Beautiful Song Of The Week

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Pogo, aka Nick Bertke, makes music that burrows into your ear, opens the part of your brain labeled “nostalgia”, and throws a belated birthday party for your inner child.

Much like Kutiman, Bertke is a master remixer. But rather than using YouTube for source material, he cuts and pastes from (often but not always) old Disney movies, creating songs that are at once completely original but strangely familiar. Many of the music and accompanying videos found on his website are worth your time, but this one, made of bits and pieces from Disney’s 1937 classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, is easily my favourite.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Despite being composed of split-second sound clips, it doesn’t sound choppy or disconnected.

2. It’s the only song I know of that uses a turtle biting a stair as percussion.

3. It emphasizes the simultaneous creepiness and beauty of that iconic 1930s style of singing. There’s something about the way she sings “I’m wishing…” at 2.21 that makes me a bit scared that if I look at Snow White the wrong way I might end up at the bottom of a well myself.

Recommended listening activity:

Staring into the night sky and inventing your own constellations.

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Having only been alive for about 6 months during the 1970s, I can’t really say that I “miss” that decade, but there are some things the seventies gave us that I think made the world a better place. Those things are, in no particular order:

-          Shirts with big collars

-          The afro (especially in basketball)

-          Star Wars

-          Orange as a good colour choice for anything

-          The Jackson 5

Considering that the album Maybe Tomorrow features three of those things on the cover alone, it’s a must-buy for anyone who has fond memories of the 70s. In fact, anyone who wants to hear the evolution of popular music from 1970 to 1979 can do so by listening to The Jackson 5’s catalogue; they ran the gamut from soul to funk to disco as the years went by and popular tastes changed.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The glockenspiel, especially its little chromatic up-and-down at the beginning. It’s the type of sound they use in movies as the screen goes blurry and we dissolve into a dream sequence.

2. The bassline. It reminds me of this one, and it works as the song’s key shifts from minor to major.

3. Michael’s voice. With everything else that happened in his life, it’s easy to forget why he got famous in the first place: he could flat-out sing. Listen to this song and realize that he was 12 when it was recorded. Do you know any 12-year-old who can sing this well? Or do anything this well, for that matter?

Recommended listening activity:

Going out for a relaxing mid-afternoon rollerskate.

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At some point, as the 1800s became the 1900s, the lion’s share of the world’s power, wealth, and culture creation shifted from Europe to North America. It’s impossible to say exactly when this happened, and of course it was probably a series of events rather than a single moment. But for the sake of making a point, I’m going to say that it happened in 1893.

1893 was already promising to be a breakout year for the United States; the Chicago World’s Fair was a showcase for American ingenuity, giving the world the Ferris Wheel, Juicy Fruit gum, Quaker Oats, and some of the first functioning electric lights. Clearly, the 20^th century was shaping up to be a century in which most of the world’s breakthroughs would happen west of the Atlantic.

Providing a soundtrack to this power shift was Antonin Dvorak, who, having moved to the US from Prague, premiered his legendary “New World Symphony” at Carnegie Hall in December of that year.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening chords. Grand, ominous, powerful. For the first 30 seconds of this piece, I like to imagine the sun rising on the horizon, wearing sunglasses and an expression that says, “That’s right. I’m the sun.”

2. The melody. Having opened so grandly, the melody that follows on the clarinet is sweet and gentle. Dvorak was a huge fan of folk music, and much of this symphony was based on African-American spirituals that he heard during his time in the states. He famously (and controversially) said he was “convinced that the future of music in this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies.” The following 100 years of American music would seem to prove him right.

3. The closing chords. Having climbed to a squeaky high note in the final minute, the closing chords are played exclusively on the low strings, and if your spine doesn’t tingle when you hear them, your spine might be missing.

Recommended listening activity:

Going home.

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I’m not the type to complain about the state of popular music, or claim that “the music died” a long time ago. However, considering the type of acts that dominate the radio these days, it’s difficult to imagine a band like Simon & Garfunkel topping the charts today the way they did in the latter half of the 1960s.

And yet, they were huge. Political and poetic with tight harmonies and soaring falsettos, Simon & Garfunkel reeled off a string of hit albums that vaulted them to superstardom. Eventually, the pressure of their fame started to eat away at their relationship, and during the recording of this song (and the album of the same name) tension and disagreements were pushing the two apart. By the time this track finished its six-week stay at #1, Simon & Garfunkel had already split.

Knowing that their relationship was under strain and that their partnership was about to end only makes this song more poignant. But despite that knowledge, I can’t help but love this song as an anthem to friendship.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Garfunkel’s voice. Apparently, he didn’t want to sing it, and thought Paul Simon’s voice was better suited. During a reunion tour in 2003, they split the difference by alternating verses, and singing together on the final verse.

2. The big echoing snare drum that begins to creep into the background just after 3 minutes. It’s the first hint of what’s coming…

3. …the huge ending. Truly epic. Any song that ends by getting louder and slower is likely to make you want to raise your fists in triumph and look to the heavens; the high strings at the end of this one might make you throw tears of joy into the mix.

Recommended listening activity:

Giving someone half your cookie.

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The Slakadeliqs are not actually a band, but one man, the talented and extravagantly-named Slakah the Beatchild. Having spent years producing other people’s music, Slakah adopted the Slakadeliqs moniker on his 2012 release, “The Other Side of Tomorrow”.

It’s the type of album that only someone with a producer’s mind could create; sonically fascinating, with hints of just about every genre you could imagine. This song alone has bits of folk, soul, and hip-hop floating under its soothing surface. It’s reminiscent of “Hallelujah” by k-os, but perhaps even more hypnotic.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The strummed guitar in the first verse is so soft, as if the guitarist is wearing gloves. Along with the glockenspiel and the harp, it gives the song a really fragile feel.

2. The switch to 7/4 time as the song hits 3 minutes. It’s hard to think of another song that has a rapped verse and 7/4 time.

3. The repeated chord progression in the final section. After a fairly normal descending set of chords, we get a bizarre major chord on the fourth degree of the scale thrown in, adding to the urgency of the song’s last minutes.

Recommended listening activity:

Tracing your hand and writing a poem inside the shape it leaves.

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The Tea Party is a Canadian band that gained a healthy following in Canada in the 1990s. They were a bit of a curiosity: in the midst of a decade where simple, three-chord grunge was the secret to mainstream success, The Tea Party was experimenting with strange instruments, odd time signatures, and a sound that brought to mind the phrase, “Zeppelin Goes To India”.

They earned a spot in my cassette collection (yes, cassette collection) with big tunes like “The Bazaar” and “Fire In The Head”, but the song that I’m most compelled to give another listen to 17 years later is this little instrumental beauty.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The title. It’s about time that the under-appreciated badger got a song named after it. I’m not sure which attributes of this animal we’re supposed to be hearing in the song, but I like to imagine the badger waking up with a stretch, brewing himself a cup of coffee, and getting ready for a busy day of whatever it is that badgers do.

2. The Hurdy Gurdy. Aside from having the coolest name in instrument history, it’s one of the wackier looking instruments you will ever see. Part violin, part old-timey movie camera. Listen for it at the beginning; it’s the one that sounds a bit like a mellowed-out set of bagpipes.

3. The guitar. Jeff Martin was (is) a very talented musician. I saw The Tea Party live once, and he seemed to switch instruments every minute or so, and played each one masterfully. But his home is the acoustic guitar, and in this song he makes it do lovely things.

Recommended listening activity:

Digging through your closet to find summer clothes you forgot you owned.

P.S. For those of you who, like me, find significance in multiples of 10, this week marks BSOTW’s 100th post. Yay!

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Along with years of piano lessons, the experience that really fixed music as an important part of my life was being in a choir. It was a church choir, and I enjoyed it immensely, even though I was never really religious (the only time I remember praying was when I lost my brand new baseball glove and declared privately that I was prepared to go to church for the rest of my life if God would be so kind as to let me have it back).

There were no girls in the choir, which made it much less complicated for me, as I couldn’t figure out how to talk and breathe simultaneously in front of girls, much less sing in front of one. There was a nice friendship between the boys; it was a bit like being in Boy Scouts, except that instead of tying knots and building fires, we were singing choral music. (And, occasionally, building fires.)

But the main reason for the men & boys choir is the sound it creates. There’s a purity to the men & boys sound that can’t be produced otherwise, and in no other piece of music is this as evident as it is in Gregorio Allegri’s famous “Miserere”, performed in churches around the world at this time of year.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The chanting. Inserted between each verse, it gives the piece a middle-agey feel, despite the fact that it was written during the Baroque period.

2. The solo. When I was a choirboy, this piece was the Super Bowl of the choir calendar. And if you got the solo, with its incredible top C, you were the MVP. Funnily enough, I’ve heard that the top C wasn’t in the original score, but came into being as a result of a copyist’s error in the 1800s.

3. The harmonies. Although the soprano solo with its top C is exciting, each vocal line is beautiful in its own way. I wouldn’t use “haunting” or “mysterious” to describe many songs, but this one fits. The mystery was, for the first few centuries of the song’s existence, intentional, as the Vatican prohibited copies from being made, on threat of excommunication. The first unauthorized copy, apparently, was made in 1770 by a 14-year-old named Wolfgang Mozart, who heard the piece twice, imprinted it on his memory, and wrote it out later.

Recommended listening activity:

Sitting by a stained-glass window late in the afternoon.

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You wake up late because you accidentally set your alarm for “PM” instead of “AM”.

You throw together a quick breakfast, consisting of the last pulpy dregs of orange juice from a near-empty carton, and the dusty remnants of cereal from the bottom of the box. Forgot to get groceries on the weekend.

You try to make up for lost time by taking a different route to work that you somehow figure might be faster. It isn’t.

You arrive at work to find a desk piled high with stuff that really has nothing to do with you.

You have 837 new emails, all your pens have been borrowed, and you’re pretty sure you forgot to lock the door when you left the house.

You struggle through a day of solving other people’s problems while convincing yourself that your own problems can wait.

You take the heat for poor decisions made by somebody else.

You play nice with people who don’t deserve it.

You spend an hour thinking it’s Wednesday, then realize with utter shock that it’s only Monday.

You wonder what you did to deserve this awful day.

Then you come home, and you listen to “Lucky Old Sun” by Aretha Franklin.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Aretha’s voice has the power and maturity that you need to make this song work. She was 19 when she recorded this. NINETEEN. Yet she manages to tap into the soul and emotion of someone who’s toiled at their job for decades.

2. I love the way she stays behind the beat of the song, as if she can’t quite get up the energy to sing the next line.

3. When she really lets it rip at 2:21, she almost sounds like a J5-era Michael Jackson.

Recommended listening activity:

Falling asleep in your work clothes.

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Buy it here.

Every country has a Glasgow.

Glasgow tends to exist in the shadow of Edinburgh. Just an hour’s drive to the east, Edinburgh is the wealthier city, the more popular tourist destination, the seat of Scottish government. Edinburgh’s natural setting is more beautiful, its buildings better maintained, its arts scene more well-known.

Even though Glasgow is slightly larger, and though it’s got plenty to be proud of, you get the sense that ever since the decline of its industry, it has become the “other child”; the one who didn’t finish school, didn’t get a great job, married someone the parents didn’t approve of.

But that’s why I love “Plastic” by Midnight Lion. It’s an anthem for the underdog, sung with pride by Glasgow native Stewart Brock.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. You can hear his Scottish accent. Too often, non-American singers try to manufacture an American accent, and I’ve never understood why. I love the Celtic twist on the vowels in words like, “up”, “back”, and of course, “Glaswegian”.

2. You can sense his love for his city. He doesn’t deny Glasgow’s grittiness or post-industrial scars, but celebrates them in wonderful lines like, “I might just paint my soul the city/Full of colour, make it dark, and make it gritty/Sketch it out lest I forget/The rain town.”

3. You can feel the song about to explode. For the first three minutes, you’re just waiting for it to open up, and then it finally does. The rush of sound brings out the line, “Stood barefoot in my own little portion of the river”.

Recommended listening activity:

Accepting your shortcomings instead of blaming yourself for them.

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Like most people who were in their teens in 1996, I figured that this song was written by Lauryn Hill. Even though the Fugees’ version will always have a special place on my iPod, and even though I still find it hard not to chime in during the chorus with an enthusiastic “…One time!” I’ve come to realize that the original is the superior song.

Roberta Flack is an amazing person. She entered university at the age of 15 on a full music scholarship. She was teaching English and Music by age 19. In 1973 and ’74, she won consecutive Grammy Awards for Record of the Year, a feat that only U2 has been able to match. The second of those awards was for this song, and it was well-deserved.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The ghostly backup singers. Not sure if they recorded the vocals in a cave, or if they just put loads of reverb on it after the fact, but we’ve got the world’s most phantom-esque backup singers here, perfect for a song about unrequited love.

2. The bass. It took a few listens for me to notice, but at several moments in the song, the bassist is almost plucking the strings like you would on a normal guitar, playing chords rather than a single note at a time. Give a listen at the end of each chorus, and during the song’s final minute.

3. The bridge at 3:22. This was one of the highlights of the Fugees’ cover; I remember being at parties where conversations would stop at this point in the song while everyone joined forces in a massive singalong. Lauryn Hill definitely brought some flair to it, but I really like Flack’s more laid-back approach, especially when she hangs on to that note at 3:39.

Recommended listening activity:

Humming just quietly enough so that you’re the only one who notices.