Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Undercover

Two tangentially-related covers that I like better than the originals

Look, I get why people like “These Days” by Nico. It’s a lovely song, and her delivery brings an unmistakable quality of earnest regret and sadness to it. But it’s just not for me.

That’s why I’m glad that St Vincent did a cover of it. It is, undoubtedly, St Vincent doing Nico doing Jackson Browne, but I think the polish is what makes me like it — all of the beauty of the song, if not quite the same emotional weight.

The one time I saw St Vincent in concert, she performed “These Days,” but it didn’t land like she’d probably hoped since the crowd in San Francisco wouldn’t shut up and pay attention.

That crowd probably would’ve had a better time at a Me First and the Gimme Gimmes show, since they’re at the other end of the spectrum. A huge part of their whole schtick is taking heartfelt, emotional songs and making them raucous and fun. My favorite is “Danny’s Song.”

I really appreciate that video, filmed at The Mint, because it reminds me how much I don’t miss San Francisco.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Houses by the Sea

Two tangentially-related songs about how much better life is when you’ve got beachfront property

This week’s two-fer is in honor of the Dirty Projectors concert I went to over the weekend.

One lovely and calming song from 5 EPs is “On the Breeze”, a perfect melody that the band kind of treats as a sketch, giving it just enough time to vibe with before fading into memory. The problem with a band this talented is that I listen to their other songs on repeat, leaving wonderful bits like this neglected.

Something I definitely haven’t neglected is The Shepherd’s Dog by Iron & Wine. It’s one of my all-time favorite albums, and listening to it feels a little like slipping in and out of a dream that’s haunting but still relaxing somehow. That might be because I most often listen to it while I’m on a plane, nodding off while a bearded man whisper-sings into my ear. And also listening to The Shepherd’s Dog.

It’s hard to pick my favorite song from the album, because it’s near perfect. But one of my favorites is “House By The Sea,” which is fortunate, because it’s thematically consistent.

Song of the Earth

Seeing Dirty Projectors with the LA Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall

I’ve got a list of must-see attractions in Los Angeles, and I’ve been slowly ticking them off since we moved. I should be able to see everything on the list at some point within the next 30 years or so.1For contrast: I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 25 years, and I’m a fan of Vertigo, but I still to this day have never visited the Legion of Honor. One of those was seeing the LA Philharmonic perform at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. So I was happily surprised last year to see that Dirty Projectors, one of my “new”2New in that I first discovered them within the last few years favorite bands, would be doing a performance with the orchestra in March.

The performance was the US debut of Song of the Earth, which was described as “…a song cycle for orchestra and voices written by Dirty Projectors leader David Longstreth. A kaleidoscopic work that takes inspiration from Gustav Mahler’s 1908 piece Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth) as much as Brian Wilson’s pocket symphonies, Song of the Earth explores the cyclical character of life and death, nature, and the transience of all things.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I definitely didn’t expect to love all of it. While there are a dozen or so songs by Dirty Projectors that I absolutely love, I have to admit that I rarely listen through the entire album, and there are still dozens of songs that I have yet to even hear. My quick-and-shallow take on David Longstreth — with the obvious acknowledgement that the band isn’t a solo act, and several of their songs are collaborations — is that he’s “an easily-bored genius;” he’s entirely capable of writing catchy and melodic alt-rock or alt-pop with a memorable hook, but he has little interest in leaving it at that. Most of their songs have some weird twist to them, like sudden changes in rhythm, voices that shift from harmony to discord and back, overlapping time signatures, or layers of percussion or unexpected sound effects. A blurb on Apple Music accurately described it as “dense.” I expected that even if I didn’t love all of it, it would at the very least be interesting.

Continue reading “Song of the Earth”
  • 1
    For contrast: I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for about 25 years, and I’m a fan of Vertigo, but I still to this day have never visited the Legion of Honor.
  • 2
    New in that I first discovered them within the last few years

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Vampire Weeknd

Two tangentially-related tunes to prove that I do sometimes listen to music made within the last decade

When I was younger, I imagined that at some point in my 40s or 50s, a switch would flip, and I’d suddenly find myself too old to listen to any new music. I’d turn into a cartoonish version of the elderly, complaining about all the profanity and the screeching and the caterwauling and how the youths didn’t appreciate the good, mellow, old-fashioned music I listened to, like the Pixies.

Turns out my prediction was half right. As I’ve settled into middle age, I do almost always retreat to the safety of my turn-of-the-millennium college radio music. But the reason isn’t that contemporary stuff is too intense for me, but that it’s so boring. There’s so rarely any hook to it; it feels like instead of getting more daring or experimental, it’s mostly just over-produced and predictable.

At our house in Oakland, there were frequently some teenagers who’d park their car nearby and blast their music while they were doing whatever teenagers do — probably involving drugs and premarital sex! — and I was often right on the verge of being the stereotypical geriatric white man storming out of the house, demanding that they turn it down. But I’d be yelling, “Turn that racket down! It’s too vacuous!” I’m in the enviable position of having virtually every new song available to me on demand whenever I want, and I’m most often saying, “Nah, I’m good.”

But I do often make an effort! Sometimes it pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t.

I think Olivia Rodrigo is the real deal, for instance. It’s very much pop music, accessible enough for superstardom and Apple tie-ins. But on top of the hook required for a pop hit, there’s such a great combination of influences and styles that it all feels really interesting.

My favorite by far is “Vampire.” The album version starts out as a breathy piano ballad, which could quickly turn into the kind of maudlin showcase for a pop star trying to show off their range as a Real Musician. But then it starts to throw in all kinds of stuff that give it depth, not just gloss. The end result feels like an extremely media-savvy artist who knows how to navigate an industry in the 2020s and get 93 million views on YouTube, but never at the expense of making it feel anything less than sincere. (And as it turns out, the stripped down piano ballad version is pretty good, too).

The Weeknd is more towards the other end of the scale for me. Most of his stuff is inoffensive, but there’s rarely any hook that I can get into. Apart from “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights,” I can’t really tell his songs apart from each other, and those I recognize only because they were played constantly.

But the other thing I didn’t predict back in my teens and twenties was what would be required to be a superstar in the 21st century. It can’t be just about the music; it has to be a full-on media blitz. And while there’s not a lot for me in The Weeknd’s music, I respect the hell out of what he does with the overall presentation.

Until Universal Hollywood Horror Nights made a house themed to his music, I had no idea that “Blinding Lights” was part of a whole horror-themed concept album, with a series of interconnected videos about fame, image, self-image, and the evils of Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Part of that is the video for “Too Late,” which has a pair of plastic surgery-obsessed women finding The Weeknd’s decapitated head in the middle of the road and then taking it home to have sex with it. (And not to tell them their business, but completely unnecessarily murdering a stripper to attach to Mr Weeknd’s head. Even though the things they were doing didn’t even require him to have a body. So wasteful).

The music doesn’t really grab me, but that video was one of the few things in modern pop music that was genuinely able to shock middle-aged me. Are they even allowed to show that kind of thing?!

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Rock and Roll Hall of Presidents

Two tangentially-related tunes for Presidents Day

Look: there are a lot of Tuesdays in a year. They can’t all be winners.

This Monday was Presidents Day in the United States, a great reminder to Americans of how it’s an office of importance that should theoretically still be respectable. And how the whole idea of “anyone could grow up to be President of the United States” is supposed to be wholesome and aspirational, not an ominous warning of a terrible design flaw.

First this week is “Ana Ng” from the They Might Be Giants album Lincoln. It’s always unsettling watching old TMBG videos, because 1988 John Flansburgh looks eerily like 1988 me. (Or maybe vice versa).

I can’t choose a favorite song off of Lincoln, but it’s probably a toss-up between “Ana Ng” and “Mr. Me.” An edited version of the latter was used as the closing theme music for an animated cartoon block on a local station in Atlanta, so I kind of just assumed it came from somewhere in Cartoonland. It was a surprise to hear it years later, popping up out of nowhere on a CD I’d bought after getting really into Flood. But it tracks, seeing as how they’ve always been at least a little bit cartoon-adjacent, making weird music for nerds and the children of nerds.

Here’s a fun fact: did you know that Martha Wash’s last name is actually Wash? I always assumed she’d shortened it from “Washington,” but no. So that’s why you’re saved from having “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” as the second song this week.

Instead, it’s “Concrete and Clay,” my favorite song from the soundtrack to Rushmore. Consider it an upgrade; that’s like Washington and three whole other presidents. It’s nice to remember how impressive Rushmore was when it first came out; it seemed to come out of nowhere, full of self-confidence and a surprising amount of sincerity. Now I’m getting nostalgic for the late 1990s.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: King Cake

Two tangentially-related tunes to let the good times roll

(King Cake photo by Caitlin Bensel for Southern Living)

Today is Fat Tuesday! As a protestant who’s to this day never once visited New Orleans, I can’t claim to be an expert, but I have got to respect any holiday that so prominently features religious desserts.

In honor of that, here’s a song by Elvis Presley, who’s The King to most, but never meant shit to me except as a karaoke song. I have to say I can do a pretty good rendition of “(You’re the) Devil In Disguise”. (That’s a painfully on-the-nose animated video that’s “official” or whatever, but of course the best animated video to that song is in Lilo and Stitch).

Tangentially related: I was a big fan of the band Cake back in the late 1990s, which is when it was most appropriate to be a big fan of the band Cake. I let my fandom lapse since then, but back when they hit it big with “The Distance,” I felt squarely in their target audience of hipsters and aspiring hipsters. I’ve never had a bucket hat, and I’ve only sporadically had a goatee, but I still thought each record was like finding a special surprise.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Old Man Atmospheric River

Two tangentially-related tunes for life in sunny Los Angeles

I almost forgot it was Tuesday, what with everything going on this week. At Spectre Collie HQ, I’ve been preoccupied with furniture and with VR headsets and, like everybody else in Los Angeles:

Rain, and lots of it. Revolver is my favorite Beatles album, and it’s only a modern convention that “Rain” is included on it, since we don’t really do singles in the 21st century. It fits, though. I honestly can’t say whether I like the song for its own merits, or just because I know that one of my best friends was named after it.

When you live in a desert, unusual amounts of rain mean one thing:

Twisting. No, wait: Floods. We’ve been relatively fortunate that for us, the storm’s been little more than a nuisance. I’ve been staying off the roads, though, since the last time a big rain storm hit, it was causing flooding all over the San Fernando Valley. It’s kind of surreal to be driving through (beautiful downtown) Burbank like everything’s normal, and suddenly finding yourself driving through foot-deep ponds in the middle of an intersection. That was enough to convince me to stay at home if possible.

It’s also surreal to see the LA River actually filled with water. I’d always assumed that calling it the “LA River,” was Los Angeles being sardonic or something, since it’s just an impossibly huge concrete canal going through the city and occasionally being used for film or music video shoots. Ignorant of LA history, I wasn’t aware that it’s an actual river, paved only because of catastrophic floods in the 1930s.

Anyway: Flood isn’t my favorite They Might Be Giants album (that’s Lincoln), and “Twisting” isn’t my favorite song from Flood (that’s “Minimum Wage”). But it’s been a while since I’ve heard it, and it’s a highlight, even if I don’t know anybody named after it.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Shut Up And (Watch Someone) Dance

Phoning it in this week, because I just like Margaret Qualley

I’m kind of phoning it in this week, because I’ve already mentioned tons of times how much I love the Kenzo World ad directed by Spike Jonze and starting Margaret Qualley.

The song is called “Mutant Brain” by Sam i and Ape Drums, if for some reason you want to hear it without that amazing choreography.

Qualley is phenomenal in it, and I instantly became a huge fan. Granted, it’s impossible for Spike Jonze to make a bad music video, but I think part of that is that he chooses the right people to work with. In particular: actors and musicians who are game for whatever wild idea he’s come up with, and will be willing to bring all their talents to it. Especially if, like Christopher Walken, they can dance.

I haven’t seen The Leftovers or Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, but I was pleasantly surprised to see Margaret Qualley show up in a rather small and weird part in Poor Things. It didn’t seem like it required someone at her level of career success, so I’m assuming that she just thought it was a weird, neat idea and wanted to be part of it. (And if that’s not the case, I’d rather not know otherwise).

She also stars in a recent video for the song “Tiny Moves” by Bleachers. I’ve got to admit I’m all but completely indifferent to the song, since Bleachers has always struck me as so inoffensive that there’s nothing I can latch onto. But it’s just nice to see someone so comfortable in front of a camera bringing that charisma, along with dance training and familiarity with a ton of different styles of choreography, to a love song. I like the story behind it, too: Qualley has said that she wanted to make it as a wedding gift for Jack Antonoff after they got married last year.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Les chansons dans ma tête

Two tangentially-related tunes for Tuesday, en francais

If you’re as prone to catching earworms as I am, I recommend avoiding the movies Death Proof and But I’m a Cheerleader, because they both contain “Chick Habit” by musician and animator April March. The last time I saw either of those movies was a year ago, and I still occasionally wake up with the song going through my head. Sometimes just thinking of or seeing a picture of Natasha Lyonne is enough to set it off.

It’s a faithful cover of “Laisse Tomber Les Filles”, and she’s recorded versions in both English and French. The original was made famous by France Gall, a French pop star with an only slightly less unbelievable pseudonym than April March.

Not as good as “Laisse Tomber Les Filles,” but no less tenacious, is “Poupée de cire, poupée de son”, another song written by Serge Gainsbourg, and the song with which she won Eurovision in 1965. You can read more about the song in your local library, or on Wikipedia, if you’re wondering about the translation, or just want to be reminded of how asinine Gainsbourg was.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Songs in Progress

Two tangentially-related tunes that are aware that they’re tunes

I’ve only seen 8 1/2 once, back around 1989, so I only remember two things about it: 1) My favorite moment had an annoying character suddenly getting hanged1Or dropped into a bottomless pit? I said I don’t remember much about it, and am too frustrated with Kanopy’s interface to try and find the scene again. with no comment from the other characters, and 2) It’s a surreal interpretation of Frederico Fellini’s struggles to make his ninth movie.

Frankly, I feel that that movie has been surpassed by the decades of movies that were inspired by it. But back in the late 1980s, just the idea that a movie was “allowed” to be so happily self-referential was like pure Chucknip.

And I also still love the idea of songs that are aware that they’re songs. “Simple Song” by the Shins doesn’t wallow in self-reflection, but it still does quite a lot with the premise. With just a couple of acknowledgements, it sets up the idea of looking back at a young love, struggling to find a way to encompass how significant the “small” moments turned out to be throughout his life.

The most extreme example is Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Your Song,” which is still such a wonderful way of expressing in song how you can be so full of love for someone that a song feels incapable of expressing it.

My favorite version of the song is still Ewan McGregor’s from Moulin Rouge, because it uses the self-reflection of the song — McGregor just narrates the entire first verse, as if he’s composing it on the spot — and then turns it into self-reflection for the movie.

Everything in Moulin Rouge up to that point had been broad, loud, chaotic, and so, so affected. I distinctly remember the urge to walk out of the theater, it was so relentlessly too much. At the start of the scene, Nicole Kidman is going completely over the top2In case it’s not obvious: deliberately over the top. Her performance hinges on the idea that she can never show anyone the “real” her, but just the affectations. — over-acting as an actress in a movie scene about an actress over-acting — about how stories feel perfect and powerful, because here, they are. Then McGregor practically unhinges his jaw like a python to let the song pour out, and she, along with the rest of Paris, is forced to stop and pay attention. It’s just such a wonderfully sincere and earnest expression of how difficult it is to be sincere and earnest.3And if you’re wondering whether watching that scene again, completely removed from its context, still made me tear up at my desk in the middle of the afternoon: I assure you that it did.

And my apologies to Carly Simon, who probably thought this post was going to be about her.

  • 1
    Or dropped into a bottomless pit? I said I don’t remember much about it, and am too frustrated with Kanopy’s interface to try and find the scene again.
  • 2
    In case it’s not obvious: deliberately over the top. Her performance hinges on the idea that she can never show anyone the “real” her, but just the affectations.
  • 3
    And if you’re wondering whether watching that scene again, completely removed from its context, still made me tear up at my desk in the middle of the afternoon: I assure you that it did.

Tuesday Tune Two-Fer: Strings Attached

Using the theme of string sections in popular music as an excuse to listen to two of my favorite songs ever

Listening to “I Am The Walrus” last week, and praising George Martin’s production in particular, reminded me that it’s been a while since I’ve heard a popular musician really commit to the string section beyond a few samples here and there.

Luckily, two of my favorite songs by two of my favorite musicians are full-to-bursting with string arrangements.

I love Neko Case, both for being funny as hell, and for really understanding the appeal of a creepy murder ballad. And of course, for her amazing voice. It’s so powerful that listening to one of her records from start to finish can sometimes leave me like I’ve been physically assaulted. She should do a team-up with Black Bolt. It’s so powerful that it makes you forget how brilliant she can be with the lyrics.

It almost seems like she had to bring in the big guns with “Dirty Knife” because a full orchestra is the only thing that could compete with her voice. You can hear the madness punching its way in, interrupting her wistful and lilting voice with a compulsive repetition that’s actually frightening.

Björk is another artist who could overpower anything other than a full orchestra, and “Isobel,” my favorite song from my favorite of her albums, uses it to full effect. It doesn’t feel like an unnecessary flourish. It’s more like the music that’s been driven by the electronic beat that seems to carry throughout Post is finally allowed to break free and soar. It felt timeless, both familiar and cinematic and still like nothing I’d ever heard before.

Tuesday Tune Twenty Twenty-foursome: What I Am

FOUR tangentially-related tunes on the theme of self-actualization for the New Year

I’m not aware of too many things, but I am aware that I missed posting a Tuesday Tune Two-Fer last week. I decided to take a break for Christmas, largely because Christmas songs are ubiquitous anyway, and there’s not much original I can say about any of them.1If you’re curious, I probably would’ve tried to find some way to pair “Put One Foot in Front of the Other” from Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town with “Santa Baby” by Eartha Kitt.

But that’s all in the past! I’m making up for the missed week by delivering four tunes this week! That’s double the songs for the same low price! And now it’s the New Year, which means it’s time to decide who or what you’re going to be in 2024.

You could go expansive, like in “New Year” by The Breeders. Granted, only somebody as cool as Kim Deal could claim to be the sun and the rain and the New Year, but this is more about being aspirational than achievable.

If you like the idea of being the sun and the air, but you want to manage expectations a bit, you could change it up like The Smiths with “How Soon is Now?” Just make sure you’ve got Johnny Marr backing up your self-aggrandizing, performative gloominess, so it’ll be a few decades before people realize your bullshit isn’t that funny anymore.

Or, if you want to wallow in your neuroses, but not quite as hard and definitely not as gothic, then you could take a cue from Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel and declare “I Am a Rock.” Pros: A rock feels no pain, and an island never cries. Cons: It’s a little on the nose.

Of course, you could just skip the whole business and just spend the year spewing out nonsense, as in “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles. Again, just be sure that you pair yourself with a brilliant producer, and you’ll be praised as an enigmatic genius.

As for me, I think LA’s fine, the sun shines most of the time, and the feeling is laid back.2Update: The palm trees still grow, but the rents are no longer low. For 2024, I aspire just to be a content, middle-aged man.