cycle 5 - drinking champagne on lake shore drive (or; into the fire you go)
A bit of a grab-bag, thematically
Hello, friends! This one isn’t as tight as the last few, because building these cycles around strict themes every time makes me put off doing these articles! I’d rather write freely than struggle to make everything a perfect package. Enjoy some songs!
quetzalcoatl is born (the mountain goats, 1994.)
The Mountain Goats, man. I don’t know what I can say about the Mountain Goats that hasn’t been said before. John Darnielle is this century’s finest wordsmith. The prolific output, the complicated recurring themes and focused structure is nothing short of brilliant.
I had the debut studio album by The Mountain Goats on repeat for most of high-school, and I frequently play through the album on my guitar. Short, sweet acoustic lo-fidelity jams to scream along to, bursting with emotion and intelligence in equal measure.
I could have chosen so many songs to include as the first Mountain Goats track on the Playlist, so instead of burning myself out with making the perfect choice, I decided to go with vibes. This one was stuck in my head this morning, so here it is.
It's a cold night in Sonora and the stars are out in full force.
It's a moment the world has been waiting for, when you set the world back on course.
In my own songwriting, I very openly steal from Darnielle’s playbook of choosing some aspect or moment from ancient history/mythology/narratives1 and identify with a central character or event. Obscuring the lyrics just enough, it can become a universal experience. A song about the myth of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl2 can be about the pressure of undergoing a personal change or entering a new phase of life coming into adulthood.
Expect to hear more MG on this playlist.
wild horses (prefab sprout, 1990.)
Hey, welcome back, Prefab Sprout. Seriously, I can’t get enough of this band. I didn’t love this album Jordan: The Comeback, when I first gave it a listen. It seemed a bit unfocused. But upon subsequent listens… damn, it might be their best album? The production by Thomas Dolby3 is perfect, the unique lyrics by Paddy McAloon are delightful.
Listen to how he hits that falsetto on “Wiiiild!!!” every time. It’s so cool.
This is a sad little song about an older guy obsessing over the beauty of youth and understanding that if he ever gets with a free-spirited younger woman, he’d only stifle their potential. It might not even necessarily be about an older/younger dynamic, but instead the narrator is desiring the freedom and independence of the women he’s singing about, but inherently if you have something that is wild it removes that quality from them.
Or! In a fun lyrical twist… it could be about a literal domesticated horse seeing a pack of wild stallions and having those complicated feelings as well. Great, smart stuff.
I want extra time to play, afternoons in the hay.
It's a sorry way for a man to feel but sentimental is part of the deal. I hate myself because it shows how I'm a fool for your rodeo!
Another detail in the production I love deeply is the little… hiccuping gugh-khHH noise underneath the vocals in the chorus. It’s just mixed over the gugga-gugga-gugg of the bass and just under the vocals of “horses.” It’s like, not even super in rhythm with the rest of it but when its all together it has this unique groove, and I love it.
let ‘em in (wings, 1976.)
Wow, is this also the first Wings song on the Playlist?? No, it isn’t. Thank goodness. I can’t forgive myself for waiting this long to return to writing about Wings. Again, I got caught up with overthinking what to say. Paul McCartney wouldn’t do that. He’d just write it and send it.
I wrote about my general Wings thesis in the 1st cycle if you’d like to revisit that. Essentially, I love Wings because it’s a man at the top of the world settling down to have a loose-goosey jam band with his wife and his mates, and not giving too much of a hoot in trying to make god-damn BEATLES-quality stuff anymore. It’s fun, it’s weird, it’s silly!
This song, “Let ‘Em In,” is a particular ear-worm. A classic Paul bassline, an invitation to join a house party, some whistles and horns. It’s all chill here. I love the march at the end that fades out, only to hit you with a definite ending surprise (because they know you’re still thinking about the melody after the fade!). It’s so cheeky.
champagne taste (univore, 2010.)
Oh no!! I shouldn’t be driving this car!!!
An eternally classic jam, the story of a night gone wrong.
There was an era of the internet that was obsessed with finding, like, “bad” songs? Just strange vocals and topics and unconventional stuff. There were endless forums about strange tunes. Most of it was making fun of very small-time artists for bad singing or “unintelligent,” simple lyrics. It was pretty mean-spirited, if I remember correctly.
I was a huge fan of these kinds of forums because they were filled with absolute gold. I’m not an ironic listener. There has to be something compelling about the stuff I like. If it don’t find it interesting, I’m not really listening to it.
Weird doesn’t necessarily mean bad! Less-than-perfect levels of talent isn’t an inherently negative quality for art. It’s kinda the whole point of art to me! It can be appreciated on many levels for many different reasons. It was so fun to see what people were trying to make. Whether they succeeded or not, I suppose, is in the ears of the beholder.
I definitely found “Champagne Taste” on one of those forums. This one is definitely a step-up in quality than most of the other ones that were frequently shared. Sometimes people would blur the lines of “indie” and “amatuer” and post something a little left of the dial instead of “bad.”
It’s a quirky spoken-word song about an incident involving driving under the influence of party drugs, being in a tuxedo in the drunk tank, and the sublime taste4 of the bubbly5.
I think the little warble-y refrain of “oHhhH NOOooo!” is one of the funniest melodies of all time and I never stop thinking about it. It brings me great personal joy to share this song on my ultimate Playlist.
here’s where the story ends (the sundays, 1990.)
The Sundays are so good. They released a handful of blissfully beautiful adult soft rock pop albums in the 90s and then disappeared, although the word on the street is the creative forces behind the band (vocalist Harriet Wheeler & guitarist David Gavurin) have been writing and recording Sundays tracks in private for 20 years. So… maybe if we talk about The Sundays enough, culturally, we can encourage them to release all that stuff! Get them popular on TikTok or something! Imaging getting a sudden backlog of the 2000s output of a 90s band. It’d be perfect in this era of trying to find some branch of New Nostalgia.
I fell in love with this song a long while ago. It reminds me of a rainy day, playing some creative block-based video game in my old garage computer room where I grew up, drinking tea and eating cookies, thinking about nothing and yearning for love and adventure.
when i needed someone (carly rae jepsen, 2015.)
Making her way to the Playlist in a big way is the Queen herself, Canada’s very own Carly Rae Jepsen.
2015’s E*MO*TION is as perfect of a pop masterpiece that can possibly exist. I’m picking this song, the climactic “When I Needed You” to include because it rocks.
Sometimes I wish that I could change, but not for me - for you. So we could be together forever. But I know, I know, that I won’t change for you ‘cause where were you for me when I needed someone?? When I needed you.
Carly’s lyrics are so unique. You can tell a Carly Rae story from a mile away. It’s always about an unrequited yearning, a desperate plea for reciprocation. Something happened between the narrator and the “You” of every song. It’s often a drunken make-out between friends that meant more to the narrator than the You. Now, the narrator of the song has found herself in the perfect position to make a pitch, scrambling to recapture the magic of the what-ifs, the what-could-be of a relationship. If they only said the right words at the right time, they could be in love forever. It’s always ships sailing past each other in the dark. This song is so dramatic and huge.
We’ll revisit Carly again in this series, but seriously, check this song out. It’s rad.
Thanks for reading and listening along to another installment of Playlist Name Pending.
You can check out the FULL PLAYLIST if you want, as well as the playlist B-SIDES, all of the bonus songs I’ve talked about in the footnotes and stuff!
Yeah, a lot of my songs are fan-fiction, actually!
Not sure if this song is explicitly about Quetzalcoatl becoming the North Star in myth or simply the creation of the being in general.
BONUS SONG: I have always loved Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” but it wasn’t until recently I thought to explore his music a little more because of his connection with Prefab. If I love the production and sound of these albums so much, I should theoretically like his music as well, right? Well - I do! It’s great stuff. Here’s my favorite song on his album The Golden Age of Wireless, “Radio Silence.”
Champagne is gross, don’t @ me