Crucial Track for January 27, 2026

"Cue" by Scott Walker

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#365songs (27 / 365)

Following up on yesterday's entry about artists containing multitudes: no one embodies this for me like Scott Walker. I sought out The Drift after seeing it on Coke Machine Glow's list of the top 100 albums of the 2000s; their writeup of it does make it sound forbidding, but I still could not but be shocked by a piece like "Cue," even coming as it does in the middle of an album of some of the scariest music I've ever heard. But then imagine my surprise when I looked up Scott Walker and discovered that he was a full-blown boy-band pop crooner in the 1960s. What an arc this guy had. What an inspiration!

"Cue" is probably the most extreme song on an album that exists entirely in the outer reaches of what can be called "songs," and I picked it for that reason: the darkness and nightmarishness are almost the whole of the appeal here. It's got an incomprehensible but morbid lyric about disease and perhaps the most terrifying moment on an album full of them. But it also starts with the line "What do Seoul/Sudan have in common? Both start with an S." You can't have gallows humor without the gallows, I guess. A lot of my 365 songs are ones that expanded my idea of what music can be like in some way. "Cue" did that!