Assorted Gems: Greendale

 

NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE - GREENDALE  (2003)

[ed. note: This piece was written before I got started on the Prog Stories project, but not long before.]

Neil wrote most of the story in one tidily sustained wave of inspiration, a new song/chapter arriving each day, as he drove his car to the studio for recording sessions with a Crazy Horse stripped to a skeleton of its rhythm section, second guitarist Poncho Sampedro having been asked, for aesthetic purposes, to sit the album out. After Grandpa died, the whole band, who loved him, was bummed out, and the vein of inspiration ran out. The way I remember Neil telling it, he thought that might be the end of the album (already too long to fit on a single LP). But then it occurred to him: what about Grandma? And so he wrote Bringin' Down Dinner, and in its wake came the final pieces, Sun Green and Be the Rain.

I love Bringin' Down Dinner. Acoustic live, the way I first experienced Greendale, it didn't add up to much, musically, but when Crazy Horse backs Neil's ragged, soulful pump organ on the album version, it sounds fantastic. But otherwise I'm no friend of the ghost that helped Neil finish Greendale. Sun Green, while developing the story in the unique main-character-shifting manner that drives the narrative, is less clever, less cutting, and less cool than all the songs before it. And finally, when Bernard Shakey's camera zooms out to show the "bigger picture" in closer Be the Rain, I disconnect completely. Don't get me wrong, both songs have great band grooves, but what makes me love Greendale as much as I do is the combination of phenomenal performances with a captivating story. When the tale dries up, though the performances remain, half the greatness is gone. Which amounts to a disorienting anticlimax. I just can't square with Be the Rain at all. It provides a sense of closure, yes, but I'd have preferred a cut-off (touching, if abrupt) after Bringin' Down Dinner, or even an awkward hobble to a close after Sun Green. Anything instead of the big-screen credits-roll here's-the-moral Be the Rain.

But most of Greendale is absolutely killer stuff. I love when Neil gets out-there. Actually, he's almost always out-there; it's just a matter of which kind of out-there you're getting—smeary heart-on-sleeve love songs? numbskull rock and roll? jokes and non-sequiturs? the shouting of big dumb slogans? idiosyncratic, or even perverse storytelling? I love them all but my favorite is the last, and that's what Greendale is, a single story told across ten (or nine, because does Be the Rain even count as part of the story?) songs. It has a setting, characters with names, plenty of dialogue, free indirect discourse, and a few fantastic blows of a battering ram against the third wall. It has a story you can summarize.

Albums like this are bizarrely rare. I'm not sure why rock and folk music have generally avoided the "story album" or "novel album," to coin two clunky phrases. An aversion to opera? Or to musical theater? I have no ear for opera and detest musical theater, but I'm fascinated by the possibilities that rock/folk/what-have-you structures present in this regard. It's a territory that's barely been explored, barely visited, even. Neil is, as so often in the mountainous, quaking land of rock and roll, part of the front vanguard. But even Neil only stopped by once and departed, classically restless. Now this part of the land lies empty. "I'm falling in love with Calliope," Dylan sang recently in Mother of Muses. "She don't belong to anyone. Why not give her to me?" I've been wondering about that ever since.

Anyway, Greendale! So good! All the songs rhyme, and the rhymes are occasionally forced, but the discomfort I felt to hear them was long ago buried under all the joy I take in how badass, audacious, weird, funny, insightful, tender, and tremendously touching the songs are. Grandpa's Interview probably wouldn't hit hard if heard out of context, but as Track 7 of Greendale (a true double-vinyl album, by the way, just structurally speaking; Neil's team made it a triple LP to keep sound quality up, I guess, but lengthwise, it's exactly four 18-21 minute sides long, and the four can be divided very cleanly), it is in my top three Neil Young songs. There's an amazing moment that makes me laugh and cry in the exact same instant. Such brilliance.

But Grandpa's Interview is only the best of them, and not by a wide margin. Each of the first eight songs is amazing, even Falling from Above, which served as midwife to the Greendale concept, but was conceived as a stand-alone track. Little did Neil know, writing his latest warmhearted country-rocker, how intense, penetrating, and sad a story was hidden in these character/role and place names: Grandpa, Cousin Jed, Edith and Earl, their "young girl" (as yet unnamed), Grandma, the Double E...

As usual for Neil in these latter years (and, fair warning, I'm a strange bird who believes that, for all its various and phenomenal peaks, Neil's 1963-1991 output pales beside what he's accomplished starting with the release of Harvest Moon in 1992, on through to now), he cloaks the song concepts in incredible music. Greendale sounds like nothing else in Neil's discography, not even other records with the Horse. Of all his "back-to-absolute-basics" albums, it seems to me the richest and most beautiful.

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

Pink Floyd studio albums ranked (outdated, but!)

Whoa. Stumbled on this today. Looks like it dates back to 2013 or thereabouts. The young Sigismund wrote it good!

If I were ranking the discography today, Album #13 would at least be above Album #11; Album #10 would be in the top five; Album #9 would probably be a little higher too, because the 2019 remix/update, with Nick Mason's re-recorded drum parts, SLAYS; Album #4 would be awarded the top slot; and Album #1 would be a lot lower, because I suddenly realized this year that I don't actually care much for Tracks 1 and 5. Also, very significantly, Fire on Fire's Haystack is now tied with the song on Album #2 that I call "the best song I have ever heard."

Otherwise, though, what can I say? This dude knows his Floyd.

I've been listening to Pink Floyd since I was six or seven years old; some sixteen years down the line, here's how I rank their studio discography. Lest anyone take unduly great offense, the fact is that I enjoy all of these; and even if I didn't, they're so much a part of my life by now that it'd be weird not to listen to them regularly!

14. Ummagumma

What's ranked here is just the studio album, to be fair to the rest of this studio-only list. It's an interesting product, Stage Two Floyd at their most happily bizarre, and it half-works: David's Narrow Way is very good, Grantchester Meadows an attractive precursor to the second side of Atom Heart Mother, and Several Species of Animals... simply delightful. Nick's piece is kinda just there, but Rick's borders on unlistenable. The thing as a whole is a hodgepodge, not even trying to hold together... but of course that was the whole point going in, and therein too lies the charm.

13. The Wall

Ambitious, dramatic and relentlessly intense, The Wall is an album you can love or hate but can't ignore. I grew up adoring the whole double album and in many ways it still holds me in its talons; I might not enjoy it as much as the rest of the band's discography anymore, but its power over me has barely waned. I think that, as released, it's somewhat overdone and has too much of Roger before his solo vision really flowered (in The Pros & Cons of Hitch-Hiking), but Disc 2 is tremendous. If I weren't such a whole-album diehard, I would knock the album up several places on its strength alone.

12. More

For a long time, More was my least favorite album in the discography. There was never a time when I didn’t like Cymbaline or Green is the Colour, but the rest of the album I found either too sad and sinister (Cirrus Minor, Main Theme) or too boring (Crying Song, Quicksilver). Despite (or because of?) my relatively low opinion of More I would periodically return to it and over the years my regard grew. It certainly works differently than any other Pink Floyd album (except, maybe, its similarly whimsical follow-up Ummagumma) and it takes a particular mood to appreciate it all the way through. But when it hits, it hits.

11. The Dark Side of the Moon

I think that Dark Side is severely flawed, but a real slice of musical grandeur nonetheless. It is a stronger concept album than it is an album, so to speak; that is, the lyrics, structure, and journey it takes you on are all world-class but there are missteps in the delivery. The album also suffers by comparison to its little brother Obscured by Clouds, which sees the band showcasing all the same strengths but with superior songwriting and no unnecessary adornments. Dark Side's best feature is its unsettling atmosphere, the anxiety that does not let up. To this day it makes me uncomfortable.

10. The Final Cut

Where The Wall was allegorical, The Final Cut is political—Pros & Cons will be personal—and Roger’s dark vision here is more purely distilled, more caustic, more shiver-inducing than it was on The Wall... not to mention the merry little fact that the album’s story ends with nuclear apocalypse. And while you won’t hear David Gilmour apotheosize the electric guitar as he did on Comfortably Numb, you do get several short bursts of solos that are among his best and most evocative guitar work on record, solos all the more striking for their brevity and infrequency.

9. A Momentary Lapse of Reason

The first Floyd album without Roger Waters is a partial remergence of the band’s early-to-mid ‘70s soul; signs of life, indeed! Waters had come to dominate the band to such a degree in the preceding decade that it took his exit to make much of what made their earlier work wonderful resurface. Momentary Lapse is, in turn, David’s album: these are all his songs (a few among the best he has penned) and it’s his arrangement decisions and, above all, his guitar that make the record shine. His smooth, melodic voice sounds grand after three straight albums of Roger’s vitriol. The '80s production wears on some tracks (poor One Slip) but it's not as damaging as it might've been.

8. Atom Heart Mother

The title track is Stage Three Floyd firing all cylinders, crafting their first long piece in which there's no section that drags—but even this self-assured display of powers, grand and masterly, was merely a warm-up run for the following year’s Echoes. The group tones things down for the remainder of the album, which contains the most concentrated appearance of the short-lived agrarian/rustic Floyd sound (acoustic guitars, soft vocals, slow tempos and relatively straightforward arrangements). Summer '68 especially, though the least rustic, is fantastic! But If and Fat Old Sun aren't far behind. It's a lovely little stretch, those three middle tracks.

7. A Saucerful of Secrets

Pink Floyd begin to find their footing after Syd Barrett’s inadvertent stepdown from the position of band leader. Syd gets one song in nevertheless and it’s one of his best as well as the album highlight, but what's surprising coming after Piper is that the other members, including newbie David Gilmour on guitar, are so capable of holding their songwriting own. Rick Wright’s ethereal Remember a Day is the only one that manages to nip at the heels of Jugband Blues but the other numbers are solid too, maintaing a somewhat Syd-like whimsy while also branching out to the spacey and the ragged.

6. The Division Bell

There’s something about David Gilmour’s playing here that makes me think of a festival. It's not just that High Hopes opens and closes with the ringing of a bell, which conjures thoughts of Chrono Trigger's Millennial Fair… well, I can't place it exactly, but for me, that kind of feeling on a modern rock album by none other than the giants of the genre is an enormous treat. The album contains several of both David’s best songs and his best solos. A huge advantage of Roger’s departure was just how much freer David clearly felt to adorn songs with prominent lead guitar. No less significantly, Rick Wright returns!

5. Animals

Though musically about as great an album as I've ever heard, Animals is a scary piece of work. Edgy, abrasive, angry (personal relationships in the band were swiftly deteriorating and conditions in the studio were miserable; you can hear the band taking their frustration out on the songs, though to productive effect), misanthropic, insidious, cynical, vicious: all the terms apply. The closest thing I can discern to a flaw is that, at this juncture, Rick Wright was no longer involved in the compositional process. Whether he was simply experiencing a personal block or felt stifled by Waters’ domineering is unclear, but either way, it's a loss.

4. Obscured by Clouds

Composed, recorded and released after the Dark Side material was first aired live but before the final studio product was completed, Obscured by Clouds is the album Dark Side should & (almost) could have been. The vibe and basic sound of Obscured by Clouds are very similar to those of its higher-profile successor and there are even some direct re-workings, with Breathe becoming Burning Bridges and Mudmen while Time morphs into Childhood’s End, but here there are no bells or whistles—no guest musicians, no backing vocalists, no endless overdubs. Just four friends at the height of their powers, making great music from the heart.

3. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

1967’s fledgling Pink Floyd was already a great band, but they were Syd Barrett’s boys through and through—in the presence of the Pied Piper, what can you do but follow? The album’s excellence is primarily Syd’s doing: his fairytale lyrics cloaked in music that’s the very sound of childhood joy, his irrepressible humor (“I’ve got a bike, you can ride it if you like / ...I’d give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it”) and his intrepid comet-path leading past the gates of dawn, out into a land only ever explored adequately by Syd himself, here with the band that was his once and forever.

2. Meddle

As far as I'm aware, Meddle contains the most triumphant recorded instances of both a dog howling the blues (Seamus) and the hunting cries of poison-wasteland death crows (not Seamus), and after all these years, Echoes remains the best song I have ever heard. Its power over me defies approximation by words, but I will confess a long-held suspicion: that on that auspicious, green and submarine day when God first dreamt up rock music, Echoes was exactly what He had in mind. It’s the universe in a drop of clear, clear water, resounding bright & evermore.

1. Wish You Were Here

Wish You Were Here is Floyd at the peak of their post-Syd powers and one of my five favorite albums by anybody. Meddle boasts the group’s best song, but where it comes to the album craft, which was always Pink Floyd’s game, this bleak 1975 behemoth is their magnum opus. The album’s five songs (four?) are heavyweights like few others in the genre. Together they constitute an album in mourning: lighter tones may litter the darkness, but Wish You Were Here's got a broken heart.

Assorted Gems: Love of Life

 

SWANS - LOVE OF LIFE  (1992)

Sister albums are cool. They're not double albums, obviously (or sometimes, as in Big Blood's case, not that obviously), but they maintain a relationship that, as you listen to the one, makes you aware of the other. Like Ten New Songs and Dear Heather: very different records (within Leonard Cohen's body of work, anyway), but linked in their being the two soundings from the Mt. Baldy years, and in their songs having similarly modest and artfully "Muzaky" arrangements, as well as in that each is a collaboration with a long-standing co-writer/backing singer, Sharon Robinson and Anjani Thomas respectively. Dear Heather is a corrective to Ten New Songs' formality and seriousness, while Ten New Songs, with its thick mood and unabashed devotion to dinky arrangements made transcendent, creates a path for Dear Heather, and clears away the need for the younger sister to be brimful of traditionally accomplished songs, since the elder had enough of those.

When I think about Love of Life, I invariably wonder: which record do I really like more, it or White Light from the Mouth of Infinity? They are both excellent, singular (or... doubular) things, staunch messengers from the same post-Burning World here-we-go-back-to-the-independent-grind era, with a lot of the same band members, both with amazing Deryk Thomas front covers, both gutted later and reshaped into the single-album compilation that Gira frowningly titled Various Failures... and yet, like the Cohens, they have their meaningful differences, their various positions. White Light (a double album, which typically means I should like it more) bludgeons and mourns. Love of Life makes room for different kinds of tracks, and its interludes are as beautiful and usually more arresting than the full-fledged songs. White Light broods with the stormiest-browed of the warrior gods, while Love of Life has more cheerful-sounding Gira songs (and/or refrains) in one place than any Swans or Angels of Light album. Love of Life's rage is like that of a waterspout moving across the open sea: strong and violent, to be sure, and amazing to look upon, but enveloped in and surrounded by a stillness and mystery vaster, more enduring, more patient, and ultimately more frightening than it. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity has more good songs (including Love Will Save You, my gateway into the pre-Angels Swans), but Love of Life gives its songs a more striking, evocative context.

The songs are not really the point. With Gira, the great songwriting didn't begin until he made a conscious effort to write great songs, around the time of Soundtracks from the Blind, leading into New Mother. The point, as in most Swans records from the '80s and '90s, is songlike mood exercises. Lyrics and melodies exist to make the fog more total. Love of Life picks up where the light-melodic/dark-pounding concoctions hinted at on The Burning World and featured on White Light from the Mouth of Infinity left off. To bolster and off-set these comes the marvelous series of instrumental mood pieces called (---), sometimes with spoken word fragments atop them, sometimes composed of eerie, melodic figures, sometimes both. They are sad and touching in ways that the actual songs aren't. But the actual songs, made stark by the interludes, feel more imposing, more monolithic, with these gentle valleys around them, than they did lined up in the crowded, unbroken splendor of White Light from the Mouth of Infinity.

But just about that band sound—and the following description applies to both albums, the difference being that Love of Life came out sounding clearer, more pristine—which I'm not saying is better, since what's not to love about some really good murk—in any case: what a blend of light and darkness! The keyboards, the electric and acoustic guitars, the cymbals, and Jarboe's vocals all grasp heavenward, while the bass with its resonant reverb, the toms and bass drum, and Gira's vocals fight to stay sprawled out in the soil, mouth full of earth.

My favorite track is the (---) before The Other Side of the World, followed by the one between Identity and In the Eyes of Nature. Favorite "song," to be stricter about it, is The Golden Boy That Was Swallowed by the Sea (I mean, you'd have to be a jerk to give a less-than-awesome song such an awesome title; this applies also to The Burning World's opener, The River that Runs with Love Won't Run Dry). Or Amnesia, into which Gira breathed new life and music some thirty years later, for the album Leaving Meaning—a choice dictated by the lyrics, apparently, but interestingly, Amnesia is the one song on either White Light from the Mouth of Infinity or Love of Life that sounds most like the kinds of Swans songs Gira would write in the band's second chapter, in the years after Angels of Light, even down to a couple of uncanny details: the sinister synth fanfare in the refrain which sounds like the screeching instrument that plays lead for a while in the song The Seer, and the "Amnesia-na-na-na" phrasing picked up in Mother of the World. Favorite riff/progression is the one that opens In the Eyes of Nature. The song I could most easily do without is No Cure for the Lonely, which is missing from all LP versions of Love of Life, and thus can in fact, justifiably, be done without.

Today, as it happens, I suspect that I prefer Love of Life to White Light. But if the urge to jot down a few things about this period of Swans had come over me last month, or next month, or last week, or next week, it might well have been White Light from the Mouth of Infinity's cover art that graced the top of this post, and you would have found me arguing its case over Love of Life, presumably with recourse to its being a double album, and to pinnacles like Song for Dead Time, Love Will Save You, and The Most Unfortunate Lie, and (speak of pinnacles) to Gira instating the outtake Blind as an official part of the tracklist in the album's 2015 reissue. But, well, sister albums, you see.

(Back to: A Personal Canon)

Introducing "Assorted Gems"

Not much to introduce here, really. "Assorted Gems" will be my heading for musings on full-length albums, musings that are not part of any other greater project or series. Emphasis will be on full-length albums, but then, why not be flexible? I could imagine live albums appearing under this heading too. EPs? I don't listen to many, but maybe. Bootlegged live shows? Yeah, could be. But then, since exactly 94.826% of my listening is to studio albums, played in full, the emphasis falls right back on, yes indeed, full-length albums.

I'd been thinking about making and annotating a list of my personal Top 100 Albums, but when I started work on it, back in January of this year, I found the process agonizing: and I mean just the selection, let alone the ranking! 

So, to some degree, "Assorted Gems" is a cop-out. On the other hand, I won't need to waste time justifying why I like this or that album more than a hundred or more great others that didn't make the list. A top hundred list has room for exactly that many; an occasional commentary on assorted gems can accommodate many more, and the gems can be gathered from a wider landscape, too. Plus, I think the looseness and spontaneity of the form can do the writing good.

I may still opt, down the line, to do a post with short write-ups about my current Top 25 or Top 33 or something. There does exist a certain dividing line between blindingly brilliant albums, and blindingly brilliant albums that mean the world to me...

Prog Stories: The Dear Hunter's Act I: The Lake South, The River North

Summer is here, the uni is on break, I have no commute to work, few errands to be running, and instead much that needs attention at home, so albums don't get heard. A song here and there, sure—usually one of Ragnar's, or else my own, as I tinker with new stuff. But the kind of space that I prefer, or practically require, for full album listens, won't be available again until the start of the new term in the final days of August. My six listens to Act I have been spread very widely far apart, weeks between them. It has helped the songs sink in, that's for sure. But the listening was done in stolen... if not moments, well then, stolen 40-minute chunks, without much chance to keep a running commentary going. We've had more chances to talk about the album over the phone than I've had to write about it. So this'll be a short one.

In any case, it's great stuff, nonstop great stuff! Musically, each of the eight songs is a treat. I love that five of them pass the six-minute mark. The arrangements are rocked-out and colorful, elaborate but with a raw edge. There are a lot of catchy, happily lingering vocal melodies ("sing softly! bring me to the lake!"). I love that the album has room for an a capella overture (Battesimo del Fuoco), a superbly catchy instrumental that could soundtrack FF9 (The Lake South), a soft and modest but still beautiful instrumental (The River North), punkish folk-rock (City Escape), a bit of villainesque jazzy sleaze (The Pimp and the Priest), and the kind of full-on folk-rock that seems to drip liquid gold (His Hands Matched His Tongue). Casey's singing is such a pleasure: versatile, strong, emotive, with a unique timber. 

No individual instruments stood out to me—actually, now that I check, I see that almost everything was played by Casey himself, which figures, because unless you're Tom Kovacevic or Paul McCartney, the one-musician-band approach usually means there won't be much that stands out, necessarily. But you will get a good, clear picture of what's going on in the writer's head and imagination, since they are the one solely (or, in this case, in all but drums) responsible for how each element ends up sounding. 

Lyrics, then. Before looking them up and reading them, I was able to tell, based on the background you provided me with, that a lot of the album is about the main character's mother: there's a lot on that classically exploited 19th-century theme of prostitution, and, it seemed to me, a lot about the "city escape" into the woods where her son is born. "Places, people, the stage is set," as sung in City Escape, seems to be the central conceit. The river as the border between the City and the Wilderness, maybe? The Lake as a refuge, sought and found. 

Having read the words, it's like you say: very little is illuminated! Casey's lyrical style here is a kind that I don't dislike but can't appreciate much either: it's too elusive, but not elusive in a way that makes me want to relisten and reread until I figure something out; it's the kind that gets me thinking, "Well, all right, I guess the songwriter knows what he means," and leaving it at that. There's a touch of the literary, in that Casey likes latinate words ("release this serendipitious design," "belated conversations saturate anticipation," and so on, tiptoeing toward Death Metal English), but the words don't seem to be honed enough to earn the epithet "poetic." Concrete enough for it to be obvious that the songs are (or are meant to be) about something specific, but abstract enough that I get little more from all those words across all those songs than a vibe. A line like "the flame is gone, the fire remains" might mean something when, or if, I understand more of the story that will come in Acts II to V. For now I receive it only as a blank image with a mood attached. 

Generally, throughout the album, the emotion and force of the songs are carried by the vocals and the music. The vocals and the music are so good that some lines will stand out and linger in the mind anyway ("the trouble began, but it never ended" or my favorite, the patiently unfolding "the pail has leaks, and even if you put all your water into it, you end up with nothing left to drink"), lifted high by their melodies.

I won't rank the songs, since they're all so good. I will note that my two favorites are The Lake South and His Hands Matched His Tongue. And I'll rank my six favorite musical sequences/things/ideas/whatever-they-are.

6.  The atmospheric beginning of The Inquiry of Ms. Terri.

5.  The organ solo that starts at the four-minute mark in 1878 and the organ/guitar duet that follows.

4.  The crowd noise, applause, and cacophonous orchestral tuning at the end of The River North: way to build atmosphere and anticipation for Act II!

3.  The modulating refrains of 1878. There could be way more of these refrains and I'd still be happy.

2.  The moment in which the extra instrumentation drops out again around 1:22 in The Lake South, and all we hear is the piano and—tuba?

1.  The layers of harmonies, keys, guitars, and wordless backing vocals around the main melody at 2:35 in His Hands Matched His Tongue, Casey singing about the water and the pail. (I have no idea what this song has to do with any story.)

I'm excited to hear the various melodies here reprised in future Acts.

And what a great image on the front cover!