Monthly Archives: April 2023

#1028: Lou Reed – Perfect Day

1 Reply

So before I knew that ‘Perfect Day’ was a Lou Reed song, I had only heard of it through one of those count down TV programs where celebrities were talking about a certain types of singles from the 1990s. ‘Perfect Day’ was chosen to be the single to represent the BBC Children in Need charity in 1997. It was a cover, and almost each line was sung by a different artist, from Elton John to Dr. John to Boyzone and countless others. I can’t remember what the exact category for that count down program was. But I only remember there was one guy who got a kick out of how Shane MacGowan sang the “It’s such fun” lyric with the most miserable look on his face. I’ll embed the video for it below. You’ll either think it’s all right or straight-up terrible.

Years later I’d find the original through listening to Lou Reed’s 1972 album Transformer, and hell yes this track is one of the best on there. Reed’s all quiet and up close to the microphone during the verses before the track opens up immensely into a grandiose chorus, backed by a glorious string arrangement courtesy of glam rock legend Mick Ronson. The track itself is about thoroughly appreciating the time spent with a loved one, doing things that relationship-people do like going to the movies and drinking in the park. Other activities are mentioned. And overall having a huge boost in mental health, feeling like a good person, rather than the sad, unstable person they would be when left alone for too long.

You see, I like that interpretation of the song. I think Lou Reed means just what he sings here. But a lot of people think it’s about really liking heroin. Then Trainspotting came out in the ’90s and everyone started to agree more that that’s what the song is really about. There’s no reason there couldn’t be a double meaning there. Plus, it wasn’t as if Lou Reed hadn’t covered that topic in another very, very popular song of his. But I truly think it’s as sincere as it gets here. The overall sentiment alongside the almost dramatic nature of the music, well, it’s almost enough to bring anyone to tears.

#1027: R.E.M. – Perfect Circle

Leave a reply

Ah, R.E.M.’s Murmur. I’ve commented on this album before. How I came about it initially, and how I came to ultimately love it. For those not in the know, it’s not a long story. Heard it once in 2013. Went on to completely forget about it. Heard it again in 2017 and thought it was one of the greatest albums I’d heard up to that point. It’s a tie between it and Automatic for the People as my favourite record of theirs. The preference can change day-by-day. What I observed right away with Murmur was that the choruses on every song were downright incredible, even on the sole slower number ‘Perfect Circle’.

The record prides itself on a whole singer-not-making-sense-but-it-still-sounds-great theme, which I think endears a lot of people to it. The lyrics are more for the listener’s interpretation rather than setting a straight-up narrative or trying to signify a message. Placed right in the middle of it all, or as the closer to the first half if you’re a vinyl person, ‘Perfect Circle’ is something of the emotional centerpiece – even though it might be difficult to find something to latch onto with all the vague lyricism. For me, there’s a hint of something clear in the second verse, in which the song’s title is said for the one and only time in the song, where there’s a scene of friends getting together, drinking and enjoying each other’s company. But that’s all I can say at this time. Otherwise, I’m mostly getting lost in the comforting instrumental backdrop of pianos and lightly strummed guitars.

Whether this was well-known before 1998, I’m not sure, but it was that year when R.E.M. were on tour that they began to bring this track back to their live sets, announcing before they’d proceed to play it that the song was actually written by drummer Bill Berry. He had amicably left the band the year prior, and so every performance of the song was in dedication to him. By “written”, I think it would mean musically. Am sure Stipe was always behind the lyrics. But that the drummer was behind the music should be no surprise. It’s just another example of an R.E.M. song where Berry’s musicianship resulted in one of the band’s (in my opinion) best songs.

#1026: The Kinks – People Take Pictures of Each Other

Leave a reply

Was this song in a car advert once? You’d think that with the Internet existing and everything, you’d be able to find evidence of this in a split second. But I can’t find it anywhere. I have this vague memory of hearing this song in the advert. And then watching a video of that advert on YouTube somewhere. This was all years ago. But before listening to the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society, that was how I came across ‘People Take Pictures…’ for the first time. It sounded so familiar when Ray Davies started singing those opening lines. Maybe I dreamed that advert up. If someone else remembers it, send answers on a postcard, please.

‘People Take Pictures…’ is the second song on that album concerning pictures being taken of memories gone by. The first to appear on there, ‘Picture Book’, focuses on the good aspects of looking at these photos and having those good ole moments of nostalgia. In ‘People Take Pictures…’, Ray Davies takes the more cynical approach, expressing a feeling that everyone’s just taking pictures of things just for the sake of it, to show their friends were missing out on or to show that they were there when something was happening just to gloat about it. On an album that’s focused on preserving the things of things that were sacred and pure, it’s here that Davies doesn’t want to see anymore pictures from the past after he’s shown an old picture of himself when he was three years old, sitting with his mother by an old oak tree. He wishes to see no more photos, and with those last words the whole record ends on a fadeout of perky ‘la-la-la’ vocals.

The sort of listener who like huge climactic finishes to their albums may be sort of let down when it reaches this point. A short and snappy number, this song is just over two minutes in length and it ends on a fade out rather than a true ending where everything comes to a concrete stop. Kinks fans will know that it was during this period that the band had also recorded ‘Days’, and if ever there would be an ideal album closer, then that track was right there. I personally like ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’ in the place that it’s in. I think it works in concluding a summary to the album’s theme, through a funny 180-turn from all the ‘god-saving’ in the opening title track, you know? Looking at the past can be fine, but only in its amounts. Too much of that could probably get you down.

#1025: Nirvana – Pennyroyal Tea

Leave a reply

First time I would have heard Nirvana’s ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ was when I got ’round to listening to In Utero in full for the first time around 2013. ‘Heart-Shaped Box’, from the same album, I’d known for a long time – but that specific year had some weight into my decision to getting round to the whole record so late, as it was the 20th anniversary of its release. The second half of In Utero is where things go off the deep end a little bit, but in the middle of the whole anti-accessible aesthetic that it goes for comes one of the album’s most accessible tracks in ‘Pennyroyal’.

Had Cobain not chosen to go out the way he did in 1994, ‘Pennyroyal Tea’ would have been the next single from Utero to get the music video treatment, the chart placement, the radio airplay. All of the usual. Once you hear it, you can easily understand why. The quiet verses consist of nothing but two lines, wasting no time on each iteration to emphatically transition into the cathartic choruses where the instrumentation is cranked up to eleven. Kurt Cobain belts out those long drawn out notes in ’em, and with all of that together he had made another “grunge” classic. Obviously, it’s never reached the heights of nearly everything that preceded on Nevermind, but those who know know just what a special song this is.

Plain and simply, it’s a about a very, very depressed person (most likely autobiographical) who drinks pennyroyal tea to at least try and somewhat numb the pain and carries out other mundane activities (listen to Leonard Cohen music, taking antacids and drinking warm milk). All of which really don’t help in any way and make the narrator feel even more sorry for themselves than they already do on a regular basis. After the last line in the last chorus is sung, the tempo slows and slows with Cobain quietly groaning with each cymbal crash as if each hit is slowly taking the life out of him. Pretty telling way to really get across the great exhaustion of the narrator in question. As it’s maybe agreed that it’s Cobain singing about himself, it really puts the whole song into perspective.

#1024: The Beatles – Penny Lane

Leave a reply

I’m sure I’ve told this anecdote before, but it was seeing the videos for ‘Penny Lane’ along a few Beatle promos (‘Hey Bulldog’, ‘The Night Before’) that fully changed my mind about seeing what all this hype about the Beatles was. In fact, I am certain I have, because I dedicated a whole post to it in about 2014. To summarise that post, I wasn’t really sure about the Beatles before 2009, but then the Rock Band game came out alongside the remasters. VH1 had a timeslot dedicated to Beatles videos. ‘Penny Lane’ was one of them, and upon hearing the music and seeing the jovial chemistry between these four people on-screen – plus, the supposed agreement that this was the best band of all time – I sent myself into the void and ended up researching everything there was to know about the group.

‘Penny Lane’ is one of my favourite Beatles songs. Years after humming the track to myself on the way to school when I was 14, it still brings a happy feeling when those ringing bass notes mark the sudden introduction. But it’s not just for nostalgia’s sake that I appear to be clinging onto this one for some sort of support. Just in general, the track is executed to perfection. Paul McCartney wrote a song about a street in Liverpool he would frequently pass through as a kid, mirroring the same approach John Lennon took on for ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. While that track became the experimental psychedelic exhibition, ‘Penny Lane’ was much straighter in approach whilst still maintaining a regal air about it with all the woodwinds and trumpets and other instrumentation that were more typical of an orchestra than a rock band.

As I said earlier, the music video played a big part in me wanting to find out more Beatles stuff. In the context of their careers, it was made at the point where the Beatles made it clear they weren’t going on tour anymore. The videos for ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’ were also revealed after an extended break, in which people were wondering if the Beatles bubble had burst and they were heading for a split. They came back with moustaches and promo videos where they weren’t lipsyncing to the words or ‘playing’ their instruments. They make it most clear in this one in a very obvious manner. They ride past their instruments on their horses as if they are above them, to say ‘we’re not doing that stuff anymore’. When John Lennon starts saying “In Penny Lane” at 1:46, the camera switches to another scene as if to say ‘Nope. We don’t do that here.’ And when they are actually handed their instruments at the end, they pretend they have no idea what they are and start fiddling about with them, while Lennon flips a table over because he didn’t get his guitar. It’s a funny, little anti-music video, signifying that these boys were now men. Men with funny looking moustaches.