Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Songs of the 1990s # 2.
Twisterella
Ride, from Going Blank Again, 1992.
So. The second Ride track to make my Top Ten of the 1990s.
I was obsessed with this track from the first time I heard it.
A friend taped his CD onto cassette and gave it to me. This guy used to walk around with the face image from the album on his T-shirt. He was a fan. I hadn't previous known about Ride.
Oddly, hard-core Ride fans sometimes regard this song as Ride-lite. It's often the way that fans 'expect' a certain kind of sound in everything and fail to judge individual songs on their merits. I found that with Jesus & Mary Chain and REM, among others. Musicians find it very frustrating that fans essentially want them to keep doing the same song over.
So Twisterella burned itself into my brain in those faraway days of 1992 when things were a little simpler, the days a little colder, the memories a bittersweet mixture.
And when it all boils down, that's a small but significant part of our attachment to certain songs. Most of my selections in this top ten have not just had common musical constructions that happen to appeal to me (polyphony, great beauty, a haggard and dramatic but indefinable quality built into the words or the music or just sheer total brilliance - not necessarily all together!) but most of them resonate with me for some exterior reason not altogether related to the song.
So I played Twisterella over and over again. I tried to kill it. (You know, you always expect to reach a kind of plateau with favourites where you think, 'I love this, but today, I've decided I don't need to hear it again for another two months.'
But I couldn't kill it. I never reached the plateau. I just wanted to keep playing it.
And now, having written this, I want to hear it in all its swirling, transcendent, sonic nectar-filled goodness again.
Any minute you will feel
The chemistry
Vibrations in the brain
Can't ever be explained
Slip away and out of sight
Feel the magnet of a night
The circus lights you see
Is where you have to be
If I've seen it all before
Why's this bus taking me back again
If I don't need anymore
Why's this bus taking me back again
Feel the weight of letting go
Feel more lightness than you've ever known
You can't see when light`s so strong
You can't see when light is gone ... etc
(After I publish my No 1 song of the nineties - in the next few days - I will then post links to the whole Top Ten so you don't have to trawl through the archives to find the rest.)
is it time for a nap yet? i think so
Ride, from Going Blank Again, 1992.
So. The second Ride track to make my Top Ten of the 1990s.
I was obsessed with this track from the first time I heard it.
A friend taped his CD onto cassette and gave it to me. This guy used to walk around with the face image from the album on his T-shirt. He was a fan. I hadn't previous known about Ride.
Oddly, hard-core Ride fans sometimes regard this song as Ride-lite. It's often the way that fans 'expect' a certain kind of sound in everything and fail to judge individual songs on their merits. I found that with Jesus & Mary Chain and REM, among others. Musicians find it very frustrating that fans essentially want them to keep doing the same song over.
So Twisterella burned itself into my brain in those faraway days of 1992 when things were a little simpler, the days a little colder, the memories a bittersweet mixture.
And when it all boils down, that's a small but significant part of our attachment to certain songs. Most of my selections in this top ten have not just had common musical constructions that happen to appeal to me (polyphony, great beauty, a haggard and dramatic but indefinable quality built into the words or the music or just sheer total brilliance - not necessarily all together!) but most of them resonate with me for some exterior reason not altogether related to the song.
So I played Twisterella over and over again. I tried to kill it. (You know, you always expect to reach a kind of plateau with favourites where you think, 'I love this, but today, I've decided I don't need to hear it again for another two months.'
But I couldn't kill it. I never reached the plateau. I just wanted to keep playing it.
And now, having written this, I want to hear it in all its swirling, transcendent, sonic nectar-filled goodness again.
Any minute you will feel
The chemistry
Vibrations in the brain
Can't ever be explained
Slip away and out of sight
Feel the magnet of a night
The circus lights you see
Is where you have to be
If I've seen it all before
Why's this bus taking me back again
If I don't need anymore
Why's this bus taking me back again
Feel the weight of letting go
Feel more lightness than you've ever known
You can't see when light`s so strong
You can't see when light is gone ... etc
(After I publish my No 1 song of the nineties - in the next few days - I will then post links to the whole Top Ten so you don't have to trawl through the archives to find the rest.)
is it time for a nap yet? i think so
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