#87 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“Captain Jack”, Billy Joel

Does anyone write epic seven-minute pop narratives of suburban angst like Billy Joel? Perhaps I have a soft spot for Joel because, like him, I was a Long Island kid with big dreams of the creative life. But it’s also a bit more than that. One of the most contested of contemporary singer-songwriters, Joel’s prolific 30 year run of Top 40-meets-Tin Pan alley throwback-meets-classic rock records has nonetheless produced some of the sturdiest and most popular songs pop radio has seen. Sure, he’s ripped off The Beatles to no end, from harmonic structures to phrasing (then again, who hasn’t, though Joel seems to have been criticized for it more than anyone). Sure he’s descended into some obvious moon-June rhyme schemes that don’t always hit the ear all that elegantly. Yes, there were moments where we wore his pop star insecurities like a defense shield against the rough-and-tumble rock hierarchy that sometimes treated him like just a suburban commuter to the serious big-city world rock-stardom. But for all his critics, he’s lasted longer than most and the fans understand. And they understand very well that it’s because of records like this one: “Captain Jack”—from Joel’s Piano Man album—is a finely etched portrait of suburban malaise, a true-feeling investigation into the complicated rhythms of post-war American masculinity. But it’s also just a terrifically rendered song, almost short story-like, drenched in melodrama and sadness. Set against a typical melodic Joel piano line, with a tension-filled chorus backed by some nice high-stakes guitar work, the lyrics recount some fraught moments in the life of a druggy fallen middle-class kid trying to find his way, blending Joel’s gift for conversational detail (“Your sister’s gone out, she on a date/You just sit at home and masturbate/Your phone is gonna ring soon, but you just can’t wait/For that call…”) with his epic sense of narrative structure. By the time the crashing organs are punctuating the final choruses, bathing Joel’s growling vocals in grand emotion, you can feel Joel reaching out to connect with the listener the way the kid in the song needs to connect with his dealer, for the hopeful headiness of that next high. “Captain Jack” will, indeed, make you high tonight, or anytime you hear it.

Listen to it here:

#88 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“Faith”, George Michael

Who knew what to expect from the former Wham! pretty boy when the shiny British duo—which relied so heavily on a slick Euro take on the Motown sound and big 80s dance pop—split up and went their separate ways? Did we think he’d drop an album of such burnished crowd-pleasing beauty that he’d place 6 singles in the Top 40 and suddenly begin to be thought of as a versatile artist getting mentioned in the same breath as Elton John and Michael Jackson? Some might have but I certainly didn’t, and I was a big George Michael fan. Sure, Wham! had given us some ear-candy treats, none more notably great than the funky, blue-eyed soul of “Everything She Wants”, but I really didn’t think George Michael had more greatness in him. Then I heard “Faith”, and selfish pop fan that I am, I was convinced he’d made it just for me…It had all the things I love in a pop record mix: Acoustic guitar? Check. Hand claps? Check. Ultra harmonic background vocals? Check. Running time less than four minutes long? Check. This was pure pop polish with an edge raw enough to inch the man closer to real, honest-to-goodness, honestly-sincere singer-songwriter territory. Of course it helped that he ripped off the right sorta rock sound, wrapping his velvet vocals and radio-ready lyrics in a tight rockabilly-meets-Bo Diddleyesque swirl of guitar and drum. And, by golly, it didn’t sound like anything else on the radio at the time: This was 1987 remember, and the big radio hits were either big slabs of loud over-emoted pop-rock anthems like “Living on a Prayer” and “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” (both of which I love by the way) or slickly-produced crossover r&b like Whitney’s “So Emotional” and Club Nouveau’s “Lean on Me”. Other than maybe Suzanne Vega’s “Luka”, there wasn’t a lot of nuance in the air; bombast ruled the day. But George seemed to know that a little ditty that sounded slightly old-wave might make him seem slighty ahead of things and still catch the kids where their dancing hips met their romantic yearnings. “Faith” was just sign of things to come.

Listen to it here:

#89 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“I Wish”, R. Kelly

When I interviewed R. Kelly in 2007 about his then-upcoming release Double Up, I was eager to find out how much legendary crooner Sam Cooke had influenced the singer-songwriter, if Cooke—perhaps my all-time favorite male vocalist—had been a conscious touchstone for Kells’ style and approach to vocalizing. This is what he told me when I asked about “I Wish” (to my mind, his most Cooke-ish moment of them all): “I usually don’t hear my influences til the song is over with. While I’m writing I’m so into what I’m hearing on the radio in my head that I’m just, like, ‘Wow I can’t wait to finish this so everybody else can hear what I’ve just heard.’ Once it’s done it’s like ‘Oh man, that riff right there is like some Same Cooke shit!” Then, sitting there in that Chicago hotel room, coincidentally getting his hair braided as we we’re talking, he sings some “I Wish” lyrics—“Come on and braid my hair”—to make his point.  I’ve always contended that R. Kelly was the true songwriting heir apparent to brilliant r&b songwriter/producers like Gamble and Huff and gifted singer-songwriters like Stevie and Marvin. Even when dabbling in over-the-top sex jams like “Bump and Grind” there was still always this incredible melodic sensibility and sturdy song construction that betrayed Kelly’s obvious commercial imperatives. Kelly’s best songs—and “I Wish” is one of his best, one of the best r&b records of the past 20 years—are scarred and bruised paeans to joy and pain, hinting at extremely complicated emotions. “I Wish” wins so much because its sad loping, acoustic rhythms perfectly match the song’s lyrics of loss, blending Kelly’s gift for colloquial expression that doesn’t pander with his dramatic renditions of outsize emotions. There is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality to some moments: the gospel chorus, the kids’ shouts, the expansive and commingled references to the deaths of his mother and two friends which inspired the song. But Kelly somehow balances all of it, using his best Cooke influences and wedding them to his own rugged elegance. The best popular music stands the test of time not just because of a great chorus or fabulous vocals; sometimes good old-fashioned craft can turn a song in a timeless moment. “I Wish”—sad, hopeful, elegiac, and defiantly of the streets—is crafted like the best of them. Mr. Cooke would be proud.

Listen to it here:

#90 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“Nothing Can Come Between Us”,  Sade

The first time I heard Sade’s dulcet tones I was sitting in the nasty kitchen in Perkins Hall at Brown University, with a bunch of other 17-year-old freshmen, trying to act grown.  See, that Friday night, instead of going to the Ratty (the dining hall), we decided to cook in our dorm, so there we were, eating pasta and drinking wine, with the evening’s soignée entertainment consisting of a boombox playing some new artist whose name many of us were pronouncing as if a “Marquis de” came in front of it. It was Sade’s first album, Diamond Life, which took us all by storm that night, and in me, created a lifelong Sade fan. Flash-forward a coupla years and I’m driving back to Providence from NYC with my friend Gordon, and we sing along, many many times, to what would end up being maybe my favorite Sade recording: “Nothing Can Come Between Us”. I think I love this song so much because, not only does it seem to be about a close friendship as well as love affair,  it displays Sade’s playful side without losing the elegance and lush emotion so much of her music trades in. And also (mainly?) because of the incredibly indelible backing vocals of Leroy Osbourne, especially that sexy-as-hell “yeah, yeah” that he interpolates into the second chorus like a suave little eighth-note of love. This song is the closest Sade’s ever come to a full-on duet and with its samba-like rhythm and in-the-pocket bassline it gives the sorta-meandering Stronger Than Pride album a firm and meaty anchor. As beautifully as Sade’s lead vocals caress her typically lovelorn lyrics, there’s also a roundelay of haunting improvs and choral shouts accompanying the vamp that closes the song, giving it even more power and resonance. This is the kind of record you have to play three or four times in a sitting; it makes you happy, it sounds like heaven, it’s sublime.

Listen to it here:

#91 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“Missing” Everything But the Girl

Before hearing this record, I never thought I’d ever dance to a song by Everything But the Girl. One of my favorite bands through college, they were the group I turned to for sad, pretty songs about love, lost and found, when my own inchoate emotions confused me about, well, everything. I luxuriated in their blend of jazz-inflected folk and soothingly melodic pop, appreciating more than anything Tracey Thorn’s sad-as-can-be vocal expressiveness. But then one day in late 1995, I’m in the backseat of a Town Car, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, and suddenly the radio speakers are popping with a familiar-sounding lyric, only this time mixed into the bass and thump of a crazy house beat. I soon found out that EBTG’s little song from their 9^th album Amplified Heart had been re-mixed by legendary club producer/DJ Todd Terry into this scorching-hot house track. Not only had the pulse and tempo of the song gotten bigger and deffer, the lyric, and the plaintive vocal that expressed such outright sexual and romantic longing, seemed to take on even more urgency. Had there ever been a house jam with so much heartache and longing in its grooves? Of course the simplicity of Thorn’s lyric (“like the deserts miss the rain”) made “Missing” perfect for the Terry re-mix—we tend to sing along with the track when we dance, and these lyrics seemed made for sing-along status—and Terry exploited every nuance of the lyric’s hesitant, heartbroken emotion to fill in the beats with extraordinary effects. Then again, Terry had always been adept at taking the drama quotient of any of his deep house cuts as high as the crowd could take it (check out classics like “Bango (To the Batmobile)” or “A Day in the Life”).  And as much as I’d enjoyed the song as the album version’s guitar ballad, it wasn’t until after hearing the re-mix of “Missing” that I started to wonder something about the object of affection Tracey Thorn sang about: who exactly was this “you” who “could be dead” and was always “two steps ahead” of every one else? What kind of number had he done on homegirl to cause her to get on that train and walk down his street, again and again and again?

Listen to it here:

#92 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

“Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To?)” Diana Ross

I recently found out that Diana Ross—in my mind, the greatest female pop star of all time (and before some of you get all up in arms by that statement, know that I put Chaka and Aretha in another category)—has never won a competitive Grammy award. I know someone like me is supposed to be sophisticated enough to know that awards don’t always go to the ones who deserve them, but I still think Diana’s been robbed. Never more so than with this gorgeous ballad—which wasn’t even nominated (though it was nominated for an Oscar). Composed by Michael Masser and Gerald Goffin, “Do You Know Where You’re Going To” is the theme song of Mahogany, Diana’s second film, and in my view it stands the test of time in a way the movie doesn’t, although the movie has a certain melodramatic 70s charm and a rare true black love story that renders it watchable still, after 35 years. Diana’s first number one pop single a few years after “Touch Me in the Morning”, “Do You Know” has a kind of ethereal wistfulness that benefits even more from Diana’s sincerely light touch. No one in the rock era ever wrapped her vocals around orchestral high-pop balladry like Diana Ross, and her ability to sell the lyric—obviously about a protagonist who didn’t have half the drive and ambition Diana does—speaks volumes about both her innate song sense and underrated acting ability. “Do You Know” plays like a sad soliloquy of regret etched with romantic hope, and Miss Ross’s careful but passionately rendered delivery transforms it into one of the most elegant sorrow song you’ll ever hear on the radio. Yes, it’s a Lite-FM staple now. Yes, it borders on the sentimental. But it’s still ear candy of the highest order, performed by a diva at the top of her powers—years before she’d show us just how much more she had to give. There’s a reason Luther Vandross considers Diana Ross an influence: anyone interested in sheer tone could do way worse than study the vocal stylings of Diana Ross.

Listen to it here:

#93 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

#93 “The Reflex” Duran Duran

“Every little thing the reflex does leaves you answered with a question mark…” goes the closing line of Duran Duran’s first Number 1 single in the US. They could have been talking about many of their songs’ lyrics when they wrote that line. And yet in 1984, Duran Duran was the very height of state-of-the-art MTV pop, consumer goods for a consumer age, selling sex and style to a generation of teens who wanted their British crossovers as cute as their parents’ did twenty years before, only this time the mascara was darker, the blush was brighter, and the designer shirts were tighter. Other British bands got more critical kudos—after all, these guys couldn’t be real musicians, could they?; they were the boys who frolicked on yachts and ran through jungles in all their video glory. But as ruthless as the critics were to DD, the Durannies understood: these guys wrote some sturdy songs, ready-made for radio and, as necessary to the times, video, too. (One way to gauge the solid musicianship of DD is this: upon hiatus after this album, half the guys teamed up with Robert Palmer and Chic’s Tony Thompson to form Power Station as the other half got peeps like Sting to appear on their Arcadia album. None of those artists needed Duran Duran for sales or hipness credibility.)“The Reflex” came off the lush Seven and the Ragged Tiger album, following great singles like “Union of the Snake” and “New Moon on Monday.” But the version of the song that exploded was remixed by super-producer/disco-architect Nile Rodgers, a perfect choice for the band. He brought out the ruthlessly dance-y dynamics of DD’s keyboard/bass mix and created a sonic pleasure zone around the boys that matured them just enough without losing their pop-tartness, yet also gave them a muscular-enough sound that made the music absolutely undeniable. There’s a reason this became DD’s first US #1: guys got into the groove and supplemented all the girl-love the guys had depended on for years. Blending Bowie’s way with a cut-and-paste nonsense lyric (that always, nonetheless, made rhythmic sense) with Bryan Ferry’s fussily contoured style warrior pose, Duran Duran made music for the masses that made the masses feel like they were sipping Champagne rather than C&C Cola. Dancing to Duran Duran was like going to the popular kids’ party, where the right clothes and the right touch of “class” meant you were part of the in-crowd. “The reflex” may have been, according to the lyric, “an only child who’s waiting in the park, in charge of finding treasure in the dark,” and Simon Le Bon may have been singing about how he “sold the Renoir and the TV set”—none of which made any actual sense in the world I was living in. But damn if it didn’t sound incredible and get me shaking me my ass while I wore my Walkman all over the place. And the video was a teen-dream in 1984: that waterfall blew kids’ minds…!

Listen to it here:

#94 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

#94 November Spawned a Monster, Morrissey

One of the first singles released by former Smiths frontman Morrissey, this song made me crazy confused the first time I ever heard it, sitting in a café in Soho back in 1990. I couldn’t tell it if it was more of Mozz’s stone-faced allegorizing or a straight-forward story of a love and monstrosity. Closer listens revealed that the galvanic track narrates a sad but ultimately heroic tale of a disabled child that’s meant, in typical Morrissey form, to push buttons, raise questions, disturb and endear. Switching from narrating the tale to actually embodying the “monster” in the title, Morrissey draws pictures of such beauty and sadness, against a swirling guitar-driven beat, that you can’t help but get wrapped up it. I’ve always been interested in the ways in which some bodies get constructed as “monstrous,” as outcast beings that ultimately comment on the “humanity” we all purportedly share. Leave it to Morrissey to envelop a pop song in such heady, thoughtful themes—he is, after all the man who wrote the greatest love song of the 1980s and cast it as a virtual suicide pact. This might not be the single to introduce non-Morrissey fans to the genius of one of England’s (and pop’s) most gifted songwriter/performers, but if you have the stomach for pop songs steeped in the grandly- and gothically-rendered allure of (and intersection of) sorrow and irony, you can’t do better than this ultimately glorious piece of music.

You can hear it here:

#95 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

#95

“Rock the Boat” The Hues Corporation 1974

I love a good metaphor. I love when a lyricist can take an image and imbue with levels of meaning beyond the words of that clever couplet that initially catches your ear. Some songs, however, work a metaphor so hard (First Choice’s “Dr Love”?) you wonder if perhaps the songwriters might be playing a joke on you. This is one of those songs—only thing is this: the melody is so grand and hummable that you can almost ignore the “our love is like a ship on the ocean/we’ve been sailing with a cargo full of love and devotion” thing and just take the ride.  It’s also so amazingly sung, in that early 70s pop/r&b style of lead vocal harmonizing, that the sound sorta carries you along on its discofied rhythms so effortlessly that you’re singing along no matter how ridiculous the words sound coming out of your mouth. I think I first started to love this record when I really clocked Hubert Ann Kelley’s fabulous adlibs: “So I’d like to know where you got the notion,” she sings, elongating “notion” into a multi-syllabic vocal lifeboat. It’s like she’s holding onto the groove for dear life as she rises a tone above her co-stars while the song fades toward its end. There’s something so free-ing and soulful about her vocals you sorta wonder why she doesn’t sing the solo parts.  I guess they had their reasons. I’m just glad the record exists; it gave my little sister Tami and I a song to sing when we did shows for the family back in the day.

You can hear it here:

#96 … SPB’s Top 100 Records

#96 Goin’ Out of My Head, Little Anthony and the Imperials

There’s a reason this song, first recorded in 1964, is one of the most–covered songs in pop history (everyone from Petula Clark and the Zombies, to Gladys Knight and the Pips and Luther Vandross have done it): it is, to me, one of the purest pop songs about unrequited love (with one of the purest melodies) that’s ever been written. It makes the list for that reason but also for more personal reasons, because during my post-adolescent quest for other boys like me, I ran into quite a few kats who led me to singing this song to myself more times than I care to remember.  Thus, as you can imagine, it’s imprinted on my psyche like few songs around. I’ve also always been obsessed with high tenor (almost falsetto) vocals, and the way male singers, by reaching into that upper register, can express a kind of sensitivity and vulnerability not usually allowable in everyday performances of masculinity and milk a tune for all its worth. Pop songs, in my opinion, often work best when rendered in the most dramatic, over-the-top fashion, mirroring the dramatic, over-the-top emotions often at play in the lyrics. I call it Kitchen Sink Pop, when you get a little bit—hell, actually more than a little—of everything, including the metaphorical kitchen sink. Sometimes subtlety isn’t the way, and Little Anthony (and probably Don Costa, who directed the orchestra) knew it better than many: that rapturous recitation of “day and night/night and day” over the glorious blend of strings and percussion and background vocals that closes out this record is like an ecstatic call to passion, a deep-seated need to express (and fill in) the absence that’s come even without an original presence to define its loss. (As an aside: as much as I truly love this record, I’m also putting it on the list to annoy a (young) buddy, who sorta criticized me for adding songs by old 50s singers like Dionne Warwick (!) … Take that, Coke Can!)

Hear the song here:

And just cause I’m in a good mood, here’s another version, for your listening pleasure, by Luther: