Torch Songs: Wicked Game

Chris Isaak: Wicked Game

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As we move through our new theme, it would help to have a definition of the term “torch song”. On the sidebar, you will see “sentimental songs of unrequited love”. Certainly, that’s part of it. But some of the classic torch songs depict a love that is requited for a time, and then lost. Others depict a love that is slipping away, usually because of the misbehavior of the party being sung about. Dictionary.com has the definition as “a popular song concerned with unhappiness or failure in love”, and that covers the range of possible topics better. That definition also says that the term dates from 1925-30, which is earlier than I expected. That means that torch songs predate the big band era. So, stylistically, torch songs begin with the Tin Pan Alley sound and really start to flourish with the big bands. After World War II, things get interesting. Most people would look at the classic crooners of the 1950s, and say that torch songs belong especially to the female contingent of that group. But you also find jazz singers working with small groups, doing material that certainly would qualify. And then there is country music. I would say that the country divas of that period certainly should be considered torch singers as well.

So, is it only a torch song if it is sung by a woman? I would say not. The singer must be the party who is wronged or unfulfilled in love. The fact that more male torch singers can be found nowadays than in the past reflects changes in gender roles in our society.

Finally, this brings me to Chris Isaak and Wicked Game. Musically, this one does not fit any of the classic sounds. Certainly the subject fits, and the song could be arranged to fit perfectly. I can imagine kd lang doing this one with a full orchestra. But Chris Isaak’s original is also a torch song. That’s because of his approach as a singer. We hear that this is an idealized love that went astray, and we hear in his performance the combination of love and hurt that makes a torch song. That’s good enough for me.

Tobacco / Torch Songs: Don't Smoke In Bed

Peggy Lee: Don't Smoke In Bed

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Susan had originally planned on posting a different version of Don't Smoke In Bed this week, but since she never got to it, I'm taking the opportunity to offer my own favorite take on this old torch song.

Nothing against Nina Simone - she's the queen. But I just love the way songwriter Peggy Lee's original vocals grow ever distant and echoey towards the end of the song, as if her voice were fading slowly into the night. It's a chilling treatment of the sparse lyrics, a fitting tribute to the woman that some cite as the world's first truly famous singer-songwriter - and an apt transition into a week of songs that lament unrequited, unfinishable, lost or incompatible love.

Tobacco: Ode to Nic

Pee Shy: Ode to Nic

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As anyone who has been a smoker or known a smoker will tell you, quitting is tough, and you will miss cigarettes for years and have cravings all your life. In many ways, coping with quitting isn't unlike coping with the loss of a relationship. Something that was familiar and comforting at one point is now lost from your life and you now have a void you don't know how to fill.

The Tampa-based band Pee Shy saw this and wrote a song about quitting smoking like an ode to the loss of a guy. In this case, Nic is Nicotine and not Nicholas.

Tobacco: A Small Cigar

Jethro Tull: A Small Cigar

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This one comes from an album called Nightcap - The Unreleased Masters 1973-1991. I assume that it was a demo that was never more fully developed for the full band; it would be more correct to call this an Ian Anderson solo track. However, Anderson thought enough of the song to release it again on a proper album, Too Old to Rock N Roll, Too Young To Die, which came out nine years later. The song is certainly not what I usually think of when I think of Jethro Tull. The arrangement starts with just voice and acoustic guitar. Towards the end, a piano part joins and then replaces the guitar. And that’s all. The lyrics seem to me to be delivered with a wink, telling how a party crasher becomes the life of the party, and what he does when he leaves. It’s worth remembering that Jethro Tull is a British band, and class consciousness is much more pronounced there than here in the United States.

Tobacco: Cigarette Abana

Habib Koite & Bamada: Cigarette Abana

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Lyrically, this little number is a simple morality tale, recounting the story of a boy who is the only one in his circle of friends who doesn't light up. Eventually, in the face of a litany of smoking's benefits - which includes the true fact that a cigarette wakes you up like coffee, and the dubious assertion that with a cigarette in bed, you hardly need a woman - our subject buckles to peer pressure...only to get sick, thus proving the song's anti-smoking message.

Of course, for those of us who don't know french, Cigarette Abana is merely a delightfully bouncy worldbeat hit for Malian star Habib Koite, whose work is as listenable as it is rich in African traditions, instrumentation and melodic sensibility. It originally appeared on Koite's 1995 debut Muso Ko, where it brought him international acclaim and recognition; the afro-cuban arrangement here is a 2001 reworking: no less wonderful, as is the rest of his utterly amazing third album Baro, but perhaps produced with slightly more Western ears in mind.

Tobacco: One Hundred Cigarettes

U.S. Rail: One Hundred Cigarettes

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U.S. Rail were a local New Brunswick, N.J. band from the early Aughts. I never had the chance to see them live, but I became friendly with one of the guys just before the band fell apart. They described their sound as "folk punk for punk folk", but I think "lo-fi indie rock, with occasional folkie touches" is more accurate. Either way, they came up with a clutch of short, catchy songs on their only album, as the banjo-powered "One Hundred Cigarettes" shows.

Tobacco: King Of The Road

Roger Miller: King of the Road

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When I announced this week's theme on our little collaborative's backchannel listserv, I noted that smoking and tobacco references often function as signifiers of class or social status, and as earlier entries have demonstrated aptly, it's true - though of course, as times evolve and smoking goes underground, old songs can take on new meanings, too, changing one-time rebels into more pitiful social outcasts in the eyes of the beholder. But smoking and its references can also signify mood - of post-sexual or post-prandial satisfaction, of nervousness or nerve, and of a dozen more connotive, memetic associations, that live in culture like spores, familiar to us all.

Nowhere do these several functions come together more sharply and effectively than in the dual references to tobacco found in King of the Road, Roger Miller's 1964 country celebration of the free-traveling underclass. First, the notation that our narrator "ain't got no cigarettes", coming as it does at the end of a litany of housing and other household signs which are absent in the life of the titular hobo, casts sharp relief upon the unpinned lifestyle, combining as it does the constant requests to "bum" a smoke we've all experienced in the wild, and the sheer triviality of owning so little that cigarettes themselves fall into the "too heavy to carry" category. And second, the subsequent verse's beginning, with its potent imagery of smoking "old stogies" that the narrator has found, reveals deep truths about the hobo's sense of inner worth incarnate - a king indeed, smoking such high-class rolls, even if his royal trappings are scavenged.

Teddy Thompson & Rufus Wainwright: King of the Road

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The Proclaimers: King of the Road

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As a homecoming - I've been away for the past few weeks, and just returned home today - I've included two favorite versions of the oft-covered song. Teddy and Rufus slow the thing down, and it just sounds good, especially when placed in the context of its origin in the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack. And The Proclaimers' 1990 cover is a bonus I couldn't resist - delightfully accented, proving primarily, to American ears at least, that the sentiment is more universal than you might think.

Tobacco: Perfume and Tobacco

Amos Garrett: Perfume and Tobacco

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If you know the name of Amos Garrett, you may know him as the player of the guitar solo on Maria Muldaur’s hit Midnight at the Oasis. I hope you know more than that, because Garrett has much more to offer. He has done studio work for Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Paul Butterfield, just to name a few. But Garrett also has had a fine career recording under his own name. He has been in a number of bands, large and small, loud and soft. But here we find him singing in a fine and mellow baritone, playing some of the sweetest acoustic guitar you would ever care to hear, and accompanied only by a stand-up bass. That’s all that Garrett needs to shine. Perfume and Tobacco has the beauty of a smoke ring. Enjoy.

Tobacco: Cigarette State

Robbie Fulks: Cigarette State

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The ninth wealthiest state in the union in terms of gross domestic product is North Carolina. They are the largest producer of tobacco in the United States. One of the six most important crops grown by American farmers, the plant is native to the Americas, though it is farmed on all continents except Antarctica. By 2005 tobacco represented 15.5% of the total value of all crops grown in North Carolina, but production has fallen 60% between 1997 and 2003. North Carolina has been one of the centers of the US tobacco industry from production of tobacco, to growing, to its final product manufacture.Ranking first in the United States in the production of tobacco, North Carolina had a 2006 annual farm income of $506.2 million dollars. With that in mind, I would like to present Cigarette State by Robbie Fulks.

Tobacco: We Love To Smoke

Patty & Selma Bouvier: We Love To Smoke

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"We Love to Smoke is a song originally meant for the episode Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious sung by Patty and Selma Bouvier, but it was cut because it did not receive any laughs.

It was to be a parody of the song I Love to Laugh from the film Mary Poppins and also contains a reference to another song from that film, Chim Chim Cherr-ee. The music was written by Alf Clausen and the lyrics by Al Jean and Mike Reiss."

(source)

Tobacco: I Smoke a Lot

k's Choice: I Smoke a Lot

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This song immediately came to mind for this theme for obvious reasons. I've posted k's Choice here a number of times before so I'll spare you their history, but their music just seems to fit the themes often. Lead singer, Sarah Bettens, has a voice that you can believe when she says "I smoke a lot", and despite not being a smoker myself, there is a universal quality to the song that everyone can probably relate to. There's always someone who thinks they need to lecture us on how to properly live our lives and let us know that whatever our vices might be, that we ought to stop, as if we didn't already know.

Tobacco: Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)

Tex Williams: Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)

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Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette) was conceived as a novelty song. Usually, that means that it might sell some, but the song will then be forgotten. Indeed, this is Tex Williams’ only real claim to fame. But the song has endured, and many artists have covered it over the years. Perhaps this is a testament to the talent of the song’s author, one Merle Travis. Travis was basically an unknown when he wrote Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!, but he would later become famous for Sixteen Tons and Dark as the Dungeon. Eventually, Travis would record his own version of Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! as well.

Fade-Outs/Tobacco: My Last Cigarette

kd lang: My Last Cigarette

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I thought if I hurried, I could get the lowest hanging fruit of all for this week's theme.

k.d. lang, an artist who's difficult to categorize (country? jazz? pop? yes!), released an album in 1997 called Drag. The album cover makes a playful, unrelated, pun on the title. Notice, also, the lack of an actual cigarette. This collection of cover songs all dance around the theme of smoking, some of which are more obvious than others – for example, Steve Miller's The Joker is included (I'm a joker, I'm a smoker, I'm a midnight toker… ), as is the Albert Hammond, Jr., tune, The Air That I Breathe.

My Last Cigarette (not to be confused with another song she recorded, I'm Down to My Last Cigarette) has the added bonus of a fade-out ending. W00t!

Fade-Outs: Knockin' On Heaven's Door

Randy Crawford: Knockin' on Heaven's Door

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I've had an utterly craptastic day and need some music to cheer me up. My usual choices under the circumstances are J-rock or jazz. Since J-rockers don't seem to use the fade-out, you lucky folks get a jazz post.

This is the stellar R&B vocalist Randy Crawford, with David Sanborn on sax and Eric Clapton on guitar. The song, of course, is a Bob Dylan cover and fits my mood a bit. Now if you'll excuse me, the pain meds seem to be wearing off, so I'll go dip into the next dose and crank up the volume…

Fade-Outs: Not Fade Away

Buddy Holly: Not Fade Away

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I couldn’t resist the irony of this one. That’s right, the original recording of Not Fade Away fades out at the end. But the song never has. People have done all kinds of things with the song. The Rolling Stones gave it an intentionally muddy production, but with a great harmonica part. For the Grateful Dead, the song became a staple of their live shows, and a frame to hang some of their trademark jams on. There is even an ill-advised version by Diana Ross and the Supremes. And I assume the song is still played by bar bands everywhere.

So it’s surprising to go back, and here just how simple and skeletal the original is. Holly and the band set up that Bo Diddley beat, with no adornment, and they just ride it for just under two and a half minutes. There is barely any room for solos or anything else. Holly and his handlers probably thought they could have a quick hit by following the Bo Diddley beat fad, and that the song would ultimately be forgotten. Maybe someday, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Fade-Outs: Johnny Clegg

Johnny Clegg & Juluka: Akanaki Nokunaka

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Johnny Clegg & Savuka: One (Hu)'man One Vote

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Johnny Clegg is a hero of mine, and not only for his music. In the 70s, he formed the first interracial band in South Africa, with all that entails. For starters, it was actually illegal under apartheid for the races to mingle, let alone form bands. Clegg, a white teen with an unstinting affection for Zulu music, persisted in learning Zulu guitar and dance from black musicians and artists, barely keeping one step ahead of the law. The biography of his early days is absolutely fascinating, describing how their popularity grew by word of mouth and in opposition to the South African government.

Clegg formed two bands: the first, Juluka, disbanded when his co-founder headed back to cattle farming. Clegg formed Savuka soon after. I'm including a song from each group. Needless to say, political themes dominate many of Clegg's songs. The first song I've featured is sung in Zulu, so I'm at a loss about the meaning. The second, though, is mostly English and the message is bold and straightforward. In the silly season of American elections, it's easy to forget the importance of democracy and the critical importance of the vote.

Fade Outs: I Believe In You

Talk Talk: I Believe In You

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I've posted once before about Talk Talk and in that post I mentioned that I never recommend them to anyone. This is true. But if I had a list of the most underrated albums of all time (oh wait... I do) then The Spirit Of Eden would probably top the list. It's one of the most haunting albums in my library.

Fade outs are often cop outs, but there is nothing about The Spirit Of Eden or the featured track I Believe In You that cops out. On the contrary this album represents the moment that Mark Hollis fully embraces his artistic vision. He sloughs his New Romantic pop image and creates a masterpiece of brooding, cerebral post-pop with nary a radio friendly song in the lot.

The featured track is about talking a friend out of slipping back into heroin use, and as always, the cardinal feature of all Talk Talk songs is Hollis's weeping voice.

Fade-Outs: 4th of July

X: 4th of July

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Dave Alvin: Fourth of July

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I've been thinking - and blogging - about fourth-generation Californian Dave Alvin this week, as my family and I head up his native coast for the last weeks of school vacation; if you're a fan, or just a curious kitten, feel free to head over to Cover Lay Down for a few coversongs from his folkier side.

But sifting through the sands of any artist's career pulls up more than coverfolk. And interestingly, though his live version, recorded fifteen years afterwards on Out of California, finds a stopping place for its slowed-down, pensive transformation, Alvin originally recorded this song twice in the same year: once as a solo artist, and once as a member of the LA-based countrypunk band X. Both of the '86-'87 versions are rockers, in the same way that Springsteen was during the eighties, though the solo take is a bit more tejano-country; both fade out into oblivion, fitting both the unfinished emotional distance of the lyrics and the wail and cry Alvin pours through his frustrated and lost narrator.

Fade-Outs: Houses in Motion

Talking Heads: Houses in Motion

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Almost two years ago, our theme here was Tricky Beats, and I did a series of posts on polyrhythm. If you missed it, I explained how polyrhythm works here. In polyrhythmic music, the Western ear does not hear divisions of measures, the way we do with the music we are more familiar with. Instead, there are these multi-measure cycles. The different rhythms all start at the same time, and there are times during the music when they all come together for a brief moment, before flying apart again. The effect is sort of like a musical perpetual motion machine, with each part moving according to its own logic. The resulting sound has the same fascination as watching a high wire act.

On albums of West African music released here in the United States, songs are usually less than ten minutes long. But when these same musicians perform in Africa, a single piece can last a half hour or more. Subtle shifts emphasize one rhythm over another as the music progresses, and the fascination never ceases. I have only read about these performances, but I would dearly love the chance to attend one some day. Talking Heads, with their album Remain in Light, were inspired by the music of West Africa. All of the songs on the album fade out. The songs are short by African standards, but the fade-outs suggest a longer work.

Me Last/Fade-Outs: Oh, Lonesome Me Edition

Don Gibson: Oh, Lonesome Me

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Ray Charles: Oh, Lonesome Me

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Neil Young: Oh, Lonesome Me

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This is a case study in how to make a cover your own. The original was recorded by "The Sad Poet" Don Gibson in the late '50s. Despite its self-pitying lyrics, Don takes it at a fairly sprightly pace, a tactic that no doubt helped make it a country and pop hit. (Having "I Can't Stop Loving You" on the flip side didn't hurt, either.)

In 1962, Ray Charles released two critically acclaimed (and very successful) albums of country songs. The second volume, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Vol. 2, included a his version of "Oh, Lonesome Me". Ray picks up the tempo and gives it a big-band arrangement and a soulful vocal. And like most of his country recordings, it works surprisingly well.

Fast-forward another eight years. At the dawn of the singer-songwriter era, Neil Young decided to include a rare cover song on his own critically acclaimed and very successful album, After the Gold Rush. Neil's version is agonizingly slow, and in a way is a more appropriate fit for the sad lyrics, which themselves are a very good fit for Neil's style. Indeed, so completely does he inhabit this song, it was years before I realized it was a cover. (And when M. Ward and Lucinda Williams covered the song last year, they used the Young version as their template.)

Despite the disparate arrangements, all three of these versions have one element in common: Nobody could figure out how to end the song properly, so they all fade out, making this a good transition post between last week's theme and this week's.