Monthly Archives: December 2009

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Song of the Day #517: ‘O Maria’ – Beck

Two years after Odelay took the music world by storm, Beck released a low-key, acoustic album that featured none of the kitchen-sink experimentation for which he’d become known. Mutations is a mix of straight-forward country, blues and folk songs (with a tropicalia tune appropriately named ‘Tropicalia’ thrown in for good measure) and it was the first indication of exactly how versatile a songwriter Beck is.

Mutations is a decidedly downbeat album, filled with songs about loneliness and despair. Here’s a typical lyric, from the song ‘Dead Melodies’: “Night birds will cackle, rotting like apples on trees, sending their dead melodies to me.” This isn’t the last time Beck would wallow in beautiful misery on record… it’s something he excels at and would return to on his best album (which I’ll get to soon enough).

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Song of the Day #516: ‘Lord Only Knows’ – Beck

Buoyed by hit single ‘Loser,’ Beck’s Mellow Gold became an unexpected Platinum-selling success, but it was his next album — 1996’s Odelay — that really put him on the map.

Odelay is one of those albums that come along every five or ten years and receive credit for transforming the musical landscape. But I don’t think you can point to a string of artists who picked up the mantle the way you can with Nirvana’s Nevermind or Radiohead’s The Bends… not artists anybody has heard of, anyway. Beck’s fusion of folk, hip-hop, blues, country, you-name-it, felt brand new and defied imitation.

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Song of the Day #515: ‘Loser’ – Beck

Through 514 songs on this blog I’ve somehow managed to feature Beck only once, which is strange because he’s one of the most innovative, talented songwriters and performers in my collection.

I’ve held back from featuring individual songs because I’ve always felt him worthy of a theme week and his number just never got called.

Until now. I’ll feature songs from each of Beck’s nine studio albums over the next two weeks, starting with the hit that first propelled him to fame.

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Song of the Day #514: ‘Day Tripper’ – The Beatles

Here’s the flip side of that double-A single I mentioned yesterday, and while ‘Day Tripper’ wasn’t as big a hit as ‘We Can Work It Out’ (and isn’t as good a song) it’s still an excellent tune.

John was the principal author of ‘Day Tripper,’ though there are conflicting accounts about how much of a role Paul played. It’s funny how the two men are in agreement about the authorship of so many of their songs but once in awhile you come upon one that they can’t seem to agree on. Just a case of fuzzy memories, I suppose, because it’s not like either man needed a bigger piece of ‘Day Tripper’ to solidify his songwriting bona fides.

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Brad Paisley – American Saturday Night

For the longest time I had a knee-jerk negative reaction to anything that even resembled country music… it was the antithesis of the sort of “cool” music I was proud to like.

But then things got complicated, as things tend to do.

First it was the country detours by some of my favorite artists — Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and Elvis Costello’s Almost Blue, for example. It was tempting to dismiss those albums as ill-advised experiments, but tickling the back of my brain was the complicating knowledge that ‘Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You’ and ‘A Good Year For the Roses’ are really good songs.

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