Music makes the people come together
Isn’t music great? It will never cease to amaze me how much music can move me and get right under my skin. Here’s what I’ve been listening to obsessively lately:
The National: This is my new favorite band. “Boxer” and “Alligator” make me wonder how I went through life without those two albums. I’ve rewound two or three songs in particular from each album fervently. From “Boxer” (the latest album) these repeatable songs are “Fake Empire”, “Slow Show” and “Apartment Story”. “Slow Show” nearly turns me into one of those obsessive fans who thinks the singer is singer directly to them:
You know I dreamed about you
for twenty-nine years before I saw you
You know I dreamed about you
I missed you for
for twenty-nine years
And from “Alligator” I’m addicted to “Karen” and “Mr. November”. The later includes the mantra “I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders”. Who thinks of that? I’m impressed.
Paul Simon’s “Graceland”: I downgraded my cable to Standard/Basic only after I finally recorded the Classic Albums episode featuring this album. The album as a whole is not something I crave, but “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes”, “The Boy in the Bubble”, “You Can Call Me Al” and of course, the brilliant “Graceland” are enough to designate this as an album classique. I even rewound the ten or so minutes Paul and others spent discussing the origins and recording of the song “Graceland”, how “I’m going to Graceland” was a throwaway line through most of the recording session. The riff always gives me chills which are amplified by this line,
She comes back to tell me she’s gone/As if I didn’t know that/As if I didn’t know my own bed/As if I’d never noticed/The way she brushed her hair from her forehead.
That line is absolutely perfect to me, and is indicative of Paul Simon’s casual, yet perfectly phrased, style. He says it’s his best song, and I agree.
My senior year of high school was soundtracked by Simon & Garfunkel’s greatest hits (and “Jesus Christ Superstar”), particularly “America.” That song and “Graceland” are very similar to me, not only because they are about roadtrips in the USA (and the metaphors that go with that kind of story), but they showcase how Paul Simon is one of the best songwriters for telling the truth. He simply says it like it is, and it turns out to be poetry.
What have you been listening to lately?