Baltimore - Mark Erelli

I met Mark Erelli at Club Passim, ground zero for many fateful musical encounters including Baez and Dylan, Steve Tannen & Deb Talan of The Weepies, and more importantly, Milton and yours truly. I was opening for Mark, and having not heard of him before I was wearing my usual jaded-embittered-snob-trying-to-act-polite facade as he began his show. But Lo and Behold, the guy is really, really good.

'Baltimore' is a canonical example of the Plain Old Good Song genre. Songs in this category include, but are not limited to 'You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome' (Dylan), 'Yesterday' (Lennon/McCartney) and 'Everybody Loves You' (Milton). These songs are so simple and true, so maddeningly OBVIOUS in their musical and lyrical elegance, they seem to have been not so much written as plucked from some timeless, collective tree of song. A songwriter is lucky to write just one of these in their entire careers, most others settle for none (Leonard Cohen, for example, wrote at least three of the best songs ever written, but not a single Plain Old Good Song). A precious few songwriters (The Gershwins come to mind) seem to have written almost nothing but.

With its opening chords, not so much strummed as beaten, the mood is set: frustrated, adolescent, filled with longing and perhaps some kind of amphetamine. The first verse sets the scene so simply it can almost be ignored, until we hear the plea:

Mister state trooper/please don't stop me now
I can't slow down/I got no choice

After which, we are flying over Delaware and across the Tappan Zee, on that crazed late-night drive up 95, 91, 84, and finally 90. We are all grinding our teeth, listening to country radio, and rooting for Mark as he pulls into the drive in Somerville just before dawn, with a bouquet of truckstop roses and that drove-all-night-to-beg-you look on his adorable, road-ravaged face.

Maybe I'm biased, having driven all the way from Baltimore myself once or twice, but can't you feel it, too?

Give a Broken Heart a Break

I think because it's an Mp4, you have to click this link to download the song.

After a lot of searching, this song apparently is not composed by Cleo Brown but by a guy called David Franklin, who (according to allmusic.com) has been an active composer, engineer and guitarist from 1910 through present day, and is also an actor (what?).

Anyhow, the song is a lilting, playful, tightly knitted little number with an adorable rhyme scheme. Built around a simple, conversationally punny refrain, this songs power is in its tapdancing obliviousness to the devastating subject matter ("all my life was full of laughter/now it's just an empty ache/won't you give a broken heart/a break"). I enjoy listening to it so much, I hardly noticed that fact (until now) that it has a total of two verses and a bridge.

Here, Cleo Brown does it up in her typical fats waller-meets-aristocratic preteen vocal treatment, complete with her "two-fist" piano style, which makes all her songs sound to me like she's singing in a paddleboat full of wrenches.

Brown Eyed Handsome Man - Chuck Berry

If you just think of Chuck Berry as the guitar guy who did the duck walk, you're selling this great pop poet/rapper extremely short. I've never heard a Chuck Berry song that didn't have great lyrics and great lyrics that are unlike those of any other songwriter in his time (which includes the present). His great lyric vignettes are delivered so seamlessly on the wings of such catchy little R&B melodies that many will never notice the craft delivered in each Berry number. Choosing one to write about is terribly difficult.
"Brown Eyed Handsome Man," originally released as the B-side to his great "Too Much Monkey Business," is very much a black power song. If you replace "eyed" in the title with "skinned" you have the forerunner to James Brown's "I'm Black and I'm Proud." Unlike Brown's anthem however, the Berry story is a satirical history lesson. Each verse is a different example of a brown eyed character that a woman (often a white woman) couldn't help but be in love with. From the first line of the first verse you have pure social commentary/ satire... "Arrested on charges of unemployment he was sitting in the witness stand". But what the men who would wrongly put away this unemployed dark fellow don't know, "the little girl's understand" as Willie Dixon would say. "The Judges wife told the district attorney you better free that brown eyed man. If you want you're job you better free that brown eyed man."
Chuck Berry was one of Bob Dylan's heroes and there's a very audible similarity between Berry's informally smart, wise cracking outsider commentator and those that would narrate Dylan's most famous mid sixties songs. Long before Dylan's hobos were getting "a date with Botticelli's niece", Berry's joker gives us an art history lesson...

Marlo Venus was a beautiful lass
She had the world in the palm of her hand
She lost both her arms in a wrastlin' match
to win a brown eyed handsome man
she fought and won herself a brown eyed handsome man

The chord changes that guide the song are simple I's and IV's and V's. But they're put together unlike any other Chess Rhythm & Blues number of the 50's. The song's feel borrows as much from C&W as it does from R&B. This was something very particular to Chuck Berry and his work on a predominantly blues oriented label in the 50's. This song would be great art if were written today. In 1956 it was the work of a cutting edge commentator. How many songwriters managed to have fun, make people dance and innovate both pop music and guitar playing while telling a story at once so comic and so biting that few will even pick up on it 50+ years later?

Milty on the Magi

I agree with CB about what it is the strongest part of this song although I'm not sure about the "checkpoint" lyric, just the choice of the word "checkpoint" itself really. I am thoroughly crazy about the rest of the lines that CB quoted. The internal rhyme and word choices are exquisite and the lyrics ride seamlessly on a pretty melody. I also love the melodic turns of the chorus of this song; familiar yet uneasy, unpredictable, looming, like the situation they portray. Lyrically, I really like how the story ends where it starts, altered slightly. The same situation is now mournful. The hope and joy are infused with hard, cold realities and yet still a hope that light will shine through the darkness lingers.

Song of the Magi - Anais Mitchell

Typically, I am skeptical (if not downright ornery) about making political statements with songs. Even the masters of the form (Difranco, Dylan, Prine) rarely slip one by me without a scoff or two. But here, Anais Mitchell has distilled the meaning from a massively complex political/religious war and made from it a succinct, understandable, moving story.

The song opens with a pretty but unsettling chord progression, and we find ourselves wandering through Bethlehem at Jesus' birth. It's a freezing night in the desert, and we're carrying our gifts to the celebration. Anais' voice, also, is pretty and unsettling; she is courageously emotive and impeccably intoned, with a voice from a Grimm's fairy tale, at once a child and a crone.

As the story continues, Mitchell leads us to a much darker scene. She gives us only the necessary details, and we follow each line eagerly, with equal amounts of reverence and terror. In the second verse, she carries us from this peaceful, joyful biblical scene to modern day Bethlehem, a city embroiled in seemingly endless war.

welcome home my child/your home is a checkpoint now
your home is a border town/welcome to the brawl
life ain't fair my child/put your hands in the air my child
slowly now, single file/up against the wall

These last lines are my favorite by far. I am floored by Mitchell's ability, in the space of a single verse, to shift the plot so seamlessly to the same city 2000 years in the future - and in doing so, illuminate the tragedy of both stories. Suddenly, in our minds eye, Jesus is a Palestinian youth, born into a vicious cycle of war. Though she never mentions it, we're asking ourselves: would a modern-day Prince of Peace surmount such odds, or would he be swallowed up in a sea of statistics, just another gun-toting teen, or victim to a suicide bomb?

But she's followed us here to this winter desert, in the midst of a war, bundled in our warmest coats, and she meets us with a prayer: open wide the gates of hope, and let us through.

Ain't So Green - Carsie Blanton

In the future I will respond with my own impressions of songs that Carsie posts for us both to geek out upon. "Nothing But a Man" however, is a song whose merits I am thoroughly unprepared and unqualified to discuss.

...So if we're going to talk about great sober songs that break apart myths of youthful innocence, let's take a look at Carsie Blanton's great title track from her first CD. This song has just so much going for it. It has a very catchy melody with very smooth, eloquent phrasing and the narrative voice that flows with as much sobriety as youthful romance. I love the classic three verse structure with all three verses playing off one another and returning to the original thought. 1.I aint' so green... 2. You ain't so bad...3.I ain't so green. The use of "ain't" gives the lyric the perfect, personal, streetwise, sticking up for oneself kind of atmosphere. The use of an A melody and a B melody ("Baby give me everything you've got..." being the B) is a classic touch that allows for the co-existence of two tracks on a complex emotional road. Both melodies are beautifully fresh yet they both seem as familiar as old friends.

There are many lyrical gems in this baby. "You ain't so bad that I ain't had a thought or two about you in the dark..." being one of my very favorites. What I love most of all about this song is that it takes no cheap shots. It dances proudly with its own honest ambiguity and though the narrator is smart, tough and wise, she is not willing to sacrifice hope and she derives strength from her ability to admit vulnerability. With each verse a layer of defense is broken until we get to the third most hopeful verse.

"...so many sorry stories written in my soul but I ain't so green that I ain't seen the way love makes the broken hearted whole."

The whole idea of being "green" is re-examined. We may be green if we have no doubt or skepticism through our experience, but we are also sadly naive if we see only the risk in letting ourselves go.

Nothin but a Man - Milton

With characteristic nonchalance, Milton illuminates another cobwebbed corner of the human psyche: the great hoax that is growing up. He takes us on a tour of his childhood delusions: a gripping self-consciousness, a fairy tale fantasy world, a naive denial of mortality. The punch line? Like most childhood delusions, they never really go away; we just learn to be embarrassed of them.

My favorite part of this song, besides the entire second verse ('I went looking for my life/in every book that I read/I was posing for the camera/shooting a movie in my head'), is the sweet irony that only in admitting one's deep and unflagging childishness can one ever hope to be a grown up. Here as always, it is Milton's casual honesty that makes him so surprising, so endearing, and so profound.