Songs and Objects: A Tasting Menu

Curated morsels to celebrate a one-year anniversary, accompanined by a selection of music.

A Year of Songs and Objects

Songs and Objects is one year old. I sent my first tentative post out on 10 November 2023 with two goals in mind. The first was to share a lifetime’s reflection on songs and the role they play in people’s lives through a medium that reached beyond the academic space I usually work within (my day job is as a lecturer in a university music department). My second priority was to get back to a book project I had put on hold for several years while I focused on administrative work at the university.

The first goal was more personal and more of an unknown for me. While I knew I would mainly be speaking about the role songs have played in my life (i.e. I wasn’t planning on doing any surveys, or crowdsourcing content, though I don’t rule these options out in the future), I hoped that there would be some common ground, some areas of recognition or at least curiosity, between my sounded experience and those of any readers I might find. I’ve been pleased to discover that is the case.

I won’t labour the second goal here; I already covered it in my first few posts last year. Suffice it to say that I have, indeed, been able to move the material for my still-planned book about songs and objects forward through the posts here on Substack. I count that a personal success, though I also realise that I need to alter my priorities as I move forward with the project. More on that later.

For now, for this anniversary post, I’m offering a ‘tasting menu’ of the Songs and Objects newsletter, a series of small samples from ten of the thirty-six newsletters I sent out in the past year. As I’ve often pointed out, and had pointed out for me, many of my posts are long, much longer than it is perhaps reasonable to expect given the amount of information we’re all dealing with regularly. I hope that these small tasters may offer readers who are not familiar with the newsletter—particularly the pieces from its early months, which I’ve focussed on in my selection—something of interest.

Just as restaurants that offer tasting menus will often provide recommendations for drinks to pair with each dish, I’ve selected one song that connects to each sample.

1. Fascinations

Songs are things borne by singers and those who listen to singers. Singers and listeners witness, carry, store and pass on songs, like vessels through and in which song travels. Song enters and exits the body via the senses: sight, sound and memory, most obviously, but also touch via sonic vibrations and the handling of instruments.

Songs are also things stored within other things: as ink on paper, as impressions of sound waves on wax or tape, as binary digits on computer drives, as samples and stems, as songs within songs, as streaming video data, as clouds of not-yet-song waiting for inspired songwriters to stumble into them.

Songs have biographies and travel on itineraries that take them far beyond human lifespans.

Accompanying song: Ella Fitzgerald, ‘These Foolish Things (remind Me of You)’

2. Rearrange Their Faces ... Give Them All Another Name

Odetta’s way of bringing out that experience, of relating Dylan’s late voice to her listeners, results in some remarkable renditions, the most outstanding of which, in my opinion, is her ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. It’s a challenging listen, drawing out the song to nearly eleven minutes and losing any of the dancing chirpiness that marks Dylan’s original recording (a feature maintained even in his extended 1966 versions via some jaunty strumming on the guitar). It has virtually nothing to do with the Byrds’ famous two-and-a-half-minute breeze through the song, even if that group did enact an era-defining reinvention of its own.

If the song-objects by Odetta and the Byrds are so radically different as to put in question whether they even have a common source, Cat Power’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is clearly modelled on Dylan’s more relaxed 1966 versions. Though known for drastic reinvention in her previous covers, here she mirrors Dylan, albeit with some subtly pleasing distortions. Where Marshall is perhaps most faithful to Dylan’s word-objects is the way that she plays around with them, exposing their malleability.

Song: Cat Power, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’

3. Auburn Hair, AI and Afterlives: ‘Jolene’ as Song Object

From a brief consideration of the lyrics (available all over the web), it seems clear that Jolene is an object in the song. She is an object made of auburn hair, hazel eyes, ivory skin: all these are objects too. Jolene is an object of desire for another object, the unnamed male character, who talks about her in his sleep. She’s an object, too, for the singer, who is obsessed with Jolene’s beauty and what it threatens.

These are all song objects and the song itself is also a song object.

How the objects relate to each other and to the subjects who engage with the song has been a much-explored topic. There’s a fascinating episode of the podcast Dolly Parton’s America about ‘Jolene’, which looks at the character relationships within and outwith the song and offers fresh perspectives about who is singing to and for whom.

Much of the narrative around the song has been about who Jolene is, who the singer is, who ‘my man’ is, and what the motivations for writing and performing the song might be. What I’m interested in here, though, is the life of the song: not so much Jolene (the character) as a song object, but ‘Jolene’ (the song) as an object.

Song: Holly+, ‘Jolene’

4. Adrift Again

Grandaddy’s album was a portrait of a Wasted West; with its interest in cowboy iconography, its desert-bleached outlook and end-of the-road bewilderment, the group provided a perfect soundtrack to a dystopic twenty-first century Western, highlighting the ways in which frontier-finding always leaves a trail of destruction.

The Sophtware Slump presents technology as an ongoing process, a culture of improvement that follows a logic it can rarely adhere to. The society depicted in the album is a society spinning out of control, its disequilibrium signalled by haywire synthesizers, haunted computers, death-driven robots and a schizophonic shuttling between noise and serenity.

Other sounds on the album—the haunted, cracked falsetto of bandleader and principle songwriter Jason Lytle, the sweet descants of Lytle’s supporting cast, the soft weeping of the piano that seeps through the cracks in the electrical storm—register an ongoing tension between awe, resignation and deep weariness. One of Lytle’s key skills has been an ability to present collective, global concerns (e.g. excessive consumption and its role in ecological disaster) as personal narratives, weaving the public into the private.

Song: Grandaddy, ‘He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot’

5. A Vision Starts to Form

I want to write about buzz and static, about the turning on of amps and speakers and hifi systems, the placing of needles on vinyl, the tentative strumming of electric guitars, the crackle of electricity and what it heralds. The opening of ‘The Hermit’, the way it hums into life, then makes its speculative way for more than ten minutes before any words are sung. The way this was replicated in concert as the musicians came on to the stage at intervals—first Dawson alone with his guitar, then Andrew Cheetham on gentle percussion, then Rhodri Davies on harp, Angharad Davies shortly after on violin, finally Sally Pilkington on keyboard—the building of tension and texture, the almost-soaring, the settling back ahead of the voice’s entrance. It reminded me of improv gigs, of musicians exploring their instruments and each other, one whole onstage ecology encompassing rapt audience members.

Song: Richard Dawson, ‘The Hermit’

6. Relentless Virtuosity: The Musicality of Lists Part 3

Lists can also give the sense of rushing and exhaustion; one can feel tired reading them, whether silently or out loud. Lists can be overwhelming—think of shopping lists, to-do lists, action points. They are exhausting without being exhaustive. Indeed, the very awareness that more things exist outside the list (off-list) can often add to the sense of anxiety they evoke.

There’s always the worry that something has been left off of the list or that the seemingly exhaustive list is, in fact, a substitute for a thing that can’t quite be grasped, let alone contained in a list.

When we think of performing a list song as a kind of virtuosity—alphabet aerobics, error-free recitations, feats of memory—it’s also a recognition that the very creation of a long list is also virtuosic, an attempt at exhaustive detail even in the face of inevitable defeat.

Is virtuosity a kind of victory? And is it also a kind of victory for a singer to sing a list without making it seem like a list? In my book The Sound of Nonsense, I suggested that lists had a ‘normalizing power’ in that the mechanism of the list made new alliances between list terms seem natural. I stand by that but list songs also make me aware of the danger of reducing songfulness through the disruptive aspect of the listing mechanism.

Song: Blackalcious, ‘Alphabet Aerobics’

7. This Shirt

The lack of chorus places the song more in a ballad tradition, though there are changes made to the melodic structure of some of the verses which provide variety and give the song a set of emotional contours. This seems apt for a song about memory and the paths of free association that a journey into memory can provide. Memories come freighted with emotional highs and lows, and also with seemingly neutral reportage: the news stories of our lives condensed into flashpoint moments. Changing the melody at the start of some of the verses is a way to keep musical interest and momentum, but also a way of dealing with the peaks and troughs of recollection: ultimately a way of controlling the past and lessening its unexpected danger.

The shirt is a proxy for memory. Or, we might say, it is memory itself, the thing that remembers, the object that enhances its owner’s ability to recall the past. If that’s too much of a stretch, perhaps we can at least think of the shirt as a mnemonic, a device for assisting the memory process. That is not what it was designed for, of course, nor what it has mostly been used for: but it is what it has become. This may be why the first and sixth verses of ‘This Shirt’ are set in the present and the rest, for the most part, in the past. These verses frame the narrative and position the shirt as an everyday and ever-present memory prompt, a reminder that memories are ultimately located in the here and now.

Song: Mary Chapin Carpenter, ‘This Shirt’

8. Songs for Some People I May Have Been

A young man hearing Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’ being read on The South Bank Show over footage of the Caribbean and falling in love with its cadence. Something is born here, some desire to want to do something with words and sounds, the presence too of an unthought known that has to do with memory and narrative. Around the same time, on a now-forgotten British television programme, Caetano Veloso is featured and something else is set in motion.

Play, or have read by someone who can do justice to its register, ‘The Schooner Flight’. Play Caetano Veloso’s ‘Estrangeiro’.

A nineteen-year-old hauling a backpack from a pickup truck in Macdiarmid, Ontario, then walking into the wooden house that would be his home for the next three months. Handed a guitar and asked if he can play, he croaks out a rendition of Lyle Lovett’s ‘If I Had a Boat’. A bond is made and he is one of the group.

A song for that bewildered young man: Lyle Lovett, ‘If I Had a Boat’.

A young man reading the back of a record sleeve that, instead of a tracklist, bears the following message: ‘A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.’

A song for that discoverer: Scott Walker, ‘On Your Own Again’.

Song: Caetano Veloso, ‘Estrangeiro’

9. Something Set Apart from Time

A song about pain becomes a song about how what pain leaves behind can be transfigured.

Pain is presented in the song as an object, the glacier of the title. Glaciers are things we might once have thought of as being set apart from time, objects moving to their own temporal logic, things in extended process. They demonstrated a temporality that we might find difficult to measure in human terms.

That idea seems less feasible now, given the state of the climate, but I’ll stick with the idea of the glacial as something slow and drawn out, because I believe that’s the metaphor that Grant is evoking.

The glacier is a metaphor for pain, but also for song. I’m hardly the first person to point out that what Grant has the glacier do for the routes that pain takes in a body and the traces it leaves in a psyche can also stand in for what a singer-songwriter can do by turning pain into the beautiful landscapes of songs.

That doesn’t mean that we have to buy into the romantic mythology that claims art must come from pain. That isn’t true. Art comes from experience, inspiration and craft in combination with other factors and in ways that can rarely be pinned down completely (which is s good thing). But ugly things can be turned into beautiful things through art.

There’s a lot of metaphorical work being done by the glacier, then. But there’s also what Grant as singer and Grant and Biggi Veira as producers do with the words ‘pain’ and ‘through you’ in the mix, drawing them out and layering them as if dragging them through the landscape of the song.

Song: John Grant, ‘Glacier

10. On Brevity

Songs are the things that remind me most often of brevity’s potential. I like many long songs, but I listen mainly to short ones. I think of them as perfect miniatures.

Examples abound in many genres. I’ve always admired country music’s condensation. There are so many classic country songs with minimal lines and short running times. ‘Three chords and the truth’, as Harlan Howard would say.

I’ve written long posts about how songwriters use lists in their lyrics to evoke characters, events, feelings and more. Some of the lists are long too, but I’ll conclude this post with a list from Gram Parson’s ‘Brass Buttons’ that I think offers a brilliant example of brevity: ‘Brass buttons, green silks, and silver shoes / Warm evenings, pale mornings, bottled blues / And those tiny golden pins …’

There’s an early, brief (2:25) version of ‘Brass Buttons’ that confirms for me that some things can be done too quickly. Parsons’ trademark fragility is there in the vocal, but the guitar seems too frenetic. The better-known version, released posthumously on Grievous Angel remains definitive. A slower delivery and what I think of as the ‘luxury bedding’ of James Burton’s guitar, Al Perkins’ steel and Ron Tutt’s drums.

There’s an even shorter version by Johnny Rivers from 1970 that delivers in 2:06, due largely to Rivers cutting half the lyrics: again, not the best way to do brevity.

If the extra minute on the ‘official’ ‘Brass Buttons’ is padding, it’s beautiful padding. I wouldn’t be without it. And I still think of the longer version as a perfect miniature because of that evocative list.

I’d like to write like that.

Song: Gram Parsons, ‘Brass Buttons’

From Expertise to Curiosity

I think this newsletter has been an experiment in expressing vulnerability. I’ve known for a long time that I was a reserved person. I’ve known for a shorter period that I’m categorised by psychometrics as introverted. But it was only recently that I reflected on how my way of doing academic work—perhaps the very reason for being drawn to academia after a period when I felt I wanted nothing to do with it—was a way of dealing with introversion and vulnerability. I mean that my habit of checking and crosschecking everything I was going to say was perhaps driven by an absolute fear of being found out as a fraud, or at least as someone who hadn’t done enough work to be permitted to speak.

But what I came to love writing this newsletter was finding that I didn’t have to be the expert. Here was a space for following curiosity and speculation, for indulging in a subjectivity I had previously felt was disallowed or that I had disavowed. My favourite pieces—one of which, ‘Songs for Some People I May Have Been’, is sampled above—were the most personal ones. Here I could make mistakes—and people would let me know when I did—but there were many things that couldn’t be proven right or wrong, like my takes on my own life and my lifelong relationship with music and what it had taught me.

I learned, or relearned, some other things. For example, there are people who dislike what they see as too-serious analysis of popular music. I’ve sometimes wondered whether this is an internalisation of a high-low divide that is a legacy of culture wars I thought were long gone. Perhaps what gets me most about this is that it makes me feel I have failed again in my writing in that I’ve often been aiming, in this strand of my work, for a playful approach that is as much about speculative fun as about earnest analysis. I see that there still exists a gap between what I think I’m writing and what readers are taking from my words. I will continue to aim at narrowing that gap.

When the editor of one of the book series I published with told me, on reviewing my manuscript, that the text wore its knowledge lightly, I was very pleased (he told me I should be and that he meant it as a compliment). I want to move further towards that zone of lightness. 

The challenge

The real challenge I face now, however, is that I need to shift my priorities. As I mentioned, one of the things I wanted and needed this newsletter to do was to move forward a book project that I’d been prevented from focussing on for too long. With my administrative burdens lightened temporarily, and with time and headspace to work on the book, I need to make it a priority, and to use the research and writing time available to me to produce book-format prose rather than long standalone pieces.

As I don’t want to abandon this newsletter, my plan is to aim for a compromise that allows greater focus on the book while still keeping a smaller scale version of what I’ve been doing here. I hope to still be able to produce texts that work for a newsletter format, but they won’t be the kind of deep dives that take me on long detours and that have resulted in me publishing longer posts less frequently, which serves neither the newsletter model nor manuscript progression.

They need to be smaller slices, shorter pieces. I’ve written before about my struggles with brevity (see the final ‘course’ in the tasting menu above). A stubborn side of me has resisted calls for shorter pieces and better branding. I still doubt I’ll get the branding bug, but I can see that shorter pieces might be better for all involved.

Let’s see how it goes. For now, thank you to everyone who has read this far.