Happy Sunday, bibliophiles! I hope this week has treated you well.
I’m finally out of finals hell! Hopefully I’ll have more time to write and read in the next month or so, but I’ll certainly be sleeping. As a celebration: songs for the beach, songs for the ocean, and songs for when you need to cry and dramatically drape a hand over your forehead. You’re totally in a movie for the latter. Totally.
Enjoy this week’s songs!
SUNDAY SONGS: 12/17/23
“Let You Break My Heart Again” – Laufey & Philharmonia Orchestra
Seems like I’m somewhat late on the Laufey train, but then again, she’s young and she’s certainly got tons of records ahead of her, so I suppose I’m not that late. She has, however, swept the internet for doing something almost unthinkable—her noble cause of bringing jazz to Gen Z. It’s an incredible cause to spearhead in your musical career, what with jazz being up there with country at the butt of every “I listen to everything but this” joke and not selling well as a genre for decades. I say this as somebody who falls into the former category with both of those genres, but from the scope of what I’ve heard, Laufey’s brand of jazz isn’t the kind of bland smooth jazz you hear in a spa and never hear about again. It’s the kind of dramatic, emotional vocal jazz sung by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holliday—two artists who she cites as some of her biggest musical influences.
Some of her other tracks (“From the Start” and “Falling Behind” comes to mind) spread like wildfire across social media this year, but although they weren’t enough to lift out of slightly out-of-the-ordinary background music for me, I’ll admit that my heart’s been fully captured by “Let You Break My Heart Again.” It’s the absolute best sort of high drama; the swelling instrumentation of the Philharmonia Orchestra in concert with Laufey’s low, honeyed voice make it just the sort of thing to listen to while imagining yourself leaning out the window and pretending you’re in a movie. It practically begs for flowing dresses and a hand artfully draped over your forehead. (Oh! I’m fainting…into your arms…) I’ve never been one for Disney, much less their musicals, but this song almost seems like the kind of princess’s solo number that stands the test of time. I’m also not a jukebox musical kind of person, but having this as the emotional climax while the lead actress laments into the spotlight doesn’t sound like a terrible idea. With every soft flutter in her voice, you can feel the yearning and heartache creep through the windowsill like golden-hour sunlight. I just can’t help but dramatically twirl around and collapse into my (imaginary) ballgown with every listen.
In closing, the genius who paired this song with this video deserves a raise at whatever job they’re in:
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue – V.E. Schwab – for all your dramatically-draping-yourself-from-the-window-in-a-flowy-dress needs. And for the heartbreak.
“Glowworm” – The Apples in Stereo
I keep having to say this, because it needs to be said: The Apples in Stereo seriously tapped into the wellspring of indie-pop magic, and we barely seem to have acknowledged that. No other band of their ilk, that I can think of, has managed to consistently produce the sheer amount of glimmering pop capsules that they have in the lifespan of their band. Under-appreciated genius, for sure.
“Glowworm” falls into that perfect category of songs that seem to be shaded in the same colors of the album cover. In this song’s case, this song glows with the same bright yellow-greens of the album art for Fun Trick Noisemaker, just like the gentle, greenish flicker of the titular glowworms and fireflies. And like the bugs it’s named after, this song feels like a swarm of gentle lights illuminating the summer night, sparking and glowing with lively energy (no pun intended). Robert Schneider’s soft voice jumps and bounces around the almost nursery rhyme-like opening lyrics (“Put a penny in the pot/Put a nickel in your pocket/Every nickel that you’ve got/Is a nickel in the slot”), opening like a storybook into a glittering tale of yearning after a reckless lover—”You just had to spend it all/Every hour, every minute/You had to make it all/Wonderful, beautiful.” Like the fleeting glow of the worm, it’s a there-and-gone kind of love—”You lived to burn.” But the ecstatic burn is one that you can instantly feel in your heart—the song makes you travel on a trail of light up into the night sky, just like fireflies.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Nothing Burns as Bright as You – Ashley Woodfolk – the song is decidedly more lighthearted (at least, that’s how it sounds) than the book, but the feeling of falling in love with a fiery, reckless person remains the same. This book, however, deals with the fallout.
“Genius of Love” – Tom Tom Club
“Genius Of Love” has found its way everywhere—most prominently sampled in Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” (oh, look, we’re mentioning her in December without mentioning…okay, I’m not gonna say it, that’s too easy)—and I feel like it has almost made us forget how delightfully bonkers it is. Heck, here I am in my dorm, looking at the boygenius picture that I cut out of a magazine and pasted on the wall, and it’s captioned with “genius of love.” It’s everywhere. If this song had a physical representation, it would probably be some kind of collage, but the kind that looks mindless from a distance—a bit of yarn here, some googly eyes there, and some brightly-colored but dried-out markers to color the background—but with a closer look, clearly has all the intention in the world. And yet, it’s such a meticulous pop song. I’d expect nothing less from half of the Talking Heads.
I mean, this starts off with Tina Weymouth doing a playful spoken-word segment with the affectation of a 50’s housewife in a grainy commercial: “What you gonna do when you get out of jail?/I’m gonna have some fun/What do you consider fun?/Fun, natural fun.” The delivery of that last line seriously makes me think that I’m about to be sold some kind of unnaturally green jello salad or something. But it all works so ridiculously well together. After the whole housewife bit, Weymouth’s gorgeous voice really has the chance to shine—the sincere sweetness of it makes every repetition of “I’m in heaven/With my boyfriend, my laughing boyfriend” seem nothing but genuine, like there’s a halo of cartoon hearts and bluebirds circling around her head. And the synths—they really feel like you can touch them. They pulsate and bubble and twinkle in every part of your ear. It’s no wonder that this song is one of the most sampled songs of the 80’s, especially in hip-hop and R&B from the 90’s up until as recent as last year. I’m getting mixed signals from the internet about the exact amount of times it’s actually been sampled—the sources range from around 50 to a whopping 179, but either way, the legacy of “Genius of Love” cannot be overstated. The synth heard ’round the world.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
Victories Greater Than Death (Unstoppable, #1) – Charlie Jane Anders – this was a super tough one, but I figured that Charlie Jane Anders’ sparkling, neon space opera world would mesh nicely with all those bubbly synths.
“O.K., Meet Me Underwater” – Jay Som
I’ve had a brief kick of collecting random Jay Som singles for my hoard, and I haven’t regretted a single second of it. Even if the songs weren’t as good as they are, I’d still come out the other side with song titles like this. This one is like a “Crocodile Tears and the Velvet Cosh” situation—if there every is another song called “O.K., Meet Me Underwater,” it’ll be copying this one.
Besides being so charmingly memorable, “O.K., Meet Me Underwater” has the advantage of being made for a Jay Som song. Her trademark of slightly off-kilter electric guitars and synths and the water-smooth ripple of how it all sounds together was made for a song title like this. All of the instrumentals already could have sounded like they were recorded from just under the surface, only slightly to the left of being muffled by a stream of bubbles rising from the depths. As Jay Som sings the chorus of “If you’re feeling okay/Meet me underwater,” every word feels like it’s being spoken just before she dips her head back down into the waves, beckoning you to follow her to some kind of colorful coral reef kingdom befitting of the cheerful glimmer of her music. Even that deliciously bouncy riff starting at 1:04 sounds like something you’d hear in the background of an ocean-themed episode of Really Wild Animals (PLEASE tell me somebody else remembers those), or even just some cartoon they play in the background of an aquarium, complete with smiling dolphins and clam shells opening and closing to the beat. The neon yellow on the cover of the single doesn’t do nearly enough justice to the summery glow of this song—you’d need a whole, pastel-oceanic palette to capture the whole song.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Girl from the Sea – Molly Knox Ostertag – not to double-dip on the Jay Som/graphic novel comparisons, but…it’s right there. Meet me underwater.
I know a somewhat clever band name when I see one, but I also see a contentious one when I see it as well. The wordplay is great, but upon further reading, it looks like the Allah-Las, a band consisting of predominantly white, non-Muslim dudes from California, mostly picked the name because it was “holy-sounding.” They have faced some criticism for the name from the Muslim community over the years, and they’ve clarified that they never meant any ill will or disrespect by it, but even then, there’s still an undeniable uncomfortableness about a bunch of white guys from LA slapping the name on themselves with what seemed like very little thought behind it.
That aside, if there’s one thing white guys from California are good at doing, it’s making songs about the beach, and man, the Allah-Las nailed it. It’s not necessarily the kind of bouncy Beach Boys song that you’d expect from that descriptor—”Catamaran” takes plentiful notes from the other side of the sixties, a summertime, surfy beach walk by way of the Kinks. It’s got all the ingredients for a slightly left-of-the-dial 60’s dial bubbling in the pan—bright, jangly guitars, gentle percussion, and the kind of lyrics that sound like they could have just as easily slipped out of the mouth of the likes of Jim Morrison: “I’m an oyster pearl’s locked up in a shell/You better bring that diving bell.” What plucks the Allah-Las out of the 60’s is the kind of flat, disaffected vocals running rampant in every white guy who has ever pursued a career in indie pop—like TV Girl, it gets on my nerves for the most part, but in the sun-baked sepia of the rest of the song, it almost makes sense.
…AND A BOOK TO GO WITH IT:
The Immeasurable Depth of You – Maria Ingrande Mora – before everything goes sideways, this would be an appropriate soundtrack to being in an old houseboat floating in the Florida mangroves.
Since this post 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!
The Bookish Mutant 