Posts Tagged ‘oldsongs’

The Cars “Candy-O”

God, that guitar sounds so lascivious! “Candy-O” radiates a very particular sort of lust energy, a barely-restrained horniness that’s spiked with neurotic twitchiness and a bit of suppressed anger. Ric Ocasek’s lyrics further complicate the tone, alternating between worshipful desire for a girl named Candy and verses that imply a vague but sinister situation. Benjamin Orr sings everything with a menacing tone – he sounds cold and calculating, and slightly contemptuous of this woman he’s objectifying. I don’t doubt the guy in this song’s affection for this girl, but it is creepy to hear a love song that comes off as ruthless and unyielding.

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ZZ Top “Got Me Under Pressure”

The sound and aesthetic of “Candy-O” was adapted – intentionally or not, I’m not sure – by ZZ Top a few years after the song came out on their extraordinarily popular album Eliminator. The ZZ Top guys kept the extreme horny vibes but replaced Ocasek and Orr’s dark urges with their usual smirking bawdiness. Like “Candy O,” “Got Me Under Pressure” is about some cool chick, but Billy Gibbons puts a lot more effort into letting the listener know details about what turns out to be an extremely specific woman. Like, for example: “She don’t like other women / she likes whips and chains / she likes cocaine / and filppin’ out with Great Danes.” An intriguing lady! Sure, he’s thinking about breaking up with her, but you really get a sense of why he’s so worked up about her.

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King Krule “Czech One”

Archy Marshall makes loneliness and despair seem so romantic and sexy. It’s almost irresponsible, really. “Czech One” is noir in tone, but there isn’t much drama in it. It’s an expression of emotional and physical stasis: He’s sitting there in a bar, trying to write. He’s sitting there in a bar, talking to a girl he can’t bear to look in the eye. He’s sitting there in a bar, lost in thought. He’s sitting there in a bar, trying to kill his feelings. He’s sitting there in a bar, utterly failing to kill his feelings.

He’s stuck and miserable, but he makes it sound like an aspirational and poetic form of sadness. The main keyboard motif is gentle and comforting, but everything else is either pure atmosphere or an intriguing flourish just passing through the mix. The feeling of it seems to loop, but the track never sounds steady or stable. It always sounds like something is just about to happen, but nothing comes. At the end of the song, it sounds like he just nods off. Even that sounds romantic.

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Richard & Linda Thompson “Don’t Renege On Our Love”

Richard Thompson is quick to point out that Shoot Out the Lights, his final album with his ex-wife Linda, was not written to be about the dissolution of their marriage. They didn’t actually split up until around the time the record came out in 1982, and these songs date back to 1980. But that only makes the record seem more sad, since they come from early on in the process of breaking up. They’re about the littles cracks and strains that gradually break a relationship and the way love can slowly drain from your heart. It’s the agony of knowing what’s coming but trying to somehow avoid it.

Thompson wants to hold on in “Don’t Renege On Our Love.” He sings the song in a tone that’s both gallant and pleading; he just can’t stand the thought of breaking off a commitment when he’s put so much of himself into it. He sounds so betrayed, but willing to bargain and blame himself if it will buy him just a bit more time. His focus and determination is emphasized by the drums, which gallop under his voice and guitar like a horse he’s riding into battle. He knows how this is going to go down, and he’s ready to go down fighting. He can’t give up, he’s just too hung up on the symbolism of it all. And there’s the real fear: It’s not being alone, it’s not losing her. It’s the dread of it all being meaningless.

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Juliana Hatfield “Universal Heart-Beat”

“Universal Heart-Beat” has an extremely bright and perky sound, like if music could somehow be made out of Starbursts and Skittles. The overwhelming sweetness of the sound barely masks the bitterness of the lyrics, in which Juliana Hatfield argues that love is entirely inseparable from pain. “A heart that hurts is a heart that works!” she sings cheerfully in the chorus, which feels like early ’80s aerobics pop filtered through crunchy mid-’90s alt-rock chords. It all sounds very fun, and that’s half her point: The high highs and the low lows are an emotional rollercoaster ride, and if you get over your anxiety and just go along with it, it’s a total rush. The bad parts don’t even seem so bad in retrospect – she comes across as rather nostalgic when she recalls the more humbling and pathetic moments. Better than feeling numb, right? That’s just boring.

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PJ Harvey “My Beautiful Leah”

Polly Jean Harvey wrote “My Beautiful Leah” in the depths of depression and heartache, in the wake of breaking up with Nick Cave over 20 years ago. It’s a horror film in two minutes of sound; a vivid sketch of a broken and miserable woman who… well, Polly never really says. But the implication is grim – it seems that she has disappeared for months. A suicide, probably. Or maybe it’s more of a Looking for Mr. Goodbar scenario? Either way, it’s rather bleak.

The lyrics are about Leah, but she is strictly a figure being observed from afar. She’s lonely and isolated. Everyone notices her misery but keeps a distance – maybe she’s walled herself off so she seems unapproachable, or perhaps everyone is afraid her darkness is contagious. Her despair poisons her life and withers her body. It’s easy to see how this could be a despondent Harvey imagining her own future.

Harvey’s arrangement for this song is truly upsetting. The bass is so deep and clipped that it seems designed to make you feel physically ill – a low rumbling tone that evokes and provokes nausea. It sounds as if it’s scraping slowly at the edges of the song while the beat seems to limp along in constant dull pain. The high end of the composition is just as unnerving as the low parts – organ drones signal slasher film paranoia, and a repetitive bashing of a cymbal suggests sudden violence. When the music cuts out abruptly at the end, it comes as a relief.

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The Beatles “Hey Jude”

Everyone thinks “Hey Jude” is for them, because it is. Paul McCartney’s wisdom is specific but universal: “Take a sad song and make it better.” “It’s a fool who plays it cool.” “You have found her, now go and get her.” “Remember to let her into your heart.” Love is different for everyone, but it’s always the same – you don’t get anywhere without opening up, you can’t get close without getting vulnerable. Paul wants you to be happy. That is an essential Paul quality: He truly wants everyone to love and be loved. “Hey Jude” is Paul telling you that if you follow your best intentions and open up and give honest and unselfish love, you will do just fine. “Hey Jude” is his way of saying “you’ve got this, buddy” to people he actually knew – Julian Lennon, John Lennon, himself – and to the entire world, forever and ever.

I get choked up thinking about the kindness of this song. It is a pure expression of friendship and empathy, Paul has no ulterior motives or agenda other than hoping that the listener heeds his words and finds the love they want so much, or solace in a time of sorrow. The music has a touch of melancholy to it, but warms up incrementally until it bursts into that “na na na” extended outro and it’s like Paul is trying to have a group hug with everyone on the planet. That shift in scale is a shift in perspective – from an intimate conversation to a sort of global awareness. The music illustrates Paul’s meaning in the lyrics: When our hearts are closed off, our lives are small and lonely. When we open up, the world is suddenly bigger and brighter. This is Paul showing you how much better better better better BETTER BETTER life can be.

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Spice Girls “Say You’ll Be There”

The Spice Girls spent the majority of their debut album singing songs about negotiating the terms of relationships and assertively stating what they did and did not want out of love. It’s remarkably mature stuff in retrospect – music for teens about setting boundaries, asking for what you need, emphasizing consent, and expecting emotional reciprocity. “Say You’ll Be There,” their best single, is about attempting to gracefully transition from friendship to romance. The lyrics are plain and direct, but respectful of the audience’s intelligence. You can certainly nitpick about whether or not their commodified “girl power” was Good Feminism, but I think in terms of presenting pop songs about love, they were Good Role Models. If only we could all be as forthright and sensible about relationships as the Spice Girls were in the mid 90s.

“Say You’ll Be There” is the sort of pop song that sounds relatively normal until you pay attention and notice it’s actually a little odd. The melodies are rooted in the glossy UK pop of its time, but its groove is heavily indebted to Dr. Dre and P-Funk. There’s a harmonica solo that sounds like someone doing a pretty good job of mimicking Stevie Wonder in the ’70s, and while it’s a major highlight of the song, it’s hard to fathom how it ended up in the arrangement. The pre-chorus has an elegant feel to it, but it slams into a proper chorus that sounds like it was deliberately designed so large groups of drunk women would eventually sing it together at bars.

There’s a bit of glittery disco glamour in the mix, but it’s nearly neutralized by how much the Spice Girls sound like a bunch of silly kids rather than the sort of bold, sassy women who fronted songs in the disco era. Those songs were aspirational, but the Spice Girls’ funk is highly accessible. Everyone’s invited to dance at their club, and they want you to sing along. And maybe when you sing along, you might just internalize some good ideas about love.

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Brandy “Sittin’ Up In My Room”

Babyface was in his mid 30s when he wrote “Sittin’ Up In My Room.” It’s vaguely surprising to learn that he wrote it entirely on his own because the vibe and sentiment of the song is so purely “teenage girl” – I’ve always felt a little like I’m trespassing in some girl’s room and reading her diary when I hear it. But I suppose it doesn’t take all that much imagination to picture a girl sitting in her room mooning over a crush, and to channel her thoughts and feelings. Especially when the truth is the feeling of the song is fairly universal and it’s just the setting that is specific. A crush is essentially the same at any age.

I love the little tells in the lyrics that show this song was in fact written by a guy in his mid 30s. “I must confess” is a pretty standard line, but here it’s built out of a legal conceit. There’s talk of “investing” in her happiness. The language gets a little formal in cute ways – “I have but one concern, how can I get with you?” Brandy makes it all sound so light and breezy, and the casual funkiness of the track goes down so smoothly that I never noticed any of this for 20 years. She exudes warmth and sweetness in this song, the crush is so pure and good-hearted. It’s not a problem aside from not knowing how it will turn out, and that concern taking over her mind. It’s stressful and emotionally taxing, but it’s fun to have this in your head. It opens you up to happy possibilities! It feels exciting! She was probably very bored while sitting up in her room before this crush came along.

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The New Pornographers “We End Up Together”

“We End Up Together” came out eight years ago, and ever since I periodically come back to it to obsess over the implication of the title phrase. In the context of the music, it’s played like this triumph of inevitability, a celebration of abandoning free will. But I know enough that this song is in some way about Carl Newman and his wife, so I think it’s meant to be sort of tender? “We end up together” surely would come across as unambiguously romantic in other contexts, but as dramatic as this song gets it never conveys that sort of feeling. It’s mostly pensive and melancholy until the bombast kicks in, and even that part feels a bit cold and distant. The chorus is an expression of distracted confusion: “You looked like you were saying something.” This song is very lost in its head.

This isn’t a song about a relationship so much as it’s about everything that leads up to the relationship – generations of family history, social and cultural context, the damage of living and loving and searching until you finally find someone to settle down with. “We End Up Together” seems to come from the perspective of the moment just after the deal is sealed and the story finally becomes clear. All of this, everything, was leading to this thing that now seems, in retrospect, to be destiny: We end up together.

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Echo and the Bunnymen “The Killing Moon”

I have spent a lot of time trying to parse who “me,” “you,” & “him” are in “The Killing Moon.” Is this a love triangle? A cuck fantasy? A love song about two men? Three men? Is the singer always a passive character, or does he switch perspective when active – another self that he’s alienated from? Is “him”…God? Is “him”…death?

Ian McCulloch deliberately wrote “The Killing Moon” to be ambiguous. That’s a lot of why it’s so powerful and timeless – a lot of songs invite you to make it your own with interpretation, but McCulloch’s lyrics are so vivid and intense that they seem to be telling you something very important that you must decode. It’s like he’s offering a key to something inside of you: What are you afraid of? What turns you on? Who do you want? Who do you want, but resist? What do you feel is unavoidable?

“The Killing Moon” is a song about desire and inevitability, and how desire can create a situation that is more or less inevitable, and how desire can also resist inevitability. There is romance in either scenario. The lust in this song is so strong – it’s repressed to a large extent, but the gothic romance atmosphere of the music gives it away. It’s sexy, but incredibly gloomy and bleak in tone. McCulloch is singing about a maddening desire, something so mind-bending that every kiss is cosmic in scale. He sings it all with a weary desperation.

So, is their love the inevitable thing, predetermined by fate? Or does his lust invariably lead to madness or humiliation? Is heartbreak inescapable? Is he doomed to never consummate this love? All of that and more seems plausible to me. Anything is possible in “The Killing Moon,” because it is stuck indefinitely in the moment before resolution. Something feels destined, but you don’t know what it is. You hope for the best, you fear the worst. You wait for the moment, and then you let go of your pride and submit to it. You give yourself to it.

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Leonard Cohen “I’m Your Man”

What does a woman want? It’s hard to say, as all of them are different. Your assumptions, especially as a straight man, are probably off base given your personal assortment of hopes and fears. But if you care – and this is not a given, a lot of men really don’t care – this question can drive you mad. Every woman you fall for offers fresh new ways to tie yourself up in knots trying to figure out how to make her happy and want you. And if you care, it’s all you want.

Leonard Cohen wrote “I’m Your Man” after trying and failing to figure out what women want. “I myself have decided to abandon the inquiry, I have decided to surrender,” Cohen has said introducing the song. “I’m ready to be whatever I must be in order to deserve her voluntary caress. That is why I say without shame and unconditionally: I’m your man.”

“I’m Your Man” is sung from a position of vulnerability and humility. It’s worshipful in tone, but willing to back away from that on a moment’s notice if he got the sense that worship would turn her off. He adores her so much, and just wants to feel worthy of her. His esteem for her is so high, it’s unlikely he ever will.

The synthesizer arrangement of this song sounds a bit cheesy and dated today, but the artifice was always intentional. The sound is aiming for suave sophistication, but what you hear is a slightly awkward simulation. It’s the musical equivalent of another mask he’s willing to put on to please this woman. It’s an act, but the intention is incredibly sincere. He just wants to be her man.

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The Smashing Pumpkins “Hummer”

“Hummer” is a song Billy Corgan wrote about coming out of a period of depression and writers block. Corgan often talks about his art as the result of divine inspiration, and while I can’t relate to his faith, I will say that the way creativity and epiphanies seem to come and go can be so inexplicable that it being God’s will is as good an explanation as anything else. In my own experience, it’s like a light bulb being turned on or off. The off periods are a dull malaise. The on periods are a glorious high. Either position feels permanent in the moment, but it never is. And you can’t ever anticipate when the switch goes on or off.

“Hummer” is a song of joy and hope, but Corgan doles out the ecstatic moments carefully. A lot of the song is riding a placid groove, with Corgan playing crisp, calm lead parts or gently chiming chords. The big distorted parts signal overwhelming happiness on a monumental scale, and seem to shoot upwards like skyscrapers bursting from the ground. How else are you supposed to accompany a sentiment like “When I woke up from that sleep I was happier than I’d ever been”?

This is also a love song. Corgan buries the lede a bit here, but the most dramatic element of the song is him trying to square this feeling of renewal and creative fertility with his love for someone. Every feeling he has is intensified, but he seems worried about holding on to this love. “Yeah, I want something new, but what am I supposed to do about you?,” he asks. He immediately knows the answer: “I love you, it’s true.”

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Bob Dylan “Tangled Up in Blue”

There is no timeline in “Tangled Up in Blue,” just scattered memories of small moments burned into the mind of the narrator, who could be singing about one woman or several different women over the course of his life. It’s all deliberately unclear, to the point that sometimes he might be a different person too. Some sections seem like vivid recollections, and others feel more like fantasies. But memory is shaky and unreliable, and is mostly just the story you tell yourself to make sense of your life and define yourself. People change over the years. I prefer to hear this song as being about just two people drawn to one another but almost always out of synch. It’s more romantic that way, and more tragic.

In “Tangled Up In Blue,” love is easy but life is complicated. Every moment of profound connection is fleeting, and every commitment is subject to change. Love gives him focus and purpose but it’s inevitably thwarted, and he’s often complicit in the failure. The music moves in circles, mirroring the way these people orbit one another, and suggesting that they will eventually connect again. There’s a brightness in the notes, a glimmer of hope. She may be gone for years on end, but she never escapes his mind. His lingering love for her and regret about losing her flattens and scrambles his timeline. It’s always her, somehow. And in his heart, it’s always her, someday.

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The Velvet Underground “Rock and Roll”

You know how if you put a seashell to your ear you can “hear the ocean” in its hollow? The guitar chords of “Rock & Roll” are sorta like that, but the space between strums contains faint echoes of the Manhattan of the late 1960s. You can feel it in the tone, and in the attack – a hustling groove, but played with a bit of “so what?” slack. I’ve never been to that version of Manhattan, but I’m certain that’s the sound of it. It sounds just like it.

“Rock & Roll” is meant to do this. It’s designed to evoke New York City, and conjure a romanticized vision of a space full of exciting people where you’re not, but could someday be. The entire song is about the way sound can take you where you need to go, if only you can just hear it. The girl in the song, a stand-in for Lou Reed as a young man, finds love and life and meaning on the radio. The “New York station” is a beacon for everyone in range of its transmission.

When Lou Reed wrote “her life was saved by rock & roll,” that sentiment was not the corny Pinterest cliché it is today. The need for escape was far more urgent, the stakes were much higher. “Rock & Roll” expresses the joy of finding your people, even if you haven’t really met them yet. The sound is a map, and it takes you to a place. In this case, it’s Manhattan and it’s 1969.

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Prince “Take Me With U”

“Take Me With U” contains one of the most charming moments in the history of pop music: The bit in the third verse in which Prince sings “you’re sheer perfection” and Apollonia replies “thank you.” The very idea of this exchange is cute, but the exact tone of their voices is what makes it so special – he’s so thirsty and earnest, and she’s so polite and demure. She sounds like she’s blushing. He sounds like he’s sweating.

“Take Me With U” is one of the few songs where Prince sounds genuinely nervous, like he’s trying to be chill about his love but is failing completely. He’s desperate for her company, he just wants her soooooo much. He can’t hold back anything, so he’s laying it all on the line: “All I want is to spend the night together, all I want is to spend the night in your arms.” To me, this is Prince at his most romantic. His desire is so pure, his love is so respectful. There’s no trace of toxic masculinity, there’s nothing controlling or manipulative or selfish. It’s just this guy declaring exactly what he wants, and being a real sweetheart about it.

And uhhh, she has a mansion? That’s cool, I guess.

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Madonna “Crazy for You”

“Crazy for You” is Madonna’s best love song and finest ballad, in large part because she so fully commits to the forthright earnestness of Jon Lind and John Bettis’ music and lyrics. It’s not unusual for Madonna to be so heart-on-her-sleeve, but her most famous songs from the ’80s often have some arch or ironic quality. Here she’s tender, direct, and incredibly vulnerable as she confesses to huge, overwhelming feelings: “I never wanted anyone like this, it’s all brand new.” That last bit is what really gets me about this song – she feels out of her depth, she has no roadmap for this. What she’s experiencing is beautiful and exciting, but also quite scary. But regardless of the fear and possibility of rejection, she is absolutely certain of how she feels. It’s such a pure sentiment.

The clarity of the chorus is in sharp contrast with the verses, which look outside her feelings to observe the space around her. Lind and Bettis’ language is so vivid here, sketching out a scene in which other people in the club pair off and clear out, but Madonna’s character is waiting for something to happen. I love how this raises the stakes of the song – you feel the time slipping away, heightening her anticipation and longing. She’s trying to find a way to express herself, to make it happen. “Can’t you feel the weight of my stare?,” she wonders. “If you read my mind,” she fantasizes. As the song progresses she seems to get closer to the one she wants, but you never get any sort of resolution. There’s a very good chance that the intense love she feels goes unrequited and she heads home alone.

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Deee-Lite “Groove Is In the Heart”

“Groove Is In The Heart” was released in the summer of 1990, in the middle of a three–year period in which music culture was transitioning between the aesthetics of the 1980s and what would become the 1990s. This phase of music history is fascinating to me because it has an aesthetic unto itself – creatively ambitious as artists and labels attempted to envision a fresh pop future, colorful and glossy, generally upbeat and optimistic in tone, and gleefully eclectic in its embrace of hip-hop, house music, and retro kitsch.

If you imagine all of that as a Venn diagram, “Groove Is In The Heart” is at the center. The track is one of the finest sample-based compositions of all time, with at least a dozen samples weaved into a seamless, ecstatic pop tune. Super DJ Dmitry’s craft is impeccable – he borrows a few grooves outright, but the bulk of the sampling is piecing together flourishes from small moments of disparate recordings. This is masterful audio collage on par with the best of the Bomb Squad, the Dust Brothers, and Prince Paul, and something that would be prohibitively expensive to create and release today. It’s an art form almost entirely snuffed out by commerce.

As glorious as Dmitry’s track gets, this song is still all about Lady Miss Kier. Her style, confidence, and enthusiasm is so strong that it’s nearly overpowering, and you don’t need to actually see her to understand that you’re listening to the coolest, foxiest woman in the universe. (But it certainly does not hurt to look! These videos are astonishing.)

“Groove Is In the Heart” is one of the world’s greatest crush songs. The music has a generous and playful tone, and conveys the euphoric rush of infatuation but without a trace of anxiety or melodrama. I love the way Kier expresses a deep appreciation for the person she’s addressing – she sounds so excited about them, and so inspired by their presence. (I love the phrase “your groove I do deeply dig!” so much. All I really want is someone who deeply digs my groove.) She gets silly, she gets sassy, she gets funky. The way she sings “I couldn’t ask for another!” is thrilling, and easily one of the most deliriously joyful bits of any song in pop history. The best part of this is that her bliss is contagious, and this song is one of the most effective ways humans have ever devised to induce crushed-out feelings.

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Robbie Dupree “Steal Away”

The WPIX Archive is one of my favorite things on the internet, as it combines two things that will always fascinate me: Generally quite banal footage from the 20th century, and New York City history. The stuff I love most in the archive are from the ’70s through the mid ’90s, as they are glimpses into the world just before my existence or the adult world I only partially perceived as a child.

But one clip from the 21st century stands out – the last live footage WPIX shot of the World Trade Center on the morning of 9/11. It’s not even a good shot of the buildings; it’s just a helicopter view of the skyline. The footage wouldn’t even be all that interesting if not for the context – the chatter of the Good Day New York hosts wrapping up their program for the morning, and that it’s soundtracked by Robbie Dupree’s “Steal Away.” Everything is cheery and relaxed. It’s just another boring late summer day.

“Steal Away” is a very appropriately titled song, given that it flagrantly rips off key elements of two major hits that came out in the two years before its release – The Doobie Brothers and Michael McDonald’s soft rock classic “What A Fool Believes,” and Eddie Money’s radio staple “Baby Hold On.” But please do not hold this against “Steal Away.” It’s a magnificent song in its own right, and frankly, more songs should have keyboard parts like “What A Fool Believes.” How many terrible punk songs are essentially the same damn thing, and no one complains about that? I could do without a hundred thousand of those, and but would be grateful for just one other good “What A Fool Believes” ripoff.

“Steal Away” is a song about an affair. It’s unclear what the entanglement is – is Dupree simply the Other Man, or is he cheating on someone too? It doesn’t really matter. The point is that despite knowing that he’s doing something wrong, he definitely can’t say no. The interesting thing here is how the chill vibe of the music defuses the conflict in the lyrics, and how despite the “into the night, I know it ain’t right” refrain, there’s almost no trace of guilt in the feeling of the song. Dupree tips back and forth between passivity and action, guided mainly by lust and excitement. This isn’t a song concerned with the aftermath of actions, it’s all about a moment. And that moment is quite romantic. I like to think that song is the start of one of those relationships that begin as some illicit affair, but end up being stable, loving partnerships.

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Radiohead “Bodysnatchers” (Live at Bonnaroo, 2006)

We have our ways of making songs what we want them to be. I’ve read the lyrics of “Bodysnatchers” and understand that it’s a paranoid fantasy about helplessness and living a lie, but I decided what this song was about for me 11 years ago. It’s all in one line: “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT.” That line, in a song that sounds like trying to frantically shake your own skin off, is what I’ve connected to, and that’s because I so badly have needed that song to exist.

I saw Radiohead play this song for the first time since 2006 on Friday night. It came near the end of the best show I’ve ever seen them play, and one of the most powerful live experiences I’ve ever had in terms of being at a high level of emotional and physical connection to the music for such a sustained period of time. “Bodysnatchers” was the emotional pinnacle of the show, and shouting “I’M TRAPPED IN THIS BODY AND CAN’T GET OUT” along with Thom Yorke was an incredibly cathartic moment for me. I felt like I was letting go of an idea I’d been holding on to very tightly for most of my life.

In that moment, during that song and during this show, I didn’t feel trapped in my body at all. My movements, typically either rigid or self-conscious, were loose and intuitive. Not graceful, but comfortable. I came out of that show feeling like I’d reversed a hex I put on myself many years ago, if just by fully realizing how horrifying Yorke’s line really is and that I don’t have to live like that if I don’t want to.

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Björk “Alarm Call”

A few weeks ago, after a series of epiphanies that have given me a lot of new focus in life, I heard this song accidentally as the result of an algorithm and unknowingly hitting a bunch of buttons on my phone. It felt like Björk herself appearing to tell me personally that I was making all the right decisions. “You can’t say no to hope, you can’t say no to happiness,” she sings. “It doesn’t scare me at all!”

“Alarm Call” has been a very inspirational song for me for about half my life now, but in that moment I felt like I was hearing it with new ears. What once sounded like advice now resonated as truth. The hope I feel and the happiness I want aren’t scary to me now, they are simply goals to work towards, and feelings I’ve opened myself up to. For most of my life desire was a frightening thing because it seemed like I wasn’t in the position to want things, and I could only envision how I might fail. But it’s better to not focus on outcomes as much as obeying intuition and satisfying curiosity. Follow the feeling and you’ll get closer to it.

“Alarm Call” is one of Björk’s most joyful pieces of music, and also one of the most pop things she’s ever made. It’s her version of Michael Jackson – a densely packed groove that nevertheless feels light as air, with a lot of wordless emoting coloring in between the lines of well composed vocal hooks. Her message here is optimistic and utopian, but very aware of the flaws of the human mind. This positive feeling, this “enlightenment,” it only comes if you fight for it. You get there if you let go of fear, and work for hope and happiness. She’s telling you this is possible, because she’s made it up to the top of the mountaintop. She’s got a radio and good batteries, and this is the joyous tune that she believes will free the human race from suffering.

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but it definitely has worked on me.

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