Since June 2019, Craig Wright has tracked a standout song that he listened to every day. So each week (or so, give us a break) our editor will release a playlist of songs that have nothing to do with each other, make no sequential sense, and lack any overlying theme. Some are brand new discoveries, others are long-ingrained favorites; some will be completely unfamiliar, others completely inescapable. No matter what, each song is worth praising and one that ruled his day.
These songs were selected during the week of May 28- June 3.
Saturday, May 28: “When You Dance I Can Really Love” — Neil Young Rust Never Sleeps (1979 film version)
The Jawa roadies perfectly set the stage, both literally and figuratively, for Rust Never Sleeps, an untouchable concert film and live album. The early acoustic set is a wonderful, playful mix of then-new songs and Neil Young classics, but once Crazy Horse hits the stage the performance erupts. Neil’s high-knee foot tapping, and the band huddled up during extended, shoulder-to-shoulder jams all mark signature Crazy Horse stage activity, but no one can really mimic that band by simply repeating their motions. Their ability to pivot between incredibly tight songs and loose cosmic jams is unmatched. The beautiful melodies and fuzzy solos Young can wrangle out of Ol’ Black will always be a wonder. The force with which Crazy Horse kicks into “When You Dance I Can Really Love” is why live music will forever be powerful. As great as the After The Gold Rush original is, this version launches the concert to a whole other level that the rest of the film maintains.
Sunday, May 29: “I’m With You Love” — Richard Marks Now-Again Reserve: Richard Marks Lost Sessions (1969-1977)
Any song that fades in with someone commanding you to “Listen” better be worth your time. This one certainly is.
I first heard Richard Marks’ “I’m With You Love” on a compilation called Strange World from Pyramid Records (a sub-label of Cairo Records, itself an affiliate of the legendary Mississippi Records). Strange World is billed as a cosmic doo-wop and R&B collection, with its alluring, reflective silver record sleeve being a selling point on its own. This acoustic version of “I’m With You Love” is such a gentle song filled with beautiful harmonies. Just two voices and one guitar but you can feel the weight of a relationship on the brink, with Marks giving his all to keep it vitalized. You can hear Marks as a guitar-slinging frontman on the equally compelling “I’m The Man For You” and the electric take of “I’m With You Love,” but this is where his talents are most impressive. His voice just has that inexplicable quality that invites you in and holds you while the guitar transfixes you. If The Stooges were Raw Power in electric rock n’ roll form, this is hushed soul music equally deserving of the descriptor.
Monday, May 30: “The Eternal Sphynx” — Sun Ra Crystal Spears (1975)
Though Sun Ra is eternal, I’m writing this on his Earthly departure day. I recently read about 100 pages on two plane rides of Space Is The Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra by John Szwed. The book is fascinating and fantastically written. It does a great job of both humanizing and mythologizing Saturn’s finest musician and the inimitable Arkestra he created. It shows how he drew philosophies from the Bible and ancient Egypt and used truly avant garde practices to both guide and mystify his musicians. One favorite story is when he’d tell his band the world might end if someone played a wrong note at a gig — then he’d instruct one soloist to play every note a half step higher than the rest of the band to force the Arkestra to react in real time.
Sun Ra’s catalog seems impenetrable and intimidating to jump into at first, but I’ve found his music a lot easier to grasp when you have a sense of who Sonny was as a person — or interstellar being. His wisdom jumps from the page, and this quote in particular stood out, having read it the day after the Uvalde school shooting when politicians were offering their scripted thoughts and prayers:
“I am beginning to wonder if conscience isn’t like intellect — you either have it or you don’t. The majority of the people in the world don’t think, they dodge social problems and many other things which puncture their ego. Is it because they don’t have the brain? Some of them, maybe? Then what about conscience? … Sometimes I think it is an abnormality to want to help others and to care about anything but self. The world is so selfish that sometimes I don’t care whether I live or die. I’ve tried to be selfish and unthinking, conscienceless, but I can’t.”
Sun Ra could solve a lot of the world’s problems if people would only listen. This song is as good of a starting point as any.
Tuesday, May 31: “Need To Belong To Someone” — Isaac Hayes Black Moses (1971)
What a perfect melody. The best Isaac Hayes songs feel like an entire world. This one is about as big as a song can feel, with gorgeous strings and horns that elevate it into the stratosphere. Though this song is buried in the middle of the double-disc epic Black Moses, it still manages to pop out among a 94-minute record stacked with great tracks. This was Hayes’ follow up to the smash-hit Shaft soundtrack, and “Need To Belong To Someone” is the one that best lives up to that amazing fold-out record sleeve. Play it as loud as those speakers can handle.
Wednesday, June 1: “Starlings Of The Slipstream” — Pavement Brighten The Corners (1997)
Pavement has a way of combining Stephen Malkmus’ simple “aa oooooohs” with those slow, on-the-beat chords in a chorus into something far more affecting than it should be. In “Starlings Of The Slipstream,” they use huge open chords to lead a story of cryptic voyeurism and almost-nonsensical ramblings in the outro. Yet they still make it feel like a singalong. Then the prettiness of the first two thirds delves into a chaotic mess, with Malkmus and Spiral Stairs turning their feedback into a harmonious duet for a final embellishment. This is what Pavement does best: they make the nonsensical completely logical, they balance feedback with pristine chords, and it’s all catchy as hell.
Thursday, June 2: “Human Race” — Neil Young & Crazy Horse Barn (2021)
The documentary of making the new Neil Young and Crazy Horse album, Barn, is now up on YouTube. Seeing Crazy Horse at work is a joy, and you can tell how much they valued this recording time after being separated during the pandemic. And though some of the album inevitably has some crotchedy energy in it, “Human Race” is where they harness the anger and disappointment in the world and how unfair it is to hand this damaged planet off to future generations: “Who’s going to tell / The children of destiny / That we didn’t try to save the world for them?” Young throws in some of his fuzziest and bendiest solos in years and his vocals are incendiary. As long as Neil is beefing with Monsanto, Spotify, and bros with expensive microphones, he can’t be called a hypocrite for trying to fight for a future worth living in.
(Perhaps this week’s double dose of Neil films is a foreshadow of things to come, or maybe it was just a Neil Young kind of week.)
Friday, June 3: “He Don’t Like Country Music And He Hates Little Kids” — Swamp Dogg Don’t Give Up On Me: The Lost Country Album
This is one of the greatest song titles of all time, and Swamp Dogg delivers a country tune that is able to stand up to that monumental moniker. In it he’s advising a friend on a new relationship with a guy who drinks champagne instead of beer and gets all the other essentials of life wrong too. “I tell ya he’d steal from a blind man’s cup / He cheated me in cards / And he’ll cheat you in love.” But perhaps the biggest red flag is that this new guy in question can’t stand kids or country songs. With a great chorus-pedal-heavy lead guitar line, Swamp Dogg lays out his advice to run from this guy and find someone who listens to Dolly Parton instead. In the end, the song turns into a love letter to country as Swamp Dogg lists his favorite country artists, rhyming Johnny Cash with “If he don’t like country he ain’t nothing but trash.”
Swamp Dogg’s 1969 album Total Destruction To Your Mind is a soul-funk masterpiece, which makes his recent auto-tune albums about heartbreak and more country-based material seem like outliers in his catalog. But he’s always explored different styles, and this song comes from his lost country album. No matter what he’s working on, Swamp Dogg is worth checking in on, and he keeps pushing his boundaries as he approaches age 80.
Read Certain Songs Part 1 and Part 2
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