Happy Sunday, bibliophiles!
Whew, here we are on New Year’s Eve! What a year it’s been, huh? The fact that there’s 2/5ths depressing songs in this batch was entirely unintentional, but I’m of the firm opinion that the last one is a good way to close out 2023. Also—no, somehow the Phoebe Bridgers song this week isn’t one of the depressing ones, bizarrely. Who would’ve thunk.
Enjoy the last songs of 2023!
SUNDAY SONGS: 12/31/23
“Garden Song” – Phoebe Bridgers
This song, like a good song does, came back like an old, loyal dog when I needed it most. But before I get into it, I remembered that I reviewed Punisher when it came out. So let’s see what I thought about it back in 2020:
This was the first single to be released out of the whole album. When I first listened to it, something about it got under my skin, but as I’ve listened to it more, something about it has grown on me (no pun intended). A nostalgic, dreamlike opener to the album. (Rating: 7/10)
…huh. Well, I thought I’d have…more to work with there, but 2020 me wasn’t necessarily wrong. I’d certainly bump up the rating up to at least an 8 or an 8.5, though. It’s what this song deserves, upon a few more years of reflection. It’s a way-homer once you get past the age of 16.
Yes, there is some sad bastard music coming soon in this post (buckle up), but contrary to what…95% of Phoebe Bridgers’ discography would have you believe, this isn’t one of them. Pigeonholing an artist into being just a “sad girl” has a multitude of pitfalls, but one of them is that automatically assuming that slow = sad. In fact, I think this is one of her most hopeful songs. I remember taking a while to warm up to it at first—the startlingly low, Matt Berninger-esque backing vocals, probably several octaves below Bridgers, felt off at first. (In fact, the voice belongs to Jeroen Vrijhoef, her tour manager, who she described as sounding like “Dutch Matt Berninger.”) It’s a stark contrast—Vrijhoef’s rumbling bass almost becomes the unstable ground that Bridgers’ frayed-silk high notes treads over, but it grows on you after a while.
One thing that writing these posts this year has taught me is that I can see more clearly how I approach music; it’s always the music itself first, and unless something immediately jumps out at me (or if I come in expecting it), the lyrics follow on subsequent listens. That’s certainly what’s happened with this song. The dreamlike calmness has never failed to soothe me, but the lyrics have a soothing quality to them as well. The sleepily rambling second verse, where Phoebe Bridgers describes a meandering dream, has the murmur that you would only expect when she’s just woken up and is scrawling the non-sequitur fragments into her journal. (Not to project onto a complete stranger, but I feel like she’s the kind of person to keep a dream journal. I just get that vibe.) But even beyond that, “Garden Song” really is about growth. It’s the soft space where you can look back on your life, recognizing the good and bad, and see it as the soil for other things to grow. It’s the sad smile that you can see as you recall the painful times in your life, but also the comfort in realizing that your sprout has gone beyond that and bloomed, and the hope that there’s blooming yet to do. I find myself going back to 2020, a few months after Punisher came out, when it seemed like all of the lead-weight things pinning my shoulders down would never lift, and inevitably feeling heavy again, but remembering where I’m sitting now, and where my feet have taken me since then. The path was winding and full of twists, but it led us all here. As Bridgers herself said, “…if you’re someone who believes that good people are doing amazing things no matter how small, and that there’s beauty or whatever in the midst of all the darkness, you’re going to see that proof, too. And you’re going to ignore the dark shit, or see it and it doesn’t really affect your worldview. It’s about fighting back dark, evil murder thoughts and feeling like if I really want something, it happens, or it comes true in a totally weird, different way than I even expected.” There’s no denying the darkness, but it is never all there is.
“Garden Song” came back to me towards the end of finals, and of course, I had to sit a while in my spinny chair and sit with it. To me, it’s the perfect song to take with us to the new year—to reflect on how you’ve grown through everything, and that there is so much left to grow through. I’ll leave it with these lines:
“I don’t know how, but I’m taller
It must be something in the water
Everything’s growing in our garden
You don’t have to know that it’s haunted
The doctor put her hands over my liver
She told me my resentment’s getting smaller
No, I’m not afraid of hard work
I get everything I want
I have everything I wanted.”
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – Becky Chambers – even if the gentle, muted instrumentals didn’t perfectly mesh with the homey atmosphere of this novel, the stargazingly hopeful attitude certainly would.
Alright, here’s a blanket. This one’s from another sad girl, and it’s very much actually sad.
If there’s one thing that Adrianne Lenker can write well, it’s a heartbreak song. Unlike most of her solo work that I’ve listened to, there’s no acoustic guitar in sight. This time, Lenker has opted for something equally sparse and solemn: the classic solo piano ballad, aided by some faint, synthy notes in the background, apparently credited as “crystals.” It could’ve easily blended in with the acoustic-dominated landscape of most of her other music, but somehow, the slowly marching piano chords leave the song room to take every rattling breath. Thanks to the music video…I…yeah, I think I’ve now seen more of Adrianne Lenker than I ever needed to see, but this song provides more of that in the metaphorical sense, which I much prefer. She’s a soul-bearer. Something about the plaintive, ever-present waver in her voice seems to age her—it’s not like much time has passed between her solo work, but the shake in her voice seems to indicated that whatever inspired this song aged something inside of her, certainly. Poor thing. Whether or not this song will eventually be a part of an album or remain adrift in Lenker’s discography, it would make a wonderful, thematic addition to the end of an album—it wouldn’t even need to be the very last song, but it would fit in at least the final three or four. The opening lines lend themselves to an album fading into the ether, of both love and music slipping through your fingers—”I wish I’d waved when I saw you/I just watched you passing by.”
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Even Though I Knew the End – C.L. Polk – I don’t think Adrianne Lenker would mind the inclusion of vampires, but this is certainly the kind of love that ruins you.
“I’m Not Feeling Human” – The Olivia Tremor Control
My musical wish for 2024: BRING BACK SLIDE WHISTLES, DAMMIT!
I’ve been riding off my dad’s high of Elephant 6 musicians after he recently watched the Elephant 6 Recording Co. documentary (hence the recent spike in Apples in Stereo-related content). There’s something so pure about so much of the music that they put out in the early days. Well…okay, maybe not on Neutral Milk Hotel’s part, but Robert Schneider (of the Apples) and Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss (of The Olivia Tremor Control) certainly knew how to juice playful simplicity out of synths and all manner of catchy melodies. The Apples in Stereo have a space-age, almost scientific quality to their pop songs, but to me, The Olivia Tremor Control has always come across as something just as whimsical, but in the way of flat colors and simple shapes that bounce around. I’ll die on the hill that this song deserves some kind of Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom-style music video to go along with it. The patchwork of goofy instruments scattered around (including the aforementioned, glorious slide whistle) gives it a delightful whimsy that calls to mind stacks of building blocks. Even the slight discomfort of the lyrics seem to be delivered with a wry smile—”Don’t I feel, don’t I feel like a mineral?/Don’t I feel, don’t I feel like a vegetable?” Maybe it’s the rhymes, or maybe just the fact that I’ve always found the phrase “animal, vegetable, or mineral” funny for no reason (I blame it on what little I remember from The Magician’s Nephew), but even vague alienation has a childlike whimsy to it in the hands of The Olivia Tremor Control. Probably the slide whistle, though.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The World of Edena – Mœbius – colored in with the same flat but vibrant colors that “I’m Not Feeling Human” is shaded in.
Okay, we’ve got one more peppy song before the depression hits…let’s ride the high while it lasts.
“Crash,” other than being a nostalgic, smiling thing popping up in my brain’s whack-a-mole system of remembering songs, feels like the better side of late ’80s pop. By then, the oversaturated synths and gated reverb had probably spread faster than the plague; I can’t speak from experience, given that…y’know, I wasn’t alive, but it had to have gotten obnoxious by that point. This song could have easily been that, but The Primitives seemed to know just the right balance to hit to make something instantly catchy, but that also managed to date itself in a way that wasn’t plasticky and corny. It’s distinctively ’80s without being distinctively ’80s, if you get what I mean. The guitars are bright, but not polished into oblivion, and yet there’s no denying the authentic, cartoon stars coming off of the opening riff. It’s practically begging to soundtrack a confident, reckless heroine with a slick jacket and and a pair of rollerblades, the kind with sparks that fly off with every turn she makes. Tracy Tracy, dolled up like some kind of new wave Marilyn Monroe in the music video, knows that she never needed to over-exaggerate her voice—the warmth of it, combined with the fiery embers self-contained in a tidy two and a half minutes, made for a song that’s unmistakable as a hit.
And they put this song in Dumb and Dumber? Huh?
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Little Thieves – Margaret Owen – Vanja Schmidt is certainly the kind of reckless firebrand that doesn’t know when to slow down—and it takes her to some unexpected places…
“Motion Picture Soundtrack” – Radiohead
Another thing I have my wonderful dad to thank for: we watched a few episodes of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (it’s all on Youtube, go watch it), and besides the plentiful, earth-shattering truth bombs, for lack of a better phrase, about the nature of life and myth (and how those two aren’t really separate things after all), a quote from the second episode stood out to me when I was reminded of this song. At about 42:48, after he and Bill Moyers are discussing the manifestation of god in everything, and by extension, machines, Campbell examines the inner framework of a computer and remarks, “have you ever looked inside one of those things? You can’t believe it! It’s a whole hierarchy of angels…and those little tubes, those are miracles.” For the sake of not derailing this post so I can actually publish it on Sunday, I’ll holding back from expanding on all of the aforementioned Campbell capital-T Truth bombs, which he seems to produce with the same frequency as the other Campbell’s soup cans, but I can’t help but think of this song when I think of computers and angels. There’s no other word besides “angelic” to describe the distorted chorus of electric voices that begins at 2:15. That sound couldn’t have come from any other place save for the miraculous angel tubes. There’s some kind of gospel to this song, I swear.
Unless something absolutely drastic and apocalyptic happens, I doubt I’ll ever stop singing the praises of Radiohead. I’m long past caring about how inevitably insufferable I am as a result, but all the language I have about them ends up being hyperbolic. Kid A is probably somewhere amongst my favorite albums—I haven’t formally organized them past top 10, but I’d say that this lands somewhere in the 20s or 30s, at least. OK Computer, even if their chronological placement has doomed them to comparisons as long as there are music critics to do so, will always be the favorite child in my mind, but the special quality of this album can’t be understated. Like Punisher, another red, blue, and black-colored album that I listened to during the summer of 2020, it’s a signpost for a hyper-specific time in my life, and one of the most cohesive showcases of the talents of Thom Yorke and company. But as much as “Everything In Its Right Place” and “Idioteque” hold uncontested places in my heart, “Motion Picture Soundtrack” will wield the ultimate trophy as far as Kid A goes, and for my standards of music in general. Right now, it’s my favorite album closer of all time. (Before anybody says anything, I know, ackshually ☝️🤓 “Untitled” is technically the closer, but at this point, it’s basically a cooling-down extension to this song). As I brought up before, there’s an undeniable air of gospel about it—the synths that press in at the beginning sound like pipe organs run through a dystopian starscape, and if that’s the case, then the choir is certainly the angels dwelling just out of view in the pews.
“Motion Picture Soundtrack” was marinating in Thom Yorke’s massive cauldron of glorious music since the mid-nineties, where it was an acoustic lament befitting of The Bends. After that, it became a deeply solemn piano ballad somewhere in the depths of the OK Computer sessions, but I, for one, am glad that this is the definitive version, even if we were robbed of what was originally the third verse: “Beautiful angel/pulled apart at birth/Limbless and helpless/I can’t even recognize you.” (OW.) “Motion Picture Soundtrack” was always meant for cosmic grandeur; even though the opening mentions of “red wine and sleeping pills” ground us in the dim hours of planet Earth, the sprawling emotion of it all is the definition of all-consuming. It feels like the final leap off the cliff from death to rebirth, watching your feet slip and the gravel crumble beneath them as the electric, harp-like notes fill your ears like an endless field of stars. Within the infinite sprawl of sorrow, you can’t help but see the staggering beauty of life itself blossom in front of you. I’ll go out again and say it: I doubt we’ll ever come close to the tearjerking final line of Kid A: “I will see you in the next life,” and the pleading waver of Yorke’s soul-caressing voice makes it resonate all the more.
Kid A is probably the pinnacle of hopeless sad bastard music, but I can’t help but feel some kind of embryonic hope resting in the egg yolk of this song. “I will see you in the next life” is a release from all the mindless, sorrowful things that the rest of the verses lay out, and the promise of a starry new beginning. The closing of a chapter, the setting of a book back on the shelf, knowing that if you ever go back and read it, nothing will ever fully be the same, but knowing that isn’t always a bad thing.
What a way to end the year, huh? Just like “Garden Song,” I’m glad this song returned to me when it did. Radiohead is the gift that keeps on giving (me too many feelings to handle).
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Darkness Outside Us – Eliot Schrefer – this book takes “I will see you in the next life” very seriously. One of my favorite love stories of all time, and one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time as well.
Since this post consists entirely of songs, consider all of them to be today’s song.
That’s it for the last Sunday Songs of the year! Have a wonderful rest of your day, and take care of yourselves.
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The Bookish Mutant 