DB's Song of the Day (day 243): "REMINDS ME OF YOU" (1999) Van Morrison

It’s Van the Man’s birthday. Van Morrison was born in Belfast on the 31st day of August in 1945. One of the greats of the generation of singers/songwriters whose careers got underway in the Sixties, Van’s still going strong and, like most of his contemporaries, he’s had some ups and downs. His major phase lasts from 1968’s Astral Weeks, one of the best albums ever, by anybody, up to 1974’s Veedon Fleece, a major statement. He hit a better-than-average stride with three albums after that: Wavelength (1978), Into the Music (1979), and Common One (1980).

After those three LPs helped to consolidate his “later” work as he turned 35, my attention to his career gets a bit spotty. The Eighties, in general, were not so good for artists his age, who had been in the game for twentysome years. I’d still point to No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) and Irish Heartbeat (1988), an album of Irish traditional music recorded with The Chieftains, as well worth having. Then, in 1991, came the magnum opus Hymns to the Silence, on which Van mused about his early years and caught a bit o’ Gospel glory—“A Closer Walk with Thee” needs to be heard. Too Long in Exile (1993) was a jazzier than usual LP by an artist who had always stretched rock and R&B into more extended and improvised forms. Today’s song—and I could’ve chosen any of a dozen for Van’s birthday—is from Back on Top (1999), an album that reminds me a bit of No Guru, which is to say it’s meditative, a bit elegiac, but also full of a crisp sense of how to “do” Van Morrison songs. Van has done so many long, searching musical journeys on his albums, rambling through stream-of-consciousness, grabbing onto a phrase as a talismanic fragment and repeating it in various inflections as if sounding it for any magic it possesses, vocalizing with abandon at times and, more often, with a consummate craftsman’s full awareness of his powers, creating a spellbinding space in which music happens to the listener as a transposition to an interior place, perhaps even as a transformational experience (“Madam George,” for instance, but that will be saved for another time). But in all that time, we must also admit that some of Van’s output only gestures to what other songs make manifest. He’s not always in true form, in other words.

Back on Top struck me as a revisit of “classic” Van Morrison but without being derivative. If I’d never heard another Morrison LP, I’d be amazed by it. Which is to say that, if it’s not top shelf, it’s only because truly remarkable Morrison albums beat its time. This is true of some subsequent albums as well, such as 2005’s Magic Time. (I almost selected something from that album because it came out the year of my only trip to Ireland and I saw a poster for it in Dublin, and got the album—which I liked even more than Back on Top—after getting back home.)  I still need to get around to 2008’s Keep It Simple. I still find myself beguiled by Morrison’s ability to keep going, listening to the lion inside and getting it across.

“Reminds Me of You” fits the memory themes I’ve got going, and it features some truly lovely Hammond organ work by Geraint Watkins. It also features backing vocals, by Brian Kennedy, that create an interesting double vocal in which Van’s almost heartbroken tone gets matched by a voice less shaken by feeling. Call it water and rock, perhaps. Then there’s Pee Wee Ellis’s sax adding fills that are a bit breezy. It all adds up to a song that is laced with melancholy and a sense of past mistakes and misfortunes, and, maybe, a trust in a fulfillment to come, but that is also aware of joy, a tense, fitfully aware realization that keeps dawning and dimming. “Everything I do reminds me of you.” The memory is better than nothing.

“I miss you so much I can’t stand it,” the song begins and that’s its main coloration: I’m barely maintaining, I’m ready to go to pieces any second. And yet there’s a verse that, to me, makes us aware of what’s really going on: Seems like the spirit is pushing me onwards / I'm able to see where I tripped and went wrong / I'll just have to guess where my soul will find comfort / And I miss you so much when I'm singing my song. Each line has a strong caesura, as though the thoughts are being measured out, and the idea of being pushed to a realization, to seeing where he went wrong, feels palpable. There’s a groping sense in the “I’ll just have to guess” and the hope of finding comfort. Without “you,” it’s anyone’s guess if there is any solace to be found. But key is the phrase “when I’m singing my song.” This is a state of longing that comes with singing. It’s like saying that heartbreak is the basis of the song but that the song saves one from being heartbroken. The song is the comfort—and yet the song and singing it “reminds me of you.”

It’s also a song of divestiture: “I don’t have nothin’ to sell no more”; “ain’t goin’ down, no more, to the well.” What’s being refused, I guess, are easy remedies or activities that make for creature comforts. It’s time to stand face to face with, to use Ray Davies’ line, “what’s been taken from me.”

What makes me choose this song over others on the album—though I’m also very partial to “The Philosopher’s Stone,” “When the Leaves Come Falling Down,” and “High Summer”—is the tension in the vocal. It walks such a tight line, distilling a lifetime of singing the blues into a vocal with no histrionics or emoting, just an unerring sense of pitch and diction.

Happy birthday, Van, many happy returns.

My soul demands it.

DB's Song of the Day (day 242): "CHELSEA HOTEL #2" (1974) Leonard Cohen

The purpose of these posts is to highlight particular songs, true. But sometimes an entire album has a coherence that makes picking one song difficult. Generally, the selection has to do with some fortuitous personal association. In the case of Leonard Cohen’s truly unique album New Skin for the Old Ceremony, choosing is thorny. Every song on the album delivers a particular kind of pang. New skin is indeed necessary because the skin is fully lacerated after listening to it.

Cohen is featured today because, in my current attempts to do justice to my complex relation to the month of August, he belongs here. I first got to know Songs (1967) in August of 1977. It dominated me for a time, then. And what’s more I didn’t venture into other Cohen albums for quite a while. One was enough. By the time he released Death of a Ladies’ Man, in winter 1977, I felt I had to have it, though it was rather unlike his other records—produced by Phil Spector, ’nuff said. New Skin didn’t really make its deep inroads into my consciousness until 1979 when Mary played it a lot. Maybe a tad obsessively. It seemed the only album that suited her morose mood. At that point, the album became indelible, so much so that I could probably take a little time to do a fully worked up analysis/interpretation/poetics of the entire album. Though where does my view of it end and the real album begin? If I were to propose an album for the series 33 1/3, that might well be it.

So what song to address? “Chelsea Hotel #2” is in some ways the obvious choice because it’s the one best known, if only because it’s included on The Best of Leonard Cohen which I don’t doubt has sold many more copies than New Skin has. New Skin is uncompromising in a way that even The Best of can’t be. Cohen is a unique bard, and he was rarely what you’d call “commercial” in any sense—but many artists recorded his songs and did well by them. New Skin’s contents rarely get called on in that regard (unless you count a tribute album like 1991's I’m Your Fan). New Skin makes something like Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks (1975) seem like a feel-good album.

The reason “Chelsea Hotel” is known—perhaps even notorious—is because it opens with “I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel / You were talking so brave and so sweet / Giving me head on the unmade bed / While the limousines wait in the street.” How’s that for grabbing your attention? We’re being addressed as someone very intimate with the singer, and now we want to know what else the “you” is up to. Cohen identified the “you” as Janis Joplin, then later regretted it as rather ungentlemanly. Fair enough, but in thinking that he’s recalling Janis, specifically, our view of the song takes on another dimension. It’s gossipy, it’s tacky, it’s . . . rock’n’roll: “You fixed yourself [heroin] / You said ‘Well, never mind / We are ugly but we have the music.’” One can imagine well enough Joplin saying that, but only in that bantering way she had. In Cohen’s sepulchral tones it sounds like some kind of judgment from God.

And that’s the way Cohen handles the vagaries of desire most of the time, and certainly on this album, where guilt is woven deep into every encounter and every comment on an encounter. But always delivered with an amazingly sardonic edge. I love the fucking thing from the depths of my being.

But I’m not that fond of “Chelsea Hotel,” though I think it’s remarkable. “Those were the reasons / And that was New York / We were running for the money and the flesh / And that was called love for the workers in song / Probably still is for those of them left.” That is so succinct, and so earned. We know Cohen, like all those songsters then, was running for flesh and cash—“making it” alluded to both. And neither Cohen nor Joplin were such—in the late Sixties, which is what he’s remembering—as to “have it made.” And yet they did have the music and they were “workers in song.” And that’s what set them apart. For the moment. While the limousines wait, and the girl does her thing with his thing. But we might think of Hamlet: "for though I most powerfully and potently believe 't, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down."

The refrain, “You got away, didn’t you baby? / You just turned your back on the crowd / You got away, I never once heard you say / I need you, I don’t need you / I need you, I don’t need you / And all of that jiving around,” if it’s intended for Joplin sounds like poetic license. Joplin “got away”? Well, from him, sure, and from us, but turning her back on the crowd, as a euphemism for her death, is a bit grand and not earned. The part about not jiving around seems apropos for her, and grudgingly admiring. I say grudgingly because the song is something of a backhanded tribute: “I don’t mean to suggest / That I loved you the best / I can’t keep track of each fallen robin / I remember you well / In the Chelsea Hotel / That’s all, I don’t even think of you that often.”

When I was a youngster hearing this song, I was always a bit put-off by that ending. The “robin/often” rhyme is, again, a bit too “high” for the song. Cohen’s a poet and he knows it, etc. But the sentiment—it took me a while to see—is on target. I remember you well, when I think of you, but I don’t have occasion too, much. One suspects these two—and here we needn’t care that it was Janis—don’t have much in common, aren’t simpatico. The point of the song is that you can be with someone in moments of intimacy, excitement even, and in the end there’s not much to say. The tone Cohen uses, in acknowledging that, is well-done offhand. Which is not to say it’s truly offhand. It’s a performance, and, like the entire album, registers a particular kind of truth. The kind that comes from having the nerve to say that.

1985

I developed considerable respect for Cohen in getting to know New Skin. Even more than his first album, which can seem a bit precious if you aren’t in tune with the Sixties, New Skin bites with the exacting precision of someone who knows what he wants to say and how to say it. Starkly, with few frills. His Songs of Love and Hate (1971) may be even more stark and sardonic, but New Skin is more compelling to me, and not only because of the summer of 1979.

We spent a night in the Chelsea Hotel, Mary and I. Our wedding night. Already in that gesture you can perhaps see the concern with ghosts that these posts also keep alive. Paying tribute. But there’s no reason to see the song in so narrow a focus—whether about Leonard or Janis or even the Chelsea Hotel. Maybe any hotel in Chelsea will do. Maybe just a hotel in New York. Or anywhere. Where two people spend some time on unmade beds, in that little bubble of longing, release, and, maybe, regret that Cohen’s song registers so well. Here's to all those fallen robins, bob-bob-bobbin' along.  

DB's Song of the Day (day 241): "LAZY EYE" (2002) Hem

Today’s song is here thanks to another August baby—my friend Emmy who told me about this Brooklyn band I’d never heard of, back in 2002. Hem’s Rabbit Songs—a bit like Cowboy Junkies’ Trinity Sessions (1988)—is one of those albums with a definite feel that all the songs share. The CJ LP is more despondent in tone, bluesier, closer to my general musical m.o., while Rabbit Songs is cheerier and prettier. So of course I pick one of its more wistful songs for today.

At the time when I got the album, I lived with it for awhile. It was a sound I kept returning to—falling to sleep to it on iPod and the like. It was comforting. Most of the music I listen to isn’t. Not only is it great when something someone recommends turns out to be worth it, but it’s also great when the album isn’t just a flash-in-the-pan. Rabbit Songs doesn’t get old because it already sounds old. “Timeless” is the term one generally uses, but, because I know when I first started listening to it, it’s also of its time. There’s a comforts of home aspect to it that still appeals to me. Songs like “Idle”—very mellow—or “Stupid Mouth Shut”—about not saying “something stupid” as the old Sinatra song would have it—or today’s song, which matches well with the last three Songs of the Day. It’s quiet and pensive and matches the mood of retrospect that seems to go with “end of the summer” biz.

“There’s a lazy eye that looks at you / And sees you the same as before.” It’s a nice conceit. In my “lazy eye,” I don’t notice that you age, that you change, that nothing, really, is the same as before. Hitting 40 in 1999, I was no doubt cheered by such mind (or eye)-over-matter lyricism in the early Aughts. Nothing’s changed, honest. And now, so far into the 50s, I’m even more susceptible to the seduction of this song. It’s not just wishful thinking, now, it’s more like inhabiting a tremendous cloud that veils all before it.

In the song, the image of “the hem of your dress” name-checks the band’s name, making us perhaps wonder why that is their name. What’s a “hem” anyway? Dress hems notoriously change with the times, which is why it seems a good detail for a “then/now” comparison. Likewise the comb that’s parting the hair—hairstyles change even more then dress hems, I think. Sung with the graceful purity that vocalist Sally Ellyson brings to everything she sings, the words seem to be from the point of view of a male to a female (and indeed the song was written by two male members of the band: Dan Meesé and Gary Maurer), and the part about the hem and the comb are so lovely, in the melody, that there’s a kind of trance there, as if of someone playing the same clip over and over. Ellyson’s voice becomes a kind of inner muse for some musing guy, thinking of “When you lay beside me every night / Though now you are with me no more.”

We might well think—that’s how it strikes me—of a widower, alone in his empty home, living as if his wife’s still there. Certainly it could be about a woman that left, but something in the way Ellyson sings the guy’s part so simply, I don’t feel the bitterness of abandonment, rather an address to someone who, as far as he’s concerned, is still with him. Still there, “the same as before.” Ghostly, eh?

I tend to think of this as “the mind’s eye”—which “lazy eye” is a good figure for—where it’s easy to let a clear memory take precedence over an actual absence. So many people we will always remember as they were, never knowing what they became later. And they’ll never know the same about you.