In My Family

Not enough individual Sparks songs on the net. Nevermind, here’s a whole album. Which you probably already own on the original vinyl, but if you don’t, you’re welcome. As you can easily guess from the image, Sparks have never been about pleasing the lowest common denominator. They’re kind of an acquired taste, most appealing to fans of camp, satire and musical parody. They’re simply too sophisticated and weird for common audiences.

In Every Dream Home A Heartache

The only convincing love story of our time. Or was that Lolita? At least Dolores Haze was alive and breathing, and that’s passe now. Indeed, the most convincing love story of our century must needs be with something inflatable, deluxe and disposable. Bryan Ferry was, in 1973, prescient about the unbearable loneliness and ennui of millenial living. So he was a bit off on the technology; he was still thinking of inflatable dolls in the literal sense, the digital inflation of our fantasies not having come to be yet. Still, old fashioned plastic or new fangled digital, he’s captured the soul of modern man, all alone in his spotless environment with nothing to interact with but his own breath. Could we all be any sadder, isolated and immobile with our shiny toys and 3D Evil Monster Porn? Or does this nationwide state of existential boredom even exist? I don’t think it really does, but it’s one of our talking points as a culture. Most of us can still – despite spending too much time alone watching unnaturally inflated women do unspeakable things – interact with one another and even experience (and share!) basic emotions. It’s vaguely romantic, I suppose, to imagine yourself as the only living being surrounded by others so hopelessly disengaged they can only invest themselves in lifeless shiny objects. You can both feel sorry for such characters and envy them – they have their dream homes and everything in the world but their souls are empty. It’s not exactly a new theme either. Wasn’t pretty rich people’s ennui what Gatsby was all about? (Seriously, tell me if it was, I’ve never read it.) What’s new is how, the culture vultures cry, we are all disappearing into a vortex of virtual ‘reality’ in which solipsism and masturbation have replaced all desire or ability for human interaction. That’s just silly of course. Like I said, most of us young moderns have the rational thinking skills to make a distinction between real and not-real life, and are comfortable taking our pleasures in both worlds. The idea of modern youth quietly going insane alone with an iPad is just the most recent iteration of out-of-it older people freaking out about how the younger generation is all going to hell because women’s ankles! novels! automobiles! the waltz! not wearing a hat in public! flappers! rock and roll! women voters! men with long hair! contraception! drugs! free love! gay marriage! the internet! and all the other things that everyone thought would lay society low but didn’t. So no, we haven’t all collectively taken leave of reality just yet. But that’s not to say we’re not without our slivers of loneliness, disengagement and ennui. There’s always some sense of hopeless romantic sorrow in the story of one man and his inflatable doll, because he’s pathetic and yet we can relate to him, because he reflects our own pathetic little obsessions, and if he happens to look like Bryan Ferry then it’s romantically pathetic and kinky hot.

In Dark Trees

I often dream of what movie would have all Brian Eno compositions as the soundtrack, and how great it would be if whatever the movie was could fit perfectly the music with the images. Does such a movie exist? There are movies with Brian Eno music in them, sometimes even a lot of it, and sometimes they’re even good movies. I even think there’s one where all the music is Eno and it might be a very atmospheric documentary about floating down some endless river. But none of that is what I imagine of course. Then I get it; I don’t need to imagine a movie because this music is the soundtrack of my life.

Immigrant Song

Led Zeppelin wasn’t talking about any actual immigrants. They were, as the British are wont to do, appropriating a foreign culture, in this case Norse mythology. It’s badassness revealed, upon closer inspection, as nerdery. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were, of course, two of rockdom’s greatest nerds. They thought ancient mythology was just the coolest and, through the powers of their own cool, made everyone else believe it too. Who, upon hearing this, doesn’t immediately visualize the sheer awesomeness of an invading horde of vaguely Vikinglike supernatural warriors with guitars? Today we prize our pop stars for their glazed, mouth-breathing ‘fresh off the assembly line’ demeanor, and it’s kind of shocking and saddening to realize that back in the day the global rock gods were book-hoarding mega-brains like Page and Plant or Jim Morrison. OMG, sexy and intelligent rock stars? With, like, their very own personalities and things to say and ideas they cared passionately about. Le sigh. That’s totally not how I aimed to write this song up. I was gonna go all fangirl and gushy about how toweringly stupendous Led Zeppelin used to be. But I got all caught up on the used to be. Because there’s no more Led Zeppelin, and although Page and Plant do still exist and even tolerate each other, they will never be the same Led Zeppelin they used to, and there’s just nothing to compare it to. And that’s depressing as all fuck. Sorry.

Imagine

There hasn’t been much time for writing in the past couple of days. Luckily, this song needs no introduction.

“Imagine”

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

 

Il Volto Dello Vita

You may not remember but I’ve had this song on here before, in a slightly different form. It’s been through many forms in many years; from English to Italian and back again. I originally posted it as The Days of Pearly Spencer, as done by Marc Almond. That was the version I’d always known, but this here is Caterina Caselli and her version predates Almond’s by decades. I don’t understand a lick of Italian, but I’m told that here, as in the original English verses by David McWilliams, as in Almond’s version, the song is about the travails of a homeless man and how crappy life can be. Hence the actual translation of the title – The Face of Life. All of which things I wrote about before, but that was two and half years ago, and I believe it bears repeating. And after all, it can’t hurt to repost a song this good. I’ve never heard any other iterations, but out of the two I know, I think Caterina’s is best. Her voice is simply amazing, and she’s not playing it campy (though the video might be, slightly.)

If You Want to Sing Out

I had a lot of thoughts about the excellent symbiosis of Cat Stevens and Harold & Maude, and just how much that was a match made in heaven. I was thinking about it so hard that I couldn’t wait until this song came up on the playlist so I went ahead and wrote than essay and posted it with a different song. Really jumped the gun on that one. No regrets or anything. It was a decent enough piece of writing and I still agree with myself. But I should have waited, because this songs is THE Harold & Maude song. Not just in the literal sense that it written specifically for the film and wasn’t culled from an album or destined to be a single. It’s that when Cat Stevens wrote it, he just nailed the whole movie down in just a few lines.

If You See Her, Say Hello

From the album that gave you the bile of Idiot Wind comes a very different ode to a woman who’s gone gone. In disclaimer, according to the Dylan himself, Blood on the Tracks was in no way influenced by the little fact that he was in the middle of getting divorced when it was written. We believe you, Bob. All those breakup songs just wafted in on the breeze, then. If you’re gonna be the subject of some poet’s divorce album, this tone of mournful resignation is the preferable way to go. At least he knows he’s at fault. Meditative songs like this one do shed more light on the human condition – and the artist’s condition – than spiteful angry ones.

If you see her, say hello, she might be in Tangier
She left here last early Spring, is livin’ there, I hear
Say for me that I’m all right though things get kind of slow
She might think that I’ve forgotten her, don’t tell her it isn’t so

We had a falling-out, like lovers often will
And to think of how she left that night, it still brings me a chill
And though our separation, it pierced me to the heart
She still lives inside of me, we’ve never been apart

If you get close to her, kiss her once for me
I always have respected her for busting out and gettin’ free
Oh, whatever makes her happy, I won’t stand in the way
Though the bitter taste still lingers on from the night I tried to make her stay

I see a lot of people as I make the rounds
And I hear her name here and there as I go from town to town
And I’ve never gotten used to it, I’ve just learned to turn it off
Either I’m too sensitive or else I’m gettin’ soft

Sundown, yellow moon, I replay the past
I know every scene by heart, they all went by so fast
If she’s passin’ back this way, I’m not that hard to find
Tell her she can look me up if she’s got the time

Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/if-you-see-her-say-hello#ixzz2S9987n31

If There Is Something

All I can say is, if you haven’t been educated about Roxy Music, I feel sorry for you and if you don’t get it, you probably don’t deserve to. I used to feel a need to make people understand, not just this but everything, me in general. Then I realized that either they do or they don’t and if they don’t there’s nothing I can do for it. I’ve also learned that loving something – whatever thing it is – is terribly lonely because nobody hears or sees things the same way and the way that thing makes me feel can’t be communicated. Even the people who share my tastes with amazing 95% overlap still hear and see and understand things their own way. Which is why you just have to accept that your relationship with your music is essentially a private matter for you to enjoy and not bore other people with. I’ve spoken before about my conviction that the act of listening to music is a communication between yourself and the artist, in which they feed their vision directly into your soul, making for a one directional and lopsided but no less real for it relationship. That’s not a way of looking at it that I’ve heard from anyone but myself, but I suspect I’m not the only one who feels that way, or who’s found that their relations with, say, Bryan Ferry are more enriching than with most of the people who actually exist in real life and we interact with outside of our heads. Bryan Ferry has been a better friend than pretty much most of the people I’ve met, and certainly more important to me than nine out of ten of the men I’ve slept with. And I don’t think that’s in any way abnormal or unhealthy. I think everyone has that place in their heart for role models and imaginary friends, although a lot of people don’t talk about it in quite this way. I also suspect that for many people that special spot is filled with Jesus. If you think about it, who is Jesus but your imaginary rock star idol, and what are rock stars but re-made and re-modeled substitute Christ figures?

If It Takes All Night

“Oh here it comes, that old ennui, I hope it won’t stay long”

Every line a classic! I come back to Roxy Music again and again anyway, but this one in particular just always hits the spot and cheers me up. Because who couldn’t relate to it? It’s all about how sometimes life is so relentlessly glamorous and exciting you just can’t stand it anymore. Come on, we’ve all been there, right? All joking aside, it is a serious topic and yes, I can relate to it. It’s one of Bryan Ferry’s greatest themes, how the glamour life can leave you empty inside. We don’t all lead glamour lives all the time, but most of us do find that underneath the superficial things like champagne, glitter and neon lights – all the tempting pretty symbols of nightlife that we flock to – there’s still that universal human desire to connect somehow, with someone. Decadence is lonely, and that’s precisely what makes it romantic.