30 Day Song Challenge: Day 11 (A Song From Your Favourite Band)

Choosing my favourite band turned out to be much harder than choosing my favourite song, since my favourite band is actually a Top 5 Favourite Bands In No Particular Order list. But in the end I settled on one of those 5 for today’s 30 Day Song Challenge, mostly since I haven’t spoken about this band here yet. Now, this band is really two bands, since they changed their lineup and sound in the 70s, moving from psychedelic pop to folksy rock & roll. It’s the second of these stages that constitutes my favourite band (not that there’s anything wrong with the 1960s pop band they were, I just prefer the hard rockin’ 70s lineup), and the song I chose is the one I think is the most rousing, from their most popular and musically tight album. I’m talking of course about Fleetwood Mac, with their shattering opus The Chain.

Rumours is an album fraught with gossip, backstabbing and suspicion, written at a time when the two couples in the band were going through acrimonious breakups, and each song is their way of exorcising some of their demons. The album is full of backhanded compliments and “see-if-I-care” bitterness, but The Chain is the song that brings them all together.

It begins with a haunting acoustic guitar riff and a low-key lyrical section full of heartbreak and misery, lines like “damn your love and damn your lies” spat through the guitars at each other. The chorus moves from anger to sadness and regret, the image of that broken chain pervading the lyrics, fantasies of possible futures lying in pieces on the floor.

But what lifts this song above the others on Rumours is the second half, when it shifts gear into a big, raucous coda. These last few minutes of The Chain are pure rock & roll: emotive guitars, vocals bellowed from the belly of heartache, whirling drums and an iconic bassline. The end of The Chain shows a note of hope, that maybe all is not lost here, that the chain will still keep them together. It could be an idle dream, or it could be a reconciliation. Either way, it’s a happy ending, a reversal of the resentment and hostility that previously damned their lost love.

I used to think that's what the song meant, but now I think that maybe there’s sarcasm involved here. It could be that the happy ending is one last “fuck you”, that the chain that keeps them together isn’t their old chain of love rebuilt, but rather one that chains them to their memories, despair that they’ll never be able to forget and will always be haunted by their past, have to live with this grief as though it were fresh everyday. Maybe it’s less a sincere “thanks for the good times” and more a sardonic “thanks for leaving me in inconceivable pain”.

Just like the song turns itself around at the end, so my interpretation of it has been turned around. I don’t know exactly what they mean by this song, whether it’s bitter or nostalgic, whether it represents a change of heart or a grudge taken to the next level. Either way, I still enjoy the song. Whether it’s ecstatic or angry doesn’t matter to me, because whatever they say in this song, it all ends up becoming nothing more than rumours.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 10 (A Song That Makes You Fall Asleep)

Speaking of David Gilmour and crazy musical geniuses, here’s a little Pink Floyd for Day 10.

Yes, this song can put me to sleep, not because it’s boring or uninteresting, but because I love falling asleep to it. In that foggy-brained half-life between sleep and waking Echoes can force your mind into strange places, making connections you never considered, dragging forth odd images and staining the insides of your eyelids with colours and flashes of light.

When you find yourself dozing on the couch, unable to stay awake, but lacking the energy to move to bed, play this song and close your eyes. The first sound of that sonar piano explodes onto the black canvas behind your eyelids in a dazzling barrage of light, like somnolent fireworks following every note around your brain.

Then you melt into backwards drums and a lazy guitar’s drawling phrases making you feel lightheaded. The world spins as if you were drunk on the music. The seabed forms inside your mind and languorous creatures swim through the jellied waters behind your eyes, a peaceful scene, a moment of quiet before the song opens out and rises to the surface of its psychedelic ocean.

Even if you’ve lost all muscle control, your nervous system shutting down and your brain not far behind, you still manage to wiggle a single toe to the rhythm, a rhythm that carries you along like the wake of a ship, ebbing and flowing, rising and falling, crests and troughs of music crashing into the surf of your unconsciousness.

And just as it begins to become hypnotic, just as you’re finding yourself at the brink of a dream, you’re pulled back into waking by a shrieking, unearthly and ungodly noise unprecedented in the wake of the funk. We’re at the bottom of it all again, an alien world on the ocean floor, an extraterrestrial soundscape, unnerving yet comforting, distracting yet languid. You slip once more to the edge of dreaming, your hallucinations informed now by the ethereal wailing of the deep.

And for the final time you wake, with those sonar fireworks once more making you jump a little, and the song again begins its hypnosis, dynamically revving up into its final swinging-watch move to lull you back to sleep and make you think that what came before has been a strange dream, which it certainly was.

You feel like you’re falling, slipping off a curb but never jerking awake, stuck in freefall along with the song’s cadence until your guts sink to your knees like going over the top of a rollercoaster, and all’s quiet again. You’re back at the beginning, on the ocean floor with the strange creatures, familiar and comforting and consistent now after the tidal forces of the song’s middle dragged you up and down and inside-out, left you gutted, floating in the halfway between bottom and surface, between awake and asleep.

In the end, Echoes leaves you broken and hollow on the beach, a piece of washed-up psychedelic driftwood startled and stunned by what you’ve seen. You can’t comprehend, you can barely remember, you’re fraught with snatches of terror and glimpses of hallucination, you don’t understand how or why your mind did what it did during the past 23 minutes: you’re intrigued and somehow empty, so you lift the needle, drop it back into the lead-in, and close your eyes and wait for it to happen all over again.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 9 (A Song You Can Dance To)

I really don’t know what to say about this song, except that it’s completely mad, she’s got the eyes of a person who’s startled to discover she’s been sectioned, and yes, I do know the dance.

I know the dance, and I will say that’s it’s some of the most fun you can have dancing, especially when you have a partner mirroring your moves, becoming a perfectly symmetrical Kate Bush facsimile.

I have no idea how she came up with this. Maybe she is genuinely mental, and this is how she dances on a day-to-day basis. Maybe she has a choreographer who’s on drugs. Or maybe it’s all an act designed to reflect Catherine’s slide into insanity as she obsesses over Heathcliff. But somehow, I don’t think so. I think Kate Bush is just plain mad. Brilliant, but quite mad.

I really am struggling to write anything sensible about this song, because it just doesn’t make any goddamn sense. As a pop tune, it’s top-class: it’s got a great singalong chorus (even if you sound like a Monty Python woman trying to hit those notes), a catchy piano riff, a lilting melody and an unforgettable music video.

As for the subject matter, only someone as outrageous as Kate Bush could write a quirky pop song about one of the darkest existential romance novels ever written. Why did she pick Wuthering Heights? Or, why did Wuthering Heights pick her to write a song about it? Maybe she was the only one who dared, or was the only one with her head far enough in the clouds of crazy to reckon that yes, a person utterly destroyed by the horror of unrequited love would make for a pretty upbeat tune.

I think that’s about all I can say about Wuthering Heights for now. This song always astounds me, and always makes me want to dance, even though I (and anyone who accompanies me) will end up looking like a total prat prancing around thinking I’m fog on the moors or something. But I’d recommend it to anyone. Learn the dance, and love it. I’ll make my last word a comment on an urban legend surrounding this song: I’d heard many times that the guitar solo was played by David Gilmour (off-of-out-of Pink Floyd), but a quick check on Wikipedia confirms that no, it’s not him.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 8 (A Song You Know All the Words To)

Now that I’ve gotten the history lesson out of the way, it’s time to talk about songs that are just plain brilliant.Today’s brief is a song I know all the words to. Even though I know the words to a lot of songs, I had to pick this one because I think it’s one of the most perfect songs ever written, musically and lyrically and dynamically, and to be honest I relish the chance to talk about it for a while. Day 8 of the 30 Day Song Challenge is a Springsteen Sunday.

This one really has everything. A great riff, a catchy chorus, a noisy breakdown, a kickback that makes you throw your fist in the air, and a hell of a sax solo. Springsteen is openly influenced by Dylan, and he once said of Like a Rolling Stone that the snare hit that opens that song “sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind”, and you can tell that he’s trying to emulate this in the opening of Born to Run, with that probably iconic drum run kicking open the door and dragging you away down a heat-hazy highway.

Then comes the riff, rolling around like the rims of a lowriding, souped-up muscle car, announcing all the joy and freedom and pure rock n’ roll to come. The layers of guitars scream at you like angry kids shouting obscenities as they drive by. This is a young man’s song: it’s angry, it’s ecstatic, it’s arrogant and it’s looking for a fight. That riff just dares you to disagree with it, challenging you not to listen to what’s coming.

And what’s coming is the usual angry young Springsteen story of escape, the same invitation he extends in Thunder Road, but this time more assured, more certain that the road is where he belongs. It’s a different girl this time---Wendy, not Mary---and it’s a different Bruce, it’s a Bruce who knows what he wants now, a Bruce who didn’t get it first time around and is trying again, more confident now that he needs to move on, that he was born to run. Once again he’s trying to talk a girl into coming with him, but he’s not taking no for an answer.

In Bruce Springsteen’s world, the road is the only place he can be himself. He can’t settle down, can’t stay in one place for too long, and probably can’t stay with one girl for too long. He says he was born to run, and he runs from women as much as he runs from places. He seems to be convinced that he’s in love with Wendy, “with all the madness in [his] soul”, but I’m not convinced, and I don’t think I should be. I don’t think it matters exactly which girl he runs with, as long as he’s got someone.

And, really, that’s true of everyone (not to make an egregious generalization about the whole human race with nothing to back it up, but hey, this is rock and roll, not science). It doesn’t matter all that much who we run with, as long as we’re not alone. You can love someone with all the madness in your soul, or you can barely tolerate them. Either way, you’ll never be bored on the road.

But after all this insight (well, possible insight: I could be reading too much into this), there comes the sax solo. Raucous and rough and furious, you can tell Clarence loves to play. You can see him wiggling across the stage, taking tiny steps, swinging his shoulders, eyes closed and cheeks rounded, putting all his soul into his horn. As much as Bruce’s youthful energy makes this song toe the line of greatness, I think it’s Clarence’s solo that pushes it over the edge.

And after it crosses that line of cool, the whole song goes into freefall, slipping down the chromatic scale until there’s only noise and chaos, like the wind roaring in the rolled-down windows of a car racing down the highway, Bruce and Wendy holding hands over the gearstick, communicating in looks because they can’t hear a word each other says.

Then, finally, Bruce manages to shout over the cacophony, counting in, and everything falls into place. The song shifts gear and they’re on their way to their place in the sun. You can’t really help but throw your fist in the air and share their triumph. This is another song that ends before it begins, but it’s the same deal as Thunder Road here: it doesn’t matter where they go, but this time they’re more certain. This time they know they’ll make it, and nothing can stop them.

So, back to the beginning, and the reasons why this song is one of the best. It’s got it all: excitement, romance, drama and a big ending. It takes you up, it takes you down, it drags you out of your little world and shows you what could be. With that stumbling drum roll in the beginning, it kicks open the door to your mind and invades your consciousness, and there’s nothing you can do about it.