Sixteen Song Moments

Each song is a series of moments. Here are some that I hold dear.

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Many of us who write about music are doubtless aware of the choices we face when deciding on what detail to include. If I were to generalise, I’d say that those choices tend to fall into two main categories. On the one hand, there’s context, or ‘backstory’—what we want our readers to know about how a piece of music was made or why it’s significant to a moment in history or in someone’s life. On the other, there’s content—what we hear in the music that we want to draw others’ attention to.

Like many music writers, I veer between these two dominant areas. And, like many who write mostly about songs rather than instrumental music, I tend to deal with the ‘content’ part by looking for evidence in the words of songs. I try to be careful with this. I try, firstly, to always check that the words I’m quoting are what I can hear in a studio recording or a live performance. I learned early on that it was not a good idea to rely on lyrics printed in records or CDs. Later, when it became more usual to look online for lyrics, I treated them with caution even as I found them useful.¹ I also try to attend to the way words sound as they are sung, how they are phrased, stretched or broken up, what human aspects I think I can hear in the voice (place, age, experience, emotion), how the voice interacts with other instruments, how it’s placed in the mix, and so on.

Here, I want to think about song content in a way that goes beyond the words in songs. I want to think about sounds, by focussing on some of my favourite in-song sounds, moments that jump out of a song and grab me.

What follows is an unavoidably subjective list. I suspect, though, that some of my examples are readily recognisable to others inasmuch as the artists clearly intended them to have an effect. Some of the examples include words, because I remain fascinated by what happens when a singer does something with a line, or when a voice sets up a contrast with another voice in the service of lyrical narrative. Others are about the sound of instruments, production decisions or other sonic moments that never fail to elicit a reaction.

Over the years, when I’ve tried to write about some of these details, I’ve been influenced by the cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Often, when Barthes wrote about literature, music or the visual arts, he would frame his reflections through binary concepts. He would set up contrasts between ‘pleasure’ and ‘bliss’ when discussing texts (The Pleasure of the Text and other writings); between the ‘pheno song’ and ‘geno song’ when reacting to singers (in ‘The Grain of the Voice’); and between the studium and punctum when analysing photographs (Camera Lucida). As is the case with many binaries, Barthes’ categories would often blur or disintegrate within the very texts he used to establish them, but they remain useful provocations for thinking about texts of various kinds.

While it might seem more obvious for someone who writes mostly about singers, songwriters and songs to borrow the concepts Barthes used for thinking about voices, I’ve often found myself thinking more in terms of his writing about photography, and therefore about studium and punctum. The former is the term he uses to describe the cultural ‘participat[ion] in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions’ of a scene, what the photograph might most obviously be said to be about. The punctum, meanwhile, is an ‘element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces’ the viewer.

I think it’s the suddenness of the punctum that appealed to me when I first read Camera Lucida many years ago and that made me want to connect the concept to the act of listening. If music is an unfolding in time, then those sudden moments of punctuation that make a listener smile, shout out, nod ruefully, gesticulate, or silently affirm or reject a sonic suggestion are, for me, the elements that rise from the studium that is the rest of the song.

It’s not a perfect concept by any means. For a start, Barthes makes clear that puncta are not things that photographers intentionally put into their work to get these kinds of reactions; they are more like accidental details that grab a viewer for subjective reasons to do with that viewer’s experience and/or perception. It is the studium that delivers the intention of the photograph. As many of the details that speak to me in songs seem clearly intended to have an effect, this is one obvious flaw with my adoption of Barthes’ concept.

Another would be my awareness that a song might contain several puncta. If I think of some of the recent examples of recordings that had me reacting more outwardly as I listened (one sign for me that I am experiencing a more than usually intense moment), then I can think of it happening several times within a few minutes of music.

This second problem concerns me less, though it does make me wonder whether Barthes’ ways of approaching still images can be applied to moving ones. I believe they can, though will leave it to those with more expertise in film studies than I to comment on that. If anything, the possibility that there could be multiple puncta in a given song serves as a reminder that each song is made up of smaller elements anyway and not perceived as a ‘whole’ in the way a photograph can be. Which is not to say that looking at a photograph or painting isn’t also a temporal experience: it is, but temporality works differently in viewing than in listening.

So much for theory. How about some examples? Below are some of the clips I immediately thought about when I decided to write on this topic (one or two of them gave me the idea, in fact) and some that came to me as I was writing about the others. This made the piece something of an experiment; what I thought I was going to do at the outset only partially matches what happened in the end, as I found myself focussing in on a particular area of my listening life.

In each case I’ve made an audio clip of the detail I wanted to focus on, cut from the longer recording so that I can amplify it. This is another major difference to what Barthes does in Camera Lucida, where he will present the whole photograph and then mention the unexpected detail that jumps out at him. But it’s quicker for a viewer to jump from the whole to the detail when looking at a photograph—that different temporality I mentioned—and so I’ve taken the decision to present short clips.

Like time, of which it is a reflection and a distillation, a song is a series of moments. These are some of the ones that I hold dear.

First off, a moment in a song intro that always fires me up. It’s the slide down the neck of the guitar that Bruce Springsteen uses to move from the intro riff of ‘Badlands’ to the start of the first verse. On the studio version on Born to Run, it appears around the 15-second mark (slightly earlier in the clip below) after four plays of the main riff. Fifteen seconds doesn’t sound like long to wait but, perhaps because I’m anticipating this moment, it always feels like one too many bars to me.

It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment (what is the auditory form of blinking?), but for me—and I believe for many fans—it’s a crucial part of the song, and one that always features in live performances. When I saw Springsteen in a rainy football stadium in Sunderland in 2012, ‘Badlands’ was the first track he and the band played, instantly lifting the mood of the dampened crowd. That time, Springsteen prefaced the count-in to the intro with a quip about the weather: ‘This is what it’s supposed to be like. I don’t want to see no 75 degrees and sunny. When I come to Sunderland, England, I want it just like this’. When I saw him in the same venue last month, with even wetter weather and a longer wait for the show to start, he trolled us by opening with ‘Waitin’ on a Sunny Day’. We had to wait until further into the set for ‘Badlands’; when it came, it was met with the usual enthusiasm and I thrilled once more to that pre-verse guitar slide.

My next examples are from indie/lo-fi rock of the late 1990s/early 2000s. Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump has remained a favourite album since it first appeared in 2000. Of the many things that have appealed to me about this set of songs, I’d have to mention the mixture of nature and technology both in the lyrical themes and in the instrumentation and production. I’ve previously written about that at some length, especially in relation to the album’s epic opening track ‘He’s Simple He’s Dumb He’s the Pilot’. Here’s an extract from a piece I published last year, this part focussing on the first of several musical transitions that happens in the track.

“‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot’ opens with birdsong and what sounds like a banjo (actually a harpsichord setting on a Casio keyboard), the same kind of clunky, hissy, slightly-off country style essayed at the time by peers such as Beck, Mercury Rev, Lambchop or Wilco. Even the vocal fits a certain kind of alt.country style, rooted in the high lonesome melancholy of Neil Young. But there is a sense, as the singer mouths the drift-based lyric, that something else is afoot.

This premonition is fuelled by the ‘control booth’ voice that intones ‘Are you ready?’ just after the one-minute mark and is then strengthened as the soundscape suddenly shifts to reveal the slick synth-cruise of the song’s next section. The sudden application of high gloss after a build-up of static encourages listeners to question what has gone before: was that really birdsong or clever tape manipulation? Where does the natural end and the technological begin? Who is speaking and singing? What are the tonal and textural centres of this music? Where are we, as listeners, supposed to position ourselves?”

The clip below highlights the moment of transition from rough to smooth.

I also want to pick another of the many moments I cherish in this recording. It comes near the end of the track. Following two lengthy, overlapping passages in which Lytle repeats the same lines (‘Are you givin’ in 2000 Man?’ from 4:00 interspersed with ‘Did you love this world and did this world not love you?’ from 5:30, both sung over slowly chugging keyboards, guitar and drums with twitchy interference textures emerging occasionally), a high-pitched sound suddenly takes the foreground to offer an ecstatic melody. I’ve never been quite sure what it is, but have assumed it to be a theremin-like effect on one of the keyboards (in live performances, such as this one, the melody is played on guitar; I don’t think it’s guitar on the studio version, but am happy to be corrected).

This, for me, is one of those in-between sounds: part instrument, part voice. It reminds me of vocal performances such as Clare Torry’s on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ (Torry, incidentally, said she was trying to sound more like an instrument than a singer when she recorded for that track).

To another transition, this time between two songs on Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic 1998 album In the Aeroplane over the Sea. This is an album I used to listen to a lot, especially when on the move. Again, there are many moments I treasured on the album, with the pinnacle usually being Michelle Anderson’s uilleann pipes on the penultimate track, ‘Untitled’. It’s the only instrumental track on an album where words and vocals are so important, making it slightly unusual to pick as a moment, yet I’ve always found it cathartic after what has gone before and preparatory for the album’s final, vocal-led track.

The transition from the previous track ‘Ghost’ into ‘Untitled’ is what sets this up so well and so I’ve included that as my audio clip.

Commenters under one YouTube upload of ‘Untitled’ discuss it as a pivotal point in the album, with some declaring it their favourite track even though it’s the only one not featuring lyrics or Mangum’s essential vocals. ‘This moment is so cathartic’, says one, ‘it feels like the ultimate triumph of good over evil in the context of the album’.

Another moment I might pick from this album—though I’m not including it as a clip here—would be the way it closes, with Mangum bringing it to an end with the line ‘don’t hate her when she gets up to leave’, at which point the music stops and we hear other noises being picked up by the microphone: the singer laying his guitar down, perhaps, and getting up to leave. That meta-level ‘sound of the recording process’ is something that Neutral Milk Hotel and Grandaddy both focussed on; indeed, it was something of a production trend at the time, perhaps as a response to the increasing perfection and silence of digital recording.

I love the way that Willie Nelson opens so many of his songs, especially in live performance, by playing around with timing and phrasing, letting his love of jazz suggest several ways that the song might proceed. One of my all-time favourite performances is his rendition of Rodney Crowell’s ‘'Til I Gain Control Again’ that first appeared on his 1978 album Willie and Family Live, and which I first heard on the excellently titled compilation Greatest Hits (& Some That Will Be).

The performance is full of brilliant moments, but the one I’ve chosen to highlight is the start of the second verse. The song is starting to come into form at this point and soon it will build to the chorus. Trigger, Nelson’s trusted guitar, is already hinting at the way the melody will go, but with typical nods to other possibilities. (Talk about puncta: Trigger is one of the finest punctuators out there, as well as being Nelson’s second voice. Evidence of that is all over ‘Gain Control’). The band are ready to come in. Nelson still wants to tarry with the lyric, setting up a small but significant pause between ‘I have never gone so wrong as to telling lies’ and ‘to you’. The line, as Crowell wrote and sang it, is already slightly long, requiring singers to add a couple more syllables than they or we might expect. Other interpreters—Emmylou Harris, Crystal Gayle, even the habitual lyric-manipulator Van Morrison—will speed up or rephrase slightly to deliver the line as one smooth whole. Nelson’s slight pause adds drama and uncertainty: will he get through the line? Will the song go off course? He does, it doesn’t, and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica is there to bring it home, echoing and anticipating Nelson’s vocal with its high lonesome presence.

Nelson and Trigger could provide me with so many examples of musical puncta, but I’m going to select two moments where, for me, Nelson provides the studium for another singer to punctuate. The first is a duet he recorded with Merle Haggard, a leisurely, beautifully paced version of David Lynn Jones’s ‘When Times Were Good’ which the pair included on their 1987 album Seashores of Old Mexico. It’s a critically unloved album, but I’ve long had a soft spot for it, and ‘When Times Were Good’ is one of the main reasons. At 6:39, it’s a long track by country standards, plenty of time to set up a studium. Nelson and Trigger start the song wonderfully, with a stark vocal and minimal guitar, soon joined by some equally lowkey piano. This sets the pace and the dramatic development as the band instrumentation gradually builds the song towards a chorus that Nelson attacks in his lonesomest register. For me, though, the standout has always been the moment more than three minutes into the song when, following a relaxed instrumental break, Haggard’s voice takes up the narrative. In two drawn-out lines—‘There’s a Golden Eagle rollin’ out of Memphis / And a country singer still lost between the lines’—we get to ride the rolling slopes of Haggard’s voice, its breaking highs and creaking lows, the moments where the voice dips or drops out momentarily, just enough of a catch in the throat for us to get the sense of weariness the singer is carrying, channelling an almost paralysing burden of memory, loss and nostalgia.

When I was working on my book The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music, I was inspired by country voices like those of Haggard and Hank Williams and I ended up using the idea of the ‘vocal tear’ that I borrowed from a wonderful essay on Williams by Richard Leppert and George Lipsitz. Leppert and Lipsitz play on the double meaning of ‘tear’ in ‘vocal tear’ to refer to both ‘weeping and pulling apart’ as trademarks of emotionality in Williams’s voice. They note the use of the vocal tear in the work of Patsy Cline too and, to me, it seems as good a term as any to describe those moments in Merle Haggard’s singing when his voice drops out of or down from the song’s main register. These moments are usually timed to coincide with particularly emotional words in the song text, providing further layers of meaning, or even subverting the meaning of the lyrics. At these points, the singer sounds choked up, unable to communicate, while actually communicating very effectively. Such moments also ‘tear’ the song line, messing with the continuity of semantics, melody and rhythm. In the terminology I’m lifting from Barthes, each tear/drop offers a punctum in contrast to the studium of the surrounding performance. Nicholas Dawidoff, meanwhile, describes such moments in Haggard’s art as ‘the unexpected wrinkles of feeling that put the ache in his sad songs’, which is an equally valid visual metaphor. (That line comes from Dawidoff’s seminal In the Country of Country.)

Another duet in which I hear Nelson as the studium and his singing partner as the punctum is his collaboration with Sinéad O’Connor on a cover of Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’. It appears on one of my favourite Willie Nelson albums, 1993’s Across the Borderline. It’s another long track (6:58), with plenty of space for the two singers and their fellow musicians to establish a stately, elegant setting. Nelson’s on superb form, wringing pathos out of the lyric and doing a brilliant job with phrasing, timing and register. But it’s when O’Connor takes over for the choruses that I feel the hairs on my neck bristle and give myself over completely to the reassurance the singer is giving. It’s a stark kind of comfort; breathy and effervescent, it feels like it might fade away at any moment. Yet it lingers, delivering the message that the song has been created to deliver. It feels both truncated and elongated, a harbouring moment that contains miniature moments within it: a catch of breath here, a jump in register there, the lightning switch between singing and whispering.

Voices that catch always catch me out. They’re supposed to, aren’t they? That’s one of the reasons why I say that most of these musical puncta I’m identifying are hardly accidental in the way that Barthes’ photographic ones were. When a singer sings her voice into cracking, breaking and going-into-whisper, it’s as likely to be the result of craft as accident. (It can be accident too, of course, and popular music is rife with happy accidents that were captured and became iconic.)

What Gillian Welch does with her voice on pivotal lines in ‘I Had a Real Good Mother and Father’ is a fine example. The third line in each verse features a sharp uplift on the penultimate syllable, taking Welch’s voice into a higher register, creating a small break, or what the musicologist Tim Wise might call a ‘yodeleme’: not quite a full-on yodel, but a form of ‘word-breaking’ nonetheless. The uplift is there in Washington Phillips’ late 1920s recording of ‘I Had a Good Father and Mother’—doubtless a reference point for Welch—but, while I can think of several musical moments from Phillips’ enchanting recordings that I might single out for punctum status, it is Welch’s vocal on this song, and especially her delivery of ‘converted’ in the second verse, that grabs me every time.

In ‘Good-Bye’, the song that closes the first side of Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely LP, the contextualising narrative tells a familiar story of lovers who swore to never forget each other. This is contrasted with the repeated moments where Sinatra almost shouts ‘But that was long ago’, followed by a more melodic, reflective ‘You’ve forgotten I know’. The general situation of the song, its studium, is not the present in which the singer finds himself but rather the past he keeps trying to revisit; this is the world in which he’s trying to live, the ‘place I can go in my memory’ as David Lynn Jones put it in ‘When Times Were Good’. This studium is punctured by the real truth that constantly returns the rememberer to the present and to his actual solitude, a process emphasised in ‘Good-Bye’ by Sinatra’s bellowing vocal.

This always jumps out at me more obviously the first time he sings the ‘long ago’ line, where it’s more surprising. When it recurs later in the song, the ground is prepared by the swelling of the orchestra.

Vocal undulation is a recurring feature of Only the Lonely. Throughout, Sinatra’s voice rises and falls like a man attempting to rally but slipping back into gloom and despondency. Writing about ‘Ebb Tide’, a track on the album’s second side, Will Friedwald connects the rising and falling of the orchestra to the techniques used by Debussy in La Mer and pursues the maritime metaphor to claim that Sinatra ‘floats rhythmically as if on a life raft’. For Bob Dylan, writing in Chronicles, this was the song in which he felt he ‘could hear everything in [Sinatra’s] voice—death, God and the universe, everything.’

My next example comes from Portuguese fado, the urban folk music that I spent a long time researching in the early 2000s and which became the subject of my first book in 2010. It’s not such a huge jump from Sinatra; the great fadista Carlos do Carmo described Sinatra as ‘the best fado singer I ever heard’. He was thinking about how slight changes in phrasing, timing and emphasis make each fado performance different, just as they do in jazz singing.

One of the contemporary artists who I listened to a lot when working on the book was Mariza. I still recall the first time I saw her performing on Portuguese television when I was living in Lisbon, and I have equally vivid memories of the first time I attended one of her concerts. She’s one of the few singers I’ve seen live whose first uttered words made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

I’m choosing a live version of the song that opened Mariza’s debut album Fado em Mim in 2001. I listened to that album a lot but came to know the live version of ‘Loucura’ through its release on the album and DVD Live in London in 2004. There are two moments from this performance that grab me. The first is the opening line of the song: ‘Sou do fado / Como sei / Vivo um poema cantado / De um fado que eu inventei’ (I was made for fado [lit. I’m from fado] / How do I know / I live a poem sung / From a fado [song] that I invented). It’s dramatic and attention-grabbing in the studio version on Fado em Mim, but Mariza and her band ramp up that drama in the live rendition. Where the studio version has her singing over the guitars, here they pause while Mariza lets the silence hang for a few seconds before and after the delivery of ‘sou do fado’.

Fado songs are full of references to guitars, singers and silences, all part of evoking the atmosphere for the obligatory saudade that the genre epitomises. Fado can often also work on a meta level: a lot of fados are about fado itself (it reminds me of country music in this way). Here, Mariza and her fellow musicians—Luís Guerreiro on guitarra portuguesa, António Neto on acoustic guitar and Fernando Baptista De Sousa on acoustic bass—emphasise not only the drama of the lyric, but also the dynamics of fado performance, especially as presented in the context of a concert such as this one.

There are several more moments in this performance of ‘Loucura’ (Madness) that offer opportunities for Mariza to display her dramatic style. The following one from the middle of the song deploys another use of silence ahead of the lines ‘Então não havia fado / Nem fadistas como eu sou’ (Then there would be no fado / nor fadistas such as I). First comes ‘então’, stretched, with an extension on the second syllable; next a loud exhalation, a ‘ha’ that announces a kind of concern or shock; this is followed by a drawing-out of ‘havia’ to five seconds of wavering vocality that call to mind the oft-noted affinities between fado and Arabic song; and finally the swiftly delivered coup de grâce of ‘nem fadistas como eu sou’.

This leads me, perhaps inevitably, to another song from Fado em Mim, ‘Ó Gente Da Minha Terra’ (People of My Land). This time I’ll stick to the studio version, though there are many spectacular live performances available on album, DVD and YouTube. And, rather than focus on Mariza, I’ll pick a moment where the guitarra takes over, as it often does in fados of this type. While beautiful in its own right, I hear the guitarra in this track as a kind of respite. Perhaps because the vocal in this song is so non-stop dramatic, it becomes a kind of studium. The guitarra marks something different, both a pause and also fulfilment of the moments in the song where guitars are mentioned. In a song all about musicality, and in which the singer claims that the voice she sings with has been bestowed upon her by the people of her land even as she takes personal ownership of it, the guitar is repeatedly evoked as the evocative object that recalls fado, its emotions and the very desire to sing.

The lyric to ‘Ó Gente Da Minha Terra’ was written by the most famous fadista that Portugal has produced, Amália Rodrigues. She never recorded it, making Mariza’s rendition a debut for Amália’s lyric. Amália, however, did make recordings of some of her other poems, and ‘Lágrima’, my next example, is one of them. The song appeared on a 1983 album of the same name, featuring Amália’s words set to music by the guitarrista Carlos Gonçalves. ‘Lágrima’ was the closing song on the album and represents, for me, one of Amália’s great later performances. As with a couple of the other songs I’ve mentioned here, I’m tempted to cite the whole song as a series of dramatic moments that build upon each other, arguably defeating the point of trying to single out sonic moments. Still, I’ll mention two.

The first is the opening of the song, where Amália enters at full force, attacking the lyric from the very outset. The words are as follows:

Cheia de penas [Full of suffering]
Cheia de penas me deito [Full of suffering, I sleep]
E com mais penas [And with more suffering]
Com mais penas me levanto [With more suffering I awake]
No meu peito [In my breast]
Já me ficou no meu peito [Already lodged in my breast]
Este jeito [Is this habit]
O jeito de te querer tanto [The habit of wanting you so]

The clip below contains only the first six of these lines, but I couldn’t help but quote the whole verse (going beyond the chosen moment and breaking my own rules again!). These first four lines are dominated by the word ‘penas’, or suffering.

‘Lágrima’ is a song of despair, unrequited love, the dream-world and death. The lyrical structure of Amália’s poem encourages a musical arrangement which, in its simplicity, provides a drive towards emphasis on key lyrical moments. The song text becomes the studium, along with the customary tinkling guitars. Within seconds, this instrumental, vocal and lyrical setting confirms this as a typical fado, albeit of the modernised fado canção style. Into this text are then studded a number of puncta, which can be identified as follows: the first syllable of ‘penas’ in the first line, echoed in the repetitions of the word in the subsequent three lines; the third syllable of ‘desespero’ in the first line of the second verse, again echoed; the interplay between ‘considero’ and ‘desespero’ in the third verse.

In the fourth and final verse, which I’ll quote in full again, the emphasis shifts to the second half. The clip I’ve chosen is the final four lines, which are repeated at the end by Amália in standard fado practice for closing refrains. The verse holds back from delivering its punctum, waiting for the repeat of the final pathetic phrase: ‘Que alegria me deixaria matar’ (How happy I would be to die).

Se eu soubesse [If I thought]
Se eu soubesse que morrendo [If I thought that when I died]
Tu me havias [You would have to]
Tu me havias de chorar [You would have to cry]
Uma lágrima [One tear]
Por uma lágrima tua [For one of your tears]
Que alegria [How happy]
Me deixaria matar [I would be to die]

In a later version of ‘Lágrima’ by Jorge Fernando and Argentina Santos there is an even clearer example of the move from studium to punctum. Following two verses sung movingly but not dramatically by Fernando, a studium is set up of melancholic meditation on hurt and loss (fado’s bedrock, we might say). The entry of Argentina Santos’s vocal into this studium shatters or cuts the serenity of the preceding moments. Through her vocalising, from the anguished cry of ‘se considero’ to the almost whispered final ‘uma lágrima’, Santos creates these puncta via stark contrasts with the surrounding song text. Fernando’s verse and the oboe/cello part create a ‘safe’ space of sadness. Santos’s voice, in its urgency and extremity, destroys this place and reminds me of the pain at the heart of the lyric.

As I draw this too-long reflection on moments in songs to a close (and thank anyone who has read this far for sticking with me), I find myself pondering the memory of moments.

Embarking on this piece, I didn’t intend to focus so much on fado. I thought I was going to write about more non-vocal moments, to dwell on loud, amplified, ecstatic playing, stormy tracks that bring the weather, wrestle with it. soar above it and transcend. To take two examples that I was sure would make the final cut, I had plans to write about Neil Young’s guitar solo(s) in ‘Like a Hurricane’ and Prince’s in ‘Purple Rain’. But the very transcendence of these tracks proved to be a problem. These solos are epic processes, not reducible to moments. And while that could be said for many of the other examples I’ve used—in every case, it’s the unfolding of the whole song that makes the moments sparkle—there was something in these solos that defied my memory. Because I’d really thought that there were points I could isolate. I thought I’d remembered a point in ‘Like a Hurricane’ where Young constructed a ladder for our ears, then allowed us to climb out of the song’s earthly realm. And I thought I knew where to find the rungs of that ladder. But I was wrong. And I thought that Prince— especially in the Syracuse ‘Purple Rain’—had built an equally wondrous creation out of some moments I could identify. And he did, but I couldn’t.

What’s more, it turned out that the first drum sound on the ‘official’ version of ‘Purple Rain’ functioned equally for my memory and was arguably more able to summon that thirteen-year-old I’ve written about before. That sound, at least, I can easily locate and isolate.

That drum beat means as much as anything to me. It stores and releases the knowledge of what is to come, of a journey I’m about to take. It’s a reassurance and a release.

I’ll finish, for now, with that one. But work like this is never finished. This seeking of musical moments is a generative process. While I had a concise list of moments in mind when I started writing this piece, working on each one made me think about several more. That made me even more aware of the inexhaustible—some might say pointless—nature of such an endeavour. But it allowed me to get to the heart of what I’m moved by in certain musical moments, which, in turn, tells me something about all the others that I didn’t get to write about this time. And it led me to some fresh thoughts, or fresh articulations of thoughts I’d had long ago. And that generative aspect of music—how it leads to reflection and writing—is, for me and for what I’m trying to do here, the point.

A note on where some of these thoughts have appeared in previous form. Some of the text about Grandaddy appeared here on Substack last year. The Sinatra example is adapted from the chapter I wrote about Sinatra and Leonard Cohen in The Late Voice. I’ve written about the Haggard/Nelson duet in a few places, including an appreciation of Haggard following his death in 2016 and in the introduction to the paperback edition of The Late Voice in 2017. I explore yodelemes in a little more detail, alongside scat, doo wop and other non-semantic singing in Chapter 4 of The Sound of Nonsense. I discuss Mariza and Amália at length in Fado and the Place of Longing and on the blog I produced to accompany that book. If any readers are interested in reading these texts, please contact me.

1. As I did in my recent piece on ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’, I’ll footnote the fascinating analysis of variations in printed and online lyrics undertaken by Dai Griffiths in an article in Popular Music & Society from 2012. Griffiths has many other publications on song lyrics which are well worth reading.