Neil Young Covers: Cortez The Killer

Marissa Nadler: Cortez The Killer

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Carrie Rodriguez: Cortez The Killer

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Built To Spill: Cortez The Killer

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Clem Snide: Cortez The Killer

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There's been a lot of great Neil Young coverage released since the turn of the millenium; of the 200 covers in my private stash, over half were released in the last decade alone. But no single song has caught my fancy more effectively than Cortez The Killer.

Originally released in 1975, with a crying guitar riff that ranked #39 on Guitar World's 100 Greatest Guitar Solos, and later named one of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, Cortez is a somewhat pensive, almost wistful, eminently political, entirely accurate historical recitative for the bulk of its journey.

In the last verse, though, the narrator switches into first person, describing a woman he knows, who's "living there today".

Wikipedia writers cite temples and Cortez' mistress La Malinche (Doña Marina) as the possible subject of these lines. Personally, I think that's a grave misinterpretation of how Young writes.

Instead, I think the woman is real - that the whole story of conquest is revealed as a metaphor in the last few lines, wherein the whole thing collapses back on you like a brick wall, placing the personal in the political in a way that only true genius can. Try it, up against Carrie Rodriguez' alt-country, Clem Snide's angsty whine, Marissa Nadler's echoey nufolk, the heavy jamband rock of Built To Spill - four vastly different takes on the emotional core of the piece - and see what I mean.

Song Chain: Beautiful

Clem Snide: Beautiful (Christina Aguilera cover)

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For me, the song chain challenge is no challenge at all, but rather the way my mind works anyway. I am, after all, the product of the very last vinyl-to-tape generation - and so, letting the mind open to the possibility of the next natural song is merely an echo of an earlier era, spent on the floor at my father's vast and varied record collection, where - in order to ensure that no silence interrupted a good evening of listening, or perhaps merely to make sense of the mix tape creation process - the three minutes listening to one song could be used wisely to search for another, so as to have it waiting for the switch-out with little more fuss than the lift and slide, the slide and drop.

Such quick-changes can come from anywhere, of course - which is to say, most chains, and most mixtapes, do not use the same sort of connection between one pair of songs and the next. Today, for example, we've gone from a titular connection to one of narrative meaning, and an antithetical one at that - for after seeing this afternoon's post of "Oh, Pretty Woman", this song came to mind, mostly, because Christina Aguilera's hit "Beautiful" always seemed like a kind of reclamation of the feminine mind from the objecthood which Roy Orbison's chart-topper imposes on the gender...and Clem Snide's grungy, gender-bent folk rock offers just the right tone of righteous, defiant anger against the femme-flattening two-dimensionality which so plagues the patriarchal society, even today.

Heaven Week: Fontanelle

Clem Snide: Fontanelle

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I don't want to hijack this blog with my personal life, but one of my best friends from High School and College killed himself a couple of days ago. With it being Heaven Week here at SMM, I thought I'd dedicate this Clem Snide tune to my friend, Chris. Rest in peace, brother.

If the world should turn it's back to you
And it seems there's nothing left to do
Then may God hold you in the palm of his hand

Advice: Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances

Daniel Johnston: Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances (original)
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Dot Allison: Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances (cover)
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Clem Snide: Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances (cover)
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Don't let the sun go down on your grievances
Respect love of the heart over lust of the flesh
Do yourself a favor: become your own savior
And don't let the sun go down on your grievances

And when you wake up in the morning
You'll have a brand new feeling
And you'll find yourself healing
So don't let the sun go down on your grievances.

If a severe manic depressive with an unhealthy appetite for Mountain Dew, who is known for such manic episodes as throwing an airplane ignition key out the window while the plane was still in the air, gives you advice, should you take it?

Oft-hospitalized indie musician Daniel Johnston is known for being a serious oddball, an outsider in a world of outsiders, but his lyrics and songcraft are celebrated by a significant slice of music world and beyond – from David Bowie to Kurt Cobain to Simpsons creator Matt Groening, themselves a fairly untrustworthy group of advice-givers. His lo-fi production and wavery falsetto first hit the world through a series of self-released cassette tapes recorded on a $59 boombox; according to Wikipedia, common themes in his music throughout his career have included "unrequited love, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and comic book superheroes...a propensity to proselytize for his conception of Christianity, warning about the devil, and a fixation on the number 9."

Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Your Grievances is one of Johnston's most covered songs, and it's a recognized classic, most recently appearing on the seminal Oxford American annual Southern Sampler CD for 2007; both covers, above, come from double-length tribute albums from a veritable who's who of fringe musicians from the indie world. Personally, I think the titular sentiment is sensible – resolving grudges quickly, and in the light, seems like sound advice regardless of the source. And from there, the song brims with words of similar wisdom, and other suggestions for psychological health, which seem equally sound.

Johnson's background lends an air of legitimacy to the lyrics, too; this is someone who has been in therapy, and knows, intellectually at least, how to keep the demons at bay, even if on occasion, he is known to force others into the shower to rid them of theirs. But Johnston's history, plus a fluidly changing chorus, also flavors this advice with a sinister implications about what the dark might bring. Caveat emptor, as with all advice, and don't say we didn't warn you.