The Free Design - "I Found Love" (1968)

A bias in my aesthetic should be pretty apparent by now: I’m a sucker for 60s pop. This is only the fifth entry here, and the third one to feature an AM Gold track from 40 years ago. I can appreciate almost any genre of music (except rap and country, lolz), but nothing gets my attention quite like lush orchestration, tight vocal harmonies, and complex musicianship; and The Free Design have no shortage of any of that. Now that the bias is exposed, I feel I should say that I’m not just going to focus on any song found on your grandparents’ favorite station; Herb Alpert was good and all, but I don’t think I could say come up with more than three sentences about him, let alone a few paragraphs. “I Found Love,” on the other hand, has something to it.

The first thing that grabs my attention about it is that it’s a love song to love. Never is there a mention of someone else. Who’d the Dedrick siblings fall in love with? Which one fell in love, even? It’s impossible to say, because they’re not as concerned with that aspect as they are with the feelings that are associated with love: the giddiness, the excitement, the sense of adventure and awakening. Perhaps I’m forgetting something obvious, but I can’t think of any other love songs to love. The best I can come up with are songs about looking for love (like Brenda Lee’s “I Want To Be Wanted”). Even “All You Need Is Love” is more didactic than celebratory. By not naming a subject, The Free Design succeed in describing something universal. It’s innocent and genuine, but more than anything else, it’s sincere; I find it hard to critique the song as being sappy or overly twee because it broadcasts such honesty.

I once had a conversation with Travis Morrison while he was selling merch after a Dismemberment Plan concert. He told me that he had just been to an exhibition of Norman Rockwell’s work in DC, and that with all of that work collected in one place, he got a sense that Norman Rockwell was trying to cheer up America throughout the Depression and the wars. He then asked me if I was going to buy anything, and I quickly made an excuse about needing to use the bathroom. My point is, when it comes to shitty years, 1968 was no slouch: The Viet Nam war was raging, Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, race relations were tenuous, The Cincinnati Bengals were formed. Things were touchy for Chris Dedrick, The Free Design’s principal songwriter, too: his cousin was killed in action in Viet Nam and his career wasn’t progressing. I don’t want to speculate on Dedrick’s actual motivations behind “I Found Love”, but an interesting reading of it, much like the Rockwell interpretation, is that it’s an attempt to cheer up himself and the country. It’s a song to remind everyone of better times. The lack of a human subject is a way of suggesting that it doesn’t matter who or what you love, as long as you love. That’s gotta be better than rioting, or at the very least, playing football in Ohio.

Youtube Link: The Free Design - I Found Love

Armand Van Helden - "I Want Your Soul" (2007)

In Dan Savage’s book, The Kid, there’s a scene where he and his partner are about to set off across the country, and Dan puts in a Björk CD. Immediately, his partner groans about how pointless it is to listen to dance music outside of a club. I can’t help but think that his partner’s a bit of a musical moron (can you imagine actually dancing to most Björk songs in a club?), but I used to agree with the general sentiment: listening to music designed to make you dance seems silly when you’re stuck in a chair. Perhaps I should mention the fact that when I thought that way, my concept of dance music didn’t extend far beyond the Venga Boys. It still doesn’t make sense to me to listen to the Venga Boys outside of a club, but it no longer makes sense to listen to them inside a club, either. Most other dance music, though, has been challenging pop’s ground in an interesting way.

See, back in the day, I was a “serious” fan of “serious” music. I liked pop, and I liked artistic statements in music. Dance music had its place, but it wasn’t art: it was hedonistic, good-timey music. I had my head too far up my ass to appreciate the irony. Pop music, of course, has hedonism down to a science: you’ve got the hook, and then whatever verse is concocted to make people miss said hook. Sometimes, if that’s not enough, a pre-chorus and bridge are thrown in to fool listeners into thinking that it’s time for the chorus when it’s still a good 10 seconds away. Musicians can be as eloquent, erudite, and engaging as humanly possible, but if they deviate too far from this form, or if they don’t have a catchy enough chorus, no one will care about them (see also: Momus).

Armand Van Helden understands this better than most of us ever will. “I Want Your Soul” follows the format perfectly and does so with such economy that it’s astounding. The song is essentially based around a ten second sample of Siedah Garrett’s “Do You Want It Right Now?”. Armand takes little more than those ten seconds and crafts a three-and-a-half-minute dance track that includes an intro, verse, chorus and a bridge and sounds as engrossing as any standard pop song. What’s amazing is not only that he’s able to craft so much out of so little without sounding repetitive, but also that when you go back and listen to Garrett’s original, it ends up sounding lengthy and bloated. I don’t care about her prechorus or verse: I just want her to tell me that she wants me so, damn it, and that’s where Armand gets it right. Check it out for yourself: listen to both, and see which would be more fun on a cross-country drive with your same-sex partner to pick up your newly-adopted child. I can almost guarantee that even Savage’s partner would choose the dance music here.

Youtube Link: Armand Van Helden - I Want Your Soul

Youtube Link: Siedah Garrett - Do You Want It Right Now?

Lio - "You Go To My Head" (1980)

Sorry, readers, for missing an update during the busy holiday season. I know how hard it must have been when you realized an update wasn’t coming: after slaving in the kitchen for hours, the meatloaf had gone cold and I hadn’t even bothered to call and say there wouldn’t be a new song review. It was inconsiderate, but I’ve got an entry that will make up for that: the Belgian pop sensation of 1980, Lio.

At a quick glance, Lio’s catalogue seems rife with frivolous throwaways. The songs on her debut address such crucial topics as banana splits, baby vampires, and Speedy Gonzales, but in the tradition of bubblegum pop, there’s a lot of depth to her music. Like the Monkees and many others before her, her silly songs are backed by an impressive roster of songwriters: her first two albums were produced by Telex and Sparks, respectively. And while most of Premier Album, her debut, may be about teenage nonsense, “You Go To My Head” demonstrates a maturity that belies its context on the album.

Before I go on about how amazing this track is, I want to speak for a second about word painting. Word painting is, basically, the art of using music to mirror the emotions or imagery set forward by the lyrics in a song. The example I always think up is Prince’s “Joy in Repetition.” In the song’s narrative, the subject goes to a nightclub, is entranced by the singer, and pulls her off the stage and out the side door to get to know her better. As they head out, it starts to rain; in fact, the line is, “In the alley over by the curb he said tell me what's your name / she only said the words again and it started to rain.” At the end of the line, Prince overdubs himself and adds backing vocals that say “Rain, rain, rain…” The back-ups are meant to further the image of the rain starting to fall, drop by drop. See? Word painting can be as easy as that. Though the compositional technique is almost as old as the concept of setting words to music, it’s hardly used today in an application more complex than making a sad song minor and slow and the happy songs major and fast.

I bring this up because “You Go To My Head” is an amazing example of word painting. Though the music doesn’t underscore the words as precisely as the Prince example, there’s clearly a great deal of thought about the meaning of the song and the emotions behind the lyrics. The song is about the uncomfortable act of falling in love with someone who might not reciprocate your feelings, and the lyrics oscillate between describing the excitement of this new, positive feeling and chiding the narrator for getting caught up in what’s likely to be a hopeless situation. The reverb-drenched keyboards approximate the drunken feeling of stumbling into love, while the throbbing bass provides a sinister anchor to underscore the haunting sensation described in the opening line. Most songs about love only address the positive or negative, but Haven Gillespie’s lyrics remind us that amidst the pleasurable feelings, love, especially when unrequited, can be frustrating if you can’t get your mind off the other person. Telex amplifies this theme with the juxtaposition of these two keyboard lines. As the song progresses, they continue to explore the emotional dissonance by layering a lush orchestra (vaguely reminiscent of the Sinatra version) over the synths, combining the organic with the inorganic.

It’s easier for Telex’s musical take to stand out to a listener than it is for Lio’s vocals. Why? Well, most musical performances of this song in the past have been quite standard and a bit bland, acting only as a vehicle for classic vocal performers. The interpretations have been left up to, say, Sinatra or Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald or any other master of song of the 20^th century that performed this song. It’s possible that Telex upped their game on this track, realizing that they were putting Lio in a position of direct comparison to these greats. Lio couldn’t possibly top her predecessors, so the music really had to shine.

If Lio had no chance of topping the likes of Ella, it’s not for lack of trying. She delivers an interesting and unique take on the lyrics, delivering them as plainly as possible. Her voice sounds matter-of-fact, and not giddy, as she runs through the emotions her object of desire’s making her feel. The chorus of “I say to myself / ‘Get a hold of yourself! / Can’t you see that it never can be?’” makes it apparent that she’s trying to force herself to get over this guy. The only emotion in the song is during the bridge; she sounds positively delighted as she sings “Though I’m certain that this heart of mine / hasn’t a ghost of a chance in this crazy romance.” It’s ironic, and feels as if she’s knows that she’s kidding herself.

As it stands, Lio’s catalog doesn’t seem to be in print in the US. Hopefully, the trendy resurrection of Italo and other synth-heavy music from the 80s might force America to unearth this gem and allow it to shine within the canon of intelligent bubblegum pop.

YouTube Link: Lio - You Go To My Head