Monthly Archives: March 2025

#1256: Sly & the Family Stone – Spaced Cowboy

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A personal practice of mine is to have my phone playing music while I’m getting changed after having a shower in the morning. Feels strange to get ready in silence, or not to have at least some noise in the background for that kind of thing. A strange way to start this post you’d think, but it’s relevant, I swear. One time, I opened Spotify and left my Discover Weekly playlist running while I was sorting out my business when my ears pricked up at the sound of a singer yodelling over what was seemingly a straight-up soul/funk song. And that was a combination I don’t think I’d ever experienced in my years of living. This was back in 2020, very sure lockdown was well underway at the time, and I needed something to be excited about. This thing came in the form of this unusual song.

I wanna say the first time I heard it, I sort of let it slide and forgot to check what the song was called. But then it appeared in the playlist again not too long after, so I took it as a sign. The song was ‘Spaced Cowboy’ by Sly & the Family Stone, from the 1971 album There’s a Riot Goin’ On. Some would say a classic. I liked it a lot when I heard it fully some years ago. But when it came to ‘Spaced Cowboy’ by itself, I became addicted to it for a while. Think there was a timespan during 2020 where I was listening to it every day, and it probably would have racked up more “official” listens if I didn’t sometimes switch my status to private on the streaming service. I wouldn’t blame you if you listened and thought maybe it’s all a bit much on my part. I still enjoy the track a lot, I don’t know what to say.

There’s a Riot… is an album that bandleader Sly Stone recorded mostly by himself, either in the studio he built for himself at the Record Plant in New York City or in his home studio, in the loft of his Bel Air mansion. He used drum machines that he would then record real drums on top of, and a lot of the instrumental work is his own too. And there’s no other track on the record that represents that whole aesthetic than ‘Spaced Cowboy’. What the song is also about is anyone’s guess. If anything, I think the words were more or less written to fit around the yodelling, which really shouldn’t work in a genre like this but somehow sound perfect all the same. The bass line provides a fantastic groove. Stone’s vocal performance is effortlessly laidback, so much so that he stumbles on a word for a brief moment and corpses during another. The harmonica solo is also a very nice touch. A smooth blend of sounds that are good for the ears. I’ll take whatever’s going.

#1255: They Might Be Giants – Space Suit

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If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you’ll have noticed the Giants’ stuff being a frequent occurrence here. I like their music a lot, to put it simply. 1992 marked the year that John Linnell and John Flansburgh had been playing together as the band known as They Might Be Giants for a decade. And in the same year they released Apollo 18, the second under their major-label contract with Elektra and their first self-produced record. Out of the first four albums which saw the two Johns performing everything except the rhythm section, Apollo 18 is the one sounding the most like a full rock band playing together. A bit of a precursor to what would arrive on their next album, when they actually did become a full rock band. But to cap Flansburgh and Linnell’s studio material as a duo off, they close out Apollo 18 with ‘Space Suit’, a reworking of the very first song the two made together when they created the band in 1982.

Things get a little bit hectic nearing the end of the album. One of the most notable moments on it comes in the ‘Fingertips’ suite, a collection of 21 little snippets of choruses and musical segments inspired by the jingles that play in the background of infomercials. That suite ends with the minute-long ‘I Walk Along Darkened Corridors’, which is played out to be the dramatic closer of the piece with Linnell putting on a faux-operatic voice alongside an emphatic “organ” and clarinets. But then ‘Space Suit’ comes along to properly end things in the form of a swinging, suitably spacey, 6/8-time instrumental, emphasising the ‘one man on guitar, one man on accordion’ setup the band originated with all those years prior.

John Flansburgh once had a guitar teacher in the early ’80s named Jack DeSalvo, who taught him a bunch of chords to use whenever convenient. With the chords he learned, Flansburgh went on to write ‘Space Suit’, but with its jazzy origins, it was originally titled ‘I’ll Remember 3rd Street’. The recording of the ‘3rd Street’ demo can be heard below. Much, much different from how it would turn out some years later. I can simply describe ‘Space Suit’ as an instrumental that consists of two parts, the one that has that ascending scale and the other containing the main melody, played by John Linnell’s accordion for the first time and then accompanied by Flansburgh’s vocals (buried deep in the mix) second time round. Makes it sound like the accordion itself is singing. Really enjoy when those cymbal crashes pack an extra punch about 40 seconds in. Put these all together, makes for some good listening.

#1254: Nine Black Alps – Southern Cross

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Nine Black Alps’ Everything Is is an album that I don’t think is known by a great number of people. But those of us who know recognise it’s really a very good one. Released in 2005 in the midst of the whole post-punk revival thing where bands like Bloc Party and The Futureheads were thriving, just to name a couple, the heaviness and angst Nine Black Alps presented in their music and throughout Everything Is immediately made critics mention Nirvana in their reviews. That might be an obvious comparison to some people. I’ve never really been able to see it. Maybe I’m just kidding myself. I’ve come to think the band were too different to the happening scene of the time, so the only way people would get prospective listeners to become interested would be to stick ‘Nirvana’ in their pieces and see where it went from there.

Whatever conclusions you draw for the album are all yours to keep. You can share them too, I wouldn’t mind. I’m pretty confident in my thoughts on it. On this site, you’ll see I’ve written about every other track from Everything Is. After this, there’s only one more left and that’s the full house. And again, people who know this album will know what song it is. But the focus today is on the album’s final track, ‘Southern Cross’. When I heard it the first time, I thought it wouldn’t have worked if it was anywhere else in the sequencing. I would have only been 12 years old at the time, but in the 12-year-old way I picked up on the sense of closure that’s brought about by the music and the lyrical sentiment. The song duration also mirrors that of album opener ‘Get Your Guns’, which is most likely a big coincidental happening, but I take interest in little things like that.

‘Southern Cross’ seems to be about the disappointment in being let down by “friends” and being taken advantage of. The struggle the song’s narrator feels in trying to take things on by themselves and ultimately failing leaves them in a state of helplessness, the song’s main refrain being a pained cry of “So what do I do?” A bit of a downer, sure. But it’s somewhat overridden by the emphatic guitars and general performance of the band, framed around the ascending/descending guitar riff that begins the song and also appears in between the first chorus and second verse. I dig how the bass guitar appears to be the loudest instrument you can hear during those riffy parts, cuts through the mix like a knife. And when you expect the melody to follow the route it has taken in the previous choruses, singer Sam Forrest raises it unexpectedly for the last one. With a firm crash, the song ends and the guitars ring out for a good 20 seconds, feeding back into a void of silence. It’s a great way to end a great album.

#1253: John Linnell – South Carolina

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I was listening to Prince’s Purple Rain a few months back. When the synthesizers and drums really got going in ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, I thought to myself, “South Carolina sounds a lot like this.” The ‘South Carolina’ I refer to is John Linnell’s song, the fourth one on his 1999 State Songs album. I wrote about another song from that just the other day. Before going through the record the first time, I was quick to judge ‘South Carolina’ before even hearing it after reading that it was meant to be the album’s accompanying single. Because it was too big to fit the vinyl, the record company chose ‘Montana’ instead. But then ‘South Carolina’ came around in the tracklist, and it became very obvious why it was considered single-worthy. I wouldn’t describe it as a banger, I’m getting to old for that sort of stuff. But I can at least say firmly that I have a very good time listening to this one.

Starts off these confident piano chords into these drum/horn stabs, which lead into Linnell’s introduction on the vocals. And from then on, it’s like he doesn’t stop singing until there’s a minute of the song left to go. It’s a very busy song, one in which Linnell sings about a person getting into a bicycle accident and successfully suing the offender. Linnell adopts a lower-pitched vocal to portray the various characters in the story, from the police officers to the neighbour who’s asked to take pictures of the wrecked bicycle for evidence. The song may or may not be influenced by the time John Linnell had his own bicycle accident some years before, which in turn led to the creation of They Might Be Giants’ Dial-A-Song project. The TMBG wiki says the song’s music was inspired by the Kinks’ song ‘Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight’. And I can see that. I still think there’s a little of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ in there, though. Maybe Linnell was looking at the Purple Rain cover with Prince on the motorbike and got to thinking. Big maybe though.

Although the State Songs album was released in 1999, John Linnell had given just a small glimpse of the project five years earlier on an EP that was exclusively released by a subscription-based record company called the Hello Recording Club. ‘South Carolina’ was the leading track on that collection, and it’s very much the same recording that ends up on the album. Just mixed a little differently. From what I can tell, there’s a bit more reverb on the older version, with the vocals more present in the mix and the deeper ends having a littles less “oomph” to them. As if anyone reading this cares about that sort of thing. I think it’s just interesting to think the guy had a song like this in the back pocket and ready to go for five years. This is the final state song you’ll get from me on here. Not the last time you’ll see something from John Linnell, though. Would like to give a nod to ‘Louisiana’. Would have been a shoe-in for a commentary, had it not been available only on vinyl for 22 years before only becoming recently available to stream four years ago.

#1252: Gorillaz – Sound Check (Gravity)

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‘Sound Check (Gravity)’ is another song from Gorillaz’s 2001 debut album. I say ‘another’ because it doesn’t feel so long ago that I was writing about the last one to appear on here. I’ll try my best not to repeat anything, but don’t hold it against me if I do. Just a coincidence that two of the songs I like on the LP begin with the letter ‘S’. Being the 16-track record Gorillaz is, with ‘Sound Check’ being the eighth on there, I think the song’s placement and general tone is meant to make it out as the epic closer of the album’s first half. Got these heavy dub-record scratch breakdowns and (synthesized) violins. Meant to really heighten the dramatic atmosphere of it all, even though the song isn’t arguably about anything much at all.

If you look at ‘Sound Check’ in a structural sense, which I guess I do sometimes on here, you can say it’s split into three different sections. You firstly get the “Graviteh-eh-eh-eh” verses, the instrumental breaks where the dubby bass guitar comes in with the record scratching, and the “ah don’t ‘pon me down” verses. Some websites list the latter part as the choruses. They seem like the least chorus-like parts of the song. Damon Albarn’s doing a thing that he does throughout the album, which is switching up his vocal style, really exploring parts of his voice that he never would with Blur and singing actual words mixed with a bit of gibberish which have some meaning and sort of don’t. There’s always a very fine melody associated with them all, though.

The main puzzle I’d always had with the track was regarding the sample that’s used during the instrumental breaks. Once I read that the person in that sample was saying “I’m gonna rock this rigging”. And it sounds like that, thought it was a pretty valid deduction, so I’ve been singing it that way for all this time. But before writing this, I just did a little check to see how the lyrics are noted on various websites. One of the first few results that came up was a Reddit post asking about that sample lyric, and someone straight up posted the actual source. You hear it about 27 seconds in. So it’s actually just “I’m gonna rock this pla-ace”. It’ll take me some time to get used to that. But that’s one question solved that I don’t have to think about anymore.