Like the Weather

Another cold and rainy day in San Diego brought this song to mind.

I'd never seen the video before—despite owning the album back in the day, as most faithful R.E.M. fans seemed to—and was immediately struck by Natalie Merchant's dancing.

I remember the first time I encountered 10,000 Maniacs. My pal Dave and I saw them open for R.E.M. in Charlottesville on the Work tour (and that show, as well as a later one in New Haven, still count as two of the best concerts I've ever seen). Despite eagerly anticipating the headliners, we were fascinated by the openers.

The band played catchy, accessible folk-rock type songs and were fronted by a singer who spun and whirled and twirled, the centrifugal force causing her long skirt to create utterly fetching patterns. The main thing, though, was that Dave and I spent their entire set—except, perhaps, when Michael Stipe came out to duet with her on one song—debating whether or not she was speaking English. There were times we were sure she wasn't, times we thought she maybe was, as a clearly English word would suddenly emerge, and most of the time we just couldn't tell.

Those are my main memories of my initial exposure to 10,000 Maniacs: the Stipe duet, the language debate, and the image of her whirling, twirling skirt. So when I saw this video for the first time, I saw surprised by her dancing. Not that it wasn't of the übër-polished, complex, technically impressive style pioneered in videos by the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna and Janet Jackson, and later made an imperative by stars such as Britney Spears and Beyonce. It's that it was...well, so utterly graceless. Given that I have two left feet, I don't look down upon anyone for not being able to dance well. In fact, I've sometimes wondered if we've missed out on some fine pop stars over the past 10 or 15 years because, despite their other talents, they weren't able to dance. (Adele is an argument that there's nothing to worry about, but I'm not sure one possible exception, no matter how popular, can count for too much. Then again, I'm just talking out of my ass and, anyway, none of this is something which causes me to lose a lot of sleep.)

No, it's more that her dancing reminded me of something, but I just couldn't quite figure out what, until my good lady wife made the connection.

Mega Party

I've never been a huge fan of dance music—the closest I come is my fondness for 70s disco. This, however, is making me reconsider.

Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)

Sure, you might think a young R.E.M. playing a great version of one of their earliest songs is the highlight of this clip.

You'd think. And then you'd actually watch and see that the internet commenter who said

"The audience members apparently learned to dance from A Charlie Brown Christmas"

was right on the money. I mean, seriously, I think I see Pig Pen in the back.

I believe, incidentally, in the original script, those dance moves are known as secret stigma, reaping wheel, diminish, and poster torn. True story.

Celtic Walk

Man, I wish I'd seen this in time for St. Patrick's Day. Sure and begorrah but music/art transcends culture.

Swingin' Party

If you're going to cover a great song, own it. Make it yours. Play it harder, softer, faster, slower, more ornate, stripped down, instrumental, a cappella. Toy with the melody, the harmony, maybe even tweak the lyric. Find something in it the original performer—even if that was the writer—maybe missed. Unless you're Elvis, where hearing you sing is its own reward, bring something to the table or don't bother.

That's not to say this approach'll always work, of course.


I don't know how I feel about this. If I didn't know the original, I might very well like this far more than I like most electronic dance music. Would I love it? Maybe. Would I dislike it? Possibly. I do love the way it ends, though.

Favorite Song Friday: Bizarre Love Triangle

I didn't like New Order. I didn't really know anything about them at the time, mind you, just that they were British and—and this is vital—from the 1980s. See, if they'd been from the 1960s and British, well, I'd have been all over them. 1970s were a bit dicier, but by the 1980s, especially the late 1980s, British bands equaled no for me, sight unseen and sound unheard. Yes, I was an idiot.

My (first) senior year of college, I ended up in a falling-apart, fire-damaged house in a dicey part of town with four other guys, only one of whom I knew at all. I got to know the others fairly quickly, of course, and one of the ways was through the habits and rituals most humans have. And one of the things a couple of my roomies did—the two who lived in the large room right above mine—was to blast this song repeatedly every Friday night as everyone (well, except me, of course) was getting ready to go out.

Naturally, I hated it from the first. And the fact that I had to listen to it three or four times every Friday night didn't help.

That's not exactly true. It turns out I actually really liked it, I just couldn't admit it, even to myself. It took seeing Michelle Pfeiffer dancing to it in the film Married to the Mob, and the surprising (to me) rush of joy hearing it in that context brought, to be able to admit that, by gosh and by golly, it was an utterly perfect pop song in every way.

The lyrics are...well, they're not good. They're not terrible, they're just little more than a series of loosely-connected phrases connoting romantic confusion and unhappiness clearly chosen more for their adherence to the rhyme scheme—one of my favorites, incidentally—than as a serious attempt to elucidate this most mysterious human mystery. Or, who knows, maybe they did try and just failed.

But it doesn't matter. Because the music—driven almost entirely by an usual IV-V-iii chord pattern, with the tonic only lightly and briefed touched upon during a few of the instrumental sections—carries the entire thing with a propulsion that makes even someone with one and a half left feet such as myself feel like he can and must dance. And when you combine that melody and those burbling synths, suddenly you realize that together they "say the words that I can't say." And when you get to the end, to that final moments, the music drifts off, unresolved, and ain't that ever so often the way?