M's'k Lstnd o'r n o'r to

Here are my current 20 -- I'm stuck in the past, past before my own being somehow--
I play them over and over and over and over and over and over.
Obsessions.

1. Bob Dylan -- Tambourine Man. This being the man's best song almost absolutely. This being that strange morning dawn moment. Blurring into a hazy morning. You need to memorize it and let the strings of these things called words ripple and tingle off your tongue with the Dylan man.

2. The Beatles -- Revolution #1. Ok. There's a cute line about Chairman Mao.

3. U2 -- Pride in the Name of Love. I've put on the version from the Unforgettable Fire and that's the one I listen to. Partly because most of my U2 life I've listened to the Rattle and Hum version. Anyway, there's supposed to be a strange underlying narrative in the play-list -- so read on.

4. Oasis -- Wonderwall. Only because it's such a strange lyric ... a mantra ... like "I would prefer not to."

5. Cat Stevens -- The Wind. A teeeeneeee weeeeeneeeee track. Just over 1.40 min. But the guitar work is great. "But never never never never" Never a more economic use of the word.

6. Sufjan Stevens -- The Dress looks Nice on You. Another one with great guitar work. And the banjo is just so creepy. Almost like a strange acoustic version of an Edge riff ... ringing ringing. I'd put like more Sufjan Stevens tracks but it wouldn't be fair to my more deeply rooted loyalties -- I mean some of these guys have seen me through many a long night.

7. Elton John -- Tiny Dancer. Ok -- I'm not a soundtrack kind of guy. But you need to check out the Almost Famous Soundtrack. Neither do I much like Elton John (only liked him in the Muppet Show doing the whole Crocodile Rock thing). But there's this scene in the bus where Stillwater and their entourage (those divine groupies) are like squabbling and arguing and then everyone's really pissed and sits sullenly. Then they start singing this and there's a strange out of tuneness that brings everyone together. It's a great moment and I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

8. Pete Yorn -- Just Another. I really liked his first album. I don't like his other album.

9. The Beatles -- I Will. Another great small track. I've got a theory about the song. They probably worked out a fabulous melody (it's great) and had a nice idea about the IDEAL woman who was a smile in the crowd or passed on the train (the one you'll "wait a lonely lifetime for"). Whatever. Anyway -- they get to the point in the song where they need to write a bridge. And so they throw it away in absolute cliche. Go listen to it. It's an amazing contrast. But reading more pseudo psycho analytically, the song's really about two desires. The beautiful bits are directed to this woman that Paul McCarthny isn't with -- ok -- the ideal woman. Then the bad bridge is the pledge / vow of constancy to one's girlfriend / wife / partner. OOOoooo all that repression going on in 1.44 mins. Read that way, it's great.

10. Janis Joplin -- Me and Bobby McGee. And you thought I wouln't have any women on this list. The narrative of the road trip. The hetero-social transforming into the hetero-sexual. I only came around to listening to Janis Joplin a couple of years ago when I decided the taboos that were placed upon her in my youth were no longer working their spell (she featured prominently in book about satanic music I read and was haunted by when I was a kid). Anyway, her voice just drives you into the raspy keys of energy, like BLUES singing that's good enough for everything else.

11. Ella Fitzgerald -- Cheek to Cheek. Another soundtrack song that I'm a sucker for. The film: The English Patient. And the scene: they're carrying Ralph Fiennes and dancing with the stretcher out in the rain. I might have remembered it wrongly but that whole tension between the paralysed / almost dead corpse and the swing that Ella brings to it. The intimacy of skin against skin against the scorched destruction that has become the non-face of the English Patient. "A plum plum" indeed. I had a version with Ella and Louis Armstrong taking the whole song one after another. That was great. But it was in a hard disk that died.

12. Nina Simone -- I Loves You Porgy. The spare piano and the smokey vocals. Nothing can beat this version.

13. Ella and Louis -- I wants to stay here. Ok I know it's the same song as the Nina Simone track. But the stark contrast in treatments has never ceased to amaze me. Now if only Billie Holiday had a version.

14. Kings of Convenience. I Don't Know What I Can Save You From. Every late night conversation remembered.

15. Lauryn Hill -- To Zion. This is like the most I can go with the whole hip hop thing. It's probably the most touching thing I've heard. From a Mother to a Child.

16. The Fugees -- No Woman No Cry. Must have an example of even more non-standard englishes being the basis of a great song. This is a "remix" thing with Steve Marley. I kinda like it cause it has applications about their new life in NY ("project yard in Brooklyn") coming from Haiti. "Redemption Song" would have made it to the list but I don't have a ready MP3 in my iBook of it.

17. Oasis -- Stand By Me. Best opening line in a song.

18. U2 -- Ultraviolet. Out of all the U2 tracks I could pick why this one? I guess right now it isn't one of those that I'm tired of. The funky guit is great. That's how inane lyrics ("baby baby baby light my way???) are transformed into great anthemic statements. I always think of a dark earthscape (or is it the moon? ultraviolet radiation having wiped out mankind) then riding waves of sound on the layers of distortion and reverb, memories of the past, in "whispers and moans".

19. Oasis -- Champagne Supernova. It's a COSMIC song. Which helps draw the list to a fitting close.

20. U2 -- MLK. Never a better ending.

Maybe I should do another.

Letters to Myself

Against an Analytical Tradition

To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness -- though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified; -- can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.

Melville, Moby Dick, 162.