When I first went to college, I discovered the album, Randy Newman Live. I loved it and most especially the song “Lonely at the Top.” There was something particularly wonderful and casual about it — just a man and his piano. It effected me in the same way that a lot of old blues does. I like the lack of production. In fact, I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t like music production. It is just a kind of craftsmanship that is designed to hide the fact that the core art is soulless.

The album was recorded at The Bitter End. I remember in 1995, my girlfriend (eventually wife) took me to New York. She introduced me to all of these places that were mythical to me because of the music I had listened to — places like CBGB and The Bottom Line. (The Mudd Club had closed years earlier.) But what I most remember is walking into The Bitter End. That was it?! This tiny hole in the wall?! No wonder Randy Newman Live sounded so intimate; there probably weren’t more than 30 people in the audience. According to Wikipedia, it has a 230 person capacity. I find that hard to believe. Maybe you could get that many people in if you took out all the tables and people stood.

Frank Sinatra and “Lonely at the Top”

Anyway, Newman apparently wrote “Lonely at the Top” about and for Frank Sinatra. Not surprisingly, Sinatra refused to do the song — just as he refused to do any of Elvis Costello’s songs. I think it would be different today. In 1971, Sinatra certainly would have thought that he was making a fool of himself. Today, he would understand that it made him look cool and showed that he was in on the joke.

Of course, Elvis Costello really did admire Frank Sinatra. With “Lonely at the Top,” Randy Newman is firing straight at Sinatra, and I don’t really think he means it in a nice way. But it’s a damned funny song.

In 1970, Randy Newman released his second album, 12 Songs — so titled because they didn’t yet know that a more fitting title would be “Randy Newman’s Second Album That No One Will Buy.” That’s not to say that critics didn’t like it. Newman was spotted as a great talent from the beginning. That’s an interesting thing. In general, music criticism is so much better than film criticism. But that’s a subject for another day. But it didn’t turn him into star. Today, we listen to “Yellow Man.”

12 Songs is a great album. But then that’s generally true of Newman during this period. I can’t find anything in his first few albums to complain about. And that most definitely includes his next (generally dismissed) album, Randy Newman Live. I’ll feature something from it tomorrow.

Yellow Man

The song itself is something that he does a lot: pretend to be an ignorant bigoted person. In this case, he is surprised that “yellow man” believes in the family “just like you and me”! And then it ends with what sounds like a call for segregation, “Got to have a yellow woman, when you’re a yellow man.” But this is how Newman is normally offensive. I always get the idea that he’s trying to be offensive and just using whatever device he can find to get away with it. He certainly isn’t satirizing the ignorance of this kind of racism.

In this way, Newman is more like a comedian than a musician. At the same time, I find that I rather like the object of the song. And there is comedic brilliance in that the singer clearly thinks that he is being liberal and generous. But it doesn’t reach the heights of “Political Science” — which we will get to later this week.

Will pointed out that I hadn’t done a week of Randy Newman. And given that we was a very big part of my life at one time, I thought this would be a good thing. But I figured that I would constrain the choices by only doing offensive Randy Newman songs. Now don’t be smart! I know that leaves a lot of choices, but it certainly isn’t the case that most of his songs are offensive.

In fact, off his first album, Randy Newman, there isn’t a lot of offensive material. But there is a classic of Newman’s own brand of offensiveness: “Davy the Fat Boy.” It starts with the singer talking about how he’s been friends with Davy since they were very young. And Davy’s parents told the singer to take care of Davy after they go. So what does the singer do? He turns Davy into a carnival freak.

Randy Newman World

It’s really horrible. But it is typical of Randy Newman’s wit. The universe of his songs is not a pleasant one. People are cruel to each other. The best you can hope for in Newman’s world is a small amount of pity and the recognition that we are all damned.

Consider the song “Old Man” off his later album, Sail Away. It is a tender goodbye to an old man who is dying — I assume his father. But it is thoroughly mocking. Newman will not allow the old man any of the standard illusions that people use at that time. The only thing that makes the song not completely horrific is the understanding that the singer will face exactly the same thing soon enough.

“Davy the Fat Boy” works on a whole other level. Maybe it is the case that the singer is doing right by Davy. If there weren’t a good deal vagueness, it wouldn’t be a Randy Newman song.

On the other hand, if you want to get an idea of the sadness that underlies everything Newman did, you can listen to I Think It’s Going To Rain Today.

Today we are going to listen to yet another band that is kinda sorta sadcore: Slumber Party. To be honest, what they sound most like to me is an all female version of the Velvet Underground — but really, with better musicianship — at least compared to the early albums. And even though Wikipedia says the band is still together, I find no real evidence of this fact. Their last album was Musik in 2006.

Thank God we are at the end of our sadcore week. I’m not saying that because the music is bad. I’ve loved all this music. But it’s frustrating. To begin with, it is, as I’ve discussed, an ill defined term. But it’s also the case that there just aren’t as many sadcore bands as I had thought. And that is itself sad. You would think there would be. There are a lot of depressed musicians out there.

The reason there probably aren’t more people doing this kind of music is because it’s a lot harder than it seems. One of the things that ties these bands together is their control of the mood of the songs. Other kinds of bands can just do whatever it is that they like. But even when American Music Club was being funny, they did it in their usual “Eeyore makes a joke” way.

Is Slumber Party Really Sadcore?

Today, we are going to listen to Slumber Party’s song “I’m Not Sad” off their 2001 album, Psychedelicate. Maybe it is more correct to call it slowcore rather than sadcore. It’s an uplifting song in a way. A relationship is over, but the guy was alright when they were together. And that’s why she’s not sad. Except that she starts the song by noting that she is sad. So it seems more one of those things where you try to convince yourself intellectually that you don’t feel the way you clearly do. It’s a beautiful song:

Early Day Miners are not a sadcore band. They aren’t even close. So why am I featuring them? Well, their first album, Placer Found, is a wonderful example of sadcore. It isn’t that the music itself is sad. But if you are at home with little to do, and it is drizzling outside, this album is the soundtrack of your day. That’s especially true of today’s song, “East Berlin at Night.”

Early Day Miners are also known as a Shoegazing band. That’s another ill defined term. But you get the idea. And that’s well on display in this song. “East Berlin at Night” never mentions Berlin or Germany. I can take the song in one of two ways. I can see it in a political light. There’s that Life Magazine cover with the sailor kissing the nurse the day that Japan surrendered. Somehow, to me, the defeat of Germany (two weeks later) always brings to mind Time Square at night. And the resolution of things in Europe was a mess. So New York and East Germany are very much linked.

But I tend to think that the song is more personal. Watching the snow pile up outside in New York makes the singer feel cut off, just as East Berlin was as a result of World War II. Not that it matters. It is, like most sadcore, more evocative than concrete. And what it evokes in me is not depression but a mild melancholy — the feeling that something is not quite right in the universe, or at least my little corner of it. It isn’t a bad feeling. But it does seem somewhat silly when the sun comes out. It’s definitely music for rain days and late nights.

Is Hood a sadcore band? I don’t know. Like I implied before: its too eccentric a concept to be clearly defined. In addition, I’ve come to think that there aren’t so much sadcore bands as there are sadcore songs — even albums. I mean, listen to American Music Club’s song Can You Help Me. Sure, the lyrics are depressing, “A century of my tears wouldn’t even fill a thimble.” Yet I don’t know of a song that makes me feel better. The whole refrain is, “Can you help me to believe?” Today, we listen to Hood’s not at all uplifting “Branches Bare.”

“Branches Bare” is off their fifth studio album, Cold House. What’s unusual about them is that while mostly, sadcore comes at music from a kind of folk perspective, Hood is essentially an electronic band. Sure, they are usually pretty down. But you know they not only listened to Kraftwerk, they also really liked it. To me, Kraftwerk was one of those bands that was clearly good and interesting and all of that — but which I just hated listening to.

Branches Bare Analysis

The song has a sorta kinda rap section toward the end of the song. It’s interesting, but doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The rest of the song couldn’t be clearer. Some people are going through the house and all the stuff left by a recently dead person. It’s a reflection on the meaning of our lives. One of the people asks the other:

Sad to say, yes. I’ve thought about this a lot. I have no children. I will never have any. In a century, one of my distant relatives will dig into the family history as people do. And they will say, “There was this curious fellow — wrote some odd books — quite the eccentric it seems like.” And that will be it. That will be my legacy. But don’t misunderstand: it thrills me to think that someone might look back and know that there was this curious fellow. When you get right down to it, that’s all I’ve ever expected from life.

Cat Power sounds like the name of a band, but it is actually the moniker of Chan Marshall. She is remarkable because, well, she’s really great. But also because she’s a woman, as the pronoun implies. She’s also had far more popular success than the other bands we’ve been listening to.

Her work is quite varied. You certainly couldn’t say that her style was sadcore. Then again, as I go through this week, I realize that it is’t pretty hard to say what the hell sadcore is. I listen to a lot of bands that get the label, and I don’t too much buy it. Truthfully, the only bands I feel really good about using the moniker on are the three featured thus far: American Music Club, Codeine, and Red House Painters.

But there is no doubt that Cat Power is sad. She’s had major problems with alcohol overuse and at least one psychotic breakdown. I don’t mean to be cavalier, but that kind of thing definitely goes along with this kind of music. When you think of rockers drinking, you think of parties and generally an extroverted experience. When you think of Mark Eitzel or Cat Power, you imagine them alone and lost in their dark thoughts.

The song for today comes off Cat Power’s four album, Moon Pix — which is widely considered her masterpiece. The album isn’t a total downer at all. Of course, you could say that of the other acts. But I’ve picked one that is weirdly down, “Colors and the Kids.” It’s hard to say what it is about. It’s just short of hopeful. Like so much of her work, it sounds like a cry for help. It is highly evocative, but other than that she is managing to hang on for one or another reasons, I can’t say.

Today we move back to San Francisco from New York with Red House Painters. They were a longer-lived band than American Music Club and Codeine, and generally less “slit your wrists” music. That’s especially true in their later years (they stayed together for over a decade). But their first album, Down Colorful Hill — wow. It contains just six songs, with an average length of over seven minutes. And the most upbeat they get is “Lord Kill the Pain.”

My favorite song on the album is “Japanese to English.” It seems to tell a simple enough story. The singer is on a beach on an island off Japan with an older woman (I assume) he’s met. They are intimate, but they don’t speak the other’s verbal language. And it is a lament about this. Of course, one doesn’t need to take it literally. It is generally very difficult to find a shared language in romantic relationships.

I know for me that in relationships, the more I’ve needed to say, the less I was capable of it. When I was younger, I felt very much like Aimee Mann, “Anything I could have said, I felt somehow that you already knew.” When I got older, it became, “Anything I could have said wouldn’t begin to get at what I feel.” And that is with having grown in the ability to express myself. I suspect most people are like that: the better you get at expressing yourself, the more ineffable what you wish to express becomes.

If you like this music at all, you might check out some of the later Red House Painters albums. They get more traditionally folk rock. Check out, Summer Dress off Ocean Beach. But first, here is “Japanese to English”:

Right around the time that people were not buying American Music Club albums, they were busy not buying Codeine albums. I must admit to long having a bit a problem with the band’s name. Look: if you’re depressed, don’t call yourself codeine (a ridiculously toxic substance — far more dangerous than morphine). Be like Nick Cave and Rowland Howard and call yourself something like “The Birthday Party.” Show a little style! It’s like if “Weird Al” Yankovic had a band, it should be called “Slow Motion Suicide.”

Anyway, I think there was something about the late 1980s. American Music Club, Codeine, Red House Painters (probably do them tomorrow) — they all started in the late 1980s. I’m thinking after 8 years of Ronald Reagan and then knowing we were looking at more from George Bush… It was all just too much. I remember. I did canvasing for Michael Dukakis. What a miserable year 1988 was! Now that I think about it, Will and I had a band in 1988, but we didn’t have the talent to actually set any kind of mood. Or sing in tune. (Well, me anyway.) But we did have depressing and angry songs like “Memories of Loneliness,” “We’re Just Waiting for Letter Bombs,” and “Cock in Brain.” They all strike me as hilarious titles now, and I can perhaps be forgiven for having written the first two when I was 17.

Anyway, today we are going to listen to a song off Codeine’s first album, Frigid Stars LP, “Cave-In.” I don’t know quite what it’s about. It seems kind of like the wait for the inevitable break-up. The “cave-in” is the backing down — not allowing it to end, as it must. But I quite like these lines: “Your eyes were lit by fire; The way you tried to smile; The way you couldn’t smile.” Yep. I’ve had that girlfriend several times!

Codeine Relief

If you feel you just can’t go on, here is James Taylor singing You’ve Got a Friend. Although he was likely strung out on heroin when he recorded it. Just saying.

Oh, I know these bands usually hate the label, but let’s do a week of sadcore music. As AllMusic put it, “Primarily an extension of alternative/independent rock, Sadcore is slow, fragile and gut-wrenching music made by and for the depressed.” And let’s start with what I think of as the ultimate sadcore band, American Music Club.

I spent years listening to almost nothing but American Music Club. This was the last couple of years they were together. (They got back together later.) Now they say that depression is repressed anger. That very much fits American Music Club. Some of their music is unhinged like “Bad Liquor” and other of it is hilarious, even if depressing, like “The Hula Maiden.” But most of it is sad at a very deep level.

To give you an idea, we’ll listen to “Blue and Grey Shirt” off their album, California. (Generally a fan favorite.) As far as I know, it is about a friend of Mark Eitzel who had just died of AIDS. Eitzel is, after all, a gay man. And American Music Club was a San Francisco band. And it was 1988. It includes the line, “Now I just sing my songs for people that are gone.” Of course, the song is broader than that. It has the line, “I’m tired of being a spokesman for every tired thing.”

As usual, it isn’t just Eitzel’s writing. His work away from American Music Club (specifically Mark Pankler, known simply as Vudi) is never as good. Even if you couldn’t hear the lyrics of song, you would still get it. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. And just heartbreaking.

If there is to be only one song from Loaded, it has got to be “Rock & Roll.” I’m not saying that it is better than “Sweet Jane.” It’s just that “Sweet Jane” has been so overdone, that I’m kind of bored by it. I still think that the version on Loaded is by far the best. But I’m getting sidetracked.

“Rock & Roll” tells what was apparently a common experience of people living far outside the “big city” hearing rock & roll (or jazz or just about any other kind of music you can think of) and having an epiphany. Life wasn’t constrained the way they grew up thinking. People of my generation had no such experience. Yes, occasionally a great little radio station would turn up. While still in high school, Will discovered KSAN right at the end of its existence. But it wasn’t a mind blowing experience.

But I’m not nearly as excited about much of the rest of the album. I don’t know what “Lonesome Cowboy Bill” is all about. In fact, it’s one of those albums where one side is just great and the other kind of meh. I am kind of amazed to see that pretty much every rock critic around today thinks that everything the Velvet Underground did was a classic. The quality of their work varied widely. And if I have to listen to “Train Coming Round the Bend” one more time, I think I’ll just kill myself.

But “Rock & Roll” really is a great song and this is a great performance of it: