It’s Jacques Brel’s birthday today. He would have been 91. He has such a hold on me that he was the first person I thought of featuring when I decided to restart Morning Music. But I thought it better to look elsewhere. Then I noticed it was his birthday and I figured it was okay to talk about him.

Brel was quite a successful actor, starring in a number of films. And that’s what really sets him apart as a singer. His songs aren’t really better than those of his peers. But when he performs, it seems like you are living through the story with him. And this is why you don’t really need a translation to appreciate his work.

Mathilde

I am featuring the song that I most associate with Brel: Mathilde. This is probably because the song speaks to me and my history. It is about a man whose ex-lover returns to him. He knows it will turn out poorly but can’t help himself. The song implies that this is not a new thing. She has returned before and he took her back then.

Mathilde is not present for most of the song. Through most of the song, he talks to his mother, his friends, even himself. He works his way from vaguely asking for people to stop him to admitting there is no stopping him to finally welcoming Mathilde with joy.

The refrain is, “Mathilde est revenue.” It means roughly, “Mathilde is returned.” Also repeated is, “Maudite Mathilde, puisque te v’là.” Roughly: “Cursed Mathilde, since you are here.” The second line is sung very differently at the end of the song than it is at the beginning — indicative of the singer’s emotional journey through the song.

It’s all very familiar. And it shows the wisdom of embracing your mistakes if you know you will make them.

Cropped from Jacques Brel by Jack de Nijs / Anefo under CC0.

I remember the first time I saw Bruce Cockburn perform live. It was at the Cotati Cabaret and it was in support for his album, Stealing Fire. The album had been getting a lot of play on AOR stations and I bought it both because it was brilliant but also because I was very focused on the way that US policy was screwing up Central America.

That album featured two songs about this in particular. First, Nicaragua about the efforts to create a decent society by the Sandinista government despite American meddling. Second, If I Had a Rocket Launcher about the military-led Salvadoran government’s attacks on refugee camps.

For his encore, Cockburn said, “A friend asked me to perform this song.” He talked about how he didn’t really want to do it because he was a visitor to the US and he didn’t want to badmouth it. But the audience was fine with it. This was, after all, during the early years of the Reagan administration, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise: Reagan was as vulgar and vile an aberration of the norm then as Trump is now.

America’s Reputation in the World

That song was “Yanqui Go Home.” It wasn’t on Stealing Fire but has since been added to the CD. I present it today because its picture of how America looks to the rest of the world hasn’t much changed: an arrogant and abusive drunk that needs to go sleep it off.

Sadly, I think that Cockburn is far too kind. I don’t see this country as fundamentally good but easily diverted from the path of righteousness. That’s the line we sell to the proles. The people in power in this country understand as well as O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four does: power for its own sake.

The main way that the myth is sold to the people is through the idea of American Exceptionalism. I’m not clear why this ever worked. Every group of people at every time thought they were exceptional. And even here in America, people don’t agree about what the term means. To conservatives, it apparently means that we should be able to act as boors and the rest of the world should roll over for us because of our greatness.

At the beginning of Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler says to his rich southern friends, “Why, all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance.” That sums up the way I think of America. We’ve got a lot of financial instruments and under-paid workers. But what we really have — in such excesses that we will never run low — is arrogance.

And for my life, I do not know why.

Stealing Fire album cover from Amazon under Fair Use.

‘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.

Georges Brassens was a French singer-songwriter from roughly 1950 until his death from cancer in 1981. He was incredibly prolific but almost never performed outside France. So he isn’t as well known here as Jacques Brel even though their careers overlap almost perfectly.

He has a beautiful voice. It reminds me of Roger Whittaker. But Brassens is not pretentious about it. In fact, you don’t get the impression that he even knows what a fine voice he has. Regardless, his focus is on the music and lyrics.

Brassens was diverse in terms of his subjects, so I’d like to highlight two songs.

Le Parapluie

“Le Parapluie” (The Umbrella) is a sweet song about a man who sees a women walking in the rain. He offers her his umbrella and they fool around a bit. But the narrator seems naive like the one in Brel’s “Madeleine.” So it’s easy to see him as deluded. Maybe he’s just thrilled to be anywhere close to a woman. Regardless, she goes on her way at the end.

Brave Margot

“Brave Margot” is one of Brassens’ best-known songs. It’s funny but ultimately heart-breaking and cynical. A shepherdess finds an abandoned kitten, which she breast-feeds. Eventually, all work in the town stops because the men have come to gawk at her.

The shepherdess is naive and thinks they are just looking at the kitten. Eventually, however, the women of the town get angry and burn the kitten to death. The shepherdess gets married in her heartbreak. But the old folk continue to tell the story to new generations.

As with all great art, I don’t think there is a single meaning to this song. It’s funny and sad the way that life is.

George Brassens by Roger Pic — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public Domain.

One of the best things about Randy Newman is that his intent is always clear. When I was 17, I got his album Sail Away. I played it endlessly. It had many of the songs I still think are among his best like “Last Night I Had a Dream,” “Political Science,” “Burn On,” and most especially, “Lonely at the Top.”

That last one was written for Frank Sinatra, and I think he missed a great opportunity to make light of himself by recording it. He would have killed it! Sadly, Sinatra had as much of a sense of humor about himself as Donald Trump.

But arguably the greatest song on the album is the title track. Its conceit is that a typical salesman is making an argument for Africans to come to America for the great life — unstated to be as a slave.

As is typical for Newman, he sprinkles in racist references like “sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake.” And this is combined with weird ignorances like mentioning tigers, which don’t live in Africa.

The song is about more than literal slavery. It’s about the absurdity of the idea of being American. The idyllic life he describes is not just unavailable to the slaves who were kidnapped but also to the entire working class. All of these people labor so the rich can “sing about Jesus and drink wine all day.”

“It’s great to be an American.” And if we just define “American” narrowly enough, that’s true.

Sail Away Album Cover by Reprise Records under Fair use.

Over time, art loses its relevance. Today, people think of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility as a nice romance. When it was published, everyone understood that it was a critique of inheritance laws and the status of women. Additionally, its razor-sharp satire of Romantic affectation has lost its edge to the point where few notice it as anything but a comment of the follies of youth.

The same is true of Scott Walker’s song “The Old Man’s Back Again.” I recently heard the song used in the first episode of the second season of Ash vs Evil Dead. There is nothing clever about its use. Ash goes back home to Elk Grove and we get, “The old man’s back again.” (In it’s defense, the scene is really well directed with the song playing on the car radio, then switching outside showing the city sign as the car passes by and music at full volume.)

The song is off Scott 4 and is “Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime.” It is a reference to the Prague Spring where the newly elected First Secretary of the Czechoslovak communist party, Alexander Dubček, began to reform the country. He and others in the government made a lot of progress in this effort even while maintaining what they thought were good relations with the other Warsaw Pact countries.

But they were wrong and on 20 August 1968, seven and a half months after it began, the Prague Spring ended. The old policies were gradually put back in place and Dubček was forced to resign a few months later. The “old man” Walker refers to is Stalin — or at least his authoritarian policies.

It’s a very sad song. Each of the verses (except the last) is about the hope of the reformers for “socialism with a human face.” Dubček and his policies were hugely popular. And then it all came crashing down:

I seen a hand
I seen a vision
It was reaching through the clouds
To risk a dream
A shadow cross the sky
And it crushed into the ground
Just like a beast
The old man’s back again.

The last verse is told from the perspective of one of the invading soldiers, which I assume is meant to be Russian because the song specifically says he is “Ivan.” (There may be some other significance of this; if so, please let me know!)

But Walker still paints a sympathetic portrait of a young man who is confused and longing:

Devoured by his pain
Bewildered by the faces
Who pass him by.

Scott Walker’s gorgeous voice and the lush production hide just how painful a song this is. But I think that understanding the song in context makes it all the more beautiful.

Sadly, Walker died just over a year ago of cancer at the age of 76.

Scott 4 Album Cover via Wikipedia uder Fair use.