(With apologies to Ted, as there are no sob stories about failed relationships this week.)

Let it not be said that Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown was without its good points.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that. I never saw the movie – the trailer, lengthy running time, questionable casting of Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst, and ultimately the reviews were enough to scare me away – but the impression I get is that it was not good. Whatever the qualities of his movies, though, Crowe always made sure the soundtracks could stand on their own, and sure enough, the music he slipped into Elizabethtown contains his typical blend of Boomer acts (along with the obligatory slot for wife Nancy Wilson) mixed with the occasional offbeat number or deep cut. For me, the album came down to the letter H: “Jesus Was a Crossmaker” by the Hollies, “Let It All Hang Out” by the Hombres, and last but certainly not least, “io (This Time Around)” by Los Angeles space rockers Helen Stellar. Few songs have grabbed me at first listen, and held me, like this one did.

Listen to that echo-laden piano track: it positively reeks of sadness, yet the few words that the band sprinkles into the song are not sad ones. “This time around, you can be anyone / This love of ours…” On second thought, I’m not sure exactly what that means, and I’m sure that was the point. Each listener takes a different journey with a song like this. It may not even be to a fixed point in time; just somewhere…else. For me, it made me feel like I had left something, or someone, behind, and this song was my guide to find it. Or maybe something had left me behind. Either way, it fills me with an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Sweet, beautiful loneliness. And as Kurt Cobain once put it, sometimes I miss the comfort in being sad. This song does it for me every time. (more…)

“A butterfly flies through the forest rain
And turns the wind into a hurricane…”

I was playing this song at work once, and a coworker of mine walked up and said, “Is this the Doors?” I never liked that guy.

It’s the sliding string riff in the chorus that just kills me. The drop from the first to second note is a little bump, but the third and fourth notes…? Much plummeting, as a fellow Popdoser once said in describing Luke Skywalker after he discovered Darth Vader was his father. There are few songs with such a melodic fall into despair as this one boasts.

“A schoolboy yawns, sits back, and hits Return
While ‘round the world, computers crash and burn…”

Neil Hannon takes his good sweet time getting to the point in this song, spending the first two verses talking about butterflies, hurricanes and hackers. What kind of song is this, anyway? Is he really getting this worked up over a punk kid who launches a virus? Of course not: he’s just saving the best for last.

“You must go, and I must set you free
‘Cause only that will bring you back to me…”

Ah, now it makes sense. The storm, the hacker, the girl leaving him: they’re all things he didn’t see coming, but in retrospect, feels that he should have. Inevitable moments that, once he embraces them, will lead to something better. It has to get better, right? (more…)

I will not rest until Simply Red covers this song.

For someone who has gotten almost as cover-friendly in his autumn years as UB40, I’m frankly surprised this hasn’t happened yet. After all, once Mick Hucknall lifted a huge chunk of Daryl Hall and John Oates’ “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” for a 2003 single, you’d think that any and all apprehension about raiding the gold in them thar ‘80s hills would be an afterthought. And yet, somehow, Hucknall has to date resisted recording his own version of a UK Top 10 hit – with a Simply Red-friendly reggae beat, no less – that is fucking begging for him to sing it. Go figure.

But enough about my cover version dreams. This song hooked me from the very first moment I saw the video in the dawning hours of MTV. There was something so heartbreaking about that chorus, no matter how funny the video was. (Keyboardist Tony Hymas should have been an actor, he was so good here.) When the clip ends, with singer Jim Diamond getting carried off in an abandoned car by a junkyard magnet, I just wanted to cry. They’re sending him off to die! Won’t somebody do something?

Six years later, I distinctly remembered a moment when I thought of the clip and that haunting chorus, even though I hadn’t heard the song since its MTV heyday. It would be another seven years before I saw the song on CD, in the form of an über-expensive UK import double-disc collection of ‘80s modern rock hits. I loved the song, but not for $30.

Fast-forward another three years (1997, for those keeping score at home), and Radiohead’s OK Computer dropped. The album came out in the summer, and while I loved The Bends, I had read the reviews about the new one, and I was damned if I was going to allow my summer to be weighed down by some dark-ass album. So I bought it in the fall…right when they released “Karma Police” as a single. Perfect. Ah, this is good cold-weather music. Hey wait, what’s this? That last bit, where Thom Yorke wails, “For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself,” I found myself thinking, “This rings a bell.” Eventually, it hit me; I was playing guitar in my bathroom – it was a small apartment, and I didn’t want to bother anyone, because I suck – and while playing the chords to that last bit in “Karma Police,” I started slowly warbling “I won’t let you down, won’t let you down again…”

Holy shit. A perfect match.

All right, not exactly a perfect match – “Karma Police” is at least a step lower than “I Won’t Let You Down” – but hot damn, were they chord progressions of the same mind, and PhD’s melody fit Radiohead’s music like a glove. Minor, minor, minor…now end MAJOR! Has a mash-up artist stumbled upon this yet? The first one to put them together has an instant cult classic on his hands.

I finally nabbed a copy of the song in 2000 – thank you, Napster – and still play the daylights out of it. I even try to watch the video once a month. (Seriously, is there anything funnier than a guy lighting a bomb that says “BOMB” on it?) There is talk, some 27 years after the band’s first release, of putting the albums back in print via iTunes. While it’s tempting to rail against an indifferent music industry for focusing more on the short-term acts than the long-term, bank account-fattening artists that could have prevented the crisis they currently find themselves in, we will instead simply say thank you. Hopefully that 45MB of disk space will generate enough revenue for them to, oh, I don’t know, make sure no album falls out of print ever again. Just a thought.

Obscure music geek trivia: the drummer for PhD was Simon Phillips. Wow.

PhD – I Won’t Let You Down

“I dooooooon’t wanna be old, and sleep alone / An empty house is not a home.”

The back half of that line is pure cliché, but that is the beauty of a good melody; you can sing any old dumb, tired expression and get away with it, as long as you say it the right way.

Indeed, it was downright ballsy of Keane – this might be the first time anyone has ever used ‘Keane’ and ‘ballsy’ in the same sentence, so let’s pause for a second and savor the moment – to open their 2006 album Under the Iron Sea with “Atlantic.” Yes, their 2004 debut Hopes and Fears played many of the same cards that Iron Sea does in terms of overwrought sentimentality, but there isn’t a single song on Hopes and Fears as naked or as vulnerable – not to mention downright odd – as “Atlantic,” and to open your sophomore album with a song like this is to risk career suicide. Of course, it only made me like them more.

Hopes and Fears was about bending but not breaking, the places only we know, and how your ex has no time for you now; it sure as hell wasn’t about the fear of dying alone. They showed glimpses of a darker side on the album’s last two songs, “Untitled I” (“You’re not the one I hoped for / I’ll see you on the other side”) and the brilliant “Bedshaped” (“Don’t laugh at me, don’t look away / You’ll follow me back with the sun in your eyes / And on your own”), but “Atlantic” takes an inter-dimensional leap from those songs. “I hope all my days will be lit by your face,” singer Tom Chaplin confesses, but Chaplin’s delivery of those words betrays the sentiment. This isn’t a love song; it’s the prayer of a groveling man. “I doooooon’t wanna be old, and feel afraid…”

And just then, just past the 2:30 mark, the clouds break, and the song sees its first major chord. The storm is over, and while the singer hasn’t escaped his dilemma, he at least begins to think in more positive terms: “I need a place that’s hidden in the deep / Where lonely angels sing you to your sleep / Though all the world is broken.” And, as one final gesture to show that Keane was trying to expand their sound as much as a keys/vox/drums band can, Chaplin’s last note is a half-step underneath the key. “The day is beginning,” he says, and you’re just waiting for him to climb up to the base note in the chord — but he never does. It’s a small thing, but I eat that stuff up.

Embedding is disabled, but there is a video for “Atlantic” (including an extended version of the song, to boot) that is just as dark as the first half of the song. Get ur mope on.

Keane – Atlantic

Yep, another Duran Duran post from Popdose’s resident DD fanboy (or Durannie, as we were once called). Between this, my White Label post on “Hold Back the Rain,” and John Hughes’ post on “My Own Way,” Popdose has officially covered one third of the band’s 1982 album Rio. I’m sure Lord Jefito never envisioned that when he assembled this alleged All-Star lineup of bloggers.

Now, I loved “Save a Prayer” as much as the next teenage girl, but when it came to Duran ballads, my heart lay with “The Chauffeur.” As pretty as “Prayer” is, the lyric never really meant anything to me (yes, I know that Simon’s lyrics didn’t really mean much to anyone). I was too young to call one-night stands paradise, and there was no reason for anyone to say or save a prayer for me.

Maybe the problem was that I just hadn’t heard the right arrangement of it yet.

In 1992, Steve Anderson, the Brothers in Rhythm member who made an earlier appearance in my White Label column on the Human League’s “Love Action,” assembled the most beautiful, absolutely fucking brilliant mix of a track I have heard before or since. Dubbed the “Thunder in Our Hearts” mix –- he samples Kate Bush in the intro, but not, strangely enough, “Running Up That Hill,” the song that features those words –- Anderson strips out the drum and bass tracks, replacing them with tasteful, electronic versions of each. Most of Nick Rhodes’ keyboard tracks are scrapped too, in favor of strings and piano. But it’s not just the new additions that make this mix so good; it’s Anderson’s arrangements and breakdowns that make the re-instrumentation so effective.

There really isn’t anything else to say. If you didn’t care for the original song, this might change your tune. If you are a fan of the song, prepare to be mindblown.

Duran Duran - Save a Prayer (DMC Thunder in Our Hearts Mix)

My girlfriend Kim (a.k.a. College Ex #2) hated this song from the start.

I can’t say I blame her, really. Not because the song is bad or anything – au contraire, the song is all kinds of awesome – but because she knew what I knew, but what neither of us wanted to admit: we just didn’t belong together. And this song summed up our relationship in 17 words, though it would be another four and a half years before we accepted it:

There are things I want to do
But I don’t know if they will be with you

That’s the genius of Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque: it’s staggeringly economical. The lyrics to “What You Do to Me” are 20 — count ‘em! — 20 words long. The chorus to “The Concept” is “I didn’t want to hurt you / Oooooooh yeaaaaaah.” But nothing from the album pierced me like those first two lines from “Alcoholiday,” because there were things I wanted to do someday – get married, have kids – but I always questioned whether she would be the one that I’d do them with. I now realize, of course, that if you’re not sure if you want to marry someone, it’s a sure sign that you don’t – and shouldn’t – marry them.

But man, did I love her. With everything I had. It just wasn’t enough. Her parents and friends didn’t like me, my family and friends didn’t like her, and our relationship with each other was what Matt Groening once described as Cobra & Mongoose. Nothing was going to hold this one together. That is perhaps the toughest lesson I have ever learned, that sometimes love isn’t enough. I was such a naïve romantic that I truly believed that love could conquer all. Fool. “Baby, I’ve been fucked already,” indeed.

Teenage Fanclub – Alcoholiday

Pull out the headphones for this one, kids. Otherwise, you laptop toters will hear nothing until the 19-second mark. I wonder if a label would even allow a song like this to be recorded today. Man, what a sad thought that is.

It would not be a stretch to say that the Waltons owe every American fan they have to Barenaked Ladies. The Waltons opened up for BNL in 1995, right as their sophomore album Cock’s Crow hit the shelves. The band’s energetic live show led many a curious BNL fan to check out the record, including yours truly. Unfortunately, much like Barenaked Ladies’ albums, the studio never quite captured the buzz of the Waltons’ live show. The standout songs in their live show, namely “End of the World” and “You Ewe U,” felt like they were holding back a little on tape. On the flip side, the band’s softer moments, like “Heartless,” the Billy Joel-esque “Wascana” and the harmony-laden break of “Surprise,” proved to be some of album’s finer moments.

Nothing, however, comes close to “Heels Upon My Head” which Q magazine accurately described as the best song Neil Finn never wrote. Singer and principal songwriter Jason Plumb pulls back on his tendency to get overly chatty and drops the album’s simplest and most unforgettable melody. Opening with a quiet bass riff, then backed by a brush snare drum beat and some plinks on the piano, the song never rises above a simmer, and it never needs to. I never quite understood the lyrics, but outside of the line “I’ve come undone, it’s easy to see,” I didn’t feel like I needed to. That line says it all, really.

The Waltons – Heels Upon My Head

The public, by and large, did not respond well to George Michael’s first attempt at career suicide — he’s since found far more effective methods for achieving that goal, and all he had to do was appeal to people’s basic dislike for homosexuals – but Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1 (1990), while a grandiose exercise in self-pity, contains many of his finest songs. Where previous efforts sounded like George was just going through the motions singing about universal themes, he’s clearly feeling it this time around. “Something to Save,” “Waiting for That Day” (both versions), and his scorching cover of Stevie Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go” positively reek of heartache.

However, if there’s one song where George bent over backward to prove he was not the same man he was three years before, it’s “Cowboys and Angels.” For starters, it’s over seven minutes long. To a jazz-waltz beat. And he never sings above a whisper. It couldn’t be less of a George Michael song if it tried — its closest relative is the great Faith track “Kissing a Fool” — which is one of the many things I loved about it in 1990. But mainly, I loved it because it was vaguely describing what I was going through at the time.

The fall of ‘90 was not a fun time for me. My relationship with College Ex #2 was wildly unstable, and it was almost entirely my fault. I was still hung up on College Ex #1, even though that relationship ended a year and a half earlier — and I was the one who ended it. (I was confused. Mistakes were made.) So when I heard George singing about when your heart’s in someone else’s hands, and how there’s a trace of someone else in the heart of your lover, I could relate. It was ridiculous that I could relate, but I could relate, and the song became strangely comforting. “You’re not to blame / Everyone’s the same,” he assured me. Of course I was to blame, and everyone isn’t the same, but I was bound and determined to be the victim of this mess I made, and George was only happy to enable me.

Such melodrama. It all seems so silly now. I wonder if George would be pleased or disappointed to discover that someone could relate to such a sad song.

That’s it for this week. Join me in two weeks when we cover a song by a Canadian quartet that Q magazine once described as “the best song Neil Finn never wrote.” Intrigued? You should be — the song is awesome.

George Michael – Cowboys and Angels

Kate Bush’s watershed moment is and always will be 1985’s Hounds of Love, and rightly so, but this week we focus on a song from The Sensual World, the follow-up to Hounds and her first album for Columbia. Why this album wasn’t a bigger hit we’ll never know. Coming out in the fall of ‘89, right as the modern-rock scene was starting to explode, and a year after her instant classic “This Woman’s Work” made its debut in John Hughes’s She’s Having a Baby, the album seemed tailor-made to launch a crossover hit or two.

Oh wait, that’s right, it’s Kate Bush we’re talking about. Americans just never “got” her. She’s too quirky, too theatrical, too British. Whatever.

“Never Be Mine” is just what the title suggests: the story of a woman who still pines for a lover who’s moved on. The chorus is the song’s biggest hook, where Kate lays it all on the table by admitting, “This is where I want to be, this is what I need / But I know that this will never be mine.” However, she does something even more clever in the first verse:

I look at you and see, my life that might have been
Your face just ghostly in the smoke
They’re setting fire to the cornfields, as you’re taking me home
The smell of burning fields, will now mean you and here

By associating a sensory perception with a memory, she has guaranteed that people will do the exact same thing with this song. Music of all kinds always reminds people of a time and a place, and Kate is basically doubling down that you will do the same. And she’s dead right. I, for one, cannot hear this song without thinking of a specific time — and person — every time I hear it, regardless of how much time has passed since the year and girl in question. That’s powerful stuff, kids, and it doesn’t hurt to have the fabulous Trio Bulgarka doing the heavy lifting with the backing vocals.

The opening lines to the second verse have a certain brazen honesty to them as well: “I want you as the dream, not the reality.” Is she saying that she understands why she and her beloved are not together but still pines for the pipe dream anyway? Wow. Show me a pop song today with that much self-awareness and maturity. Okay, I’m kidding, stop looking. It doesn’t exist.

Kate Bush — Never Be Mine

Let us take a quick trip back to the land of Cutouts Gone Wild! and unearth a song that was heard by roughly 17 people upon its release in 1989.

It had been nearly three years since Julian Lennon had released an album, and five years since he had released a hit album. Mr. Jordan had its work cut out for it to say the least, and the Bowietastic lead single “Now You’re in Heaven,” well, it just confused people. He doesn’t sound like his father anymore. What’s wrong with him? Imagine what kind of panic would have taken place had they heard him channeling Elvis on “I Get Up.”

But “Angillette” is the song that I gravitated to as a heartbroken college kid. And upon re-inspection of the lyrics, I’m not sure why. What exactly is wrong with the girl he’s addressing? Is she using Julian as a booty call boy toy? (“Please don’t call me like you’ve always done before / As if I need to know, am I your basic whore”) Is she suicidal? (“Can’t you save her Lord, ‘cause I just seem to miss / There’s only so much one can do to save a friend / I’ve given her my all, it’s useless to the end”) Lastly, what is her actual name? ‘Cause it ain’t Angillette. The opening line to the song is actually “Have a nice day with your Stoli and Gillette.” Get it? Wocka wocka wocka! But wait, what Gillette? The actor? The glam singer? The shaving cream? The football stadium?

So yeah, I never quite got the song as a whole, but found the cascading piano melody and tasteful guitar playing irresistible, plus the last line in the chorus rang true as my relationship with College Ex #1 (we’ll call her Jane) wound down: “I want my life back / I want you.” It’s not profound, but it sure hit the mark.

Julian Lennon - Angillette