5 Songs Friday February 28, 2025

Once again the month pushes three of my regular posts to within four days

Trampled By Turtles – “The Party’s Over” 2022 from Alpenglow. I don’t know why I haven’t spent more time with this acoustic band out of Minnesota, where nobody remembers if the grass was ever blue because it’s buried under snow. They came from rock and taught themselves about bluegrass and folk music. Whatever the form, though, the important thing is they have good songs. This one is a sad elegiac number from the point of view of an older man at the end of his – I don’t know, life, career, love affair? Singer Dave Simonett sells the emotional truth of this character, as his eyes light up with good memories and images, and then he returns to the emptiness of his drunken present. That second verse is a killer – “I once was a writer of disparate means” and “My instincts get duller the more that I drink.” The arrangement is perfectly spare, with individual instruments rising briefly to the forefront but never taking the spotlight from the vocals. A beautiful record, indeed.

Roberta Flack – “Bridge Over Troubled Water” 1971 from Quiet Fire. When Roberta Flack passed away on Monday, I realized how much I had neglected her despite loving many of her singles and owning this particular album for decades. My gosh, her take on this song moves me to tears, especially at the point about 4:40 seconds in when she sings “See how they shine / If you need a friend / I’m sailing right behind” while her left hand makes the lower piano keys shake and the female choir behind her reaches for the heavens and Flack holds each syllable an extra beat or more while ramping up in power and then easing back down as though she were wrapping her arms around the person who needs her most. Paul Simon wrote this song with gospel music as his inspiration, and Aretha Franklin sang it as if she was in church testifying. But Flack, whose music was rarely near either the blues or the gospel impulse, sings it as an intimate connection yet with the power to reach the last row of the theater. She stretches notes and words, she substitutes melodic phrases here and there without ever letting us lose the grace of the original tune, she touches our hearts. I think the whole album needs to be moved up in the canon, and this version of this song needs to be heard way more often.

Television – “Careful” 1978 from Adventure. I got used to the singing voice of Tom Verlaine some 45 years ago, so I have to use projection to imagine the way outsiders hear it. He’s reedy, maybe a little whiny, certainly not robust or smooth. But dammit, I love the way he sings, I love the way he writes, I love the way the band arranges songs, and I love every little thing about Television. It still chaps my butt that a song this carefully constructed, this sharply delineated, this plain and simple catchy couldn’t have been played on FM radio instead of Foreigner or Kansas or the Eagles or any of that schlock that sold millions at the time and perpetually moves units in the used record world. I’ll admit, the erection joke – “When she whispers in my ear it gets so hard” leading up to “to get out of bed” – is a little childish. But Verlaine is trying to pretend nothing matters to him, and the girl he’s lost isn’t going to mess with his mind. And meanwhile, there are these nearly country guitar licks I think from Richard Lloyd, and then one honey of a solo, and the bass and drums are locked in so solid, and the backing vocals so undeniably perfect. I always feel better when I hear Television.

John Coltrane – “Bahia” recorded 1958 released 1965 on Bahia. John Coltane recorded for several record labels, most notably Prestige, Atlantic, and Impulse. It must have been confusing for fans back in those days as each label released records years after they were recorded, so what seems like an obvious progression in his style to me, who first heard all these long after his death, would have been jumbled around in release order. The song “Bahia” features Coltrane on tenor sax, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. It’s an old Brazilian song written by Ary Barroso with a catchy, insistent riff in a 1-2-3 1-2-3-1-2 rhythm that opens up to swing every few measures. Coltrane waves his sheets of sound over the chord changes, with so many notes flying around like a snow storm. Garland plays a lighter, fluffier solo, and Chambers has an elegantly bowed solo near the end. As an old friend used to say when we were discovering these records together in the mid-eighties, “It’s another essential Coltrane record.”

Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers – “Rockin’ Rockin’ Leprechauns” 1977 from Rock ‘n’ Roll with the Modern Lovers. After making one of my all-time favorite loud and exhilarating rock’n’roll record – The Modern Lovers – Jonathan Richman decided he wasn’t going to make so much noise any more, and he was going to sing about subjects that did not embody the angst of lyrics like “Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole.” His first record with a new band of Modern Lovers has only very light connections to the sound of the original group. Instead, he’s making rock’n’roll music appropriate to a children’s party, but with a sense of whimsy that makes sense to adults. “Mother Nature’s leprechauns have come back to rock ‘n’ roll” so you’ll find “they’re wobblin’ and a-wigglin’, they’re fumblin’ and a-gigglin’.” Nobody else could have gotten away with a song like this, but Richman makes me believe that’s what he’s seeing, and it’s a beautiful thing.