Tag Archives: to

#1374: The Beatles – Ticket to Ride

Leave a reply

Just a very small memory I have when it comes to The Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’ is my sister asking me whether it was a song that our mum liked or sung from time-to-time. I replied “No,” and we carried on with our day. I think the song was playing in a very out-of-time ringtone advert which was exclusively based on The Beatles, ’cause it was around that time that the remastered catalogue was being reissued and The Beatles: Rock Band game was hot on the scene. But I’m sure that situation wasn’t the first time I’d heard the song myself. I think its dedicated segment in the Help! film was one of the few Beatles music videos that played on VH1 when there was a Beatlesmania programme on the channel, again because of the Beatles hype in September 2009. I may have also just come across it through watching Help! on Dailymotion or something. It’s all a blur now, it’s been in the psyche so long. I didn’t know it once. I’ve known it for a while now. That’s what this entire blog comes down to.

So, ‘Ticket to Ride’. It was the first single from the band’s fifth album, Help!, released four months in advance of the LP’s arrival. It was also recorded and finished in one day, believe it or not, on 15th February 1965 – worked on in the first recording session the band undertook since releasing their Beatles for Sale album a mere four months earlier. They also started working on ‘I Need You’ and ‘Another Girl’, which would both end up on Help! too. Something must have been in the air in EMI Studios that day. John Lennon primarily wrote ‘Ticket…’. Paul McCartney helped. The song’s known for that kind of herky-jerky drum part Ringo Starr has going on. It’s very effective. Apparently, McCartney told him how to play it. It sort of straightens itself out as the song progresses. Main highlight for me is John Lennon’s vocal, and I guess McCartney’s harmony too. Mainly the melody line, though. I like the way Lennon sounds in a lot of songs he does the lead vocal on. But he sounds very clear on this track, like he’s using all the air in his lungs to deliver the words. He sounds very confident. He kind of flubs the lines at about 1:26 and 2:15, which makes it all the more charming.

No one really knows what this song’s about. Only Lennon and McCartney would, but they both had differing answers regarding the influence. It’s all up in the air. One interesting take, easily viewable on Wikipedia, is that it’s about a girl who leaves a relationship to become a prostitute and have sex whenever she wants. A ticket to ‘ride’. Thinking about the humour shared between the two songwriters, that could very well be the case. My take, the narrator’s sad a relationship’s over and the girl’s free from the shackles of it all. It’s a ticket to freedom. To ‘ride’ is to ‘be free’ in the broadest sense. Sounds a bit melodramatic. It’s a happy-sounding song about a not-so-happy situation. That’s how I think of it, but only when I stop to think about it, if you know what I mean. Otherwise I’m just enjoying the tune in the musical aspect. You’ve got the two main writers singing with each other, George Harrison plays a continuous A-flat note in the verses, the aforementioned drum part, and the surprise double-time ending with Lennon singing “My baby don’t care” until the track fades to silence. It obviously hit the number-one spot in many, many places. Well deserved too.

#1347: James Dean Bradfield – That’s No Way to Tell a Lie

Leave a reply

After finishing what was to be their last tour for a couple years in 2005, the members of Manic Street Preachers took a little break from each other. During that time, drummer Sean Moore… well, no one really knows, but I’m sure he had a good one. Bass guitarist and lyricist Nicky Wire went and recorded a solo album, released in 2006, called I Killed the Zeitgeist. And in the same year came The Great Western, James Dean Bradfield’s first solo project. Bradfield, as many may know, is the lead singer of the Manics, taking great pride in writing the music of the band’s songs alongside Moore. It wasn’t until 2001 that fans got a completely penned Bradfield song, covering music and lyrics, in the form of ‘Ocean Spray’. So how would a whole album of Bradfield-written tracks turn out? I can’t say myself, I’ve never listened to the whole thing. But the one track I know from there, the album’s opener and selected first single, I’ve enjoyed for a very long time. I guess almost 20 years now, ain’t that something?

I saw the video for ‘That’s No Way to Tell a Lie’ once on TV, and it feels like it was never played again. It most likely was. But if that’s the case, I didn’t see it. The video showed up, not on MTV2 but VH2 when that was a channel in the UK. I was sitting on the floor chilling, as you do when you’re 11 years old, watching Bradfield getting dunked into a lake while another Bradfield in shades watches on accompanied by some Asian mobsters while the song played over the top. I didn’t know what was going on. The song sounded all right, though. The chorus where the title’s sung a couple times left a mark. The visual of the mobsters lip-syncing the “Sha-la-la-la” vocals in the break were funny. The video finished, life happened. I’m sure I kept the song in the back of my mind for a while. But then it got to a point where I couldn’t get away from it later on in 2006, because someone at the BBC decided the track would make good backing music for the Goal of the Month competition on Match of the Day. It was like that for a good two seasons of football. Was singing along to it probably every time. So there you go. I was locked in.

I’ve been singing along to the lyrics and enjoying the music to this for so long now, I’ve never thought to go and really dig deep into what the song’s about. I did always like the “I hear you’ve got something to say / But first you need some people to say it to / Just before you rise from the dead” lines. I don’t know just something to the sound of them. But in Bradfield’s words, the song’s about “the push and pull of your head and your heart telling you different, conflicting things about the way you should feel about religion”. Your head saying, “No,” but your heart saying “Yes”. He says so here. I never would have thought that. But I guess mentions of ‘lost souls on a pilgrimage’ and the ‘rise from the dead’ does give way to that context, with the whole ‘that’s no way to tell a lie’ idea being a flat-out rejection of the religious imagery that sways people to believe in it. Or something? Honestly, I don’t know. I just like the song. Knowing what it’s about doesn’t make me like it any less.

#1218: The Futureheads – Skip to the End

2 Replies

Goddamn it, it’s been nearly 20 years since this song came out, and I vividly remember watching MTV2 when its music video was showing on the regular. That places me at the age of 11, nearing the end of my days in primary school. ‘Skip to the End’ was unveiled as the first single from what was going to be the new second album by The Futureheads, News and Tributes. It was something I wasn’t expecting because 1, I wasn’t reading up on music like that back then, and 2, another song by the band had been released some months prior that had been announced as a standalone thing and nothing more. But none of it mattered. The band were officially back, back. And owning the band’s debut album on CD like I did, and still do, it was an exciting thing.

I wouldn’t be able to specifically remember the very first time I watched the video/heard the song, but I do recall at least thinking initially that it maybe wasn’t as immediate as a ‘Decent Days and Nights’ or ‘Area’. The verses hopped along with clicking cross-sticks and stabbing guitar chords. Guitarist/singer Barry Hyde delivers his vocals, unusually without the notable backing vocals that were ingrained in the Futureheads DNA. But then the chorus comes in, those backing vocals arrive with it and everything felt all right again. It took a while to get there, but that familiar Futureheads feeling was established. And after hearing it probably almost every morning before school in that time, it made sense that it would stick in my head and I would add it on a phone so I could write my feelings about it nearly two decades later.

The lyrical matter is pretty simple. The narrator here states that if there was a chance to somehow go forward in time and witness the end of their relationship with someone, they would do so to see if there was any point in starting it in the first place. Whether it’s a happy end or a broken heart is the main factor with which they would make their decision. There’s no answer to how the relationship in question goes because obviously it isn’t something anyone’s able to do. It’s just a song to say if they could, they would. But if the second verse is anything to go by, Hyde sings about “going through the roof” (getting very upset) when his lady makes sense, it may be fair to say that things could be going a little better.

#1191: Ween – She Wanted to Leave

Leave a reply

Before I properly dove into the world of Ween in the autumn of 2015, The Mollusk was the first album I listened to by the band a year and a bit earlier. Like many others out there, I heard ‘Ocean Man’ at the end of the SpongeBob movie, liked it and added it to the old iTunes library. (I’d already known ‘Daisies’, ‘Freedom of ’76’ and ‘Loop de Loop’ by seeing them at various points on the TV, which left me confused because they all didn’t sound they were made by the same people. But this is way besides the point.) ‘Ocean Man’ was the only Ween song sitting in that library for a while. So one day when I was chilling in my uni room, I thought “Why not?” and listened to the record in its entirety. Probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in this lifetime. I was 18 by the time this was going on, but it felt like the album should have been a longtime favourite of mine by that point. Was definitely a “Where has this been all my life?” kind of thing.

How suitable that the last song on The Mollusk is the final one from the album I’ll be talking about on here. There’s not a lot of love for ‘She Wanted to Leave’ that I’ve seen online. I’ve read other people saying that the album should have ended with ‘Ocean Man’, which I don’t understand. I like the song myself, but as an album closer? I think I’d really be wanting more. And ‘She Wanted…’ brings it all home with a sort of unexpected emotional ending. It’s a breakup song, “straight Richard Thompson” according to Dean Ween, but instead of the usual guy-girl clichés, Gene Ween sings from the perspective of a man who’s completely left out to dry and lost for words after their lady’s been wooed away by a bunch of pirates. Left broken by the whole ordeal, he goes straight to the booze and wallows in his misery. Quite the sad way to end what is an incredibly fun album. In fact, the last words “For I’m not the man I used to be/And now I’m one of them” left such a mark initially that the sentiment inspired me to make a post about the best ending lines on an album.

So you’ll notice the song really ends about 2-and-a-half minutes into the runtime. Leaves you wondering, “Well, what else is there?” And a few moments later, these whooshing synths come in – I guess meaning to sound like these ominous breezes in the middle of the quiet ocean – before a familiar melody begins to play. It’s only a slowed down reprise of ‘I’m Dancing in the Show Tonight’, the song that started the whole record off and, by that point, in the closing moments seems so long ago. The little hidden touch puts a feather in the cap of the whole package. This is the way that the album should close out, and it was always meant to be. Clicking on the ‘the mollusk’ tag below will take you to the other songs from the album I’ve written posts for. And if I’d known it when I was doing the ‘B’ section, ‘The Blarney Stone’ and ‘Buckingham Green’ would have had their own articles too. It’s just how these things go sometimes.

#1125: Ween – Right to the ways and the rules of the world

Leave a reply

Maybe the best way to listen to The Pod is through the way its broken up on its vinyl releases. Split up into four sides, having the time to digest one of those at a time with some breaks in between would probably allow a new listener to at least digest the 15-20 minutes that each side of vinyl provides. I didn’t do this. When I was fully on my Ween exploration in 2015, I dove headfirst into the album on Spotify and listened to it the whole way through. All 76 minutes. That first time was a slog. I don’t know if you know, but the album is known for having extremely shitty production, even though a lot of the songs are classics. At least to us Ween fans, anyway. ‘Right to the ways and the rules of the world’ is only the seventh track on there. On that first listen, it felt like I’d been listening to the album for much longer than when the song arrived. And it also felt like it went on for a lot more than the mere five minutes it lasts for.

Now of course I’m used to it all. The track is a slow, slow one though. Coming after the little non-song of ‘Pollo Asado’ (a very popular one for Ween people), ‘Right…’ is what I believe to be a mimic of those old, melodramatic ’70s progressive rock songs by bands who would write about things like folklore or traditions of the past… myths and legends and the like. Gene and Dean Ween take on this melodramatic route, singing about nothing but a bunch of silliness – brilliant imagery though, gotta be said – all of which is crowned by the aloof harmonies that recite the song’s title phrase. “Monsters that trinkle like cats in the night/The cosmic conceiver continues his plight.” Those are just the first couple of lines.

The screeching organ that blares throughout is the melodic linchpin throughout the song, really hammering home that sort of medieval type of sound that I think the song’s going for. Something of a vocal chameleon, Gene Ween puts in another captivating performance. Increasing in intensity throughout, it culminates in the final verse where he lets out a shriek and then falls into a fit of laughter as the instrumental continues. Some people may argue that the song takes some momentum out of the album’s proceedings. Whatever “momentum” that may be, going through this album can feel like being in a state of purgatory sometimes. It’s just as essential as any other track on there, I feel. The production is so murky, you could almost choke on it. But the song at the core of it stands strong.