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.

#1225: They Might Be Giants – Snail Shell

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They Might Be Giants’ 1994 album John Henry was the first of the group’s to be performed by a full, rock ‘n’ rolling band, as opposed to the synthesized rhythm section and guitar and accordion performed and arranged by Johns Linnell and Flansburgh on the records that came before. I frequent the band’s subreddit from time to time. A common opinion among users on there is that John Henry is a definite favourite. I think it’s swell. In my mind, you can’t go wrong with any TMBG album, really. ‘Snail Shell’ is the second song on there and also had the great privilege of being its first single, the representative chosen to introduce the band’s new formation and sound.

Fans of They know that the two Johns aren’t your usual songwriters who explore the standard themes in their lyrics, and ‘Snail Shell’ is no exception. As I’ve come to see it, the song is told from the perspective of a narrator who becomes extremely grateful after being helped out of an uncomfortable situation by another person. They want to make it known to this saviour that their act of selflessness is appreciated, and they have a bit of an internal crisis in the process. If I were to describe a real-life situation, think if you did something as simple as open a door for someone and they then continued to thank you and ask if they could do something for you in return when all you want to do is walk on and get to where you need to be. This is the song written by that strangely grateful person.

According to the band’s drummer at the time, there was a lot of hope that the song would match the success of ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’. That tune’s known to be one of the band’s signature numbers. ‘Snail Shell’ not so much. Though I’m a fan of it myself, Linnell’s vocal has this sort of phasing effect that I dig, Flansburgh’s guitar has a scratchy tone to it which makes the sound all the more better when he pulls of those crazy fills and runs, I do have to admit there’s a bit of an creepy feel to it. Think it’s the minor key that’s the catalyst behind it. The music video reinforces it. It doesn’t give much of a ‘first single’ vibe like I’d say ‘Destination Moon’ does for example, or ‘No One Knows My Plan’. Flansburgh had ‘Sleeping in the Flowers’. Probably more suitable choices. The track maybe didn’t bring the commercial success they wanted, but I’ll always be singing along to it. And that’s what this whole thing is all about.

#1224: Paul & Linda McCartney – Smile Away

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Well, I’ve got no qualm in saying that I think Ram is my favourite out of all the Paul McCartney solo albums he’s ever done. Quite funny too because it’s technically not even a solo album, being credited to him and wife-at-the-time Linda and everything. The LP was burned at the stake back when it was released, mainly by critics who hadn’t got over the Beatles breakup and blamed McCartney for it. As the years rolled on, more and more people recognized its quality. I’ve come to think of it as a response to anyone who may have thought his first album was underbaked and lacking of substance. People wanted a bigger-sounding record, so this is what they got, with fuller band arrangements and wilder vocal performances.

‘Smile Away’ is a number on Ram, one which I don’t think people take much notice of. I would guess that’s because of the somewhat inconsequential subject matter. McCartney reminisces about a time when he was walking down the street and a friend of his came up to him and said ‘I could smell your breath/feet/teeth a mile away’. The song’s title is sung in response. And that’s pretty much the whole song. Now, you could take it at face value. But I read an interpretation that said it was about the times when McCartney would just be out in public and people would make fun of him or take slights at him ’cause of the whole Beatles breakup thing and, being the clean-cut, PR man he is, McCartney would just grin and bear it instead of taking things to a physical level. I don’t know if that’s true. But I’ve always thought about the song in a different way since.

Though the song seems silly, the McCartneys and the backing musicians ham things up to make the track one of the most enjoyable to listen to from the album. Paul McCartney puts on his American soul voice, hollering and whooping and laying things on thick throughout right up to the song’s ending where he’s straight up hooting like a monkey. Linda McCartney’s supporting vocals change from “Don’t know how to do that” to “Learning how to do that”, which I think is pretty cool. I initially thought she was just singing wordless phrases. The fuzz on the bass guitar is immense, cutting through the mix and coming in with a vengeance particularly around two minutes and 50 seconds in. The whole affair’s delivered to be this big one-night-only showtime kind of song, which is hilarious considering what the McCartneys are singing about, but it works somehow.

#1223: Kings of Leon – Slow Night, So Long

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It was during the Aha Shake Heartbreak era of Kings of Leon that I properly go into the band, due mainly to the three singles that popped up around those youthful times of 2004/05. But I didn’t get my hands on a physical copy of it until 2008, when I got it as a gift for Christmas. I don’t know what it was about that year that made me request it. By that time, Only by the Night was the band’s latest album which hoisted the group into household names thanks to ‘Sex on Fire’ and ‘Use Somebody’ which were now worldwide hits. I’m going to guess that, even at the age of 13 that I was that year, I was one of those people who thought, “Man… Kings of Leon have changed,” and wanted one of their old albums to remind me of the good times. But that is just a guess, I feel like I might be making that up completely.

‘Slow Night, So Long’ opens the album up, and I’ll straight up say it doesn’t really hold a lot of sentimental value. It was one of those songs where I heard it that first time and knew that it was a keeper, and so it’s been in the library ever since. Unlike the opener on the album before, which got things started quite swiftly, ‘Slow Night…’ builds itself up layer by layer, letting the anticipation set in before the whole band eventually kick into gear. Gotta appreciate that bass guitar hook by Jared Followill in that introduction, it’s the melody of that which Caleb Followill almost mirrors with his vocals and the riff that I think really ties the whole song together. I didn’t know this before typing out, so it’s a surprise to me as much as it might be for you, but the song concerns Caleb Followill’s feelings about a girl younger brother Jared was seeing at the time. He kind of liked her, the feelings weren’t reciprocated. It was a weird thing going on there. And Followill at the end of the song asks where the ‘leading ladies’ can be found, in the search for an emotionally stable relationship. KOL songs in those days were usually about women in some way, but would never have guessed any of that myself.

But as the people who enjoy this song will know, this track has a little surprise for you. The band come to a big finish, but there’s still about a minute and a bit remaining until time runs out. And after a bit of suspense, with Nathan Followill’s last chord still sort of ringing nearing silence, Caleb Followill’s guitar comes in on the right-hand side introducing a completely unrelated chord progression and segueing into the smooth coda to which you wanna grab your partner and slow dance to. Even got a little güiro going on low in the mix there. During this part, Caleb asks the “gold digger mothers” out there if “they’re too good to tango with the poor boys”, which I think could mean anything whilst also being very obvious. And with a nice touch of piano, the whole song comes to its actual close. But not really because ‘King of the Rodeo’ picks up right where the next bar would begin. No time to rest before kicking things up again.

#1222: Interpol – Slow Hands

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Well, this is the last Interpol song that’s gonna be on here. A real shame, to be sure. Some of you may click on the ‘Interpol’ tag at the end of blog, witness the others posts about the band I’ve written on here and come to a conclusion that I might be quite the basic fan of them because they’re all singles. And I wouldn’t argue with you. But I’ve listened through at least five Interpol albums. The band’s first three are the best ones, and the singles are almost usually the best numbers on them. At least to me. And then bassist Carlos Dengler left after the fourth one, and it hasn’t been the same since.

But when the songs are good, they’re very, very good, and this can be said for today’s featured number ‘Slow Hands’ – the first single from Interpol’s Antics, released in 2004. It may have very well be the first Interpol song I’d ever heard too, again, thanks to the good people who were working at MTV2 back in the day. I want to say I may have saw the video a couple times initially, a few months passed, and then for some reason the video started showing quite regularly. That reason turned out to be that the song was being released as a single again over in the UK. It got to a lower position than the first time.

The old family CRT-TV had this thing where the right speaker played much more loudly than the left. And from listening to Antics, I know the interplay between Daniel Kessler and Paul Banks’s guitars are usually the main focus. So I missed out on that for a while. But even hearing the right side, featuring Kessler’s guitar part, it didn’t stop the song from sounding as good as it did. ‘Slow Hands’, I think, is a song about love and all the aspects of it. Falling into it, not trying hard enough to find it, being heartbroken after rejection. I put an emphasis on ‘I think’ because Paul Banks’s lyrics are written in a way that really doesn’t make the subject matter obvious in any kind of fashion, yet they still possess a poetic quality to them. Banks sounds fantastic behind the microphone here too. He does throughout the whole album. The comparisons to Ian Curtis of Joy Division was a huge thing for a while. The reference to a song of that band here may be a joking nod to them. But there’s a particular tone to them on this track that have always been captivating since that first time I heard it.

#1221: Gorillaz – Slow Country

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Moving out of the city and into the countryside is a theme that Damon Albarn explores a lot, at least that I know of from listening to the stuff he does with Blur. The earliest I can think of is on ‘Chemical World’ from Modern Life Is Rubbish in ’93. There’s a b-side of the band’s called ‘Get Out of Cities’, which is pretty self-explanatory. And in 2003, he sings about the country having a hold of his soul and having no town to hide in in ‘Good Song’. I guess there’s something about the natural landscape that interests him. And I’m also gonna guess that it was on his mind again when he was casting off his Blur shackles for a while at the start of the century, started Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, and wrote a song called ‘Slow Country’ that was included on that project’s debut album.

I don’t think it’d be a wrong thing to say Gorillaz gave Albarn a sense of freedom that he probably wasn’t able to fulfil, being in a band with three other guys for a good part of a decade up to the point of Gorillaz’s inception. And with this reinvigoration, he laid out bare his interest in dub and hip-hop that no Blur fan would have guessed existed. ‘Slow Country’ is a track indebted to the former, led by a thick bass line and formed by a generally spaced-out soundscape, reinforced by the windy sound effect sampled from ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials. A lot of the lyrics on the Gorillaz debut, I feel, were mostly written around the music, written more for the sake of feel rather than a narrative standpoint or having a sense of direction. Albarn also found that he could sing in any way he wanted, switching up the timbre of his vocals plenty of times throughout. It’s no different on ‘Slow Country’. Sometimes I think any lyrics site that has the words to the track on their pages don’t have the correct ones, just because of the loose and playful way he enunciates the words.

From what I’ve come to understand after hearing it for so many years is that ‘Slow Country’ may be about Albarn getting out of the city, no matter how attractive it might be with all those vices and all, and focusing on upping his funds and generally getting his life sorted out. It’s quite serious stuff. But with this new Gorillaz project, he could disguise it in a way that made it off-kilter and quirky. He didn’t have to deliver his words as earnestly and could instead joke around and have fun a little. Instead of electric guitars, there’ll be a piano playing a childlike melody. Musical breaks with drifting synthesizers that make you feel like you’re floating in space. And of course those unforgettable “noot noot” vocalisations that remarkably sound very similar to those of everybody’s favourite animated penguin.