We Now Resume Our Regularly Scheduled Abuse

The Honeys, "Goodnight My Love" - Sometimes, it's not the songs that deny you a point of analytical entry that pose the biggest problems when it comes to Esquire-length writeups doomed to be read by a handful of overeducated shut-ins; more often than not, it's the songs that I can't help but understand that leave me ripping my hair from my head after wasting my time at the computer even more fruitlessly than usual. My guess is that this is because there's no process involved with the more readily accessible stuff; a lot of times, the rambling screeds I write here are just my way of sorting the song out for myself in public, and as a result I'm frequently thrown by songs whose can leave you feeling satisfied without necessarily feeling like you understand something new or useful.

So what, then, am I supposed to do with a song like the Honeys' take on "Goodnight My Love"? I mean, this song's been around in more or less the same form for so long that your grandfather may well have rounded your grandmother's second base for the first time to its dulcet melodies ("Baby, tonight, let's not worry about whether the Kaiser's gonna get us..."), and I have to believe that that's at least partially due to the fact that there's just not that much to explain - lest we forget, after all, that hipsters, much like (some might say exactly like) the poor, have always and forever will be with us; rest assured that when "Goodnight My Love" first leaked in nineteen dickety-two after a couple of shellac discs platters off old Old Man Johnson's Record Delivery And Dog Carcass Removal Wagon, lonely, bespectacled losers were lighting up the telegraph lines with dots and dashes of incalculable passion and force recounting its transparent inferiority to "For You, I Will Thresh The Grain While Your Father Recovers From The Mule's Kick (My Sweet Pansybelle)". It's just that nothing they had to say could possibly compare to what the song had to say about itself whenever those strings swell (and I've never heard it without strings) or the singer seizes on any of the bounteous wide vocal turns afforded by the songwriter ("pleasant dree-eee-eee-eee-eems"); your grandparents may be old and gross now, but that doesn't mean they weren't nodding sagely somewhere or other on the inside back when everyone was losing their shit over "Ignition (remix)". Some centers can just flat-out hold.

I'll admit, though, that any insight into habits of consumption which I may have gleaned from this particular version of "Goodnight My Love" was sheer coincidence; I heard this song as the concluding track to Pet Projects, a compilation of notable songs from outspoken sandbox enthusiast Brian Wilson's career as a producer. I like to think of some records as simply waiting out there in the ether for me to walk past them one day; if this is the case, then it's somewhat surprising that Pet Projects didn't jump me from behind with a knife for leaving it out in the cold, tedious CD racks to be passed over by idiots lacking the cultural savvy to go "Hey, those Beach Boys were kinda all right - wonder what else they got to sound like that?" But what may be more important is the insight it offers - or should offer, anyway - into Wilson's creative psyche; these productions were very much His Show in a way most Beach Boys tracks rarely ever managed even when Wilson was behind the wheel. The question, then, becomes figuring out how this phenomenon plays out in the music, a trickier proposition than you might expect given the preponderance of embarassingly shitty novelty singles (q.v. the wince-inducingly unironic "Surfin' Down The Swanee River", which sucks for reasons best left for you in a flaming paper bag on your doorstep).

But there's definitely an answer - actually, I came up with two. The first is that Brian Wilson's much-vaunted elevation of pop into an expressive art is, like most things which can't be described without using the word "pop", utter bullshit. Pet Projects is marked by several songs notable only for the extent to which they sound exactly like Beach Boys songs; little more needs to be said about them other than the fact that they'll do a better job of slaughtering your opinion of a musician as a beacon of unique and inspired genius than anything you've encountered since whatever Bush's second single was. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I've been putting most of my focus on the second answer, the one which simply points out that regardless of how original Wilson may or may not have been, damn near every song on Pet Projects finds him ripping damn near the entire world to shreds with his supernatural gifts for arrangement or creating huge, nigh-unto-Lee Perry fields of sonic space, all of which manifest themselves in ways that have absolutely fuck-all to do with the content of the song or the psyche of anyone involved in its making. What's interesting, however, is the way in which you can pick out threads which Wilson would later unsheathe with all the pomp and significance of some auteurist Excalibur; even on a song as bog-standard as "Goodnight My Love", you can hear Wilson tapping into the effect of volume levels pushed so high that they distort the overall sound or of dreamy multi-part harmonies (which stand in stark counterpoint to Phil Spector's exhausted multi-part harmonies) or of the way high-register tones can cleave a song in two (which he actually does twice at once when he brings in the violin while simultaneously switching up to a single, glacial-meltwater-pond-level clear voice) - all tricks he'd later use to grab listeners by the ears and go HI THERE, IT'S ME FUCKERS. And, in a way, it makes total sense - after all, wouldn't you expect the creative force behind "God Only Knows" to have more than a passing familiarity with the conventions of schmaltz?

Anyway. My point is simply that Pet Projects is just a fascinating disc, the musical equivalent of Charlie Chaplin's shorts for Mutual; true, the quality of the product might not be as overpowering as in later works, but sometimes it's just fascinating to see ideas germinate. Oh, and then there's the piddling little side concern about a bunch of these songs, "Goodnight My Love" arguably first among them, just flat-out rule the universe when it comes time to just listen to them, but I'm assuming that you've long since downloaded the track. You'd be forgiven if your eyes just started drifting down the page in a beatific stupor within a few seconds of its kickoff; lord knows it sums itself - and Pet Projects, and Brian Wilson - better than I ever could. (Click here to buy Pet Projects from Amazon.com)

Lorna Bennett, "Breakfast In Bed" - Until I started picking around on AllMusic to try and glean a little more information about "Breakfast In Bed", I had no idea that it had ever been recorded by the Pretenders, and the fact that now I can't hear it without comparing it to my conception of Chrissy Hynde's interpretation sounds like yet another great reason why we should just blow the fucking internet up and give smoke signals another chance. I hasten to add that I'm nowhere near as much of a hater of the Pretenders as I may have let on in this space; like way more bands than I'd like to admit, their only real sin was being far too easy a target for my abuse (well, that and not writing a thousand songs as unfuckwithable as "Don't Get Me Wrong"). It's just that even without having ever heard Chrissy Hynde sing "Breakfast In Bed", I'm a billion percent confident that she couldn't have nailed the essence of the song half as well as Lorna Bennett did; my knowledge of the Pretenders catalogue is, shall we say, rather porous, but I don't think I've ever heard a single one of their songs with the kind of sated glow that installs Bennett's rendition its supernatural breeziness or its post-coital stumbling-to-the-bathroom loping rhythm, much less do it with the subtlety required to slip in all those moments of soaring, searing desperation that sneak into the song when Bennett hits those high notes pleading with her lover to stay. I'm guessing that the Pretenders' version is three minutes of brass, sass, and wistful innuendo, or as I like to call any such rendition with the nuts to go up against Bennett's version, "a whole lot of shit". Maybe Kelis' cover of "Brass In Pocket" was just karma sorting shit out. (Click here to buy Reggae Love Songs, a really really really really REALLY great reggae compilation featuring "Breakfast In Bed", from Amazon.co.uk)

Fear of Flying, "Routemaster" - My copy of Fear of Flying's debut single "Routemaster" showed up in my mailbox about two seconds before I set off on my journey through the last year of shit I'd posted, an event I personally take to mean that God really likes it when the world makes me say FUCK a whole lot. You better believe I was checking the Hype Machine every single day to see if "Routemaster" had been posted, and frankly, I'm a little surprised that it's not; I can't for the life of me figure out how all the usual suspects who go bonkers for stuff like Good Shoes or the Futureheads' more recent album have managed to keep a lid on this song when it's so clearly better than anything in either of those bands' 2006, and to be honest that may be underselling it a little. What mostly stands out about "Routemaster" to me is its sense of momentum; it's like someone took "Take Me Out" and turned it on its head, reducing the big, glammy bits to as compact a form as structurally possible before slicing you open with that utterly infectious straight-outta-Postcard skitter of the Gods, and then topping it off the kind of lyrics which admittedly work way better as tones punctuating the song than as content but DAMN ain't it some punctuation. Best of all, if the b-side's any indication, this is all hardly a coincidence; not only is it just as dancey and invigorating, it's dancey and invigorating in a completely different fashion (trading in sly abandon for neck-straining force), which is just the kind of event that can lead a dork like me to wonder if they might not actually be for real. I had honestly hoped to write it up as one of those signature things I tend to write where I give a band forty times as much column space as they're likely to receive over the rest of their careers, and while I do feel badly about paying the song I'm stealing less than its due, I have to think that my inability to preserve my soul in patience has something to say about how insanely Worth Listening To "Routemaster" might be. I mean, even if every other single they release bombs out in epic proportions impossible to be matched on this earth until Elton John releases the worst-advised record ever, at least they can say "Well, we wrote at least one song that knocked James Cobo kinda speechless". Who else can say that? (Click here to buy the "Routemaster" single from Rough Trade)