Springsteen

I could write a long post about everything I think is wrong with country music today, but I generally think that diatribes against any type of music are ill-advised and end up making the critic (in this case, me) look worse than whatever he's criticizing, so instead of going into a lengthy disclaimer about how I don't usually like country music as defined by Toby Keith and Jason Aldean, I'll just stick to saying that I really do like the Eric Church song "Springsteen." I mean, I really like it. I really, really like it. And the thing is, it's not that different from all the songs currently playing on country radio that I don't like, but I think it's got a unique (-ish) melody and a nice chorus, and I'm mostly just glad that a thirtysomething male country singer decided to namedrop an artist other than Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, because it seems a lot more likely that the guys singing country today spent more time in their youth listening to singers like Bruce Springsteen than the scratchy recordings of guys making music fifty years ago. I understand that part of being a country singer today is proving your country credibility, but I find it a little disingenuous how guys like Aldean (and "guys like Aldean" describes roughly fifty percent of country music right now) seem to skip right over the superstars of their youth, people like Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire and, yes, Shania Twain, and act like they owe everything to way-back singers like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, people whose music actually bears very little resemblance to their own -- sort of the way Chris Martin from Coldplay is always going on and on about The Beatles, when we all know he owes a lot more to Radiohead.

But "Springsteen"! I like it! I wish they would play it more on the country station in my town, but then that would mean less time to play Luke Bryan's "I Don't Want This Night to End," which makes me want to jump off a bridge. I'm less excited about the video -- I like that it uses real-looking people (credit where credit is due, a lot of country artists are good about using real-looking people in their videos), and I like that it captures the feeling of nighttime in the song, as well as the chilly sound of the piano notes (which is ironic, since the song is about a "July Saturday night"), but it's also set in one of those modern, tree-less neighborhoods that make me feel like I can't breathe just to look at them, and the chronology is pretty wonky: there's no way the guy or the girl in the video are seventeen, and the video seems to be set in present time, yet the song is set in the past, back when people made mix tapes instead of CDs, so...who knows. I have now put way too much thought into this. I like the song! And the kid on the bike in the video is a nice touch.

Brothers

I have no idea how this video works, or how they filmed it, but if you click and drag the image, you can see different parts of the room in real time -- "real" meaning while the video was filmed, not live, obviously. Anyway, it's pretty cool, and the song itself is one of my favorites from 2012 so far.

Brian Fallon Mega Post: Skin-Tight Jeans... and White T-Shirts

I was looking around on youtube yesterday for a video for the song "Behold the Hurricane" by The Horrible Crowes (a side project of The Gaslight Anthem's lead singer Brian Fallon), and I stumbled across two live performances of Fallon singing Katy Perry's song "Teenage Dream," which I would have loved to actually see live, because "Teenage Dream" was my Pop Jam of 2010, and Fallon has a way of turning pop songs into really nice ballads without losing their hooks, that endorphin-rush quality that makes them appealing in the first place. I know people have a lot of issues with Katy Perry -- hell, I have some issues with Katy Perry -- but something about "Teenage Dream" really clicks with me, and it's actually a more appropriate song for Fallon to sing than it initially seems (that "You make me feel pretty/without any makeup on" first line is a real eyebrow-raiser for a male singer), because a lot of "Teenage Dream"'s appeal is its retro quality, and The Gaslight Anthem are nothing if not masters at recreating sounds, feelings and images from the middle of the twentieth century. Fallon's lyrics almost always have a nostalgic air to them, and he maintains the nostalgia in "Teenage Dream" even without using the original track's late-seventies/early-eighties synth sounds.

For what it's worth, the video for "Behold the Hurricane" is also worth checking out, although it strikes a decidedly darker tone than "Teenage Dream" and is also one of those videos where I'm pretty sure I understand what's going on... but maybe not completely. It's definitely a different interpretation of the song than I had when I listened to it on The Horrible Crowes' album, but not so different that it doesn't make sense, and it's also nice to see a video from Fallon that goes beyond the basic punk/rock-band-sings-a-song concept that TGA usually uses.

December Music: Day Thirty-One

"Auld Lang Syne" as featured in Waterloo Bridge (1940)

Out of all the movies I watched for my big movie project in 2010, Waterloo Bridge was probably my favorite. It's hard to explain why it's such a good movie to people who haven't seen it, because on paper it sounds like a pretty standard war-time romance (with a little prostitution thrown in for good measure), but in effect it does what every movie romance should do, but most don't: it makes your heart swell at the same time it rips it out and stomps it into the ground. The scene above isn't actually set on New Year's Eve, but it embodies the spirit of New Year's Eve perfectly, from the use of "Auld Lang Syne" to the candles slowly going out around the dancing Roy and Myra.

December Music: Day Thirty

Trembling Bells and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, "New Year's Eve's the Loneliest Night of the Year"

December Music: Day Twenty-Nine

Sun Airway, "Put the Days Away"

December Music: Day Twenty-Eight

Brie Larson (aka The Clash at Demonhead), "Black Sheep"

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World definitely has its own rhythm -- I spent the first fifteen minutes or so not liking it, before eventually falling in step with it and ending up liking it quite a bit -- but the above scene is hard not to like even if you're not a fan of the movie. (It also works better in the movie than it does on its own, but you'll have to go rent the movie to see what I mean.) The song the girl is singing is actually by the band Metric, and their version is featured on the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack. The first video below is a live performance by Metric at Comic-Con overdubbed with the album recording; the second is the same performance with the live track. (I've been in a Metric sort of mood these past few days.)

December Music: Day Twenty-Seven

Metric, "Sick Muse"

December Music: Day Twenty-Six

Santigold, "Lights Out"

December Music: Day Twenty-Five

Judy Garland, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas"

December Music: Day Twenty-Four

The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale of New York"

December Music: Day Twenty-Three

The Raveonettes, "The Christmas Song"

December Music: Day Twenty-Two

Julie London, "Warm December"

I wasn't going to use this song, but considering it's felt like April outside for the past week or so, it seemed appropriate. 

December Music: Days Twenty and Twenty-One Double Feature

Bing Crosby, "Happy Holidays (Beef Wellington Remix)"

Holiday Inn is the movie that got me into classic film. The year that I saw it, I was a freshman in college and taking a class in early film history, and one of the last films we watched (because we were watching chronologically) was Judy Garland's Meet Me in St. Louis, which follows one year in the life of a family living in St. Louis during the turn of the twentieth century. I thought St. Louis was just okay when I watched it in class, but I was also aware that this opinion might have derived from the fact that, again, I was watching it for a class, so when I went home for Christmas break that semester and found myself up late on Christmas Eve with St. Louis playing on TCM, I decided to give it a second chance. As it turned out, I still didn't like it all that much, but the movie that played next on TCM was Holiday Inn, and...well, the rest was history.

Make no mistake, Holiday Inn is not a great movie, whereas Meet Me in St. Louis is, objectively speaking. I am in no way suggesting that Holiday Inn is the better of the two films. It's a slight, almost-gimmicky affair -- Bing Crosby moves to New England and opens a hotel called The Holiday Inn, where they stage musical numbers for just about every holiday you could think of, from Christmas right down to President's Day -- and its main claim to fame is introducing the song "White Christmas," which went on to become an immensely popular single and spawn a more-famous holiday film of its own. I even knew as I was watching it that Holiday Inn wasn't very good, but what it had going for it (that a lot of the movies I watched for my film history class didn't) was that indefinable, magical "old movie" feel, that sense of looking at a different time and place where everything is far cozier and more elegant than real life. I've watched enough old movies now to have gained a greater appreciation for the sort of timeless, more realistic films I watched in class, but escapist pieces like Holiday Inn have their place too, especially around Christmas.

The video above has scenes from the movie underneath a remix of the song "Happy Holidays," which I assume was intended to be the main song from the film, until "White Christmas" became so popular. I'm not sure at what point "White Christmas" turned into such a hit, if it was right when the movie came out (during World War II) or later on in the forties, but I do know it was the first song where the recorded music outsold the sheet music -- prior to the forties, the way people consumed music was drastically different from the way we consume music today, or even twenty years ago, because the relative newness of radio and the lack of anything as convenient as a CD player meant that when people bought music, they often bought the written music and learned to play the song themselves on their pianos. "White Christmas" began the process of changing all of that.

December Music: Day Nineteen

Swimming, "In Dulci Jubilo"

December Music: Day Eighteen

Red House Painters, "Sundays and Holidays"

December Music: Day Seventeen

The Waitresses, "Christmas Wrapping"

December Music: Day Sixteen

Brenda Lee, "Papa Noel"

December Music: Day Fifteen

Common wisdom usually says that you're either a Beatles fan or a Rolling Stones fan, a Led Zeppelin fan or a Who fan, but I've found that it's more often the case that you're either a Beatles/Stones fan or a Zeppelin/Who fan -- at any rate, my allegiance is with the latter two bands. The Who was the first band I really got into in high school, thanks in large part to their epic performance at the Concert for NYC following 9/11, and in the past few years I've come to appreciate Led Zeppelin, especially their folkier stuff and the way they were able to blend American blues with traditional English music and their own specific brand of rock and roll.

To my knowledge, Led Zeppelin never put out a holiday song during their career -- they were popular long before the ironic holiday song became a staple of any hip band's music catalog -- and I suppose you could argue that The Who never did, either, but The Who do have one Christmas-themed moment in their 1969 rock opera Tommy, in a song aptly titled "Christmas." Most people know the premise of Tommy without realizing that they do, thanks to the song "Pinball Wizard" -- "that deaf, dumb, and blind kid (sure plays a mean pinball)," and the purpose of "Christmas" is to question whether a kid who can't see, hear or speak can expect to go to heaven, when he doesn't even know what a holiday like Christmas is supposed to mean. The song wasn't a radio hit, but it was an important part of The Who's touring of Tommy in the early seventies, and also featured in the film adaptation of the album that came out in 1975, directed by Ken Russell.

The only band I know of that's released a cover of "Christmas" is Rogue Wave, and I think they do it justice. Covering a Who song (or a Led Zeppelin song, for that matter) is usually a bad idea, because there's no way a singer can approach the power of Roger Daltrey's or Robert Plant's vocals without seeming like a pale imitation, but "Christmas" is more about Daltrey embodying Tommy's character than showing off his vocal acrobatics, and Rogue Wave manage to imbue the song with an extra sense of holiday spirit to make it more accessible to people unfamiliar with Tommy while also honoring the original version lyrically and stylistically.

December Music: Day Fourteen

Woody Guthrie, "1913 Massacre"