Song ID Blog

“There Must Be Someone” (2021) – Matt Sweeney and Bonnie “Prince” Billy * Written by Vern, Rex, and Cathy Gosdin * Album: Superwolves * Label: Drag City/Palace

You, too, would adopt a stage name with the carefree connotation of Bonnie “Prince” Billy if you enjoyed such longtime critical attention and TLC as Will Oldham. On Superwolves, he shares billing with producer/guitarist Matt Sweeney. Two standouts: 1) “Hall of Death, one of three songs to feature guitarist Mdou Moctar, but going even further by including an additional three Moctar bandmates, thereby vaccinating it with Nigerien Tuareg musical immunity; and 2) “There Must Be a Someone,” covering a 1968 Gosdin Brothers track wherein 4/4 is changed to an Otis Redding 6/8. Another tweak explodes the surface-level pathos in the song’s yearnings for love, acceptance, and friendship: Oldham sings, “Why can’t a man be accepted for what she has to be.” (The Gosdins, of course, went straight “he.”) It comes off, on one hand, as a gag, leading you to think that you now “get” the gender-confused singer’s self pity. Could Oldham be poking fun, along the way, at gender dysphoria icons Antony and the Johnstons and their “Hope There’s Someone” (2004)? Or is he being sincerely PC, on the other hand, and presenting the pronoun switch as fair play and/or food for thought? That the motivation is so unclear is probably what made it worth doing.

 

“My Baby Wants a Baby” (2021) – St. Vincent * Written by Annie Clark * Album: Daddy’s Home * Label: Loma Vista

The “look at me” messages in St. Vincent’s cover art follow a fame arc. Album one (Marry Me, 2007) is the introductory entreaty, where she needs us to look her in the eyes. On album two (Actor, 2009), she needs us to keep looking, but she’s no longer obliged to meet our gaze. Albums three (Strange Mercy, 2011) and five (Masseducation, 2017) make do with St. Vincent body parts, while on album four (St. Vincent, 2014) she surveys us from a throne. Album six (Daddy’s Home, 2021) shows an altered, I-never-knew-ye Achtung Baby St. Vincent. She’s looking us in the eyes again but we don’t recognize her. On this album she sings a song called “My Baby Wants a Baby” in which she wrestles with and rejects the notion of familial dependency and responsibility. (Her audience may perhaps feel a Freudian inclination to read themselves into this.) Has anyone noticed that she sings it to the chorus melody of Sheena Easton’s 1981 hit “9 to 5 (Morning Train)”? That hit single was an ode to the straight world, and a songwriting credit to Florrie Palmer might have given St. Vincent’s distaste for that in this song even more clarity.

 

“My Lovely Elizabeth” (c. 1962) – S.E. Rogie and His Guitar* Written by S.E. Rogers * 45: “My Lovely Elizabeth” / “Advice to Schoolgirls” * Label: Rogie

Here’s an ideal representation of the West African “palm-wine” genre, so named for its suitability for having a nice tropical drink while you listen. Sierra Leone’s S.E. Rogie (Sooliman Ernest Rogers, d. 1994), in spite of the laid back impression his music conjures, was rather industrious, launching his own label in the early sixties and working its distribution. “My Lovely Elizabeth” was his first big seller – the label image above contains the frustrating note that it was “first published in 1965,” although other sources claim that the record had been floating around as early as 1962 and that his sound had changed quite a bit by 1965.

Here’s what Gary Stewart says in his Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm (1992, p. 48): “Rogie’s biggest record of the early days was the 1962 hit ‘My Lovely Elizabeth’ … [it] sold an estimated thirteen thousand copies in Sierra Leone (an astonishing figure for the time given that record players were, for the most part, the property of more affluent city dwellers in a country whose population was largely rural) and thousands more when EMI picked it up for international distribution … Suspicious of EMI’s sales figures and disappointed in their royalty payments, he reverted to doing his own distribution.”

Side B contains Rogie’s “Advice to Schoolgirls,” in which he recommends, along with the virtues of honesty and staying true to one’s dreams, the avoidance of prostitution.

 

“Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” (1978) – Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * Written by Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce * Produced by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson * LP: Waylon and Willie * Label: RCA Victor * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#42); Billboard Country (#1); Billboard AC (#33)

By 1978, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had turned their reputations as country music outsiders into marketable assets. Although the “outlaw” tag arose out of their (and others’) unwillingness to comply with the wishes of Nashville record industry sheriffs, they also played up a grizzled, maverick persona that found a theme song in Ed Bruce’s “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” Released around the time the Dallas Cowboys beat the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XII, a cultural association that certainly helped fuel it (think about the problematic relationships between moms and football), the record also invited other fantasies and projections among audiences. Many a doctor and lawyer surely listened with wistful escapism, while the word “cowboys,” for others, served as a code word for any occupation lacking in societal respect. Most crucial among these, for the sake of Jennings and Nelson, were the ones who heard it as “mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be DJs.”

“Backlash Blues” (live) (1968) – Nina Simone * Written by Langston Hughes and Nina Simone * Produced by Joe René * LP: ‘Nuff Said! * Label: RCA Victor

The Summer of Soul (2021) concert film unearths footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival, the forgotten “Black Woodstock” that ran for six separate nights during the summer of ’69. It’s a concert film rarity that has the power to take viewers through a full range of emotions, from giddy joy to sanctified tears and then to anger. Nina Simone, at her uncompromising peak, handles that last bit, serving it up with an equal portion of awe. “Backlash Blues” is here at full boil, with words by Langston Hughes, bearing the same vocal edge, spoken statement of purpose, and boom-crash piano it had on her ‘Nuff Said! album. This was a live recording done three days after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Her first version of the song, a studio take on her 1967 Nina Simone Sings the Blues album, captured it at a mere simmer.)

In the film, “Backlash Blues” launches Simone’s set, and by the end of it she is working the crowd with lines such as  “Black people…Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?…Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” She’s actually reading verses by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, but you wouldn’t know it.

“Gone” (1971) – Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * Written and produced by Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw * LP: Alternatives * Label: Music De Wolfe

If you can afford a slot on your classic album list for library music, consider Alternatives by the British composers Alan Parker (guitarist) and Alan Hawkshaw (keyboardist). They loaded up the master shelves at KPM with recordings done together, individually, and with others, and did much in the way of shaping that genre’s curiously evocative sound.  Alternatives was one of the few projects Parker and Hawkshaw did for De Wolfe instead of for KPM, but it seemed to overachieve in media placements during the seventies. “Jolly Thomas” is possibly the record’s most recognizable one, classified for prospective sync-ers as “bouncy” and “childlike,” but “Woodworm” (“heavy, comic…”) also made the rounds.

The track called “Gone” appeared as a “desolate, lonely” needle-drop in a well-circulated educational short produced by Brigham Young University called Cipher in the Snow (1974). Its flute and guitar blew chilly winds as Cliff, a neglected grade schooler, used his lunch money to craft a melancholy snowman’s face. For its closer, the film made use of the album’s “The Difference” (“dark, moody, mellow”), wherein the flute, raven-like, reappears. The film’s uninformative music credits have likely frustrated viewers who couldn’t shake the distinctive music from their minds.

Where did Cipher in the Snow‘s joyous frog sequence music, though, reminiscent of Sagittarius’s “Song to the Magic Frog” (1968), come from?

“Flight of Icarus” (1983) * Written by Adrian Smith and Bruce Dickinson * Produced by Martin Birch * 45: “Flight of Icarus” / “I’ve Got the Fire” * LP: Piece of Mind  * Label: EMI (UK) / Capitol (USA) * Charts: UK (#11); Billboard Rock (#8)

A few things about Iron Maiden’s 1983 “Flight to Icarus”: It was the UK metal institution’s highest charting track in the US (#8 on the Billboard rock charts); its ending features an irrefutable demonstration of metal vocal majesty; and it found disfavor with band captain Steve Harris, who resented singer Bruce Dickinson’s insistence on keeping the tempo out of the full gallop zone. He thus banged his gavel and forbade live performances of it for the span of thirty-two years. Another thing: it uses the monotonous metal chord changes of Im-VII^b-IV in a way that doesn’t sound monotonous, and gives an alternate treatment of the Greek myth of Icarus, in which the hero’s journey to the sun is a teenage rebel’s willful self-destruction.  Although the lyrics do leave room for interpretation, Dickinson made his intended meaning clear in his 2017 What Does This Button Do autobiography.

What other pop songs have an Icarus theme? Duncan Browne’s “Death of Neil” and Scott Walker’s “Plastic Palace People,” both from 1968, come to mind as the best ones worth mentioning, each of them fairly ambiguous tales about boys with wings and both of them clearly tragic. The B-side of “Flight of Icarus” is a worthwhile, thematically consistent non-album cover of Montrose’s 1974 “I Got the Fire.” (You can hear the genesis of the “Icarus” chorus melody in “April” by Dickinson’s heroes Deep Purple.)

“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right)” (1986) – The Jazz Butcher * Written and produced by the Jazz Butcher * Label: Glass Records

There’s a type of British ’80s indie rock that’s appealing to American listeners precisely because of its fuzzy and exotic phrasing, wit, and eccentricity. This track by Oxford’s Jazz Butcher is a good example. The attach-a-rap at the beginning, the sort we heard too much of in those days, distinguishes itself by talking about egg-to-potato ratios (sorry, can’t help), while later in the song we hear about the BBC’s Channel 4 and feeling as “sappy as the late George Brown,” a Labour party politician who’d died in 1985 and who bore the Monty Python-esque full title of George Alfred George-Brown, Baron George-Brown.

After the opening rap, though, this song has the power to sink deep into your psyche and do actual healing duties. The main gist is that, in spite of “big questions,” you will inevitably, whenever [choose a doomsday scenario] happens, be all right. You can play ethical ping pong with this – are you receiving this message from a standpoint of privilege, or are they delivering it from one? Do they minimize the potential for misery from any given doomsday scenario? Perhaps, but the healthiest philosophical or religious outlooks will assure that, regardless of what may happen, you will be all right.

“Conspiracy (You’ll Be All Right),” with an emphasis on the “big questions” section, served as the opening theme for Rich Hall’s Onion World, a talk show that ran on the Comedy Channel from 1990-91. The E.P. that it appeared on was billed weirdly to the Jazz Butcher v. Max Eider, alluding to an apparent rivalry between band leader Pat Fish and band member Eider, who would depart after the two came to blows at the end of 1986. But it was all right – they later reunited. After this release, the band would sometimes bill itself as the Jazz Butcher Conspiracy.