Tag Archives: left

#1410: Big Boi ft. Sam Chris – The Train, Pt. 2 (Sir Lucious Left Foot Saves the Day)

Well, André 3000 eventually gave us his real debut solo album we were waiting for a few years back. It most likely didn’t turn out the way everyone wanted it to. But it’s now something that exists in the world. I haven’t listened to New Blue Sun, but I’m sure it’s interesting at least. I think I’d have to be in a certain kind of mood or physical space to listen to the whole thing. In the world of respective individual releases by he and Big Boi after the splitting of OutKast in 2006, even though the latter has three albums to his name, I think it’s still Big Boi’s 2010 Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty that’s the best out of the lot of them. I was looking back on some posts for blog maintenance’s sake and saw I gave a whole backstory on my experience with that album in the first Big Boi post I did on here. I did have a good time with it back in those early 2010s. I haven’t listened to it fully in a while. But I have my favourite tracks from there, a few of them I’ve already covered, and ‘The Train, Pt. 2’ is another one.

In name only, the track’s a sequel to “Part One”, which appeared on OutKast’s swansong Idlewild. That saw Big Boi reminiscing on his career up to that point, potentially hinting on leaving the rap game. On ‘Pt. 2’, the ‘train’ theme continues, but here the artist provides a bit of commentary on the music industry, progression in technology, and on rappers constantly faking their wealth on the TV and getting the naive youth to believe in it. “Got them bay-bays believing that bullshit”, is how he puts it. On the choruses, Sam Chris expands on the notion of lying and exaggerating events, singing that these kinds of things happen on a daily basis – a never-ending cycle presumably in the music business – but if no one’s hurts by them and it’s all for a good laugh, then it’s all fine at the day, right? The answer should be no. But it is yes in a way too. A kind of negative action causing a positive reaction? I think it’s the ambivalence about it all that’s the main issue here.

I don’t know who came up with the repeating rhythm guitar line that plays almost throughout, but it’s essentially that element which acts as the foundation beneath everything else that happens in ‘The Train, Pt.2’. Sam Chris delivers the chorus impeccably, I remember being instantly hooked to his vocals, and Big Boi rides the beat with his flows as well as ever, even if it took a little longer to fully digest what he was talking about. What I feel I enjoy most is how Big Boi bounces off Sam Chris during the chorus, I think from the second one onward. “Lying to yourself like it really happened (Really happened)”, “Riding on a never-ending train (Choo choo)”, “Pick a stop (Pick a stop), pick a lie (pick a lie)”. You get the idea. These vocal echoes that create this sense of endless motion on the vocal front. “I think I (I think I, He said, he said, he said) Sometimes I think I love it…” A great part there. Could have ended the album with this song, to be honest, but ‘Back Up Plan’ does do the job in bringing things home. Also, the track’s really 4:43 in length with the remaining time taken by an unrelated samba(?)-inspired interlude, ’cause what’s a hip-hop album without a skit or two?

#926: Blur – No Distance Left to Run

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Damon Albarn and former Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann were sometimes labelled the ‘King and Queen of Britpop’ during that time in the ’90s when that whole movement was happening. They were a couple through and through until they broke up in 1998, leaving Albarn traumatised and incredibly bummed out by the ordeal. The fallout of that, plus a dependence on heroin and straining relationships within Blur resulted in 13, the group’s most experimental album, possibly their most sonically adventurous too. It truly goes off the deep end about four songs in and onward. So when ‘No Distance Left to Run’ comes in as the record’s penultimate track, it enforces a sound of band that really has nothing left to give.

The song has to go down as one of the saddest in Blur’s catalogue. It’s about the dreadful realisation that a relationship’s over, one that a lot of years went into with a lot of heart, and tearfully wishing the other person all the best with someone else while you’re all alone and left wanting to die. I may have exaggerated a little bit on that last point. But it’s clear that Albarn wasn’t in the greatest of places while recording this. His trembling vocal take alongside Graham Coxon’s weeping guitar are the highlights throughout. In the band’s 2010 documentary, named after this track as a matter of fact, Coxon mentions that Albarn never told the bandmates what was going on, but it was quite obvious that things weren’t good. So he tried to make a riff and some chord progressions that would match whatever words Albarn wrote down. Fair to say he does them justice. I do particularly like the spacey instrumental in the middle, with those twinkling keys that pan from left to right alongside those smooth ‘ooh’ vocals. I thought it was a choir doing them, but I upon further research it seems they are done by Albarn and Coxon, or Albarn double-tracked. Whatever way, it’s good listening.

I wasn’t properly living around the time of this album’s release or thereafter. Would have been very young at the time. But looking back as a Blur fan and reading up on stuff, ‘No Distance Left to Run’ could very much have been the band’s last track on an album. One on which there’s singing anyway. Going into the new century, it seemed that the group wasn’t sure where to go, releasing a ‘Best Of’ compilation. Then Damon Albarn put more focus on Gorillaz, and forged a whole other path of success. But thankfully that wasn’t the case, and two more Blur albums were made. Let’s hope there’s another soon.

#725: Julian Casablancas – Left & Right in the Dark

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I want to say that I was the first person to get the lyrics for this song on the Internet back in 2009. If anyone remembers the website we7.com, I believe Phrazes for the Young was an exclusive on there before it was officially released a week or so later. Somehow the lyrics for every other song were up on sites already, but no one had taken the time to try and decipher ‘Left & Right in the Dark’. So I did. I listened to this song over and over again, pausing and restarting at various points in order to decipher exactly what Casablancas was singing. I think I did an alright job. I’m very sure that the lyrics I typed up (back a long time ago on letssingit.com) are the ones that are available all over the World Wide Web today. They may have been edited at some point though.

And it was through that somewhat tedious task that I got to know this track. While some may have become sick of the track if they were in my shoes, I found that Casablancas’ song was still bearable. The album was his first solo project outside of The Strokes; while that band is stemmed by 60s classic rock like The Velvet Underground, Phrazes signified an emphasis on glossy synthesizers and drum machines in debt to 80s new wave. ‘Left & Right in the Dark’ makes this apparent right out of the gate with an awesome keyboard riff that is echoed by Casablancas later on in the song.

The track sees Casablancas having almost something of an existential crisis. He reminisces on days when he was a child, when he may have wronged people, generally situations in the past where things were so real. Now they are just moments in time and Casablancas wants the listener to make the most of the time they have in the here and now. Like a lot of Stroke songs, the track is characterised by the songwriter’s classic croon, which seems to sound quite different to how it usually does in his band’s recordings. That might just be down to the mechanical sounding guitars and glossy drums that surround it though.

I listened to Phrazes for the Young fully for the first time a good decade after it initially came out. Wasn’t really for me. This is my highlight from it, still.

My iPod #115: Hope of the States – Blood Meridian

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The Music in My Ears

A blog about music (and sometimes other things).