Round-The-World Barstool Blues: Search results for great love songs

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Saturday, February 13, 2010

Great Love Songs (17)

It's been ages since we had a Great Love Songs entry, over 8 months. I am loth to post one on the eve of the dread day, lest anyone think that I am succumbing to the ersatz emotion of this dratted festival. On the other hand... well, Love Songs is starting to fall badly behind the rival Great Drinking Songs strand, and I wouldn't want anyone to think that drinking is more important to me than romance (it probably is; but I wouldn't want anyone to think that!). So, the time is ripe.

I developed a bit of a weakness for Country & Western music when I was living in North America for a year-and-a-bit towards the end of the '90s - not least because the female singers all tend to be rather gorgeous. (And I was based most of the time in Toronto; C&W is also very big in Canada, and their music video TV station for it - CMT, Country Music Television - I find rather better than its cross-border equivalent, GAC [Great American Country].) And Faith Hill is one of the most gorgeous of the gorgeous; she made a particularly big splash that year ('98, I suppose it must have been) with a rather poppy album, from which this infectiously catchy number, This Kiss, was the main hit single. (I'm sure many C&W purists denounced her for jumping on the Shania Twain 'crossover' bandwagon and deserting 'true' country music. And I gather she has subsequently returned to a more traditional style.) In addition to its hookiness, though, it's also got some very clever rhymes - always something I'm a big fan of (how can you not love a song that includes the word 'subliminal'??). It even includes aposiopesis - now how many songs can you say that about?

I was reminded of this song by the improbably mind-bending - if disappointingly brief - smooch I enjoyed with an old flame at New Year this year, so I've been meaning to root it out and post it for a while now. Unfortunately, Faith Hill's "people" at Warner Records have got YouTube well locked down, so you can only view her original video for it here. However, there are quite a lot of good "homemade" videos accompanying the song; this anthology of clips from Disney cartoon romances is probably the best. I just hope the Warner Records killjoys won't demand its deletion too soon.

[For some reason, anime video compilations for this song seem to be especially popular. Well worth checking some of these out, too.]

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Great Love Songs (28)

I notice that my Great Love Songs selections have fallen rather behind my Great Drinking Songs this year. I hope this isn't indicative of the relative importance of these two activities in my life! (Yeah, OK, it probably is.)

Anyway, to start redressing the balance, here's one of my favourite bits of Ella, You'll Never Know, written by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon in the early 1940s (I learn from Wikipedia that Gordon supposedly based the lyrics on a poem written by a young war bride, Dorothy Fern Norris).

That Wikipedia article led me to go checking on Alice Faye, who first performed the song in the 1943 musical, Hello Frisco, Hello, winning the Oscar for Best Song that year (she sang it again in the USO morale-booster Four Jills in a Jeep the following year; a better rendition of the song, but the video is only a montage of stills of the actress). I don't recall seeing it on the American Film Institute's 100 Best Movie Songs list that I discussed over on Froogville earlier this year (no, indeed it was not: a shocking oversight!). Strangely, she never released it as a record, and so the song eventually became more associated with other artists. This is an entertaining clip of the song from Hello Frisco, Hello: a rather muted performance, in rehearsal; but it's cute how all the theatre staff stop what they're doing to listen to her, and almost start tearing up - such is the power of this song.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Great Love Songs (24)

Gosh, I suppose I must have had a crush on Suzanne Vega for 25 years now; I really ought to enrol her as one of my 'Fantasy Girlfriends' over on Froogville one day. Another of her songs, Gypsy, was one of my earliest entries in this 'Great Songs' series. Here's a wonderful live performance of the irresistibly lilting Caramel, with one of the all-time great bass lines.

And here's the original video.

And if your sweet tooth is not yet sated, here's a new version from her recent Love Songs anthology. Dreamy.

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Great Love Songs (37)

Today, I am nominating Nina Simone as my 'Fantasy Girlfriend' over on Froogville. It doesn't matter that she was in her thirties before I was even born, and has now been dead for 9 years. Most of these selections have been 'impossible' in one way or another. It's the idea of Nina Simone that I'm in love with.

In addition to the good things included in the Froogville post, here's one of my favourite of her love songs, He Needs Me (which blog-friend JES once informed me was written by one Arthur Hamilton; not one of the more celebrated lyricists, but he was given a flying start in the business when old high school friend Julie London asked him to write her some songs and he came up with Cry Me A River).

This is a great song about 'difficult' love. I'm not comfortable with the suggestions of imbalanced affection, dependence, and self-delusion in it - but these all too commonly are elements of love. I prefer to think of it as suggestive of stoical, calmly optimistic perseverance with a partner who's just a little wayward - or perhaps just a little slow on the uptake, a little slow to realise or acknowledge the depth of the relationship that has formed. It's a complex and beautiful little song, and Nina's rendition of it has always sent shivers down my spine.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Friday, September 09, 2011

Something for the weekend!

I don't think this can be a candidate for my 'Great Love Songs' strand, because, frankly, I have no idea what it's about; the lyrics are too dark and weird for me to decipher. It's not quite a 'Great Drinking Song' either (although it was first introduced to me by Best-Barman-In-The-World-Ever, Big Nige, last year, and has been a popular fixture in our 12 Square Metres playlist ever since). It has an incantatory aspect to it that's very powerful; but it's just not singalong stuff. Well, apart from that groaning na-na-na-nah-naah chorus, maybe. But no, it doesn't have that rollicking, get-you-in-the-mood-for-another-round quality about it. Yet it is a great song.

I love this band, one of my favourite discoveries of the past year or so. I believe they provide potent support for my theory that great bands tend to have great band names (and vice versa). Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is surely one of the coolest band names ever (it's the name of Marlon Brando's biker gang in The Wild One), and on first hearing of them, I feared that they would struggle to live up to it. But they've got a stripped-down, grungy blues-rock sound that's right up my street, and they've come up with a number of hauntingly memorable songs.

Plus, of course, their drummer is dead sexy.

And they're playing in Beijing this weekend, headlining the Intercity Music Festival in Chaoyang Park on Sunday. Wild horses couldn't keep me away (although I suppose really bad weather or a dose of the laduzi might).

Here, then, is probably their best-known song, our 12 Square Metres favourite, Beat The Devil's Tattoo. The sound's not great in this version, but it is a very cool b&w performance video.

Here's another good version, performed for Santa Monica's KCRW.

[Another great performance from a show in Seattle last year here (but the video's not very good), an interesting acoustic session recorded for Paste magazine here, and the original video (which is a bit of a non-event) here.]

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Great Love Songs (21)

I fret that it may be unwise for me to ponder too long on the question of love songs when I am trapped in a particularly deep and persistent depressive trough, much of that depression stemming from contemplation of the dismal state of my love life over the past five years. However, Don't Get Me Wrong by The Pretenders is so irresistibly bouncy that I feel it may just perk me up out of my stubborn glumness. At any rate, it's not a brooding-on-love-lost kind of song, so I don't think it will drag me down further into the pit. I don't think there's much further to go.

There's quite a decent live version (well, you know, the usual awful bootleg sound, but a fun performance) by Chrissie and the gang from a 2007 concert in New Zealand (with a pond in front of the stage?!) here.

[Trivia Note: Chrissie originally formed the band in my home town of Hereford (well, that's where I was born, anyway; I spent most of my early years in little towns and villages in the country round about, and then the next 14 years until the cusp of adulthood in Monmouth, a small farming market town on the Welsh border about 20 miles south of there. The only other band of any note I can recall coming from there was Mott The Hoople - who were briefly quite a big thing in the early '70s (David Bowie let them cover his All The Young Dudes; and Queen first went to America as an opening act for them!). However, in out-of-the-way Monmouth, we were quite a little hub of the recording industry. Nimbus Records had an LP (and later CD) pressing plant nearby, and the tiny Rockfield recording studios at the bottom end of town was where Queen laid down their landmark A Night At The Opera album (not that I remember them being in town; I was only 9 or 10 at the time). A number of quite big cheeses in the world of rock'n'roll bought country homes in the area - most notably Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant. And there were some great session musicians who lived around there too, and would often perform impromptu gigs in one of the town's many, many fine public houses (we used to claim the record for the most generous per capita provision of boozers in the UK: when I was a kid, I think it stood at 37 bars for a population of around 12,000). In fact, I think the first gig I ever saw (circa 1980) was by Nick Lowe, another regular - if not permanent - local resident, playing solo in the Nag's Head pub. Nick produced the first Pretenders album.]

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Great Drinking Songs (21)

Well, the pessimists say we're as good as out already, after two uninspiring draws; but Slovenia really shouldn't be that much of an obstacle.... and, if by chance we should get our act together and give them a sound spanking at the end of the week, it will be refreshing to exchange - for a few short days, at least - our (probably well-founded) pessimism for a renewed dose of false optimism.

This is the latest re-tread of England's Euro 96 song, Three Lions - surely the best football song ever (possibly the only good football song ever?). It perfectly captures the wistfulness of the England football fan's aspirations, the passionate but unconvinced optimism with which we anxiously approach every big game. (And the accompanying fan video includes a much better selection - and better picture quality, too - of the England team's greatest moments than the 'Top 10 Goals' I posted on Froogville last week.)

[I had wanted to do a 'Great Love Songs' post for the beginning of the World Cup - but the two songs I'd wanted to use were both unavailable. Neil Innes' One Thang On Your Mind (an hilarious Country & Western parody which uses football metaphors to describe the progress of a romantic relationship, and makes fun of the fact that, when single, women disingenuously complain that men tend to be only interested in sex, but, when in a relationship, are reminded, to their great disgruntlement, that most men are actually far more interested in watching sport on TV than in sex) seems to be about the only one of his songs from his superb Innes Book Of Records series that has not been uploaded to YouTube (It eventually showed up a couple of years later!). And my favourite Thomas Dolby song, Close But No Cigar (the marvellous chugging guitar at the beginning is by Eddie van Halen, who guested on a number of tracks on the early-90s Astronauts and Heretics album), which also draws on the imagery of sporting disappointments as a parallel to romantic failure, is barred from embedding. It's a very clever video - worth clicking on the link.]

Come on, England!!!

My football discussion thread is gathering momentum: chip in your thoughts here.

Saturday, May 12, 2012

A Japanese lesson [Great Love Songs - 32]

I was a huge Queen fan in my youth. Still am, I suppose.

Odd how they seem to have passed many people by, even in England, even amongst the generation who enjoyed the prime exposure to them in the '70s (which was when they produced all of their best music, though they continued to be the best live act in the world throughout the '80s, and gained a new audience for themselves in 1985 when, after a few 'wilderness' years, they saved the Wembley 'Live Aid' concert with a showstopping set). A lot of people didn't quite get it. Or they liked it for a while, and then became embarrassed at themselves, dismissed this music as a youthful folly and moved on to other things. Queen never really took off big time in the States at all.

Maybe people couldn't take the sheer bloody exuberance of them, the orgiastic parties, the publicity photo shoots with dozens of naked girls on bicycles... There was probably a certain amount of homophobia working against their flamboyantly camp frontman Freddie Mercury (in fact, I was initially a bit uncomfortable with the band myself, but was inspired to start liking them because they outraged my father so!). Maybe some people were alienated by their intellect too: they were notoriously the 'cleverest' band of that generation, pretty much unique at that time in all being college educated (heck, Brian May was working on a PhD in Astrophysics when the band broke big in the early '70s; he eventually completed it 35 years later, and is currently the Chancellor of Liverpool University). They could all play multiple instruments, and all contributed strong songs to the group, too.

Maybe some people were overwhelmed or repelled by their musical lushness and diversity: they dabbled in such a range of styles - metal, punk, rockabilly, folk, jazz, and eventually synth-pop. And, of course, opera. And while some of these experiments were more successful than others, none of them stunk the place up. It's really hard to think of a poor Queen song, at least from their first 8 albums. Most bands are guilty of using a lot of sub-standard filler to pad out an album. Even The Beatles, I find, don't have that many albums that you can comfortably listen to the whole way through: next to their truly great songs, the weaker ones stand out painfully. But with Queen, even the 'filler' is quite often exceptionally rich. Certainly with the great trilogy of albums that launched them to mega-stardom, Sheer Heart Attack, A Night At The Opera, and A Day At The Races, I can listen to them right through again and again. [All three of these deserve to be in the top few dozen of any all-time ranking, but it's a measure of the snobbery directed against the band from much of the musical establishment that Rolling Stone only grudgingly included A Night At The Opera in the mid-levels of its notorious '500 Greatest Albums Of All Time' list.]

And when you get to the end of A Day At The Races, you find this haunting oddity, Teo Torriatte - a brooding melancholic love ballad from Brian May which erupts into a surgingly anthemic chorus entirely in Japanese. It's ostensibly based on a Japanese poem introduced to them by their translator the first time they toured there. And Freddie, of course, could get a crowd of 50,000 non-Japanese passionately singing along with every word. All true Queen fans know at least a dozen or so words of Japanese.

It perhaps went down even better with a Japanese audience. Here are Freddie and the boys performing it at the Budokan, c. 1979. (Or you can listen to the album version here.)

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Great Love Songs (12)

I suppose I was first introduced to big band music back in the late '70s or early '80s through Dennis Potter's TV series Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective, which featured scores of popular hits from the '30s and '40s (are those soundtrack albums still available, I wonder - I'd love to get them on CD). My parents had some Glenn Miller, but not much else; at university, the blues became one of my earliest niche interests, soon followed by early jazz. It might well have been my Indian friend, The Younger Dr P (junior sibling of The Egregious one), an idolater of Frank Sinatra (and a passable impersonator of him, too), who first gave me a wider exposure to the other great musicians of that era. As soon as I heard Harry James's trumpet, I was in a swoon. I don't think anybody else has had quite that sound, or has been able to carry a melody quite so sweetly.

This is You Made Me Love You, sung by one of his regular female vocalists, Helen Forrest. It appears to be from an old film, but I can't tell which one. I'm afraid the sound is fairly weak, but it's still a lovely clip.

I think this was one of the tunes used by Woody Allen for the soundtrack of Hannah and Her Sisters (of course, after that, for a little while, everyone was a Harry James fan again!). Other Harry James numbers from that film were, I think, I've Heard That Song Before (again, sung by Helen Forrest; you can see that here, but alas, there's no video with it, only a still from Hannah), and It's Been A Long, Long Time (which I had thought was also sung by Helen, but apparently it's by another of Harry's stable of fine singers, Kitty Kallen; I absolutely love this, and might well have chosen it above You Made Me Love You, but again there is no video accompanying it). And while we're having a splurge on Harry (god, YouTube sucks you in, doesn't it?!), here's a colour clip of the great man playing his Trumpet Blues & Cantabile, from a 1944 film called Bathing Beauty.

What better way to spend a Saturday afternoon???

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Great Love Songs (40)

I think The Wind Knows My Name was my favourite of the Mark E. Nevin songs from the superb Fairground Attraction album First Of A Million Kisses. The theme of restlessness and inconstancy strikes a particular chord with me. I don't think that's been an issue in my love life. Well, not on my side, anyway. Well, not directly; I suppose that if one is unsettled in the rest of one's life, it makes it difficult to form stable and lasting relationships. It's hard for a nomad to make a nest-builder happy, and vice versa.

One of the great songs of farewell, anyway. And so this seems an especially appropriate choice, as I prepare to move on from this blog. And, hopefully, from Beijing. And maybe even from drinking. Really. Lots of changes happening in my life at the moment.

Here's the lovely Eddi Reader singing The Wind Knows My Name. She might be the only singer to get three mentions in this series; I've posted on her previously here and here. [You can listen to the album version here.]

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Great Love Songs (35 & 36)

My little post yesterday about the comforting familiarity of being back in Beijing (where everyone seems to know me) of course put me in mind of On The Street Where You Live, one of the best songs from Lerner & Loewe's My Fair Lady. It was my old college drinking buddy The Bookseller (another big fan of musicals - it's NOT just a gay thing!) who first got me into the habit of singing this on the way home from the pub at night during my student days in Oxford... where there were just a handful of streets we seemed to traverse dozens of times a day... and where love seemed always in the air... and where there wasn't very much residential space in the city centre (other than the colleges themselves), so such late-night ebullience didn't seem too likely to disturb people's sleep. After lapsing from the habit for years, I found it powerfully revived on moving to Beijing - perhaps because I am so often walking home drunk at around midnight here. In my first year, particularly, returning each night from the 'Adventure Bar', I would frequently burst forth into joyous snatches of this song on the brief walk home.

Here's the scene from the film, with a young Jeremy Brett playing the infatuated Freddy (although I gather his singing was overdubbed by an actor called Bill Shirley). I doubt if this will stay up on Youtube for long, so enjoy it while you can.

And here's a great instrumental version by jazz pianist Errol Garner.

In fact, largely as a result of how ferociously cold Beijing was in my first winter here (and even in autumn; the second half of October was absolutely bloody freezing that year), it was another song from that show that I found myself singing even more often, the song that has become most associated for me with my sojourn here in Beijing - Eliza's fantasy of simple creature comforts, Wouldn't It Be Loverly?

Audrey Hepburn's singing in the film was famously dubbed by Marni Nixon, although some of her original test recordings of the songs resurfaced some years back, and are, I gather, included in the extras on the latest DVD editions. Unfortunately, I can't find Audrey singing this on Youtube, but you can check out her rendition of I Could Have Danced All Night. It doesn't have the polish or power of a professional singer, but there's a simplicity and zest about it that is as captivating as... well, as captivating as Audrey always was. Fellow devotees of the classic musicals may be interested in this posting, in which the same scene from the film as above is overdubbed with the original theatrical cast recording, in which Julie Andrews was the voice of Eliza.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Great Love Songs (7)

We're overdue another of my love song picks, and I've had it in mind for a while to post this one - There She Goes by The La's. I don't think I ever heard - or even heard of - the band. My Wikipedia researches reveal that they've now spent a couple of decades failing to keep a stable line-up, cut a record, or keep a major label deal - some really determined avoiding of fame and success going on here, very admirable!

I first heard this song in the mid-90s (several years after its first release, I think) at my favourite sleazy arthouse cinema - the famous Prince Charles, just off Leicester Square in London. While I was a law student, I was heading down there whenever I had a free afternoon - usually at least once or twice a week - and for a quite while this song was a regular on the playlist there. Hence, the song became inexorably linked in my mind with my great love affair (and breakup) of that period - with a ferociously smart Australian graduate student who has subsequently become known as The Evil One.

Anyway, here's the song. 2 mins 30 secs of pop perfection.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Great Love Songs (10)

One of my favourite songs by The Cure - Friday I'm In Love. A catalogue song about a difficult affair, it's always seemed dangerously appropriate to the kind of fascinatingly bonkers women that I tend to fall for. It is particularly strongly associated for me with the lady I have since come to know as The Evil One, a rather ferocious Australian academic who was one of the two great failed love affairs of my life (although I am, I suppose, currently suffering through No. 3 - except that this one probably doesn't really count, since it is entirely unrequited!!).

Sunday, August 19, 2012

Top Five Songs That Make Me Weepy

This topic came up when bantering online with Music Mike a few weeks back. He had suggested there were some songs that brought a tear to his eye simply because they were so good. I'm sceptical of that: I think that for a song to act on the tear ducts there has to be some innate sadness in its content, and/or in the personal associations that it has acquired for you.

Since I am hugely prone to depression and melancholia, there are any number of songs that can have this effect on me (and only a few that can snap me out of it). I might well have to come up with one or two further posts on this topic. But these were the five that came most readily to mind. [They are also very good songs, Mike; but that's not what tears me up about them.]

Top Five Songs that bring a tear to my eye

5) Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees

I know, I know, it's a bit of a cliché. It might seem that only people born around the beginning of the '80s, people of the generation that experienced the emergence of this song in their moody early teens, should really be entitled to get exaggeratedly emotional over it. But the lyrics speak to me powerfully of middle-aged exhaustion and disillusionment and despair. There's something about the way Thom Yorke sings "It wears him out..." that leaves me gutted every time. Here's the original video. (There's also an excellent live performance video from the 2003 Glastonbury Festival.)

4) Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

A song of creepy intensity and an ultimate wallow in nihilistic despair and disgust with the world, the prettiness of the tune only serving to create an additional tension with the suicidal tenor of the lyrics. Moreover, of course, it has acquired further dark resonances from its use over the devastating closing shot of The Graduate - Dustin Hoffman in the back of the bus, having apparently gained his heart's desire but suddenly realising he has no idea why he wanted it or what he's going to do next. Here's a live TV performance from 1966. (The original album version can be heard here.)

3) K.D. Lang - Outside Myself

A powerful representation of alienation and despair so great that it leaves one emotionally numb. I grew dangerously attached to this song during a spell of particularly bad depressions in the later '90s, and again following the death of my mother shortly after I moved to China. This is a performance from the BBC music show Later... with Jools Holland in the 1990s; slightly dodgy sound and picture quality, unfortunately, but a great performance.

2) The Pogues - Kitty

A beautiful traditional ballad, hauntingly sung by Shane MacGowan at the end of the Pogues' marvellous debut album Red Roses For Me. That whole record has had the power to move me to tears since my student days, but it is this song that works most powerfully on my heart-strings. Songs of farewell are a particular weakness of mine; songs of failed or thwarted love, also; and outlaw songs of men wronged by a harsh government, too (yes, I know, I'm a hopeless Plastic Paddy at times). Kitty combines all three genres into three-and-a-half minutes of distilled heartache. Here's a rather nice live performance from Glasgow's Barrowlands in 1987.

But in the No. 1 spot this time we have....

1) Fleetwood Mac - Storms

This has been a late-night depression-wallow staple of mine since the early '90s. I think I'd initially been attracted to it as a poignant account of a failed love affair, but I'd been listening to it a lot just before my father died and so it has become associated for me not just with separation but bereavement. I also identify with the defiant celebration of a tempestuous temperament at the close of the song: "I have never ever been a blue cold sea; I have always been a storm." Here's the album track, accompanied by a nice montage of photos of the delectable Stevie Nicks. (There's also an interesting 'demo' version of the song here.)

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Monday, June 16, 2008

Friday, September 09, 2011

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Saturday, December 06, 2008

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Saturday, June 14, 2008

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Sunday, August 19, 2012

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