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.

#1275: Blur – Star Shaped

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When it comes to Blur’s ‘Star Shaped’, I have vivid memories of being in my room during my first year of university and listening to it repeatedly, air drumming to Dave Rowntree’s performance many times. The summer prior, I’d listened through the band’s whole discography and downloaded all their LPs to my laptop. According to my ‘Chemical World’ post, I did all of that in one weekend. It was a lot of music to take in. I think I revisited Modern Life Is Rubbish at some point during the first semester of uni, and ‘Star Shaped’ just jumped out as an immediate favourite. While the band were making Modern Life… they were told by their label that they didn’t have any singles on there. Damon Albarn went off and wrote ‘For Tomorrow’ in response. But listening to ‘Star Shaped’ all this time, I always thought of it as an obvious single contender.

The track is the thoughts of a narrator just doing the things he can that’ll help them get through the week. They wash with a new soap, which apparently helps keep a good mental health going. They can’t help but get to the office late, even attempting to show their face when the weather outside isn’t very good. And they have a few drinks with mates at the weekend to maintain that strong bond of friendship. The narrator works hard on keeping up appearances, but inside they know this focus on work can’t be too great in their actual development as a person. But the cheery backing vocals tell the narrator it’s all good and that the work they’re doing now will eventually pay off. They’re star shaped. They’ve got potential. A little bit of an existential crisis thing going on in this track. But you wouldn’t know it because the music’s so upbeat and packs a heck of a punch.

Gotta say, I like almost everything about this song. Damon Albarn’s got that youthful tone in his voice, which always worked wonders in that particular era of Blur, and it’s one of the few that I can think of in the band’s catalogue where he goes back and forth on the vocals with Graham Coxon, who provides the chirpy backing during the choruses. Coxon’s guitar work’s impeccable, filling in spaces with little runs and licks here and there to make things a little more engaging. Dave Rowntree’s drum performance plays a huge part in my enjoyment of the track. May not seem incredibly special to some, but they have a massive presence that provides an extra edge. And a lovely part is when things get a little quiet for the horn interlude by composer Kate St John, who also plays during the song’s floating waltz-time outro. Ah, so much to latch on to in the three-and-a-half minutes this track lasts for. One of my favourites from that whole ‘Life’ trilogy.

#1274: R.E.M. – Star Me Kitten

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Uh, R.E.M. again? You might be feeling that way if you saw this popping up in your email. Just how the cookie crumbles, I’m sorry. And it’s not as if the song today is a widely-known favourite of the band’s, even though it’s from arguably their best album. I look at the number of plays for ‘Star Me Kitten’ on Spotify, and the cold hard truth is it’s the least played out of the total 12 tracks that make up Automatic for the People. It’s definitely the one that brings about a left turn in the album’s proceedings. But it’s the difference it brings that makes me enjoy it a whole lot more, more than a couple other tracks on there, to be honest.

I’d had Automatic… sitting in my iTunes library for years and had maybe gone through it a few times, but nothing really registered. But bring around 2018, I was at work, brought the album up on Spotify, let it play on the loudspeakers and it was a totally different experience. I’ll leave it to general youth and foolishness as to why I couldn’t get into it before then. I gained a whole new appreciation for the record by the end of ‘Find the River’, which would have had its own post too if I’d got my act together, and the individual tracks within. When it came to ‘Star Me Kitten’, I just remember feeling entranced by it. Those layered Mike Mill vocals in the back alongside the organ? Hypnotizing stuff. And the guitar melody by Peter Buck which Michael Stipe mirrors from front to back with his vocal is all slinky and almost seductive in a way. What really got me though was that descending three-note scale that happens at points during the track. You’ll know what I mean when you hear it. But it was really those parts that got stuck in my head and made me listen to the whole thing over and over.

Why the song’s called ‘Star Me Kitten’ has a pretty simple story. We all know the lyric is ‘Fuck Me Kitten’, and it was originally going to be listed as such on physical copies. But doing so would mean that a Parental Advisory label would have to be slapped onto the album covers. The word ‘fuck’ is said a few times in fellow album track ‘Ignoreland’. The band didn’t want this to happen, so they censored themselves using inspiration from The Rolling Stones’ ‘Star Star’. And as to what the song’s about, well, I’ve never come up with anything myself. But seeing the lyrics, it appears to be from the perspective of a narrator lamenting the end of a relationship, but still being enchanted by the other person that they want to have a casual get together every once in a while. That’s my deduced take for you.

#1273: R.E.M. – Star 69

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After making Automatic for the People and releasing it for the people to hear in 1992, the members of R.E.M. made a conscious decision to make their next album rock. They figured that people would be expecting an Automatic… 2, more of the acoustic, introspective, ‘Everybody Hurts’/‘Losing My Religion’ type deal that had made them massively popular at the beginning of the ’90s. So to subvert those expectations, they made Monster, released in 1994, a record heavily inspired by glam rock and a little inspired by the grunge movement that was the style of the time. A lot of tremolo guitar effects happening on this album. And Michael Stipe shaved his head right down to the dome. It was a big deal. And one song I’ve always dug from it is the fifth track, ‘Star 69’.

Like the rest of the R.E.M. albums, I heard Monster in its entirety when I went through the band’s discography in the early months of 2018. It actually may have been the first two weeks of that year. I’d heard ‘What’s the Frequency, Kenneth’ a couple months prior for the first time, so I guess I was a little excited when it came round to hear Monster. That song will get its due on here another day. And I think ‘Star 69’ was a number on there that I liked pretty much instantly. Michael Stipe’s vocals are almost indecipherable, drowned in the applied echo effects and energetic guitar work of Peter Buck. When you find them online, you’ll see they tell something of a story in which Stipe knows a person who’s burned down a warehouse because that person went on to call him. He refuses to be involved with the whole situation. You’ll be breaking out the air guitar and jumping around to the punk rock attitude of it all. At least, that’s where I’ve found myself I few times.

What the title ‘Star 69’ refers to is the last-call return feature of telephones in the US. Someone called you on the landline and you missed it? Well, then you’d grab the phone, dial ‘star 69’ and your phone provider would tell you the last number that called and what time it happened. So that’s what Stipe’s talking about when he says ‘I know you called’ in the chorus. We have that service over here in the UK too. You dial ‘1-4-7-1’ instead. Not as cool as a song title, though. Overall, it’s got quite the outdated message because everyone uses mobile phones now, and it’s very easy to see who specifically called and where they’re calling from, in addition to the number that called and what time. But that’s just how things were in the ’90s, man. The early 2000s too. Song makes for a nice little capsule. Always a good time hearing it.

#1272: Graham Coxon – Standing on My Own Again

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I know for sure that an official music video exists for this track. It’s just that it’s nowhere to be found on YouTube and seems to be wiped off the face of the internet. By seeing it what felt like every day for a period in 2006 on MTV2, I became very familiar with Graham Coxon’s ‘Standing on My Own Again’ very quickly. It was released as the first single from his then forthcoming album Love Travels at Illegal Speeds. As I write to you, I’m starting to wonder whether this was the first song by him that I had ever heard, or if it was ‘Freakin’ Out’. Maybe I answer that question in the post for that track. To keep things mysterious, I won’t go and find out. But I do know for sure that I didn’t know who Blur was, and so for a bit I just recognised Coxon as this solo artist who was just doing his thing. Doing it well too.

In Coxon’s words, the song builds a scene where the narrator’s standing on a grey and muddy beach looking out at a ship that’s sinking and likening its situation to a relationship where neither person involved are enjoying themselves anymore. You think of that and hear the lyrics, or read ’em, and it all makes perfect sense. It’s much better watching Coxon explain it all himself. Combine that with a charging performance led by striding guitars and a wailing vocal performance, it makes for some very cathartic listening. Coxon performs with what was his usual live band in the music video, but I didn’t find out until quite recently that in the studio he played all the instruments himself. I always knew him to be a great guitarist. He ain’t to shabby on the bass guitar and drums as well.

Yeah, listening to this song will always take me back to those days in 2006 when I was pretty much sitting in front of the TV all day watching music videos and seeing this song on a regular basis. I seem to remember this and ‘All These Things I Hate’ by Bullet for My Valentine were usually played within a video or two of each other. And looking at the Wiki pages for both songs, they were both released in February of that year. At least my memory’s still somewhat kicking. Love Travels at Illegal Speeds will be out for 20 years in 2026, so hopefully the videos for ‘Standing…’ and fellow single ‘You & I’ show their faces for the anniversary. Until then, here’s the making of the video for the former, just to show you I’m not going crazy about a magical video that may or may not be real.

#1271: Billy Talent – Standing in the Rain

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Back in the days of 2005, Billy Talent’s official website used to look like this. Two years after the release of their debut album, the design was still very much focused on that era. And the example I provide was the page that came up if you didn’t have Flash installed. Now that Flash is busy not existing anymore, not even Archive can go further than that. But I can tell you that when Flash was the thing to have, you were able to watch the band’s music videos, either through Quicktime or Windows Media, catch up on the latest news regarding the group, and listen to three of the songs from the debut album as a kind of preview through an integrated music player on the homepage. I want to say one was ‘Try Honesty’, another was ‘Line & Sinker’, and the third was ‘Standing in the Rain’. So I knew that one almost by heart before I had the album for myself.

‘Standing in the Rain’ is the eighth number on Billy Talent, a bleak one about the struggles of a prostitute. Not sure there’s much to pick apart in my opinion, because the lyrics are very much what-you-see-is-what-you-get. Ben Kowalewicz sings from the point of view of a woman of the night, or man, you don’t know, the gender’s never revealed in the words, detailing their misery. An annotation on Genius says the track was inspired by the Pig Farm murders carried out by Canadian serial killer Robert Pickton. I can’t find any other source by the band that corroborates this interpretation. It may very well be true. Maybe Kowalewicz and guitarist Ian D’Sa were just inspired to write about prostitution and thought it would be interesting to cover it from the prostitute’s point of view. I’d like to think it was just that. You can’t believe everything you see on those lyrics sites.

Just a solid, solid performance throughout by the band. D’Sa very much plays a strong rhythm guitar on this one rather than doing the simultaneous lead/rhythm guitar playing he carries out on the vast majority of the record. But the chord choices and progressions are still as strong. A lot of the attention, I think, may probably be directed to the harmonies and general singing carried out by D’Sa and Kowalewicz. They sing in unison for the pre-chorus, before the former goes to the higher harmony for the actual chorus. And then in the break, D’Sa takes the lead for a brief second before Kowalewicz joins in and the rest of the band crash in together for the song’s closing moments. On a personal note, I’ve always thought the mixing of the cymbals sounded a little strange during the opening. I know they were recorded separately from the actual drumkit during production, but I don’t know what it is. Anyone else can agree or disagree. But if you can at least get what I’m on about, I’ll be plenty happy.