An old man's wrinkly smile at the plus one.
Brian Wilson - "Midnight's Another Day"
(4:17, 8.00mb)
That Lucky Old Sun, 2007.
mp3 available from brianwilson.com (or usually is - when I just checked it the site seemed to be down).

This blog has been a bit quiet recently because I've got a PhD thesis to write. I still have a thousand songs I want to tell the world about. Anyway, my girlfriend, Jadey of pet_studies fame, this year started doing a PhD thesis on the Beach Boys, and this means that I will have to overhear/listen to the Beach Boys incessantly for another 2 and a half years at the least. It's a good thing that a lot of the tasty delights of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys are subtle, and only enfold after a few listens. This song appears to contain several of those tasty delights.

"Midnight's Another Day" is easily the best thing Brian Wilson has written for at least 20 years. Apparently from some song cycle called That Lucky Old Sun, the song has a sparse, dignified sadness to it, the song of a man who's been to some dark places but somehow survived. The song has a strange restlessness to it, a sense of having lived through it, which prevents it from being saccharine despite the 'love conquers all' theme of the lyrics, and there's enough of those unexpected Brian Wilson Chords. Brian sounds there on the vocal take, avoiding that odd nasal barking he's had a habit of falling into at times.

You get the impression that That Lucky Old Sun, when and if it gets released (the amount of unreleased Brian Wilson solo work out there), might be an old's man wrinkly SMiLE, what with Van Dyke Parks helping out with the lyrics like he did on SMiLE, and what sounds like the SMiLE backing band playing in a subtle and suitable style.

Okkervil River - "Plus Ones"
(3:43, 9.57mb)
Track 5, The Stage Names, 2007.

You probably all know this by now, seeing as they mention it in every review of the album, but the general conceit of the song "Plus Ones" is that the lyrics use clever references to pop songs with numbers in the title. Plus one. We're talking about the 100th Luftballoon, talking about the 51st way to leave your lover, shooting up 9 miles high, and being in Cell 45. It's the kind of songwriting lyrical virtuosity that you can't help but admire. The thing that makes the lyrics, and the song good, though, isn't this lyrical conceit, but the way it is used to suggest the theme of things just being around for a bit too long, of not having anything left; the song, at heart, is about a relationship that's just faded away slowly until there's nothing left. Considering that The Stage Names, if anything, is a concept album about what it's really like to be in Okkervil River, the girl the song was written for was probably a 'plus one' on a guestlist somewhere, somewhen - one of the few perks of being the partner of a musician. So there's some sort of resonance with the wider themes of the album, too.

What's interesting to me about this song, beyond its fantastic lyrics, lovely melody, and interesting instrumentation (not to mention the way the guitar meanders for a couple of seconds before the song starts for real, which for some reason catches me), is this: Will Scheff stole my idea. Couple of years ago, I wrote a song where the lyrics were largely based clever inversions of commercial pop songs - sample line: "you wanted a river, but I could only cry you a creek". I think I was trying to make some point about what someone's music taste suggested about them. My song also had the same, well, end-of-relationship theme as well (though Sheff's song is considerably more charitable in tone than mine). It's a strange feeling to hear a song that's doing many of the same things that a song you've written does, except that it does it better; Sheff's song is more elegant, flows better and has more poetry in the lyrics. Maybe this is what it's like to be Noel Gallagher or the guy from Jet. In the end, though, his song is his and mine is mine; we're expressing different feelings in different ways, despite some family resemblance.

I never really got into their last album, Black Sheep Boy, beyond the sheer Bluebottle Kiss-esque emotional intensity of "For Real". Maybe I should go back and listen again; The Stage Names is an incredibly strong album, full of interesting ideas and hooks and sounds. Maybe it would have been better to write a post about "John Allyn Smith Sails" instead. "John Allyn Smith Sails" is not only equally as impressive as "Plus Ones", but it also manages to reinterpret "Sloop John B" (made famous by the Beach Boys) as an ironic metaphor for death and suicide. There would have been a certain elegant poetry to the post, it would have flowed better.

But fuck that.

tim.
PS. Note to Will Sheff: what about not needing your loving on the ninth day of the week, not being fucked trying to walk the five hundred and first mile, the leaky boat sinking in the seventh month, the 20th nervous breakdown, 12:01am in a perfect world, or the forgotten eighth nation in the army, or the 36th rainy day woman? and of course there's the one after 909.