Wild Sage - Original Cover!

I've got a little time on my hands lately, so I'm noodling around with more songs. Here is my faithful rendition of "Wild Sage" by the Mountain Goats, from their album Get Lonely.

Last blogged on November 23, 2011.



Artist: Sooze
Written by: John Darnielle
Year: 2014, (2006, original)
Rating: Hot!

Untouchable Face

I presume that Ms. DiFranco came to mind because I was discussing her music with Scott the other day. This particular song seems suited to some mental tangents of late as well. The song is not analogous to what has happened between me and my recent ex-girlfriend, but certainly I've had some of that "Fuck you, and your untouchable face" feeling lately.

Also, I was at a post-Thanksgiving feast with a bunch of poly friends last night, and finding the company worthy of stirring several mild but burgeoning crushes. This song exemplifies the conflict in monogamy, in which someone is "taken" and therefore, "untouchable." This is not the case in my scene of choice. However, the combined factors of 1. a close-knit circle of friends wanting to maintain good boundaries with each other and 2. most folks in the circle seeming to have fairly full dance cards right now, leads me to assume that any number of those faces may very well continue to be untouchable. For now.

Artist: Ani DiFranco
Year: 1996
Rating: Luke Hot

Note: The main guitar line leads me right into The Who's Baba O'Riley. Funnily enough this is the second entry in which a song has strongly mingled in my mind with Baba O. The last time this happened was with REM's Supernatural Superserious. I guess this happens when your band is palpably influential over the course of decades.

Wild Sage

And when somebody asks if I'm okay
I don't know what to say
And along the highway
From cast-off innumerable seeds
Wild sage growing in the weeds.

One of my very favorite songs. Makes me cry almost every time I hear it. It names a lifelong conundrum of mine: am I okay, or am I not okay? Usually, the answer is both, simultaneously, just like wild sage growing in the weeds. But how should I answer the question today?

Artist: The Mountain Goats
Year: 2006
Rating: Hot!

Play with Fire

Fitting in with some of the roiling emotions of this week.

Artist: The Rolling Stones
Year: 1965
Rating: Firey!

Half Dead

One of the simplest, most relatable break up songs ever. Though I'm not breaking up with anybody (kenahora!*) I happen to be cleaning out a bunch of junk in my room today. As the lyrics indicate, the most effective way to manage such a task is to "act like a machine" while you're sorting through stuff. I'm not interested in being machine-like, but coming across my ex-girlfriend's house key was more of a mildly-amusing curiosity than a trigger for grief, which felt good. Artist: The Mountain Goats Year: 2006 Rating: Luke Hot *"kenahora" is the Yiddish equivalent of "knock on wood" - basically, an incantation to banish the evil eye. Pronounced "cun-a-HU-ra."

Country Feedback

This song was actually in my head a couple weeks ago, before "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" which I logged a few minutes ago. I'm still catching up on my mental queue. Sorry for the out-of-orderness.

Artist: R.E.M.
Year: 1991
Rating: Luke Hot

I Can Feel It

I got a thing for you, too, You can have it, you can have it. Artist: Sloan Year: 1994 Rating: Luke Hot Note: This clip from 2006 features the Yoko Casionos. The original single duet was with Jennifer Pierce of fellow Canadian indie band Jale.

Heretic Pride

Title track from last year's album. Typical, brilliant John Darnielle - an uplifting song structured around a grim lyric: the character is proud to be alive even in the moments his body is being dragged across the town square and into a ditch.

Artist: Mountain Goats
Year: 2008
Rating: Luke Hot

With Whom to Dance

Lovely gender-bendy video for this broodingly sweet song. The rest of life pales in significance I'm looking for somebody with whom to dance Artist: Magnetic Fields Year: 1995
Rating: Luke Hot

Oh Comely

Amazing song, full of wonderful, terrible imaginal imagery blending everyday vulgarities with the legacy of Anne Frank and the Holocaust. See the Pitchfork album review. The part that was in my head specifically starts at about 6 minutes in.

Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Year: 1998
Rating: Luke Hot

Love, Love, Love

Yummy.

Artist: Mountain Goats
Year: 2005
Rating: Luke Hot

You or Your Memory

The video cuts off the first line of the song:

I checked into a bargain priced room on La Cienega...

Pensive, simple song opening the autobiographical album The Sunset Tree. The reference to Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers dates the scene to the '80s or early '90s, probably when John Darnielle was in his late teens/early 20s and reflecting on the events that the album describes. I've always thought about the song as a half-assed suicide attempt (what harm could baby aspirin and wine coolers do?) and a marker for the character to make changes in his life.

Artist: Mountain Goats
Year: 2005
Rating: Hot!

Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 1

One of the most memorable and most evocative songs from NMH. See the fan discussion on song meanings here. I also blogged about this song's reprise in an earlier entry.

Artist: Neutral Milk Hotel
Year: 1998
Rating: Hot!

Battle of the Broken Hearts

Sort of a spacious post-rock version of prog, with its many changing motifs and spacey synth lines. I dig 'em.

Artist: Mojave 3
Year: 2003
Rating: Luke Hot

Break It on the Kitchen Floor

Wow! Amy Miles doesn't even have a wiki page, that's how goddamned indie she is! And the album this song comes from, Dirty Stay Out, is out of print. Amber and Scott saw her open for They Might Be Giants a few years ago, and voila, she's become part of my mental soundtrack. Emotionally raw, spare, and vocally melodic, I think you'll enjoy her.

Artist: Amy Miles
Year: 2002
Rating: Luke Hot

The King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1 by Neutral Milk Hotel

This is the opening track on Neutral Milk Hotel's extraordinary album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. The song, like the entire album, inspired by the story of Anne Frank, manages to be gorgeous and unsettling at the same time. One of my all-time favorite albums.

Year: 1998
Rating: Hot!

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...

One of the greatest popular-genre songs of the 20th century, as far as my knowledge of music goes. It's on my mind 'cause Scott recently requested this song as his funeral dirge for when he sheds this mortal coil. (This was thankfully just in a Facebook meme and not in a serious conversation about his death.) Scott's death is not something I want to think about; nevertheless, I don't regret the song being in my head.

The version knocking around in there is really kind of a pure, stripped down version, just really Cohen's voice and the voices of John Cale and Jeff Buckley intermingled. Cohen's original album version (above) is too churchy-sounding for me, but the vocals, and of course the lyrics, are indelible.



Cale's version is the archetype of most of the cover versions, in its more bare instrumentation and choice of lyrics (Cohen's drafts evidently filled several notebooks; he took a year to write the song.) Buckley took Cale's version, which appears on a 1991 Cohen tribute album, as his original source material.



Apparently there are more than 150 known covers, but I thought these would be sufficient for your listening pleasure.

Year (original): 1984 Rating: Luke Hot
Year (Cale): 1991 Rating: Hot!
Year (Buckley): 1994 Rating: Hot!

The Book of Love by the Magnetic Fields

In my entry entitled My Musical DNA, I linked to a studio version of this song (set to an old silent film of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk). The above version is from a 2008 show, a tour I got to catch.

The Book of Love has music in it
In fact, that's where music comes from
Some of it is just transcendental
Some of it is just really dumb

It was just a wonderful experience to see them live and stripped down to such spare acoustic accompaniment. For those of you unfamiliar with the Magnetic Fields, their sound is often much more produced and heavily influenced by '80s synth-pop. Here's an example of one of their more synthy songs. They have huge catalog of material, and songs range from old-timey country to ultra-modern, but nearly always with a tinge, or maybe a gash, of irony, arch humor, and melancholia.

Year: 1999
Rating: Hot!

Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2 by Neutral Milk Hotel

Not Two-Headed Boy but the reprise at the end of Neutral Milk Hotel's truly great album In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. This song manages to combine eerie uncertainty and graphic images of loss with some sort of comfort, as in sheets warm and wet.

Year: 1998
Rating: Hot!