Internet’s back! Sorry for the delay, kids, but the ‘webs have been non-functioning at my apartment since sometime on Sunday. Luckily, I appear to be developing a raging case of insomnia and can now profit from their return. In addition to retarding the publishing of this post, the situation has also given me an unfortunate glimpse into what my life would really be without technology, namely: poorly prepared for the weather. One might think that I could just take a peek outside and dress accordingly but my apartment looks out onto a deceptively covered space between buildings that often gives the illusion that it is not raining. Thus, I don some kind of adorable shift dress and am greeted upon exiting the building with…a monsoon. Apple MacIntosh Weather-Forecasting Widget, I am glad to have you back. Also WordPress. And so, onwards with the countdown.
#25
The Thought of You – Jennifer O’Connor
Album: The Color & the Light
Year: 2005
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s a rare singer/songwriter track that has any lasting resonance for me. I prefer my sad songs over disco beats so it takes something very fresh or empathetic to keep me interested in acoustic guitar strumming. Usually, I’m just embarassed for the singer. But Jennifer O’Connor has whatever that something is – most likely it stems from her voice. O’Connor’s is half sweet rasp, half whispery twang and it pairs beautifully with the stripped down confessionalism of the lyrics and the meandering guitar. Like a sort of musical oasis, the song extracts clarity from the dismaying entanglement of love, uncertainty and fear. I read once that people who have experience what they perceive as a betrayal at the hands of a lover are more likely to report nightmares and skittish behavior, like jumping at loud noises and startling when someone enters a room suddenly. When O’Connor sings, “you are still my biggest fear, and I have got a few,” I’m always reminded of this bid of sad trivia, the confederation of disappointed and divested who panic inwardly when the telephone goes. So, now that I’ve totally scared you off, listen to this song! It’s really really sad! But it’s also really really great.
#24
A Relatively Famous Victory – Ballboy
Album: I Worked on the Ships
Year: 2008
Cinematic beauty and scope strikes again, this time in the upper echelons of songs I’ve heard and liked in the last ten years. Combined with the power of Scots (always lovable) this song is unmatched for sheer tenderness and joy. Ballboy represent a sound and a sensibility that, for me, are inseparable from (my idea of their) their Scottish homeland; these are songs born of changeable climate, harsh wind, chill dark, blood history and a strangely peaceable (given the above, anyway) beauty . The imagery of that midnight tennis court on the run down estate of the unnamed heroine’s family is so specific and still so evocative that it paradoxically becomes the stuff of daydreams. “This – and this – this is what our skin is for” represents to me one of the purest expressions of the symbiotic relationship between romantic love and its more, um, physical side. Why say, “I want you,” when you could instead imply that we have nerves and a weird soft coating over it all with the ability to process sensation because someday we might brush up against someone worthwhile on a cool night in the garden?
#23
Losing Haringey – The Clientele
Album: Strange Geometry
Year: 2005
So, Haringey – a borough of London – is my old hood. I have an obvious soft spot for this song for that reason alone, although my fondness for it was born at a time when moving to London was only something that seemed unlikely to happen. And god damn, do I have soft spot for spoken word songs by intellectual Englishmen (see the James Yorkston track I posted a few weeks ago: same schtick). And then there’s the story itself. Is it possible that identify so closely with this song because Alasdair MacLean and I both like telling stories? Strange Geometry in its entirety is an incredibly atmospheric album, steeped richly in the particulars of living in North London. But it also masterfully incorporates into this meta-narrative a smaller vignette about life in 1982 that is not just a story within a story, but a physical space described by another physical space. Here the elements and sense of oncoming disaster in 200-whatever combine atmostpherically to give the impression of a less complicated memory atmosphere. Which has a lovely ring to it. And its sonic atmosphere is no less hypnotic, wrapping the listener in the dulcet, looping rainy day tones The Clientele are so offhandedly proficient in.
#22
I Wish I Was the Moon – Neko Case
Album: Blacklisted
Year: 2002
Neko Case has likened her voice to an entire horn section in interviews, an assertion to which there may be some truth, although in this song she’s at her most plaintive and Patsy Cline. There’s no question that Case is 7,000 times more human than instrument if you’re listening to her belt out these lyrics about…well, not heartbreak and loss, exactly. This is no “If You’ve Got Leavin on Your Mind” although its broken harmonies and swirling guitars call to mind some of that song’s defeated bravado. Its chief brilliance is that while Cline mourns the absence of something tangible, Case is hurting from an aching, amorphous lack – a pain neither she nor the listener can quite grasp. Case’s voice milks more from the repeated her bald exhaustion and loneliness than a score of ambitious guitar-strummers with extended metaphors about empty ashtrays and empty love lives. The way the instrumentation swims and roils into being is like a particularly agonizing sob only serves to underline the transcendent hopelessness of the song.
Fun fact: I first heard this – in a spectacular occurrence of perfect timing – several months after the limoncello incident I mentioned in conjunction with The Knife’s “Heartbeats.” (And in the same kitchen!) Lucky kitchen, right? It saw so much Amanda angst. These days, all my kitchen sees are salads and rhubarb galettes.
#21
I Thought You Were My Boyfriend – The Magnetic Fields
Album: i
Year: 2004
I am of the opinion that The Magnetic Fields‘ frontman – all-around talented guy, misanthrope, pop anthropologist – Stephen Merritt is at his best when singing songs of romantic woe. Although the straightforward sweetness of “The Book of Love” or “Kiss Me Like You Mean It” has just occurred to me and made me want to eat my words. Lets say, then, that it is when Merritt turns his pen to the dregs of a dalliance rather than its heady progress, his sense of comedy is at its most finely-tuned. I often think of “I Thought You Were My Boyfriend” and “Long-Forgotten Fairy Tale” (off of 69 Love Songs, Volume II) as companion pieces; both detail the angst of men in bars behaving badly and being done poorly by turns. It is a constant sadness that the lines “[sweetly]: some guys have a beer and they’ll do anything, anything, anythingggg,” (from “Boyfriend”) and “if someone told me I’d succumb/if someone said I’d be so dumb/after all the sleepless nights when I turned on all the lights/I would’ve hit them,” (from “Fairytale”) will never live in the same song, as they are two of the funnier moments in the ‘Fields catalogue. But sadly, this musical liaison will never be, especially not here in this countdown, as “Fairytale” was released pre-2000. So we shall have to content ourselves with the tongue-in-cheek piano house of “I Thought You Were My Boyfriend” (no small consolation prize). As an extra humorous nod to the structure of the house music machine, this song was actually release as a single, with several accompanying remixes. I stumbled over the disc several years ago in a used bin and thought I’d hit the jackpot but sadly, none of the remixes could hold a candle to the source material. So just listen to that. Like I said, it’s quite funny, and not just by the standards of Light Parody, Gay Club Heartbreak Division.
