Songbook (4 page)

You'd think that self-reflective songs about the music-biz life – about the pain and joy of being a talented but struggling singer-songwriter (‘I've Had It'), or about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship and a career in rock
'n' roll (‘You Had Time') – would suck. You'd think that these songs would reek of self-indulgence, or betoken a failure of imagination and creativity and empathy; you'd think that DiFranco and Mann are three-quarters of the way down the road that leads to songs about room service, concession stands and the imbecility of local-radio presenters. So how are these two of the most moving and beautiful pieces of music one could hope to come across on pop albums?

‘You Had Time' sets itself a further handicap: it begins with more than two minutes of apparently hopeful and occasionally discordant piano noodling. I know, I know – neither ‘Baby Let's Play House' nor ‘(Hit Me) Baby One More Time' begins with piano noodling, and they wouldn't have been much good if they had; that's not what pop is supposed to be about. But DiFranco's song is nothing if not ambitious, because what it does – or, at any rate, what it pretends to do – is describe the genesis of its own creation: it shows its workings, in a way that would delight any maths teacher. When it kicks off, the noodling sounds impressionistic, like a snatch of soundtrack for an arty but emotional film – maybe
Don't Look Now
, because the piano has a sombre, churchy feel to it, and you can imagine Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie wandering around
Venice in the cold, grieving and doomed. But it cheers up a little, when DiFranco makes out that she's suddenly hit upon the gorgeous little riff that gives the song its spine. She's not quite there yet, because she hasn't found anything to do with her left hand, so there's a little bit more messing about; and then, as if by magic (although of course we know that it's merely the magic of hard work and talent) she works out a counterpoint, and she's there. Indeed, she celebrates the birth of the song by shoving the piano out of the way and playing the song proper on acoustic guitar – the two instruments are fused together with a deliberately improbable seamlessness on the recording, as if she wants us to see this as a metaphor for the creative process, rather than as the creative process itself. It's a sweet idea, a fan's dream of how music is created; I'd love to be a musician precisely because a part of me believes that this is exactly how songs are born, just as some people who are not writers believe that we are entirely dependent on the appearance of a muse.

And, thankfully, the song proper isn't anticlimactic: ‘You Had Time' is perhaps the gentlest and most generous-spirited break-up song I know. (And just as the intro is a talentless fan's dream of musical creativity, this generous-spiritedness is a liberal heterosexual's idea of how nice gay
women are to each other, even when their relationships fail. While straight men are inwardly plotting revenge while feigning indifference, and straight women are cutting the crotches out of expensive trousers, gay women are hugging and crying and pledging eternal friendship. This is actually offensive nonsense, of course – unhappily, the only intelligent right-on response is to recognize that gays are as violent, unpleasant, pious, judgemental and unreflective as everyone else – but ‘You Had Time' is so sweet-tempered that it inspires this sort of embarrassing stereotyping.) What gives ‘You Had Time' some of its power is that, whereas most break-up songs are definitively heartsick, this is a song about indecision and stasis. The narrator has just returned from a tour of some kind; both her fingers and her voice are sore, so we must presume that she is a guitarist and singer (you must forgive us, Ani, if we temporarily confuse fiction and autobiography). It becomes apparent that, while away, the narrator is supposed to have sorted out what she wants to do about her relationship, and so the title of the song, it becomes clear, is her lover's predictable and legitimate retort to the age-old plea. Anyway, she's had all this time, and she still hasn't made up her mind . . . Except, the song manages to imply, she has, really: she knows it's over. In one lovely, and very sad,
couplet, the narrator says, simply: ‘You are a china shop and I am a bull / You are very good food and I am full' . . . See what I mean about generous-spiritedness? How many of us wouldn't have felt better about being dumped if someone said that to us? But the song ends dreamily, with nothing resolved, at least externally, and I doubt that DiFranco will ever write another song quite as piercingly pretty, or as moving.

Mann's song is more straightforwardly about work, and is, I would guess from its detail, unmediated autobiography, an anecdotal scrap which has been worked and enriched until it contains more resonance than it had any right to. Mann and her band straggle together to play a gig in New York, a gig that none of them seems to have any expectations for; but then ‘something strange occurs': the band might not be going anywhere, yet clearly some kind of musical epiphany takes place that night. It's not a happy song, however – Mann chooses to regard the epiphany as ironic (this is our finest hour?) rather than redemptive, and ‘I've Had It' becomes a song about the triumph of bitter music-biz experience over hope.

I listen to ‘I've Had It' a lot, and there are occasions when I find the tinge of self-pity in the lyric immensely comforting. (Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it,
and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.) Even so, there's something a little troubling about the song's breathtaking melodic strength. Here's the thing: which came first, the tune or the words? Because if it was the tune, then that makes you wonder why Mann thought music that sublime was best served by her travails in music. Wasn't there a break-up that meant this much to her, or a parent, or a childhood memory? (Her song ‘Ghost World', incidentally, contains a verse indicative of what a fine writer she is: ‘Everyone I know is acting weird or way too cool / They hang out by the pool / So I just read a lot and ride my bike around the school'. These few words do the job of perhaps as many as 700 recently published semi-autobiographical but deeply sensitive first novels.) And if the words came first, then are we to presume that it is only her career that can produce this level of musical inspiration? Either way it bothers me a little, and makes me doubt whether my love for the song is really to be trusted. This frequently happens in pop music, of course – all sorts of people knock up a neat tune and then can't furnish it with anything but a few tatty second-hand lines about eagles flying and love dying – but one is struck here by what seems like Mann's inability to tame and control her
melodic gift. It is, perhaps, the curse of the trade. ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,' Walter Pater said, in one of the only lines of criticism that has ever meant anything to me (if I could write music, I'd never have bothered with books); music is such a pure form of self-expression, and lyrics, because they consist of words, are so impure, and songwriters, even great ones like Mann, find that, even though they can produce both, words will always let you down. One half of her art is aspiring towards the condition of the other half, and that must be weird, to feel so divinely inspired and so fallibly human, all at the same time. Maybe it's only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt on a bad day.

But what is appropriate subject matter for a song? There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication, something both timely and timeless, and, in the case of pop music, something that will sustain over several hundred plays and, possibly, a couple of margarine advertisements. Sometimes songs seem to survive the going-over they are given by fans and radio stations almost despite themselves, more by luck than judgement. The Clash probably
didn't think that ‘Complete Control', an attack on their record label for releasing a single without their approval, would make any sense to people a couple of decades later (‘They said release “Remote Control” ' is surely one of the less promising first lines of a song) but it still has something to say about naivety and cynicism and artistic impotence. Even ‘Nelson Mandela' doesn't sound daft, despite the great man's release; it celebrates a life – a great life, an important life, a life well-lived – and therefore easily and joyously transcends the focus of its protest. Nils Lofgren's ‘Keith Don't Go', on the other hand, is a song which pleads with The Rolling Stones' guitarist not to go to Toronto in 1977, because he would have been arrested on a drugs rap; it's not a cause that one wanted to devote an awful lot of energy to, even back then (not least because Keith could just, like, not go), and it's not a song that has revealed hidden depths in the intervening years. The great Australian comedian Norman Gunston used to sing Liza Minnelli's ‘I'm Liza with a Z' and then profess himself mystified that more people didn't cover it – perhaps Nils is just as bemused that ‘Keith Don't Go' hasn't earned him the publishing royalties he'd anticipated.

In the end, it's the songs about love that endure the best. Songs about work are good. Also songs about rivers,
or parents, or roads. Good songs about children are surprisingly rare (yes, it's hard to write about the feelings one has for one's child without nauseating people, but somehow songwriters manage to knock out perfectly decent, sometimes even breathtaking, songs about the airhead model they met in the toilet of a club without the same effect); songs about pets are best avoided. Songs about drugs – especially songs that purport to be about girls but are ‘really' about drugs – don't have the same appeal when you are no longer at school and there's no one you can explain the hidden meaning to. And jokes never really stand the test of airtime. (I have always felt slightly ambivalent about Randy Newman's work, brilliant though much of it is. How many times do you want to listen to a song satirizing bigotry, or the partiality of American congressional politics? Listening to Randy Newman over and over again is like reading
The Grapes of Wrath
twice a year: however much you care about the plight of America's migrant workers in the 1930s, there is surely only a certain amount of your soul and mental energy you can devote to them.) But the truly great songs, the ones that age and golden-oldies radio stations cannot wither, are about our romantic feelings. And this is not because songwriters have anything to add to the subject; it's just that romance,
with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself. Songs that are about complicated things – Canadian court orders, say, or the homosexual age of consent – draw attention to the inherent artificiality of the medium: Why is this guy singing? Why doesn't he write a newspaper article, or talk to a phone-in show? And how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? But because it is the convention to write about affairs of the heart, the language seems to lose its awkwardness, to become transparent, and you can see straight through the words to the music. Lyrics about love become, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song. Maybe this is what gives ‘You Had Time' the edge: our break-ups, in the end, have more melody to them than our work does.

Actually, that's a serious question: how does a mandolin solo illustrate or clarify the plight of Eskimos anyway? In fact, how does any sort of solo illustrate any sort of plight, whether it be the plight of Eskimos, or the plight of a young
man whose girlfriend is seeing his best mate behind his back? Why are words suddenly suspended while the guitarist or the sax player or the violinist steps forward and does his thing?

Those of us who were born in the late fifties and fell in love with rock music during the early seventies have a complicated relationship with the solo. I can remember seeing Grand Funk Railroad play in Hyde Park, and trying, with what in retrospect strikes me as a heartbreaking earnestness, to enjoy, appreciate or understand the twenty-minute drum solo; a couple of years later, older and wiser and in a late-teenage, pre-punk, anti-bombast frame of mind, I nipped out of Led Zeppelin's show at Earl's Court during John Paul Jones's interminable keyboard extravaganza, went to a local pub for a game of pool and a pint, and came back just in time to catch the end of Jimmy Page's bit with the violin bow, thus missing ‘Moby Dick' (The One with the Drums) completely. I have no regrets. (Not only do I have no regrets, but also, now I come to think about it, that night taught me one of life's most useful lessons, one of the only pieces of advice I have to offer to younger generations: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO WALK OUT! I still remember the feeling of giddy liberation I had when we walked into that pub; and had I not left the Zeppelin show then, who knows
whether I would ever have realized that it was possible? Oh, I knew that people walked out because they were shocked. But I didn't know that it was permissible if you were simply a little bored. Since that night I have tasted that sweet relief hundreds of times: I've walked out of films, gigs, and – of course – the theatre. If you sit next to me during the first act of a play and my fidgeting is annoying you, don't worry – I won't be back after the interval. And let me tell you, there's nothing like the taste of pasta and a glass of wine at nine-thirty if you thought you weren't going to be eating until eleven. It is not overstating the case to say that John Paul Jones and his keyboards turned my whole cultural life around.)

Nobody does the extended-solo thing any more – or at least, no one I'm interested in seeing live – so all fears of The Solo have long vanished. (And in any case, we're talking about songs made in a recording studio here, not live shows, so the solos are almost always contained, and always involve a lead instrument, rather than bass or drums.) In fact, since the members of Grand Funk Railroad went their separate ways (although, like everybody else, they have almost certainly since reunited), I have learned to love solos; and, though of course it's possible to find a great song which doesn't have any kind of instrumental
break, I would argue that a great song containing a great instrumental break is by definition superior to a great song without one.

There are two kinds of great solo. The first, and most common, type is the one where a brilliant (or momentarily inspired) musician steps forward and fills the allotted number of bars imaginatively – even thrillingly, if you're lucky – but not necessarily appropriately. At the end of Steely Dan's ‘Kid Charlemagne', for example, there's a guitar solo of such extraordinary and dextrous exuberance that you end up wondering where it came from, and quite what it has to do with the dry ironies of the song's lyrics; ‘Kid Charlemagne' is a typically clever, mordant look at the death of the sixties, but the solo that closes it is the sound of pure, untethered joy; the guitar jumps up on the song's shoulders and then just launches itself toward the clouds, and as the song fades you can tell that it's going to reach them, too. But what the sound of pure joy has to do with ‘Kid Charlemagne' and the death of the sixties remains unclear, and in the silence between that track and the next, it's the guitar you're left with, like a single, wonderful flavour that has completely and regrettably overpowered a delicate recipe. Joy is never an unwelcome guest, but some songs are happier to see it than others: Springsteen's
guitar solo in ‘Thundercrack' (from
Tracks
) comes tumbling ecstatically out of a deliberately discordant screech and, though Springsteen's not the cleverest guitarist in the world (and the song isn't really a song at all, simply a tumultuous way to finish a stage show), he can do that kind of
West Side Story
street-punk energized ecstasy standing on his head, and it always makes me happy to hear it.

But my favourite solos are the ones that somehow show that the soloist has felt the song, words, music and all, felt the song and understood its very being, so that the solo becomes not only an imaginative reinterpretation of it, but also a contribution to and articulation of its meaning and its essence, like a piece of brilliant practical criticism. And sure, this is what solos are supposed to do, but most of them are at best an imaginative reinterpretation of the melody line; very few of them give the impression that they want to engage with the songwriter's soul. David Lindley did this spectacularly on the first few Jackson Browne albums; Clapton did it repeatedly on
Layla
, when he was apparently strung out on heroin and exalted by grief – a blow for those of us who don't want to buy into either of these myths about art. His solo on ‘Nobody Knows You When You're Down & Out', a deeply felt, simply played break that seems to pour unstoppably from a deep wound
in the centre of the song itself – not the guitarist, but the song – is my favourite white blues-rock moment. Clarence Clemons isn't my favourite soloist – we've heard the same solo too many times – but if I were Bruce I would have wept at what Clemons produced for ‘Lovers In The Cold' (a
Born To Run
out-take that you can find on the Net), because I would have felt well and truly understood, and every single swoop and squall is an articulation of devotion to the spirit of the song and of its creator. And the delirious violin solo in the middle of Mary Margaret O'Hara's extraordinary ‘Body's In Trouble' hiccups and swoons as if it's on the verge of the kind of fainting fit that young nineteenth-century English women were supposed to have experienced in Florence: you don't get too many attacks of aesthetic ecstasy on your average pop-folk album, but this one nearly overwhelms the song.

The thing I love about these solos is that they can crop up in unexpected places, and they needn't even be particularly well played. Paul Westerberg, everyone's favourite coulda-beena-contender, is no pianist, but his solo on ‘Born for Me' is just lovely – maybe because he's the singer-songwriter, and knows what his song feels like to him, and therefore what it should feel like to us. ‘Born for Me' is a ragged ballad, with a Waitsian lonely losers' lyric
and an affectingly heartsick tune; the solo is basically played with one finger, and initially at least consists of three notes, but it sounds great to me – not in a punky, do-it-yourself way (although frankly you could, once you've heard it), but in a strangely, intensely musical way. A better pianist would have wrecked the moment, filled in the gaps, failed to recognize how the tune has exerted a spell over the right listener; somebody with little talent and absolutely no ear would simply have chosen the wrong three notes. Just as you know intuitively when the simplest and crudest brushstrokes have been made by a proper artist, I can never listen to the solo without thinking that it's played by a born musician – not a virtuoso, not even someone who could make a living as a pianist in a cocktail lounge, just a man who thinks and feels and loves and speaks in music.