‘Til Tuesday accomplished something remarkable: they released three albums, each better and less successful than the previous.

Their first album, Voices Carry, was not that different from other things on the radio at that time. It was a good album with better songwriting than most New Wave. But it was also kind of generic with the production not matching the emotional core of the material. Plus Aimee Mann’s vocals on the album sounded somewhat artificial and very affected.

Welcome Home

Their second album, Welcome Home, went in a very different direction. it was more personal and less electronic. The songwriting was also greatly improved. In fact, I’d say the songwriting is as good as anything Mann has produced since.

The sorta title track, “Coming Up Close,” was a revelation. A repeated theme in Mann’s work is that it’s dangerous to let people know what you feel. This is what “Voices Carry” is about in its most pure form. But in “Coming Up Close,” she suggests that our emotions are all laid bare regardless and being concrete about them only makes our foolishness clear to the world.

Don’t you know that I could make a dream
That’s barely half-awake come true
I wanted to say
But anything I could have said
I felt somehow you already knew.

Everything’s Different Now

The third album, Everything’s Different Now, was intensely personal and sounds more like Mann’s first solo album even though she got a lot of songwriting help including the title track being written by Jules Shear and Matthew Sweet. Mostly, the album is very dark. By this point, Aimee Mann’s themes are pretty clear like the impossibility of wounded people to find happiness together. For example, in “Rip in Heaven” we get:

So long and sorry, darling
I was counting to forever
And never even got to ten.

David Denies

The song that most stays with me over all these years is “David Denies” off the second album. In it, the singer is reckoning with a lover who she knows is about to go back to his ex out of guilt. What I find most interesting about it is that the man will hurt one of the two women but doesn’t see that.

I’ve always thought the song would be more interesting sung by a man with David being bisexual because the song would be richer because of the anti-gay social pressures. But it works great as is.

Welcome Home album cover image via Amazon under Fair Use.

I’ve written before about Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. I particularly like the McGhee song “Rainy Day” (with Terry on harmonica). I’m really taken with its emotional feel, which is different from most songs.

Generally, a break-up song features very pure emotions: sadness, despair, anger. But in “Rainy Day,” there’s a mix of emotions. Certainly, the singer is sad. But he’s experiencing it from a distance. He’s feeling down because it’s raining and his true love left him on a rainy day.

There’s also an implied final scene in the kitchen where “she had two cups of coffee.” That always reminds me of the George Jones’ song “A Good Year for the Roses,” with the lines:

And a lip print on a half-filled cup of coffee that you poured and didn’t drink
But at least you thought you wanted it, that’s so much more than I can say for me

But enough of that. The song speaks for itself. And it is perfect for a rainy Saturday morning.

Image cropped from Brownie McGhee by Michael Bennetts from Nambassa Trust and Peter Terry (broken link: http://www.nambassa.com) via Wikipedia.

If you go by how often it comes into my mind, my favorite song is “If I Only Had a Brain.” It haunts me so much that I broke down and taught it to myself — first on piano and then on guitar. It’s a pretty song with clever lyrics.

Domini Forster

The performance in The Wizard of Oz isn’t that great, however. Of course, I’ve never been a big fan of the film. As a kid, I did not enjoy watching it each year. The witch terrified me and the wizard annoyed me. (Why was the witch real but the wizard a fake?!) And I really didn’t like that whole “it was only a dream” ending. But I did like that dog!

While researching this article, I came upon a very nice version of the song by an Australian singer-songwriter Domini Forster. Her 2017 debut album Raven reminds me a great deal of Jane Siberry’s self-titled debut album.

This is a solo performance of “If I Only Had a Brain” with Forster on ukulele.

Livingston Taylor

One thing you notice with Forster’s version is that she repeats a lot of it. And it is still short. Done straight through, it clocks in at about one minute and 20 seconds.

I figure that is what Livingston Taylor was thinking when he came up with his idea of creating matching songs for the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion. It was released on his album Good Friends.

He does an excellent job of matching the lyrics with clever bits like “I’d be friends with the sparrows; and the guy who shoots the arrows; if I only had a heart.”

What’s more, he’s made the music quite a bit more complex with a smooth jazz sound. I’m very impressed with it, but I actually prefer to listen to Forster’s simple version. I just wish she was doing the extra lyrics.

Regardless, this is a great version.

Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow is in the Public Domain. It is unclear as to whether the press-materials were distributed by a personal publicity agency representing the subject, or if they were distributed by an agency employed to publicize the film, or the first CBS television broadcast of the film, which aired on 3 November 1956.

Tinariwen is a band from northern Mali in the Sahara Desert. They’ve gained a huge following around the world including in the US. In 2012, they won the Grammy for Best World Music Album. To be honest, I don’t even know what “world music” is. It sounds like something I should hate. But I always enjoy Tinariwen’s music. They can produce a groove as well as any group in the world.

The song I’m featuring is “Iswegh Attay.” It is off their Grammy-winning album Tassili. I assume the title refers to Tassili n’Ajjer, a huge national part in Algeria — in Tinariwen’s neck of the woods (or desert).

Joining the group on guitar and vocals is American musician Kyp Malone. The song is written by Mali musician Sanou Ag Ahmed.

Song Meaning

The lyrics to the song are curious but I’m not sure if that isn’t just due to a bad translation. It repeats the line, “I drank a glass of tea that scorched my heart.” So the singer seems to be wounded, emotionally.

But he also expresses regret that he can’t open up to the outside world. And the song ends with a telling comparison:

The lion is intrepid and the frog is vulnerable
But the latter is better at finding the path to water.

He seems to be saying that one needs to risk harm in order to get what they need to survive. It’s striking. I know well the feeling that I must change to make my life better but being completely incapable of it.

Tinariwen Tassili via Wikipedia under Fair use.

Like most things about him, Robert Johnson’s song “Sweet Home Chicago” is a package of controversy. The song has many sources, most especially Scrapper Blackwell’s “Kokomo Blues.”

But John changed the refrain to, “Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago.” And he repeats it several times. He clearly does not mean, “Back to the land of California or to my sweet home Chicago.” This problem is so big that people normally change the lyrics to get rid of all references to California.

The most obvious explanation for this is that Robert Johnson was confused about American geography. But this seems unlikely. His songs indicate that he was a smart and knowledgeable guy. What’s more, Johnson traveled widely — including to Chicago and New York. So even if he didn’t know where California was, he certainly would have known where it was not.

Some have suggested that the narrator is simply meant to be ignorant. That seems a little far-fetched given that Johnson’s songs didn’t seem to go to such extremes of character.

I like to think he just means “anywhere the hell out of the south!” But who knows? He recorded the song in Texas. And I know that whenever I’ve been in Texas, I’ve wanted to be anywhere else.

Image of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings via Amazon under Fair Use.