Sunday, January 13, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #7 (Chris Malinchak, "So Good to Me")

Contentment is not among pop music's preferred topics. Ever since the agitation of rhythm-and-blues combined with the anguish of country-and-western and exploded into rock-and-roll, popular songs have thrived on the extremes of adolescent emotion: heartbreak, jealousy, ecstasy.

"You make me so lonely, baby, / I get so lonely, / I get so lonely I could die." "Maybellene, why can't you be true? / Why can't you be true? / You've started back doing the things you used to do." "It's such a feeling that my love / - I can't hide! I can't hide! I can't hide!"

While all of this Sturm und Drang is terrifically exciting, it begs the question: What comes afterward? What happens when you're no longer lonely, when Maybellene cleans up her act and the two of you find yourselves chilling on the sofa, holding hands? Does pop music collapse under the pressure of your tranquility?

Chris Malinchak's "So Good to Me" seems to say no, it doesn't have to. Mellow yet giddy, matching Balearic synthesizers with some Marvin Gaye vocal snippets, this track is about the gratitude one feels for a sustained contentment. It finds glory in maturity. It is the sound of an endlessly re-listenable love.



"Every sky would be blue, / Long as you're lovin' me, / Lovin' me."

Monday, January 7, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #8 (Kacey Musgraves, "Merry Go 'Round")

There's a lot to like about this sigh of a country song: the push and pull of the backing arrangement; the elegantly elongated chord progression in the chorus ("where it stops, nobody knows"); the conversational yet tuneful vocal; the revisionist nursery rhyme that serves as an outro, anchoring what could have been a drifty tune; and above all, the understatement of the whole affair, the refusal to go big and cheesy, when going big and cheesy must have been terribly tempting.

But in "Merry Go 'Round," the debut single from Kacey Musgraves (who's too talented and pretty to remain obscure for long), the lyrics are the main attraction. Rather than paying obeisance to small-town mythology, as every Nashville newcomer seemingly must, Musgraves says stuff like, "And it don't matter if you don't believe, / Come Sunday morning, you best be there in the front row like you're supposed to." Yeah, it's not exactly a Sinclair Lewis-style polemic. But in mainstream country, you hardly ever hear skepticism toward God and community, much less from an ingenue.

Bracing as it is, "Merry Go 'Round" also tells a lived-in, empathetic story about a place and an ethos. Particularly moving is the chorus:
Mama's hooked on Mary Kay,
Brother's hooked on Mary Jane,
Daddy's hooked on Mary, two doors down.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
We get bored, so we get married,
And just like dust, we settle in this town.
On this broken merry go 'round
And 'round and 'round we go,
Where it stops, nobody knows.
All of this punning on "Mary," "married," and "merry" might seem facile at first. But it turns out to be more than cleverness; the shared phonemes represent a shared disease: a helpless, mechanical repetition. Mother, brother, father, and singer (sister?) are trapped on the same Mary/married/merry go 'round. And ever so delicately, the circles sketched by the piano and the banjo suggest the same thing.



"Ain't what you want, it's what you know, / Just happy in the shoes you're wearin', / Same checks we're always cashin' to buy a little more distraction."

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #9 (Solange, "Losing You")

A few years back, Solange Knowles, kid sister of Beyoncé, recorded one of the most underrated songs of the young millennium. Co-authored by soul specialist Cee-Lo Green, "Sandcastle Disco" coasts on a shuffling beat and a relaxed vocal, then punches the accelerator into an ecstatic, girl-group chorus: "Bay-b-b-b-bay-bay, don't blow me away!" It's pure Motown, a 21st-century answer to "You Can't Hurry Love."

With this year's "Losing You," Solange goes both more current and more mainstream, exploring the downtempo aesthetic preferred by many of today's R&B artists. The ambivalent lyric, alternating between entreaties ("Just treat me good baby and I'll give you the rest of me") and threats ("I'm not the one you should be making your enemy"), wouldn't seem out of place on a Drake track. And yet something of Solange's predilection for vintage party music remains in the song's jubilant, Family Stone-like beat.

Despair and self-assurance, brooding and boogying: it's this emotional and textural complexity that, in a year full of remarkable R&B singles (see: Usher's "Climax," Miguel's "Adorn," and my soon-to-be-revealed #2 song of 2012), sets "Losing You" apart.



"I don't know why I fight it, clearly we are through. / Tell me the truth boy, am I losing you for-eh-eh-ver?"

Thursday, January 3, 2013

Top 13 Songs of 2012: #10 (The Mountain Goats, "Harlem Roulette")

John Darnielle, a.k.a. The Mountain Goats, is often called a poet. While he deserves the compliment implied by that label, his talents have more in common with those of a short-story writer.

Consider "Harlem Roulette." Here we have a wisp of a narrative about Frankie Lymon, who died in 1968 of an overdose, just after recording a melancholy tune about "a little town / Where the stars shine bright / And the moon never drowns." Smartly, though, Darnielle never quite tells the story - never shows us Lymon shutting himself in his grandmother's bathroom and plunging a needle into his arm. Instead, Darnielle circles around the tragedy, touching on a few pungent, suggestive images. Engines beneath the city. A New York summer night. Armies in the distance.

As if trying and failing to grasp the meaning of his own song, Darnielle perseverates on an enigmatic declaration: "The loneliest people in the whole wide world / Are the ones you're never going to see again." Who's lonelier: the people observed, or the observer?

And then, in an unexpected middle eight, he flips to the present with shattering specificity: "Four hours north of Portland, a radio flips on, / And some no one from the future remembers that you're gone." Denis Johnson could hardly have done better.



"Every dream's a good dream, / Even awful dreams are good dreams, / If you're doing it right."