The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: review

Reviews of books, movies, CDs, whatever.

  • Strangers in a Car (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 16)

    “Strangers in a Car”
    Marc Cohn

    Now we reach the final song of the “car trilogy” (after “Listening to Levon” and “Silver Thunderbird“).  It certainly wasn’t planned to make automobiles the pivot point of my 30-day exploration of Marc Cohn, but it’s worked out nicely.  “Listening to Levon” is Cohn thinking back about a relationship about to end in a car; “Strangers in a Car” might well be that same encounter about to happen.

    There’s a stranger in a car
    Driving down your street
    Acts like he knows who you are
    Slaps his hand on the empty seat and says
    “Are you gonna get in
    Or are you gonna stay out?”
    Just a stranger in a car
    Might be the one they told you about

    This is an unusual second-person song.  We assume that this is not literal truth — that the narrator isn’t watching someone get into a car with someone they don’t know.  The strangers are more metaphorical, of the “Does anybody ever really know anybody?” type.  The driver acts like he knows who she is — he should know.  Indeed, the action is casually intimate:  A car pulls up, a boyfriend gestures for his girlfriend to hop in.  The question is so wonderfully ambiguous.  It could be a friendly welcome, but it seems to contain just the hint of menace.  The driver is forcing her hand, leading her to a choice she might not be ready to make — elsewise, why would she have been hesitating once the car pulls up?  It’s probably no coincidence that, whenever I find myself humming this song, I think the line is “Might be the one they warned you about” (which carries a darker connotation than the actual line).

    Well you never were one for cautiousness
    You open the door
    He gives you a tender kiss
    And you can’t even hear them no more

    I’ve always heard the line as “Can’t even hear him no more”, though admittedly it’s hard to pick out from the vocals. Although the lyric as found online links up to the “All the voices of choices”, I prefer my (mis)-hearing. It underlines the gulf between the driver and his passenger. It’s an almost-cliche moment in a dying relationship, when both parties are going through the motions but aren’t really invested.

    All the voices of choices
    Now only one road remains
    And strangers in a car
    Two hearts
    Two souls
    Tonight
    Two lanes

    I absolutely love this sequence.  Things escalate so smoothy and so naturally.  Now it’s not just the driver whom she can’t hear.  She’s lost the voices of her inner angels, the whisper telling her it can be better, or at least, what it all means.  All her options have come down to the choice she’s made before getting into the car, and now she’s just along for the ride.  The repetition of twoness divides them and makes them separate.  And of course, on a two-lane road, all traffic is headed in different directions.

    You don’t know where you’re goin’
    You don’t know what you’re doin’
    Hell it might be the highway to heaven
    And it might be the road to ruin

    The theme of dichotomy remains, all the futures laid out bare, but the fact of choice mocked:  She doesn’t know where she’s headed, she doesn’t know what she’ll find there.  All she has left is the ride, and when it ends, much ends with it.

    But this is a song
    For strangers in a car
    Baby maybe that’s all
    We really are

    This has always struck me as full of the odd hope and wistful resignation that runs through many of Cohn’s songs.  It’s as if he acknowledges the ending on the way but he absolves her of it.  The song isn’t about the destination; it’s about the ride.

  • Silver Thunderbird (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 15)

    “Silver Thunderbird”
    Marc Cohn

    It really wasn’t planned that this song follow “Listening to Levon” on my countdown, but it’s nice that it worked out that way.

    In “Listening to Levon”, Cohn tells us he was sitting in his dad’s “blue Valiant” but this is the song he really associates with his father.  It’s a very heart-felt piece of nostalgia and, like many of Cohn’s songs, gentle while remaining pop-ish.  Whenever I hear it, I’m struck by how thoroughly successfully it evokes the memory of being a child.  My dad didn’t own a silver Thunderbird (or a blue Valiant — the only car my dad ever purchased new was a 1983.5 Chrysler Reliant K car, notorious as one of the worst cars to ever roll out of Detroit).  But I totally get the vibe Cohn is sending in this song.  There’s pride and wonder and just a hint of loss.

    Great big fins and painted steel
    Man it looked just like the Batmobile
    With my old man behind the wheel

    I just love the line about the Batmobile (even though, of course, the Batmobile is black and not silver  :-P).  That’s exactly what a six-year-old might say describing his dad’s new car. And the pride that radiates through — “with my old man behind the wheel” — is palpable.

    He got up every morning
    While i was still asleep
    But I remember the sound of him shuffling around
    Then right before the crack of dawn
    I heard him turn the motor on
    But when I got up they were gone

    Here too Cohn brilliantly evokes childhood.  Who hasn’t heard their father (or mother) rooting around the house in the early hours, before any children are supposed to be awake?  Who can’t read in there a safe feeling of being provided for?  I can definitely empathize with the thought of jumping out of bed to say goodbye without realizing that, if the motor’s on, he’ll have pulled out long before I get there.  Here is the moment of loss that often informs Cohn’s songs — not teary mourning, but a soft regret.

    I suppose this songs speaks to me because of how and when I lost my father.  By the time the song came out he’d been gone eight years; there would be no chance to sit and reminisce with him.  My memories of my dad are wrapped in the same misty nostalgia that informs this song.  What remain are glimpses and impressions of the man he was, but as a kid I didn’t have the context to weave them into a real understanding of him.  Cohn’s sparse tribute to his dad honors that incompleteness and captures the important parts anyway.  To a young boy, his father is more than a person; he’s the living concept, the very definition, of what it is to be a man.

    Don’t gimme no Buick
    Son you must take my word
    If there’s a God in heaven
    He’s got a Silver Thunderbird

    You can keep your Eldorados
    And the foreign car’s absurd
    Me I want to go down
    In a Silver Thunderbird

     

  • Listening to Levon (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 14)

    “Listening to Levon”
    Join the Parade

    This was the pop song leading off Join the Parade, the first studio album from Marc Cohn in a long time — and the first after he was shot.  This gave it some emotional oomph beyond the song. It’s a warm nostalgic tune which probably helped inspire (or at least reinforce) his desire to visit the songs of his youth in Listening Booth: 1970.

    There are some flourishes I like.  The use of detail — his dad’s “blue Valiant”, his insistent remembrance of Mary’s hair and skin — give it verisimilitude.  The listener totally believes this is Marc remembering and sharing this fond memory of his youth.  Except, we learn later that key details are just made up:

    I changed her name
    To protect the innocent
    I might have even lied
    About the car

    That has got to be one of my favorite lines in music.  It’s so playful and mischievous.  You can just see him grinning a wide smirk at us as he admits up-front the song is a sham.  I even love that he “might” have lied about the car.  We’ll never know.  That line struck me when I first heard it because I had been spending the early part of the song thinking — I kid you not — “I thought his dad had a silver Thunderbird”.  So part of me thought “Ah, that explains it” (as if a person only ever owns one car in his life).

    As is typical, there’s more going on here than just reminiscence.  This month-long exploration of Marc Cohn’s songs has made me aware how very many of them involve relationships past their sell-by dates.  Cohn obviously didn’t stay with “Mary” — he doesn’t even know where she is now.  This courtship ended, and one gets the impression not too long after the rainy night in the car.  Apparently Mary felt his lack of attention.  Now, from the vantage of many years, he’s looking back and feeling regret — not that the relationship went no further, but that the ending of it hurt her, that he hurt her, and probably through accidental indifference more than fiery explosion.

    The whole song is sweet but bittersweet.  Cohn is more than distracted — he’s “lost”.  His willingness to own up to his oblivious mistreatment of Mary (even if it has to be done via a broadcast with little hope of reaching its intended recipient) might be evidence that he has finally found himself, or at least made peace with what he did in his youth.  He wryly notes the best possible revenge Mary could have on a singer-songwriter:

    It serves me right if
    You can’t even hear me singing
    If you tuned me out a long time ago
    And it serves me right
    If you already changed the station
    And you’re listening right now to that old boy on the radio

    One hopes that, maybe, Mary did hear the song, and forgave him at last.

  • Walk Through the World (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 13)

    “Walk Through the World”
    The Rainy Season

    This song holds a special place for me.  Marc Cohn was a transformative album for me — heck, I even considered attending grad school at the University of Tennessee just so I could be “Walking in Memphis” — and so I looked forward with eager anticipation to Cohn’s sophomore effort.  This was both the first single and the first track on the album, so it burst upon me as the first new Marc Cohn I’d heard since the tremendous debut.  It had a high bar to clear.

    The Rainy Season suffered in public estimation from being the followup to an album that won its artist the Best New Artist Grammy.  It had a different style and a different vibe from Marc Cohn, and it didn’t capture the public in the same way.  That’s a shame, because it’s really a strong album with many different nooks and crannies in which to find beauty.

    “Walk Through the World” seems like an upbeat and cheery opener to the album, and maybe the dissonance this causes with the later, darker tunes helped undermine the popular appeal.  In any event, “Walk…” is catchy enough.  It’s a little unusual for Marc Cohn, in that it appears to be about a relationship that’s actually working.  There’s all the pop and hum of a couple in the middle stages of love, past the awkwardness, not yet pulling away.  There’s longing

    I’m sitting in a lonely room without a view,
    Wishing I was there with you instead

    driven by a physical separation

    I’m writing you this letter from some old hotel
    I can feel the distance between us
    From the Spanish Steps to the Liberty Bell
    I know the angels have seen us…

    But there isn’t yet the wistfulness of, say, “If I Were An Angel” or “Shadow“.

    More interestingly, if The Rainy Season is a concept album (and I don’t think it is, but roll with me here), then this is the prologue/overture.  And that’s very intriguing indeed.  For while the song is peppy and the vibe hopeful, there are some dark clouds gathering.  First, although the singer sounds full of love, he has to implore his lover to walk through the world with him; they’re not doing it already.  There’s physical separation that, all too easily, could become emotional distance.    He’s writing not just from “some old hotel” room, but from a “lonely” one “without a view” — maybe the same one where things will fall apart in “Paper Walls”.  He’s wandered all over the world — from Rome (the Spanish Steps) to Philadelphia (the Liberty Bell) — but she’s stuck in New York (where I choose to believe Seventh Avenue lies).  Perhaps most importantly, she is just “hanging by a thread” — that phrase never means anything good.

    Even though he’s in a room without a view, he’s “staring out across the rooftops”.  This means the room has a literal window but metaphorically he’s having trouble seeing — perhaps trouble seeing a future together.  Instead he sees the “writing on the wall” (another phrase whose common usage is ominous). And in what may the most brillant connection, he “hears a little bit of thunder” — a rolling tumult that presages the coming Rainy Season.

    In the end, like many another pop-sounding song (say, “Every Breath You Take” or “Luca”), things are much darker underneath the brightly-speckled breezy chords.  “Walk Through the World” is less a paean to a flowering love than it is a self-consciously desperate attempt to will one into being.  Things are slipping away, and he doesn’t know what more to do but to earnestly exhort his lover to take the next step with him… knowing it likely won’t be enough.

  • Review: Tron Uprising (Soundtrack)

    Tron: Uprising (soundtrack)
    Joseph Trapanese

    This is not Daft Punk.  This is not Daft Punk’s soundtrack for Tron: Legacy.

    Neither of those are bad things.  I really enjoyed Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack and thought it evoked the movie’s themes flawlessly.  But Uprising is its own show and should have its own music.  The needle to be threaded was very tight: The show’s sound had to be compatible with the movie but distinct in its own right.  Joseph Trapanese, who collaborated with Daft Punk on the movie soundtrack, does a great job resolving that tension.

    It doesn’t take long in the first episode to notice that the music was going to stand on its own.  “Beck’s Theme” opens sounding thematically similar to “The Grid”, with synthesized strings that sound almost like wind chimes and then a driving beat underlying a motion motif.  Trapanese’s music is a bit faster, a bit more insistent, which it has to be if only because the format is so much more compressed — 22 minutes versus 127.  The Beck/Tron leitmotif is a bit more open-ended than the Legacy one, a little less resolved.

    There is a progression throughout the first (only?) season of Tron: Uprising.  The music begins as distinct from Daft Punk, almost aggressively so, but hints and flavors begin to bleed through.  As Trapanese can be more confident that he’s carved out his own musical landscape, he can afford to allow more and more elements of the Legacy soundtrack to come through.  This makes a sort of meta-sense, as Uprising is a prequel to Legacy — as the season progresses, we are moving closer in time to the film (even if it’s not really clear how they’ll get from here to there).

    Nearly a third of this album is made up of music from one episode, “Scars”.  In a Joss Whedon show, “Scars” would be the so-called WHAM episode … the one when everything changes and what you thought you knew is no longer true and never has been.  A two-parter, “Scars” revisits scenes from the flashback in Legacy:  It fills in details and adds new texture to Clu 2’s rebellion and shades Tron in a bit more fully.  In fact, this episode gives Tron more screen time and depth than the entire Legacy movie.  It’s also a masterful use of the surprise reveal, when we learn that what Legacy implied — that Tron is defeated by Clu 2 and then becomes Rinzler — does not happen immediately.  We even get a cameo of Kevin Flynn (who only appears one other time in the season).

    Fitting for such an important episode, the middle tracks comprise an epic “Scars Suite”.  It has all the major themes and a grand sensibility to it.  There are a lot of issues wrapped up in the story — trust and betrayal, fall and redemption — and the music is comparably complex.  It is really here, in the “Scars Suite”, that Trapanese rises to the level of his material.  In other places the soundtrack can veer from the grandiose to the merely bombastic, but the suite is sparse and deep.

    Overall, it’s a very satisfying soundtrack to a very ambitious series.  Trapanese does a masterful job connecting to what came before without being overshadowed by it.  One of the reasons to wish fervently that Disney sees the light and renews Tron: Uprising is that we might see further development of the musical themes.

     

     

  • True Companion (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 12)

    “True Companion”
    Marc Cohn

    I’ll admit it — I was very on the fence about including this song.  It’s always struck me as somewhat mushy and it so clearly is “the wedding song”.  It seemed a bit trite to add it to my list, especially in the year when I got married.

    But then I listened to it again and thought about it and realized that there’s a reason it’s so many couples’ wedding song:  It’s a great song for a marriage — and not just because of his “vision of a  girl in white” whose veil inspires trembling fingers.  It’s just so thoroughly earnest about the deep abiding love that the singer expresses.  Annie didn’t even have a veil but I definitely had the trembling.  It wasn’t nerves, exactly.  It was more like I was bottling up the vast energy of all the years to come, the untold sweep of love and all the potential paths we’re going to walk together, all the limitless worlds stretching out from that day.

    OK, so it’s mushy.  But I guess I am too, in this case.

    And maybe what really catches me is what comes after:

    When the years have done irreparable harm 
    I can see us walking slowly arm in arm 
    Just like the couple on the corner do 
    ‘Cause girl I will always be in love with you 
    And when I look in your eyes 
    I’ll still see that spark 
    Until the shadows fall 
    Until the room grows dark 
    Then when I leave this Earth 
    I’ll be with the angels standin’ 
    I’ll be out there waiting for my true companion

    I generally don’t like to quote at length but that just about sums it up, doesn’t it?  That‘s what I’m looking forward; that’s what I’ve been seeking and I’ve been so blessed to find.

     

  • Life Goes On (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 11)

    “Life Goes On”
    Join the Parade

    This is one of those pop songs that have a catchy melody but when you stop to listen to the words, you say, “Wait, what?” It’s a pop song about dying, but it’s surprisingly upbeat. Marc is a little brutal here. Life goes on, no matter what we lose: Elvis, Jesus, your mother, your father, all your siblings. It just goes on. Indeed, it’s a bit relentless and uncaring: It just goes on, oblivious to our tears and our losses and how much it hurts to go on — and it doesn’t even miss a beat. (“Without your children down the line / The drum stays right in time“).  It’s worse than that, actually.  Life won’t even notice when you pass: You might think it’s gonna stop just because you’re closing shop… Life goes on… Life goes on…

    I’d like to say that there’s a hopeful end to the song but really, it’s pretty bleak.  I suppose there’s a comfort to be had in the implacability, the eternal renewal of life, but it’s thin soup.

    Aside:  I generally love Marc Cohn’s songwriting but every once in a while, he puts out a clunker of a line.  In this song, it’s “Without the beggar or the King / Without every living thing. / Yeah, Life goes on.”  Um, without every living thing, life would not go on… there’d be nothing alive.  The line would scan as “without any given thing” and work better logically.

     

  • Perfect Love (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 10)

    “Perfect Love”
    Marc Cohn

    This is another gentle song.  It’s incredibly an incredibly sweet tale.  I have to wonder if a real couple served as a model and if so, who?  It’s not his parents (since we know Marc’s mom died when he was young) and it’s not him (because he would have been 5 years old when “they worked one summer together at the ’64 World’s Fair” and he didn’t marry until 1999.

    By the way, we should take a moment to appreciate the writing in “They met Bobby Kennedy there … it was just before the fall”.  There’s the literal meeting, of course — RFK visited the Fair in late summer and they met him.   But there’s always something bittersweet about the Kennedys in American pop culture, and 1964 is not too long before 1968 and RFK’s assassination … which is a more metaphorical fall.

    It’s also impressive how he sums up a pair of lives across many years using just a bridge and a few lines of verse.  You can see their lives play out like on a home movie — the jobs, the kids, the struggles, the quiet triumphs — and it’s all caught up in “Well, they had their share of hard times too / But whatever they were, they never let it get them down.”

    Then the song ends with its gentle evocation of what, maybe, everyone wants: Their quiet comfort together, holding hands, probably not saying much because they’ve said it all before many times.  This is the “one safe place” he’s longing for — not a where but a who.

  • One Safe Place (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 9)

    “One Safe Place”
    Live 04/05

    This is a gentle song, far from the usual brash rock that marks his other guitar songs.  It’s also one Marc seems to strum in concert himself, rather than leaving it to Shane Fontayne.  As in many other of Marc’s song, there is a palpable sense of longing in this one, but it’s not for a lover or a lost relative.  It’s a yearning for a place, but more than a place — a state of being, a state of grace.

    How many roads you’ve traveled
    How many dreams you’ve chased
    Across sand and sky and gravel
    Looking for one safe place
    One safe place

    This is an ode from one weary traveler to another.  Or maybe from one weary traveler to himself.  Is it a song of admonishment and chiding?  Or of grudging admiration and hope?  Are those roads paths of despair or of homecoming?

    Will you make a smoother landing
    When you break your fall from grace
    Into the arms of understanding
    Looking for one safe place
    One safe place

    It’s “when”, not “if”, you break your fall from grace.  The fall is inevitable; the destination is not.  And it’s not just a fall, or a fall from grace — it’s a fall into the arms of understanding… it’s a leap of faith ending in a catch.

    Oh life is trial by fire
    And love’s the sweetest taste
    And I pray it lifts us higher
    To one safe place
    One safe place
    One safe place

    This is quintessential Cohn:  Life is trial by fire.  It’s never easy and it’s never smooth.  But there’s always hope for love, hope from love.  And hope is all he offers — just a prayer, not a surety, that we can end higher than we began — higher than our fall into the arms of understanding, lifte up by those same arms.

    How many roads we’ve traveled
    How many dreams we’ve chased
    Across sand and sky and gravel
    Looking for one safe place
    One safe place
    One safe place

    (As an aside, I thought I remembered him saying once that this song was commissioned as, or even purchased as, the theme song to a tv show.  But I can’t find anything about that anywhere so I might be making it up.)

     

  • Saving the Best for Last (30 Days of Marc Cohn — Day 8)

    “Saving the Best for Last”
    Marc Cohn
    I missed a day, so this will be quick.  The second song in my list from the incomparable debut album.  I like this song because it is so unconventional.  Not a bit about love, unless you count the line, “When I finally take this journey, I’m going to wave goodbye to her”.  It’s just a story about a guy who met a guy in a cab and heard his unusual philosophy.