Music vs Lyrics

In episode 10 of our podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, Christopher Grey and I discuss music and lyrics, and whether one is more important when falling in love with a composition.  I concluded that with some exceptions, music is most important to me, and that as long as a lyric isn’t overtly lame (“Hey baby let’s go out tonight, Hey baby, I’m feeling alright”) a good melody will carry the tune to the finish line for me.  But a lyric that’s embarrassingly bad will often ruin an otherwise good song.

A few weeks ago, John McWhorter of the New York Times reviewed an upcoming book called Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers and Other Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan, and concluded that the book “is a reminder that one can be massively fulfilled by language one doesn’t fully comprehend.”  I love this summation because it perfectly captures my sentiment for a band like Yes, whose lyrics are complete nonsense to me, but that still manage to be profoundly evocative.

Consider a song most everyone knows: “Roundabout.”  The lyric of the chorus is:

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky
And they stand there

Nothing crazy there. Kind of poetic, maybe.  But nothing overtly comprehensible.  Now imagine if singer Jon Anderson had instead leaned on rock and roll’s worst lyrical instincts and composed the following over the same melody:

I’ve got to see you, babe
You know you’re all I crave
In the evening

Not exactly what I’m looking for in a song! And surely “Roundabout” wouldn’t be a classic if its lyrics were such garbage. It’s the same reason why a band like The Babys are hard for me to listen to. An otherwise competent song like “Every Time I Think of You” isn’t helped when John Waite sings:

People say a love like ours will surely pass
But I know a love like ours will last and last

Ugh, who farted, right? And the Babys actually outsourced this tune, written by Jack Conrad and Ray Kennedy. You’d think someone could have come up with a better lyric. Terrible.

But then you’ll get words that are kind of lame but are backed up by such a terrific groove, that it hardly matters what’s being said. I think of a song like “New Sensation” by INXS.  I dig this song despite its lyrics:

Live, baby, live
Now that the day is over
I got a new sensation
Mm, perfect moments
That's so impossible to refuse

Somehow, this works for me. I can’t explain it, and I certainly can’t defend it. But I really like the song.

Of course, the best result is the perfect marriage of music and lyrics, an alchemy that’s rarely achieved, but when it happens it can move me to my core, and it’s why I admire artists like Jackson Brown, Randy Newman, Bruce Springsteen, Rickie Lee Jones, Paul Simon, etc. When Jones sings “And I can hear him
In every footstep's passing sigh/He goes crazy these nights/Watching heartbeats go by” or when Springsteen sings “There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away/They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets”…well, damn. I’m all in. Tears, every time.

For my own compositions, just as I try to avoid musical clichés, I try to avoid pedestrian lyrics. Occasionally, I hit the mark, combining melody, harmony, groove and words that convey an emotion together that could never be achieved by their separate parts.

The beauty of song.

Back to Baseball

It’s Tuesday morning, and as I write this a replay of last night’s Brewers game is streaming behind me, a comforting companion to my morning. Like Bob Uecker himself – who’s announced Brewers games on the radio since I was three years old – my life’s accompaniment has always been baseball.

Except last year.

In a bit of bravado, on the heels of baseball’s moronic lockout that delayed the start to last season, I decided a year ago that I was done with baseball. And I was. After announcing in February, “Screw ‘em. I’m done,” I didn’t watch any baseball on TV except for a few game recaps, and I only attended five innings in person (at a White Sox game to hang out with my daughter and her partner).

This was a big change for me, and as I summarized last October, I didn’t really miss it. I found other things to do with my time, and I got lucky that the Brewers didn’t finish the season strong, sparing me the agony of having to watch my team miss the playoffs for the first time since 2017.  But I recognized that my baseball boycott might not continue.

A new season has started, and it only took four games for me to dive back in, purchasing the MLBTV package and following every Brewers game since in some form or another (a game recap, highlights, live or on-demand).

What led to this turnabout? Two things that I can think of:

1)      Major League Baseball, finally – FINALLY – enacted rule changes meant to speed up the game, something that should have been done a decade ago. It was a relief to check out box scores for the first few days of the season and see game times of 2:21, 2:32 and 2:57 (the latter for a high-scoring 9-5 game). This change was sorely needed. After enduring over a decade of watching showboating Ryan Braun step out of the batters box after each and every pitch to mess with his batting gloves, viewers are now treated to a streamlined game that transpires happily, neither rushed nor sluggish.

2)      Reviewing the box scores for those first four games was jolting for me because I recognized three names in the starting line-up. THREE! And I’d only been away for a year! I suddenly felt oddly disconnected from my hometown, no longer a native to Milwaukee, but an outsider. 

It was a combination of these factors, and the fact that the Brewers got off to a hot start, with three young rookies making an impact, that led me to spend $150 for MLBTV, eschewing the monthly bill that I could have opted for and cancelled at any time.  Nope, was all-in.

Two nights ago, I watched a spectacular 1-0 Brewers victory against the Padres, the only run being scored from a combination of a bunt single, a balk, a stolen base and a sacrifice fly in the second inning.  That was it for the night, and I sat on the edge of my seat as Wade Miley and Yu Darvish traded zeros through the seventh inning, and my heart raced as Brewers closer Devin Williams loaded the bases in the ninth and took Trent Grisham to a 3-2 count before obtaining a game-ending strikeout.

Baseball is back!

The Secret Life of Groceries: a book review

On a whim I picked up Benjamin Lorr’s investigative journalism book, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket, and walked away with a newfound respect for the people who allow us the modern miracle (dark as it may be) of having almost unlimited food options in every grocery store in the western world. We forget that the grocery store as we know it is a fairly new invention, coming into being last century and used as propaganda to bolster support for capitalism. That food is as inexpensive and as abundant as it is, is indeed a miracle when considering the course of human history.

But oh, the price we pay for such convenience and abundance. Lorr doesn’t resort to preachiness, pointing an accusatory finger at greedy Americans. In fact, he willfully acknowledges all the benefits of today’s grocery stores, while highlighting many of the downsides of the grocery industry, particularly as it pertains to the challenging lifestyles of many of the people who devote their careers to meeting consumer demands. Lorr spends significant time with the people who make it all possible: the founder of Trader Joe’s (Joe Coulombe), a Whole Foods employee manning the seafood counter, a female long-haul trucker, an entrepreneur trying to get a new condiment onto grocery store shelves, a man who’s spent years on a shrimping boat. Lorr shines a light on the people we take for granted, and does so in a caring, meaningful way. Hearing directly from his subjects as they share stories about their often-difficult lives, I felt not only sympathy for them, but gratitude that they make my comfortable life possible.

Surprisingly, The Secret Life of Groceries isn’t a call to action in the obvious sense. Lorr doesn’t end the book with “five things American consumers should be doing to make the world a better place.” He actually does the opposite, offering little more than a shoulder shrug at our current plight, conceding that there is virtually nothing consumers can do in their purchasing habits to change the system. Rather, “any solution will have to come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside.”

What about buying organically certified foods? Or products produced from cage-free chickens? Or going vegan? Of this, Lorr writes that seals and certifications “promise us that moments of individual action can create a type of change that in reality only institutional forces like labor laws, unions, and trade deals can begin to approach. They allow us to purchase our ideals from others without ever having to enact them on our own.”

Perhaps not the message readers would like to hear, but also kind of refreshing. It’s not going to stop me from buying 100% recycled paper or using canvas bags, but I get it: my actions aren’t solving the problem; they’re making me feel good. Lorr concludes, “…we have got the food system we deserve. The adage is all wrong: it’s not that we are what we eat, it’s that we eat the way we are.”

If for no other reason than to get a better understanding of all that’s involved in the global industrial food complex, I highly recommend this book.

When Musicians Don't Want You To Like Their Songs

Last week on the podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, my co-host and I praised a song by Mike Viola called “She’s the One” from his very first EP back in 1985. Viola has had an impressive career as a songwriter and producer, but he doesn’t think much of that early release. He caught wind of our episode and wrote a response about his “crappy EP” and how he threw away about fifty copies of it years ago.

And look, I can totally get how he might not be proud of that first effort anymore. 1985 is a long time ago, and he may not even recognize the person he was at the time and probably thinks the songs pale in comparison to what he’s written since. Fair enough. Hell, I’ve done thirteen albums over the past 31 years, and I don’t believe my 1992 album is all that good. I get it.

But I have been approached after a show I’ve performed in and been told how good my keyboard playing was, and even when I don’t agree with that person’s comment – even if I think I kind of flubbed up my performance – my response is always the same: “Thanks for much. I’m glad you enjoyed the show.” It would be foolish and rude of me to say, “This concert was for shit and I played like crap.”

Viola could have just responded, “Wow, that was a long time ago and I hardly remember the song, but I’m glad you dig it,” but he instead basically told us that we were idiots for liking his song. To which I say, “Hey, you’re the one who wrote it. Don’t blame us.”

A similar thing happened to an entire audience back in 2002. Anyone who was in attendance to see Elvis Costello at the Chicago Theatre that year will remember that he was in a surly mood that evening. After a couple of songs, he snarled at the audience and announced, “Anyone who wants to hear ‘Veronica’ can fuck off right now.”

Few artists resort to such buffoonery, but many accidentally achieve the same results in a more subtle way by dismissing a song or an album. Paul McCartney has dismissed the Wings album Back to the Egg (which is silly, because the album rules), Phil Collins has dismissed the Genesis album …And Then There Were Three (also good), and Rush has dismissed the song ”Tai Shan” explicitly, and the album Presto a little less explicitly. And I get it: those may be songs or works that the artists no longer identify with. But they have fans who identify with those works, and when a musicians says – in effect – that a song is crap, it’s a dig at any fan who happens to like it.

I think artists everywhere should be careful about how they approach their past efforts and recognize the love that fans send their way. Look back on missteps not with regret but with mild amusement, and for goodness sakes, when someone praises you for a composition you wrote, just say “thank you” and move on.

The Best Picture Nominees

Ten films are up for best picture this Sunday at the 95th Academy Awards, and for many years I’ve made an effort to see each nomination, though there have been a few exceptions. I didn’t see Black Panther in 2018, The Joker in 2019, and this year I’m not going to see All Quiet on the Western Front or Avatar: The Way of Water, as I’ve heard the former is like watching the first brutal 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan for an unrelenting 147 minutes, and I feel like I’ve already seen Avatar, as it’s basically like the original from 2009, except with water (or so I’m told).

On the app Letterboxd I mark movies that reach me in a significant way – ones I’d either like to see again or that really moved me or excited me or made me think. Some years are duds: in 2021 only two films I saw rose to that level: The Worst Person in the World and King Richard. By contrast, 2022 was a very good year, with six of the 27 films I’ve watched to date (and I hope to see a few more soon) making the cut for me: The Fabelmans, TÁR, Triangle of Sadness, I Want You Back, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. 

Of these six, the last is my favorite movie of the year. Marcel blew me away. It was funny, touching, impressive looking, thought-provoking, surprising…it was everything I want in a movie. And funnily enough, Jenny Slate – the voice of Marcel – is in two of the other films I loved in 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once and I Want You Back, the latter a solid romcom on the same plain as two other good ones from recent years: Palm Springs and Long Shot. I would be happy watching any of those three films on a Saturday night.

There are people who love to hate on Steven Spielberg (yeah, Amy Nicholson, I’m talking to you), but I certainly don’t understand where it comes from, aside from maybe jealousy or a sense that Spielberg has gotten enough accolades and it’s time to make room for some others. While I get that sentiment, and I understand that people are upset that Jordan Peele’s Nope didn’t get the recognition it supposedly deserved (I haven’t seen it), The Fabelmans is an excellent movie. It also had what I consider to be among the worst previews I’ve ever seen, offering a series of out-of-context shlock that made the film seem like nothing more than a boy finding himself through his love of filmmaking. Nothing could be further from the truth. The film is about the destruction of a family. That’s its essence, and it tackles it beautifully and with much more heart and nuance than, say, Marriage Story, which I found to be laborious despite its wonderful performances (Scarlett Johansson deserved the Oscar for that one).

Everything, Everywhere All at Once was a great romp – creative, frantic, impressive, funny – except for the hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-message near the film’s climax. Aside from that, this was one of those exhilarating movie-going experiences that I was happy to see in a theater.

I’ve already blogged about TÁR, and I wrote, “…while I may not rush out to watch Todd Field’s TÁR a second time, I can’t stop thinking about it. And really, what more could you ask of a work of art?”  Well, since then I’ve decided that I do want to watch it again, along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Add it to the list!

As for Triangle of Sadness, it wasn’t perfect, but it was an entertaining commentary on social class, with a tad less subtlety than Bong Joon-Ho’s 2019 masterpiece, Parasite. Like, no subtlety at all with lots of bodily fluids! But still, it was a fun, suspenseful watch, and I marvel at how smartly Woody Harrelson has managed his career. Who would have thought when he made his Cheers debut in 1985?

Of the six films I loved in 2023, four were nominated for Best Picture, and one was nominated for Best Animated Feature. So which do I hope wins?

For Best Animated Feature, despite how much I love Marcel, it’s not as much an achievement in animation as it is in filmmaking, and I can’t deny the visual triumph of Pinocchio. I also unobjectively support Puss in Boots: The Last Wish since my daughter is listed in the credits!. It also happens to be a good movie. Any one of those three winning would be okay by me, but I wish Marcel had been nominated for Best Picture. It’s that good.

For Best Picture, my favorites are TÁR, The Fabelmans, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I believe the latter is amazing but moderately flawed, while the first two are just about perfect. Everything Everywhere… is going to win and that’s cool by me, but if I had to choose one I think I’d go with The Fabelmans.

Regardless of the outcomes, 2022 was a damn good year for movies, and I have yet to see Living, Aftersun, White noise, Armageddon Time, Causeway, She Said, Babylon and After Yang. Since winter and spring theatrical releases are historically subpar, I’ll have to spend the next few months catching up on last year’s releases. Here’s hoping 2023 eventually rises to the occasion.