5 Songs Friday, January 17

You may not notice, but I finally got back to my favorite way of finding these songs

The Rain Parade – “Angel Sister” 2023 from Last Rays of a Dying Sun. This album from a couple years back was only the third full-length release from one of my favorite bands of the 80s. I can’t tell you how many times I played Emergency Third Rail Power Trip back in 1983. I can tell you that this album came out eleven years after the band got back together in 2012 with three of the original members. I can also tell you that this song has the kind of swirling, zooming, and chiming guitar parts that helped me fall in love with these guys. It also has better vocals than in the old days, with some nifty harmonies that jibe well with the guitars. It’s the best song on a very good album from a band that deserves a lot more attention than they’ve gotten these past 42 years.

Orquesta Aragon (with Omara Portuondo) – “Siboney” 1999 available on The Real Cuban Music. Here’s a Cuban orchestra now in its 85^th year of sweeping dancers off their feet in Havana. They provide an irresistible lilting rhythm, with gently sweeping strings and a sweet flute making the music seem warm and comfortable. The vocal, courtesy of the currently 94-year-old Omara Portuondo who was then a spry 69, is passion personified. I have no idea what she’s singing about, though I heard the words “mi amour” in there, so she’s clearly worked up about somebody. The melody is intoxicating on its own, and even grander sung by this remarkable vocalist. She sings the first verse straight, then starts injecting dynamic shifts, legato vowels, light melisma, and an emotional power completely under her control.

Eliza Gilkyson – “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” 2020 from 20. Her father wrote “Bare Neccesities” from The Jungle Book. Her brother was in X for a little while when Billy Zoom left in the mid-80s. And Eliza Gilkyson has been one of the most consistently engaging singer/songwriters of the last few decades. Pretty good family. This interpretation of Bob Dylan’s all-purpose hymn to forthcoming disaster was released just at the time our pandemic disaster made everybody disinterested in doom-laden music. I’m writing about it a few days before our nation’s governmental disaster gets underway. Everybody’s talking about Dylan these days because of that movie I figure I might watch when it’s streaming but not before then. And yes, when he went electric, he changed the possibilities of rock music forever. But don’t dismiss the folkie days – this song contains as many multitudes as anything he ever wrote. Gilkyson sings it without earnestness, but with compassion. The arrangement builds and builds, but her vocal never changes its delivery. It’s a powerful rendition which brings new focus to one of those songs I thought I knew perfectly well.

Donny Hathaway – “Sunshine Over Showers” sometime in the late 1970s, available on Never My Love: The Anthology. Donny Hathaway was one of the most remarkable singers of his era – of any era, really. With gospel, soul, jazz, and pop influences, he put together a style of graceful elegance, of gritty beauty, of steady surprises. This song was apparently never released until they put together a CD anthology of his work, and I can’t figure out why. I guess the reason is that the bridge seems dropped in from some other record, but I happen to like the way the song stops, shifts, stops again, and returns. It was written by William Peterkin, who authored a couple other Hathaway songs and I think a late Four Tops cut, but has only a handful of credits on Discogs. “Sunshine Over Showers” refers to the way the singer’s lover has volatile moods that seem to catch him by surprise but which are quickly overcome when she smiles. This doesn’t sound like a recipe for a healthy relationship, but Hathaway sells the love this guy has for her. I particularly like the way he sings the hook line differently each time it comes up – that’s his jazz chops sneaking into this lovely little record.

Coconut Records – “Back to You” 2007 from Nighttiming. I’m always glad to see Jason Schwartzman pop up in a movie or TV show. I sometimes forget he’s made some pretty cool music at times, too. He had been the drummer in the band Phantom Planet before he put together this mostly solo project that released a couple records in the late 00s. Schwartzman has a love for pop melody and rocking crunch that is perfectly on display for the first two thirds of this nifty little song. He’s singing about a person who can’t stay with him, who has to go away, and yet he convinces himself that he can wait until a magical return happens. There aren’t many different words in this song, but he puts them to a zippy fun melody with several different sections to it. About halfway through, a crowd roars over the music before dispersing for the sound of waves lapping a beach, at which point Schwartzman switches to mandolin and a more yearning and sad awareness that his baby’s gone.