Desert island singles

Y'know, there's nothing wrong with being a one-hit wonder if your one hit is a real contribution to the musical canon. Not that all of these guys are one-hit folks, but if this were their sole contribution to music, they'd be doing OK. If you add up the time I've spent listening to these songs, it'd be well over a month.

As everybody ever has noted, music reviews are dumb if you can't hear the song, so I've put samples up at the gmail.com account (user: some.files, password: caring). Again, I'm sorry that gmail forces me to put each item in a separate file, meaning that you'll need to do more clicking than you really should.

Silo, Scud Mountain Boys. The version on Pine Box; somehow the one on Dance the Night Away doesn't do it so much for me. It's a guy on the guitar, with somebody harmonizing here and there; when I hear it I think about the guy at the guitar composing it, and deciding at some point that he should stop noodling on the guitar and just call it done. At first the lyrics sound kinda dumb and overalternatyve, but once you pass on that they're heartfelt. The song is very much in my range, so I sing along comfortably.

Brand New Love, Sebadoh. A song about the endogeneity of social relations. `Any thought could be the beginning/a brand new tangled web you're spinning./ Anyone could be a brand new love./ Follow what you feel,/ `cause you alone decide what's real./ Anyone could be a brand new love.' As with the numbers below, the noise at the end fits perfectly.

Ana Ng, They Might be Giants. OK, I just felt obliged to include at least one vaguely perky/bounceable song. I put this one on repeat every time it comes up if only to hear that opening guitar lick over and over. Somewhere on their web site, the duo explain that the line `I don't want the world, I just want your half' came up in an argument over money. I wish the people I argue with were so well-humored.

Miss Sarajevo, The Passengers (which consists of U2 and Brian Eno), featuring Luciano Pavarotti. This in no way makes up for anything Bono does as a human being, but it shows that these guys really are good musicians and can produce something which is more than just well-formed pop. I somehow keep losing the album, but I don't care `cause I still have this track and Your Blue Room. It was used at the end of the documentary Miss Sarajevo, about hipsters living in Sarajevo during war time. The movie all seems so normal until you realize that those popping noises are snipers firing at people.

Collected songs where every verse is filled with grief, Alfred Schnittke (only version I've seen performed by the Kronos Quartet). The Kronos Quartet is famous in my mind for picking good pieces. I guess they play them OK and all too, but it's really their selection of repertoire which is off the beaten path but which is not just annoying atonal weirdness which causes me to buy lots of stuff with the Kronos name attached. Anyway, I don't have much to put to words about this track. Um, it's emotive and fun to listen to over and over again.

Resemblances, Arto Lindsay. Oh, what a synthesis of everything. Arto had this period playing skronk guitar, in which he treated the strings in the style of treated piano (i.e., made noise), and he had a long string of bossa nova numbers which were all beautiful and heartfelt. Then this track here is the synthesis of it all: it starts all calm and quiet, then by my count a dozen instruments come in, culminating in this blob of noise which completely and totally fits in with the song, except that it's noise. Or, for example, I saw this one painter (whose name I've forgotten; perhaps Ms ZK of Canberra, Australa can help) whose backgrounds were abstract art pieces in the standard abstract tradition, but by painting a few characters in here and there, he made them into perfectly concrete, normal-seeming paintings. You have to look at it for a while before it hits you, `Oh, if that background were by itself, I'd be dismissing it as too-abstract art for art's sake.'

Now and then, somebody will tell me something like `I never get much into music; it's nice in the background but generally all a blur.' I play them Resemblances and try to get subject to follow one of the dozen instruments and work out its specific role in the song. Subject is usually impressed with how much there is to be found. Of course, such an exercise is standard music appreciation advice, but I think it works especially well for Resemblances.

Sunken Treasure, Wilco. It's fun to see Wilco get more offbeat with every album. They started off with AM as pretty much straight country. There are a few subtleties that made them hip country, like underuse of pedal steels and details of the lyrics; then on Being There they started to add some noise to the mix; then Warner Brothers kicked them off the label for not making Yankee Hotel Foxtrot e-z enough. [Haven't heard A Ghost is Born yet, but I hear it follows the trend.] So Sunken Treasure is a crossover song of sorts, where they were still doing straight songs but indicated that something was going on in the background. They go for the same effect of noise-as-composition-element as Arto did with Resemblances (or even Radiohead did with How to Disappear Completely; it'd be on the list but there's a fluke in the editing which I can not f.ing stand. Maybe they meant to do it, but it still takes me out of their world.).

Magnetic Fields, The Death of Ferdinand de Sassure. In contrast, this is entirely stripped down. Bass, synth, vocals, period. See, Ferdinand de Sassure was a linguist, so the chorus conjugates verbs (except it's English, so there's no conjugation to speak of). I like to sing along pronouncing everything as if it rhymed with the exaggerated French pronounciation of Sassure. By the way, if you're gonna buy an entire Magnetic Fields album, get The Charm of the Highway Strip. It's about vampires.

Quiet American, Antarctica. I can't plug this guy enough. For the story to this piece, search this page for Antarctica. Then listen to everything else on the page. This is what I'd expected Modest Mouse's `A life of arctic sounds' to sound like; was disappointed when their arctic sounds were so far from it. [Was also disappointed when I found out the band's name isn't really any sort of reference to Modest Moussorgsky.]

Some runners up, any one of which I'd be happy to put on repeat for an hour. Most of them are slower songs, because I'm clinically depressed, and because it's easier for a composer to create a new world if he/she isn't worrying about being danceable.

David Bowie: Space oddity. So when did you first work out that Major Tom's a junkie?
Gonzo the Great: I'm going to go back there some day. Probably just because it's one of the first songs I really, really empathized with. It brought tears to my six-year old eyes.
Motels: Suddenly last summer.
Till Tuesday: Voices carry. Yes, that's Aimee Mann.
Speedway, Morrissey. I'm not sure what I like about this song. See html comments.
Radiohead, Creep. When this came out everybody thought Radiohead would be a one-hit wonder, `cause this one track was so incredible.
Smashing Pumpkins, Soma. Maybe if I didn't live in Chicago in 1993 I wouldn't be including this one, but I did, so here ya go.
`Rebekah del Rio', Llorando. This is the cover of Roy Orbison's Crying from Mulholland Drive; I assume the name is a pseudonym. The DVD doesn't have chapters, so I had to mode shift this to MP3 so I could put it on repeat; see gmail.
Eagles, Hotel California. I think this one counts, as a piece that creates its own little world. A bit out of fashion, I guess, but all of Latin America still loves this song, even though they collectively don't understand the words.
Grandaddy: Miner at the Dial-a-view. Another song that builds its own mythology.
Chris Isaak, Wicked Game. The first time I'd heard it, I thought it was a classic which had played on the radio for decades; it just sounded so logical (in a not-derivative way. It's nothing like 99% of country songs).