It's me, Dan

Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

“Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is - we’re here on Earth to fart around.

And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.“

Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now… or at least dance.

I knI’m not good about lyrics. For reasons I can’t fathom, I can barely pay any attention to the lyrics of songs when I listen to them, and if I end up learning the lyrics to things it’s almost always by accident. This isn’t a choice; I’m simply not able. It could be because I was a musician in my youth, but almost certainly it started way before that, and maybe it had something to do with how, for a long time there, I couldn’t read or write. The other kids were on chapter books while I was learning what a period was and how to sound out the word “teeth.”

On the flip side, I can sing a lot more guitar solos note by note than other people can. Lyrics—and more specifically vocals—to me are another element of composition, and primary to meaning, for the most part, are the melody and tone that the vocal instrument provides a song. This hasn’t prevented music from being a Top 5 Important in My Life Thing for me, and I love singing along to songs, it’s just that sometimes I have to mumble a lot more of the words than the other people in the car do.

However, I know I’m not getting the full experience. (I was a terrible song writer back when I was in bands full of other terrible song writers. The eighth grade music teacher was so concerned about my lyric writing during a song project that he called me parents. I think the song was about “smashing you in the face with a crowbar, crowbar, crowbar,” but it’s hard to remember exactly. Likely, they still do and have agreed to never bring it up around me.) I’m not naive. I know I’m losing out especially in the world of indie music, which is what I listen to most these days. Indie, like folk, which I have also loved for most of my life, puts an emphasis on the lyrics, partly as a response to the banal repetition of what’s called “popular music” and partly as a way to show off when shredding would be inappropriate, and like poetry there’s a whole history of one-upsmanship that’s mostly over my head.

This is long preamble to Aldous Harding’s “The Barrel,” a song I love because of the vocals but not the lyrics, which I’ve now read and are still meaningless to me. I wanted to talk about what I like in relation to the meaning of the words but I can’t. I assume the lyrics are good—she seems like the type—and from a pure aesthetic standpoint I enjoy the juxtaposition of “peaches” and “celebrate” in the pre-chorus, for example, and especially the evocative image of “Show the ferret to the egg.” The word “barrel” has an incredible roundness to it and it sounds like it coats Hannah Sian Topp’s mouth in port wine as she sings it. But there’s a lot of other stuff to like about this song, from the opening guitar lick that sounds like something from your childhood that you just can’t place to the annunciation of the piano to the egg shaker—a party instrument if ever there was one.

Best of all is the chorus. I said in the last post, and I have a feeling that it will be a feature of most of these posts, that surprise is one of the things that most attracts me to a song. This song has two big surprises, and both of them are in a chorus and both of them are singers.

The song does not warn us that anyone but Sian Topp will be singing. Listeners, without knowing it, walk into every new song with a bag of expectations. Indie music in particular likes to surprise you by denying these expectations, usually by changing up the basic song structure (verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus is one example) that’s been burned into our unconscious. This song does surprise differently. It gives us the shifts we expect, the little guitar intro is met by drums and bass and the verse starts, then there’s a pre-chorus that’s a little punchier as the sax (?!) kicks in, and this is all normal. Things are going well, in other words. She’s holding our hand and we are so comfortable, we are so safe and warm.

She carries us like this, in our little papoose, into the chorus. We know a few things can happen here, the biggest two are: things will stay largely the same or they will notch up with added instrumentation/backup vocals/both. She sings the first line of the chorus alone, indicating the former, and we’re good. The tension is released. But then! Then, on the 2nd line of the chorus, a deep, sonorous male voice jumps in out of nowhere, as loud as the main lyrics and singing the same notes rather than harmonizing. The rug has been pulled out from under us. It’s wonderful, and I love it. The next line she sings alone, leaving us scrambling. What did I just hear? Where did that come from? And before we know it, the deep voice is back, singing the rest of the chorus with her, releasing us from this new and unexpected tension, which makes a person feel relieved and good. Queue the soothing piano.

I’m going to try to wrap this post up. The song goes through the paces again. Another verse, another pre-chorus. So far, our expectations are being met, and it’s not the same kind of enjoyment but it’s an equal one, getting exactly what you expected. Then the next chorus arrives, with new and unpredictable surprises. Nothing wild, for that would be too much. Like the last surprises, this one is entirely about the voices singing with her. The male voice has been replaced—immediately, at the very start of the chorus—with a childlike, synthesized female voice, as well as more traditional backing vocals. The male voice, suddenly unexpected again, is back where it was before, starting on the 2nd and 4th lines of the chorus. Queue the guitar solo. The song is just so fun. Especially for a song that seems so simple on the surface. It’s a really clever trick.

But what is it saying? What else is it doing, other than surprise?

For most of pop music history, songs have been told from a single and coherent point of view. That point of view can be serious, ironic, single or a group (we’re not gonna take it), a ghost, etc., etc. Whatever it is, it’s the same all the way through. Even duets make their point of view known; they’re the same as any song but with two POVs talking to each other instead of one.

I’m of two minds about Stone Temple Pilots, or more specifically their reputation. They’re regarded as a joke, and I’m in on it. STP are/were soft, pretentious, cheesy, and better than most bands of their era but not as good as bands that never achieved STP’s success. They were the band for the guy who thought he was a music guy but never actually was a music guy. And that guy was me right up until my late 20s.

I loved STP, and I still do more or less unironically. Purple was a favorite album growing up, and I listened to it endlessly. (Some, but not all, of it holds up.) I had an STP poster in my high school bedroom, though I have no recollection of where or when I got it. I tacked it on top of an X-Files poster—my first online purchase, back in probably 1996—because I thought that the girls I brought up to my room wouldn’t want to kiss me if they saw the X-Files poster but would want to kiss me if they saw this STP poster. Irony of ironies, the only girl I actually convinced to climb into bed with me was a lifelong X-Files fan.

STP was exciting to me as a kid, and I still believe they are/were a good band. Exciting is an important word when you’re young, and, actually, fuck that, I still believe exciting is maybe the most important quality that a song can have. I don’t find STP exciting now that I’ve grown up, but I still hold that in their prime they wrote gloriously sleazy, androgynous, and varied songs, and that Scott Weiland was a real rock star, meaning that he slithered his way between the boxed up definitions we use to describe ourselves and out culture. The band wrote a lot of mediocre (and plain bad) music, too, but who cares? If Jim Morrison hadn’t died so young, we’d all feel the same way about The Doors as we do about STP.

The way I feel about them now is: I’m not making any STP jokes myself, but I will laugh at them when someone else makes them. Were they not a popular rock and roll band, that might be a situation worth interrogating. 

I didn’t know that STP was making new music. I have a severe distaste for when a band replaces a dead front-person. I’m open to getting over that, I guess. It’s a dumb take, for sure. The other thing is, a 90s band making new music in 2020 is probably not something I’m interested in, original lineup or otherwise.

I don’t know anything nor do I want to know anything about new STP singer Jeff Gutt—or any other over-40 musician discovered via reality television for that matter—but he’s the guy who sings the new song I will now talk about. He sounds enough like Weiland for me to buy into the idea that this is the same band as the one I loved, and that’s important? It’s something, at least.

The STP catalog ranges from power chord idiocy (“Bang, Bang, Baby”) to spare, melancholy ballads (“Pretty Penny”), with their hits (”Plush,” “Interstate Long Song”) landing squarely in between. “She’s My Queen,” which Spotify force fed me before I knew what it was, falls to the ballad end of the spectrum, and like those songs it’s led by a quiet, thoughtful guitar riff and almost stupidly simple, saccharine lyrics. You can look them up for yourself; the song is all about his queen being a queen to him (oh yeah oh yeah). I miss Weiland for many reasons, not the least of which being that even when he was writing a sappy love song he would find ways to complicate it, such as when his lover understands that he needs her to be both his woman and also his man on “Lounge Fly,” or in my favorite, “Still Remains,” when he implies that a relationship is only perfect (e.g., eternal lovers becoming each other, bath-water drinking, etc.) if it includes stabbing thorns alongside the picked flowers and nectarines. In fact a lot of STP songs are about the opposite of what “She’s My Queen” is—heartbreak and loneliness, healing from both—but the news song’s tonal mood is familiar enough to be comforting.

“She’s My Queen” starts in an Indian mode, with a tanpura drone followed by a sitar run, and when the “Discover” playlist arrived on it I actually thought Spotify was serving me up a raga, which wouldn’t have been unusual, especially when the song kicked into what sounded like a tabla drums beat but on re-listen is probably from something tauter and more mundane. I can’t quite decide if it’s a bongo or a bodhrán, but I’m guessing it’s a mix of percussion. The predominant instrument on this track is an acoustic guitar (this is apparently an acoustic album, who knew?) on top of which we hear the metallic strums of a marxophone—an obscure cousin of the autoharp with lead hammers. This already would be an adventurous arrangement for STP, but they further commit to the eclecticism with winds, a breathy chorus, and a flute solo that I thought, momentarily, as I was steeped in the multiculturalism of the instrumentation, was from a pan pipe. The song really makes you feel like you’re gliding through the air on an overcast day, coming down much like the titular queen from a “northern sky.” It’s beautiful.

Ragas are devotional songs, and thinking about “She’s My Queen” this way make the less-than-exciting lyrics into something a little more interesting. The song becomes a hymn to a lover, possibly even a divine mother (I don’t fully know how it works, but certain notes in a raga/raag are linked to Hindu goddesses), who the narrator wants to pull from a dream and spend his days beside. Actually, why not both lover and goddess? This song is saying by being my perfect lover you deserved to be worship like a goddess, and fuck off if that isn’t right. The “she” in the song is, as he says, the narrator’s soul and queen, and though he cannot count the ways (oh yeah oh yeah) of her, he doesn’t lament this fact. The attempt is enough. The attempt is holy. Aside from a pronoun, there’s not much of a difference here, lyric-wise, from George Harrison’s Krisha prayer, My Sweet Lord, and both sound to me like their speaking not to me but above me. The effect is of making me want to devote myself to someone, too.

Ragas are also about the exploration of a mood, and I think that this song does that, and again in interesting ways. For one, there’s the accumulation of instruments, a classic trick for building drama which has an additional effect on “She’s My Queen” of making like his prayer is pulling the universe closer and closer to him. Religious music ought to be ecstatic. The wide range of instruments makes the song other-worldly in a very analog way, and the song never has to verge into the psychedelic or melodramatic or extraterrestrial to achieve its effect.