What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Love. The knotted feeling in the pit of your stomach, the release of certain chemicals into your brain causing feelings of euphoria and desire, the inexplicable bond between two people whose side effects include dizziness, nausea, insomnia, impaired breathing, pregnancy and, in extreme cases, death.

At some point in most of our lives we will experience this intense phenomenon which is why songs about being in love, falling in love and falling out of love will continue to be written and resonate with listeners until we finally unshackle ourselves from emotion to create an orderly autonomous society focused on the academic and scientific until it one day heralds our doom and we are forced to send a saviour into the past to rectify our mistakes and adjust the timeline accordingly (see Mark Millar’s Superman Red Son for an inkling of what that could be like!)

So here’s a few of my favourite love songs. Not the break up songs, they can have their own list.

1. Headphones – Slow Car Crash
   Okay so it’s a song about death. It also happens to contain one of the sweetest sentiments ever committed to record. A couple are about to die in a horrific traffic accident and use the last seconds that they have to reaffirm their love for each other. Proof, if proof was needed, that love songs come in all shapes and sizes.
2. The Magnetic Fields – The Book Of Love
   The book of love is long and boring. Forget saccharine love ballads, forget declarations of unrequited love or longing. In one line Stephen Merritt sums up the unspoken truth about true love. Movies and television are lying to you about love but not Stephen Merritt.
3. Björk – Hyperballad
   Being in a relationship is not easy. Hyperballad perfectly captures the internal madness that we put ourselves through in order to be part of it. If you have ever found yourself staving off the madness it is comforting to know that this song is for you.
4. The Replacements – Androgynous
   Who can’t love a song about two people loving themselves and each other despite what everyone else thinks of them? ‘Mirror image / see no damage / see no evil at all’. Isn’t this just what we have all spent our lives looking for? Someone that loves us because (and in spite of) everything that we are? Aren’t we all just looking to be happy in our own skin regardless of the world around us?
5. The Guillemots – Made-Up Love Song #43
   Celebrating the positive effect of love on your own life. Too many love songs focus on ownership (of either the love or the giver of love) whereas Fyfe Dangerfield chooses here to rejoice in being a better man because of it. It’s so easy in love songs to be consumed by the emotion that they become intensely one sided (see The Lemonheads’ Into Your Arms) and while this still falls into that trap it does so with gleeful grace.
6. Elliott Smith – Say Yes
   Okay so this one is a bit of a break up song but it’s so fucking beautiful. It’s the advice that all of us insecure idiots need from time to time, “They want or they don’t say yes”.
   It’s less a lyric than it is a hug.

So there we go. My list of break-up songs will probably be a hell of a lot longer. I’m more familiar with them.

Read into that what you will.

Now go sing one of these to someone you love, or find someone to sing them too. Or don’t. I’m not your dad.

International Women’s Day

It is upon us once again. The day when we celebrate the lives of women from all walks of life and those little shit rags that you went to school with but don’t really talk to anymore post thinly veiled anti-feminist shite on their various social media outlets.

This being a blog dedicated largely to music and the arts, I have decided to celebrate with an inconsequential list of some of my favourite women in music. I’ll eschew the diatribe about how the gender gap still exists as I am a straight white male whose understanding of such things is academic at best. It does still exist, it shouldn’t and that’s where I’ll end  the matter

On to awesome women:

1. Mimi Parker
   To say that Low changed the way I thought about music is an understatement. What they do is beyond wonderful, in my ears, and it hangs on the interplay between Alan Sparhawk and this woman. Have you ever tried playing any of the early Low songs on drums? In time? At THOSE tempos? You get that beat wrong and it all falls apart. She does not.
2. Peaches
   Cos who doesn’t love this woman. Bold, brash, endlessly inventive. Her turn in Chilly Gonzales’ Ivory Tower movie is magnificent and even a cursory listen to any part of her back catalogue will reveal her greatness.
3. Björk
   It’s Björk. What else do I have to say?
   
4. Kira Roessler
   I’m limiting the list to one kick ass bass player. There are so many phenomenal female bass players (Kim Gordon, Kim Deal, D’Arcy, Mandy Clarke) so I’ve opted for the original. Her work in Black Flag alone is enough to guarantee her legendary status but she just won a fucking Oscar for her work on Mad Max: Fury Road.
   
5. Stevie Nicks
   What can be said about Stevie Nicks that hasn’t already been said? Only sweet little lies. But you’ll find none of that here. I grew up worshiping Peter Green and took much less interest in the later incarnation of Fleetwood Mac. Once I had safely removed my head from whatever orifice it was previously inserted, my love for songs like Rhiannon, Landslide and the plethora of hits that this icon brought to life only grew.
   
6. Beth Gibbons
   I remember hearing Glory Box for the first time and not knowing what was going on. The sounds, the pace of the thing, a guy using a wah-wah pedal and not making it sound like Hendrix or funk. At the centre of it all was this voice that wouldn’t leave you alone. It morphed and changed, it soared and dropped leaving me breathless. Let us not forget her oft forgotten record with Rustin Man, Out Of Season. An album filled with darkness and baritone guitars, horns and mystery.
   
7. Joanna Newsom
   SHE PLAYS THE FUCKING HARP! What more do you need? A spell-binding voice and uncommonly wonderful lyricism? Well she’s got that down too. Do your ears a favour and go listen now!!
   
8. Martha Argerich
   Arguably one of the finest concert pianists in the world. Chopin? Sure. Ravel? Not a problem. Tchaikovsky? Rachmaninoff? Piece of cake.
   

So there’s eight for the 8th. There are far too many wonderful musicians to fit them all in. Karen O, Audrey Tait, Sheila E, Jennifer Batten, Joni Mitchell, Shirley Manson, Emma Pollock, Lauren Mayberry, Jo Mango… and that’s with an unfair emphasis on Scottish musicians.

All over the world women are transforming music as they have been for decades. Take a moment to appreciate them then remember that you should be doing that anyway. Not just on International Women’s Day.

But what the fuck do I know?

These photos are not mine. Sorry.