Week One- Ira

I'm only putting 4 of the 8 on here because this assignment turned into something entirely too long.
“Let It Bleed”- The Rolling Stones
The first song I really became obsessed with in 2008, “Let It Bleed” is the title track off of the Stones’ 1969 classic LP. As a young kid growing up in Southeast Missouri where the only radio station playing anything remotely good was the classic rock station 100.7 KGMO, I was nourished on The Rolling Stones’ radio hits, unaware of the riches to be found within their albums (particularly those from 1968-72). Compared with the schizophrenia and terror of “Gimme Shelter” and the choral grandiosity of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, “Let It Bleed” finds the Stones back in their natural habitat, a smoky barroom filled with cheap drugs, cheap beer, and even cheaper sex. Starting with a lone acoustic guitar, the song takes off with two shots from Charlie Watts’ snare drum. Mick Jagger sounds weary and defeated in his first line of the song, “Well we all need someone we can lean on, And if you want it you can lean on me.” Backed by a great piano and autoharp part, “Let It Bleed” steadily gains intensity as an increasingly horny Jagger switches out “lean” for “dream”, then “cream”, and finally “bleed.” The Rolling Stones can pull off a chorus like no other band, with backing vocals further contributing to the sleazy barroom vibe.

“White Winter Hymnal/ Ragged Wood”- Fleet Foxes
I realize this is two songs here, but they segue so well I find it hard to listen to one without the other. I lived in Shanghai this summer for about five weeks while studying abroad. Surrounded by skyscrapers and coated in a blanket of haze, at times I caught myself thinking about the blue summer skies and open fields and trees of Missouri. Fleet Foxes’ organic harmonies and rustic instrumentation provided the perfect remedy to this lack of natural beauty. “White Winter Hymnal” starts with just Robin Pecknold’s voice until his fellow Foxes join him in harmony creating a song that sounds like a sleigh ride with the steady thump of the bass drum and ringing acoustic guitars. A split-second of silence separates “White Winter Hymnal” and “Ragged Wood” before Pecknold and company sound their own full-throated “barbaric YAWP”, in the American tradition. “Ragged Wood” is a high-spirited song. I found myself able to close my eyes in my dorm room in China and imagine myself three thousand miles across the sea in the remaining natural areas of America.

“AT&T”- Pavement
Wowee Zowee by Pavement will forever be associated with driving back and forth from school. I got the album at Slackers down in Columbia during the spring semester of my freshman year, and it’s been in my car rotation ever since. Kanye, My Morning Jacket, Arcade Fire, and Bob Dylan have come and gone but Wowee Zowee in its fat reissue case has remained lodged in my center-console for almost a year. My favorite song off of Wowee Zowee, for now at least, “AT&T” finds Pavement at their abstract best, still sounding like slackers but doing it with style and poise. This track contains some of my favorite Stephen Malkmus wordplay, including “Maybe someone’s gonna save me/ My heart is made of gravy/ And the laps I swim from lunatics don’t count” and “Spritzer on ice in New York City/ Isn’t it a pity/ You never had anything to mix with that.” Malkmus’ lead guitar work on this song is phenomenal, snaking its way into the song around the half-minute mark, twisting up and around the vocals, and exploding with Malkmus’ stuttered lyric of “Whenever, when-ne-ne-neverrrr ever I feel fine/ I’m gonna walk away/ From all this and all that.” A difficult song to interpret lyrically, “AT&T” provides me company and something to ponder over as I make my North-South pilgrimage through Missouri.

“Anything You Want”- Spoon
Hundreds of songs exist extolling the virtues of being sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and even twenty-one. Songs about being nineteen, my age for most of 2008, are much harder to find. I discovered “Anything You Want” before I turned nineteen, but the song didn’t really take on any importance for me until I graduated into the last of my teen years. When Britt Daniel sings the last verse of the song I encounter a weird feeling of pre-nostalgia, like I’m looking back on myself at the age of nineteen from the future, thinking about how great things were back when I was still in college. The verse discussed reads, “And now time is my time time is my own/ And I feel so alive yet feel so alone/ Cause you know you’re the one and that that hasn’t changed/ Since you were nineteen and still in school waiting on a light/ On the corner by Sound Exchange.” As I close in on entering my twenties, I’m savoring “Anything You Want” as much as possible.