rock music that the ideal is to be making a recording of yourself playing a song you wrote yourself.”
Look, people do sometimes place too much priority on authenticity. There is plenty of room in our musical culture for people who ‘merely’ perform or for people who ‘merely’ produce. Or for people who write songs but don’t perform. Some of the finest music in rock and roll comes from studio musicians playing for a buck. Some of the best songs of the 60s were made by Phil Spector from behind the controls, or written by Goffin/King but sung by other people. Modern pop music is often generated via two distinct groups of people (pop stars and producers) linking together in various ways.
And that’s all fine. There’s lots of good music in there.
But it’s not a coincidence that a LOT of the very best music of the modern era comes from people who take charge of the entire chain of custody in their music.
The imaginative element of music, which is what really matters to us, has very little to do with pure virtuosity. Anyone can record a cover, and sometimes the cover will be (technically) far better produced than the original. But on the whole, the ‘best’ version of a song is usually the one recorded by the original artist, and that’s because there’s an organic component to the whole process.
Even more, if you are going to follow an artist for a long time, it’s because their entire artistic output gels together. It’s about their ability to consistently produce high-quality work that comes from a particular place, that speaks to a certain personality. If Okkervil River releases a new album, I know that Will Sheff wrote some brilliant lyrics, and I know that I’ll be hearing him sing. And that’s what I want. It’s not a ‘problem’ that Sheff doesn’t have the most technically pure voice. I don’t WANT a perfect rendition. I want the beautiful cracks of “Westfall” or the soaring and jagged peaks of “The War Criminal…” Isaac Brock has a lisp. Dylan is Dylan. Michael Stipe has a range of about seven notes, but R.E.M. writes songs for that voice. And so on.
All of which is to say: while great music certainly CAN be made via the division of labor, it still makes plenty of sense to valorize the artist or band who can start from nothing and turn it into a complete song. It’s not the only way to make music, but it’s certainly one very important way.
Houses on the Hill – Whiskeytown
It’s a terribly sad song, about the things that are just taken away from us. More than that, about the things we can never even find the words to talk about after their gone.
A woman in love, who feels the pain of separation, and the deep feeling of pride that he goes away to serve their country. And then…nothing. What is it like to just sit there every day hoping for a letter – knowing that you can’t dare wish for anything more.
And then…he’s gone and there’s nothing left but those letters. But you can’t mourn forever, so eventually you meet someone new, settle down, have a family, and live out your life. But all that time, there’s a box in the attic that holds your secret memories. Your dreams of a completely different life. Of a different family. Of a road untraveled. How could you ever find the words to tell your children that you never really meant to have them, that they are the result of some bullet fired before they were born?
You can’t. It wouldn’t be fair. And yet…you can’t just throw away those letters. So they sit there, unread for decades. An unread story, an unlit candle, a work of art never finished. They’re pregnant with meaning, but we will never be able to know what it is. We can only guess…
I’m calling this a list of my favorite Paul Simon songs, but these are almost exclusively Simon and Garfunkel songs. To be honest, I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Simon’s solo work. He’s got plenty of nice songs spread throughout the years, but very little that rises to the level of his songs from the sixties. Still, I had to expand things to his whole discography simply for the sake of Graceland.
10. The Sun is Burning (Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.)
I have a somewhat weird fascination with songs about apocalypse. In high school I collected them pretty relentlessly, and this was in a pre-MP3 world, too, so it was pretty hard to compile them. For obvious reasons, a lot of these songs come from folk and from metal. In each case it makes sense, but it’s kind of a weird pairing.
Anyways, of the entire set, this one is probably my favorite song. It’s just so achingly beautiful. Until the final two verses, there’s no hint whatsoever that it’s even going anywhere dark.
9. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes (Graceland)
I’ve always had a big crush on the woman in this song. There’s something effortless in the dualism of it. You could think of her as careless (a Gatsby character), so rich that she has diamonds even on the soles of her shoes. But you can also think of her as rich in spirit, not ashamed of who she is and where she’s from, but feeling no need to flaunt it. She wears the diamonds because…why not. But she wears them on her soles, where no one will ever see them, where they are trodden on every day. “She’s a rich girl, she don’t try to hide it, diamonds on the soles of her shoes.” But later, “She said you’ve taken me for granted because I please you, wearing these diamonds.” And you wonder…was she cast out or did she leave? And is it possible that she’s far happier than she could ever have been in high society now that she’s out on the streets with the poor boy? There’s no way to no for sure, but that’s what makes it such a great song.
Because here’s the thing, the best he can do is put on a new set of clothes and some aftershave. He can’t take her out on the town, maybe doesn’t even have a home. It’s sad and discouraging, but also beautiful. Because suddenly “by the bodegas and the lights on Upper Broadway,” it’s no longer diamonds on the soles of HER shoes. It’s diamonds on the soles of THEIR shoes.
And then he just says ‘oooooooooo’ as if everyone knows what he’s talking about…because what else can you say?
8. The Only Living Boy in New York (Bridge Over Troubled Water)
Some of the best ‘ahhhhs’ ever recorded. The song is Paul saying goodbye to Art (they originally went by the name Tom and Jerry), and it’s pretty much the sweetest song about a band breaking up you’re ever likely to hear. No hard feelings, just an expression of joy about what they were able to do together, even if it was for only a short time. And yet, it’s by no means a happy song. You can’t regret what needs to be, but you can still feel the pain of its loss.
7. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme)
It’s such a beautiful and simple melody, and the harmonies are gorgeous. The line that really gets me is: “I am blinded by the light / Of God and truth and right / And I wander in the night without direction.”
6. The Sounds Of Silence (Sounds of Silence)
I love the original, quiet, acoustic version of this song. But there’s no denying the power of the electric one. The juxtaposition of the electric jangle just makes the refrain against the sound of silence reverberate that much more powerfully.
You might not know this, but the drums, bass, and electric guitar overdub were recorded by Bob Dylan’s studio band in the immediate aftermath of them recording “Like a Rolling Stone.”
That kind of blows my mind, really. To record one of the finest records in history, and then on a producer’s whim add the crucial bits to a relatively unknown track by some duo with a goofy name (who had broken up at this point), which then springs that song to #1…
It’s crazy to think that Paul Simon might never have become famous if not for Tom Wilson asking for those overdubs – completely without the knowledge of Simon or Garfunkel.
5. The Boy in the Bubble (Graceland)
I was too young to experience Graceland firsthand, but I can easily imagine what it would have been like to hear it fresh. For all the nice songs in Simon’s catalog from between Bridge Over Troubled Water and Graceland, it was certainly a comparatively weak period. You could easily be forgiven for thinking that there were no more great songs left in him.
And then he went to South Africa, causing controversy for his violation of the sanctions. What he came back with was a record that mixed the classic Paul Simon songwriting skill with world music, and wrapped it all up in a beat that feels very much a product of the mid-80s (with all the good and bad implications that come with that thought). It’s really pretty crazy that it works.
But it doesn’t just work, it’s mind-blowing. It’s a revelation.
This doesn’t sound like Simon tacking on some ‘world’ sounds in order to spice things up. It sounds like him getting caught up in the tempest of sounds and feelings and doing his best to find himself within it. It’s distinctly a Paul Simon album, but there is simply no way that anything remotely like this song could have been produced out of a different milieu. It’s what makes his voice sound so perfect on the line “these are the days of miracle and wonder” – because you can tell how genuinely he feels it.
4. Kathy’s Song (Sounds of Silence)
One of the very finest love songs ever written. Also one of his finest pieces of poetry. It’s a product of a very specific moment in Simon’s life, and yet it’s also completely universal. It’s simply the feeling of quiet desperation, the lack of certainty that you will ever amount to anything or that it will ever make sense. And it’s the way that love helps sustain in those moments. It’s not that we’re rescued by love; it’s just that the struggle and the pain is somehow redeemed, made worthwhile.
3. The Boxer (Bridge Over Troubled Water)
This song was Paul Simon’s version of Born to Run. It famously took over 100 hours for them to produce a recording that satisfied him, and he drove everyone crazy trying to micro-manage it. He was also tremendously unhappy with the wordless chorus, which was only meant to be a placeholder until he figured out the right words. But for me, that’s part of the serendipity of the song. There’s something ineffable about those repetitions of ‘lie la lie’ that couldn’t possibly have been captured with lyrics.
This will, forever I think, be the benchmark against which coming-of-age songs are measured. The story is so sad and desolate and sparse; it combines beautifully with the huge cannon-fire drums, the strings, the rising tide. Simon’s finger-picked guitar is wonderful here, too.
You know, the 60s almost defy belief. So much took place in so short a time. And when we think about ‘the 60s,’ really we’re thinking about a period even shorter than a full decade. You might say that the 60s started in Dallas, 1963 and ended in Woodstock, 1969. But for me, I can’t help but think that the 60s really ended with just two little musical moments. First, The End from The Beatles. And second, the final verse of this song. The boxer stands alone and cries out “I am leaving, I am leaving” – but the fighter still remains. And curtains draw close on the decade.
2. Graceland (Graceland)
In one sense, it’s a fairly straightforward song about broken hearts and the difficult task of rebuilding a life. In another, it’s about the existential meaning of love, and what it means to live your life FOR something as opposed to simply existing. And mixed in with all of that is the thoughts of fading empires and the politics of identity. All in all, it’s really nothing more or less than the sound of hope which shines through in the darkest of times – not always (or even often) successfully. But trying nonetheless.
It opens: “The Mississippi Delta was shining like a national guitar / I am following the river down the highway through the cradle of the civil war.” That is pure poetry, evocative and beautiful. And it establishes the multi-layered themes. Traveling with the one who loves your most truly (your son) on a pilgrimage to the roots of rock and roll, seeing the country that tore itself apart and slowly (very slowly) began to heal itself over the centuries, and thinking about your own world being blown apart.
So it’s no surprise when you hear the next verse:
She comes back to tell me she’s gone
As if I didn’t know that
As if I didn’t know my own bed
As if I’d never noticed the way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you’re blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow
The deep, intense sadness. The slight sense of bemusement and disbelief. The realization that you knew all along but just couldn’t quite admit it. And the falling down of walls that you have tried desperately to erect between your interior and the world outside.
There aren’t answers here, but there really couldn’t be. The important thing is the searching, not what you will find.
1. A Poem on the Underground Wall (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme)
It’s the other side of The Sounds of Silence, the poetry of the underground. When there is nothing except the suffocating silence, a simple scrawl of four letters is all that’s left. It challenges us to mark the violence, to remain attuned to the impossibility of representation, to wrestle ourselves out of a stupor.
And what is the word? For years I just assumed it to be an obscenity. An expression of rage to mark the hypocrisy. The truly obscene, it says, is the advertisement that has been written over. No matter its connotations, a word is still an act of poetry. But advertisements are all the more disgusting because they hide themselves under the clean veneer of happy consumption.
But after years of listening to the song, it suddenly dawned on me that there’s another equally plausible word, something that stands in direct opposition: “love.” I think there’s a deliberate ambiguity here. And it’s not just an ambiguity of the wording, but also of the possibility for meaning at all.
The crayon is a rosary; it’s an object to signify devotion. We hold onto it in order to grab hold of something stable in the midst of chaos. Held with true belief, it transforms the bearer. It gives us a sense of deeper purpose. But that purpose is not found in the object but comes through its use. Individual words, individual prayers, these have no meaning by themselves. They obtain meaning through their context.
The word scrawled across the advertisement is only poetry because it is there, in that place, at that time. What it means depends on who we are every bit as much as it depends on what it says.
In my heart of hearts, I can see the bold letters screaming ‘fuck.’ And yet, in that desperate plea, I can hear a whisper, a quiet voice reminding us that the WORD doesn’t matter. Salvation is not in the word; it’s in the act. Even more, it’s in the faith that lies behind the act. The faith that one word, scratched onto a subway wall, can still be heard. And that is, above all, faith in the power of ‘love.’
Honorable mentions
11. America (Bookends)
12. I Am a Rock (Sounds of Silence)
13. The Dangling Conversation (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme)
14. Homeward Bound (Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme)
15. Mrs. Robinson (Bookends)
This is a pretty diverse list, with some of his big hits, and a few that are pretty minor parts of the catalogue. Eight different albums make it into the top 10 (with one album placing three in the top six). From that you can probably guess my favorite Petty album. But for second favorite: that’s a much tougher call. I am tempted to say Damn the Torpedoes, but I could equally make an argument for Full Moon Fever or Hard Promises or even Echo. The point being: he’s had a long and productive career with a lot of different peaks, but not really any big valleys.
10. Listen to Her Heart (You’re Gonna Get It!)
There’s nothing especially complex here. It’s about a proto-80’s jackass trying to steal a girl with promises of cocaine and the easy life. Which is a nice demonstration of the sort of world that his characters tend to inhabit. Although literally it’s actually directed at Ike Turner who was apparently hitting aggressively on his wife. Anyways, this song makes the list almost entirely because of the guitar. It’s probably the best example of the classic Petty jangle.
9. Keeping Me Alive (Playback Disc 5: Through the Cracks)
This is an unused song from the Long After Dark sessions. That album is among my least-favorite of Petty’s, which makes sense, I suppose, since he inexplicably left both this song and “Turning Point” off of it. And both of those songs are better than anything that did make it.
Petty says this song was him trying to channel the Everly Brothers, which I think is spot-on. Of course, this is the Everly Brothers as interpreted by Tom Petty, so it’s a big more jangly and a bit more countrified. In terms of theme, it’s got a very Springsteen vibe: life may be tough, things may not always make sense, but he’s got his girl, and that’s the only thing that ultimately matters. And, like with Bruce, you can’t help but wonder if any of this will last, but you just have to accept that it might not and that these moments of happiness are enough.
8. Echo (Echo)
This song was written in the midst of Petty’s divorce, and you can really hear the anguish. Still, it’s not so much ‘about’ the divorce as it is about a general feeling of pain and loss. I hear hints of anger and recrimination, but ultimately it’s more about lamentation. Both parties want to make excuses, want to rescue what used to be, but all they can do is repeat the cycles of hope and failure (the same sad echoes). You want desperately to find a way to make it work, but it just can’t…
7. Even the Losers (Damn the Torpedoes)
If Keeping Me Alive is Petty at his closest to Springsteen, this song helps to really clarify the crucial differences between them. Thematically, it kind of fits into the Springsteen oeuvre. The difference is that even Petty’s most heartfelt love songs are told from the perspective of loss. This is a song about young kids in love, and the seemingly endless joy to be found in sharing the world with someone. But it makes no pretension that this love is redemptive. It doesn’t fundamentally change them, and they don’t expect it to. It’s just that ‘even the losers get lucky sometimes.’ What’s more, it’s told in the retrospective. She’s gone, and all he can do is point to the good times in desperation.
In some ways, this is deeply pessimistic. And yet, somehow it doesn’t feel that way. I think it’s in part precisely because the characters in the story are just real folks. Because they didn’t dream the heroic dreams, their love can simply be a moment of joy. A moment of joy which happens within a life equally full of pain. There’s no grand meaning to it all; it’s just life…
And, in a strange way, that’s what sets it free.
6. To Find a Friend (Wildflowers)
I love every single thing about this song, but it’s that little piano interlude after the second chorus that turns this something truly special.
5. Letting You Go (Hard Promises)
It’s a really touching portrait of someone who has lost love, but can’t quite accept it. In a broader sense, it’s about how hard it is to get on with our lives after a great loss. While there is a brief bridge that sounds a little more like the “normal” Tom Petty stuff from this era, the rest of the song is a little bit gentler. The music is warm, and often makes me think of sitting in a big chair with blankets wrapped around me. The keyboard, in particular, helps give the song a firm foundation. And the guitar joins for an occasional bubbly burst to keep you from getting too down. Petty’s voice is emotional, but not overwhelmingly so. He expresses sadness, but is pensive, contemplative more than he is broken apart.
This feeling breaks apart a bit during the previously mentioned bridge when he lets it all out and asks plaintively “What about the broken ones? What about the lonely ones? Honey I’m having trouble letting go.” When the warmer, more comforting sound returns, it eases you back from the edge. As the song fades out over the “oooo, oooo-oh-ohs” you’re left with some feeling of hope that “off in the distance, somewhere up the road” there really is “some easy answers for the tears you’ve cried.”
4. Crawling Back to You (Wildflowers)
Each verse could be connected, or could be seen as a completely different mini-scene. The quick sketches suggest some deep melancholy, some unredeemable sadness that resides in the relationships between these characters. And, the chorus is a simple refrain, “I keep crawling back to you,” which hints even more at the possibility that love, in this instance, is a life-raft where we simply try to weather the storm. Long after the genuine feeling of love has faded, we still return because the terror of facing the world outside is even worse than the dull pain of our lives. And yet, all hope is not lost. Some of the verses suggest happiness:
Hey baby, there’s something in your eyes
Trying to say to me
That I’m gonna be alright if I believe in you
It’s all I want to do
This is to say that “crawling back” can also be the desire to make things right. If he can still see the spark of love in her eyes, then there is still something to believe in. The way he sings the chorus makes me believe that this is the truth. It doesn’t come with a sense of self-loathing or frustration. Rather, there is a hint of wonderment that, after everything, there is still someone there to turn to.
These thoughts are guided along perfectly by the sound of the song. It begins with a long intro, featuring a slow cascading series of notes in a minor key on the piano. To me, this riff sounds like the breaking of a wave. It rises almost imperceptibly and then falls. It glides up the shore and then recedes, pulled underneath the swirling water. The piano is joined by a guitar which punctuates the highs and the lows. Throughout the song, the same basic riff remains the same, though in a number of variations. At times it returns to the feeling of the introduction, like a pond on a still day. At others it is tempestuous and stormy.
Or perhaps it sounds like a breath. As the song begins, it is a long breath, in slow-motion, inhaled and exhaled softly. Then, at the 44-second mark, the drums appear and the pace quickens and the song begins to thump like someone out of breathe from running.
Whichever metaphor you prefer, the general mood of the song remains the same, while the shifts in tone create a great deal of minor variations on the theme. The notes are so downcast that one cannot help but feel that there is a great deal of sadness, but it is never overwhelming. The song is simply too beautiful to believe that there is no hope in the world.
3. American Girl (Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers)
Petty once remarked that this song sold thousands of 12-string guitars, which he thought was pretty funny because it’s actually just two regular six-string ones. But you can understand why people would have gone nuts over the sound. Lots of people had done jangle before, but it had never sounded like this.
This has always struck me as one of those songs that basically everyone loves. Old rockers, young dudes, even the punk kids. It’s just a glorious song.
2. Free Fallin’ (Full Moon Fever)
For a significant portion of my young adulthood, this was my absolute favorite song in the whole world. It felt like the most romantic, the most beautiful, the most pure thing I had ever heard. That little guitar riff, so simple and yet so ineffable. And when he sings ‘freeeee fallin’ it literally makes my whole body feel lighter. I can almost feel myself drifting on the breeze. I’m much older now, and hopefully a little bit wiser. But there’s still a part of me that simply cannot believe how good it feels to experience the final minute and a half of this song. I hope I never become so jaded that this song doesn’t make my whole body sing.
And yes, I know that the most direct reading of the lyrics is pretty pessimistic. I appreciate that, and it’s part of the larger meaning of the song. But honestly, I mostly just listen to this because of the way it makes me smile.
1. Wildflowers (Wildflowers)
I’m not sure there is a more beautiful song in the world.
It’s so simple, perfectly intimate. I can still remember how I felt the first time I heard it: full of wonder, and just a little bit scared that if I moved the spell would break and it would turn back into just another song. As I look back, I am starting to realize that it was almost twenty years ago. And I feel like the song has only grown up with me.
You know, in some ways, my top two tracks almost work as mirror images of each other. Free Fallin’ is a song for a young man, full of hope, and just a little bit unaware of the pain in it. He’s a ‘bad boy, for breaking her heart’ but all the implied damage being done is just completely washed out by the deep feeling of love that is embedded in the very essence of the song.
Meanwhile, Wildflowers is an old man’s song. It’s the feeling of love after the passion has gone. It’s a goodbye to someone you care about but know that you can’t hold onto. It’s the sort of song that only grows more poignant with every year that passes. If I had made this list even a few years ago, Free Fallin’ would have topped it. But now…as much as I still love that song, I hear a little more of myself here. I do hold out hope that I will always be able to live in a place where I feel free…
Honorable mentions:
11. The Waiting (Hard Promises)
12. Turning Point (Playback)
13. A Higher Place (Wildflowers)
14. Mary Jane’s Last Dance (Greatest Hits)
15. All The Wrong Reasons (Into the Great Wide Open)
16. Learning To Fly (Into the Great Wide Open)
17. Room At The Top (Echo)
18. Louisiana Rain (Damn the Torpedoes)
19. Southern Accents (Southern Accents)
20. A One Story Town (Long After Dark)
There’s a long history of American storytelling, stretching back through folk heroes like Woody Guthrie to authors like Steinbeck and the people who moved out to homesteads on the frontier, braving the cold and the wild all in the hopes of finding something better.
It’s a noble legacy, but also a deadly one. Grand dreams sustain us in our hardest times – it’s what makes us want to believe, need to believe in the myth of Tom Joad – but those same dreams also contribute to the bust and boom cycles that brought on the Depression in the first place. And that long line of Okies trudging across America desperately searching for a job or a full meal – if you trace it back far enough, you’ll find yourself in the midst of one of Jay Gatsby’s famous parties.
That’s what Springsteen captures: the enigma, the longing, in all of its passion and full belief. And it’s what rescues the bombast of “Born to Run” or “Thunder Road.” These songs explode with a fervor that lays bare all that is buried in their subjects. Youth, wild abandon, a belief that true meaning can be found on just the other side of the hill. And a secret terror that all those dreams may have already passed you by.
All of which is to say: there is genuine magic here, if only we remind ourselves to hear it.
Mandatory disclaimer: these are simply my favorites. I make no claim about the objective list of their ‘best’ songs. I can only tell you what I like.
10. Land of Hope and Dreams (Wrecking Ball)
It’s a tour de force. You get basically the entire Springsteen mythos here: trains, lost souls, community, redemption, and a killer saxophone solo from the Big Man (one of his very last, sadly). The fact that the mode of reference is almost anachronistic these days (who catches a train to their salvation in 2013?) is actually part of the point. It’s a call to remember what is great in our past, not to say that we can go back, but to caution us about what it means to move forward.
9. Youngstown (Live in New York City)
The acoustic version of this song is fine. But it doesn’t really convey the feel of the place. Here, with dirty guitars and an ominous, looming sense of menace, is the real Youngstown. The history just seeps out of it like a thick sap. And the anger is evident in his snarl.
If “Land of Hope and Dreams” is the positive expression of this idea—that there will always be room in this great country for those willing to strive for it—“Youngstown” tells the other side of the story.
And again, of course this is nostalgia. It’s not meant as a political treatise on the political economy of coal, nor is it a demand for the restoration of a city that is gone forever. It’s just the expression of a palpable frustration. And it’s a call for us to exercise our memory, to recognize those who have been left behind in this brave new world. It’s all too easy to just cast them aside as the detritus of progress. But everything we are now depends on the sweat and the blood and the pain of those who came before.
8. Darkness on the Edge of Town (Darkness on the Edge of Town)
The vocals are shredded. The soul is shredded. He’s on that hill because what else can you do? In all the things that we want, in all the things that we can’t have, there’s a great darkness. For those who find themselves living in the midst of that darkness, somehow everything obtains a new clarity.
It’s not a bad place. But it’s not a good place either. It’s the place where concepts like good and bad lose their hold on us. There is only the pure wanting, the desire, the need for something. We don’t know what it is, but it drives us forward. The darkness is the place where we look deep into ourselves and see the blank spaces. It’s where secrets come to life and are burned away in a fire.
It’s where we see our true selves.
7. Dancing in the Dark (Born in the USA)
I know this one divides opinion a bit among serious Springsteen fans. But I care not one whit. Of course it’s a product of its time, with the synths and the straightforward pop sensibility. And it was written explicitly for the purpose of generating a strong single, which suggests a degree of crass commercialism. To that I say: so what? It’s a beautifully crafted song, one of the prettiest melodies he has ever written, and a fine vocal performance. And the background for its creation—Jon Landau’s insistence that Born in the USA needed a standout single and Bruce’s frustration with the demand—actually just makes me like it more. It’s a window into his own creative process as much as it is a story about someone else.
6. Born to Run (Born to Run)
He set out to write the greatest rock and roll song of all-time. And you’d have to admit that he just about hit the mark. It starts big and only gets bigger. It famously took literally months to produce, and you can hear it in the depth of the sound. It sounds huge, impossibly dense, and yet somehow carefree.
This song, as much as any Springsteen track, invites misunderstandings. You can read it as an overly simplistic glorification of the misfits. And yes, it does seem to suggest that any problem in the world can be beat if you just get yourself out on the road.
But, if you dig in just a little bit, you’ll discover there’s a lot more going on here. Lines like “Together Wendy we’ll live with the sadness / I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul” suggest that the redemption promised here is temporary at best. You dream crazy dreams, you love like there’s no tomorrow, you drive away into the night—not because you think this will make the sadness go away, but just because if you don’t keep striving the sadness will overwhelm you.
There’s no perfect life waiting around the corner for them. They will find pain and sorrow. But in the face of that pain the best they can hope to do is to refuse to give up.
5. Badlands (Darkness on the Edge of Town)
If “Born to Run” is the greatest rock song ever made, this is somehow something even better. To me, these two songs mark something wonderful in his artistic evolution. Born to Run is a triumph. It’s the sort of album that sings with the voice of Homer. It paints in huge strokes, and in highly stylized forms. And it’s a testament to Springsteen that he never tried to make something exactly like it again. The follow-up, Darkness on the Edge of Town, is much darker, much more narrowly drawn. And so this is what happens when you channel all that passion and energy and the pure forces of nature through the parched lands of our national spirit.
“Born to Run” is rock and roll for the dreamer in all of us. It tells us that we need to dream in order to survive. And, if we dream hard enough, we just might “get out while we’re young.” “Badlands” is rock and roll for those who have come to realize that there’s something beyond the dream. And it’s simply the “notion deep inside, that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.” When you live in a world that beats you down mercilessly, you might come to believe that dreaming is the only escape. But here, Bruce is telling us, in the Badlands, we start to realize that escape is the wrong way of thinking about it. We don’t need to escape. We just need to “go out tonight and find out what we’ve got.”
When I’ve seen Bruce live, this song was without a doubt the most exuberant. And I think it’s because “Badlands” is fundamentally about coming together, about shared belief in something greater, about the invitation to live well in the world we have made for ourselves. “Born to Run,” for all its grandeur and wonder, is fundamentally about dissatisfaction, where “Badlands” is about the simple honor of a life well-lived. It’s not a ‘happy’ song, but it is a joyous one.
4. The River (The River)
In some ways, this is the companion piece to “Born to Run.” Here the subject is what happens to people once they realize that their youthful dreams are long gone, but nothing is there to replace them. I’m not sure there is a line in the history of rock and roll that is more heartfelt and deathly-sad than the bridge in this song:
But I remember us riding in my brother’s car
Her body tan and wet down at the reservoir
At night on them banks I’d lie awake
And pull her close just to feel each breath she’d take
Now those memories come back to haunt me
They haunt me like a curse
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse?
It just hurts so much, to know what it felt like to be happy, and to know that it will only ever be a cold and lifeless memory. To look at someone and see in them the person you used to be, that you still wish you could be. How can we bear the pain? How could you not grow to hate that person who represents the iron cage that has been dropped around you. Their version presence mocks you. And yet, would you really wish to not have those memories? Would that make it any better?
3. My City of Ruins (The Rising)
He wrote it about a neighborhood falling apart but I’m not sure it would be possible to write a better song about 9/11. Possibly the most emotional musical moment of the decade is when he asks: “Tell me how do I begin again? My city’s in ruins…”
That it wasn’t written about 9/11 almost makes it better, since the tragedy of 9/11 has always been the way it inflicted itself on us in the places that felt the most safe, the most personal. It’s about the loss of a specific home, but that allows it to stand in for the loss of home on a much grander scale. It could be about Asbury Park; it could be about Ground Zero; it could be about New Orleans after Katrina; it could be about Flint after the decline of the auto industry. No matter what it means for you, it’s about the need to rise up out of our sorrow and pain. Out of the ashes, we will rise again.
2. Backstreets (Born to Run)
Just listen to the poetry. I don’t know what a “soft infested summer” is, precisely, but I know exactly what he means nonetheless. And the tiny details, unexplained, allow the story to emerge in its own way. We get specific names (Stockon’s Wing, the Duke Street Kings) without any clarification. It’s a perfect case of simply showing rather than telling. We don’t need to know what those things are – we just need to know what it felt like.
And the ambiguity doesn’t end there. There’s a core question at the very heart of the song. What precisely is the relationship being discussed? The most straightforward reading is simply one of young love. But there’s nothing here that actually necessitates romantic interest. It could also be simply a story about growing up, the transformative feeling of realizing what it means to have a friend with whom you can share everything. And, of course, there’s the ambiguity in the name. It’s simplest to read Terry as a woman, but there’s no reason it couldn’t be a man—which would add another layer to the explanation for them “hiding on the backstreets.”
After two verses of set-up, the inevitable breakdown hits just about as hard as any piece of music I have ever heard. Even on an album well known for bombastic moments, there really isn’t any other that comes close to the epic feel of this verse. Bruce singing “blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down” is the sound of a heart being torn to shreds right in front of us. It’s almost impossibly intimate and yet also feels universal. And again, we don’t really get the details. This isn’t a blow-by-blow account of what went wrong. It’s about the feeling. The story is told just beyond the actual events. What lie that killed them? What truth that ran them down? Who is the guy? We never find out because this isn’t a story driven by the plot. It’s a painting, or a series of photographs, meant to capture the flickering moments of pain.
This song would be a complete and perfect work of art if it only contained those opening three verses. But, because Bruce is Bruce, he gives us the coda to tie it all together. Laying in the dark, thinking about what has passed. And his memory of what it was all about:
Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see
Trying to learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be
Well after all this time to find we’re just like all the rest
Stranded in the park and forced to confess
To realize that you are only a character in your own story…it could lead you to doubt whether there really are heroes in this mean old world. But, and here is the essential and wonderful ambiguity of the song, we never really find out where it all goes. If it’s all a matter of “hiding on the backstreets” what precisely is he hiding from? Is that part of the magic of the backstreets, that they are always there for us as a sort of refuge? Or is hiding the problem: that no matter what new troubles we face, we can always run away from them to hide on the backstreets? Or both? We don’t need an answer: we just need to keep asking.
1. Thunder Road (Born to Run)
It’s an entire movie in four minutes and fifty seconds. And not just any movie, this is the Casablanca of rock and roll. All the tropes, all the references, all the things that you’ve heard in hundreds of songs since then…this is where it all comes from. If it sounds tired or worn down, it’s only because you’ve replaced the real thing in your imagination with the imitation.
And if this is where the tropes begin, if this is the center of the Springsteen universe, it’s worth pondering for a little bit what precisely they mean.
My theory is that the Springsteen tropes aren’t meant to be understood in isolation. They work together, over the course of decades, to build up an entire universe. The guy who shows up at Mary’s door with the promise of redemption inhabits the same world as the Vietnam vet who lost his brother at Khe Sanh. And they both stand in as archetypes for the guy who is trying to write his novel and just can’t make it click. The fellow in a union coat standing in the county courthouse with his pregnant girlfriend may have been friends with the singer of “Thunder Road.” And they both probably drive their cars around at night feeling lost in “Racing in the Street.”
Cars mean freedom, but they also represent wasted years spent on ephemera. The train is the universal metaphor—it takes us into the land beyond, brings us all together, forms the connective tissue of our greater psyche. And these vehicles scream to us of salvation and redemption. But the broader point, made clear only from the distance as the whole narrative blends together, is that redemption was never in the thing. Redemption is the thing, and it comes from our capacity to believe.
Here, he sings “All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood,” and if you want to be ungenerous you would interpret that as a belief that the car is some simplistic metaphor for freedom. That the American Dream is found in some fuel-injected engine. But that’s not the point at all. No, it’s the act of offering that matters. The substance of the offer is what gives it a narrative hook. But if you treat the hook as the thing itself, you are doomed.
Of course we can’t help but feel just a tiny bit cynical. As the credits roll and the kids drive away into the sunset, we know deep down that bad times will come to them, and probably sooner rather than later. But that doesn’t matter for the song because he’s not asking us to believe in the objective truth. He asking us to believe that the characters in the story really believe. And to remind us of when we believed, too.
The kid sits there with hand outstretched, and asks her to share his dream. But the dream is not the magic of the highway. The dream is the dreaming itself. The finding out, the testing, the endless faith in the possibility that there must be something more. And if we can’t find it here, then we just have to keep looking.
Honorable mentions:
11. Loose Ends (Tracks)
12. American Land (The Seeger Sessions)
13. Girls in Their Summer Clothes (Magic)
14. You’re Missing (The Rising)
15. Born in the USA (Born in the USA)
16. Racing in the Street (Darkness on the Edge of Town)
17. The Promised Land (Darkness on the Edge of Town)
18. Jungleland (Born to Run)
19. Atlantic City (Nebraska)
20. Rosalita (Come Out Tonight) (The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle)
More on Springsteen:
Springsteen and the Power of Earnestness
Thinking about Springsteen in the context of The Gaslight Anthem
Mandatory disclaimer: these are simply my favorites. I make no claim about the objective list of their ‘best’ songs. I can only tell you what I like. Regular readers will not be surprised to see their work from the 90s represented a lot more than their later work. I lost my heart to Lonesome Crowded West, and while the stuff since then is also plenty good, I will always go back to my true love…
10. Night on the Sun (Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks)
Isaac’s voice is in fine form – for all the lispiness, the guy really could sing back in the day. Particularly on the “hopelessly hopeless, I hope so…for you” bit. But this song makes the list for the guitar work. It builds up languidly, but insistently. But then you get the instrumental section starting at about 3 minutes where it rings like the bells of God.
9. Doin’ the Cockroach (Lonesome Crowded West)
God this song is messy. The guitar starts out woozy and Isaac is at his mumbly/angry best. And then there are those drums, like cannon-fire. And the pace picks up and things start to catch on fire. But this song makes my top 10 almost entirely for the guitar in the bit that starts around 2:30. I’ve often thought of Modest Mouse in this period as playing a guitar like a serrated blade, and this is just about the perfect example.
8. Neverending Math Equation (Building Nothing Out of Something)
There’s something beautiful and terrible about the notion of life being structured by the cold inhumanity of equations, the animal necessity of survival being built into our very nature, the way this overwhelms the pretense of free will and individual decision. The cold loneliness. And yet, this is simultaneous with the bare animality of existence – the crude bodily reality that “the plants and the animals eat each other.”
7. Cowboy Dan (Lonesome Crowded West)
This is Modest Mouse at their most desolate. The slow-burning frustration, the anger, the deep sense of loss. He didn’t move to the city, the city moved to him. So he goes to the desert, fires his rifle in the sky, says “God if I have to die, you will have to die.” The crashing cymbals, the piercing guitar note. And yet, there’s the interlude…where we’re just standing in the tall grass “thinking nothing.” It’s not a resolution, or even really an escape. But it is a moment of temporary solitude. There’s no meaning in it, but that’s kind of the point. In response to the aching, sullen, slow catastrophe of the modern world, thinking nothing at all is the only possible response.
6. Broke (Building Nothing Out of Something)
It opens with 30 seconds of just the guitar, dour yet engaging. When Isaac’s voice enters, it is eerie and achingly sad. It tells the tale of self-recrimination and a life slowly unraveling. It’s a slow descent, spiraling downward until about two minutes in, when the pace picks up and moves faster, faster, faster, until it’s one glorious mess. The drums are flailing about, the guitar is dancing, the lyrics trip over themselves trying to fit into the little bit of time and space provided for them until it all melds together into a series of riffs that hit you like gunfire. And then, WHAM, it’s over. I can’t deal with rollercoasters, mostly because I’m terrified of heights, but this song sort of makes me understand the appeal. The slow climb, the little bit of panic in the back of your mind, and then the rush.
5. So Much Beauty in Dirt (Everywhere and His Nasty Parlour Tricks)
One minute and twenty-four seconds long, and it’s exactly the right length. It’s about those moments, gone before you know it, but perfect in themselves. The refrain “so much beauty it could make you cry” is repeated a number of times, emphasizing that life is perfect in all its imperfections. The randomness, the pain, the mistakes, and the stupidity, all of these things are intermixed with the beauty, the wonder, the silliness, and the joy.
Frankly, I find this song to be far more optimistic, and encouraging, than much more explicitly hopeful songs. Perfect moments are perfect only because we all know they must end. Similarly, we all know that suffering is a part of life, but what makes it acceptable is the realization that it is transitory, ephemeral. When we let pain wash over us, it cannot last – the pure moments burst forth no matter the circumstances, if we let them. It is only when we fixate on the pain that it haunts us.
These perfect moments can happen anywhere. I find them often in music, but it can be as simple as breathing a deep breath of clean, fresh air. It can be saying goodbye to a friend. It can be a tear shed for someone that you’ve hurt. It can even be a moment of pain or sadness. What makes these moments perfect is not that they are “good” but rather that they are beautiful. And beauty is a perilous thing, as Sam Gamgee would be happy to tell us:
‘The Lady of Lórien! Galadriel!’ cried Sam. `You should see her indeed you should, sir. I am only a hobbit, and gardening’s my job at home, sir, if you understand me, and I’m not much good at poetry — not at making it: a bit of a comic rhyme, perhaps. now and again, you know, but not real poetry — so I can’t tell you what I mean. It ought to be sung. You’d have to get Strider, Aragorn that is, or old Mr. Bilbo, for that. But I wish I could make a song about her. Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes like a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowndilly, small and slender like. Hard as di’monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime. But that’s a lot o’ nonsense, and all wide of my mark.’
‘Then she must be lovely indeed,’ said Faramir. ‘Perilously fair.’
‘I don’t know about perilous,’ said Sam. ‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.’
4. Third Planet (The Moon and Antarctica)
“Everything that keeps us together is falling apart.” In seven words, the zeitgeist of an era is summed up, setting the stage for a record that will delve deeply into our sense of isolation. It taps into the inescapable feeling that, even as the world grows smaller, the things which helped us feel close to one another are fracturing.
3. Float On (Good News For People Who Love Bad News)
This song marks a turning point. Before this, the defining feature of the band seemed to be the overwhelming force of loneliness that comes from living within an incomprehensible universe. It wasn’t ever quite phrased in these terms, but I would suggest they were primarily concerned with the lightness of existence, the way even the most durable things are perpetually at risk of fading away into nothing. So here, we find them looking at this all in a new way. If we are nothing but leaves on the wind, if life moves on a plan beyond our comprehension, maybe there’s something to be said for simply floating along with it.
I’m sad to say that the band finding a bit of peace led to them producing music that matters a whole lot less to me. Nothing after “Float On” has ever hit me with nearly the force of Lonesome Crowded West. But here, just as they are starting to make the turn, they hit one of their single finest notes.
2. Teeth Like God’s Shoeshine (Lonesome Crowded West)
Writing about this song feels impossible. It’s so huge and violent and beautiful and far beyond the scope of articulation. It’s a force of nature. It’s the end of the world. It’s…something more.
Unlike some guitar bands who do their damage with noise, Modest Mouse are something else. Not that they can’t get loud. But at their most devastating, the thing that truly takes you apart is the loneliness, the isolation, the spaces in between the notes. There’s an artful looseness to it – it kept you from ever identifying a center.
And it was never better expressed than on this song. There’s the piece around 3:00 (Take ‘em all for the long ride…) which follows close on the heels of the ‘chorus’ which feels to me like it comes via a sort of jangly saunter. Or the absolute apocalypse at 5:18, when the entire world gets torn down around you. And bizarrely, this is immediately preceded by a quiet moment that feels like the aftermath of some great destruction. It’s somehow perfect: the eruption is in some way caused by its own effects.
Hidden somewhere in this is true understanding. I know you better than you know yourself they seem to say. You in all your madness and confusion. This is not a comforting feeling but it is right.
1. Trailer Trash (Lonesome Crowded West)
My favorite Modest Mouse song, and the inspiration for the name of this blog. It’s about a life that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, when you have to wonder if maybe the reason things haven’t turned out quite right is your own damn fault, not because of anything out there. I don’t find it to be a hopeless song. Lines like “Taking heartache with hard work / Goddamn I am such a jerk / I can’t do anything” suggest a deep-seated weariness, a fear that life will never be anything more than it is in this moment. And a bit of self-loathing. He sees himself and is disgusted with his inability to change.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. I like to believe that it’s a warning more than a prophecy. The song contains one extended verse which bleeds into something of a chorus, and is then repeated. Over this, the pace slows and while Isaac initially sounds emotional, maybe even a little tortured, by the end, he is just speaking the lyrics over a drum beat, and the guitars have almost disappeared. You can almost feel the burden of life pressing down. Then, however, the prettiness and weariness of the first half explode into the chaos of the second half. The drums go crazy, and the guitar riff dances around.
There are no lyrics, just the commotion of the music. All weariness is forgotten, and if you’re not quite sure where things are going, you do know that it is exciting. I like to think that’s sort of how life works. Frustration, fear of stagnation, and discontentment can be shattered. It’s a back-and-forth thing, but there’s still some reason to hope that you can learn from your mistakes and be a better person. I’d like to believe that.
Honorable mentions:
11. Polar Opposites (Lonesome Crowded West)
12. Spitting Venom (We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank)
13. Other People’s Lives (Building Nothing Out of Something)
14. Bankrupt on Selling (Lonesome Crowded West)
15. The World at Large (Good News For People Who Love Bad News)
Radio Song – The Felice Brothers (from The Felice Brothers)
Campfire sing-alongs from back before they were made cool by Mumford and Sons and the like. But with the substantial improvement of the accordion! It’s such an under-utilized instrument in contemporary music.
This is one of those boozy songs that just feels like it must have been a joy to record – in the long tradition stretching back to Barbara Ann.
Violets Of Dawn– Eric Anderson (from Violets of Dawn)
Someone (I think it was Dylan – and it certainly sounds like the sort of thing Dylan would have said) said this song was a piece of total derivative trash with nonsense phrases meant to evoke deep thoughts, and that it gave the whole genre of folk music a bad name.
And of course, there’s something to that critique. This is the sort of song that you’d write if you were hoping to cash in on the whole raft of Dylan-lovers who had recently been turned off by Dylan’s own turn to the electric.
But you know what, the reason it sounds like that is because it’s just a damn good song. It’s precisely the sort of thing that a folk-lover full of optimism about the birth of the counterculture would love to hear. If you approach it with cynicism, the whole thing falls apart. But there’s something wonderful here waiting for you if can manage to suspend your disbelief through lines like “Oh whirling twirling puppy-warm / Before the flashing cloaks of darkness gone / Come see the no colors fade, blazing / Into petaled sprays of violets of dawn.”
