February 14, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “I’m Your Man” By Laurie Stone Leonard Cohen, 2008. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. The other night I streamed Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, a documentary by Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine. In most of the footage, we see a Leonard who’s reflective and doubting. As I watched his Jewish man’s face age and his dark hair turn gray, I wondered what I could learn from him about drawing no conclusions. That might be the motto of his life and music—draw no conclusions. It’s a sexy, freewheeling stance. I’d like it to be the motto of my life, except I draw conclusions all the time. They happen to be wrong, which saves me. I always wondered what women wanted from Leonard. I think they wanted what they thought the songs were about. In the songs, a man is thinking about how to get the woman, and he thinks he can get her by figuring out what she wants. Leonard is imagining what it would be like to be a woman with a man coming on to her. Read More
February 14, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Being in Love” By Robert Rubsam Jason Molina. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. I am not a terribly romantic person. An ex once described me as “stable,” which is hardly the most erotic quality. It’s not that I’m unfeeling, per se. I just prefer to keep these particular feelings at a slight remove, a step or two apart. So in those rare periods when love enters my life, the results are disastrous, consuming every private moment of my day. Even something as simple as a text message can make my body feel like it’s falling apart. Yet what other agony gives so much pleasure? For “being in love,” as Jason Molina sings on his song of the same name, which he put out under the moniker Songs: Ohia, “means you are completely broken.” When he sings of breaking, it is as the prelude to being remade. “And for the first time,” he croons with delight, “it is working.” Molina, who died ten years ago, makes this statement of ultraromance sound like a dirge, all creaky organ and quaking drum machine with a single electric guitar keening softly overhead. The song exults even as it prepares to mourn. For as he notes, this passion—all-consuming, overwhelming—can burn through the fuel that fires it. I think back to Gillian Rose’s description of desire as something monstrous, driving the lover onward, onward, until they burn out or their beloved withdraws. It can be a pitiless sensation, love, especially love unreturned, love held in suspension. “There is no democracy in any love relation,” Rose writes in Love’s Work, “only mercy.” And there is no guarantee. Read More
February 13, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Someone Great” By Daniel Poppick LCD Soundsytem in Chicago, 2017. Wikimedia Commons, Licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Out of nowhere, like an ambulance approaching from a great distance or a bedside alarm boring a hole through your sleep, a sound fades in, so subtle and liquid that at first you might mistake it for your own thought—a mid-tempo drone. The first time I heard it, at a sweaty dance party in a cramped room at the tail end of college, I wondered for a moment if this sound would last the entire song. Then the drum kicks in, heavy on the backbeat, a steady thump paired with an agitated tapping that skitters ahead of and behind itself, as if that initial sound were an object of worship to be chased but not quite approached. That sound, gathering momentum, amounts to a test—how far can a collection of tones speed up, fall back, pitch rising and falling, and still remain whole and anchored to their original pulse? How far can a series of relations be stretched before they break? When James Murphy’s baritone finally enters, glockenspiel chimes cling to his every syllable: “I wish that we could talk about it / But there, that’s the problem.” “Someone Great” sounds very much like an elegy for a lost relationship, and in a sense that’s what it is. But it might be more accurate to say it’s an elegy for a way of relating. The album it appears on, Sound of Silver, is dedicated to the memory of Dr. George Kamen—Murphy’s longtime therapist, and an innovative practitioner of group therapy. Kamen died in 2006, the year before the album’s release. Narrating the feeling of a dreaded, ill-timed phone call, Murphy sings, “To tell the truth I saw it coming / The way you were breathing / But nothing can prepare you for it / The voice on the other end.” The way the synth works, slinky and mournful, you could be forgiven for thinking of it as a love song. Read More
February 10, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Water Sign” By Addie E. Citchens Mosaic in Maltezana. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away. Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.
February 9, 2023 On Music Love Songs: “Mississippi” By Sophie Haigney Bob Dylan. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 2.0. This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. Someone once accused me of being unrealistic about love’s aftermath. This was in the middle of an interminable argument, one in a long series of interminable arguments. I am not really someone prone to interminable arguments, which probably should have told me something about this person and myself sooner than it did, but at the time I was experiencing a new experience and not every aspect of it was entirely unpleasant. What he said was something like this: “You think there are never any consequences! You think you can go around hurting people, and that everyone you hurt will still want to be in the same room as you, having a drink!” I thought about this for a second. It wasn’t true but it wasn’t not true either. Then I said something stupid, which was, “Do you know the Bob Dylan song ‘Mississippi’?” Is “Mississippi” a love song? Yes and no. I think it is among the most romantic songs ever written and also among the most ambiguous, which are not disconnected qualities. It is not even clearly about a romantic relationship—some people hear it as a sociopolitical song about the state of America, which isn’t wrong. It might be about a guy who has literally stayed in Mississippi a day too long. Yet it contains, I think, every important kernel of wisdom about love and the loss of it; it hits every note that matters. Is that too much to believe about a single song? “Mississippi”—and I am talking about the Love and Theft version, the heart likes what it likes—is about the love that outlasts love. I think often of the line: “I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” And I think, Yes, that’s how I feel! This is true! Read More
January 26, 2023 On Music On the Bus with Pavement: Tour Diary By Mina Tavakoli Pavement. Photograph by Marcus Roth, Courtesy of Matador Records. One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder. A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” Read More