Day 43: Paul McCartney – Ram

After yesterday, just about anything would have been a treat. Living in Lou Reed’s aural hell for a day made me crave something less epileptic-seizure-y. This was good enough.

I’ve never listened to any of The Beatles’ solo work, mostly because I wore out enough Beatles tapes during my childhood that the songs are codified in my brain, and besides that I’ve almost gotten sick of them. I still love The Beatles and enjoy listening to them, but the solo stuff is in some separate category in my mind, and doesn’t feel necessary.

Plus, over the years I have associated the worst song of all time with McCartney/Lennon’s solo work, and have thus assumed that, subtracted from the beautiful equation of The Beatles, the members individually were some sort of perverse music rapists who delighted in ruining every happy memory their voices had ever forged.

So this morning, I started this up — noticing the album was credited to Paul & Linda McCartney, which for some reason made my knee jerk even harder — with serious apprehension, expecting something worse than yesterday. After two tracks I was relieved, to say the least. And then track three came on.

“Ram On” is one of the nicest goddamn songs I have ever heard. I feel like I am making this statement regardless of the context of my recent listening. It is wonderful. Almost every second of it is magical. From the studio chatter at the beginning, to the do-over Paul pulls on the ukelele part, the song seems to happen spontaneously. At the same time, it is lavishly decorated — McCartney paints the back of the soundspace with rich ribbons of voice, and the percussion in the song is all handclaps and whisper-quiet drums that quake with bass. It’s a truly fantastic song, and to be honest it’s almost kept me from even hearing the rest of the album. With each listen I just find myself getting impatient, waiting for it to come back around. And that’s after earlier today when I just repeated “Ram On” for about an hour.

What’s most striking to me is that it sets a number of precedents for most of the indie music I’ve loved in the last year. That’s probably a big part of why I like it so much. The backing vocals, with their unmiked-in-the-back-of-the-room sound and their ethereal tremulousness, are a precursor to the vocal arrangements of Grizzly Bear, and the ukelele part that drives the song could have come off of any Pitchfork top 10 album in the last 4 years. And the rest of the album, too. “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey” plays at Pet Sounds’ “pocket symphonies” in its languid first half, before taking an absurd detour into a medley of almost-rock styles. “Dear Boy” is a nervy, bitter tune that teems with voices, all applied gorgeously and faultlessly. The use of studio effects on this track, as well as most of the album, is a big stand-out here. “Dear Boy” opens with the lead voice and the piano stuffed and compressed into a jar somewhere in the right channel, while in the left channel a lightly-touched conga drum sets the beat and its echo is allowed to ring out, lonely. When the song eventually grows into all of this space that these two effects created, it makes the whole song seem to have a real definable space. The album abounds with clever craft like this.

Which really gets at what’s interesting about this album, for me. For all the schmaltz — which is there — and the grating songs (“Long Haired Lady”, and “Monkberry Moon Delight”, which appears to be some sort of horrific Tom Waits tribute), there’s a “Dear Boy”, “Ram On”, or “Heart of The Country” that has enough great tricks or just plain lovely shit in it to make the whole thing shine. And though at its worst moments the album can be a bit trite (“Heart of The Country”, “3 Legs”), it just sounds so fucking good that the sometimes questionable content of the songs seems kind of beside the point.

And supposedly Linda McCartney was involved in this? I only noticed a female voice on one track. Oh well.

Day 25: The Lemonheads – It’s a Shame About Ray (Expanded Edition)

What a treat. I don’t want to attribute how much I liked this to nostalgia; that seems like it would cheapen the love affair we have shared  all day. Thank god I got this on a day off where I could really sink into it. Straight out of my Walkman circa 5th grade comes a lean slab of joyful, unalloyed pop, taking the crusty-eyed grunge of the time and turning it into something friendlier, more likeable, more chill-with-able.

It’s a Shame About Ray occupies a particular emotional space. Evan Dando’s vocals come off at times as ambivalent, morose, or indecisive, but when layered over the gleaming guitar, it tempers the mopiness with exuberance, resulting in a mixture that places the album in a perfect middle space between each extreme, its perspective accepting of happiness and sadness, and perfectly willing to acknowledge both (if simultaneously).

The album deals extensively in weird relationships, and describes with an understanding eye the turbulence in the spaces where people meet. In song after song, Dando confronts his own aloofness, as in “Confetti” when he sings “He kinda shoulda sorta woulda loved her if he could’ve/He’d rather be alone than pretend“, and manages not to judge himself for the weakness implicit in his bind: that he believes in being fair to this unnamed girl, yet struggles to act in accordance to his morals. That he takes this reflexive reprobation and makes it into an irrepressibly infectious hook shows his mastery of songcraft.

But these binds come from situations that at least occasionally satisfy. “My Drug Buddy” describes a friendship(?) with a girl that hits its stride when the two are doing drugs together, and describes in unflinching romance every moment of their rendezvous; she’s coming over, they’ll stop to use a payphone along the way; her eyes lighting up as she makes a connect; “We have to laugh to look at each other/We have to laugh ’cause we’re not alone.” It’s lovely, and reveals Dando lost in a rapturous love that lacks definition, and that seems lovelier for it. But like the music, this is where he’s most comfortable: when he can just get lost in the indefinite space adjacent a strict boundary. He lusts uncomfortably, on “Alison’s Starting To Happen”, when he finds himself obsessing about a girl as she blossoms into a punk rocker; he loves a virgin girl and comes to find beauty in her decision to remain chaste; and finally, on the excellent “Shaky Ground” he takes a whole-hearted stand behind his love of a (just a) friend, singing “Always helps to have someone else along/But if my girlfriend sees us, she’ll come to the conclusion it’s wrong/Does this mean we’re on shaky ground?/I’m happy when you’re around/So let’s not put our friendship at bay/I love you in a different way.“

“Shaky Ground” is not only excellent for its beautiful acoustic intimacy, where Dando’s just-shy-of-strained voice can be heard in its every breathy shade, but because it segues neatly into the bonus tracks that come with this re-release of the album. The demo versions, one for almost every track, are lo-fi and sound like revised first drafts: the vocals and guitars are in place, and the simple but thoughtful melodies shine without the commotion of the drums and amplifiers. The songs relax, and the lyrics blossom in that grey room-noise space. “Bit Part” goes from its rollicking album version to a dirge, as the line “I just want a bit part in your life/Little more than a cameo/Nothing traumatic when I go“, disarmed of its platonic enthusiasm, reveals a desperate man pleading to be allowed to resign himself to a compromise.