Rob Steen
Hey, Tom Cruise. Try this mission impossible: marooned, alone, no direction home and eight castaway songs to pick. Where should the priorities lie? Genre or artist? Words or chords? Vocals or instruments? Rhythm or tune? After three months of hourly second thoughts, I finally decided on none of the above and settled for mood. The following is a timetable for those endless Groundhog days.
SUNRISE
Stone Flower: Santana (1972)
How I love the smell of samba in the morning. And who better to shake those hips out of bed than the planet’s most pleasant plucker? Composer Antônio Carlos Jobim hit biggish with this two years earlier, and even at double the length, it’s not an ambitious cover, but thanks to another Carlos and his unique ability to bend and sustain electrified strings, this constant source of spiritual renewal would be my best way to face the same old Groundhog of a day.
BREAKFAST
’Til I Die: The Beach Boys (1971)
‘I’d been depressed and preoccupied with death,’ wrote Brian Wilson, reflecting on the genesis of his most naked ditty. Only he could have made it sound beyond beautiful.
‘I’m a cork on the ocean/ Floating over the raging sea’… the opening lines ooze helplessness and resignation. ‘Did I have no control? Had I ever? Feeling shipwrecked on an existential island, I lost myself in the balance of darkness that stretched beyond the breaking waves to the other side of the earth… I felt dwarfed, temporary.’
Whether minimalist on Surf’s Up or nearly eight minutes long for the Steve Desper mix on Landlocked and its hypnotic extended proto-trance intro, ’Til I Die is matchless as a portrait of human fragility. As he assembled the tune on piano, Brian ‘wanted each note to sound as if it was disappearing into the hugeness of the universe’.
Approval was not unanimous, so he backflipped: ‘It kills my soul’ became ‘It fills my soul’; ‘I lost my way’ was changed to ‘I found my way’. Knowing this contradicted the verses, the band thankfully voted to revert.
Popular music’s most cloudbusting choir hovers angelically over vibraphone, organ and drum machine (Dennis Wilson was shooting Two-Lane Blacktop), though who sang what varies between versions and remains a mystery. No matter: after this, even the anti-Brian, Mike Love, deserved a modicum of forgiveness.
10AM
The Sweet Sky: Laura Nyro (1978)
My favourite voice at its most life-affirming. Propelled by that inimitable three-octave mezzo-soprano and its unique capacity to soar and swoop, Laura’s homage to the splendours of nearing 30 but feeling like a teenager is as celebratory as crotchets and quavers get.
Like parent album Nested, it came out of the blue. The Bronx Bronte had fled to Connecticut, her marriage had snapped, she’d released one album of self-written new material since 1970 and she’d had it up to here with all that starmaker machinery. Privately, though, she’d found her utopia: motherhood was looming and she’d rediscovered love in the arms of the painter Maria Desiderio, an alliance that would last the remaining 20 years of Laura’s horribly brief life.
There’s nothing fancy here: that trademark rinky-dinking on the keys is soon reinforced by Will Lee’s stately bass, John Tropea’s crisp guitar flicks and Felix Cavaliere’s nimble electric piano. Expressing her untold gratitude to Maria, whom she’d known since teenagehood, Laura can’t decide whether to ‘rock all night’ or ‘be shy’ beneath that sweet sky.
Then, at 2.11, almost imperceptibly, the tempo gracefully quickens and the watts climb as the multi-tracked backing vocals (all Laura) go gospel and rhapsody reigns. Two phrases are repeated, exuberance rising each time: ‘Ooh… sweeter than the sweet sky/ Stop on by, stop on by…’
Sexy and wise. If this list had to be condensed to three-and-a-half minutes, these would be those.
LUNCH
Move on Up: Curtis Mayfield (1971)
Has there ever been a more rousing or timeless clarion call? Unlike A Change Is Gonna Come, Glad To Be Gay and Curtis’s own People Get Ready, this could shake the tailfeather of a tyrannosaurus. Even now, as that glorious falsetto surfs those skittering drums, heartbeat-quickening congas and get-up-and-go horns, it feels fresher than a newborn daisy. That’s why the best version is this one, the one that could keep you dancing til doomsday.
The message, nonetheless, is why it transcends generation gaps. Remember the dream is your only scheme, urges Curtis, so keep on pushing. And whatever you do, take nothing less than the second best. Philosophy has never been funkier.
TEA
Political Science (Let’s Drop the Big One): Randy Newman (1972)
They all hate us anyhow
So let’s drop the big one now
A dollop of drollery is imperative. Political Science feels more terrifyingly contemporary than ever, so why look beyond Newman?
Drummer Jim Keltner once blew a take for this noble satyr of satire (and most unreliable of third-person narrators) because ‘the lyrics were so funny I couldn’t control my laughter’. Don Henley admitted much the same. Whether the topic is homophobia (Half A Man), racism (Christmas In Cape Town) or ignorance (My Life Is Good), you never quite know whether to throw up, crack up or cry. ‘A moralist disguised as a sarcastic misanthrope’ was Lester Bangs’ bang-on verdict.
Talk about a chameleon. Are those who tear up at the sound of You’ve Got A Friend In Me aware that the singer’s biggest hit, Short People, was misinterpreted as sneeringly sizeist? Or that on his most overtly political album, Good Old Boys, he defended a rabid racist? Or that he once characterised his fellow Americans as ‘overarmed and under-enlightened’?
We’ll save Australia
Don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo
We’ll build an all-American amusement park there
They got surfin’ too
So that’s where Trump got the idea for his Gaza plan.
DINNER
It’s Never Too Late: China Crisis (1985)
Sacrilegiously, my Liverpudlians of choice these days are China Crisis. When Walter Becker produces two of your albums, you have to be a bit special. So much so, melodic virtuosity, sonic experimentation and unapologetic low-calorie sweetness made Gary Daly and Eddie Lundon’s band my most-Spotified act of 2024.
Secreted as a bonus track on the flipside of Black Man Ray, this simple, delightful and quietly defiant ditty first crossed my path when it resurfaced last year as the lead-off single on an eponymous compilation. It was love at first listen.
Fluttering strings lay the table for vocalist Daly’s tender positivity as he reassures his partner that, no matter what obstacles might strew their path, everything will be all right. Hoariest of clichés, sure, but what else can you cling to when she’s oceans away and you’re running out of module data?
8PM
You Get What You Give: New Radicals (1998)
A sentiment as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls but as writer-vocalist-multi-instrumentalist Gregg Alexander was only too aware, every generation needs to heed it. Joni Mitchell chose this as one of her Desert Island discs, so enough said.
Born in Michigan to a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, Alexander was in his late 20s when he penned his one-album band’s lone major hit. Inexplicably, the equally superlative follow-up Someday We’ll Know, covered by Hall & Oates among others, only struck a chord with Brazilians.
Not that that derailed Alexander. The AllMusic website hailed him as ‘the catchiest, smartest professional mainstream pop songwriter of the early 2000s’; The Game of Love – his song, Santana and Michelle Branch’s hit – won him a Grammy; a co-write, Lost Stars, was Oscar-nominated in 2015.
Jabbing keyboards, a rocksteady beat and a rollicking riff serve as the hors d’oeuvre to a feast of rabble-rousing that sounds as if Alexander’s boyhood ambition was to update My Generation:
Wake up, kids
We got the dreamer’s disease
Age fourteen, they got you down on your knees
So polite, we’re busy still saying please
Frienemies, who when you’re down ain’t your friend
Every night we smash a Mercedes-Benz
First we run, and then we laugh ’til we cry
The final verse, unsurprisingly, wound up more than a few of the Alexander clan’s fellow conservative Americans:
Health insurance, rip-off lying
FDA, big bankers buying
Fake computer crashes dining
Cloning while they’re multiplying
Fashion shoots with Beck and Hanson
Courtney Love and Marilyn Manson
You’re all fakes
Run to your mansions
Come around, we’ll kick your asses
Manson responded all too predictably, threatening to ‘crack [Alexander’s] skull open’. Joe Biden, conversely, revealed in his memoir that YGWYG had become the family theme song while his son Beau was fighting cancer.
I may be a mighty long way past 14, but in that daily battle against despair, I can’t think of a better way to recharge the batteries.
BEDTIME
My Song: Keith Jarrett (1978)
The Magical Minstrel Never Ever Known As Keef tinkles and pounds keys as if Liberace is sitting on one shoulder and Liszt the other. On this endlessly soothing occasion he channelled the latter.
In recent years, latecomers and loyalists alike have devoured those American Songbook collaborations with Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock, but when Jarrett laid down the title track of the second alliance with his European Quartet (Jan Garbarek sax, Palle Danielsson bass, John Christensen drums), it was a far cry from the experimentation of his other studio work in the 1970s, above all the magnificent orchestral jazz of Arbour Zena. My Song is exquisitely simple and simply irresistible.
Can a song truly be wordless? Only when it’s this enchanting, this melodic, this emotional, this uplifting. Besides, the best players can always turn notes into nouns. If Carlsberg could bottle peace of mind, it would taste like this.
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