Monthly Archives: November 2024

#1191: Ween – She Wanted to Leave

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Before I properly dove into the world of Ween in the autumn of 2015, The Mollusk was the first album I listened to by the band a year and a bit earlier. Like many others out there, I heard ‘Ocean Man’ at the end of the SpongeBob movie, liked it and added it to the old iTunes library. (I’d already known ‘Daisies’, ‘Freedom of ’76’ and ‘Loop de Loop’ by seeing them at various points on the TV, which left me confused because they all didn’t sound they were made by the same people. But this is way besides the point.) ‘Ocean Man’ was the only Ween song sitting in that library for a while. So one day when I was chilling in my uni room, I thought “Why not?” and listened to the record in its entirety. Probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in this lifetime. I was 18 by the time this was going on, but it felt like the album should have been a longtime favourite of mine by that point. Was definitely a “Where has this been all my life?” kind of thing.

How suitable that the last song on The Mollusk is the final one from the album I’ll be talking about on here. There’s not a lot of love for ‘She Wanted to Leave’ that I’ve seen online. I’ve read other people saying that the album should have ended with ‘Ocean Man’, which I don’t understand. I like the song myself, but as an album closer? I think I’d really be wanting more. And ‘She Wanted…’ brings it all home with a sort of unexpected emotional ending. It’s a breakup song, “straight Richard Thompson” according to Dean Ween, but instead of the usual guy-girl clichés, Gene Ween sings from the perspective of a man who’s completely left out to dry and lost for words after their lady’s been wooed away by a bunch of pirates. Left broken by the whole ordeal, he goes straight to the booze and wallows in his misery. Quite the sad way to end what is an incredibly fun album. In fact, the last words “For I’m not the man I used to be/And now I’m one of them” left such a mark initially that the sentiment inspired me to make a post about the best ending lines on an album.

So you’ll notice the song really ends about 2-and-a-half minutes into the runtime. Leaves you wondering, “Well, what else is there?” And a few moments later, these whooshing synths come in – I guess meaning to sound like these ominous breezes in the middle of the quiet ocean – before a familiar melody begins to play. It’s only a slowed down reprise of ‘I’m Dancing in the Show Tonight’, the song that started the whole record off and, by that point, in the closing moments seems so long ago. The little hidden touch puts a feather in the cap of the whole package. This is the way that the album should close out, and it was always meant to be. Clicking on the ‘the mollusk’ tag below will take you to the other songs from the album I’ve written posts for. And if I’d known it when I was doing the ‘B’ section, ‘The Blarney Stone’ and ‘Buckingham Green’ would have had their own articles too. It’s just how these things go sometimes.

#1190: The Beatles – She Said She Said

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Another contender for one of my favourite songs of all time. I think I’ve said that for only two other songs on this site. Good luck trying to find them. For any Beatles fans reading, were you just as disappointed in the 2022 remix of this track as I was? Having been such a fan of ‘She Said She Said’ since 2009 when I first listened through Revolver, I was really hoping that Giles Martin would pull through with a new mix that packed as much of a punch as the 2009 remaster. I was quite disappointed when that new version came through though. I’m not even going to embed it, I was that sad about it. Almost every other song on the 2022 Revolver remix got a better treatment. Even though the original mix is laid out in a way that modern listeners can’t stand, I’ll take it any day over the new one.

Story goes the Beatles were holed up in a rented house in Beverly Hills and invited a couple guys from the Byrds and Peter Fonda over one day. They all took LSD and, while under the influence, Fonda began telling George Harrison that he knew what it was like to be dead in an attempt to somehow comfort him. Harrison thought that he himself was dying, but it was most likely the drug making him feel that way. John Lennon overhearing Fonda saying this got quite annoyed, remarking “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born” and asking him “Who put all that shit in your head?” Fonda was asked to leave the party, eventually. But the whole ordeal was enough of a spark of inspiration to get a song down. Phrases from the conversation were almost used verbatim as the lyrics. The original “He” in the title became “She”, and the song was eventually recorded, the last one to be, for inclusion on Revolver.

So what makes this an “all-time” favourite of mine, you might be asking? Well, simply put, I like everything about the song. The tone of the guitars provide this bright, summery feel. Ringo Starr’s drumming is some of the best he ever put down to tape, and I’ve always got a kick out of the emphatic cymbal crashes on the “making me feel like I’ve never been born’ phrases. The decrease in volume of those in the 2022 mix play a part in why it’s worse than the original. John Lennon sings the track really well. The delivery of the first “She saaaaaid” has such a rousing quality to it, and the tone of his vocal is generally pleasant to my ears. And I still remember how sort of surprised I was when I found out that the harmonies were done by Harrison. I thought it was Lennon doing all the vocal work initially. Harrison’s voice sounds very similar. Always appreciate the transition between the “She said you don’t understand…” section to the “When I was a boy…” bridges. Just a little subtle time change there, but it’s enough to make the track stand out that little bit more. And the great double-time ending as Harrison echoes Lennon’s lines with the cymbals crashing away into the fade out. There’s a lot of things there for me. And the whole song is only under two-and-a-half minutes. Bands today could do with a song like it.

#1189: Soundgarden – She Likes Surprises

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For anyone who wasn’t living in the US and Canada at the time of the release of Superunknown, ‘She Likes Surprises’ could be found as the album’s final song as a bonus addition. The band didn’t think it really fit into the overall theme and feel of the actual record, which truly finishes with ‘Like Suicide’. But record companies back in the days of 1994 were really trying to push CDs out there, at the sacrifice of vinyl, and give an incentive for fans to buy them in stores. So Soundgarden’s record label requested ‘She Likes Surprises’ be on the editions released in Europe, Japan and Australia to compete with those available in North America. I don’t know who won in that competition. But for me, more music is an automatic victory. Might not match the vision of the artist, but sometimes you just have to let these thing pass.

I may have only heard this song for the first time a few years back. Maybe 2019 or so, when an urge to revisit Superunknown came to me. The album was already in my iTunes library, and I think after really getting into Down on the Upside the year before, it made sense to go back to what many would consider to be the band’s best. The way I remember it, I think I ended the album with ‘Like Suicide’ too and was quite hesitant to hear ‘Surprises’ out. Anytime there’s a bonus anything anywhere on a record, it’s usually the result of the record label’s request rather than the artist themselves. But after a while I thought “What the hell” and listened to it anyway. And I’m glad I did because at this point, I usually listen to ‘Surprises’ a lot more frequently than a number of other songs on the “official” album.

I thought the way it starts off was strange initially. A screeching guitar line alongside a plodding bass riff. It was a choice, but it’s how it goes. Matt Cameron’s drums come in along with Chris Cornell’s vocals. That guitar line carries on screeching before things get heavy for about two seconds before returning to normal like nothing happened. Things get heavy again as the band launches into the song’s chorus, with that ascending half-step scale on the guitar, and I think that’s where the song won me over. In fact, I like how much the song feels like it’s moving constantly from one direction to the other. It’s in 4/4 mainly, with maybe a bar of 5/4 and 10/4 here and there. But even in the standard time, notes are sometimes played on the upbeat to keep you on your toes. When it comes to the lyrics, it seems to be about a lady who doesn’t think too much of herself but gains gratification out of casual hookups. At least I think that’s what it’s going for. Saw an interpretation online that the ‘colourful disguises’ referred to in the song are condoms. Seems reasonable enough. The band never played the song live, but I’ve always appreciated the drumming in it, so I’ll embed this pretty accurate drum cover from YouTube.

#1188: The Flaming Lips – She Don’t Use Jelly

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The first time The Flaming Lips came into my consciousness was around the time that At War with the Mystics was their “new” album that was going to be released soon. Guess that places us in 2006. The video for ‘The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song’ was a regular in the mornings on MTV2. It was a strange video. It was a strange song. But I dug it. To the 11-year-old child I was, it scratched that weird internal itch that I think all young ones have at that age. Because there was this hype for The Flaming Lips going around, their older videos would be played on the channel too. Through this, it’s how I came to know songs like ‘Race for the Prize’, ‘Fight Test’, ‘Do You Realize??’, and today’s featured track ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’.

I was a younger, foolish kid back when I saw the video for ‘Jelly’ for the first time, and I think I cared more about appearances than the music. The first thought I had was how different Wayne Coyne looked compared to all the other videos I’d seen him in. In fact, the whole band looked completely unrecognizable. It appeared to be a much older music video than than the ones for the songs from Bulletin and Yoshimi, so obviously they were younger. They just also happened to look like completely different people. Plus, there appeared to be this other person in the band that by 2006 was not in there anymore. I had a lot of research to do. The track just seemed weird to me. The combination of the audio with the visuals, my little brain couldn’t handle it. I got over that bridge eventually.

The Flaming Lips could have easily been known as the band that did this one song. and then dipped, never to be heard from again. As we all know, they went on to do great things which I think we’re all very grateful for. But there are a lot of one-hit wonders who have worst tracks than this one. ‘She Don’t Use Jelly’ is about three kooky characters, two girls, one guy, all described in three respective verses, who use unusual objects for the completely wrong purposes. There’s choruses per se. Where the choruses would usually be are instead replaced by the crunching guitar riff and loopy slide guitar refrain, which also start the track off. And I like Coyne’s vocal in this too, all bare and untampered with. He’s not the strongest singer, but he gives it feeling, even if the lyrics aren’t meant to be taken all seriously.

#1187: The Beatles – She Came in Through the Bathroom Window

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Well, this track comes as a bit of a weird one to talk about. It’s The Beatles. ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window’ is from Abbey Road. Everyone likes that album. When I think about it, it’s not the one I return to when I want to hear a Beatles album in full. That would probably go to Revolver or Rubber Soul or something. But I won’t argue that it has some of the band’s best songs on there. ‘She Came in…’ is a part of the medley that makes up the majority of Abbey Road‘s second half, kinda closing out its first part, and was performed in one take alongside ‘Polythene Pam’ whose closing solo segues right into the introduction.

For the longest time I looked at the medley with a bit of a side-eye. Blasphemous to say, I know. This was the masterstroke that marked the ending of the Beatles’ recording career. But seeing as it was made up of tunes that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had in the can going back to 1968, the album was released in Autumn 1969, I used to see it as the guys sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel for material and shmushing them together. Although I appreciate it a lot more these days, I do usually have that feeling lurking in the back of my mind. As a result, I like some of the parts more than the whole. And I can’t say that I have a deep, deep connection with this particular tune other than I found myself singing it to myself whenever I was out shopping or in the shower. If I was singing it in those situations, that probably means I’ve liked it somewhere along the line.

‘She Came in…’ was inspired by a real-life incident where a fan broke into Paul McCartney’s London home, literally through the bathroom window while he was out. The parts about being ‘protected by a silver spoon’ and sucking her thumb ‘by the banks of her own lagoon’ I have no idea about. Only McCartney could tell you if he asked him. But being a grandmaster of melody that he is, he makes the whole two minutes the song goes on for sound rather good. I guess he just let his imagination run wild about this particular person, wondering what she does as a job and what her aspirations may be. It’s all a bit up in the air, this one, regarding the lyrics. But regarding the harmonies, the backing vocals, Harrison’s guitar licks, the sort of half-time tempo McCartney’s bass takes for the second verse. That’s all good, good stuff. One of my highlights out of the so-called ‘Long One’.