#365songs (51 / 365)

I'm pretty sure I learned about this album from a node about "101-level" rap music on everything2 (which has been on the internet for like 30 years but is currently consistently giving me timeout errors, for which I'm blaming LLM scrapers with no more than circumstantial evidence, but I digress). Listening back to it today I was struck by how much it hasn't held up, for me, but I still retain a lot of fondness for it because it really was the album that turned me on to the possibilities of rap music.

"Virus" was, and remains, my favorite track on Deltron 3030. I love the dark and ominous chimey vibe of it, as well as the creepy samples, and despite that it exhibits the problem of much of Deltron 3030 that the techno-jargon is both primitive and incoherent for an album supposedly set one thousand years in the future, it's campy enough that it bothers me a lot less here than elsewhere. And if the jargon feels clunky and out of place, the criticism of the societal problems of this imagined 3030 feels timeless and much more believable. It's not hard to connect Deltron 3030 up to the android allegories of Janelle Monáe's work (which will probably get at least one entry this year) a decade later.

#365songs (50 / 365)

OK, Owen Pallett gets the first twofer, because it kind of feels like "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt" has to be back-to-back with "The Butcher." Lewis is the protagonist of Heartland, an album about a sort of swords-and-sorcery fantasy realm with a god named Owen, as in Owen Pallett, the singer on the album Heartland. In "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt," after leaving his family to pursue a life of devotion to Owen and suffering a wound at sea fleeing a proselytizing mission gone wrong, causing him to have a crisis of faith, Lewis is picturesquely riding his horse across a plain or some shit, on his way to Owen, to kill him.

The fantasy trappings here might make all this seem unbearably corny but Pallett is alternately classy and cheeky with it, giving Lewis some genuinely poetic lines, using the framing as a way to muse on the role of creator-as-Creator and what the created might feel about it, never really letting the listener forget that every line out of Lewis's mouth was put there by Owen Pallett. And Pallett also portrays themself as a petty, vainglorious, indifferent and rather horny deity. We saw this in "The Butcher" with "Every morning I listen to confessional / I don't give a shit 'bout the bulk of it," we see it in "Lewis Takes Off His Shirt" as, well, Lewis is charging Owen-ward with deicide on his mind and all Owen cares about is that he's doing it shirtless.

Great song though. Heartland brought some electronics to Pallett's oeuvre and the bed of synths here combines nicely with the tone-blocky orchestral swells that are kind of their signature sound. The verse melody is bold and catchy and Pallett's voice sounds as good as it ever had at this point in their career, but it's kind of all about that "I'm never gonna give it to you" hook and especially the last repetition of it. If you're not convinced, perhaps try watching this performance of it?

#365songs (49 / 365)

I like it when musicians indulge in their own mythmaking. Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie does a lot of this. Destroyer does it, kinda. The Mountain Goats sorta do. But I don't think anyone has ever done it quite like Owen Pallett, who recorded the EP, Spectrum, 14th Century, that originally contained "The Butcher," under the name "Final Fantasy" before wisely changing it so as not to incur the wrath or litigation of Square/Enix.

I mention the name change because of the lyric "Put all your fear, your fire, your family / Into the mouth of Final Fantasy," which does, yes, refer to the musical act Final Fantasy. See look. "Spectrum" is an imaginary world that Owen Pallett made up and Spectrum, 14th Century is about that world. It's kind of a medieval fantasy world, and it contains a country or something called "Heartland" (the LP that came after Spectrum, 14th century was also called Heartland) and some people in Heartland worship a deity named Owen. "This land is big, this land is bigger, but never as big as the mouth of a singer," sings Owen Pallett, non-coincidentally, in "The Butcher."

The absolute fucking chutzpah, to write a song as good as "The Butcher" as part of a multi-album fanfic about a world that you are the god of by virtue of having literally sung it into existence! Now that's indulging in your own mythmaking!

#365songs (48 / 365)

I probably found Shearwater via cokemachineglow, for many years my favorite music review website, who raved about their 2008 album Rook. Besides the very positive review, my curiosity was piqued by their reference to Okkervil River, who I was already a fan of and whose singer Will Sheff was in Shearwater for their first few albums, I think they parted amicably, there's a whole song about it that both Sheff and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg sing on.

You should click on the word "raved" in the previous paragraph and read cokemachineglow's review of Rook, which is a great bit of writing about a stunning album, but you should also listen to "Rooks," which is a very approachable way in (if I recall correctly, it was mine, and thus my onramp to Shearwater as a whole). Superficially, you got a hooky fingerpicked electric guitar line. You got some swelling horns over the instrumental breaks to lend some gravitas. You got Jonathan Meiburg's powerful voice, the centerpiece of Shearwater, including both an instance of the strident /aɪ/ diphthong that he does so well in the last syllable of "And we'll sleep until the world of man is paralyzed" and his very nice falsetto in the last verse. As with so many songs, what elevates "Rooks" for me is the lyric. All that prettiness and hookiness is in service of some pretty dark, apocalyptic stuff: birds dying or disappearing en masse, the world of man (as mentioned above) being paralyzed, nowhere to flee for your life, empty cages, kingdom come. And I always like a song that ends abruptly and without a lot of foofaraw, and "Rooks" does that, on a low piano note that sounds just enough like the tolling of a bell not to be too on-the-nose.

#365songs (47 / 365)

Just read a news article thing about how various members of Live are squabbling with each other over what remains of the band's reputation, so I'll admit it: I still think Throwing Copper is pretty good, despite its being pretty corny in places and nearly every song on it doing the loud/quiet/loud thing, and "Pillar of Davidson" is probably my favorite song on there (these days "The Dam at Otter Creek" might be a contender, but I had a lot of affection for "Pillar" for a much longer time).

Despite being almost 7 minutes long, "Pillar of Davidson" is mercifully free of the lyrical howlers that Ed Kowalczyk sometimes commits: honestly, the opening line, "Warm bodies, I sense / are not machines that can only make money" hits pretty hard these days. And while it absolutely does the loud/quiet/loud thing, well... Throwing Copper does that so much because it works, and it works here. The verses are sparse minor-key affairs, the shift into a major key — but a borderline mournful melody — for the chorus is moving, the layered vocals in the outro are a suitable payoff for those 7 minutes. With the title and all the lyric's references to "the shepherd," there's a pseudo-religious grandiosity to it, the kind of thing that makes Live a love-hate proposition teetering at all times on the brink of po-faced cringe. But I like the unsourced, unattributed claim on Genius's page for the song that claims

The "pillar of Davidson" refer [sic] to the Caterpillar and Harley Davidson plants in the band's hometown of York, PA; presumably these are two of the places that expects [sic] people to live as "machines that can only make money."

Singing about relatable economic realities in this kind of over-the-top register just kinda works for me. I think there's a straight line from "Pillar of Davidson," and maybe from Live in general, to "Nux Vomica," the first of my #365songs, which has a very similar kind of melodramatic religious vibe to it, and for that matter the singers sound similar in a lot of ways. Interesting how this project is making me draw connections I'd never thought of before.

#365songs (46 / 365)

Uncharacteristically linking to a specific performance of this track on YouTube rather than the album version, because they are night-and-day different aside from the beat and the COLORS show version is the one that I love. The album version is pretty sleepy. The COLORS version is... extremely not that.

Some kinds of over-the-top theatricality can get on my nerves a bit, but this performance absolutely is not one of those kinds. Maybe I should say none of this performance is those kinds, because through the whole thing, JPEGMAFIA is on about five different levels in the space of any given 20 seconds. The beat is really interesting and the lyrics are a series of compelling-enough near-non-sequiturs but in this particular performance they're just the means to the end of Peggy going spellbindingly batshit for three minutes. I challenge you to start this video and not watch the whole thing.

#365songs (45 / 365)

There are going to be at least a few Joanna Newsom songs among these 365, and this isn't my favorite, just the one I happened to be thinking about today. But still, what a song.

Every incredible duality of Joanna Newsom is on display here. Writing such catchy, classic-sounding melodies over such a strange series of chord progressions. Ridiculously erudite, complexly allusive lyrics with a powerful, poignant emotional core: other writers may shine in different ways but I genuinely cannot think of another lyricist who does anything like what Joanna Newsom does anywhere near as well. Sophisticated, interesting internal rhymes, but always with something to say, never for their own sake. Virtuosic musicianship, but always serving the song, never for its own sake.

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is that when I listen to it, the climax moves me to tears more often than not. The way the lengthy outro turns down the instrumentation to almost nothing to "zoom in" for the vignette about John Purroy Mitchel (a man about whom I know nothing I didn't learn due to this song) and then swells with vocal harmonies and winds and drums as it pulls back to look at everything that gets obliterated by the vast sweep of history: it's a classic songwriting trick but "Sapokanikan" just nails it, and Newsom swinging up into the top of her vocal range is the coup de grâce. No, wait, the coup de grâce is after that, when the bottom drops out again and she flips "Look upon my works, and despair!" from the seemingly too-clever-by-half "Ozymandian" rhyme from the song's second line into simply "Look, and despair." Full circle, like Divers itself.

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is how even beyond the gut-level impact of the songwriting, every layer I excavate in the lyrics makes it still more moving. In a "Songs We Love" column about it that I think is great for tugging on a bunch of threads without risking unraveling the whole think, NPR includes a quote from Newsom about "Sapokanikan." She says:

"Sapokanikan" is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.

What I love about "Sapokanikan" is that it actually literally is about all of those things while still being at its heart a fucking great tune. And it's still probably not even my favorite Joanna Newsom song.

#365songs (44 / 365)

You ever wonder what if someone made an entire song out of hooks? On some level I think this was the song that made it possible for me to be a poptimist, like, 10 or 15 years later. Just one incredibly potent sugar rush after another.

#365songs (43 / 365)

I think maybe in high school I mistook being a dude who liked Loreena McKennitt for having a personality, a little bit — encouraged somewhat by one or two of my best friends — but as I listen to "Marrakesh Night Market," one of the songs I remember sticking with me a little longer than the rest of her catalog, I have to say it does still kind of slap.

I have not listened to Loreena McKennitt in quite a long time. I think sometime in college or later I got kind of into her second album, Parallel Dreams, which has that "transitional album" quality that I often find really interesting, before she made it big (???) (?????) with her major label debut The Visit. But "Marrakesh Night Market" I do remember finding compelling even after some of her other music started to feel a little too sleepy for me.

#365songs (42 / 365)

Richard Dawson deals in some kinda skronky proggy avant-folk story songs, all things that are generally pretty in my wheelhouse, but I bounced off his album Peasant when I sampled it after reading a rave review or two in the wake of its release.

Maybe Peasant was just too ye-olde-sounding; maybe Dawson's voice was weird enough to put me off; who knows, but when I gave him another try with his next album 2020 it really got its hooks into me. Almost all the things that might be hard to stomach about Peasant are still here but the lyrics are decidedly of the (unfortunately relatable) present rather than the distant past, and the instrumentation leans a bit more rock than folk.

"Jogging" is the obvious entry point — and so it was for me — with digestible question/answer phrases in the verses and an instantly-likable opening line: "Recently I've been struggling with anxiety / To the point I find it hard to leave the flat." The melody is appropriately both peppy and melancholy. The lyrics are overstuffed with a charming disregard for strict meter as they hop between amusing-awkward vignettes from the depths of anxiety in the anthemic choruses and the struggle to escape those depths in the verses, the guitar jogging along chug-chugga-chuggingly all the while.

As its protagonist starts to be able to take a little bit of a wider view on his world, "Jogging" becomes another look at the core of 2020, of which nearly every song on it feels like a reflection: "I feel the atmosphere round here / Is growing nastier / People don't care anymore." Every character in 2020 is struggling with this in their own way and "Jogging"'s, for all their challenges, seems to be one of the more successful ones.