The Concretes - "You Can't Hurry Love"

In the most unintelligible English this side of Shaquille O’Neal, the lead singer can only emerge with an old Motown lyric for a chorus.  The songwriters don’t have a bridge and from what I can tell she sings the exact same thing for the second verse as she did for the first.  The hook of the sung hinges on the Velvet Underground/Shirelles drum pattern and the off-key vocal.  AND IT’S ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL!  Play this the next time someone waxes on about how significant song structure, lyrical detail and the relatability of sentiment is to a  great pop song.  Those are nice, but they’re for those of us who have nothing better to do than go on about them.  This sucker serves in less than two minutes and doesn’t ask you to stay and chat.  Now read that title again.

Joe Jackson - "Steppin' Out"

The whole album’s brilliant, actually.  Night and Day was a rare moment when art and commerce came together in music.  Jackson was desperate to make a “New York” album and A&M records decided to fund it regardless of the fact that it probably wouldn’t yield a hit even on the modest scale of “Is She Really Going Out With Him.”  It turned out to be his bestseller and an album that still means something to him.  I loved the album as a child and my father was a big fan as well.  Now as an adult who writes songs, I’m impressed with Jackson’s recognition of the New York’s multicultural atmosphere.  Latin rhythms and Eastern harmonies sit along cosmopolitan structures and relationship issues.  “You don’t do the things that I do/You wanna do things I can’t do” is a freedom that can undo a romance in a country such as ours...a city such as Gothham.  “Steppin’ Out” emerges out of the previous songs fade out of poly rhythms, programmed drums and bass imitate the traffic of midtown Manhattan setting up the piano and glockenspiel that tell us that work is over and a night in New York is about to begin.  In New York that means that life is about to begin.  Jackson’s lyric contains the same thing that made Let’s Get It On so vital:  sex/love as a means of escape for mature people that struggle for meaning day afer day.  “Don’t you wonder what we’ll find steppin’ out tonight?”  John thinks the chorus is saying “New wave, steppin’ out into the night, into the light.”  I think John’s full of shit on this one.  I think the lyric is “you babe” not “new wave.”  If it’s the latter, then John’s correct-that’s a bad lyric.  But the former is a brilliant one.  Jackson tells the woman that this cathedral of a city is her grand accessory for the evening.  She can’t be consumed by it but she can wear it.  Perception being reality, it doesn’t get more romantic than that.

The Kinks - Days

When Ray Davies wants to be touching he can devastate.  I don’t know it as a fact, but I can’t help but think that this song has something to do with his older sister that passed away when he was younger.  It was very sudden and she was very supportive of Ray.  

One of the things that I really like about this song is that it’s extremely moving but it’s not a ballad.  It jangles and moves and damn near dances.  The chord sequence in the verse kind of reminds me those folk songs that list things quickly.  (Something well-lampooned in “A Mighty Wind.”)  But the lyrics, direct and unflinching, are so heartfelt that you can’t shake feeling that you’re listening to something that you’d eventually dedicate to someone in a final moment.

“You took my life and very soon I knew you’d leave me.  But it’s alright cause I’m not frightened of this world anymore, believe me.”  It’s the “believe me” that I cannot get over.  And you think that he’s about to feel bitter about the loss, but forgives the missing person in absentia.  And it’s a weird fact of life that you have to eventually forgive someone for dying on you.