Author Archives: The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

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About The Music in My Ears (by Jamie Kyei)

Just one man who's making his way through life one day at a time writing about the songs he has on his phone. And other things at some points.

#1360: Ween – Things You Already Know

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In the space of two weeks in October 2015, I went from having one full downloaded album by Ween on my laptop to having seven. That time, the Autumn/Winter of that year into 2016, was when I fell deep into the work of misters Gene and Dean Ween and found myself having a “new” band to fawn over. The stars were aligning too. It was during that period the band got back together after Gene had left the band in 2012 to focus on his sobriety. It was like someone out there wanted me to start listening to them to prepare me for good times ahead. Once I’d gone through their studio albums, I found myself wanting more. Very luckily, Ween are one of those bands who literally have hundreds and hundreds of songs recorded that never made it onto albums. A noteworthy compilation of some of these is The Caesar Demos, originally shared on Facebook by Dean Ween in August 2011, containing cutting-room-floor tunes and demos made around the time the band were working on their 2003 album Quebec. That compilation is the source of today’s subject.

‘Things You Already Know’ is a song about that good, old situation of unrequited love. Or to put it simply for today’s generation, it’s about a simp. The narrator in ‘Things…’ wishes to woo their subject of interest by diffusing a mob, sailing them around the world in a yacht and promising them the moon and stars. A set of seemingly impossible tasks. It’s not meant to be taken literally, these are all just ways of saying that they’ll do anything to win the heart of this other person. It’s an obsession, one where the narrator seems to think that the other party is aware of the narrator’s advances when it’s very likely that this isn’t the case at all. The narrator takes it personally when, in the final verse, they see their crush with another man, trying to deflect it as a “Your loss, you didn’t get with me” type of deal when inside they’re hurting bad. Thinking about it now, it’s really the “grown-up” version of ‘Nan’ from the band’s first album. Both songs follow an obsessed narrator, who detail their misguided fascinations on a lady before facing reality and feeling slighted as a result. Both very entertaining in their own respective ways.

Had the song been fleshed out, I’m sure it would have been a shoe-in for the final tracklist of Quebec. But it wasn’t. I guess you could say it’s a little repetitive. The melodies are the same from verse to verse, chorus to chorus. The dualling guitar solo mirrors them. It’s anchored by the bouncing drum machine pattern. But it all sounds so good. And Gene Ween sings it in earnest too. It goes down as one of the great Ween tunes left on the cutting room floor. Those Ween fans who know about ‘Things…’ love the track, and I think I had an instant attraction to it when I heard it that first time. I have a memory of sitting behind an iMac at work and listening through this video of The Caesar Demos while doing something else. I went and downloaded the second “disc” of the compilation on 24th October 2015, mainly ’cause of the trifecta of ‘Eulogy for David Anderson’, this track, and ‘Hello Johnny’ on there. Those three alone can make my day. There’s still so much more on that compilation that displays the range of Ween’s creativity in that relatively small two-year span it took to make one of their most popular albums.

#1359: The Notorious B.I.G. – Things Done Changed

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Just to get the fact out of the way, this’ll be the only track by The Notorious B.I.G. you’ll see on here. Not for a reason that I don’t like any other song that he did. It was more that I had to be stringent with the songs I used to add on my old phone ’cause of the storage space and all. After hearing more music after initially hearing Ready to Die in 2014 or so, there were just so many more songs I came across that I preferred to add rather than other cuts from the album. It’s not like I had to add ‘Big Poppa’ or ‘Juicy’. I can go on nights out and hear those songs anywhere. It’s been a while since I’ve gone through it from front to back, though. I should do that again someday. I’m sure quite a few would go straight to the Liked Songs playlist. But for 11 years now, Ready to Die‘s proper opener ‘Things Done Changed’ – coming after the scene-setting three-and-a-half minute intro – has been my highlight on there since that first time I heard it when I was in first year at university.

So I’ll try and tell you from my perspective what it was like to listen to this that first time. At the end of album intro, Biggie Smalls talks about how he has “big plans”, he chuckles, strings in the background leave this in a tense, unresolved note. And then ‘Things Done Changed’ comes in. An emphatic drum fill kicks the track off, falling into a soundscape of rising strings and horns. The chorus contains the sampled vocals of Biz Markie and Dr. Dre – the latter of which contains the source of the song’s title. It had the hook, it had the beat. All sounded good so far. But then Biggie started rapping. “Remember back in the daaaays when niggas had waaaves / Cazal shaaades and corn braaaids”. Just on that flow alone, I was all in. I couldn’t help but pay attention to his voice, it had such a presence about it. I was only a small, small child when Biggie passed and wasn’t around on this earth when Ready to Die was released, but it only took this song to make me see why people listened to him and still talked about him with the regard they did, particularly in 2014 when it was Ready to Die‘s 20th anniversary.

‘Things Done Changed’ sees Biggie put his storytelling skills at work immediately, as he compares the days (presumably of the ’70s/’80s when he was a young man) when people were friendly, having neighborhood barbecue parties in peace to those in 1993 (when the song was written) where it seems like everywhere you turn around people are getting and shot and getting into fights without a moment’s notice. It’s something that if a young kid’s parents shared the same sentiment, the kid probably wouldn’t care ’cause parents never know anything about anything. Biggie did know from first-hand experience and made his worries and feelings sound so engaging and thought-provoking in the process. He raps about how futile it is trying to fight using your hands like how it used to be, because everywhere you turn someone’ll have a gun on them to end that fight very quickly. And while all that’s happening on the streets, on top of that, he had to worry about his mother having breast cancer too. The track depicts a stressful time for everyone involved. It’s a great one. Such a strong way to open a debut album.

#1358: Nick Drake – Things Behind the Sun

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It always comes back to Pink Moon. There have been a few “last songs from an album” posts around recently. After this, there’s only one more to come from Pink Moon. Any fan of it will be able to correctly guess what song that post will be for. But for now, this one’s for ‘Things Behind the Sun’. The track is the longest one on Nick Drake’s third and final studio album, positioned right in the middle of it, acting more as the closing number for the LP’s first half before you’d flip the vinyl around and listen to the second. Even back when I first heard the track in late, late 2012, it did feel like I was listening to what was meant to be considered the record’s most poignant moment. This and the preceding instrumental, ‘Horn’, together make up a one-two punch of poignancy. They both sounded so much sadder than anything else than the numbers that came before. But then again, I think ‘Horn’ acts as more of the tone setter, the moment of quiet reflection before the storm of ‘Things…’ begins soon after.

Not like ‘Things…’ is this wild, raucous rock number or anything. It’s just as acoustic as everything else the album delivers. It’s a storm in terms of the tone… there’s something uneasy, disquieting about it. It’s probably the minor key it’s in for the verses. That would do it. ‘Things Behind the Sun’ sees Drake detail his disillusionment with his musical endeavours. He goes out to perform, but he doesn’t trust the people who go and watch him. And as he goes about his way, observing people on his idle travels, he sees how they act and concludes that there’s no point in trying to win their hearts with his music – the likelihood is they won’t listen anyway. It seems to me that this is a track – another being ‘Harvest Breed’ – where he more or less implies that he won’t be around for much longer, or at least has thought about the end of his life, but doesn’t want to “name the day” on which it happens or reveal that he’s tried to end it before. So until then, where the more sprightly, happier chord progressions come in, he’ll take his time, find delight in the dark humour he appreciates that makes other people frown and generally keep to himself with his head down while he carries on feeling depressed. He’s comfortable in his state of dejection. It’s all very bittersweet.

And just like almost everything other song on Pink Moon. the track is provided to you solely by Nick Drake with his weary vocal and fingerpicked acoustic guitar. Goes to show how much you can do with so little. One thing I’ve always liked about this tune is how rhythmic Drake’s playing style is. He sort of skips around from one chord to the next throughout, playing a root note or two in between. It really shows during the guitar break halfway through when he jumps higher and higher with the progression before dipping back downwards again and repeating the process again. I’ve always thought this and ‘Which Will’ – which if you didn’t guess, will be the next song – both had a rhythm that could have been infused into a hip-hop track of some kind easily, which I guess would be sacrilege to some for weird reasons, but it’s just how I feel. Then Kendrick Lamar used a re-recorded sample of ‘Things…’ in one of his own songs – unreleased, mind you – and my point was proven. But overall, it’s disheartening to listen Drake’s track and hear how let down he was by the fact – and it was a fact at the time – that his music wasn’t going anywhere, not making him the big star that he wanted to be and that people told him he could be. It happened eventually, people love his music now. If only he’d stuck around.

#1357: They Might Be Giants – They’ll Need a Crane

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‘They’ll Need a Crane’. A TMBG classic right here. It’s another track of theirs I came to know through Launch.com. Whenever it played on the radio, it was always listed as being on the band’s Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants compilation rather than the studio album it originated from. Same went for ‘Ana Ng’, ‘Cowtown’, and ‘Purple Toupee’ on the one occasion I think it played on there. Cue to many Christmases and birthdays when I asked for that compilation but never got it. I think it was a rare one to get over here in the UK. But unlike ‘They Might Be Giants’ where I heard the song once and didn’t hear it again until years later, ‘They’ll Need a Crane’ also had its music video – featuring two young Johns and a band of distinguished old fellas playing and rowing boats in Battery Park, New York City – available to view on the site’s video service. So, if the 2004 broadband connection was good, I could watch that whenever I wanted.

‘…Crane’ is on the band’s second album, Lincoln, the 14th track on there, and another by the band to tackle what you can consider to be an emotionally heavy subject – a tragic breakup – with catchy, upbeat music. Linnell sings about the situation of “Lad” and “Gal”. The two are together, but there’s a sadness lingering in the relationship that takes a toll. Gal sometimes says things to Lad that hurts Lad’s feelings. An argument is depicted in the song’s minor-key bridge where Gal walks away from Lad in frustration after the latter suggests to go to a restaurant where “the other nightmare people like to go”. And by the final verse, they’ve gone their separate ways with Lad looking at other women and Gal drowning her sorrows with Jim Beam whiskey. The whole situation’s likened to the destruction and gradual reconstruction of a building, both aided by the metaphorical crane that’s referred to in the song’s title.

‘They’ll Need a Crane’ has one of those melodies you feel you must have heard before somewhere. When I first heard the song way, way back, I thought it was one I knew like the back of my finger. I would have been eight, but I think I had a grasp of what a good song sounded like at that somewhat negligible age. The tune’s from 1988, but it’s like it should have been around for much longer. Gotta thank John Linnell once again for this one. And John Flansburgh too, because why not. Only makes sense that the song was released as a single during the band’s Lincoln era in February 1989, four days before Valentine’s Day, funnily enough. I don’t think that’s coincidental. The band played the track for their network television debut on Late Night with David Letterman around the same time. But I’m gonna embed a 2011 performance of it just for comparison’s sake with the music video at the top.

#1356: They Might Be Giants – They Might Be Giants

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The song ‘They Might Be Giants’ by the band They Might Be Giants is another by the group that I discovered at a very early age, one that stuck with me for the longest while, and then eventually one that I sort of revisited while also going into it with fresh ears years down the line. If you’ve read another They Might Be Giants post on here where I’ve mentioned this website Yahoo! used to run back in the day called Launch.com, the story there is very much the same here. That was the site that introduced me to They Might Be Giants when I was eight years old or something. I frequently used the internet radio service on there, tracks by TMBG would show up at the same kind of rate, and a lot of the time I liked what I was hearing. ‘They Might Be Giants’ was one of ’em. Heard it in 2004. Didn’t get to listening to the album it was on until 2010. I was always asking for TMBG compilations in those six years for gifts with little success. So when I discovered the art of downloading in 2009-10, I went to town.

The band’s self-admitted theme song was written much earlier than 1990 when it was released on the band’s third album Flood, their major-label debut on Elektra Records. John Flansburgh and John Linnell had initially recorded it in 1985 for possible inclusion on what was to be their self-titled debut record, but left it off thinking the theme song on the first album would be ‘too weird’, and thought about recording it for their second album Lincoln too. When it came time to making Flood, the band were now on a major-label, they enlisted seasoned producers to help them, they had the bigger budget, and they had the, I assume, better equipment for the recording process. So it only made sense to revisit ‘They Might Be Giants’ with all this at hand. But even still, Flansburgh recalled it being an incredibly complicated piece to put together again because of the elements contained within the music. Particularly on the vocal front. There’s a lot of ’em.

I think I once watched an interview with the two Johns where one of them explained their band name as a remark someone might say upon looking out of a window and seeing these strange presences in the distance. “Hmm, they might be giants”. Along those lines. So ‘They Might Be Giants’ explores peculiar alternatives that these presences might, ranging from in-jokes like “Dr. Spock’s back-up band” to the nonsensical “rain” or “heat” to the possibly conclusive answer of “big, big, fake, fake lies”. John Flansburgh takes lead vocal. John Linnell provides a lot of the backing. Not sure who between the two delivers the deep “Boy” vocalizations. I’m thinking Linnell. The “Hang on tight” samples are from a self-improvement cassette tape the band acquired for a miniscule amount of money. Everyone’s chanting ‘They Might Be Giants’ by the song’s end, and by the sound of the sudden vocal change, the actual giants might be getting involved too. It’s a triumphant number, and also acts as a bit of a call-out to their fans. You see, with the major-label move, there were those that were worried that the band were gonna change. Sell out, as they would say. Their theme song placement was a tactical move of reassurance that they weren’t. At least not for a while.