Tag Archives: my ipod

#1362: The Beatles – This Boy

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Oh, look at that, another Beatles track. I don’t make up how these things go, I’m just following the list. When it comes to ‘This Boy’, I don’t think I heard the actual Beatles recording first, but rather the instrumental version of it known as ‘Ringo’s Theme’. That plays in the background during a scene in A Hard Day’s Night where Ringo Starr walks around London on his own. You see, back in 2009, you could watch an upload of A Hard Day’s Night on YouTube with no problem, except it was separated into a number of videos because of the 10-minute duration limit the site used to have. But I don’t think it would have been too long after that I did listen to the tune as The Beatles originally did it. Was in my Beatles phase, which if you’d like to know more about I did a whole post on that. Eventually I came round to the Past Masters compilation, where ‘This Boy’ can be found on the collection’s first disc.

That compilation is made up of the singles and B-sides The Beatles released in the eight years they were around for, the first disc containing those from 1962 to 1965 and the second, 1965 to 1970. ‘This Boy’ was a B-side, released as the companion piece to ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – the track that got the band their first US number one and kicked off the years of Beatlemania hysteria. A smart move having the energetic rocket on side of the vinyl and the slower ballad on the other. I’m sure it was a calculated one. They get to show off their range with two very different songs. While ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ has a narrator that’s very much in a relationship, ‘This Boy’ contains a sadder one who wants to be in a relationship again, specifically with the girl they were once with who’s now with another man. ‘That Boy’. The narrator is in his feelings, singing the words he wants to say to the girl, but can’t, watching from afar as she goes about her business. He waits in the wings, ready to swoop in and take her back when ‘That Boy’ messes up, which ‘This Boy’ is convinced he will sooner or later.

The Beatles were usually a very good band on the vocal harmony front, and there’s probably no other song of theirs that showcases those better than this track right here. Well, actually, maybe ‘Because’. But ‘This Boy’ is up there too. John Lennon takes the lower range, singing the main melody. Paul McCartney provides the higher backing harmony, and George Harrison’s bridges the gap in the middle. You just have to listen and admire. Things ramp up a gear when Lennon forces his way to the front with the “Ohh, annnd this boy…” bridge, the big vocal serenade moment of the track, before an audible edit where two takes were spliced together takes us back to the quieter final verse like that moment never happened. The three vocalists repeat the song title alongside a swooning guitar line as it trails off into silence. A nice, little wistful number. George Harrison was a fan of it. John Lennon must have liked it himself, as he tried to rewrite it a couple years later resulting another B-side, ‘Yes It Is’. That’s something for another day. The band play it at the Washington Coliseum in 1964 below. The crowd go wild.

#1361: The Beatles – Think for Yourself

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Seeing as we’ve had a few last representatives on the blog lately, I had the thought the same would apply for ‘Think for Yourself’ on The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. It’s not the case. There are two songs left I’ve yet to cover. Have had a lot of love for the album for years now, but it didn’t start out that way. Back in 2009, when I was going through a massive Beatles discovery phase, it was announced that Rubber Soul was to be one of three full Beatles albums used as DLC on The Beatles: Rock Band, alongside Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. The last two I understood. But being the Revolver fan I was, I didn’t understand why it was shafted for this “Rubber Soul“, which I hadn’t yet heard but thought couldn’t possibly be better. I write all this to say my first experience with the album was, I’m very sure, through watching the Rock Band “dreamscapes” for each song on YouTube. Had to admit, Rubber Soul, solid choice for the game. I’m still Revolver all the way, generally.

Rubber Soul is usually seen as the album where the Beatles turned from boys to men and stepped up their game in terms of songwriting. The Lennon-McCartney train kept on rolling. George Harrison had his imposed two-song per album quota, which started proper on Help!, but the point stands when considering he contributed ‘If I Needed Someone’ and today’s subject, ‘Think for Yourself’, the fifth song on Rubber Soul. In his autobiography, Harrison couldn’t recall much regarding the inspiration behind the tune, but said his intention was to “target narrow-minded thinking”. And it may also have something to do with the British government. Overall, it is about not wanting anything to do with another person, leaving them at that fork in the road where they go one way and you the other because you can’t support the things they stand for. And for a song inspired by those kinds of sour situations, it still manages to be catchy as anything.

For me, it’s all about that fuzz bass guitar, played by Paul McCartney, that plays the role of lead guitar in the track. It was an unprecedented move recording a bass guitar through a fuzzbox, as well as including that fuzz-affected bass alongside the standard one. It’s a process one wouldn’t think twice about now, but in November 1965, this was a crazy, crazy idea. The results are very nice. That downward scale played by the basses during the verses, you’ll know what I mean if you listen to the track, swiftly followed by the emphatic harmonies of the three vocalists during the verses make up the best seconds of the entire tune. It’s a little steamroller of a number. The verse flows into the chorus which flows into the verse, and so on, until it ends. No bridge, no instrumental break. And sometimes that’s all it takes. There’s a 15-minute audio clip of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison recording overdubs. Lennon and McCartney, working on a Harrisong, don’t take it all that seriously. Go ahead and have a listen.

#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 shoo-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.