Sunday Songs: 2/16/25

Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.

This week: We’ve got Paul McCartney and a song about a dog on the docket, but nowhere is “Martha My Dear” involved. Sorry, gang.

Enjoy this week’s songs!

SUNDAY SONGS: 2/16/25

“Jimmy Fallon Big!” – Japanese Breakfast

Michelle Zauner jokingly referenced this song when posting about her recent appearance on the Tonight Show to promote “Orlando in Love,” the first (excellent) single from her forthcoming album For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women). But before she got Jimmy Fallon Big, someone else tried to—Deven Craige, the bass player for her former band, Little Big League; Zauner wrote the song about how he split the band after his other band was, in his words, about to go “Jimmy Fallon big,” and decided to put his energy into that instead of Little Big League. The move left Zauner crushed: she told NPR in 2017 that “it felt like losing a brother, and there was this shame, feeling like I was never going to get there myself.” There’s truly something more than bittersweet about it—the passion she poured into every bit of the vocals shows a deep devotion to her former bandmate, and yet the resentment sloughs off of the chorus in relenting waves: “Why walk/When you can show up on time?” I mean, they’re on good terms now, but BURN.

I promise this segue will become relevant, but I recently listened to the first episode of Björk’s excellent Sonic Symbolism podcast, where she frequently refers to the history of music as a great tree with thousands of interspersed branches that connect and diverge from one another. Listening to “Jimmy Fallon Big!” is one of those 21st century moments where I can so clearly see the tree rings, the ancestry and lineage where an evolutionary branch broke off. Michelle Zauner has been crafting intricate, emotional dream pop for quite some time now (see: “Sit,” which I talked about back in July), but this track has the Cocteau Twins written all over it. It’s not just the warm, dreamlike drone of the instrumentals, but the way that said instrumentals obscure the meaning of the chorus almost completely. It makes the opening line of “We aren’t bound by law/We aren’t bound by anything at all” make all the more sense artistically. On the first few listens, I almost wondered if it was born from the same songwriting method that Fraser used to craft her nonsense miracles. Where they break off—besides having a clearer anchor tying the music down to earth, is how Zauner grounds the emotion; not many people can get to the level of Fraser, and I don’t think Zauner is one of them, but she’s got the clear talent of crafting the most elaborate musical smoke screen to cloak her misgivings.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” – Paul & Linda McCartney

Memes aside, shoutout to Paul McCartney and his joyous whimsy. I’m fully aware that I use the phrase “joyous whimsy” with the same frequency of congresspeople emailing you saying that you have a MIDNIGHT DONATION DEADLINE and it’s URGENT, and I don’t want to repeat myself, but I think the world needs more of it. And who’s got it? PAUL!

BUTTAH PIE!

BUTTAH PIE?

THE BUTTAH WOULDN’T MELT, SO I PUT IT IN THE PIE, ALRIGHT?

As far as Beatles lore goes, I feel like Ringo gets more of the credit for whimsy, and for good reason—the dude saw the other three tearing at each other’s necks and decided to write a song about an octopus. But as obnoxious as Paul got during a lot of those sessions, over the course of his career, he had a gentleness to his artistic soul too, and it showed in his songwriting.

“Admiral Halsey notified me/He had to have a berth or he couldn’t get to sea/I had another look and I had a cup of tea and butter pie?” C’mon. That sounds like something straight out of some 1940’s British children’s book with yellowing pages and inked illustrations. But uptight is the opposite of how McCartney and McCartney—Linda deserves the brunt of the credit for the sheer jubilation she brings to the “Hands across the water, Heads across the sky” refrain—delivers this song. Plus, the Admiral Halsey in question was loosely based off of an American admiral from World War II, and McCartney painted him as a stiff authoritarian who is “symbolic of authority and therefore not to be taken too seriously,” so it’s making him uptight just so you can stick your tongue in his face. It’s just so infectiously jolly. There’s an orange-hued, sunlit laughter to the whole bit. It’s got the warmth of reuniting with an old friend, or being back in some rose-tinted decade and sweeping your lover off their feet on the dance floor, particularly the “Admiral Halsey” section. It’s hard to think of a song so wonderfully carefree, in every sense of the word. Hands across the water, heads across the sky indeed.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Falling to Pieces” – Faith No More

Hoooooowhee. Going straight from Paul & Linda McCartney frolicking through a field to Faith No More…I don’t think whiplash even begins to describe that. Well. Welcome to my shuffle.

Faith No More seem to have been on the fringes, even where hard rock is concerned, and it’s easy to see why even the freakier people weren’t as willing to embrace them—Mike Patton’s voice and their mishmash of rock and early hip-hop influences stand out immediately. As does the goofy video. The lyrics and subject matter are standard fare for any kind of alternative music of the time (“Indecision clouds my vision/No one listens/Because I’m somewhere in between/My love and my agony”), but everything else is just off the walls. Directed by Ralph Ziman, the video is the last thing you’d expect to match the song’s aesthetic—neon colors aplenty, Mike Patton in a bowler hat and some kind of clown suit for half the video, and enough fish that I imagine the storyboarding process went something like this. Patton’s distinct vocals rangefrom a nasally standard to a hint of the heights he’d later reach on “Midlife Crisis,” and they stand behind a bassline that holds all of the instrument’s resentment for being in the background for decades. Even in a subgenre that’s already weird, this is real weird, unpredictable, unabashed weirdness. Somebody needs to bring back green-screen goldfish back into hard rock.

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Sylvia” – Julien Baker & TORRES

On April 18th, I’ll have to show where my allegiance lies…Thee Black Boltz and Send A Prayer My Way come out on the same day. Well, okay. I’ve already decided. My allegiance is to Tunde Adebimpe, to the republic! But I’ll stagger my listening. The former has a priority over Julien Baker & TORRES, but I’ll give both a listen.

“Sylvia” is the second single Send A Prayer My Way, and it proves a valuable point: we need more good, wholesome songs about our pets. Why not write love songs for the little creatures that enrich our lives? I mentioned “Martha My Dear” earlier, but we need more songs about our furry (and not furry) friends, if you ask me. (See also: Jim Noir’s “My Little Cat”) TORRES takes the lead on this track, which recounts their experience with a foster dog and how a puppy can touch your heart in the way that only a puppy can: “anyone who has ever had the honor of sharing a home with a beloved pet knows that a pet is family—they’re the best friends you could ever have.”

They recalled an experience of taking Sylvia on the road and feeling as though they were truly meant to be. There’s something special about holding a puppy when you’ve just brought them home, and not just in the warm-and-fuzzy way. There’s an immediacy you feel, the knowledge that you’ve got a little heartbeat next to yours, a furry, helpless body that you’re suddenly in charge of. It really is a new member of the family, and one that you have the responsibility to protect. Puppies are exhausting—the time my boy Ringo slipped out of his collar, ran down the street, and evaded me for a solid five minutes before showing up on my porch with a shit-eating grin comes to mind. But “Sylvia” taps into that feeling of knowing you have more than a companion: “Haunted by all the goodnights that I’ve missed/Every time your cheek goes unkissed/A day for me is a week for you/And my life’s already halfway through/Tomorrow, today’s worries might turn out to be regrets…” It taps in to being conscious of your pet as something you can keep around for amusement, but a deeply ingrained part of your life, while retaining the simultaneous fear and joy of giving them all the love you can in their short lives.

And because we NEED a picture of sweet Sylvia…

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by TORRES (@torreslovesyou)

BABYYYYYYYYYY

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

“Love Spreads” – The Stone Roses

Really and truly Severance-pilled rn…CAN WE TALK ABOUT SEVERANCE? The deepening of existing friendships and yet also the storylines of corporations driving a wedge in their workers to discourage them from solidarity? Unity…unions, perhaps? HELLY WOULDN’T BE CRUEL? SHAMBOLIC RUE? THE WORST MELON PARTY YET? A CHILD? PAPERCLIPS? THE TENDENCY OF CORPORATIONS TO SHOW PROGRESS AS MARGINALIZED PEOPLE SIMPLY SWALLOWED INTO THEIR SYSTEM? GOATS? THE—

Oh, wait, there’s a song here? ALL THE BETTER TO PUT INTO SEVERANCE—

…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:

Since this posts consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.

That’s it for this week’s Sunday Songs! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves!