…maybe. For now, some YouTubage recommended to me by my roomie: M.I.A. and Timbaland frolicking in-studio. A moment of Zen if I’ve seen one.

Spoon “Everything Hits At Once”

The radio got totally intolerable last night while I was driving home from work, so I needed a change. I put in Girls Can Tell, Austin rockers Spoon’s moody and marvelous 2000 return to the indie world after an ill-fated sojourn into the indifferent arms of Neglektra Elektra. I ended up kinda just listening to “Everything Hits At Once,” the album opener, on repeat. (Yeah, you got me, at first it was all about that “lights in traffic we become/on the way back home” line.)

I notice that I focus a lot on lyrics–which are easier to pick apart in that “what is a song but poetry set to music” way, especially for a words guy like me–to the exclusion of talking about the actual, you know, music. Sometimes it’s really hard to get past the rockcrit mad libs: [stock adj] [instrument] (e.g., “swirling organ,” “jangly guitar,” “booming drums”) or “sounds like [band 1] meets [thing 2].”

So today, one and a half instrumental things that surprised me about “Everything Hits At Once,” and one and half that didn’t.

The Trouble Tone: If you’d've asked me what the very first sound on this song is, I would’ve said, “Easy. The drums kick in, ‘bish-dum-dum-doo-dat.’ ” But really, a split second earlier, a really quiet synth drone comes in, and maintains that chord for the song’s first 30 seconds or so. (It might go on longer, but I lose it around the half-minute mark.)

That the presence of this sound is a revelation to me speaks to either (1) my listening so often on shitty computer speakers, (2) my habit of listening while distracted by some other task or (3) that hole in my head everybody keeps talking about.

Anyway, as the song gets going, the bass moves and some brighter keyboards alternate between a couple chords. But that static drone in the background hangs, somber, creating unease like the sound of distant sirens. It’s super-subtle, but it’s alerting yr animal brain that this isn’t necessarily a happy time coming up.

Dreamtime Solo: Britt Daniel, the main Spooner, has always had an inventive touch with guitar solos, at times ending up just this side of out–blasting minimal skronk or tearing off figures that are more rhythmic in character than shreddy or melodic. Solos become little detours and tangents in Spoon songs.

Elements of this approach translated to the mellotron solo, played by one of the dudes from Trail of Dead, that starts around 2:16. “Everything Hits At Once” goes all the sudden from being lean and dark to turning lush and weird and starry-eyed.

Skins: I love the way Spoon places the drums in their mixes. They’ve figured out a consistent sweet spot where you really feel and hear what the drums are doing, but they don’t overpower the song, while the overall sound remains streamlined and clutter-free. As a result, they’re one of the few rock bands who have sat out the overcompression/loudness wars but nonetheless make songs that can sit next to a hip hop track in yr party shuffle without sounding weak.

In “Everything Hits At Once” you get a steady, nuanced performance from sticksman Jim Eno. It sounds like a real drummer doing his thing in a room (this is rarer than you think), booms loud and clear enough to really move the song, and has accents that actually, you know, seem to accentuate the feel and meaning of the song.

(And OK, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks: I find the refrain “I go to sleep and think that yr next to me” to be a perfectly succinct encapsulation of the post-breakup desolate devastation blues as I remember them; and the concept of fading into the sea of rush hour cars as a kind of communion is mystifying.)

Please enjoy the computerized rotoscope magic of Divya Srinivasan’s video for this song. It’s got parts that are lean and dark and lush and weird and starry-eyed, so it’s kind of perfect.

Girls Can Tell at Target. (and at iTunes.)

Ted Leo “Under The Hedge” (Demo)

I’m kind of a Ted Leo/Pharmacists superfan, and I realized that a couple months into hacking away at this newfangled “blag” thing all the kids are talking about, I haven’t featured any music by dude.

He pulls off his Thin Lizzy/Jam/Elvis C./dubby vein of punk-inspired smart rock–not exactly a trendy endeavor at any point in the last decade or so–without being, to these ears, wholly derivative. His songs are catchy, and the POV of his lyrics show a guys whose head and heart are in the right place. And anyone who’s seen the live sweat knows Leo’s like the Hardest Working Man in Indie Rock. (Or is that damning with faint praise?)

So today we have the demo version of “Under The Hedge” (The Tyranny of Distance, 2001), provenance unknown but possibly nabbed from TedLeo.com in the past. In its nascent stage, it’s a bit slower than the harder-rockin’ album version, which I’d argue allows the song of the song to come through a little more. Everything else is intact, from the opening step-dancin’ riff to the big solo. I’m never 100% sure I’m totally getting Leo’s point, and maybe I’m copping out before I even get going here, but “Under The Hedge” nails, for me, that special crushed-out feeling.

The demo take is incrementally more tentative-sounding than the final album version, and what befits being crushed out more than butterfly-bellied doubt? Sometimes it feels like yr just talking yrself into it. But it feels like love, even (especially?) if it’s not returned. Sometimes you feel a little like a spectator. In this case, the metaphor employed, watching from the margins, hiding in the bushes, should be creepy and stalkerish. But the openness of the melody and the chime of the arpeggio in the verse makes it sound sweet.

The song also has the sense of rooting for someone who doesn’t see in herself all the wonder you see in her. (Make that “himself … him,” as appropriate.) The White Knight Syndrome lives on, expressed aphoristically here by Mr. Leo. Actually, this evokes a particular long-ago crush from me, in the bad old days. So as much as I know that the kind of infatuation described in “Under The Hedge” is a bad idea, it still feels romantic to me.

The Tyranny of Distance at Newbury Comics. (MP3s at iTunes and Insound.)

The Spinanes “Madding”
Lois “Rougher”
Mark De Gli Antoni “They Wave”

For those of you who enjoyed all or part of Sabado de Gloria week, I thought I’d close out with one more Elliott Smith-related post, here collecting a handful of guest vocal type situations.

Elliott harmonizes on the sultry, syrupy “Madding,” opener to Portland indie pop fellow-travelers the Spinanes’ 1996 record, Strand, maybe as a return favor for main Spinane Rebecca Gates’ backing vox turn on the recorded version of “St. Ide’s Heaven.” (Strand being a decade old reminded me again that I’m a grey old man. Hooray!)

Gates’ songwriting has always fascinated me. She’s got the same sort of personal vocabulary, and resistance to cliché, that I’ve been attributing to Smith all week. And she’s got a combination of mystery and forthrightness to her lyrical voice that, delivered in her own husky tones, is undeniably sexy. So as Elliott’s whispery tenor blends perfectly with saidsame dusk ‘n’ husk, we get an unsettling lullyaby, to someone who, inscrutably enough, has head afire but “I know yr tired.”

Also from 1996 is Lois’ “Rougher,” first track on Infinity Plus, recorded in Elliott’s Portland house and again featuring him on strums and harmonies. The band Lois is built around Lois Maffeo, a prime mover of the K Records scene who was in fact in a short-lived band with R. Gates (it all comes back around) and played for a while with Courtney Love (the band, not the train wreck).

“Rougher” is a bit of wistful acoustic pop. It’s shot through with the regrets and resignation of picking up the pieces after the break-up, but there’s a lightness to the chorus that gives the song a warmth and shine. And somehow two voices, two acoustic guitars, imply something bigger and fuller.

The oddball track in this post is from 1999’s Horse Tricks, the solo album by Mark De Gli Antoni, keyboard and sampler operator for once-upon-a-time NYC avant/alt/jazz-hoppers Soul Coughing. “They Wave” bops along on a minimal, glitchy groove, and then at the 1:50 mark (d’oh!) a sad, sweet and bizarre little piano tune fragment by Smith floats into the background of the mix.

I’m not sure what exactly to make of it. It’s less a “you got yr chocolate in my peanut butter” thing and more like “you got yr whiskey in my buddha rhubarb butter.” I’d imagine there was a plan here, but it feels a bit more like worlds colliding, and awkwardly. De Gli Antoni’s record was pitched as avant composing (it’s on John Zorn’s label), so maybe it’s simply beyond me.

Feel free to set me straight in the comments section, or just enjoy the strangeness.

Donate to the Elliott Smith Memorial Fund.
Strand at Target. (and at iTunes.)
Infinity Plus at Gemm. (and at iTunes.)
Horse Tricks at Newbury Comics. (and at iTunes.)

This week Paper Covers Rock is presenting a live Elliott Smith show in five installments. Mp3s in each entry will expire when the next installment is posted. All apologies from the writer/recordist, etc.

Elliott Smith (Live @ Largo, 4/11/98) banter “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” banter “Lost Highway” banter “No Name #1″ banter “Alphabet City” banter “Thirteen”

Late into the evening of Low Saturday 1998, Elliott Smith had gotten past the tension that he’d complained about earlier in the night. I’ve seen the whole range of performances by Elliott, from transcendent to the shambolic, but I never saw him as talkative and at-ease as he was at that show.

So he’s joking with the audience, sharing his beer with a gurl sitting in front of the stage, and playing some country covers, with love and a wink. First up was his rendition of Hank Williams Jr.’s “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)”–an interesting choice set among the personal tour of the lowlife found in Smith’s own catalog.

I won’t pretend anything more than a passing acquaintance with Jr.’s material, but this half-joking review of the greying of country music’s outlaws, which first popped up on record in 1981, is tuneful fun. There’s also a certain mournful feel. It is, after all, an elegy to the loss of youthful exuberance, healthy or not. But Elliott was clearly connecting more with the humor–some of it unintended, such as the reference to George Jones’ drying out.

After a false start to change keys, Smith went from Jr. to Sr. with “Lost Highway,” actually namechecked in the previous tune. The song is actually a Leon Payne composition, but it’s most closely associated with Hank Williams Sr. Even though he lost the thread again for a moment after the first verse, Smith imbued “Lost Highway” with a spooky kind of intensity.

These aren’t waters I want to wade into too deeply, but the contrast here is Bocephus’ rocking-chair rock, the woes of someone who’s lived to grey, versus Hiram’s haunted cautionary tale, the sort of thing we label “prescient” coming from those whose excess dooms them too young.

Well, as Elliott said, “OK, that’s it for country songs.” Smith recounted a hilarious, or hilariously sad, story about the King in his own days of decline, then picked things back up with “No Name #1,” a favorite from solo debut Roman Candle, backed here by Jon Brion again on the vibes.

This more-or-less untitled weeper sports a verse built from another masterfully personalized reworking of that old set of doo-wop chords. But then everything here is communicated in a very personal set of signifiers: unnamed trouble and heaps of alienation sketched out with people who are barely there, a party that must be fled and a guest appearance by Kali the annihilator. I’m pretty sure, though, that I’ve been at this kind of party.

“Alphabet Town,” off the self-titled album, maps out a hard-boiled sort of romance, an assignation that might start in a dive bar on a deserted corner of a decaying city but comes from the arid places of the soul. I mean, wiser folks than me said something about, if you can’t be with the one you love, loving the one yr with, right? This, though, feels a little truer to life.

A few words, dialogue that’s all monotone come-ons, peppered with some elliptical stage directions, and a scene where the brokenheart falls into the comfort of a stranger. At the same time, there’s something almost cinematic happening when the mind’s eye swoops in like a camera, “her hand on yr arm/she put her hand on yr arm/she put her hand on yr arm.”

Another note on memory, to close this little project as I opened it: after finishing “Alphabet Town,” Elliott apologized that it was tough to get into the Largo show, intoning sheepishly, “There was a big industry… uh, people bought a bunch of tickets that I didn’t know about.”

At this remove, a snapshot of the machinations of a company town leading up to one Saturday night in April are less interesting than ever. It’s really only with this cue that I vaguely remember some sort of kerfluffle (wha?) among E.S. obsessives in L.A. about tickets (does Largo ever actually issue tickets?) being held aside for label employees, maybe even some last minute hustling by artist and venue management to right things.

It must’ve been a big deal back then, and I’m sure I waited hours on the Fairfax Ave. pavement to secure my spot at Smith’s feet, but in my head that night’s bathed in some sort of golden glow. I guess it’s always 72 degrees and sunny in the land of nostalgia.

But are we here to talk about music, or about my navel? (OK, a little bit of both.)

So as a perfect closer to the evening, Elliott sang a sweet take on “Thirteen.” Elsewhere and a long time ago, I called this Big Star tune the most perfect pop song not appearing on a Beatles record. An editor wisely challenged this bit of, well to a rational mind, obvious hyperbole. Makes me look like an old fart, an indie schmindie soft rockist with safe, calcified taste. Well, bring it all on, throw me over, hit the red button on yr browser. Because years older, wider, maybe wiser, I stand fucking by it still.

I want to talk about the simple beauty of the melody; the balance between the innocence of sentiment and tinges of sadness; how it’s all in the teenage pledge “rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay”; no, how it’s all in the “Do you like me? Check one: __yes __no” of the final verse…

But really it’s been a long week wrestling with memory, crashing into the limits of my vocabulary, dancing out-of-time about the most stunning architecture. I’m copping out. Just listen and enjoy, and thanks for reading.

Donate to the Elliott Smith Memorial Fund.
Elliott Smith music on iTunes.
Roman Candle at Newbury Comics.
S/T at Newbury Comics. (or mp3s at Insound.)