Bruce Springsteen - Vietnam

One of the amazing things the both of us have taken in by being part of this project over at One Week//One Band, where we and many others are posting extensively about Bruce Springsteen's lesser known works for the past and next several days, is how much we have learned. We thought we knew plenty, no doubt. But as Mom always said, there's still plenty more to take in as long as you keep your eyes and ears open.

Case in point. Did you know that Bruce Springsteen, during his Nebraska sessions, had a song called "Vietnam?" Which was pretty damn good? But which he scrapped 90% of or so, only to keep a few strands? Well, he did. And those strands turned into nothing more than two masterpieces: "Born in the U.S.A." and its heartbreaking flipside, "Shut Out the Light?"

Because I sure didn't. And now my mind is sufficiently blown.

Here's the extremely well-written post about the aborted "Vietnam" song by Mark Richardson.

Here's the song itself, in the raw form Bruce initially created it back in December 1981.

And here are the two immortal songs it turned into.

I swear. Watching the creative process slowly unfold like this? Watching something good get discarded, only to have it repurposed a bit later on as something so much more amazing?

 I love music.

Janey, Don't You Lose Heart

DT and I wrote a series of posts for the great One Week // One Band. They're all archived over there, along with an incredible number of other fantastic pieces. Here's the one I wrote about "Janey, Don't You Lose Heart."

***

Few rock major rock stars have been as prolific as Bruce Springsteen; Steven Van Zandt has said Springsteen always has at least a half an album of unreleased songs ready to go. And during the recording of Born in the U.S.A. Springsteen was prolific even by his standards, with stories of him coming in every day with two or three new songs they’d cut and then never play again; at least 70 songs were recorded for the 12-track LP and maybe more. And that’s just one damn album. The fact that there were apparently 300 songs under consideration for the Tracks boxset, the vast majority of them unreleased, lends credence to these tales even as it boggles the mind.

Springsteen has said that these songs provide a sort of alternate map, a road-not-taken, what-might-have-been view towards his catalog. Many of the songs were omitted from albums not because they were in any way lacking in quality, but simply because they didn’t fit the larger theme in some way, lyrically or sonically or atmospherically.

Which brings us to “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.” The b-side to “I’m Goin’ Down,” the sixth single released off Born in the U.S.A., “Janey” is perhaps the most unabashedly direct love song Springsteen had yet released.

The lyrics begin with an odd and arresting image:

You got your book baby with all your fears
Let me, honey, and I’ll catch your tears
I’ll take your sorrow if you want me to
Come tomorrow that’s what I’ll do
Listen to me

Janey don’t you lose heart
Janey don’t you lose heart
Janey don’t you lose heart
Janey don’t you lose heart

The opening verse could have come across as a simple pick-up line, or as a man trying to appear heroic as he Prince Charmings to the damsel in distress’s rescue. But the chorus changes that. Yes, he’s offering to catch her tears, a romantic if not overly useful gesture. But he’s not offering to solve her problems. He’s offering to help her…but mainly he’s encouraging her own efforts and offering her emotional support. The fact that he’s focused on such an abstract concept as her fears leads more depth to the lyric. He doesn’t see her crying over a broken heart; he sees her destabilized by her own insecurities. Not the average song topic from a male rocker in the 80s—and that the song seems to be about a woman who has a string of one-night-stands, and the male singer passes no judgment is also (sadly) noteworthy.

The second verse amplifies this:

Well you say you got no new dreams to touch
You feel like a stranger babe who knows too much
Well you come home late and get undressed
You lie in bed, feel this emptiness
Well listen to me

Here Springsteen sings about a woman getting undressed and into bed and yet somehow manages to make it not the least bit sexual or creepy but instead entirely relatable—who hasn’t had those kind of days, where they just want to crawl into bed, hoping against hope for some respite from that hollowness inside?

The final verse turns from the intensely personal towards the kind of imagery he’d rarely used post-Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, albeit in a much less verbose manner, and with a “God Only Knows” backhanded approach:

'Til every river runs dry
Until the sun honey’s torn from the sky
‘Til every fear you’ve felt burst free
And gone tumblin’ down into the sea
Listen to me
Janey don’t you lose heart

I’ll tell you, a guy says that to me in my darkest hour? I might just consider switching teams.

As with most of even his seemingly simple songs, there’s usually more going on beneath the surface than is immediately noticeable to those who’ve been conditioned to view Springsteen as a pumped-up heartfelt arena rocker. (Which isn’t to say that’s not part of his persona.) I remember Springsteen being criticized at the time for his use of the familiars “baby” and “honey” and “girl” and so on. Even the fact that he used Janey, the diminutive form of the name, could be viewed in this light. (Or course, you’d have to then ignore the many male names—Billy, Bobby, Charlie, etc—he used in similar fashion.)

But Springsteen’s women, unlike most of those of most other artists of his stature, are neither perfection upon a pedestal nor simply vessels for male satisfaction. They are imperfect characters but treated with and deserving of respect, reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Janey, as with so many of the females (and males) in Springsteen songs, has been beaten down and is on the verge of losing faith. But she hasn’t yet. She’s obviously still fighting, or the singer wouldn’t be imploring her to stay strong.

Musically, “Janey” is one of the most immediately catchy songs Springsteen ever released. Sure, it’s bathed in those cheesy 80s synths that make this era so hard for many to take seriously (although I don’t think they’ve aged nearly as badly as their reputation would suggest—I think they’ve aged, sure, but it’s more that it’s cool to show your disdain for those sounds now…some of which are pretty deserving of disdain, admittedly), and it’s got a trademark Clarence Clemons sax solo, as well as a trademark Springsteen one-line repeated chorus. But “Janey” is unusual in that it starts not the expected tonic chord (an E, since the song’s in the key of E), but instead the subdominant chord, so the song begins with an already slightly unsettled, searching feel. This same subdominant chord is also the most frequent chord in the fadeout, again, leaving the song in an unresolved state, and the listener with an ever so vague sense of disquiet.

There’s also that one last final solo vocal of Nils Lofgren’s that I’ve never been able to figure out. I could argue it’s showing a sense of community or something like that but, really, I just think it’s weird. But cool. Nils Lofgren’s E Street Band studio debut FTW!

"Janey," more than just about any other officially released song from the Born in the U.S.A. era reinforces what “Blinded by the Light,” “Because the Night” and “Fire,” should have—but didn’t—make obvious previously, which is that if he had wanted to, Springsteen could have been a writer of pop songs along the lines of Bacharach and David, Goffin and King, Mann and Weil and so on. His melodic gifts are often overlooked, but then that’s largely due to his own decisions—after all, he’s the one who decided to discard “Fire” and “Because the Night” and “Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart.” (Springsteen later showed his mastery of melody in spades on Working on a Dream…but unfortunately at the seemingly unnecessary expense of lyrical depth). “Janey” is melodically reminiscent of, and could have stood proudly alongside, such 1960s gems as “Walk Away Renee,” “When You Walk in the Room,” “Look Through Any Window,” etc, and reminds us that as much as he was a fan of the Beatles, Stones, Who, Kinks, Dylan, CCR, etc, it was the wonderland that was pop radio at large in the 1960s that was his main influence.

It’s not surprising Springsteen left this off Born in the U.S.A., as there’s nothing else remotely like it on the LP. But it’s also not entirely surprising that he recognized it was a great enough song to be deserving of an official release, and not just stuck in the vault for a few decades. For most other good artists, ”Janey, Don’t You Lose Heart” would have been a highlight of their career. For Springsteen, it was just good enough to make the b-side of the album’s sixth (sixth!) single. That’s one hell of a plethora of riches.

***
The original post can be found here, along with the other amazing posts that week. And while you're there, check out their other weeks, featuring so many great pieces on so many great artists.

Under Pressure

So this once happened.



Here's my ever so erudite, incisive, perspicacious yet pithy musical analysis of this performance:

Sweet fancy Moses.

Be True

DT and I wrote a series of posts for the great One Week // One Band. They're all archived over there, along with an incredible number of other fantastic pieces. Here's the one I wrote about "Be True."

***

Ah, the 1980s. Such a simple time. An ignorant time. A time before that wild and wooly western frontier known as the internet. When an international superstar like Bruce Springsteen could play in concert an officially released song and few of even his long-time fans would know what it was, because the previous night’s setlist hadn’t been posted in real time. (And later we’d ride our dinosaurs back to our caves.)

The first time I heard “Be True” was in Worcester, Massachusetts in late February 1988. It was the second show of his Tunnel of Love Express tour and I’d paid a lot of money for a scalped ticket—a scalped ticket I soon learned was, in fact, not even authentic. That it still got me in is a matter that confuses me to this day, but about which I was not and never have been exactly displeased.

I’m sure I’d heard of the song before that night—I was Springsteen-crazy enough to study various hard to get b-sides in catalogs and discographies and what have you—but I’d certainly never actually heard it. Back then, to hear a rare b-side, you had to either know someone who owned it and would let you listen, or you had to send away for a copy, a process which was expensive and time-consuming—and not just compared to today, where you can download an mp3 or play something on the YouTube with a few clicks of the mouse, but even compared to being able to run down the record store, back in those halcyon days of such marvelous things as record stores existing.

So the song was entirely new to me. And while I generally take a while to warm up to songs, I loved this from the first. It was catchy and the E Street Band was putting their all into it, and the interplay between Bruce and Patti was delightful, engaging and arresting and an effective visual component to the concert’s overarching theme. (And am I misremembering that I thought their mock romantic on-stage behavior was…let’s say, unusually believable? Or is it merely later events which have implanted faulty memories?)

Sometime thereafter Springsteen released an EP on a mini-CD, with four previously unreleased live songs: “Tougher than the Rest,” his amazing acoustic version of “Born to Run,” and his cover of the Byrds’ cover of Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” And “Be True.”

If it were possible to wear out a CD, I would have at least come close. I listened to that damn disc scores upon scores of times. And while it’s not possible to love a recording more than I loved that first acoustic “Born to Run,” my feelings for “Be True” came close.

"Be True" wasn’t quite like any other Springsteen song. When I later learned to play the guitar, I realized that at least in part it’s because it’s got far more chords than the average Bruce tune. By Darkness on the Edge of Town, and especially by the time of The River and Nebraska, Springsteen had famously stripped down his music to, for the most part, three and four chord songs. (Yes, there are many, many exceptions, but then this is a guy who put out a four-disc, 66-song set of unreleased songs 15 years ago, and even at the time, that was apparently less than half the unreleased songs they considered releasing—he and the band recorded over 50 songs just for The River album alone. The point being, he’s written kind of a lot of stuff, so anything you can say about his music, you can also find a lot of exceptions to the rule.)

"Be True," by contrast, had the kind of busy chord changes he’d used on his first few albums. Melodically, it was more River era. Lyrically, however, it wasn’t quite like anything else he’d released. It’s an unabashed, heartfelt love song…albeit, in classic Springsteen fashion, with an object of his desire who’s a million miles away from the simple T&A the Rolling Stones were singing about (literally) at the time. Nor is she some untouchable goddess on a pedestal. This is a woman who’s been hurt, who’s made bad decisions and who has a proclivity to continue to do so, and yet is smart enough not to fall for what she suspects are simply the singer’s pickup lines. She is, in other words, a smart but flawed person, hurt but hopeful but wary. In other other words, she feels real.

Springsteen’s lyrics, as I said, don’t quite fit into any pre-existing category. They’ve got clever wordplay, like his earlier material, but without any of the excessive words for the sake of words of his first album. (Which I adore.) Rather, he make use of allusions and metaphors in a way he’d rarely if ever done before, and would only rarely do afterwards. (And most of those kept “Be True” company on Tracks.)

Your scrapbook’s filled with pictures of all your leading men
Well baby don’t put my picture in there with them
Don’t make us some little girl’s dream that can’t ever come true
That only serves to hurt and make you cry like you do
Well baby don’t do it to me and I won’t do it to you

You see all the romantic movies, you dream and take the boys home
But when the action fades you’re left all alone
You deserve better than this, little girl, can’t you see that you do
Do you need somebody to prove it to you?
Well you prove it to me and I’ll prove it to you

Now every night you go out looking for true love’s satisfaction
But in the morning you end up settling for just lights, camera, action

And another cameo role with some bit player you’re befriending
You’re gonna go broken-hearted looking for that happy ending
Well girl you’re gonna end up just another lonely ticket sold
Cryin’ alone in the theater as the credits roll
You say I’ll be like those other guys
Who filled your head with pretty lies
And dreams that can never come true
Well baby you be true to me
And I’ll be true to you

Looking at the lyrics and considering the rest of Springsteen’s output from the time, it’s hard not to wonder if the song isn’t actually surprisingly autobiographical, and that he’s actually singing about himself, and simply switching gender.

"Be True" reminds me of Elvis Costello’s "Everyday I Write the Book," but using cinematic terminology, rather than literary. (Interestingly, Costello has said he likes "Everyday I Write the Book" less than almost anyone else—obviously, Springsteen liked "Be True" okay, or he wouldn’t have put it out as a b-side, much less played as the second or third song of a major tour for the next four months. On the other hand, he didn’t like it enough to put it on an album or play it on earlier tours, waiting nearly a decade to do so.)

So. A few years later, sometime in the early mid-90s, I shelled out the twenty or so bucks for the “Fade Away” single, just so I could hear the original version of “Be True.” And I was amazed. The energy was off the charts. I couldn’t believe how much faster it was—somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 BPM faster. The result, however, while exciting, is that the song feels somewhat lightweight, with Max’s drums skittering rather than pounding, and Roy’s piano sounding like Schroeder’s toy. I love the record. But, frankly, despite his modern confusion over the issue, Springsteen was right to choose “Crush On You” over the original “Be True.” (Confession: I’m an unapologetic “Crush On You” apologist.)




One of the original recording’s most interesting features is how, in retrospect, very punk it is. The River's debt to rockabilly is often noted, but I think its allegiance with punk has always been unjustly overlooked. The River and “Be True” were recorded at almost exactly the same time the Clash—big Springsteen fans and vice-versa—was recording London Calling, and except for its lack of low-end, they share a certain energy. Which helps remind a perhaps incredulous modern audience that Springsteen, that most classic rock American rocker, was considered something of a punk at the time, friends and admirers of the Clash, the Ramones and Suicide—fans of early rock and roll as at least the first two bands were. It’s a refreshing reminder and helps limn the rest of recordings from that era in a slightly different light.

I’m one of the rare hardcore Bruce Springsteen fans who doesn’t subscribe to the notion that the songs always sound better in concert, that that’s where they only truly come to life, and that you need to see Springsteen live to really get him. I love Springsteen live. I love seeing him in concert and I love listening to live recordings, of which I have over…well, at least three times as many as someone sane would have. But I’ve just never bought into the belief that he’s always better live. He’s sometimes better live, often better, maybe even usually. But not always. And I have to believe Springsteen himself agrees, otherwise, he’d release more live recordings, or even go the Running on Empty/Big World route and record his new material in front of live audiences. But “Be True”? “Be True” is one instance where it’s absolutely true—the live version is markedly superior to the original studio recording.

It’s a great song. And the original is a wonderful recording. I love it. But it’s not a great record. I love it. But Springsteen was right to leave it off The River, as it didn’t fit sonically or thematically. But, damn, am I glad he did release it on its own and as part of Tracks.

***

The original post can be found here, along with the other amazing posts that week. And while you're there, check out their other weeks, featuring so many great pieces on so many great artists.

The Promise

DT and I wrote a series of posts for the great One Week // One Band. They're all archived over there, along with an incredible number of other fantastic pieces. Here's the one I wrote about "The Promise."

***

Somehow I missed hearing any of the legendary performances of that most legendary of unreleased Bruce Springsteen songs, “The Promise,” despite having acquired a fair number of live bootlegs throughout high school and college. So the first time I actually heard “The Promise” was the day 18 Tracks was released. 

A lot of hardcore Springsteen fans find his (then) new, solo recording of it severely lacking, in contrast to the 1970s performances. Having, as I said, never heard any of those, I didn’t have the same reaction. At all.

The first time I listened to “The Promise” was on a small boombox in a small room in the small Queens apartment I was sharing with my wife and two very small children. I had no idea what the song was going to sound like, melodically, or in terms of tempo. I just pressed play. And didn’t move for two minutes and eight seconds, awestruck by the song’s quiet power. 

Until the first time Springsteen sang “thunder road.” The moment he did, the moment those sounds hit my ears, I got goosebumps as badly as I’ve ever gotten in my life. The power of those three syllables I’d heard so many thousands of times over the years they were practically embedded in my DNA, yet here so unexpected and in such a different context, was just…and the same thing happened when he got to the song’s second ”thunder road” section.  

And when the song was over, I just sat for a few minutes. Then I stood up and started to leave the room but realized I wasn’t ready to see anyone else just yet. So I sat back down. But I didn’t play the song again. I wasn’t ready for that either. I just sat. I know that probably sounds melodramatic to most people, but my guess is, if you’re reading this, you’re the kind of person that’s happened to a time or two yourself. 

After a while, I played the song again. And again, the words “thunder road” caused goosebumps, both times. But this time, having now heard it once and therefore knowing how the song was going to end, those words also felt like a punch in the chest. And when the song was over again, I remember thinking, “That’s about the most powerful fucking thing I’ve ever heard. No wonder he didn’t release include it on Darkness.” Then I thought, “And thank God.” 

"The Promise” is one of Springsteen’s most amazing creations—and, yeah, I know how bold a claim that is. But I stand by it. “The Promise” is a staggering deconstruction of his own (arguably) best song, something virtually no other artist of his stature ever even attempted—with the obvious and important exception of John Lennon’s “God.” (Although that’s more a deconstruction of Lennon himself than one of his best-known songs, a small but important difference.) And although I’m not sure Springsteen has ever spoken as extensively as, say, Pete Townshend about the way art becomes something else, something new, once it’s shared with an audience, I find it hard to believe he doesn’t agree with this statement of Townshend’s:

“Rock is art and a million other things as well—it’s an indescribable form of communication and entertainment combined, and it’s a two-way thing with very complex but real feedback processes as well." 

It’s not a coincidence that Springsteen took to playing "Born in the USA” in various different arrangements so often in his post-80s years; obviously, the way the song was received and misinterpreted was a source of some consternation and the rearrangements an attempt to provide less-easily-mistakable clarity. 

So I like to think that it wasn’t just the impression that “The Promise” was about the Appel lawsuit that kept Springsteen from releasing the song at the time. I like to think that he looked out at the people in the crowd singing back to him, “have a little faith, there’s magic in the night,” and he thought, “right. I can’t do that to the song. I can’t do that to them." 

So. Below is an updated version of a piece I wrote about the song a few years ago. I’m only sorry I didn’t have time to write more about it. 

***

“Thunder Road,” virtually any Bruce Springsteen fan (and many who aren’t) would agree, is one of Springsteen’s greatest and most important songs—as well as one of his most popular. The never-mistaken Wikipedia said about it (in part):

In 2004, it was ranked #1 on the list of the “885 All-Time Greatest Songs” compiled by WXPN (the University of Pennsylvania’s public radio station). Rolling Stone magazine placed it as #86 on its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” The song came in at #226 in Q magazine’s list of the “1001 Greatest Songs Ever” in 2003, in which they described the song as “best for pleading on the porch.” Julia Roberts, when asked which song lyric described her most accurately, chose "Thunder Road”’s “You ain’t a beauty, but hey, you’re alright.” The song is featured in the book 31 Songs by British author Nick Hornby. “Thunder Road” has also been ranked as the 188th best song of all time, as well as the #3 song of 1975, in an aggregation of critics’ lists at acclaimedmusic.net.

Among other things, “Thunder Road” is one of Springsteen’s very first songs to make explicit themes—the power of the automobile and the freedom of the open roads—which would come to dominate his music for the next decade and beyond. Although never even released as a single, it would become a staple of AOR radio in the 1970s and 1980s, and Springsteen would go on to release multiple versions of it, from the piano-based live version on Live 1975-1985, to the 1979 No Nukes version on his video anthology, to his acoustic guitar rendition on MTV Unplugged in 1993. Springsteen himself acknowledges the song’s power, while seeming a bit mystified by it:

“I’m not sure what that song has. We played it the other night at the Sony studio, when we were taping a European show, and it just felt all-inclusive. It may be something about trying to seize a particular moment in your life and realizing you have to make very fundamental and basic decisions that you know will alter your life and how you live it. It’s a funny song because it simultaneously contains both dreaming and disillusionment.” (“Human Touch: Bruce Springsteen reflects on his music, life with and without the E-Street Band, and the glory of rock & roll,” Neil Strauss, Guitar World, October 1995)

In August 1976 Springsteen began playing a new song in concert, “The Promise.” Speculation immediately began as to the song’s “meaning,” speculation which was later to play a part in determining the song’s fate. The main interpretation was that it was about the contentious lawsuit between Springsteen and his manager, Mike Appel. In an interview with Paul Nelson, Springsteen denied that it was about the Appel situation, per se. “I wrote it before the lawsuit,” Springsteen claimed. “I don’t write about lawsuits.” (Bruce Springsteen: The Rolling Stone Files, 70) He did, however, much later admit on the Charlie Rose show that “The Promise” was indeed a continuation of the “Thunder Road” narrative, when responding to a question as to why it wasn’t on the Tracks album:

“Basically, I went back and I listened to it and we never really got a good recording of it in my opinion. It’s been a favorite song of a lot of..a lot of people mention it. It sort of was the sequel to “Thunder Road” in some fashion, it referred back to those characters. But I went back and we sort of had a very plodding, heavy-handed version of it. I couldn’t quite live with it, so maybe another time.”

One of the keys to Darkness on the Edge of Town is the hope to be found in each and every one of its songs. While its pervasive sense of the grimness of reality is the album’s most prominent feature—indeed, following the youthful romanticism of Born to Run, it feels like its defining feature—that nugget of hope contained in each song is the key to the album. In many of its most popular songs—most obviously “Badlands” and “The Promised Land”—the optimism is unmistakable, but even the album’s most somber songs, the ones which upon first examination seem devoid of any spark of hope, reveal themselves to have at the very least a glimmer. “Factory,” for example, may very well be the starkest, most desolate song on the album, yet even it contains the line

Factory gives him life

Coming as it does hard on the heels of the previous line

Factory takes his hearing

it is, at the very least, a mixed blessing, to be sure. Nevertheless, as compromised and difficult a life as it may be, the fact remains that the factory does give him something—and not just anything, but specifically life. What’s more, the song ends with the promise

And you just better believe, boy, somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight

Even after all the workers have been through, years and even decades of back-breaking, grueling, (almost) thankless and unrewarding work which has taken its toll, the men are still fighting, not just metaphorically, but literally, an act which in and of itself proves that they’ve not acquiesced, surrendered or given up. It’s not ideal…but nor is it nothing. It’s not ideal, but it is still something.

That stands in stark contrast to “The Promise,” perhaps the bleakest song Springsteen had written up to that point, and thirty years later, still one of his grimmest songs. The narrator runs down a list of his friends and acquaintances:

Johnny works in a factory and Billy works downtown
Terry works in a rock and roll band
Lookin’ for that million-dollar sound

It’s interesting to note the way “The Promise” begins here, with not just a nod to early Sun records, but also a recitation of the narrator’s friends, as opposed to the only characters in “Thunder Road”: just the singer and Mary. No one else is named in the earlier song, and there’s barely even a mention of another human, in fact, save Roy Orbison’s disembodied voice singing about loneliness. The only other people who get brought up are Mary’s lovers, for whom she idly and vainly makes crosses, until the end of the song:

There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets
They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they’re gone
On the wind

So are they even real? Are they ghosts? Are they merely metaphorical? Whatever they are, they’re not physical, tangible presences like Mary and the singer, no more able to touch or be touched than Roy Orbison’s voice floating in the background.

There may be one additional character in the initial song, but it’s not human: it’s Thunder Road itself, the only other proper name in the song, and which exhibits some decidedly human traits:

Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it’s late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road, sit tight take hold
Thunder Road

Is the singer directing Thunder Road to take hold? Is he telling Mary to grab onto Thunder Road? Is he telling her to grab onto him in order to keep that killer in the sun from snatching her? Whatever the answer, the result is that Thunder Road itself becomes an actor in this drama, and one which shows up in the sequel.

“The Promise” (recorded January 12, 1978 at the Record Plant, New York, NY; available on The Promise)

Acting, in the sense of taking action, is notably missing from “The Promise.” The narrator’s friends may have jobs to which they go, but he himself isn’t exactly ambitious

I got a little job down in Darlington
But some nights I don’t go
Some nights I go to the drive-in, or some nights I stay home

This isn’t the romantic rebellion of a guy stuck in a job he hates, who’s willing to throw it all away for a shot at something bigger and better, and it’s not a former grad student filled with what he imagines is intellectually-viable existential ennui: this is a man who’s learned the ugly truth of what the world is really like. As Springsteen himself said in Philadelphia on December 9, 1980, “It’s a hard world that makes you live with a lot of things that are unlivable.”

So sometimes the singer goes to his job and, well, sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t, it’s not to run off to the beach—or even some sleazy hot sheets motel—with a girl, it’s to go to the drive-in, apparently alone: certainly there’s no mention of Mary or any other female. Unless he doesn’t go to the movies either, on those nights when he can’t even be bothered to do that. And yet the listener doesn’t get the impression that the narrator’s what would later be termed a “slacker,” a guy who’s voluntarily, even happily, dropped out of society, seeing it for the receptacle of inherently shallow set of values it is. The narrator of “The Promise” is man who has learned, to his crushing disappointment, that despite what he was always told growing up, this is the reality of the adult world. This, we discover, is a man who tried the best he could to play the game the way he was taught in school, and learned the hard way that the game is a fake, that it’s rigged, that the American dream is a con, a shell game, and that guys like him, from his socioeconomic class, are always the marks.

I followed that dream just like those guys do up on the screen
And I drove a Challenger down Route 9 through the dead ends and all the bad scenes
And when the promise was broken, I cashed in a few of my dreams

Like the singer of “Racing in the Street,” and so many other Springsteen songs, the narrator of “The Promise” views cars as, among other things, a means to freedom. And as a symbol of rugged American self-reliance, both singers actually built (or, more accurately, rebuilt) their own cars themselves. From “Racing in the Street”:

I got a sixty-nine Chevy with a 396
Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor
She’s waiting tonight down in the parking lot
Outside the Seven-Eleven store
Me and my partner Sonny built her straight out of scratch

So too the singer of “The Promise”:

Well now I built that Challenger by myself

But unlike the singer from “Racing in the Street,” whose car continues to be a means of support, both financially and spiritually:

And he rides with me from town to town
We only run for the money got no strings attached
We shut ‘em up and then we shut 'em down

the singer of “The Promise” has lost his car:

But I needed money and so I sold it

But the loss of his car is more than merely an inconvenience. It symbolizes his loss of faith and hope later in the song.

All my life I fought this fight
The fight that no man can never win
Every day it just gets harder to live
This dream I’m believing in
Thunder Road, oh baby you were so right
Thunder Road there’s something dyin’ on the highway tonight

How far the speaker has come since the Born to Run album. Then the highway was an escape. From “Born to Run”:

Sprung from cages out on highway 9

and “Thunder Road” itself:

Well the night’s busting open
These two lanes will take us anywhere.

The road signifies freedom and unlimited possibilities, and any fear Mary feels isn’t so much fear of the open road or its chances, but her own reticence, her hesitation to leave the safety of home—and perhaps her doubts about the long-term prospective of the singer. It may not have been an easy path to freedom:

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

but the fact that it’s jammed means it’s clear that everyone knows what the highway is: it’s the way out. Furthermore, note who it is on the highway—broken heroes—and they’re not merely fleeing but on “a last chance power drive.” Even the language implies strength and a vital desperation, compared to “The Promise,” where death, whether physical or spiritual, awaits. It’s not even clear just what’s dying—it’s ambiguous, as though it’s too dark and murky to be able to tell for sure. But that something is dying there, there’s no doubt.

The narrator of “Thunder Road” had seemingly limitless beliefs in himself and life’s possibilities:

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

but by “The Promise” any such illusions have been stripped away and he’s learned that even if you seem to have won, it’s not enough:

I won big once and I hit the coast
But somehow I paid the big cost
Inside I felt like I was carryin’ the broken spirits
Of all the other ones who lost

When the promise is broken you go on living
But it steals something from down in your soul
Like when the truth is spoken and it don’t make no difference
Something in your heart goes cold

As with many of the other songs on the Darkness on the Edge of Town album, “The Promise” takes the singer far from the east coast of the first three albums. But whereas the Utah desert of “The Promised Land” had its share—maybe more than its share—of trials and tribulations, the region of “The Promise” has nothing to offer but rundown dives without even the devastating power of a tornado:

I followed that dream through the southwestern flats
That dead ends in two-bit bars
And when the promise was broken I was far away from home
Sleepin’ in the back seat of a borrowed car

Even here, so far from home, so broken-hearted, it comes back to cars. But how things have changed, how far he’s fallen: he’s in a car, but he’s not racing it, nor is he cruising—he’s sleeping, apparently homeless. But not just homeless: despite being reduced to living in a car, it’s not even his car—he actually has to borrow a car to sleep in.

Thunder Road, for the lost lovers and all the fixed games
Thunder Road, for the tires rushing by in the rain
Thunder Road, Billy and me we’d always say
Thunder Road, we were gonna take it all and throw it all away

The listener never actually finds out what promise was broken, not literally, but it doesn’t really matter. The very ambiguity attached to that mystery enables the listener to identify all the closer with the concept, for who hasn’t had a promise broken and felt the accompany devastation of betrayal? The singer doesn’t overly romanticize the reality of the harm done: he admits it’s not life-threatening, that the damage isn’t physical. But he insists that it robs a piece of your soul, with the strong implication that if it’s not a fate worse than death, it’s not far from it, at best. And yet the singer is “merely” wounded, and not even dead. He lacks the strength to even throw it all away—perhaps because he feels it was already taken from him or perhaps because he’s just a shell of the man he used to be. Either way, he’s a man who’s been pushed beyond his limits. And, unlike other Springsteen characters who find that out beyond their furthest limits they have still more as-yet-untapped resources of which they’d never even dreamt (such as the singers of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” and “The Promised Land”), the narrator of “The Promise” has no such resolve. He has been beaten and can do nothing more than lie in the dark, listening to the melancholy, woeful sound of cars driving past him in the rain—and is there a more evocative image, a more powerful memory than that of lying there, listening to cars drive past in the rain? driving past him, away from him, leaving him behind, again and again and again, and the existence of the rain implying he’s no longer in the southwest but is instead right back where he started from, in the northeast again, but with a decidedly untriumphant homecoming—as he, carless and bereft, is impotent, powerless, unable or unwilling to act.

Which may just give a clue as to what the broken promise was: perhaps it was the promise the narrator of “Thunder Road” felt was made by those two lanes, and which he, in turn, then tried to sell to Mary. “We’re pulling out of here to win” is not just an exultation, it’s a promise, a guarantee that good times and good fortune lie ahead. And indeed, the narrator of “The Promise” seems to have won, at least once, and that apparently a big win. But what the narrator seems to find out is either that one big win doesn’t make one a winner or perhaps that it doesn’t guarantee future wins. In any case, it makes that closing promise of the earlier song a lie. That is the promise which has been broken and which has, in turn, so utterly broken his spirit.

It’s fascinating to note that while Springsteen himself admits “The Promise” is a sequel of sorts to “Thunder Road,” that there’s no mention of Mary. Whether she decided to stay on the porch and forced the narrator to travel on alone, or whether she’s the cause of the narrator’s crushed spirit is unclear: there’s no textual evidence to support either view. But her very absence looms large either way, especially as through the rest of his career Springsteen would continue to use the name Mary again and again, in more than a dozen songs, and even more than that if one were to count the number of times “Maria” pops up in his work. It is as though the Mary of “Thunder Road” became a prototype for The Springsteen Female, almost an archetype to which he returns times and again. (Yes, earlier, there’d been “Mary, Queen of Arkansas,” but the less said about that the better.) Yet in “The Promise” itself she’s notable mainly by her glaring omission, especially when limned against the dramatic appearance of Thunder Road itself in the chorus.

Additionally, knowing his biography as well as many even casual fans do, it’s not hard to imagine Springsteen’s looking at some of his fellow rock and roll-obsessed musicians from the early Asbury Park days and the results of his fabulous success and wondering just who really won and what the price was. 

“The Promise” is one of the finest songs Springsteen wrote in the 1970s, with a beautiful melody and unexpected yet still logical chord changes, and a complex lyric. But it’s also an utterly pessimistic song, lacking any of the optimism to be found in even the grimmest of songs on his first four album (save, perhaps, “Lost in the Flood”). While there’s no doubt that the way song was already being viewed vis-à-vis the Appel lawsuit was a major, perhaps even the major, reason for the song’s exclusion from Darkness on the Edge of Town, it is this unrelentingly harsh viewpoint which makes the song more fitting for later Springsteen works such as Nebraska and merits exclusion from the album, regardless of its high quality. Additionally, it is hard to discount the idea that Springsteen himself backed away from casting such a negative light on “Thunder Road,” a song which had already begun to take on a mythical, almost mystical quality, as he himself would admit. It’s one thing to write and sing such a bleak sequel in concert; it is something else entirely to go on and release it on an album.

I’m beyond happy that he finally released the song—several times now, in fact. But I’m even happier that he didn’t put it on Darkness on the Edge of Town.

The original post can be found here, along with the other amazing posts that week. And while you're there, check out their other weeks, featuring so many great pieces on so many great artists.

This Is Not America

There was a period in my life where I'd guess I listened to David Bowie at least 20 or 30 hours per week; for about 18 months, he was very nearly the only artist I listened to, or at least 90% of my total listenings. And this is one of my very favorites of his, and has been since the first time I ever heard it, when I had to track down a then hard to find 45. And yet now years will go by without my thinking of it, due to it not being on one of his regular studio albums or his Changes compilation. And that's a shame, because it's pretty amazing.

Even removed from the film for which it was written and recorded, I think it still holds up—it hasn't dated nearly as poorly as I might have though, its shimmery sound and dancey groove holding up surprisingly well. Sure, it has 80s keyboards, but the dominant instrument is the bass and that's one instrument that never seems to age. Bowie's vocals are pretty much always welcome and is Pat Metheny the least heroic guitar hero ever? If you didn't know, would you ever guess he was one of the most important jazz guitarists in history? Would you even notice the guitar on here?

Favorite Song Friday: Gypsy

I first saw Suzanne Vega at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston in 1990, just after graduating from college. It was entirely done on a whim – a friend and I were having dinner in Hartford, for some reason we knew the concert was happening that night, so we decided to head 90 minutes north to go see her. It’s funny—I have no recollection as to how we even knew where we were going. This was, of course, before GPS and cellphones and Google Maps and I’m not even sure we had a roadmap in the car. My guess is I knew how to get to Boston, and once there we just winged it.

The point is this is often the most enjoyable way for me to see a show—without much anticipation and, often times, without much expectation. Scott and I saw a show by the Smithereens in much the same way at Toad’s Place in 1988 and we were both very impressed. When I saw NRBQ for the first of many times at UConn in 1990, it was a decision I literally made after midnight for a show that started, I think, at 1 am, and I became a fan from that moment forward. Suzanne Vega that night in Boston wasn’t the best show I ever saw, nor was it the most memorable or even deliver anything unexpected. What is was was an excellent two hour show by a woman whose music I always liked and, from that night on, appreciated more and more as the years went by.

This was on her Days of Open Hand Tour, many albums and (eep!) decades ago. What struck me that night about Suzanne Vega is what still impresses me all these years down the road. That total lack of pretense with which she carried herself onstage, even as a younger performer just on the cusp of stardom that night, and the good humor and graceful…I guess the word would be approachability that she brought with her.

All are ingredients for an engaging, likable performer, and it made the night for me. And starting that night and ever since, one song of hers stood out. One song became, hands down, my favorite song she ever did. And remains so today. And it is today’s choice for Favorite Song Friday.

Favorite Song Friday – Suzanne Vega – “Gypsy”

“Gypsy” appears towards the end of Vega’s breakthrough second album Solitude Standing, and all these years later it strikes me that it never became a hit. It had what her other hits had—easy and lovely melody, a hummable chorus and lyrics that were instantly relatable. Alas, it was a straight-ahead ballad, slower paced than that album’s biggest hit “Luka” and without the social commentary that song came armed with. And it didn’t have that subversive a cappella seduction that the album’s other hit, “Tom’s Diner,” had. So perhaps for the same reason I thought it could have been a hit—its simple accessibility—it wasn’t destined to be.

No matter. “Gypsy” remains a masterpiece.

Suzanne Vega wrote a love letter with “Gypsy” to a boy she knew for a short time while they worked together at a summer cap, and it actually stands as one of the first songs she ever wrote, when she was still a teenager in the late 1970s. That fact alone is what gives the song its heartbeat. “Gypsy” is not written as a look back, but is told in the present, as it happening to her. The affection, the kindness, the kinship are all experienced in real time. Even the parting of the ways, forecast at the end though never witnessed, is presented as something that will happen, not something that has. She finally released the song a decade after she wrote it, but the immediacy she lends to the story creates a layer of timelessness. And that is what makes the story told in “Gypsy” resonate so deeply.

You come from far away
With pictures in your eyes.
Of coffee shops and morning streets
In the blue and silent sunrise.
But night is the cathedral
Where we recognized the sign.
We strangers know each other now
As part of the whole design.

Oh, hold me like a baby
That will not fall asleep.
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat.

Oh…

You’re the jester of this courtyard
With a smile like a girl's.
Distracted by the women
With the dimples and the curls.
By the pretty and the mischievous
By the timid and the blessed.
By the blowing skirts of ladies
Who promise to gather you to their breast.

Oh, hold me like a baby...

You have hands of raining water
And that earring in your ear.
The wisdom on your face
Denies the number of your years.
With the fingers of the potter
And the laughing tale of the fool
The arranger of disorder
With your strange and simple rules.
Yeah now I've met me another spinner
Of strange and gauzy threads,
With a long and slender body
And a bump upon the head.

Oh, hold me like a baby...

With a long and slender body
And the sweetest softest hands.
And we'll blow away forever soon
And go on to different lands.
And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay.
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day.

But now hold me like a baby

That will not fall asleep.
Curl me up inside you
And let me hear you through the heat.

Oh…

Vega delivers “Gypsy” to us with a poet’s soul and a romantic’s heart. Aided along by a gorgeous acoustic guitar and some rich-yet-tempered production from indy god Mitch Easter and punk forerunner Lenny Kaye, the lyrics are image-rich and personal without being bogged down by sentimentality. She paints a stunning picture—“…the blue and silent sunrise,” “…night is the cathedral,” …hands of raining water…fingers of the potter…”—of a love story that has grown past infatuation and into something deeper. And embedded in the chorus (“Hold me like a baby…”) are the pervasive themes of the song: comfort, closeness and contentment.

Despite her talents as a songwriter, Suzanne Vega greatest strength (to me) comes in her voice—bell-clear and affectation free. Rather than depending on crutches like tremolo or vibrato, she attaches an almost minimalist ease to her singing voice, generating a tonal clarity that is wholly unique and perfectly suited to her meticulously crafted lyrics. It’s not a voice that can break glass or even knock you over (thank God), but in the way Vega employs it, it remains one of the most perfect and powerful voices in music over the last 25 years. Without question.

“Gypsy” also conveys a happiness to it that belies the inevitable breakup it foretells; one more trump card in Suzanne Vega’s storytelling. She tells her story with a mixture of whimsy and wonder, clearly smitten with the one she sings about yet seeing much more than the surface reveals. We don’t have to know the color of his hair or what a knockout he may have been when we know this instead:

You’re the jester of this courtyard
With a smile like a girl's.

The wisdom on your face
Denies the number of your years.

Yeah now I've met me another spinner
Of strange and gauzy threads,
With a long and slender body
And a bump upon the head.

Suzanne Vega has always had the eye for detail that allows her to tell a story with subtlety and depth, rather than relying on convention or any sort of standard form. To wit: “Gypsy” is a love song, indeed, yet one that never mentions the word “love.” It doesn’t have to.

Finally, there’s way it ends. Vega uses that rather unusual turn of looking into a future that is, in effect, still the past. And in doing so she so beautifully engages a mechanism that, if done correctly, stands as one of my favorite songwriting tropes—a promise to one day write about these times.

Maybe you’ll be out there on that road somewhere,

Some bus or train traveling along.

In some motel room there’ll be radio playing,

And you’ll hear me sing this song.

-Bruce Springsteen, “Bobby Jean”

Things I can never tell you,

Down the line someday,

You’ll be a song I sing.

A thing I give away.

- Paul Westerberg. “Things”

Please do not ever look for me,

But with me you will stay.

And you will hear yourself in song

Blowing by one day.

            - Suzanne Vega, “Gypsy”

This is exactly how Suzanne Vega says goodbye in “Gypsy.” In a way that extends that warm, lasting affection far past any notion of melancholy, far beyond any tearful parting of the ways that we never even see and really don’t need to. Instead she brings it all to some place in the distant future, where it will remain as alive as ever. And where she promises to not only never forget, but to tell the story.

“Gypsy” may not have been written to us, but it is indeed, all these years later, for us. All of us.

Country Road

Of my many, many blind spots, contemporary country is a particular large one. So the only time I've ever actually seen/heard Keith Urban is at these tribute type things, but I think this is the third time now and damn. Am I going to have actually investigate his stuff? 'cuz he's pretty damn awesome here.

Old Red Eyes Is Back

I realized recently that every time I hear or read someone use Frank Sinatra's famous nickname, within a few minutes I'm singing this song. That's pretty wrong. And yet I'm okay with it.

Sweet Child o' Mine

I love covers. I like decent covers, I love good covers, I adore great covers beyond all reasoning.

I'm not sure this is a cover. This is...you know what, I don't care what this is. This is great is what this is. I realized about fifteen seconds in I was grinning and when it really kicked into gear—you'll know what I mean when you listen—I actually laughed out loud.

So. Awesome.

Body Talk, Pt. 2

Context. It's so important. A hair can be a lovely thing when it's attached to the head of a beautiful woman, or rather repulsive when you find it sticking out of a glazed donut. An ostrich can be a remarkably ridiculous thing when seen from the other side of a fence or it can appear to be your ungainly imminent death, as Johnny Cash once nearly experienced.

And when a quote from one of Paul Simon's best and most famous songs pops up in the middle of an indie band's ethereally gentle love song, the unexpectedness of the context turns it from a gleefully absurdist coming-of-age tale into something painfully introspective and redemptive and gorgeous.

One Week/One Band

The great One Week/One Band blog has, for the first time, decided to devote not one but two weeks to one artist. The identity of that artist won't surprise Reason to Believe readers.

Starting tomorrow, we’ll have two entire weeks devoted to Bruce Springsteen! And a very distinct aspect of the Bruce discography at that…  

You’ll have to hold out until tomorrow morning for the specific details of this endeavor — we’ve assembled a very fine group of people to tackle the storied musical and personal legacy of The Boss (the OWOB Street Band, if you will… har har).

We're posting this not just because we're confident there's going to be some mighty fine writing over the next two weeks—we are indeed confident—but because the two of us are amongst the many contributors. Keep an eye peeled.

"lyrical dissonance"

So my kid had to bring a short piece of music—roughly thirty seconds or so—into class and explain why s/he liked it. It could be just a small excerpt from a longer piece; the entire thing didn't have to be 30 seconds long. Most kids brought in a current pop hit, or a bit of a video game theme, or a snippet of classical from a movie soundtrack.

She brought this.

(That should have started at about 3:06, and her clip ended around 3:42.)

This is what she said about the piece:

"The lyrical dissonance of this clip adds a layer to the song not present in either the words or instrumentals alone; while the lyrics are despondent, hopeless -- 'broken heroes,' 'no place left to hide,' -- the music sounds just the opposite -- not just hopeful, but triumphant.

"Together, they could indicate that things may seem now like it can never get better from here, but that in fact there is still hope, that the narrator and Wendy will someday 'get to that place where [they] really want to go' and 'walk in the sun,' no matter how bleak the future seems now."

Once again, I'd like to introduce myself: ladies and gentlemen, I Am That Dad.

Can't Find My Way Home

Imprinting's a funny thing. This was the first version of the song I ever heard. When I later acquired the Blind Faith album and heard the original, I was so disappointed. Steve Winwood's a truly great singer, obviously, better than Eric Clapton. And it's Winwood's song. And yet I much prefer this version, despite the fact that I'm generally lukewarm on mixed gender duets.

Part of it's that I find the dynamics more effective. Much of it's that I like Jamie Oldaker's drumming so much better than Ginger Baker's. Most of all, though, it's that I find Clapton's understated, slightly gruff yet warm vocals far more engaging than Winwood's passionate keening. They simply seem to fit the material better.



His acoustic guitar solo's mighty purty, too.

Favorite Song Friday: September Gurls

There’s no way he could have known.

There’s no way that a teenaged Alex Chilton could have known in 1966, with his voice rich in soulful southern gravel as he belted out rock-n-roll gold like “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby,” that he would one day front a band that wouldn’t get half the attention that his Box Tops did, but it would be that very band that would become the proto-postpunk and college rock fore-bearers for a generation to come.

I mean, how could he? He had no idea in 1966 that Big Star would exist. He was 16! And postpunk? Hell, punk rock hadn’t even reared its head yet. At least not as a genuine rock movement, anyway.

But there ‘tis. In the 1960s Alex Chilton possessed the grittiest voice on the pop charts, the archetypical “blue-eyed soul” sound that was raw and throaty enough to become an instrument as vital to the Box Tops sound as the dreamy keyboards or country-fied guitars. And then he hit his 20s and decided to form a band that seemed to lean way more on Roger McGuinn or Stephen Stills’ influence than the Holland-Dozier-Holland sound of his youth.

It was a dramatic turn, that is to say, the transition from The Box Tops to Big Star. Not only that but he had taken to writing his songs (with partner Chris Bell) rather than signing other people’s material. The simple tales of young lust turned to the more introspective 1970s ilk of the singer-songwriter. At which he more than excelled. This wasn’t the same kid who was belting out “Soul Deep.” And for those who noticed, the change must have been alarming.

But that’s the thing. Not many folks noticed. At least not right away. Their three albums between 1971 and 1974 all received good reviews, but the sales were minimal. When Bell died in a car accident after Big Star’s third album, that was pretty much it. Chilton moved on to his next chapter.

Somewhere in there, though, and in the years to follow his legend began to build. That Memphis cool, that grown-up voice now aching with sincere, pained longing, and those lyrics that placed his heart smack out there for all to see. There was a melodic raggedness to Big Star’s sound that was there for a reason, a sound that gave hints to what was soon to come from the CBGB and from Athens and from Minneapolis and from, yes, eventually Seattle.

I mean, it’s easy to see why he had such a profound influence on Paul Westerberg (who of course penned one of the Replacements greatest songs in his honor, eponymously). Paul Westerberg even sounds like a less-refined version of Alex Chilton. But you also get why Michael Stipe and Peter Holsapple and Frank Black and Evan Dando and so many other singer-songwriters of Generations X and Y worshiped him too.

Which brings us to today’s installment of Favorite Song Friday. Which is somewhat appropo, given what month we’re still in.

Favorite Song Friday—Big Star—“September Gurls”

Those opening chords. Those opening chords!

Those scraping, jangly chords that open up the song and carry it to the very end. Those chords sound like someone someone crying in the rain, staring up at a closed window he knows will never open. It’s a jarring and unsettling way to open up a love song, but damn if it also isn’t just so pretty, too!

September gurls do so much

I was your Butch, and you were touched

I loved you, well nevermind

I’ve been crying, all the time

December boys got it bad

December boys got it bad

September gurls I don't know why
How can I deny what's inside
Even though I'll keep away
Maybe we'll love all our days

December boys got it bad
December boys got it bad

When I get to bed
Late at night
That's the time
She makes things right
When she makes love to me

September gurls do so much
I was your butch and you were touched
I loved you, well never mind
I've been crying all the time

December boys got it bad
December boys got it bad

Read these lyrics and one thing you notice—after, I guess, the spelling of “gurls,” which, well, I just don’t know, but it probably has something to do with that eternal obsession of youthful love Chilton always seemed to have—is its never exactly clear who “September Gurls” are or why “December boys got it bad.” (Aside from maybe the plain fact that Chilton was, well, born in December. Occam's Razor and all that.) But really, we don't know. Not at all. Nor is it clear who or what “Butch” is or means. It’s a loveletter, the contents of which are possibly only understood by one person, and maybe not even her.

What we get is a fairly sparse and heartfelt plea. These words mean something to someone, though, and maybe that’s the point. But they are nonetheless breathtaking. And honestly, as someone who very often loves great songwriting and great lyrics above all else, and has assembled myriad lists in his head of his favorite lyrics over the years, this little toss-off:

I loved you, well never mind

…is and remains one of my favorite lyrics of all-time. It’s beautiful and it’s silly. It’s petulant and immature and desperate and defeatist and it’s bluntly honest and plainly confused and it’s all of six words long and I just used 10 words to try and describe it!

Every little inch of this song is lovable and memorable. The sweet and sunny harmonies that hang over it. The lustrous background vocals and cries that take the song up into the ether. Chilton’s shows some damn impressive range, starting high and staying high and going ever higher when he hits the “When I get to bed” bridge. And that weeping, descending guitar line, which you just know Peter Buck must’ve listened to a thousand or two times, seems to offer a pleasant nod to everything that led Chilton to this point – Motown and Stax and Liverpool and his beloved Memphis. It’s all in there, neatly tucked into 2:44 of rock-n-roll splendor.

“September Gurls” is neither a kiss-off or a sappy plea. Or it’s both. It is what you want it to be, as so much of the best music so often is. When Chilton died in 2010, his postpunk godson Westerberg wrote an op-ed about him for The New York Times. He summed up his career thusly:

Success shone early on Alex Chilton, as the 16-year-old soulful singer of the hit-making Box Tops. Possessing more talent than necessary, he tired as a very young man of playing the game — touring, performing at state fairs, etc. So he returned home to Memphis. Focusing on his pop writing and his rock guitar skills, he formed the group Big Star with Chris Bell. Now he had creative control, and his versatility shone bright. Beautiful melodies, heart-wrenching lyrics.

That’s the story of Alex Chilton, leader of Big Star and, as Westerberg would later describe him, “folk troubadour, blues shouter, master singer, songwriter and guitarist.” And what he left behind, with “September Gurls” and plenty more, keeps him going, makes him relevant to those of us who weren’t even alive when “The Letter” was released.

September comes to an end in four days. “September Gurls” exists forever.