| Tom Waits – (Looking For) The Heart of Saturday Night Lyrics | 4 years ago |
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Jumping in late to the party, several years later. I always hear in Tom Waits' own version an extra layer: Time. Actually, =two= extra layers, Time, and Booze (which is often a Major Supporting Character in Waits' best songs). So, I hear a jump of a couple of decades between the first three verses and the last, reinforced when he sings the bridge the second time. In the first three verses, he's talking about (remembering?) what it's like to be a young stud with a few dollars in his pocket, a hot car, a six-pack of beer, and a pretty girl in the passenger seat, doing the only thing worth doing, the only thing that makes him feel alive, in the small town or city he lives in: cruisin' down the boulevard on a Saturday night. But watch the verbs. So, to me, the bridge ("Tell me, is it the crack of the poolballs ...") is a question he's asking himself, or someone like him, years later, sitting in a bar on an another Saturday night:: What's got you thinking about those "Saturdays that went before" when you were young and strong and, maybe, sober? Does the sound of the pool balls, or the buzz of the neon beer sign, bring it back? Did you get a call from a relative or friend who wanted to remember those "glory days"? Did the waitress give you a little smile, like your girlfriend used to? Are you glad to feel anything but sadness and despair right now, to dream, once again, of just how good those Saturdays used to feel? What ever it was, it's enough to get you off that bar stool, maybe a bit unsteady and reeling, but up on your feet, stumbling, not cruising, out the door, into the street, to get that tingling, special feeling one more time, from the lights, and sounds, and melancholy memories, of Saturday night. And the second time Waits sings it, he doesn't even finish the sentence, just does a little bit of humming: ."cause you're stumblin' ...." |
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| Sugar Ray – Someday Lyrics | 15 years ago |
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I guess only someone old school would have figured this out, but I am absolutely certain that Sugar Ray's "Someday" was composed as a mashup canticle to Chad and Jeremy's British Invasion classic "A Summer Song." The chords and verse forms are the same, and even the sentiments kind of mesh. If you don't believe me, try singing "Someday" while listening to "A Summer Song" Check it out. Trees Someday Swaying in the summer breeze When my life has passed me by Showing off their silver leaves I'll lay around and wonder why As we walked by You were always there for me Soft One way Kisses on a summer's day In the eyes of a passerby Laughing all our cares away I'll look around for another try Just you and I And I'll fade away Sweet Some say Sleepy warmth of summer nights Better things will come our way Gazing at the distant lights No matter what they try to say In the starry sky You were always there for me They say that all good things Just close your eyes and must end some day I'll take you there Autumn leaves must fall This place is war without a care But don't you know This place is war without a care that it hurts me so To say goodbye to you We'll take a swim in the deep blue sea Wish you didn't have to go I go to leave as you reach for me No no no no Musical bridge) So far, so long, so far away So far, so long, so far away And when the rain Someway Beats against my window pane When the sun begins to shine I'll think of summer days again I hear a song from another time And dream of you And I'll fade away And dream of you And I'll fade away And dream of you And I'll fade away “A Summer Song” June 1964 “Someday” January 1999 Recorded by Chad & Jeremy Recorded by Sugar Ray [Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde] [Mark McGrath, Murphy Karges, Rodney Sheppard, Stan Frazier, Craig Bullock aka “DJ Homicide”] Composed By Clive Metcalf, Composed by Murphy Karges, Sugar Ray Ken Noble, David Stuart |
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| Paul Simon – American Tune Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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Yes, the music of "An American Tune" is in a sense a "flagrant rip-off," since it's at least 400 years old, which is when it turned up in a love song by the German Baroque composer Hans Hassler. And =he= probably stole it from an old Bavarian folk song. It was next stolen by no less a personage than Johann Sebastian Bach as a motif for his "St Matthew Passion," and soon became a utiltity tune for singing many different hymns in the Protestant church. So it was a favorite of the Pilgrims when they came to America, and eventually was used by the American labor movement for some of their marching songs. And that was why singer-songwriter Tom Glazer chose it for "The Whole World Around," a song he wrote for the folk group The Weavers (which included Pete Seeger), later popularized as "Because All Men Are Brothers" by Peter Paul & Mary. As the saying goes, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal outright." So we have to assume that Simon had his tongue in his cheek when he call the song "An American Tune," since like most Americans, the song is an immigrant. Paul Simon began thinking about writing the song in the early 1970s during the preparations for the American Bicentennial in 1976. He was planning something upbeat, with a reference to the American Moon Landing in 1969 But by 1972, Watergate happened, the economy was in a tailspin, and the antiwar movement and civil rights movements had become increasingly violent. And he and Art Garfunkel stopped performing. There was a lot of talk about the "decline of the American Empire," and some people were wondering if we would even make it to the Bicentennial in one piece. There's a story that Simon actually had the dream, which is spelled out clearly in the song, of hovering high above New York Harbor, watching the Statue of Liberty sail away over the horizon. And when he woke up, the song wrote itself. The point of the song, I think, is the same as that of Arlo Guthrie's "Patriot's Dream." We can't give up on the struggle for freedom, even when times are hard and things look hopeless. Hmm. Might be time for another cover of this one. When |
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| Paul Simon – Under African Skies Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I'm guessing that Paul Simon may have had all three "Josephs" in mind when he wrote the song. And I believe his thesis in the song is that Jewish and African American cultures are joined at the roots. As a Jewish kid growing up in New York City next to Blacks and Latins and Italians, at a time when there was still come solidarity between the Jewish and Black communities (this was during the civil rights movement), Simon belonged to a long tradition of Jewish musicians who felt a kinship with Black musicians, from Al Jolson and George Gershwin to Bob Dylan and Carole King. It's likely that both Biblical "Josephs" were dark-skinned, if not "black as night," and they both "walked their days under African skies" as exiles in Egypt. Not the first time African and Semitic cultures touched, and certainly not the last. The clue to this interpretation is the second verse, which I read as another link between two strains of religious "roots music." The woman singing is Linda Ronstadt, a Mexican-American woman who grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and tells the same story about her girlhood that Paul Simon tells in the song "Late in the Evening," that listening to music, from Catholic hymns and Mariachi Canciones, to Black Gospel, C&W, R&B and Brill-building Pop, "pulled her through," giving her the courage to leave her hometown. (She finally came back, but that's a different story.) So Graceland is "the story of how we begin to remember," the common roots of our different musical traditions, which have their origins in "the powerful pulsing of love in the vein," a love both physical (as in "sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll"), and spiritual, as in the ecstatic chants of the earliest religions. For the meaning of "the dream of falling," see my notes on "An American Tune." |
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| Paul Simon – All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints Lyrics | 16 years ago |
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I agree with most of what's been said. Simon, it seems to me, is talking about the hypocrisy of saying we value individuality (no two fingerprints are alike), while at the same time stereotyping entire groups out of prejudice (whether it's illegals, republicans, moslems, blacks, gays, evangelicals, or old white men) One classic racist remark from a few decades back is "All of you people look the same.") As I noted in my comments on the song "Graceland," I think a theme of the entire album is how deeply ambivalent Americans are about the powerful stream of African and African-American culture that runs through every part of our society. I don't know who the "former talk show host" is in the song (it's too soon to be about Arsenio Hall and too late to be about Phil Donahue, who lost his job to Oprah), but that person is clearly bitter about some act of prejudice that killed his career because he was a black, a gay, a jew, or what have you. His advice is to "learn to live alone," without trusting your fellow man. The clues that Simon is thinking about race are phrases like "ever since the watermelon," reminding us of the not so long ago days when it was okay to joke that all black people ate watermelon, and "black pit town," which not only refers to the "black pits" of a watermelon, but segregated black towns in America and black mining pit camps in South Africa. So, unless I'm reading too much into it, this is shorthand for the history of colonialism, which began with "army posts over the ocean somewhere" where people of color were conquered, "grew heavy," and later "grew bloody" as colonies finally threw off their conquerors in bloody revolutions. Or it could just be a song. :) |
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| Paul Simon – Graceland Lyrics | 18 years ago |
| Oh. And the "cradle of the civil war" not only refers to his own more or less "civil" breakup with Carrie Fisher, but to black slavery in the south which was the root cause of the War Between the States. | |
| Paul Simon – Graceland Lyrics | 18 years ago |
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The skeleton key to this song, and the whole album, is Paul Simon's song "Late in the Evening," which, I think, first appeared on the "One Trick Pony" soundtrack. The key is the line "it was late in the evening, and the music pulled me through..." The whole Graceland album braids three strands, Simon's own personal story of loss and love, the recurring power of African and African-American music to refresh the musical world, and the related power of that music to heal loss and love. So the "Graceland album," to me, is a "Canterbury Tales" pilgrimage back to the "roots of rhythm," in Africa, in Memphis, where black music jumped the barrier into white culture through Elvis' music, in New Orleans, where Zydeco continued the dialogue. And the song itself is about Simon healing his own pain by going back to his musical roots. IMHO |
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