ballads

The 100 Greatest Songs of the Rock Era: #82: Leaving on a Jet Plane

By lousiteadmin

 

Lyrics

Peter, Paul & Mary from Album 1700 (1967)

“The first cover song on the list,” Peggy said. “John Denver fans are going to have a bone to pick with you.”

“Actually, this is no more a cover than ‘I Heard it through the Grapevine’ was. John Denver wouldn’t release a commercial version of this song himself for six years. He was essentially an unknown songwriter when Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with it. As far as his fans having a bone to pick with me, I don’t think his version holds a candle to the PPM version. His vocal is lovely, but Mary Travers’s vocal is transcendent. You’re right there in the room with these two people.”

“I get what you’re saying. He’s singing it out to the crowd, while she’s singing it to her lover.”

“Exactly.”

“John Denver fans are still gonna be pissed with you.”

“I’m ready for their ire.”

“Good to see your convictions are strong. So what exactly is going on in this song, anyway? Is she going on a business trip? Is this a long-distance relationship? Is she joining the Peace Corps?”

“I hadn’t considered the Peace Corps thing, but that makes as much sense as any other scenario. There’s a little too much pain here for a business trip, unless it’s a really long business trip, and I don’t think this is a long-distance relationship. If it were, she wouldn’t be talking about what happens when she comes back.”

Peggy was quiet for a few seconds, during which I conjured other scenarios for this couple’s separation.

“I was never good at long-distance relationships,” she said, which seemed like a bit of a non-sequitur to me.

“Or long-distance friendships,” I said, the words jumping from my mouth before I had a chance to consider them.

“Ouch.”

Now that we were back in touch on a regular basis, I hadn’t planned on bringing up how we’d lost communication or how I felt that Peggy had largely been to blame for this. I’d tried in multiple ways to stay connected to her after Stevie whisked her away, but I never felt as though she was trying as hard, and I finally let it go.

I thought about apologizing for being insensitive. Then I decided against it. Instead, I said, “Good thing one of us came up with an elaborate excuse for getting back in touch, huh?”

She hesitated a couple of seconds before saying, “Yeah, good thing.”

Sticky
Jul 17, 2015
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The 100 Greatest Songs of the Rock Era: #84: Operator (That’s Not The Way It Feels)

By lousiteadmin

 

Lyrics

Jim Croce from You Don’t Mess Around With Jim (1972)

 

“I wouldn’t have let her keep the dime,” Peggy said.

“You wouldn’t have? You don’t think the therapy session – not to mention getting the number for him – was worth ten cents?”

“That’s not what I mean. They obviously had a connection, and he’d finally moved on from his old girlfriend. He should have stayed on the line and gotten to know the operator better.”

This surprised me. Peggy was as far from a romantic as anyone I knew who actually had a soul. “You wanted him and the person on the other end of the phone to hook up? We don’t know anything about her. She could have been someone’s grandmother.”

“She wasn’t someone’s grandmother. You could tell from her voice.”

“We never hear her voice.” I was beginning to wonder if Peggy knew about some alternate version of this track that I’d never discovered. “Besides, that’s not the point. He hadn’t moved on. He goes back to his request at the end of the song.”

Peggy didn’t say anything for several seconds. I wondered if she was playing the end of the song (you know, the one that everyone else knew) in her head. “What are you talking about?”

“The song goes back to the chorus after he tells her she can keep the dime. He still wants the number. He can’t get past it.”

“Are you saying that Croce wasn’t just repeating the chorus?”

“Well, of course he’s repeating the chorus. But he’s doing so for a reason. He’s doing so to show us that this guy is on an endless loop about this relationship. He’s desperate for closure, even though he’s afraid of what will happen if he actually talks to his ex.”

“I think you’re reading too much into it.”

“Said the person who hears the voice of the operator.”

“I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.” Peggy made a sound on the other end that could have been tsk-ing me or could have been blowing me a kiss. Cell phone fidelity being what it is, I couldn’t be sure. “So what’s the deal with this song. I love it, too, but I can’t really tell why. The melody is very simple, Croce is hardly a remarkable singer, and, as we’ve already established, the lyrics are a bit vague.”

“I think it’s just very sincere. You know how basketball GMs will talk about going after unrefined big men because you can’t teach height? I think sincerity is one of those things you can’t teach singers. They either have it or they don’t. Jim Croce absolutely had it.”

“Yeah, I think you’re right about that. It allowed him to get away with songs like ‘I Got a Name.’ That song could have come off as hackneyed with a lot of other singers. So you really don’t think he should have spent more time on the phone with the operator? I thought you were a happy endings kind of guy.”

“You’ve always misunderstood me with that. I’m a right endings kind of guy. This is the right ending.”

“The operator was totally grooving on him.”

I laughed. “Maybe I should go listen to the song again.”

Sticky
Jun 16, 2015
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The 100 Greatest Songs of the Rock Era: #86: I’ll Be There

By lousiteadmin

 

Lyrics

The Jackson 5 from Third Album (1970)

“You know what’s interesting?” Peggy said. “This is the second artist on your list already who had his first hits as an adolescent and continued deep into adulthood.”

“You find that interesting?”

“You don’t? How often does it ever happen? You have Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. How many more can you name?”

“Okay, good point.”

Peggy paused. I noticed that she tended to pause when she said something I wouldn’t have observed myself. I wasn’t sure if this was to let me consider it or to have me stew in the fact that she was smarter than me.

“Do you think Michael Jackson had any idea what he was singing about when the Jackson 5 recorded this song?” she said.

“Given his public persona throughout his life, I’m guessing the answer to that question is ‘no.’”

“But even if that weren’t the case, how could any twelve-year-old sing a song this romantic convincingly?”

“And yet he did.”

“Yes. He absolutely did. How does that happen? This isn’t Justin Bieber singing ‘baby, baby, baby.’ This is a mature love song that sounds entirely believable coming from a middle-schooler.”

She had me there. What Jackson was doing wasn’t mimicry. It wasn’t a producer in a studio telling him to whisper here and get soulful there. It was a twelve-year-old singing like a man and making adults all over the planet believe it. “I’ll Be There” had been a massive hit across a wide demographic, and at this point it definitely wasn’t because little Michael looked cute fronting a band of his brothers. That might have been the case with “ABC,” but it certainly wasn’t the case with “I’ll Be There.”

“He was tapping into something,” I said. “Maybe he really was an alien. Maybe he’d lived multiple lifetimes on other planes before adopting this form. Maybe he’d loved and lost repeatedly in those other lifetimes.”

“I was going to say that he was a skilled student of human interaction, even if he didn’t turn out to be much of a participant.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a better theory.”

Sticky
Jun 09, 2015
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The 100 Greatest Songs of the Rock Era: #87: Homeward Bound

By lousiteadmin

Lyrics

Simon & Garfunkel from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)

 

“Do you know which word shows up most amongst the titles of the eight thousand songs I have on iTunes?” I said.

“Um, ‘the?’” Peggy said. “‘A?’”

“Other than articles and other super-common words.”

“‘Love?’”

“Okay, other than ‘love.’”

“Is there anything else you’d like to eliminate before I continue guessing?”

“You’re right; that was a stupid way to start this conversation. It’s – other than ‘love’ – ‘home.’”

Peggy laughed. “That is so you – in two ways.” She laughed again.

“Really?”

“Really. One, that you’re such a nerd that you would actually know this kind of thing, and two, that you’ve always had a home fixation.”

“I have?”

“You don’t know this about yourself? No question about it – marriage, family, food. You’re all about that stuff.”

“Food is about home? You know, there are these businesses called ‘restaurants’ –”

“– Food is definitely about home for you. Remember who you’re talking to.”

Since I’d reconnected with Peggy, it wasn’t always easy to remember who I was talking to. Because we were so close a long time ago, did she know me in a way that more recent friends and associates didn’t? Or did she only know who I once was? She had me on the home thing, though.

“So, you’re saying that we can define ourselves by the titles of the songs we have on our computers? I think the word that shows up fourth most often – other than the common stuff, again – is ‘better.’ Does that mean I’m an incurable optimist?”

“I think you’re making a good case for this as a new form of analysis.”

I decided to pursue a different course of conversation. “This song came very early in Paul Simon’s run. He kept writing memorable, influential songs for nearly a quarter of a century – right through The Rhythm of the Saints. That got me thinking about something else I want to explore soon: whether or not you could collect a good album from the songs an artist released after their peak-output period ended.”

“In other words, would an album of the best songs released by, say, Tom Petty after Into the Great Wide Open be considered a major release?”

“Exactly. The answer to that one would be no, by the way.”

“Agreed. We’re gonna have fun with this one. So what about Paul Simon?”

“I don’t think so. After Rhythm he just dropped off the table. Did you listen to that album he released a few years ago? Ouch. And we don’t even want to consider the Capeman stuff.”

“Maybe he just ran out of things to say. It’s amazing that he had so much to say to begin with.”

“And ‘Homeward Bound’ was one of the best of them.”

“One of the best? Does that mean there’s more Paul Simon to come?”

“You’re not going to get me to reveal anything before it’s time.”

She laughed again. “You already have.”

Sticky
May 05, 2015
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The 100 Greatest Songs of the Rock Era: #91: You and I

By lousiteadmin

Lyrics

Stevie Wonder from Talking Book (1972)

 

“Do you know this is the first truly romantic song on your list?” Peggy said.

“You don’t consider ‘Whole Lotta Love’ romantic? It even has ‘love’ in the title.”

“Yeah, I consider it romantic the way I consider the Big Mac to be food.”

I laughed. “‘You and I’ is a crazily romantic song, though, isn’t it?”

“You aren’t kidding. I listened to it this morning in advance of our call and I wouldn’t let my Stevie out of the bedroom.”

“I’ll skip the rest of the details, if you don’t mind.”

There was a moment of silence that felt odd to me. Then Peggy said, “Why do you think it’s so hard to write great love songs?”

I gave that a little bit of thought. Most of us have had at least some experience with love – maybe not as much experience as we’ve had with lust, or rage, or betrayal, but some. Why, then were there so few songs that captured the essence of love the way “You and I” did? I remembered a conversation I had a few years back with a music industry lawyer. He told me that after representing pop stars for so many years he became convinced that he was as capable of writing a hit as they were – until he tried. He figured the easiest kind of song to write was a love song and he spent a couple of days churning out one cliché after another until he went back to his day job.

“I think it comes down to there being a very fine line between banality and universality.”

“Translation, please.”

“I think it’s super easy to say the same thing that everyone else is saying, because there’s some level of truth to what everyone else is saying. To write a great love song, though – one that really gets through to people and lasts a long time – you need to find a way to capture the universals of love instead of stringing together a series of tired phrases. That’s what makes this song so brilliant.”

“That, and Stevie Wonder’s voice.”

“Well, yeah. And his mastery of melody.”

“So, really, all you need for a great love song is the ability to tap into universals, write gorgeous melodies, and sing like Stevie Wonder.”

“I think you just answered your question.”

Sticky
Apr 07, 2015
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