Beautiful Song Of The Week: Recent Episodes

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Paul-Hindemith-Sonata-For-Viola-And-Piano-Op.-11-Nr.-4-In-F-Major_-I.-Fantasie.mp3When I think of music between the two World Wars my mind immediately goes to jazz, which is understandable, but does a bit of a disservice to the classical composers of that time. I haven’t featured nearly enough composers from the interwar period yet; even the big ones like Stravinsky and Prokoviev. All in good time. But a lesser-known (to me at least) voice from between the wars was Paul Hindemith.

Born in Germany, Hindemith was a teenager when World War 1 broke out, and his father died in battle in 1915. Three years later, Paul himself joined the army, and narrowly escaped death a couple of times. The end of the war began a prolific period for Hindemith; the 1920s saw him produce eight operas, four ballets, four orchestral works and countless concertos and choral works as well.

His music was not atonal like some other composers of the time, but it also didn’t rely on a diatonic scale; his stated goal was to free up all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. As a result, much of his music was written without a specified key signature, and it wanders from one tonal centre to another in surprising ways.

As the Nazis came to power in Germany, Hindemith’s music was eventually condemned as “degenerate” and was banned. He fled to Switzerland, and eventually to the US, where he taught at Yale and lived out the rest of his days.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. I love that he wrote specifically for the viola. I’ve already written about the underappreciated viola before; Hindemith really does it justice here.

2. The way the melody is passed between the viola and the piano.

3. That melodic line is so darned catchy and low-key epic. Feels like it could be from a John Williams film score.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking into the whereabouts of your direct ancestors during the 1920s.

Spotify.

The post Week 788: “Fantasie” by Paul Hindemith appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Penguin-Cafe-Ricercar.mp3There are plenty of good Father’s Day gifts out there, and many of them require minimal effort.

Most dads are so easy to please that you can literally (speaking for myself here, but I bet I’m not alone) buy them a couple dozen pairs of socks and they will be genuinely happy.

If you can afford a bit more, the perfect gift is usually not hard to identify. Dad is a sports fan? Tickets to a game. More of a theatre buff? Take him to a show. Got a foodie father? Head to the restaurant he loves but is too cheap to pay for himself.

But what gift do you go for if your dad was an avant-garde musician who created a musical project inspired by a hallucination he had as a result of food poisoning but who died before age fifty?

Well, if you’re Arthur Jeffes, you create a new band committed to playing – and extending – his musical repertoire. I mean, there’s no Hall of Fame dedicated to Father’s Day gifts, but that’s gotta be right up there.

The dad in question is Simon Jeffes, and the hallucination was of a dystopian city in which humanity lived disconnected from each other. Arthur described his dad’s vision like this:

“…there were these blocks of flats where everyone lived and it was a very bleak and grey place. You could look into these different rooms and see all these different examples of a dehumanized existence. So in one room there was a couple making love, soundlessly and lovelessly. In another room there was a musician with an array of musical equipment but he had headphones on and there was no music in the room. And in another room there was just someone looking at a screen, immobile and inactive. In the top corner of all these rooms there was a big malevolent camera, fundamentally a big eye spying on all of them.”

Down the road from this bleak setting was a café that was full of life and music; a beacon of hope that must have seemed to the hallucinating Jeffes like the only logical choice for a meaningful life. It was called the Penguin Café, and he named his band The Penguin Café Orchestra, writing music that he imagined this band would play.

Following the elder Jeffes’ premature death, his son Arthur played a series of concerts featuring his dad’s music. The only difference was that Arthur dropped the “Orchestra” from the band’s original name, going instead by simply, “Penguin Café”.

The Penguin Café grew beyond a tribute or cover band into a project of his own, but the new music he composed remained true to his father’s vision: music of hope and life.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The way it fades in already in full stride, like an idea that was there before you even knew it.

2. The way it oscillates between the first and augmented second degree of the scale. There’s something mystical about an augmented second.

3. The steady tempo and looping eighth notes in the background lend a comforting feeling of infinity.

Recommended listening activity:

Doing something special with your dad. Or even better, something completely normal.

Buy it here.

The post Week 787: “Ricercar” by Penguin Cafe appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Marsipan.mp3In my opinion, marzipan is a bit underrated in the world of sweets.

It’s not a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer like chocolate, or a Halloween icon like gummy bears, or an after-dinner favourite like mint. Marzipan occupies the same tier as, say, licorice. Those who love it, live for it. Those who don’t…find it disgusting.

Furthermore, it’s rare to find folks who like both marzipan and licorice. It’s like Messi and Ronaldo. You’ve gotta pick a side.

I’m in the pro-marzipan, anti-licorice camp, and I’ll tell you why.

First, there’s the holiday connection. Marzipan is the secret superpower in Christmas cake, right between the layer of icing and the cake itself. Licorice has no holiday connections that I’m aware of, and frankly, I’d rather get a stocking full of coal than a stocking full of Licorice All-Sorts.

Second, marzipan isn’t a spotlight hog. Licorice is so full of itself it thinks you’d be happy to have it on its own. Marzipan is modest. It’s a helper, a key ingredient in many chocolates and the aforementioned Christmas cake.

Finally, licorice comes from a plant called Glycyrrhiza glabra which, first of all: ridiculous name. Completely off the rails. But more to the point, doctors have advised that black licorice can cause complications that are “acutely life-threatening” according to heart.org. Marzipan meanwhile comes from the honourable almond, jam-packed with vitamin E, protein, and calcium among much else.

So eat your marzipan. And while you’re at it, listen to Marsipan by Swedish lofi artist Onyx Value.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The guitar and horns are delicious natural ingredients.

2. The bossa flavour is as sweet as sugar.

3. A modest little piano solo in the second minute.

Recommended listening activity:

Splitting something sweet with someone sweet.

Spotify.

The post Week 786: “Marsipan” by Onyx Value appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Marian-Hill-Got-It-Audio.mp3I know this isn’t “make out song of the week” but I just have to share this track because it’s too good. And making out is beautiful in its own way, right? Right.

Seriously- this song by Philadelphia duo Marian Hill is seething with make-out anticipation energy, regardless of your life stage. Remember the beautiful innocence of heading over to a high school sweetheart’s house? Or, twenty years later, the sudden realization that you and your spouse have a weekend without the kids?

That’s a beautiful thing, and let’s never forget it.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The lazy, laid-back approach to the vocals, especially the sultry delivery on lines like, “I got this thiiiiiing.”

2. The unexpected layering of harmonies heading into the chorus.

3. The horniest saxophone in the history of music.

Recommended listening activity:

That’s your business.

Spotify.

The post Week 785: “Got It” by Marian Hill appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Berceuse-pour-Riel.mp3Before Europeans settled in North America, millions upon millions of bison roamed the great plains in thundering herds.

They were hunted by Indigenous groups, but always in moderation. Indigenous culture was tightly intertwined with the bison, and the creatures were seen as sacred, given that they provided the people with food, tools, fuel, shelter…just about every aspect of life on the plains was connected to the bison. There was a use for absolutely every part of the animal.

Then came the 1800s, and colonists in North America started moving west. The bison population plummeted to triple-digits by the year 1900. The American Bison Society helped to interrupt the path to extinction, and through lobbying and fundraising secured a small but stable population of wild bison in national parks by 1935. At which point they patted each other on the back and disbanded the organization.

A nice early example of animal preservation, but it ignored the fact that the decimation of the bison population had pulled the foundations out from under the feet of many Indigenous groups. And in fact, the stamping out of Indigenous culture was part of the purpose of decimating the bison population.

There are a few places you can go to learn about the bison and the people who lived alongside them. I went to an excellent one this week with my family, and it was a beautiful place. But its existence did make me sad, because it’s a monument to a species of animal and a way of life that, while perhaps not completely gone, will never be the same.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The “Riel” in the title is Louis Riel. If you’re Canadian, you already know who Louis Riel was. If you’re not, he fought to ensure that a group of people – the Métis – were not ignored in Canada’s westward expansion. He was also a hero to French-speakers in Canada’s early years, and stood up to the Anglophone powers-that-were.

2. Born into a bilingual household, Étienne Fletchersings in French despite hailing from a part of the country (Saskatchewan) that is primarily English-speaking. The irony of this song named for Louis Riel is that Fletcher’s only vocals are a muted humming, while a recording of a young child speaking – in English – is in the foreground.

3. The album cover features a Hawaiian bird, which at first seems not to fit with the song’s themes. Except that the bird is the O’o, a bird native to Hawaii that has gone extinct since the age of American takeover began.

Recommended listening activity:

Browsing a second-hand store and imagining the people who once loved the things on the shelf.

Buy it here.

The post Week 784: “Berceuse Pour Riel” by Étienne Fletcher appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/svalbard-leland-whitty-steptodown.com_.mp3Svalbard is group of islands belonging to Norway, with a combined area about the same as Sri Lanka. (Or, if it’s easier for you to conceptualize, Latvia. Or West Virginia or Nova Scotia or Tasmania.)

To say it’s an interesting place is a gross understatement. Just a few of the territory’s quirks:

• Nobody is from Svalbard. Everyone who lives there was born somewhere else, and anyone due to give birth must go to mainland Norway to do so.
• There are no trees. (The environment won’t allow it.)
• There are no cats. (The government won’t allow it on account of the rare birds.)
• If you travel outside the main settlements, you are required to carry a gun. This is in case a polar bear gets hungry.
• It’s home to the Global Seed Vault. You can read about it here, but basically it’s a huge cave filled with seeds in case the world’s vegetation is wiped out due to [insert global catastrophe here].
• It’s so far north that it goes three months without a trace of sun.

Being just about as far north as you can go before you start going south again, Svalbard is home to the northernmost of several things, including the northernmost:

• Settlement (Ny-Ålesund)
• Airport (in Longyearbyen)
• Blues Festival (also in Longyearbyen)
• University (well, research centre, which totally counts)
• Piano (in Pyramiden, which is an abandoned Russian mining town)

That last town must feel like a time capsule. It was built in the Soviet era and abandoned in 1998, but because of the permafrost and dry arctic air, disused buildings in Svalbard don’t decay. The structures in the ghost town are all basically just as sound as they were when they were built.

I don’t know which aspect of Svalbard’s uniqueness prompted Toronto’s Leland Whitty to name this song after it, but it does evoke the Norwegian islands in a few wonderful ways.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The disorienting polyrhythms of the opening seconds.

2. The unresolved feeling of the opening minute.

3. The final settling onto the root chord at 1:05.

Recommended listening activity:

Making a diorama in your freezer.

Buy it here.

The post Week 783: “Svalbard” by Leland Whitty appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Past-Present-Future.mp3Before learning to play the saxophone, the clarinet, and the flute; before attending the Detroit Institute for Musical Arts; before meeting John Coltrane, who encouraged him to move to New York to pursue his dreams; before collaborating with Herbie Hancock; before playing on Miles Davis’ most pivotal album.

Before all that.

Before all that, a young Bennie Maupin would go down the street after school to sit under an open window where an elderly neighbour would play the saxophone. He’d hold a stick in his hands, imagine it was a sax, close his eyes and play along.

I hope it was that memory that went through Maupin’s head each time he performed this song.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The first ten seconds have the hazy quality of a memory from the distant past.

2. Then, the eleventh second hits you with a sudden key change, jolting you back into the present.

3. The final chord lasts for just about the last 30 seconds of the song, fading off into the future.

Recommended listening activity:

Travelling through time.

Spotify.

The post Week 782: “Past + Present = Future” by Bennie Maupin appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/KIDSO-Childhood-Original.mp3I figured that sharing a song called “childhood” by a band called “Kidsø” would be the perfect opportunity to share something about my own childhood. But upon further reflection, I realize that if you’ve been reading this long enough, you already know more than enough about my childhood.

You know about my childhood bedroom. You know about my childhood Christmases. You know about the cassette tapes that my family listened to on long road trips. You know the bizarre imagination game my brother and I played intermittently for years.

But before this post turns into the blog equivalent of a flashback episode, let me give you one quick childhood memory that I haven’t told you:

I must have been something like 9 or 10 years old, and my family was visiting Ottawa; the nation’s capital. Not sure why we were there, but there was some kind of big celebration going on, so let’s say it was Canada Day.

The memory is hazy, but I remember there being a big crowd of people in an outdoor space, and there was music playing. The crowd had formed a big circle around a central place where people were dancing. Not a dance battle or anything, just a half-dozen people or so who felt the desire to dance.

And then, out of nowhere, I decided I was going to dance too. And not normal, clap-your-hands-and-move-your-feet-slightly dancing. I decided I was going to full-on breakdance and blow these people’s minds.

Did I know how to breakdance? No. No I did not.

But I wasn’t going to let that detail stop me. I hit the floor (pavement) and did some kind of dance that must have looked like a fish’s movements when it lands on the floor of a fishing boat, but with arms and legs instead of fins.

The crowd parted further, to give me more space / to protect themselves from my flailing body. I think they were cheering, but that sound may also have existed solely in my head.

I mention this in the context of this song because it’s the last memory I have of the complete inhibition that is one of childhood’s treasures, and that uninhibited joy is one of the primary emotions evoked by the music of German house duo Kidsø.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s hard not to love a song that incorporates a group of kids singing on the playground. I don’t know the exact story behind the sample here, but it’s as catchy as it is heartwarming.

2. Many of the melodic and percussive elements – the finger piano, the glockenspiel – are instruments that just emanate childhood.

3. The slow-down at the end is like a music box running out of steam.

Recommended listening activity:

Learning a new hand-clapping game.

Buy it here.

The post Week 781: “Childhood” by Kidsø appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Hey-Rosetta-Psalm.mp3When I was 26 my new girlfriend told me about a music festival we absolutely HAD to attend. She’d been the previous summer and assured me it was the best opportunity to see tons of local bands for cheap before they got famous.

Held on an island big enough for three separate stages but small enough to feel like a village, the festival had its finger on the pulse of the exploding Toronto-area music scene of the early 2000s, while still hanging on to its hippie roots. I scanned the lineup and saw everything from Broken Social Scene to slam poetry to a workshop on making your own vegan diapers.

Having the utmost respect for my new girlfriend’s musical tastes, I gladly went along and loved every minute of it. Every band blew my mind – I wrote about one of them in week 558 – and many bands we saw there have appeared on this list over the years. We went back summer after summer, and as I got older and less cool the band names became more and more unfamiliar. I just Googled the lineup for this year and I recognize a total of zero of the scheduled performers. I hope the vegan diaper tent is still going strong.

Ultimately, the festival was the perfect thing at the perfect time for me. It provided a bridge into adulthood; it helped me feel connected to something vital and young as I took on first jobs, got a first house, bought a first suit.

In our seventh summer together, rather than go to the festival my girlfriend and I got married.

We went back a few years later, but it was mostly for the sake of nostalgia. It carried the same feeling of familiarity and estrangement that comes when you wander the halls of your old high school. I missed it, but the excitement of that first summer would be impossible to reproduce.

I can’t remember which year’s lineup included Newfoundland’s Hey Rosetta! (Exclamation mark theirs, not mine). But it must have been somewhere in the middle of our six-summer run. This song, released around that time, really encapsulates the complicated feeling of moving imperceptibly from one stage of life to another.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The slow, purposeful piano really does come across with the calm solemnity of a psalm.

2. In the second half, the lonely pianist is joined by a few other instruments (this was, after all, a seven-piece band) but only briefly, before they respectfully step out of the spotlight.

3. The lyrics are mournful but reassuring, reminding us that although we may head towards something new and unknown, eventually “your eyes will adjust” and “the fear that you feel will set you free.”

Recommended listening activity:

Making a playlist featuring one song released in each year you’ve been alive.

Spotify.

The post Week 780: “Psalm” by Hey Rosetta! appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/William-French-Blue-Heron.mp3When my kids were tiny, we bought them a bird book. One of those books where the kid can press a button and hear what the pictured bird sounds like. Our kids were captivated by the bird calls these buttons summoned forth, especially the ones they recognized from the neighbourhood.

For my part, I wasn’t captivated so much by the bird songs, but by another bit of information the book gave: the birds’ scientific names. You know; those Latin- or Greek-derived names meant to standardize animal names across the world.

I couldn’t get over how ridiculous some of them were. How can I concentrate on reading to my kids when I find out that the bird I’ve been calling a Robin all these years is discussed in scientific circles as Turdus Migratorius? How about the Great Horned Owl, officially known by the considerably less-cool name Bubo Virginianus?

And it turns out that the book wasn’t just picking the weirdest ones, either. There seem to be more birds with wacky names than with normal ones. A crane called Bugeranus. A Finch called Poospiza Hypochondria. And, as if trying to outdo the Robin, a Thrush known to scientists as Turdus Maximus.

However, there is one bird whose name isn’t simply giggle fuel for adolescent boys: the Great Blue Heron. The most majestic member of the Heron family, its scientific name is Ardea Herodius. The first part is the Latin name for Heron, and the second part is Greek for…Heron. That’s correct: the Heron Heron.

It is truly the Heron to end all Herons. And I’m guessing that William French is a fan.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Every other bar, there’s an extra kick drum thrown in between beats one and two. It makes me think of those big wing-flaps that birds with particularly impressive wingspans will do every so often, just to show off.

2. At 2:11, everything gets very still for a moment, like a heron standing mid-river waiting for a fish.

3. At 2:46, a new chord structure comes in, striding along like a heron at a stately one-chord-per-bar pace.

Recommended listening activity:

Measuring your wingspan.

Spotify.

The post Week 779: “Blue Heron” by William French appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Prelude-In-E-Minor.mp3For those keeping score at home, this is the third Prelude in E Minor I’ve featured here, and none of them have been Chopin’s original.

There’s been the experimental electronic Chopin chop-up,we’ve had the indie piano re-imagination, and now we’ve arrived at the mid-century bossa jazz extravaganza.

One day, I hope to find an actual Prelude in E Minor recording that fits my personal and strangely stubborn preference for tempo and dynamics. But for now, this one more than holds down the fort.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Of all the Prelude versions I’ve posted, this is the only one that doesn’t feature a piano, and yet it’s also melodically the closest to the original.

2. The sax is the perfect instrument to capture Chopin’s melancholy.

3. The snare rim is the perfect syncopated replacement for the eight-note chords in the original.

Recommended listening activity:

Drawing a picture of a photo of a painting.

Spotify.

The post Week 770: “Prelude in E Minor” by Gerry Mulligan Sextet appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/The-Kiffness-Feira-De-Mangaio-Ft-Mari-Merenda-The-Kiffness-Mari-Merenda.mp3I’ve decided that the next instrument I’m going to learn to play is the asalato. (Or the kashaka, or kosh kash, or any number of other onomatopoeic words to describe shakers on strings.)

You’re likely thinking that learning to play a shaker can’t be too difficult, and I don’t blame you; it’s rare to find an instrument with a name that basically functions as an exhaustive list of instructions as to how to play it.

But is not an ordinary shaker.

You have to see someone play this shaker to appreciate how amazing it is. I recommend starting with this video, where Ghanaian musician Moussa Diarra gives a tutorial that goes from “beginner” to “advanced” in the blink of an eye.

Although it originated in west Africa, the simple percussive instrument has made its way around the world, and is often used in folk styles that place rhythm at the forefront.

Brazilian musician Mari Merenda’s Instagram profile is full of clips of her singing while accompanying herself on the asalato. It’s mesmerizing to watch her sing in her easygoing Portuguese, smiling and closing her eyes as if she’s settling in for a tanning session on the beach, with the shakers whizzing frantically around her fingers like bees around a hive.

Everyone I’ve watched play the asalato online makes it look so easy, and I’m sure that the learning curve is much steeper and filled with bruised knuckles than I’m expecting. But I’m going to try anyway.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Portuguese is such a fantastically singable language. The lyrics to this song – originally by Brazilian legend Sivuca – amount to nothing more than a stall-minder at a market listing off the items they have for sale. But to my ears it’s the most rhythmic, flowing poetry imaginable.

2. The extra instrumentation comes courtesy of The Kiffness, aka David Scott, a South African musician who remixes videos that catch his ear on YouTube (most notably cat videos). He must be just about as big of a fan of the asalato as I am, as he’s also remixed the Moussa Diarra video mentioned above.

3. Even before all Scott’s instruments come in, Merenda’s voice and the asalato are enough.

Recommended listening activity:

Shaking whatever you have that feels like shaking.

Buy it here.

The post Week 769: “Feira de Mangaio” by The Kiffness and Mari Merenda appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Heirlooms.mp3Here’s a very unimportant thing I learned today: tomatoes are not the only fruits or vegetables that come in an heirloom variety.

To be honest, I didn’t really know what “heirloom” meant in this context. At the risk of revealing my total lack of gardening knowledge, I think I might have assumed that heirloom tomatoes were descended from the vegetable gardens at Buckingham Palace or something. But no; it just means that the seeds have been saved and passed down for decades, with no cross-breeding or artificial stuff. People who know things claim they have a better taste than supermarket tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes have been hogging the heirloom spotlight it seems, and many other fruits and vegetables come in heirloom format. They’re prized for their higher nutritional value and more robust flavour than the mass-produced food of modern agri-business.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. If pop music is supermarket fruits and vegetables, Pale White Moon is an heirloom variety of band. A loose collective of multi-instrumentalists, their use of classical instruments in a folk-pop context makes their music feel…artisanal?

2. The swinging ¾ time makes it feel easy and relaxed.

3. The plucked strings feel like the careful sowing of seeds.

Recommended listening activity:

Shopping at a farmer’s market.

Buy it here.

The post Week 768: “Heirlooms” by Pale White Moon appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Paradise.mp3In 2017, Finland celebrated the 100th anniversary of its independence from the Russian Empire. In the lead-up to this occasion, its neighbour Norway tried – as any good neighbour would – to come up with the perfect birthday gift.

But what? Finland consistently ranks at or near the top in just about every quality-of-life list you’ll ever see. Healthcare, education, safety, environment, work-life balance…it’s basically a paradise. A frigid paradise, sure, but a paradise nonetheless.

So what do you get the nation that already has everything?

Well, some enterprising Norwegians had a great answer to that question: a mountain.

When the borders between Finland and Norway were made official in the mid-1700s, a fondness for straight lines paired with a lack of attention to detail resulted in a minor geographic quirk: the tallest mountain in Finland…wasn’t fully in Finland. The mountain, Mount Halti, was largely within Finnish territory, but its peak was 20 metres on the Norwegian side.

As Finland’s 100th birthday approached, the movement to give Finland the peak of its own highest mountain gained quite a lot of social media traction and news media attention. The Norwegian government was on board at first, but after looking into the paperwork, it decided that ceding territory would be counter to its own constitution, article 1 of which states that Norway is “indivisible” – and the campaign abruptly ended there.

Norway’s Prime Minister at the time stated that they would choose another “suitable gift” for Finland on the occasion of its anniversary, but try as I might, I can’t find any evidence of what they eventually settled on.

Part of me doesn’t want to know, because it’s safe to say that whatever it was, it wasn’t anywhere near as cool as a mountaintop. But I also want to know that Norway tried; that they at least gave Finland something cooler than a 100 Kroner prepaid Visa.

Please get in touch with me if you happen to know what it was.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Finnish DJ / Composer Kuplahas a knack for very textured sounds. There’s a white noise in the background of this track that brings to mind falling snow.

2. The ascending arpeggios in the piano make me imagine someone hiking up Finland/Norway’s highest mountain.

3. The melancholic melody played by the clarinet makes me imagine a generous Norwegian standing at the top of Mount Halti, gazing wistfully across the border, constitutionally prohibited from giving his Finnish neighbour the gift he wants to give.

Recommended listening activity:

Practising your gift-wrapping technique.

Buy it here.

The post Week 767: “Paradise” by Kupla appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Peter-Sandberg-Motion-Official-Audio.mp3Top five types of motion:

5: Perpetual. Great concept, but loses points for not being possible. Various hucksters claimed to have invented perpetual motion machines over the years, to the point that I’ve heard it referred to as “the snake oil of physics.”

4: Contrary. A beautiful musical trick. Unfortunately not found in this week’s song, but still worthy of the number four spot.

3: Brownian. Fascinating and mesmerizing, and helped prove the existence of atoms. Plus it’s one of the few terms I remember from High School science.

2: Slow. Everything looks better in slow-motion.

1: “Motion” by Peter Sandberg.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The piano is so soft it feels like it’s wearing slippers.

2. Because it’s so soft, the mic is placed close enough to hear the damper pedal coming on and off; this sound acts like unintentional percussion.

3. The consistent tone in the background provides the illusion of perpetual motion.

Recommended listening activity:

Getting motional.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Lennys-Mood.mp3Lenny Breau’s story includes enough talent and tragedy that he should have enjoyed the same type of career revival as Nick Drake or Rodriguez.

His parents, Hal and Betty, were a country music duo. For a while, Lenny was part of the family’s act, but as soon as he was exposed to jazz it was the only path he was going to follow.

Breau absolutely tunnelled into his craft, honing his finger-picked style and becoming the type of guitarist that famous guitarists admire. Steve Vai, Andy Summers, Pat Metheny, George Benson, and a long line of others get glassy-eyed and speak humbly of their own talents when talking about Breau. Chet Atkins called him “the greatest guitar player ever,” and added that “if Chopin had played the guitar, he would have sounded like Lenny Breau.”

Unfortunately for the mainstream, Breau was never much of a fame-chaser. He played some sessions and made his living, Breau’s genius was mainly recognized only by his contemporaries.

Unfortunately for Lenny, he was hampered by drug addiction for much of his creative life.

Sometime in the mid-1970s, his friend Glen McDonald took him to a secluded off-grid cabin for some downtime as a way to help him shed his addiction; it was apparently here where the album “Cabin Fever” was recorded, though it wouldn’t be released until 1997.

On August 12, 1984, Lenny Breau was found dead in the rooftop pool of his apartment building in Los Angeles. You’d be forgiven for assuming it was a drug overdose, but it wasn’t; in fact, friends report that he had largely turned a corner on his addiction by that point and was re-focused on music. The investigation revealed that he had been strangled and then dumped into the pool. His wife at the time – who was reportedly often violent towards Lenny – was the prime suspect, but with no evidence to move forward, the case of Breau’s murder was never solved.

Lenny Breau’s daughter, Emily Hughes, released a documentary about him in 1999 – right around the time that Nick Drake and Rodriguez were being rediscovered – but Breau’s music remains tucked away in the category of “your favourite musician’s favourite musician.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The melody is simple and plaintive.

2. Technically, it’s not overly complex, and he was certainly capable of much more “difficult” music. But one of the things most friends remember about him is his humility.

3. It ends abruptly. Not quite mid-phrase, but one gets the impression of a thought left incomplete.

Recommended listening activity:

Reading a book you’ve already read, but have mostly forgotten.

Spotify.

The post Week 765: “Lenny’s Mood” by Lenny Breau appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Nina-Nesbitt-Mansion-Official-Lyric-Video.mp3Most December holidays are about putting others before yourself; finding the perfect gift for someone, making charitable donations, all that good stuff. And rightfully so.

But at New Year’s the mind’s spotlight generally turns back inwards. Once the gifts have been given and turkey has settled, we start asking ourselves those uncomfortable questions: did I accomplish anything this year? Am I any further ahead than I was a year ago? Where do I want to be a year from now?

Sometimes these questions lead us to consider things about ourselves that we’d rather not consider. Realizing there are certain things in our lives that are keeping us stuck, we sometimes make outlandish resolutions that – while they give the illusion of progress – inevitably break down and land us more firmly in our stuck-ness than we were before.

So let’s make Scottish singer Nina Nesbitt’s “Mansion” our New Year’s anthem for 2025.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The lyrics are aimed at someone who’s in a relationship where they aren’t appreciated or treated well, but the message could apply to plenty of other situations worth escaping in 2025.

2. At 2.24 the song seems to be building towards a second chorus, but instead it pulls back and cuts the reverb on the vocals. Suddenly Nesbitt is right next to you, insisting that you’re more than you think you are, and the song builds to its actual climax.

3. The final “you are” is less certain and more pleading than the others, and for some reason utterly heartbreaking.

Recommended listening activity:

Planning a renovation, whether literal or figurative.

Buy it here.

The post Week 764: “Mansion” by Nina Nesbitt appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/spotifydown.com-A-Child-Is-Born.mp3One of the things I like about Christmas is that it involves celebrating a baby.

I’m not religious, but if at this time of year you need a reason to try to live a better life, hanging out with a baby – or at the very least, thinking about how your actions will affect future generations – can be good motivation.

Christianity often frames Jesus’ birthday as God’s way to save sinners, and while I don’t agree with the guilt trip implied by that line of thinking, being made responsible for helping raise a baby can really change your habits. By modeling the things you want that baby to become (patient, physically active, compassionate, intellectual, whatever) you can’t help but become better as well. Having a baby in your life can, as the herald angels sang, give you second birth.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The ¾ time signature makes it feel like it could believably be an outtake from Vince Guaraldi’s Christmas album.

2. The way the pianist’s hand scurries around the higher notes at 1:19 is like someone giving a baby’s tummy a tickle.

3. The upright bass doesn’t take much of the spotlight, but stands behind the piano patiently, like a grandparent smiling from a few steps away as they watch their adult child care for a baby.

Recommended listening activity:

Lighting a candle.

Spotify.

The post Week 763: “A Child is Born” by Hudson Harris & Haim appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Teset-Bloom.mp3The first time I saw it, the cover of Teset’s 2023 album Egress caught my eye almost as much as the music caught my ear.

It’s hard to say at first what it was about the image above that captivated me. It’s mundane but unusual. Stark but unaggressive. It shows a natural landscape, but the focus is on something entirely unnatural.

The angular structure in the foreground is frustratingly unidentifiable. It has the look of something functional and permanent, bolted into the rock. But it seems so incongruous that it must be some kind of art, right? The way it frames the landscape in the background, creating a bit of a photo-within-a-photo…it seems too artistic to be something purely functional.

I suddenly became gripped with the desire to know where the photo was taken. I had played a fair bit of Geoguessrduring the peak of the pandemic – an online game that plunks you down somewhere in the world via Google Street View, leaving you to guess your location based on anything from street signs to landmarks to the position of the sun – and Teset’s album cover had awoken my dormant inner Geoguessr addict.

The hunt was on. Here’s how my afternoon of sleuthing went:

• Did a reverse image search. Turned up nothing, indicating that this wasn’t a pre-existing image, but likely one taken by the artist himself.
• Looked up the artist, Teset. His internet presence is minimal; no website other than Bandcamp, no interviews in which he discusses the album art or his love of bizarrely ambiguous metal structures.
• Did find two facts of interest however: his real name is Colin Janz, and he is based in Vancouver. Aha!
• Image definitely felt like Vancouver. Headed to Google Maps to check out any and all seaside parks.
• No luck. Every vista had mountains in the distance, but none matched the distinctive diagonal line of the mountain in the photo.
• Realized that looking for the landscape was a fool’s errand. Decided I should focus on the sculpture instead.
• Did a search for “weird seaside sculptures Vancouver” and “tuning fork sculpture” and “football upright near ocean Vancouver” all of which (predictably) turned up nothing.
• Just about gave up.
• Went back to Google Maps and started looking further outside the city.
• Almost peed my pants when, in street view for Whytecliffe Park, I saw a familiar diagonal mountain in the distance. But where was the metal thing?
• Tried to position myself so the view would be the same angle as the photo.
• Found one photo that felt right, but a lady seemed to be standing right in front of where the sculpture might be.
• Quietly cursing that lady for standing there, I scrolled to the right in the photo…and saw the structure.
• Or at least, something like it. Not a sculpture, but a sign, facing out towards the water. A warning or notice for boaters perhaps. The one on the album cover was simply missing the actual sign part; the metal structure is the frame for a sign, covered in graffiti by countless hikers and tourists.
• Maybe there are more of these signs in the area? Maybe one is missing the sign part? After all, the one I found wouldn’t frame the diagonal mountain in the same way as Teset’s one does.
• Down the coast a bit, I found Whyte Islet, a little (and more importantly, rocky) island pointing in just the right direction to face the diagonal mountain.
• Saw a few photos taken on the island, including some with seals relaxing adorably on the rocks. But the sides of the island are so steep that if there is a sign down there, you wouldn’t be able to see it.
• Just about gave up again.
• Found this photo. In front of the camera is a seated woman, distorted by the way the photo is stitched together. And just in front of her, poking up over the rocks, are the two raised arms of the metal sign frame. This is confirmed by another photo from a bit further down the island in which our friend the metal frame is clearly visible.
• Exhaled deeply. Silently thanked Teset for his music and his artwork.
• Closed laptop. Wondered where the time went.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It opens with 15 seconds of static which – and you can only really pick this out on headphones or really good speakers – is in tune with the song.

2. There aren’t any chord changes, but the way it alternates between a resolved chord and that devilishly delicious tritone makes it hypnotically mysterious.

3. Given the careful, masterful build-up to the song’s peak at 4 minutes, it concludes surprisingly quickly, which always makes me want to go back and hear it again.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking for clues.

Buy it here.

Needless to say, if you know anything more about these signs at Whytecliffe Park, or if you are Colin Janz and you’d like to share the story of the album cover, please get in touch: beautifulsongoftheweek@gmail.com

The post Week 762: “Bloom” by Teset appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Whispering-House.mp3Every house whispers.

Mine gets most talkative in winter.

There’s one spot near the bottom of the stairs where putting pressure on just the right floor board makes the air duct beneath it thump lightly like a heartbeat.

The front door needs an extra gentle hip-nudge to close, but it lets you know you’ve hit the spot when the latch clicks, with a sound not unlike the clicking you’d do with your teeth when giving someone the finger guns.

And of course, when the wind whips up from the valley and slams into the side of the house, you can hear its old bones sigh just a bit.

I sometimes wonder how this house’s whispers have changed in its hundred-and-some years. What noises did the first owners, third owners, fifth owners once hear that the house has now grown out of? What new vocabulary will it learn when I’m gone?

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Hania Rani clearly cares about the sonic details of each instrument. Some of the instruments here sound old and weathered, while others sound brand new.

2. The vocals are barely more than whispers.

3. The fade-out seems to last forever.

Recommended listening activity:

Writing a love letter to your house and leaving it in a place nobody’s likely to look for another hundred years.

Buy it here.

The post Week 761: “Whispering House” by Hania Rani ft. Olafur Arnalds appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Lusine-Retrace.mp3In the seventh century BCE, the Latin cities of Rome and Alba Longa were on the brink of war.

From what I can tell, it was mostly a territorial pissing contest; the two cities were geographically close enough that there were no religious or ethnic disputes to speak of. It seems to have been more of a “this region ain’t big enough for the two of us” thing.

The armies lined up, but before the battle commenced, a messenger came over to the Alban side, sent by Roman king Tullus Hostilius. The gist of the message was: instead of a bloodbath that will likely kill many people who are related by blood (again, the cities were geographically quite close) why don’t we just have three soldiers from each side face off against each other? Winner takes all.

Both sides were fine with this, but here’s where the story gets strange enough that you have to question whether it’s true.

Each side had soldiers who were triplets. The Roman set was known as “the Horatii” while the Alban triplets were “the Curiatii.” So naturally, this war would be settled the way all wars should be settled: a showdown between identical siblings.

The three-on-three battle was intense. The Roman triplets quickly injured all three Albans, but two of the Roman triplets were slain in the process. It was down to one healthy Roman against three injured Albans. The remaining Roman made a quick and clever decision: he ran.

He ran knowing that he would be pursued by the others. But, injured as they were, it wasn’t long before pursuing him left the three Albans weakened and separated. At which point the remaining Roman triplet stopped running, strolled back, and easily slew all three Albans.

Not sure what the moral of this story is. There may be none, or there may be several. But I’m hoping that by this point you’ve picked up the link to this week’s song.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Fierce triplets. The three-against-four rhythm is strangely both driving and soothing.

2. In the opening seconds, it’s hard to tell what kind of rhythm Lusine is establishing in the track, as a chopped-up sample in the background doesn’t seem to fit with the slow 4/4 time signature implied by the consistent kick and snare.

3. The vinyl crackle gives a hint of sonic antiquity.

Recommended listening activity:

Playing an intense game of three-person rock paper scissors.

Buy it here.

The post Week 760: “Retrace” by Lusine appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/ford.-The-Color-of-Nothing-Official-Music-Video.mp3Okay, do I have everything I need?

I guess I can always drop by the house later if I forget something.

The next month is going to be busy.

I have the feeling there’s something I’m supposed to do today, but I don’t know what it is.

Was I supposed to call someone? Was it an appointment?

No, that’s next week.

This place is a mess. Why didn’t anyone put this away? I can’t be the only one who sees this mess.

We’re out of milk again. Shoot, I knew I should have picked some up.

They’ve got their decorations up already. Do we look like we don’t care?

Wait, do we exchange gifts with them? I don’t think so. But if they get us something and we have nothing to give back, then we look terrible.

Don’t worry don’t worry. Take a breath.

Yes, there’s a lot coming up this month. But you don’t have to do it all today. Today you just have to do today.

Stop for a moment and listen to the calming energy of Ford.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The repeating four-note cycle, like the calming rhythm of a repetitive but comforting routine.

2. The percussion, hustling you along to the next task without being pushy.

3. The way that the chords hit on the second beat of the bar rather than the first. It proves that even if you don’t get things done on time, it can still work.

Recommended listening activity:

One thing at a time.

Buy it here.

The post Week 759: “The Color of Nothing” by Ford appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Beatchild-Something-Forever.mp3This list has been going for so long that I sometimes can’t remember who’s on it. Well, I guess it has as much to do with the age of my brain as the age of the list, but still.

This supervibe song came up for me recently on an algorithm-curated Soundcloud playlist while I was getting some groceries. My phone was in my pocket so I couldn’t see who the artist was, but by the time it was over, my head was nodding so hard I could hardly read the best before date on the milk I was reaching for.

I pulled the phone out of my pocket, hoping that the artist wasn’t someone I’d already featured, because I have this self-imposed rule that I can’t post the same artist twice. I was happy to see that the artist was Beatchild – not on the list! – but the name was vaguely familiar.

It turns out that I had in fact featured Beatchild (aka Byram Joseph) although it was a different project of his with a couple of collaborators, way back when this blog was barely 100 weeks old.

I checked the non-existent rulebook to see if the same person under a different musical project or name could still qualify for the list. I ended up deciding that adding Beatchild was okay because a precedent has been set; I’ve already featured a song by The Beatles as well as songs by each individual Beatle (well, not Ringo, but his solo career peaked with Thomas the Tank Engine).

So in the end, I came home with a fresh batch of groceries and a new beautiful song to share.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s mostly an instrumental, but it opens with those half-sung, half-whispered vocals, sung as if nobody’s listening.

2. Beatchild always leans towards jazzy chord progressions, and this one leans heavily.

3. The percussion, from the deep kick to the jangling tambourine, layers on top of itself across every part of the sonic spectrum.

Recommended listening activity:

Buying a different brand of the same food you normally buy at the grocery store.

Buy it here.

The post Week 758: “Something Forever” by Beatchild appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Ends-of-the-Earth.mp3As we all know – well, most of us – the earth isn’t the right shape to truly have “ends.” There are some places however that do have the appearance of terrestrial cul-de-sacs; parts of the world that for one reason or another have a feeling of finality about them.

Here are my five nominees for Ends Of The Earth:

1. The Pacific Coast. Standing at the edge of any ocean and staring out at seemingly endless ocean is enough to make anyone feel small. But the Pacific is a beast even in oceanic terms. If you’re ever fortunate enough to stare out over the Pacific, think of this: if you had a boat that could travel at highway speeds (and unlimited fuel) you would still need an entire week of non-stop travel to get to the other side.
2. Point Nemo. While we’re talking about the Pacific, let’s stop at a tiny patch of ocean known as “Point Nemo” – an anonymous piece of water somewhere around 48 degrees south and 123 degrees west. It’s recognized by the National Ocean Service as the remotest place on earth, and is more that 2600km from the nearest land. If you were floating in that piece of ocean, the nearest humans to you might well be astronauts overhead in the International Space Station.
3. Mount Roraima. Located where Brazil, Venezuela, and Guyana’s borders meet is the spectacular Mount Roraima. It’s a flat-topped mountain, and the plateau is surrounded by cliffs up to 1000 metres high. This means that everything about the top of the mountain is different from the rainforest floor far below; the climate, the plants, the animals, everything. It’s basically an in-land island, with many species endemic to its fifty or so square kilometres. It may not be as remote as some other places mentioned here (it’s actually a fairly popular hiking spot) but stand on the edge when conditions are right and you’ll definitely feel like you’re at the edge of the earth.
4. The edge of the Sahara. The United States is an extremely large country. The fact that you can just about squeeze the entire thing into the Sahara desert is mind-boggling. If there’s a sandbox at the end of the world, it’s the Sahara.
5. Antarctica. Okay, the Sahara is enormous, but most obnoxious nerds with a fondness for the corner of YouTube devoted to geography (me, for example) are only too happy to tell you that with its other-worldly lack of precipitation, Antarctica is technically a desert, and at 150% of the Sahara’s size, the globe’s chilly underbelly is the king of deserts. And given the way it is usually presented on 2D maps – an expanse of white acting as the world’s southern endpoint – it’s hard to argue with Antarctica’s claim as a true End Of The Earth.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The vocalizations at the opening sound like someone calling out across a great wide somewhere.

2. Despite the lonely places conjured up by the title, it’s actually a song about adventure and companionship. Oh, there’s an island where all things are silent / I’m gonna whistle a tune / Oh, there’s a desert that’s size can’t be measured/ I’m gonna count all the dunes […] To the ends of the earth, would you follow me? There’s a world that was meant for our eyes to see.

3. As it fades out, all that’s left in the last couple of seconds is the sound of wind that begins the next track on the album, “Time to Run”.

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining what your part of the world would look like to someone who’d never been there before.

Spotify.

The post Week 757: “Ends of the Earth” by Lord Huron appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/You-Dont-Know-This-But-Im-Sorry.mp3Maybe I was joking around and I said something that hurt you more than you let on.

It might have been a really bad day for me. Perhaps it was a day when I didn’t have the patience I would normally have, or the jokes I can usually reach for, or the smile I would normally share.

Maybe I didn’t respond when you needed me to.

Or maybe I responded too quickly, without the effort that would have made you feel better.

It could be that I accidentally excluded you. Or did it on purpose to impress someone else.

I might have been too busy watching the waves I was making to consider the boats of those around me.

I might have been too focused on straight ahead to check my side mirrors.

The worst part is, I might not even know I hurt you, and that might make you feel worse.

Please know that if I could do it over again, I would do better.

I hope you know that.

I hope I didn’t hurt you.

But if I did, I’m sorry.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s full of texture. The mechanics of the piano, the ringing of each note. Even the silence has texture; it’s either some kind of vinyl crackle added after the fact, or else the mic is so sensitive that it’s picking up the sound of dust hitting it.

2. After floating around on an un-resolving rotation of chords for most of its duration, the song finds its light at 2:25. The sudden brightening is a wonderful relief, like an apology finally being accepted.

3. I couldn’t think of a third thing. Sorry.

Recommended listening activity:

Checking to see if there’s anywhere that sells olive branches near you.

Spotify.

The post Week 756: “You Don’t Know This, But I’m Sorry” by Juan Pablo Garcia appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/OMA-C.R.E.A.M.-Live-Instrumental.mp3Mainstream hip hop took a sharp turn in the early 1990s.

At the start of the decade, many of the biggest hits were goofy party rap; The Humpty Dance, Ice Ice Baby, U Can’t Touch This. Later in the decade, goofy was replaced by gritty. By 1995, artists like Nas, 2Pac, and Biggie were putting out music that topped the charts while feeling completely different from the hits of just a few years earlier.

Part of it was the subject matter, which was often more political and more violent than what had come before. But a big part of it was the samples that producers and DJs were using to underscore their MCs’ lyrics.

I remember listening to Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday for the first time and being taken aback by how different it was from the shiny, highly produced sound I was used to hearing from mainstream hip hop. Cypress Hill’s music (and their album art) wasn’t shiny at all. It was dusty. Dark. Even spooky.

OMA is a four-piece band out of the UK, and they specialize in playing live instrumental versions of precisely this era of hip hop. Their versions of Nas’ “NY State of Mind” or 2Pac’s “The World Is Yours” are just hype enough and just eerie enough to be a good addition to a Halloween party playlist.

But the one that gets stuck in my head the most is their rendition of Wu-Tang’s “C.R.E.A.M.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The main sample from Wu-Tang’s classic is the opening two bars of “As Long As I’ve Got You” by The Charmels. It’s a typical late-60s soul love song, replete with cheesy lines like, “If happiness was water, I’d never run dry.” It’s not a great song, but the first two bars, with the haunting, fluttering piano line and spooky vibe, are perfect sample fodder.

The Charmels song never comes back to those first two bars; the rest of the song is in a totally different key, and that piano line never repeats. It’s like the Charmels put those two bars in specifically for Wu-Tang’s benefit.

1. OMA reproduces the instrumental quite faithfully, but listen closely and you can hear the bassist making his part just a bit funkier with little fills here and there.

2. The tremolo guitar, with its big reverb, is the spatial opposite of the tight, no-reverb drums.

Recommended listening activity:

Decorating for a Halloween party.

Buy it here.

The post Week 755: “C.R.E.A.M.” by Wu-Tang Clan (OMA cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Pointillism-By-Laurent-Dury.mp3Hiroyuki Doi was a successful chef in Japan until his mid-thirties, when his younger brother died suddenly of a brain tumor. Overcome by grief and not knowing quite how to relieve it, Hiroyuki began drawing.

Not landscapes or portraits, but circles.

Each of his works are made up of thousands upon thousands of tiny circles, not really arranged in any patterns, but created in such a way that staring at them can produce patterns in the observer’s brain. Some might make the viewer see a galaxy. Or the inside of a living cell. Or the roiling, bubbling water at the base of a waterfall.

Forty-five years after the death of his younger brother, Hiroyuki Doi is still creating his circle drawings, which are shown at exhibitions all over the world. He has no formal art training.

If you’ve got some time and would like a more eloquent description of how Doi’s art speaks to something at the core of what it means to be human, you should read John Green’s take on the circle drawings. But if you’ve only got 100 seconds, just listen to French composer Laurent Dury’s audio equivalent of a Hiroyuki Doi drawing: “Pointillism.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It sounds motivated, but unhurried.

2. It sounds busy, but uncomplicated.

3. It sounds small, but expansive.

Recommended listening activity:

Being engrossed in a repetitive task.

Spotify.

The post Week 754: “Pointillism” by Laurent Dury appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/FaceSoul-Grow-Freestyle-A-COLORS-ENCORE.mp3Generally, watching a performer push buttons doesn’t fill me with respect for their musicianship, but folks who can build beautifully layered tracks like Facesoul does kind of blow my mind.

Like previous BSOTW artists Madison McFerrin, Sean Angus Watson, and Ecce Cello, Facesoul (Faisal Salah) loves to create music by layering loops one on top of the other. Once each loop is recorded, he can sing over top of them, or have some loops disappear for a few bars before reappearing when the song’s momentum requires it.

It’s magic. Like a sort of audio 3D printing.

This particular track was apparently improvised, with the live recording also serving as the official video. It’s fascinating to watch, but the fact that the song itself is beautiful – regardless of the process by which it was created – is the clincher.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. If you’re going to layer your voice on top of itself this many times, your voice had better be an impressive instrument. Facesoul’s voice is fantastic, handling the rumbling bassline and high tenor lines and falsettos with equal skill and at any volume.

2. It sends a message of patience with oneself. Growth and change are hard, but every step and every mistake still count as progress.

3. The medium fits the message: that message of growth is sung over layered loops that themselves grow one on top of another.

Recommended listening activity:

Singing a duet with your reflection.

Spotify.

The post Week 753: “Grow” by Facesoul appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/blue-david-bennett.mp3David Bennet is one of my favourite music YouTubers. In fact, with more than a million subscribers, he’s one of YouTube’s favourite music YouTubers.

His pop music analysis videos are just at the right level for people like me – and since you’re reading this, likely people like you, too – in that they are best appreciated by those with a modest but firm background in music, an appreciation for smart pop, and a love of analyzing things.

He’s discussed songs that use different modes. Songs that use different time signatures. And just about every aspect of The Beatles that you could hope to dissect.

It’s all done with a delivery that is distinctly and refreshingly free of the condescending know-it-all tone that characterises too many music critics. In fact, it’s the exact opposite of that tone; he sounds like the smart kid at the back of the lecture hall who’s been called on by the professor to answer a question because the professor thinks the kid hasn’t been paying attention, but who then proceeds to deliver an answer which, rather apologetically, points out the errors in the professor’s analysis.

His recent release The Sea in July proves that Bennett does more than talk the talk. The songs on this fleetingly brief but satisfying EP balance accessibility and originality in a way that fits perfectly with the music he so enthusiastically analyses on his channel.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The main chord progression he plays is just straightforward enough to be immediately catchy, but with just enough syncopation and suspended notes to get more delicious with each successive listen. (Side note: check the lyrics to this track on Bandcamp and you will see that Bennett has included the chord changes in the lyrics, which is the most David Bennett thing imaginable, and I love it.)

2. The vocals, by Chris Matthewson, have the fluttering falsetto and semi-sloppy articulation of Thom Yorke, one of Bennett’s most-analyzed singers.

3. The song’s climax comes not with a rush of percussion or an oversaturation of strings, but with the stunning layered vocals that sweep in at about 2:30.

Recommended listening activity:

Making breakfast while imagining a YouTube voiceover that makes your kitchen skills seem more genius than they are.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Elisapie-Qaisimalaurittuq-Wish-You-Were-Here-feat.-The-Westerlies-Official-Audio.mp3I’ve recently been listening to Inuktitut, Elisapie’s fantastic 2023 album of cover songs in which she sings the western pop culture music of her youth in the language of her people, the Inuit of northern Canada.

Here are some things I’ve learned about Inuktitut (the language) while listening to Inuktitut (the record).

• It’s not a language. Well, it is, but the more accurate way to describe it would be as a spectrum of dialects running from Greenland in the east to northern Alaska in the west. This is a huge area – about the same distance as from New York to London – and the dialects vary so much that folks from opposite sides would not be able to understand one another.
• If you’ve heard that old “fact” that Inuktitut has a ridiculous amount of words for “snow” – the most popular number seems to be 50 – it isn’t true. There are (at most) twelve, and some of those describe snowy conditions, not the snow itself. The 50-words-for-snow myth probably stems from the fact that…
• …It is a polysynthetic group of dialects. This means that word parts get strung together to form “word sentences” that appear very long to non-speakers. Hence, the phrase “Wish You Were Here” becomes “Qaisimalaurittuq.” My favourite example is the two-word phrase Aannialiqpasaarama iksivaassuujaluarnikumut, in which those two words do the work of eleven words in English: “I was sitting for so long that it started to hurt.” Believe me when I say I will be looking for opportunities to use those two words soon.
• Like many indigenous languages, it existed in verbal form only until the mid-1800s when European missionaries helped develop a written system of language. Which sounds uncharacteristically helpful in the context of European-Indigenous relations, until you realize the purpose of developing the written language was to give the Bible another language to be translated into.
• Today there are a bit fewer than 40 000 people in Canada who claim an Inuktitut dialect as their first language. I know the Canadian north is sparsely populated, but when the number of speakers of a language could fit in a baseball stadium, it seems to me that preservation should be a priority.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The songs on this album are far more than just covers sung in a different language. In part, they are statements on the ubiquity of pop music; the way Elisapie, growing up in the far north of Quebec, found solace in the same music that people her age were listening to in London, or Los Angeles, or Japan. But the fact that they are translated into a language that English colonialism nearly wiped out just makes it all the more powerful.

2. The instrumental – performed by an ensemble we encountered in week 398 – is haunting and fantastic.

3. In interviews, Elisapie has said that rediscovered many of the music of her youth during covid, and it unearthed emotions she didn’t know were still there. That comes through in her voice, strong but on the brink of breaking.

Recommended listening activity:

Learning some new words.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Continuum-3.mp3My family had the chance to be part of something pretty cool today.

A British artist’s collective called Station House Opera set up a 2.5-kilometre trail of concrete dominoes.

Eight thousand (!) dominoes, each one about two feet high and weighing 18 pounds, made their way in a winding trail from a downtown neighbourhood, through streets, parks, a restaurant, someone’s house, down a hill, under a highway, until the last one fell into the lake.

But since following the dominoes the whole way wasn’t possible, the experience of being there was mostly one of anticipation.

We got to our chosen spot a good half-hour early, and it was already bustling with people. Our viewpoint was great; underneath the highway where the dominoes would make their way up a spiral tower until one domino at the very top tumbled down to trigger another, before the chain reaction continued towards its ultimate destination.

To our left, we looked up a steep hill towards a permanent sculpture of a canoe perched on the edge, with dominoes set up right to the canoe’s bow. This would be where our first glimpse of the event would come from.

The first domino was set to be pushed over at 4:30, a full 2km from where we stood. It would take nearly fifteen minutes for the tumbling to reach us, and as 4:30 became 4:35 became, 4:40, the building excitement was palpable. Phones started popping up above people’s heads, all pointed towards the canoe.

Like New Year’s Eve, we knew that some people, unseen to us, had already experienced the excitement that we were about to experience. There was an undercurrent of civic excitement like when the local team wins the championship. There was the understanding that you were about to see something fleeting yet rare and special, like last spring’s eclipse.

Finally, a rush of excitement could be heard over the hill, and we saw the dominoes topple right over the edge of the canoe as planned. A few moments later the reaction reached us, climbed up the twisting tower, and was soon on its way out of sight.

Even though the trail was most definitely finite, something about viewing it in the way we did made it seem endless. Which – finally – brings us to this week’s song: “Continuum 3” from Endlessness by Nala Sinephro.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The five-note arpeggios give a sense of continuous momentum.

2. As the song approaches two minutes, a fluttering organ enters, climbing an invisible twisting tower, completely oblivious to the time signature suggested by the arpeggios.

3. After a brief swell, it fades away out of sight.

Recommended listening activity:

Standing in a river and feeling infinite.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Aquarium.mp3Aquariums (aquaria?) are cool places.

Well, not at peak hours. Then they’re absolutely awful. But at opening on a Tuesday, they can be very serene. It’s a strange feeling to walk up to walls of water, held back from drowning you by a few centimetres of glass, while those alien-looking-yet-probably-harmless fish stare back at you.

If the aquarium is empty enough, other visitors will take on that reverential silence that they usually reserve for art galleries, talking to each other in echo-ey whispers that you can’t really decipher.

I wonder if Nosaj Thing had a big, public aquarium in mind when he made this track, or if he was thinking more along the lines of a little rectangular prism type of aquarium that someone might have in their bedroom. Either way, it works.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening seconds hint at a minor key, but then the bass and twinkling glockenspiel come in to make things happy and cute.

2. The snare hits sound like someone taking a gulp of air before plunging underwater.

3. The strange chopped up vocal samples are a whisper that you can’t really decipher.

Recommended listening activity:

Losing a staring contest. (With a fish.)

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Lo-Velo.mp3I’ve always been a fan of evenings (the time of day) but I’ve only recently become a fan of Evenings (the musical project of Nathan Broaddus). And it wasn’t until even more recently that I discovered how well the two go together.

I was outside playing soccer on the street with my son on a semi-dreary overcast late afternoon. It’s one of those activities that is monotonous in a good way; you watch the ball go from his foot to your foot until you start to lose track of time, your brain snapping out of it only occasionally to let you know that a car is coming and you need to move to the side of the road to let it pass.

So there we were, enjoying the high of a repetitive physical activity, when suddenly the light shifted.

The sun was starting to set, but because of the near-100% cloud cover, it wasn’t setting in a majestic way. But still, the colours of the world around us suddenly got sharper, as if someone had replaced cold, dim fluorescent lighting with a warmer incandescent glow. Everything was the same, but it all looked different.

We both noticed it.

We didn’t stop playing, just acknowledged that it was cool and kept going. But for the next few minutes I was completely captivated by things. The hints of orange in the sky. The dark blue on the ball. The light blue on his shoes. The colour of his hair. The fact that he was the age that he was, and that this day wouldn’t ever happen again.

It was right around that moment that the song “Lo-Velo” by Evenings popped uninvited into my head, and it stayed there until it was time to go back in the house.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The way he gives rhythm to the looping melody by using a quick ducking-out of volume, rather than percussion or the attack of an instrument. The glitchy, jangly vibe is reminiscent of Four Tet.

2. The way the bass notes change while the melody doesn’t. The melody sounds different each time it loops over a different root note, as if it’s being viewed in a different light.

3. The title. It implies the song’s slow tempo (low-velocity) but write it down repeatedly and it looks like you’re writing “love” over and over again.

Recommended listening activity:

Feeling the permanence of something temporary.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/747.mp3When it was launched into service in 1970, the Boeing 747 was the pinnacle of air travel.

A top speed of almost 1000 km/h. Capacity for up to 600 passengers. An upper deck which, in the early days, looked like a mini-conference room that James Bond might find himself in. The plane measured 71 metres from nose to tail – the Wright brothers’ first flight was almost exactly half that length. It had a range of 15 000km – 37% of the earth’s circumference.

To say that the 747 is iconic in the aviation world is an understatement.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never flown in one, but I was fascinated enough by them as a kid that I think I might have. I have memories of being in a plane which had a staircase to an upper level, but that memory might be completely fabricated. I just don’t know.

A memory I’m sure I do have is of being in Florida on a family vacation and seeing the Space Shuttle being delivered home to the Kennedy Space Centre, riding piggy-back on a specially modified 747. The Space Shuttle was, in my mind, such a symbol of the enormity of space and the miracle of the future that it seemed ludicrous that there was a regular old airplane big enough to carry it in the same way my dad would carry me.

At the end of 2022, the last Boeing 747 was produced. Iconic as they are, airlines are trending in favour of jets that have two engines, as opposed to the fuel-hungry four-engines of a 747 and similar planes. Which is fair enough.

They will continue to fly for the next few years on a few airlines, and perhaps a few cargo lines, but eventually these giants will be a thing of the past.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Luv Pug is the lo-fi project of Kyle Scherrer an LA-based guitarist and pug lover (10% of streaming revenue goes to a local pug rescue charity). I love that an artist committed to such a tiny dog named a song after such an enormous aircraft.

2. The lo-fi genre, with its muted percussion and general lack of reverb on any instruments, always feels small and intimate. But in this song there’s just enough sustain on the piano, and just enough ethereal synth noise in the background, to imply the bigness of air travel.

3. The twinkling guitar reminds me of the twinkling lights on an airplane’s wings.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking up.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Leon-Bridges-Georgia-to-Texas-Official-Audio.mp3Sometimes I think that the way we celebrate birthdays is wrong.

I mean, it’s nice to celebrate everything you’ve accomplished, useful to have a time when everyone gives you gifts and gives you treats. But if what we’re celebrating is you being born…well that isn’t much of an accomplishment, right?

It’s easy to forget that your birthday is the anniversary of one of the most difficult and significant days of your mother’s life. She did the hard work: the months leading up to the birth, the labour itself which may have been more intense than she’s told you, and then in the weeks that followed when you were a helpless bundle of flailing limbs. She’s the one who should get some cake.

I guess this should really be a Mother’s Day post, but I just had this thought and just heard this song, so we’re celebrating Mother’s Day now – fittingly – nine months early, with Leon Bridge’s fabulous, almost solemn tribute to his mother, “Georgia to Texas.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Without long complex lyrics, it tells the story of his mother’s journey from New Orleans to Georgia while pregnant (“504 black girl carried me / in her womb to the land of the peach”) then to Texas a few years later after the breakup of his parents’ marriage.

2. There are no verses or choruses, just four-bar sections. To me this format makes it feel almost psalm-like, which is fitting given how important religion was to Bridges’ mother, as hinted at in the line, “Mama taught me the righteous way.”

3. The drummer isn’t smashing the kit to pieces by any means, but he’s not exactly holding back either. All the fills and hi-hat stutters give a nervous glitchy energy that contrasts nicely with the calm repeating loop of the bass line.

Recommended listening activity:

Buying a Mother’s Day card to give to your mom on your next birthday.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Instants.mp3Here’s a weird story I heard recently.

In 1977, Eric and Greg Hentzel of Palo Alto came up with a plan. They were at their local ice cream parlour when they noticed a promotion: sign up for the shop’s mailing list and you would be entitled to a free ice cream on your birthday.

Cool, but each of them only had one birthday apiece. So to try and get a bonus frozen treat, they invented another kid by the name of Johnny Klomberg. They gave Johnny a different birthday but placed him at their real address. It all worked out fine and eventually the boys moved on, their trick fading into the past along with their childhoods.

And then, in 1984, an interesting letter arrived in the mail from the Selective Service.

The Selective Service was the office of the American military that diligently reminded 18-year-olds to register for the army. Eric and Greg turned 18 in 1984, so that in itself wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that the letter was addressed to, you guessed it, Johnny Klomberg.

So rather than reminding Eric and Greg to register for the army, all the letter did was to expose the fact that the Selective Service had used the ice cream store’s mailing list to find people who were turning 18.

The story spread quickly; it understandably struck people as creepy that the government would use a free ice cream list to draft new recruits…especially since the year was now 1984.

Lawyers jumped in. The ice cream parlour (a national chain who must have feared their reputation would be destroyed) insisted that they hadn’t knowingly provided the list, the military insisted using mailing lists wasn’t illegal. Eventually, it was determined that because those signing up did not consent on the form to having their information shared, the Selective Service could not use the list.

Is there a lesson here? Maybe. Probably something about reading the fine print. Or maybe now – in the age of mile-long user agreements that nobody could ever possibly read – the only solution is to sign up under the name Johnny Klomberg.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Skúli Sverrisson is a bassist, even though I don’t think either of these guitars is a bass, something about the way he plays them – the tuning maybe, or the way the one that carries the melody slides around – feels bass-ish.

2. At about a minute in, there are some very surprising and sneaky chord changes.

3. Because there are two guitars, and because of their sneaky chord changes, I’ve decided that one guitar is named Eric, and the other Greg. The piano is Johnny Klomberg.

Recommended listening activity:

Creating a junk email account just in case you need to provide an email account when you sign up for something.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/moa-moa-Drive.mp3I hesitated on this one because it’s a bit louder and less traditionally beautiful than most of the things I normally post.

I sat and thought and put my hand thoughtfully to my chin. “Should I post it?” I asked myself.

But then I remembered that the only rules here are that 1) it has to be a band I haven’t featured before, and 2) it has to be a song that I find beautiful and 3) I have to be able to justify it. “Oh yeah,” I said. When I remembered that 4) the only person enforcing the rules is me, the deal was sealed.

So here’s my justification, a bit lengthier than usual:

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It might be the best anthem to apathy to be released since the 1990s, a decade usually regarded as the apex of apathy. After a full minute of instrumental buildup and a sprawling sonic landscape, the listener might be expecting something equally expansive when the lyrics finally enter, but instead we get, “Come now, give me your hand / And I’ll show you incredibly bland.”

Things continue in this vein with similarly wonderful lines like, “Wanna start a cult but got left on read / Considered occupying but I love my bed,” and “Daydream to pass the time / Was there even anything on my mind?”

And what fan of 90s-era self-referential humour wouldn’t love the line, “gonna name my band all in lower case” – coming, of course, from the lead singer of a band named all in lower case?

1. But the best apathetic songwriters know that apathy without empathy is empty. Throughout the song, other lyrics imply a deep insecurity and helplessness. The syncopated first chorus crescendos into the line “Think I have a hunch things are gonna change for good…” only for the music to drop out under the back-to-earth line of “things will be the same.” It’s hard not to feel for the person writing those words.

2. Lyrics aside, the music has an undeniable groove. The motivated percussion, the slithering distorted bass, the shimmering synths that hang out on the ethereal seventh degree of the scale…it makes for great driving music.

Which of course is the final ironic touch: a song called “Drive” that makes ideal driving music, but sung by a narrator who lacks drive.

Recommended listening activity:

Driving, but on cruise control and with one un-enthusiastic hand on the wheel.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Bens-Sanctuary-Harley-Card-Quintet.mp3One of my very favourite places in Toronto is High Park.

Torontonians sometimes like to refer to it as “Toronto’s Central Park” – even though it’s not at all central and is less than half the size of New York’s famous green space.

But it’s got plenty going for it: forests, a large pond, a zoo, playgrounds, tennis courts, a swimming pool, baseball diamonds, hidden public art…just about everything you could want in an urban park.

Jazz guitarist Harley Card and his co-songwriter and drummer Dave Clark are also High Park fans. In an interview following the 2018 release of his album The Greatest Invention, Harley Card recalled a conversation the two musicians had about the park:

“Dave was telling me to go check out the bird sanctuary there, where a very dedicated and eccentric elderly man cares for the birds eight months a year. His name is Ben.”

That man is Ben Holloway, who founded High Park’s bird sanctuary. Despite living on the other side of the city, Holloway would make the trip by public transit each day to tend to the birds and make the park that little bit better for visitors.

Unbeknownst to Dave Clark and Harley Card, Ben Holloway had died in 2014, a few years before their conversation and subsequent creation of the song in tribute to his sanctuary. There’s now a bench deep within High Park dedicated to the “Bird Man” – and at some point I hope to sit on that bench and listen to this song.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening moments, as quiet as a pre-dawn forest.

2. The brushes Dave Clark uses on the drums remind me of birds’ wings.

3. At 2:31, when the guitar and bass share that haunting melody in unison. The first time through, the phrase ends on the minor third, and the second time it ends on the major.

Recommended listening activity:

Finding a quiet spot.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/You-My-Love.mp3Three weeks ago, I took a song suggestion from my son for the first time. Now it’s my daughter’s turn.

Earlier this summer she decided, seemingly out of nowhere, that she wanted to go to circus camp. This was not an option presented to her, and I have no idea where the idea came from, but her mind was made up: circus camp.

After five days of learning to climb, spin, and strike cool poses, it was time for the showcase; a nice opportunity for the camp to show off what they can accomplish if they borrow your kids for five days. To be honest, it was quite impressive. The kids were using silks, suspended hoops, and trapezes. (Never had to pluralize that word before. It looks weird.)

All of this was soundtracked by a mix of eclectic tunes meant to evoke a certain type of Cirque-like mystique. Before the show, my daughter told us that we really REALLY needed to listen out for the first song, because it was so good. So while other parents pulled out their phones to capture their kids being superstars, we got ready to Shazam this mysterious track.

Shazam quickly told us the band was British duo Anushka, and now I get to share the song with you.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It uses a double-harmonic scale, also known as a “Byzantine” scale. This scale is cool because it alternates between half tones and full tones as it makes its way up the scale. This gives the song what producer Max Wheeler calls the song’s “otherworldly” sound.

2. Vocalist Victoria Port’s layered vocals and slow vibrato remind me very much of another British artist we’ve featured on this blog.

3. It balances driving percussion with a laid-back piano loop, giving it the poise and muscle of a high-wire circus artist.

Recommended listening activity:

Doing a mundane task – washing the dishes, brushing your teeth – in the style of a circus performer.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Allah-Las-Houston.mp3Houston is a huge city. It covers an area more than 28 times the size of Manhattan Island, and its greater metropolitan area is home to about 7 million people. Its sprawling size and car-focused layout has led to the local joke that “Houston is an hour away from Houston.”

In a way, it’s even bigger than that: because NASA’s Mission Control Centre is in Houston, the International Space Station has a Houston area code. So not only is Houston an hour away from Houston, but Houston is in orbit around Houston.

But at the end of the 19th Century, Houston was barely more than a backwater. At that point, the island city of Galveston, 80km to the south on the Gulf of Mexico, was the most important city in Texas. With a busy port and a bustling downtown, Galveston was on track to be one of the country’s main cities as the 1900s began.

And then, in late August of 1900, a hurricane hit. They didn’t name storms back then, but it’s usually just referred to as “The Galveston storm.”

Galveston Island – a long, skinny, low-lying piece of land on the Gulf, basically an on-ramp for hurricanes making their way ashore – was completely obliterated by the 1900 storm. Looking at a map of the damage, you get the impression that the island’s northern section was largely unscathed. That’s somewhat true, but in fact the reason there was less damage in that area was that it was somewhat protected by a two-story high wall of debris made up of all the structures to the south of it. 125 years later, it is still the deadliest natural disaster in US history.

In the aftermath, many folks decided to re-settle further inland. Houston seemed like a good spot, and it has since grown into the behemoth that it is today.

(NOTE: since drafting this post, the second of two major storms this year hit Houston, leading to flooding and interminable power outages that have led some Houston residents to think it’s time to go even further inland. Maybe Houston will become the Galveston of the 21st Century.)

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The tremolo guitar makes me think of frontier towns.

2. The rise and fall of the keyboard makes me think of slowly-rolling, innocuous ocean waves.

3. The intermittent but persistent “thum PUM” on the drums makes me think of distant thunder.

Recommended listening activity:

Standing on the highest ground in your immediate area.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Whisky-Story-Time.mp3Improvisation is an underrated skill.

In fact, I think many people would benefit from taking an improv class or two. Not because everybody should be a comedian, and not even because being spontaneous can be fun. The real benefit of practising improv is not learning how to be unpredictable, but learning how to react to the unpredictability of others.

Life, after all, doesn’t stick to a script. Sometimes the most frustrating moments are the moments that don’t conform to the scripts we’ve laid out in our heads. Being ready to improvise is important because it can save you from feeling like you have to bend life to your will, and allow you to let life happen.

Improvisation in musical performance isn’t the same as improvising in daily life, but it’s related, and musicians vary in their level of stick-to-the-scriptness. Some musicians practise their performances meticulously to ensure that every note is perfect. Others have general guidelines, but are fine allowing certain moments within songs to be more free-flowing. Still others prefer everything to be improvised.

Alabaster DePlume (aka Gus Fairbairn) is firmly on the improvisational end of this spectrum.

In fact, he takes it to a new level by not only improvising his shows, but by playing with different musicians each time he plays. The results vary, he says, depending on the group. He described what improvisation feels like to him in an interview:

It doesn’t feel like inventing something, it feels more like getting out of the way. It feels like someone wants to pass through the door – any thoughts or concern about ‘myself’ or ‘what I’m doing’ is like standing in the way of that person. […] In the show I bring material – songs and tunes and poems. They’re available to us in case they’re useful. They’re like snacks at a party – it’s nice that they’re there, but the main thing is the people and how they interact.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The pentatonic nature gives it a soothing simplicity.

2. The sax sometimes sounds reversed, or like it’s had too much whisky.

3. There are multiple sax tracks playing at once, and they often (but not always) play the same melody. Sometimes they just support the main melody, or drop in and out at random.

Recommended listening activity:

Doing something related to (but not on) your to-do list.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Powfu-death-bed-Lyrics-feat.-beabadoobee.mp3For the first time ever, this week I’m bringing you a song recommended to me by my son.

This makes me feel a few things. First, I feel my age. When I started this blog, he was negative 5 years old (he was born in week 244).

Also, I feel out of touch with music. This is hard to believe given the amount of digging I do, but the fact that this song flew under my radar for five years while amassing a billion streams on Spotify…well, I guess no matter how firmly I keep my ear to the ground, I’m bound to miss things as the ground shifts.

But more than anything I feel happy. No- bittersweet. No, wait, nostalgic.

Maybe the sheer volume of emotions this song can spark gives a hint of why it’s been so successful.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The core sample – a lyric from Beabadoobee’s “Coffee” – is a looped guitar and vocal about caring for someone who’s tired. The diminished fifths on the guitar add to the lyrical sweetness.

2. Powfu’s own lyrics were written from the POV of a person on their death bed, expressing regret that they won’t be able to fulfill their partner’s dreams. It’s heartbreaking, but most heartbreaking of all is the hint of acceptance in the doomed person’s voice.

3. The “lofi beats over a folk sample” aesthetic is the perfect cure for a specific type of sadness- see week 459 for details.

Recommended listening activity:

Making two cups of coffee even if you have nobody to share them with.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Golden-hour.mp3When you were a teenager, did you have that one friend who suddenly got deep into photography? That friend who was playing with normal kid toys like everyone else, but then one day they’ve suddenly got a collection of lenses and lighting and terminology that makes you wonder where they came from?

I did. And it was from this friend that I learned the term “golden hour.”

It’s that hour right after sunrise, and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle creates the perfect lighting for beautiful photography. It’s also the hour when my friend was never available, since he was out documenting the neighbourhood in its most flattering light.

I feel bad for (gently) teasing my friend for their fleeting and intense detour into photography. But like most adolescent teasing, it was likely based on insecurity. In this case, the guilty insecurity that maybe I hadn’t been looking at the world around me as carefully as I should have been.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It eases in, like a sunrise.

2. The guitar is the star, but the piano frames it perfectly.

3. It ends on an unresolved cadence, like a sunset promising to return the next evening.

Recommended listening activity:

Experimenting with a camera that isn’t also a phone.

Buy it here.

The post Week 738: “Golden Hour” by Dolkins appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Coleridge-Taylor-Sometimes-I-Feel-Like-a-Motherless-Child.mp3Like many spirituals with roots in the era of slavery in the United States, this song has two key emotions at its heart: a bones-deep melancholy and an unshakeable strength.

Because its pain is so accessible (what image could be more hopeless than a child without a mother?) this song has been performed by an unbelievably wide range of artists. Here’s a list of artists I bet you’ve never heard in the same sentence before: Paul Robeson, Elvis Presley, Van Morrison, Prince, Tom Jones, John Legend, Michael Kiwanuka…even Hootie and the frickin’ Blowfish recorded a version of this song.

But the most wonderful version I’ve found is this arrangement by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

Coleridge-Taylor is a bit of an underappreciated star of British classical music. The child of an Englishwoman and a doctor from Sierra Leone, his musical precociousness got him a spot at the Royal College of Music where he studied composition under Charles Stanford. One of his many ambitions was to integrate elements of traditional African music into his compositions.

“Motherless Child” isn’t traditional African music of course, but as a cultural artifact, as a product of the African diaspora, something about the song must have captured Coleridge-Taylor’s imagination. Perhaps its combination of melancholy and strength resonated for him; he must have faced more than his share of intolerance as a man of mixed race trying to make his way in the world of classical music.

Despite his success as a composer, Coleridge-Taylor struggled for money. One of his pieces, “Song of Hiawatha,” was wildly successful, but because he’d sold the publishing rights as a way to make ends meet, its success brought him no royalties.

It’s often written that the financial pressure to continue churning out music led partly to his exhaustion, pneumonia, and eventual death aged only 37. However, the sadness of his untimely passing led directly to the creation of the Performing Rights Society, which works to ensure artists are fairly compensated for their work. Strength from melancholy.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Isata Kanneh-Mason is the perfect person to perform this piece, as she has some connections to Coleridge-Taylor; both are British composers with hyphenated last names, and both have a parent who was a doctor from Sierra Leone.

2. In terms of dynamics, Kanneh-Mason covers every part of the spectrum, from a meek pianissimo to a determined fortissimo.

3. The arrangement uses a lot of suspended chords; where the fifth or the third doesn’t resolve when we want it to. This has the effect (to my ear at least) of making it feel like it’s reaching for something that’s just out of reach.

Recommended listening activity:

Realizing that your melancholy contains within it the seeds of strength.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Echo-Sax-No.8.mp3I’ve already confessed my love of walking on this blog – tracking my steps, following railway tracks – but there’s a slightly weirder side to my walking that I feel I need to admit to you. And here it is: one of my favourite places to walk is the underground parking lot next to my house.

I know, I know. Most people avoid parking garages, and being able to walk around in one alone without being paranoid likely smells like privilege, but I want to tell you why I like it.

First, it’s pretty big. Two levels, the lower one of which has very few cars in it, and therefore very few people. I almost never see anyone down there, so it feels like my own private cave.

Second, it’s got motion-sensor fluorescent lighting. So when I arrive, it’s quite dark…but then as I walk along I get the feeling of conjuring light by my mere presence, which is a cool (if admittedly bizarre) ego boost.

I’ve been walking down there (usually on rainy days or overly cold days or days when walking around the neighbourhood isn’t enticing but I still need steps) for a few months now. While I usually listen to a podcast or audiobook, recently I went down with my ears unplugged and got quite a surprise when I sneezed.

I was startled by the multi-second echo it created.

The whole space seemed to grow a bit bigger, and I had to stop for a second to listen to the decay.

If you’re not so into listening to the reverberations of your own sneezes, fair enough. That’s probably healthy. But might I suggest the works of saxophonist Caleb Arredondo, who used parking garages as the setting for his beautiful “Echo Sax” pieces.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. His precision. You can hear every note.

2. His ease. He’s doing something difficult, but making it sound easy.

3. The echo. You can really hear the shape and texture of the space he’s in.

Recommended listening activity:

Making words out of the letters on license plates.

Buy it here.

The post Week 736: “Echo Sax No. 8” by Caleb Arredondo appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SZA-Good-Days-Audio.mp3If you’ve ever seen a tiny stream empty into a lake on a sandy beach, you’ve seen the beautiful patterns it imprints into the sand. Flowing braids sculpted by the current as the water does what it does.

Zoom out.

If you’ve ever been in a plane and looked below to see a huge river empty into an ocean, you’ve seen those same patterns in a river delta whose width is enough to be measured in kilometres, as the water continues to do what it does, just on a larger scale.

Zoom in to see the swirl of the water as it drains out of your bathtub; zoom out to see the rotation of a hurricane over the ocean; zoom out still further to see the rotation of our galaxy as it spins through the universe.

The way nature does one thing is the way it does everything.

And the same goes for you: the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.

If you’re on time for the little things, you’ll never run late for the big things. If you’re in the habit of giving your best effort on the things that don’t seem important, then you’ll be ready to give your best when it matters most. If you’re in the habit of lifting up others with kindness, then when someone really needs a boost, you’ll know exactly what to say. If you do the right thing when nobody’s watching, then you’ll succeed when all eyes are on you.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The way SZA sometimes sings just behind the beat, as if she’s as unconcerned by the song’s meter as she is by the time of the day.

2. The percussion is completely dry while the guitar drips with reverb. This contrast makes the song feel like both a memory and immediately present.

3. It features backup vocals by (and was co-written by) the artist we featured this time last year.

Recommended listening activity:

Sitting right where something tall meets the ground.

Buy it here.

The post Week 735: “Good Days” by SZA appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Ascension.mp3Let’s take a trip this week. A forty-thousand-and-a-bit kilometre trip along the famous but invisible line that divides the world in half: the equator.

We’ll start our day off at Coffee Beach in the country of Sao Tomé and Principe, partly because something with the name “coffee” in it seems like a good place to begin a trip, and partly because Sao Tomé and Principe is just east of the spot where the equator intersects with the Prime Meridian; 0 degrees latitude and 0 degrees longitude. We’re not starting at actual zero-zero, because the only thing in that part of the ocean is a buoy affectionately known as “Null Island” floating in the Atlantic about 600km from land, and that’s a terrible place to start your day.

We hit mainland Africa at the country of Gabon, about 40km south of the capital of Libreville. As we cross Gabon towards the Republic of the Congo, we will consistently be about 100km south of a country that dares to call itself “Equatorial Guinea” – despite never touching the equator. Get it together, Equatorial Guinea.

After the Republic of the Congo, we pass through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then Uganda, flying above the largest lake in Africa: Lake Victoria. Then we’re into Kenya where we’ll pass over that country’s tallest mountain, the creatively-named Mount Kenya. Then we cross the southern end of Somalia before heading out over our second ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Get used to being over the ocean, by the way; 78% of the equator is over water, and the African jaunt we’ve just finished is the longest stretch of land we’ll see in the whole trip.

As we fly over the Indian Ocean, we almost hit land at the tiny island chain country of Maldives, but miss it by just a few kilometres. Our next landfall isn’t until Lorang Island, one of the 17 000 islands that make up Indonesia.

Indonesia holds the distinction of hogging more of the equator than any other country, and by a long shot. By the time we say goodbye to our last Indonesian island, we will have been above that country for about as many kilometres as we were passing through the continent of Africa.

We’re now out into the Pacific, which as you probably know is pretty big. By the time we pass just south of Howland Island (an uninhabited property of the United States) we will stop for lunch, as we’re now halfway around the earth. While having our lunch we can sit by the Earhart light. This is a small lighthouse built in 1937 in anticipation of Amelia’s refuelling stop on the tiny coral island. The crew awaiting Earhart heard her radio signals, but she never arrived.

From there, it’s another 7500km of blue ocean until we reach Ecuador. Its Galapagos islands come first, followed by the mainland.

Ecuador, as you might have guessed by its name, is rather proud of its position at the midpoint of the world. But at least they’ve earned it, geographically speaking, unlike that fraud Equatorial Guinea. In Ecuador, we might stop for a moment to visit “Mitad del Mundo” – a monument just north of the capital of Quito, and the site of ruins that pre-date colonization.

Next we hit Colombia and its sweltering rainforests. Peru will try to get in on the action, but we will miss it by less than 5km.

We come into our final country, Brazil, deep in the Amazon. As with Peru, Venezuela will also miss us on our journey by just a few kilometres.

The Brazilian town of Macapa does a pretty nice job of celebrating the equator, with a monument, a street, and a hospital named after the earth’s midpoint. But the highlight for us here will be watching a soccer match at the stadium known locally as “The Big Zero” – where the equator runs across the field’s centre line, so that teams face off on opposite halves of the globe.

It has to be said: putting a soccer field on the equator might be the most Brazilian thing ever.

We hit the Atlantic once more right where the Amazon River empties into the ocean. It’s a grand ending to our journey…although we still have another 6000km to go before returning to Coffee Beach.

If we do this trip at about 206 kilometres per second, we should make it all the way round in the time it takes to listen to the lovely “Ascension” by Germany’s Martin Rott.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Punctuated by 16th notes, it feels urgently excited.

2. The strings are grand and sweeping.

3. The handclaps are joyful and expectant.

Recommended listening activity:

Exploring Google Maps late at night.

Spotify.

The post Week 734: “Ascension” by Martin Rott appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Jonny-Greenwood-Open-Spaces.mp3If you’re into ultra-dark movies exploring humankind’s penchant for greed, hatred, and power via the exploitation of natural resources, 2007’s There Will Be Blood is for you. On the other hand, if you just want those things conveyed musically without having to actually witness them, Johnny Greenwood’s soundtrack should be enough.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It just sounds so bleak. Greenwood has always been good at bleak, but his work in Radiohead has always been evocative of near-future technological bleakness. Here he captures a lower-tech, late-19th Century wild-west lawlessness kind of bleak.

2. The (I think) clarinet that fades away a few times, such as at 1:20, has a tonal quality startlingly similar to Radiohead front man Thom Yorke’s voice.

3. Usually, songs that shift up a tone or two towards the end do so to uplift the listener. But when this one modulates at 2.27 it just makes things more tense.

Recommended listening activity:

Shuddering.

Buy it here.

The post Week 733: “Open Spaces” by Johnny Greenwood appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/weighty-ghost-wintersleep-anydownloader.com_.mp3Everyone’s got a ghost. Not a floaty skeleton dressed in a bed sheet, but something that follows them around and scares them every so often.

Some ghosts specialize in the mistakes of the past. Others focus on the near future. Or the worst-case future. Some just stick with the everyday anxieties of the present. Some unlucky folks get stuck, Scrooge-style, with all three.

While fears and anxieties are well-trodden paths for songwriters, few bands capture the feeling as effectively as Halifax indie rockers Wintersleep on “Weighty Ghost.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Many songs dealing with this type of subject matter go too poetic or too literal. Wintersleep keeps the lyrics balanced between the figurative (I got out of bed today / swear to God I couldn’t see my face) and the relatable (Sick of those goddamn clouds.)

2. The persistent organ almost allows the listener to imagine the band performing in a church.

3. It’s got a surprisingly joyful vibe for a song about feeling lost and aimless. Maybe it’s more of a jubilant exorcism than a lament. It’s got a similar gospel rock lurch as the song featured on this blog 702 weeks ago.

Recommended listening activity:

Purchasing a night light to keep the ghosts away.

Buy it here.

The post Week 732: “Weighty Ghost” by Wintersleep appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Weird-Fishes.mp3Covering Radiohead can’t be easy. I mean, if any fan base is going to put your interpretation of a band’s work under a microscope and post thesis-length explanations of its shortcomings on reddit, it’s Radiohead’s fan base.

To me, the best Radiohead covers (or the best covers of anything, really) are those that take the emotional heart of the song and transplant it into a completely different body. See Mark Ronson’s funk adaptation of “Just” for a prime example.

Or, see Lianne La Havas’ wonderful interpretation of “Weird Fishes.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It doesn’t simply transplant the song’s heart into a different body, but it brings you into the operating room to view the procedure; in the opening two bars, the drums tease the original fast-pace before cutting the tempo in half. It’s like she’s announcing, “yes, I like the original too, but I’m here to re-form it, not re-produce it.”

2. The arpeggiated guitars towards the end feel like they are straight out of La Havas’ vocabulary. They could almost have been sampled from her 2015 single “Green & Gold.”

3. The final two minutes, already powerful and heart-squeezing in the original, work just as well with the more laid-back tempo here.

The repeated lyric of the last two minutes really gets me: only Radiohead could have a line sound equally full of hope and despair: “Hit the bottom and escape.” Thom Yorke could just have easily given us “Break the ceiling and escape,” but that would be too emotionally straightforward. Instead, we’re left wondering if this is a song of dark triumph or bright failure. Or something in between.

Recommended listening activity:

Wearing a raincoat on a sunny day.

Spotify.

The post Week 731: “Weird Fishes” by Radiohead (Lianne La Havas cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Mother-Child.mp3If you’ve ever wanted to step inside a piece of art by MC Escher and explore the visual paradoxes within, then the Monument Valley games are for you.

Released in 2014 and 2017, they are wonderfully engaging puzzle games in which you lead a character through a hypnotic landscape of impossible structures.

In the original, the protagonist works her way through the levels by herself. But in the sequel she is followed by her daughter, who trots along dutifully wherever her mother leads.

Occasionally, the two characters are separated. In these cases, the mother must use her movements to coax her daughter – who always moves when her mother does, even if they are separated – into walking certain parallel paths in order to unlock subsequent levels. When mother and daughter are reunited, they always hug for a few adorable seconds. There’s a subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) theme of a parent’s need to let go that tugs at my heartstrings just a bit.

As is so often the case with games that receive critical acclaim for their immersive worlds, the success of Monument Valley 2 is in no small part thanks to the music and audio design, done by British composer Todd Baker. The game’s soundtrack, which skims past various influences without ever touching them directly, will alternately bring to mind Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and Steve Reich.

I’m not much of a gamer, so take my recommendations with a pinch of salt, but I would definitely recommend playing Monument Valley 2. And when you play, be sure to use headphones to appreciate Baker’s soundtrack.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The warmth of the keyboard.

2. The high notes of the keyboard (daughter) and how they interplay with the low notes (mother).

3. The forever echo that makes each touch on the keyboard spiral off into infinity

Recommended listening activity:

Doing a puzzle with someone either much older or much younger than you.

Spotify.

The post Week 730: “Mother & Child” by Todd Baker appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Guaranteed-Humming-Version.mp3Everything in my demographic profile suggests that I should like Pearl Jam.

My age, my skin tone, my just-good-enough ability on the guitar, right down to my precise location on the masculinity-vulnerability spectrum. Run a thousand simulations of my life and most of the time Pearl Jam will wind up being the most important band of my adolescence. Most of the time I’ll end up chasing their tours around the country, “Black” will be the first dance at my wedding, and my wife and I will move to Seattle and buy dog named Vedder.

But in this timeline, I really don’t like Pearl Jam that much.

I like – even love – plenty of bands that were Pearl Jam-adjacent, and a few of them have appeared on this blog. Pearl Jam itself? Not for me. And I think it’s less about their music, which isn’t all that different from other bands of the era, and more about Eddie Vedder’s voice.

To me, nobody epitomizes the stereotypical 90s rock voice more than Eddie Vedder. Kurt Cobain was the metaphorical voice of a generation, but the literal interpretation of that award goes to Vedder. His broad vowels, sheep-like vibrato, and the way his voice too often seems to sit neither in his head or his chest but somehow in the back of his throat. It just bugs me.

Well then, thank goodness for this song, from the soundtrack to the 2007 film “Into the Wild.” The original version earned Vedder a Golden Globe Award, and an Oscar nomination. The version I’m sharing here was included on the soundtrack as a hidden track (so very 90s), and thanks to its sparing use of vocals I really like it.

I’m not about to move to Seattle or name a dog after him, but at least now I can say I have a favourite Eddie Vedder song.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. By humming rather than singing, Vedder actually highlights the rich tonal quality of his voice. I’d always thought of him as a high tenor, but those lower notes really resonate when he’s not doing his sheep voice thing.

2. By humming rather than singing, it fits better with the theme of the movieit was written for. Nothing implies a semi-aimless soul-searching adventure more than humming.

3. Although the chord structure never changes, the different melodies he hums prevent it from feeling too repetitive.

Recommended listening activity:

Ambling.

Buy it here.

The post Week 729: “Guaranteed (Humming version) by Eddie Vedder appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Flyte-Tough-Love-Official-Audio.mp3If aliens were to judge human relationships based on our music, they would likely conclude that we have two types of romantic entanglements: ones that are brand new and blissfully happy, and ones that are over and ended in heartbreak.

Real relationships often have moments of these two phases, but few songs are written about the mundane moments; the routines that are the foundation of a couple’s strength. Or the routines that push a couple apart. The small victories that make a couple unbeatable. The small resentments that make a relationship untenable.

Thankfully, British duo Flyte can provide our extraterrestrial overlords with a bit of nuance, thanks to songs like “Tough Love” in which a couple questions its will to continue, simultaneously recognizing their desperate love for each other and their tendency to mistreat each other.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Sung from the perspectives of both people involved in the relationship, the two singers acknowledge their own faults with lines like “How are you still breathing / with my hands all over your heart?”

2. As guest vocalist Laura Marling’s verse transitions to the pre-chorus, her voice pans from its original space in the mix over to the left, making room for the other vocalist.

3. While the verse is in 4/4 time, the chorus is in 6/4. Not a huge difference, but enough to be unpredictable and slightly on-edge like a difficult conversation.

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining whether you would be able to explain your relationship to a younger version of yourself. (Or maybe an alien.)

But it here,

The post Week 728: “Tough Love (feat. Laura Marling)” by Flyte appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Shrimpnose-chief-Sundials.mp3Sundials are, without a doubt, a cool invention.

They are practical. They’re ingenious. They’re astoundingly simple. They’re even poetic, in that they require something tangible (a stick) and something immaterial (a shadow) to measure something that is both natural (the movement of the sun) and human-created (the concept of time).

And I’m not the only one who finds sundials poetic. Many sundials have inscriptions on them, often sharing philosophical musings on the notion of time itself. They’re known as “sundial mottos” – and while it’s a neat idea, it would appear that most sundial mottos are a little on the dark side.

Here’s a sampling of some inscriptions found on sundials around the world:

• Time devours everything.
• Life passes like the shadow.
• Time takes all but memories.
• Look at my shadow and you will see your life.
• It is later than you think.
• The last hour is hidden so that we watch them all.
• One of these hours will be your last.
• All hours wound; the last kills.

Remember: most of these are from sundials found in public places, in an age before the average person had a watch. An age where, if you wanted to know the time, you needed to go to a town square or a building significant enough to either have a sundial affixed to the wall, or placed on the ground out front. These are meant to draw the attention of the masses, and remind them, as they take a look to see what time it is, that THEY MIGHT DIE AT ANY MOMENT.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you like the idea of time but prefer not to focus on your own mortality, you should avoid looking at sundials.

If, however, you like the idea of time and feel like relaxing on the couch with some blissfully relaxed chillhop, the album Changes in Time by Shrimpnose might be for you.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It fades in like a well-calibrated morning alarm.

2. The snare hit is a gentle little tap, like a cat batting at a piece of cardboard.

3. Having a major third repeated on the piano non-stop for the entire song should be boring. But it’s calming.

Recommended listening activity:

Using sidewalk chalk to outline a friend’s shadow at your favourite time of day.

Buy it here.

The post Week 727: “Sundials” by Shrimpnose appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/JBM-years.mp3In North America, today is eclipse day. School days are cancelled or shortened, everyone’s scrambling to buy glasses, and we’re all giddy about the rarity that we are privileged to experience.

Not to burst any bubbles, but total solar eclipses aren’t actually all that rare. There have already been 14 of them this century, with another 54 to come before the century is out. The only rarity is that this one passes over several major population centres, and will be visible (at least partially) from everywhere in the continental US.

But if you’re not in the geographic position to see 2024’s most highly-touted shadow go by, here are some other things about 2024 that make our current year stand out:

• It’s an Olympic year
• It’s a leap year
• It’s a leap year that starts on a Monday (which only happens once every 28 years)
• 2024 is an election year for eight of the world’s ten most populous countries; about half the world’s population will have an election this year
• The digits in 2024 add up to 8, an auspicious and lucky number in many cultures, and something that won’t happen again until 2033
• Parts of the US are about to experience the simultaneous appearance of something like a TRILLION cicadas in a rare double brood that won’t happen again until 2037
• On August 19, there will be a full “blue” moon, which happens so rarely that its occurrence is shorthand for something that happens rarely

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s a rarity in the context of the album it inhabits; the only instrumental on the 10-track LP.

2. The guitar is the star of the song’s first minute, while the strings take over in the second minute.

3. It has the smooth entrance and exit of an eclipse; fading in from silence and fading out into the record’s second song.

Recommended listening activity:

Using those special wine glasses you never use.

Buy it here.

The post Week 726: “Years” by Jesse Marchant appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Collector.mp3Several times during my childhood, I tried to start a specific type of coin collection. The goal was to accumulate one type of coin for every year. It didn’t matter whether that was quarters or nickels or what; I just wanted a complete set.

After scouring my own coin jar (and that of my parents) I quickly realized that such a collection would be very difficult to complete. Finding coins minted in the past twenty years was easy, but finding coins from the 1960s, 50s, 40s…with each step further into the past, it became clear that I couldn’t do it.

But then, an idea: Canada had recently (1987) discontinued its one dollar bill, replacing it with a coin, lovingly known as a “Loonie” in honor of the bird featured on its tails side. If I didn’t need to find anything older than 1987, I could easily grow my collection one year and one coin at a time.

For a while, it worked. And it was exciting. Each January, every handful of change offered the possibility of a coin from the new year.

The problem was that about ten years into the project I fell into a predictable cycle. Every once in a while, I’d find myself in need of ten bucks. I’d look at my pile of Loonies and think, “well, it’s only ten coins, I’m sure I can re-start the collection.” I’d spend it, re-start it, and soon enough find myself ten dollars short of whatever it was I needed.

Years later I eventually got the chance to collect a piece of currency – pennies – and since Canada stopped producing them in 2012, when the collection was complete, it was truly complete. And as cash becomes less and less a part of daily life, that collection seems even more antique.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It fades in gradually, which is sometimes how a collection starts; you don’t know you’re collecting something until it’s too late to stop.

2. The acoustic guitar, tuned down so that its lowest note is lower than usual, sounds simultaneously rich and fragile in a way that makes me imagine the guitar itself is a collector’s item.

3. It begins and ends with the same simple but sweet lyric: You are the collector / Running out of room / I am gonna be there / When you do.

Recommended listening activity:

Passing down an incomplete collection to someone much younger in the hopes they can complete it.

Buy it here.

The post Week 725: “Collector” by Searows appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Belle.mp3Any musician famous enough to amass a large fan base inevitably amasses some haters. If it’s not for their music, it might be their look, their politics, or their personas.

When Jack Johnson’s fame peaked in the mid-2000s, he had plenty of hatred aimed his way, and I never fully understood why. He seemed like a pretty likeable guy. He married his college girlfriend and steers clear of tabloid drama. He’s quietly active with charity work in his home state of Hawaii, environmentally conscious without being preachy, and usually dressed as if he’s a background actor in a grocery store commercial.

Was it his music that bothered people? I always found it catchy, pleasant, easy. Browsing reviews from the time (In Between Dreams was released in 2005) it’s hard to find a review that doesn’t contain the word “mellow.” How can you hate something that’s mellow?

And yet those reviews are often written with an edge, and seem to take issue with the very innocuousness that makes the music so mellow in the first place. SPIN Magazine graded it a D+ and provided scathing observations like, “He’s the hotter, chiller version of that barefoot sociology major you always saw picking ‘No Woman, No Cry’ on a Martin guitar in front of the dorms, flashing a ‘who, me?’ smile at passing cuties.”

Even the favourable review in the Village Voice ran with the title “Dumber Breeze” and proclaimed Johnson the “dumbest genius in pop.”

It’s as if, as the 90s morphed into the early 2000s, the musical landscape was such that critics could accept either vapid boy-band pop OR ultra-conscious Radiohead-type acts. I guess innocuousness is hard to enjoy ironically or authentically.

And while some of his songs are almost too cute for my liking, some of them – like this short little gem from the record’s tail end – are quite lovely.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. While most of his music draws on indie folk or even Caribbean influences, this one is more Bossa Nova. How can you hate Bossa Nova?

2. While most of his music doesn’t stray far from guy-and-guitar instrumentation, this one features a little bit of accordion. How can you hate a little bit of accordion?

3. Just when you think it’s going to be purely instrumental, he throws in a half-verse, sung in multiple languages, in which he tries to get attention from someone beautiful. That someone was apparently his wife, to whom he jokingly first sang this song on a vacation in Europe. How can you hate such a wholesome backstory?

Recommended listening activity:

Making a list of pet peeves and then deciding to stop hating at least half of the things on the list.

Buy it here.

The post Week 724: “Belle” by Jack Johnson appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/A-Mirror.mp3One of my kids’ favourite things to do is to watch videos of themselves as babies and toddlers. They love seeing how they moved, talked, interacted with each other. It always feels very wholesome when we sit together and do this, and it often makes me wonder about the effect it has on their sense of who they are.

We have watched some moments so many times that I wonder: do they have a memory of that event, or has the memory of watching the video supplanted what may have existed of the original memory?

If you were born before about 1995, it’s unlikely that you have a stockpile of videos of your very young self to watch. If, like me, you were born well before 1995, you can only guess at how you moved, talked, interacted with others at that age. You look at faded photos and wonder at who that kid was.

Your memories are speculative.

Composer Yair Elazar Glotman did more than just wonder about his childhood memories; his 2022 LP Speculative Memories draws from them and uses cinematic soundscapes to bring them to life.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. I’m not sure what memory Glotman has that involves standing in front of a mirror, but it feels pretty intense. The listener can imagine him staring at his reflection in anger, or while an argument echoed from another part of the house, or even just in contemplation of what the world might be like on the other side of the mirror.

2. The vocal lines, sung by Sara Fors, are utterly haunting, calling to mind Allegri or Palestrina.

3. Nothing to do with the song, but the album art: at first glance it appears to be black and white. But stare at it a bit longer – the kind of hard critical stare we usually reserve for our own reflections – and you’ll see flecks of blue hidden within.

Recommended listening activity:

Pressing your index finger against a mirror hard enough to leave a fingerprint.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Hold-On-Magnolia-Demo.mp3This week’s song was recommended by a reader. Thanks, Mia!

Do you ever look at an old photo of yourself and wonder when that version of you became the current version of you? You can see that you look younger in the photo. Shockingly younger. But when, precisely, did those changes happen? When did your eyes change? When did that line appear? Did you wake up one morning with an older-looking face?

Of course, other than a drastic haircut or a removal of braces, the changes that come with age are incremental and undetectable. It’s rare to see a photo of yourself and think something like, “that’s the last photo of me as a kid,” or “that’s the first photo of me as an adult.”

For musician Jason Molina, 2003 might have been an identifiable turning point.

From 1995 to 2002, Molina fronted a band with the cryptic name “Songs: Ohia” to significant critical acclaim and a devoted if slightly underground fan base. From 2004 until 2012 he fronted a different band, with different musicians, called “The Magnolia Electric Co.”

Which is all fine, but it raises an interesting question about the album he released in 2003: who is it by?

It was released as a Songs: Ohia LP, so it’s easy to say that it belongs to that band’s catalogue. Except that the moniker “Songs: Ohia” is nowhere to be found on the cover; the only text to grace the album art is the album’s name, which is – guess what – The Electric Magnolia Co.

So maybe it’s an Electric Magnolia Co release? But it wasn’t recorded with the musicians who would later form The Electric Magonlia Co. And to complicate things, on the vinyl release it does say “Songs: Ohia” on the sticker in the middle of the record.

Maybe it’s most accurate to say that it’s two things at once: the last release by Songs: Ohia and the first release by The Electric Magnolia Co.

It’s a graduation photo. A rare picture you can look at and see the beginning of one thing overlapping with the end of another thing.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Because it’s a demo version, it’s very rough and unpolished, like a diary entry written in the first minutes after waking from a dream.

2. Because it’s a demo version, you can hear ambient noise from the room Molina was in when he recorded it, and it sounds like a window’s open and a hint of birdsong is just barely audible.

3. Unfortunately, 2003 was (according to one bandmate) the beginning of Molina’s destructive relationship with alcohol. Almost ten years to the day after recording this demo, Molina died of organ failure related to his alcoholism.

Maybe there’s an alternate timeline somewhere in which Molina’s life branches in a different direction after recording this demo. Maybe he goes for a walk and listens to the birds and makes one or two small decisions slightly differently, and lives to look back on 2003 as the turning point it deserved to be.

Recommended listening activity:

Doing something that your future self will thank you for.

Buy it here.

The post Week 722: “Hold On Magnolia (demo)” by Songs: Ohia appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Puccini-Manon-Lescaut-Intermezzo-Danish-National-Symphony-Orchestra-Live.mp3No, it’s not a glitch with your device and you’re not having some kind of Bill Murray-esque Groundhog Day experience. We’re doing another intermezzo, from the same compilation album as last week’s. I’m not usually into this type of repetition, but as we’re about to see, doing something over again is occasionally a good idea.

First performed in 1893, the opera Manon Lescaut was Puccini’s first big hit…but it almost wasn’t. His publisher was against the idea of using the story (from a 1731 novel by French author Abbée Prévost) because it had just been given the operatic adaptation treatment less than a decade earlier by French composer Jules Massenet.

Puccini’s response to his publisher’s hesitation, as noted in The Opera Lover’s Companion, was: “Manon is a heroine I believe in and therefore she cannot fail to win the hearts of the public. Why shouldn’t there be two operas about Manon? A woman like Manon can have more than one lover. Massenet feels it as a Frenchman, with powder and minuets. I shall feel it as an Italian, with a desperate passion.”

Puccini’s passion must have been just desperate enough for audiences, because his Manon Lescaut propelled him to superstardom.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The lonely cello at the opening.

2. The other strings who join in, tentatively at first, and then with more conviction.

3. After the louder middle section, which might accurately be described as “desperately passionate” things settle down, and the strings wrap things up way up high.

Recommended listening activity:

Scrolling through your photos to see what you did this time last year, and doing it again.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/CAVALLERIA-RUSTICANA-MASCAGNI-Intermezzo-KARAJAN.mp3Generally speaking, I’m not really into opera. The last time I featured anything from an opera was seven years ago, and even that was closer to baroque than what is typically considered opera.

Opera – and by that I mean 19th Century, Wagner-Verdi-Bizet stuff – has always felt too big and bloated for my tastes. I mean, I’m not against going over the top from time to time, but most of the songs on most “greatest hits of opera” playlists feel so over the top that they can’t even see the top anymore.

However, I think I may have recently discovered my entry point into opera appreciation: the Intermezzo.

An Intermezzo, as you might have guessed from the name, is a piece of music played between acts, during the intermission. Back in the 1700s, it was more than just a piece of music; operas would have full-on mini-operas between acts. They often served as comic relief from the more serious, epic dramatic words that they supported.

Later, the Intermezzo became instrumental only, and sometimes were meant to be a musical connection between one act and another, using the motifs associated with certain characters. The practice continued right up to the movie musicals of the mid-20th Century, which would sometimes have music playing while the projectionists changed film reels.

Intermezzos (or Intermezzi if you want to pluralize like an Italian) remain popular among opera fans as evidenced by the fact that this one is found on an Intermezzo compilation album (!) conducted by the legendary Herbert von Karajan.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. This Intermezzo comes halfway through Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, a story of love and affairs and vengeance and general melodrama. And while the dynamic range of the Intermezzo hints at melodrama, I find it much more subtle (maybe even understated) than most famous pieces from operas.

2. That understated drama may be because the Intermezzo doesn’t accompany drama, but follows after it instead. Before the Intermezzo plays, a scene plays out in front of a church in which various characters admit to affairs. Revenge is vowed, tears are shed, and the square empties out. The audience is then treated to the Intermezzo and a hauntingly empty stage.

3. Cavalleria Rusticana was an enormous hit as an opera, but the only real hit of Mascagni’s career. It was the winning entry in a competition held by a Milanese publisher who invited un-published composers to submit their work. I can’t express exactly why, but I find it poignant that the most enduring composition from Mascagni’s only hit opera is an instrumental piece played to an empty town square.

Recommended listening activity:

Trying a type of food or drink you think you don’t like, but haven’t had in a long time, just to make sure.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Sonny-Smith-Wolf-Like-Howls-from-the-Bathhouse.mp3Plenty of musicians have recorded albums of covers, typically at the tail end of their careers, once the creative well has started to run dry and original material is in short supply.

However, Sonny Smith’s 2013 album 100 Records, Volume 3 is not your standard album of covers, and it’s more of a creative peak than a trough.

That’s because all 100 bands covered in the project are fictional.

It began as a visual art project. Smith challenged 100 artists to create album art for non-existent bands. Once that work was done, he set about imagining the personas of each band, and created songs by each invented group.

The impressive thing about the project is not that he came up with 200 songs (that’s one A-side and one B-side for each made-up musical act) but that when compiled, the songs kind of work together. They sound like Smith and the fictional bands all at once.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The band name is fantastic. South East Lake Otter Champs. I mean, who doesn’t want that on a band shirt / sports jersey?

2. The uneasy mood is likely a result of the way it alternates between major and minor. Reminds me very much of the song we listened to in week 447.

3. There’s something about the recording quality (not sure if it’s the production or the post-production) that makes it sound like a lost B-side from decades ago.

Recommended listening activity:

Exploring your own alter egos.

Buy it here.

The post Week 719: “Wolf Like Howls from the Bathhouse (South East Land Otter Champs)” by Sonny Smith appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Olafur-Arnalds-Bonobo-Loom.mp3After a few days travelling and camping in the highlands of Iceland, Bonobo and Ólafur Arnalds went back into the studio to relax and make some music together. The result was a song so enthralling that Arnalds kept coming back to it when putting together his next album, 2020’s Some Kind of Peace.

It’s fitting that the song is a two-person collaboration, because it’s a song that feels two-sided in many ways. It sounds synthetic but also natural. It sounds modern but also classic. It could just as easily be a first listen of the day, or as you’re hitting the pillow.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The synth pattern that emerges at the beginning was programmed by Arnalds on his own software; he plays chords on a keyboard and the synth takes those notes and plugs it into the stuttering pattern you hear at the beginning. Hold that thought.

2. The chopped up vocals that fade in near the beginning but only become clear at around 2:30 are courtesy of Bonobo, and I can’t help thinking that they’re sung by fairies.

3. Also at 2:30, a piano comes into the mix, and if the pattern sounds familiar, that’s because you’re hearing a player piano (one of those old-timey pianos that plays itself) hooked up to that synth pattern mentioned above; it’s not a synthesized piano, but a synthesizer and some software controlling a real acoustic piano.

If this type of technological / musical nerdery makes the left hemisphere of your brain tingle, you should watch this video, in which Arnalds goes into deep detail about the track and the various pieces of software he’s developed.

If, however, you’re feeling more right-brained, you might enjoy the official video for this song, which features interpretive dancers doing their thing while waist-deep in an Icelandic lake.

Recommended listening activity:

Eating organic food off a plastic plate.

Buy it here.

The post Week 696: “Loom” by Olafur Arnalds and Bonobo appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Tor-Eleuthera-Official-Audio.mp3I didn’t have a treehouse in my backyard growing up, but I did have a special, private perch just outside my bedroom window. It was a 30-foot-tall mast for our TV aerial, and climbing to the top gave me a peek across the neighbouring houses and out towards downtown.

From up there I could see all the way to the CN Tower, my hometown’s altitudinous pride and joy. Due to a combination of my own elevation, the slight slope the city took as it approached the lake, and perhaps my imagination, it felt as if I was up at the same level as the observation deck. As if I was on eye level with whoever happened to be up there at that moment. I imagined that if I were a bird, I could fly in a straight line and say hello to them.

There is a limited number of precious instances in city life when you feel completely alone among millions of people, but being up there was one such instance.

Tor’s 2021 album Oasis Sky takes its name from something similar: the feeling the artist gets in his Vancouver high rise; floating serenely above the city, with a view of the ocean and the mountains. An oasis in the sky.

This song closes the album.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The drum sample is one of my favourites. Originally from a 1974 song called “Sneakin’ in the Back” by Tom Scott and the LA Express, it’s been used by plenty of acts from Massive Attack to Third Eye Blind, but it never gets old.

2. That drum sample gets a bit syncopated at 2:16 in a way that augments the groove.

3. The rising and falling piano line sounds like a bird that decides to take off from the roof of your house to go visit someone in an observation deck far away.

Recommended listening activity:

Scanning the horizon.

Buy it here.

The post Week 695: “Eleuthera” by Tor appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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The quickest way to understand the kind of music made by Britain’s Public Service Broadcasting…

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I am particularly susceptible to getting lost in albums that pile obscure samples on top…

The post Week 693: “Doubletalk Gets Through to You” by Xploding Plastix appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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Sam Prekop’s self-titled debut album came out in 1999, but it doesn’t sound like 1999.…

The post Week 692: “Practice Twice” by Sam Prekop appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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Here’s a musical genre that I didn’t know I needed in my life: daytime disco.…

The post Week 691: “Tulsa” by Poolside appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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There’s a series of photos of Kurt Cobain taken at the 1993 VMAs that are…

The post Week 690: “All Apologies” by Nirvana (Sinéad O’Connor cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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We had a crawl space in our basement. It was up behind the TV, hidden…

The post Week 689: “Crawl Spaces” by Jesse Brown and Andy Salvanos appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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One of the great joys of summer is watching a storm approach, then rage, then…

The post Week 688: “The Water Rises” by Kronos Quartet and Laurie Anderson appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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Unpopular opinion alert: Talking Heads are one of those bands that I’m supposed to like…

The post Week 687: “This Must Be the Place” by Talking Heads (Iron & Wine and Ben Bridwell cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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{sc_embed_player_template1 fileurl=http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Father-John-Misty-In-Twenty-Years-or-So.mp3] Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about recently: is optimism a symptom of…

The post Week 686: “In Twenty Years or So” by Father John Misty appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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In keeping with the title of this song, I wanted to tell you a “lost…

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How clearly do you remember your childhood room? Since my childhood was spent entirely at…

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Not much time this week, so we’re doing a quick one. Just time for a…

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Afternoon-Bike-Ride-Glossover-feat.-Lowswimmer.mp3One of the trickiest things about starting a band has to be coming up with a good name. How do you sum up a band’s sound or vibe or style or message in a name that’s also memorable, clever, and not already copyrighted?

Very few bands have names that do all the above, and for some reason they tend to be on the heavier end of the genre spectrum: Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Cannibal Corpse; you know what you’re getting with these acts before you hear the first note.

For some reason the quieter, thoughtful, sing-you-to-sleep bands tend to have names that vary from quirky to flat-out confusing. Iron & Wine: Comedy duo? Energy drink? Vineyard subscription service? Death Cab for Cutie: Horror movie? Sitcom? Three-panel comic strip?

Well this week’s featured band has the whole name thing sorted out. If you were hired to come up with a name for them, a name that captures the feeling conveyed by their music, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something better than Afternoon Bike Ride.

Everything their name implies – freedom, gentle breezes, the warmth of a late-spring afternoon – it’s all there in this Montreal trio’s music.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. In the chorus, the lyrics overflow the melody: “Hide me / Here right in the middle’s delight be- / -tween the faulted riddles of life” …making each bar spill into the next.

2. At 2:10, a quick ticking fades in that sounds very much like the ticking a geared bike makes when you coast.

3. The way two singers share the verses makes it feel like a bike ride with a friend.

Recommended listening activity:

I want to come up with something more clever than “taking an afternoon bike ride” but I can’t. And I thought naming a band was hard…

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Populous-Pietre-roventi.mp3

| The world’s most populous… | …is | And you might be interested to know… | | Country | India | It just overtook China about a month ago (April 2023). | | City | Tokyo | It kind of depends on how you define a city, but Tokyo’s metropolitan area contains about a third of all of Japan’s people. | | Island | Java | Java is part of Indonesia, which might look like a bunch of small-ish islands, but it’s actually huge. From east to west it’s easily wider than the US or Europe. | | University | Indira Gandhi National Open University in India | It’s got about 7 million students. | | Building | Hard to define, but it might be this apartment complex in St. Petersburg, Russia | There are more than 20 thousand residents. | | Place on earth ever, probably | (was) Kowloon Walled City | It was bonkers. A 6.4-acre site that was home to 33 000 people. Read more about it here. |

Populous, the musician also known as Andrea Mangia, comes from the town of Lecce in the heel of Italy’s boot. It’s got a population of just under 100 000, in case you were wondering.

His 2021 album Stasi, meaning “stasis” is great thinking music. Or perhaps counting music.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The title. The other stracks on the album have beautifully meditative Italian titles, most of which even my less-than-basic Italian can easily translate; “Luna Liquida” (liquid moon); “L’architettura del Mare” (the architecture of the sea); “Vita Lenat” (slow life).

But the song “Pietre Roventi” caught my eye because I immediately wondered who Peter Roventi was. After an embarrassingly long and fruitless internet search, it finally occurred to me that the title might not be someone’s name.

Nope. It means “hot rocks.”

1. Populous’ style is minimal and textured, like a combination of Tycho and Lemon Jelly. Easy to get lost in.

2. Despite the persistence of the percussion, it’s not overbearing.

Recommended listening activity:

Zooming in on the map of a city you’ve never been to.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Taylor-Swift-invisible-string-Official-Lyric-Video.mp3I don’t believe in fate, but I do like the idea of fate.

It’s such a typically human thing to think: we’re so important that god or the universe (or whatever) has a vested interest in making our lives turn out a certain way. We crave meaning, and what could be more meaningful than being assigned a specific task by the creative force that made all life possible?

I think what our tendency to believe in fate actually speaks to is our (again, typically human) ability to make sense of our lives by retroactively applying a story arc to everything that happens to us. And that’s a pretty good survival tool, when you think about it. If our big human brains curse us with the knowledge that so much is random, it’s pretty great that those brains also give us the ability to apply reason and patterns and narrative to all the randomness.

And on those rare occasions in our lives when things just fall into place, it’s a wonderful thing to experience. Thinking of all the small things that had to go right for you to meet a specific person, it feels so great that it’s hard not to think of it as having been planned by a higher power. Charlotte Bronte put it poetically in “Jane Eyre” – “It is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.”

I’m not sure if Taylor Swift believes in fate but her 2020 song “Invisible String” captures the wonder of fate (or coincidence) just about as nicely as Charlotte Bronte.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The production on this whole album has been widely praised, and a good chunk of that praise goes to Aaron Dessner of The National who produced it. The key production choice in this song is the guitar, which has a wonderfully soft sound to it, likely the result of a rubber bridge.

2. Like any Taylor Swift song, it’s catchy enough to stick in your head for days, especially the descending melody on the “meeeeee” in the chorus.

3. The lyrics make me think that maybe Taylor Swift both does and doesn’t believe in fate. “Isn’t it just so pretty to think / All along there was some invisible string tying you to me?” That line from the chorus, despite mentioning the invisible string of destiny, phrases it like a question posed by someone who isn’t sure if it’s real or just poetic.

Recommended listening activity:

Deciding what to do tomorrow by flipping a coin.

Spotify.

The post Week 680: “Invisible String” by Taylor Swift appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Trees-Should-Be-Purple.mp3I agree with Gemp that trees – or at least some trees – should be purple. It would be a nice change from all that brown and green.

However, I’ve recently learned that there’s a type of tree that’s already going several steps beyond and that has been glamming up the forests of south-east Asia for millennia: Eucalyptus deglupta, commonly known as the Rainbow Eucalyptus.

Its size makes it an impressive tree already: up to 75 metres with a trunk as wide as a motorcycle. But it’s the way the its bark regenerates that gives this tree its name and its spot in the Tree Hall of Fame.

Bark does for a tree what our skin does for us; protects the fragile inner workings from the bacterial dangers of the outside world. However unlike our skin, which you’ve probably heard sloughs off and regenerates over time, the bark of most trees simply thickens as the tree ages.

The Rainbow Eucalyptus is an exception; its bark comes off in thin strips throughout its life. Each strip exposes a light green patch of wood underneath. This new wood gradually changes colour, from purple to blue to orange to red to yellow. Because the strips fall off at various times, at any given moment each tree is covered in a beautiful vertically-striped patchwork of hues.

Like many beautiful things in nature, they look too fake to be real.

But they’re real.

So I hope that Gemp knows about the Rainbow Eucalyptus, and that maybe they can pay one a visit sometime, because yes, trees should be purple. And red. And green and yellow and maroon.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It opens with crickets. I know plenty of songs do this, but it sets such a great forest mood I’m fine with it.

2. For a track that is loosely within the “lofi” genre, there’s a lot of high-frequency sounds going on; the crickets, the guitars, the keys. Makes for a nice lush canopy layer.

3. Counteracting all that high-frequency stuff is the kick drum. Sometimes, like at 1:09, everything else drops out and only the kick drum is left. It’s like when a tree’s roots poke out in the middle of a forest path, just to remind you they’re there.

Recommended listening activity:

High-fiving a tree.

Spotify.

The post Week 679: “Trees Should Be Purple” by Gemp appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Thirdstory-Grows-Old-Searching-EP.mp3Last week was a pretty deep dive into an obscure pastime, so let’s make this week the opposite: a shallow dive into a universal emotion. Namely, love.

On May 13, 1924, a woman named Zelmyra married a man named Herbert in North Carolina. They remained married until 2011, when Herbert died at age 105. Zelmyra followed two years later, also at 105.

That’s 86 years of marriage. To put that into more perspective than you likely require, here are some facts:

• When the Second World War ended, they had already been married more than 20 years.
• As of this writing, Morgan Freeman has not been alive for 86 years. And he seems old enough to basically be immortal.
• When the first astronauts walked on the moon, Zelmyra and Herbert had already been married for 45 years. In fact, their wedding day was a full six years before Neil Armstrong was even born.
• On Zelmyra and Herbert’s wedding day, the country of East Germany wouldn’t exist for another 25 years. By the time the Berlin wall fell and East Germany was no more, Zelmyra and Herbert still had 21 years left together.
• In their home state of North Carolina, public schools were still segregated on Zelmyra and Herbert’s wedding day. In 2010, the first Black president of the United States wrote them a commendation for their enduring relationship.

Once their marriage was certified by Guinness, the couple were asked the usual ridiculous, unanswerable questions of the “what’s your secret” variety. The answers were simple, and included:

• Marriage is not a contest. Never keep score.
• There’s no secret. We just did what was needed for each other and our family.
• We are individuals, but accomplish more together.
• We were best friends before we were married. A friend is for life.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The song’s heartbeat is the rhythmic, one-note bounce on the bass that lasts virtually the entire length of the track.

2. Thirdstory’s strength is their vocal harmonies. I first encountered them through a video of their cover of a Sufjan Stevens song,in which the main captivating feature was the blend of their voices. Each of the three singers is an individual, but they accomplish more together.

3. The build-up that begins at 2:30 is intense, but rather than bursting into some mind-bending outro, it goes back to the steady, heartbeat rhythm that’s carried the song all along.

Recommended listening activity:

Going on a date together in the oldest clothes each of you owns.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Croquet-Club-You-Left-Me.mp3It is 1830. Industrialization is in full swing. Labourers, made redundant by advances in agricultural technology, are flocking to London to find factory work.

The city – dirty, dangerous, and disconnected from nature – is a pretty awful place. Those who can afford to find refuge in some of the world’s first suburbs; neighbourhoods on the outskirts of London that attempt to combine the natural serenity of the countryside with convenient proximity to the life of the city.

Conditions are perfect for inventor Edwin Budding, whose 1830 masterpiece will become a symbol of suburbia for generations to come: the lawn mower. Specifically, he invents the cylinder lawn mower, a design so effective and easy to use that versions of it are still widely available today.

The zoological gardens at Regent’s Park in London are among the first to purchase the invention from Budding, and they are pleased to discover that it can allow one man to do as much cutting in an hour as several men could do with scythes, and much more accurately. Soon, all members of Britain’s upper crust are in possession of lawn mowers so that they (or at least, their groundskeepers) can keep the lawns uniformly shorn.

Before long, the cylinder lawn mower was ready to make lawns perfect for the pastime that was about to become all the rage among said upper crust: croquet.

Image: recollections.bizAlthough similar games were played in medieval France, the first recorded game of croquet was played in the 1860s. Within a few years it was THE pastime in Britain, as well as France and much of the western world. The All England Club at Wimbledon was in fact originally a croquet club. I can just imagine the sight (and distinctive sound) of the groundskeepers at Wimbledon preparing the grass for an afternoon’s croquet.

As the century ended, croquet’s popularity peaked. After its one and only appearance in the Olympics (at the Paris games in 1900) croquet’s following fell off sharply. Ground space at Wimbledon was given over to the new popular sport of lawn tennis, and although the word “croquet” still hangs on in the official title of the All England Club, croquet is more past than pastime today.

One other visible relic of the sport is the London street known as Pall Mall, which was once home to a croquet field and which takes its name from the French word for croquet, “paille maille,” or “ball and mallet.”

All this is to say that I’m glad that Jeremy Villecourt, a Paris-based musician on a London-based label, chose the stage name Croquet Club for his musical project.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The piano sample is from “Clair de Lune,” featured on this blog in week 29 and composed by Claude Debussy, whose life (1862-1918) overlaps almost perfectly with croquet’s rise and decline.

2. Rather than a snare drum, Villecourt chose a rim hit for the percussion. When listening to that sound, it’s hard not to imagine a croquet mallet hitting a ball.

3. The vibe is pretty laid back until the halfway point, when the vocal sample enters, repeating the line “you left me” – and suddenly the mood turns nostalgic.

Recommended listening activity:

Scouting out places in your neighbourhood where you can play this summer.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Jim-James-Exploding.mp3Carbon, one of the most common elements in the universe, is found in many forms thanks to its willingness to combine with other atoms. As you might remember from high school science, the scientific term for this willingness is “valence.” I prefer “willingness” because it allows me to imagine carbon holding hands with other atoms.

All this microscopic hand-holding leads to carbon’s many allotropes – diamond, graphene, graphite, lonsdaleite – all of which have very different and very cool looking molecular arrangements.

One of the coolest is Buckminsterfullerene, and no, I’m not making that name up.

It takes its name from its resemblance to geodesic domes, popularized by mid-century modernist architect Buckminster Fuller. Although first observed in a lab, Buckminsterfullerene is found in nature, but very rarely: in stars, in interstellar space, in the area around lightning strikes. The molecules also bear an uncanny resemblance to soccer balls, and are therefore sometimes known by the adorable name “buckyballs.”

I repeat: I am not making this up. I feel compelled to repeat this because it’s about to get weirder.

The discovery was interesting, but few applications were immediately apparent. Commenting on the compound, a member of the British House of Lords said that it “does nothing in particular, and does it very well.” But in 2015, some American scientists found a potential application by doing what Americans love to do: blowing stuff up.

Specifically, they took some buckyballs and got them to hold hands with some nitrous oxide molecules. The result was microscopic explosions that, they hypothesized, are small enough but powerful enough to perhaps destroy cancerous cellswithout damaging surrounding cells.

Searching this stuff up brings many excited articles from 2015, but little else within the last eight years, so it seems as if the science of nano-explosions hasn’t made much progress. Which is too bad.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy this explosion-themed song by the lead singer of My Morning Jacket.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Like buckyballs, Jim James has an interesting name. I mean…Jim is short for James, so it’s pretty much James James, right? (Okay, his real name is James Edward Olliges Jr. But that’s still a pretty cool name.)

2. Like nano-explosions, it’s modestly sized at just 2 minutes.

3. The lead guitar with its friendly, sweet, almost cute melody; if atoms could hold hands, they would do it while listening to this song.

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining tiny fireworks going off in the palm of your hand.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/MisterWives-SUPERBLOOM.mp3When conditions are just right, wildflowers in parts of California will burst into colours so vivid and widespread that the effects are visible from space.

It’s called a “super bloom,” and there’s been a spectacular one this year. The first months of 2023 saw so much rain – more than in all of 2022 – that local wildflowers, including poppies, sunflowers, desert lilies, and many others, all bloomed brilliantly and simultaneously.

The phenomenon requires more than just rain, however: it will only happen if it is preceded by a period of significant drought.

I like this for a few reasons. First, it’s refreshing to hear California experiencing a weather-based event that isn’t tragic. Second, it’s a nice bit of natural-world symbolism that can be encouraging during tough times. It’s like the “after the rain comes the rainbow” metaphor, but taken to the next level. When going through a personal “drought” of any kind (creative, financial, emotional) it’s reassuring to know that around the corner there might be a stroke of luck so great that your creative or financial or emotional rebound will be visible from space.

New York-based group MisterWives took inspiration from this idea in the creation of their catchy, ultra-mood-boosting 2020 song Superbloom.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The first time I heard this song it was over the tiny speakers of a phone, so all I could make out of the piano was that each bar had three syncopated chords. It wasn’t until I listened on proper speakers that the crunchy funky jazziness of those chords came across in full bloom.

2. The chorus is a big old singalong party that gets bigger each time it returns: multiple voices, horns, and a tambourine for good measure.

3. Whether you’re currently experiencing a drought or a downpour, the lyric “I came out the other side” will still be in your head long after you stop listening.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking really closely at the blossom of a flower.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Gerry-The-Pacemakers-Youll-Never-Walk-Alone.mp3In 1909, Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár released his play Liliom.

The title character is a fairground worker who tries to provide for his unborn child by orchestrating a robbery. The robbery goes wrong and Liliom ends up dead. After spending some time in purgatory, he’s allowed to return to earth for one day to visit his now-teenaged daughter and perform a good deed for her. Success wins him entrance to heaven; failure means an eternity in hell. I won’t spoil it for you, but let’s just say it’s not a Disney ending.

The play didn’t do particularly well upon its release, but Molnár kept at it, mounting productions across Europe and the US, where it gained a bit of traction in the early 1920s. Puccini expressed interest in turning the play into an opera, but Molnár turned him down because he wanted the story to be remembered as his play, not a Pucinni opera.

A century later, it’s remembered primarily not as his play, but as the musical Carousel by Rogers and Hammerstein.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone” was the show-stopping number in Carousel, and it has seen many iterations over the years – Elvis, Aretha, Sinatra, Marcus Mumford – but this version is pretty much the version.

Gerry and the Pacemakers came out of the Liverpool scene at the same time as The Beatles, and were at one point just as popular. Gerry Marsden had seen Carousel as a child and had always liked the song. Upon its release it almost immediately became the anthem for Liverpool FC, a role it continues to play to this day.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. As a sports anthem, part of the reason it works is that it can be sung in victory or in defeat. Try singing Queen’s “We Are the Champions” after your team’s just been eliminated from the playoffs and you’ll feel like a tool. That one only works if you’re fresh off a big win. But “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” with its references to storms and sun and hope in your heart, can motivate winners and losers alike.

2. The unexpected shift from major to minor in the verse (for example, at 0:27) is the musical reflection of the win-or-lose functionality of the lyrics.

3. The sentiment is…well, sentimental. But still good. In a lot of ways this song reminds me of “Unchained Melody,” which I cannot stand for its cheesiness. But somehow the cheese provided by this song doesn’t bother me. I think I agree with John Green’s insightful commentary on this song in his book The Anthropocene Reviewed: “The song doesn’t claim the world is a just or happy place. It just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts.”

Recommended listening activity:

Walking in the rain without an umbrella.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Hide-and-Seek.mp3Our house was too small for hide and seek, so my brother and I invented a variation known as “hide and sock.”

The concept was as simple as you might expect for a game developed by kids aged four and six:

Step 1 – take a sock

Step 2 – hide the sock

Step 3 – have the other person find the sock

Things went swimmingly until one of us (can’t remember which one, so I’m going to blame this on my brother) hid the sock by draping it over the bare lightbulb of a lamp. Hidden so effectively by the gaudy 70s-era lampshade, the game lost its appeal and we went and did something else, leaving the sock to lie there.

Then the evening came. The house got darker. The lights got turned on. You can see where this is going. With a twitch of her nose and a furrowing of her brow, my mother interrupted the calm of the evening with a sharp, slightly worried question: “What’s that smell?”

Once the sock was peeled away like a slice of partially-melted processed cheese, we were advised that this game was perhaps not our best idea. Creative, but not our best idea.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Creativity has always been a staple of Imogen Heap’s music. Whether it’s her use of a keyboard-controlled harmonizer (as in this song) or the use of magic gloves, she finds a way use technology to boost her creativity. To my knowledge, her creativity has not yet led to the melting of any socks.

2.Despite the disregard for instrumentation and tempo, it still manages to be catchy in an unconventional way. In fact, the catchiest part (and the part that spawned multiple remixes) comes deep into the song; the famous “mmm watcha say” section doesn’t show up until 2:53.

1. They may be a bit opaque, but the lyrics are rich in imagery. “Ransom notes keep falling out your mouth / Mid-sweet talk, newspaper word cutouts” …it’s like a Bjork-Cobain collaboration.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking under furniture for things you forgot you lost.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Christian-Loffler-Beirut.mp3
You know how when a disaster happens it’s all the world talks about for a few days, and we all donate and send thoughts and prayers and then something else catches our attention and we’re basically done with it? And then a couple years later you see a follow-up story buried in the noise and you’re impressed at how quickly that place has recovered, and how resilient humans are?

Well sometimes they don’t recover. Sometimes things get worse.

More than two and a half years after the explosion that devastated the port of Beirut, the city is not a heartwarming story of people coming together and building things back up stronger than they were before. According to the relief organization CARE, of the 300,000 people left homeless by the blast, barely 50% had returned to their homes after two years. Compounded by the economic effects of the pandemic, Lebanon’s currency lost 99% of its value in three years.

And then there’s the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Lebanon relied primarily on those two countries for its wheat imports, and that source has mostly disappeared since the war began. Even if they could import their pre-2019 levels of wheat, they would have a hard time storing it, since so many of the city’s silos were destroyed in the explosion. Electricity is rationed to two hours per day, and many citizens rely on gas-powered generators; fuel, of course, became much more expensive during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Add it all up and you’ve got a city which, in 2019, was basically reaching a level of middle-class quality of life for most people, and which is now struggling to meet its citizens’ basic needs.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening noises sound somewhat rhythmic, but don’t appear to follow any particular tempo or time signature. It’s only when the kick drum comes in that order starts to emerge from the chaos.

2. Like Jon Hopkins and Kiasmos, Christian Löffler is very good at walking the line between noise and melody.

3. Through its nearly eight minutes, the song doesn’t move through different melodic sections so much, but rather goes through phases of sounding close and phases of sounding expansive. By tweaking the reverb in this way, Löffler makes the song seem to alternate between stretching to the horizon and sitting right next to you.

Recommended listening activity:

If you can, clicking this link and donating $672 dollars to the Red Cross’ Lebanon humanitarian needs fund.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/The-First-Day-of-Spring.mp3This song was huge in the 90s. I remember hearing it everywhere, marvelling at the exotic album art, the album title lifted from Dostoevsky’s writing, wondering if this mysterious band was made up of re-incarnated hippies who had spent their childhoods in Bora Bora learning to play handmade instruments.

Turns out it was just huge in Canada.

See, Canada’s pretty good at pushing its own artists through Canadian content laws – although Canadian artists might disagree – and so the only reason I heard this track on the radio a lot as I made my way through an awkward phase of Fimo beads and bracelets made of hemp was the fact that they were Canadian. And not even hippie west coast Canadian; they were from London, Ontario, a university town that likes pick-up trucks and football.

So because it’s the first day of spring, and I am a dutiful Canadian, allow me to introduce you (assuming you yourself didn’t grow up in the 90s under the strict rule of Canadian content) to a quirky little song about the first day of spring.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The heart of the song is the uneasy four-note bass line and the way it interacts with the guitar line, which for its part seems carefree and unaware of the bass line lurking underneath it.

2. The vocals aren’t so much sung as whispered, as if the vocalist is apprehensive about jinxing spring’s arrival.

3. Like a Canadian spring, everything blooms suddenly and enormously at the last minute.

Recommended listening activity:

Not putting the winter clothes away, but putting them in a holding area.

Spotify.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/River.mp3When I’m feeling really sick, and when the only thing I can do is to lie in bed, I sometimes try to imagine that I’m an island in a river.

And then I imagine that the water flowing past me in the river is a bit warm (or cold, if that’s the temperature that would make me feel better).

And then, lying down, I try to imagine the spot on my head where the water meets the island before splitting into separate streams to flow around it.

And then if I imagine hard enough, I can almost feel the water flowing around Me Island from head to toe.

And then if I imagine even harder, I can feel that instead of the water flowing around me, I am the one moving through the water.

And then, if I’m still sick, I do it again the next day.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The way it fades in, the way a river’s flow becomes audible as you approach it.

2. The way it shifts at the two-minute mark; the bridge brings a new chord progression, a new instrument (the piano) and a sense that things are changing. It’s like that moment in the middle of a flu that you thought you might just have to live with forever, when suddenly something lifts and you start to feel better.

3. The lyrics sound like they may have been written by someone holed up in bed recovering from an illness: never slept in a bed so cold / can you hear me crying out / I’m aching and all alone.

Recommended listening activity:

Pretending the damp cloth on your forehead is a beach.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Adrianne-Lenker-symbol-Official-Audio.mp3Are you the type who craves stability, or who’s always looking for something new?

A few years ago, I think I would have classified myself as a creature of habit. A lover of routine. I mean, you’ve got to be pretty into routine to write a blog post every week for over a decade, right?

But I think the pandemic made me realize that I’m not as change-averse as I may have previously thought. I still enjoy routines, but as the framework of my life shifted in 2020, I found that I enjoyed finding ways to establish routines within the strange new normality that we all had to deal with. So I guess what I’ve learned is that although I like stability, I fear complacence more than I fear change. Although, to be fair, my life has never seen quite as much upheaval as someone like Adrianne Lenker.

Lenker was born into a religious cult in Minnesota. Her parents met in the church, and were barely into their twenties when Adrianne was born. By the time Adrianne was four, her parents saw the cult for what it was and managed to escape.

Over the next four years, the family lived in a van, with an Amish couple, and in a dozen other houses either rented or borrowed. Lenker’s father, a musician, taught her piano and basic composition, and began entering her into open mic nights and various other competitions. By the time she was 13, her parents had split up. Her father was her manager, attempting to push her on course to become an adolescent pop star.

But Adrianne was strong enough to realize that she didn’t want to take that path – perhaps watching her parents have the strength to walk away from a cult was somewhere in her subconscious – and so she struck out on her own.

Having never attended high school she earned her GED, did a summer program at Berklee, and ended up studying there on a full scholarship. She’s now a Grammy-nominated musician who has released multiple albums on her own and as part of the critically acclaimed band Big Thief and…

…yeah, my own life is suddenly looking pretty stable. But when the next upheaval comes, I’ll remind myself of the resilience of people like Adrianne Lenker.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The soft pattering of percussion that I almost didn’t notice on first listen.

2. In the second verse there are backup vocals, but they don’t harmonize so much as echo the main vocal line, audible only during the off-beats when the main vocals are between words.

3. While the root of each chord moves up and down, the other notes on the guitar remain the same. A nice combination of change and stability.

Recommended listening activity:

Breaking a habit. Or establishing a new one.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Carolina-Eyck-Eversines-Waves-official-video.mp3When I saw online that Carolina Eyck was a “German-Sorb composer” I thought, “that’s an interesting typo…I wonder what part of Serbia she’s from.”

What I didn’t know was that Sorbs are not from Serbia. They share Slavic roots with Serbians, but they are their own distinct group indigenous to what is now eastern Germany. Their culture, language (actually two languages) and way of life has hung by a thread over centuries of European wars. Various invading empires outlawed their languages, burned their books, and generally did their best to suppress them.

Each time Germany was defeated in a World War, the Sorbs would lobby for their own independent nation to rise from the ashes, but those pleas always fell on deaf ears. Following the reunification of Germany in the 1990s, Sorbians did get a certain level of support and assurances from the government that their cultural uniqueness would be protected.

But with a population of only about 50 000, it feels like this unique and fascinating minority might have to continue hanging by a thread for the foreseeable future.

And so: please enjoy this song by my new favourite German-Sorb composer – Carolina Eyck.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. If you’ve been listening while reading this, you’ve probably already noticed that her voice is fantastic, and the way she loops it is hypnotic. But you probably didn’t realize that…

2. …you’re also hearing an instrument in there. It’s a Theremin, and watching her play it is like watching a magician. In this track, it’s hard to pick out which lines are vocal and which are played on the Theremin.

3. The percussion and bass line, provided by Dutch producer Eversines, provides the perfect backdrop for Eyck’s magic.

Recommended listening activity:

Rooting for the underdog.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Tides-of-Washington-Bridge.mp3On the list of ridiculous things humans have come up with, shoes made of wood have to be close to the top.

I mean, I know that shoemaking is a careful balance between comfort and durability, but surely our ancestors must have been able to find a material in nature a bit more forgiving on the feet than…trees.

And yet, clogs appear across the globe in various forms stretching back centuries, from the Netherlands to Turkey to Indonesia to Japan. It wasn’t until after the Second World War that wood was uniformly replaced by leather and synthetic materials as a material for making shoes. Side note: how many world wars have we had in the years since? That’s right…zero. Maybe the war-plagued centuries of the past were partially a result of grumpiness caused by aching feet.

Like the wooden footwear for which they’re named, the American-Australian collaborative ensemble Clogs evokes the antique. For proof of this, look no further than the fact that their 2006 album Lantern opens with a cover of the baroque song featured on this blog back in week 445.

There’s also something decorative about their music though; if it was a pair of shoes, it wouldn’t be something utilitarian. It would be the kind of clogs made for royalty and the well-to-do. Crafted with care and skill.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The instrument that opens the song is a mandola. It’s the lesser-known, lower-registered version of the mandolin, and the level of lament it’s able to convey is off the charts. Played here by Bryce Dessner, better known as a member of The National.

2. When the other mandola comes in at 0:55, panned just slightly more to the right, it opens the song up wonderfully.

3. As things continue, more instruments enter, notably the bassoon at 1:45 (more lament) and then some kind of ominous hissing at 3:37 that I think might either be a bowed cymbal…or maybe the ghost of the last person known to wear clogs in public.

Recommended listening activity:

Walking barefoot around your house and paying attention to what all the different surfaces feel like under your feet.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Friend-of-the-Devil.mp3We’ve arrived at this blog’s 666th week. This got me thinking: of all the numbers, why did poor old six hundred and sixty-six become the one so often associated with pure evil?

It began with the Bible’s Book of Revelation, which helpfully reminds us to “count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666.” Which is, translation and centuries of linguistic evolution aside, a strange phrase. It’s precise enough to sound legit, and yet vague enough to encourage everyone from scholarly historians to internet weirdos to put forward theories about what it means.

Some people contend that because 777 represents perfection, 666 represents Satan’s imitation of perfection…a cheaper, off-brand version perfection I guess.

A more popular theory seems to be that the passage was a reference to the Roman emperor Nero, who was particularly nasty to Christians, and whose name could be encoded as 666. This encoding requires each letter of the Hebrew alphabet to be assigned a number, and then the letters in Nero’s name can be summed to make 666.

A more recent emperor, Ronald Reagan, was also associated with the number when people realized that his full name – Ronald Wilson Reagan – contained three words of six letters each. This was first pointed out in a Washington Post article shortly after Reagan won the 1980 election. He didn’t help quell the rumour when, after retirement, he purchased a property that had 666 as its street address. (He had it changed to 668.)

Of course, music, particularly rock and roll, has often been accused of being a tool of the devil. A number of musicians have used 666, and the devil more generally, as a way to ruffle feathers, exercise artistic license, or (most likely of all) boost sales.

But of all rock’s references to the devil, none come off more upbeat than The Grateful Dead’s classic “Friend of the Devil.” It’s the closest they ever came to a mainstream hit, and it’s been covered by so many others that it could rightfully be called a folk standard. Mumford & Sons put this version together for the 2016 multi-band mega-tribute Day of the Dead.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. While I have nothing against the original, the slower pace of Mumford & Sons’ version has a more patient feel to it that fits better with the “set out running but I take my time” lyric.

2. After going up the octave in the chorus, lead singer Marcus Mumford comes back down to a lower sing-mumble for the “got two reasons why I cry” verse, which makes the song’s protagonist seem more sympathetic.

3. The long sonic fadeout/evaporation at the end makes me think of the third verse lyric when the devil vanishes into the air.

Recommended listening activity:

Getting a (temporary) tattoo.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Tame-Impala-The-Less-I-Know-The-Better-Official-Audio.mp3As band names go, it doesn’t get much better than “Tame Impala.”

To start with, it’s got that touch of contradiction that works so well for rock bands. But the contrast isn’t as on-the-nose as it is with names like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or Guns N Roses. Tame Impala gets points for contrast, but also subtlety.

Phonetically, it just rolls off the tongue nicely. Tame Impala. The sequence of vowels is pleasing for some reason, interrupted only by gentle consonants like ‘m’ and ‘p’. It’s neither too long nor too short for a band name; it’s about as long as a person’s full name. In fact its syllable count mirrors the name of the multi-instrumentalist and mastermind behind the project: Kevin Parker.

Which brings us to another important ingredient in a good band name: relevance and meaning. Despite being Australian, Parker’s parents are from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, both countries where impalas can be found.

Original, meaningful, easy to say, and memorable. Top marks.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The hallmark of Tame Impala’s music is the bass lines. They tend to have a looping, infinite quality to them, which means you’re likely to have them stuck in your head all day. This one is a perfect example: notice how the track starts not on the downbeat, but with the last two beats of the bass line’s melody, as if you’ve joined it already in progress.

2. Sonically opposite to the bass lines are the high-tenor vocals. It’s like…it’s…sorry, this is the only comparison I can think of: it’s like if the Bee Gees were cool.

3. Tame Impala is also known for his dreamy, psychedelic soundscapes. It’s not overdone, but bits of reverb here and there go a long way. (Side note: in 2012 he helped produce an album by then-girlfriend Melody Prochet that spawned the dreamy track we listened to in week 413.That project was also superbly named – Melody’s Echo Chamber.)

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining what your family’s name would be if it was a band.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Lullaby.mp3Jon Batiste is known for his jubilant jazz, while Cory Wong specializes in the type of music that makes you want to nod your head and make the kind of face usually reserved for having eaten too much sour candy.

But listening to Jon Batiste and Cory Wong’s collaborative 2020 effort Meditations is like watching hyperactive kids sleeping peacefully after a busy day.

The entire album was improvised. Conceptualized in Batiste’s dressing room while he was at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Wong would sometimes join as a band member, the LP was recorded, in Wong’s words, “straight through without stopping.” The type of musicianship this requires is profoundly impressive.

It was then released at the end of May 2020, perhaps the lowest point of that low-point of a year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if listening to this record played a significant role in getting some people through.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Those two notes on the piano get the listener’s attention while also rocking them to sleep.

2. The organ provides a soft blanket on which the piano dances.

3. In the final minute, some bizarre noises emerge in the background. I think it’s just instrumental manipulation, but it sounds like voices. It reminds me of those nights when my parents had friends over, and they’d all be talking downstairs while I was up in bed. I couldn’t hear their conversations, but the low-end rumblings and occasional laughter kept me feeling safe.

Recommended listening activity:

Buying a night light.

Buy it here.

The post Week 664: “Lullaby” by Jon Batiste and Cory Wong appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Dido-Thank-You-Official-Audio.mp3As the 90s transitioned into the 00s, Dido was just about the biggest thing in pop music.

Or maybe that’s just a matter of perspective; my social circle included a lot of white women in their early twenties at that time, and holy smokes did that demographic looove Dido. It was as if some music industry focus group had picked out the best qualities of Sarah McLachlan and Portishead, creating the ideal musical icon who could lead this generation of women into adulthood.

I liked her music a lot too, but never enough to purchase it or seek out concert tickets. I was more of a “borrow the CD from my female roommates” type of fan. Nonetheless, every 5-7 years I’ll hear one of her songs by accident and think, “oh yeah, she was really good.”

Dido has released plenty of new work in the two decades since she was at peak popularity, and it’s all worth revisiting. But for me the best will always be this one.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The percussion is great; from the opening bongo (who opens a pop song with four bars of bongo?) to the main drum loop, sampled from this classic funk song.

2. The change from minor to major is a stroke of brilliance. Like many people, I knew this song first from its use as the backbone to Eminem’s “Stan” which stays decidedly dark and minor throughout. So the shift in Dido’s original song always comes as a slight (and pleasant) surprise.

3. Although her rhymes are suspect (rhyming “at all” with “at all,” and “last” with “towel”) I give her a free pass on that because her voice is just so darn soothing. The way she flips so gently from chest to head voice is so comforting. It’s the vocal equivalent of flipping over the pillow to get to the cool side.

Recommended listening activity:

Painting your nails with your roommate.

Buy it here.

The post Week 663: “Thank You” by Dido appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Christian-Sands-Cant-Find-My-Way-Home-Official-Audio.mp3Christian Sands’ 2020 record Be Water takes its title (and its central theme) from an interview with Bruce Lee, in which he advised his Canadian interviewer to be “like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Several songs from the album reference this quote, and water in general – “Crash”, “Steam”, and the two-part title track – but then there’s this one, the seventh of the record’s ten tracks.

It seems out of place. It’s the only cover song of the bunch, and the title seems at odds with the theme; water, after all, is famous for finding the low point, the path of least resistance…the way home.

On the other hand, Sands takes a song by a 60s rock supergroup and makes it work as a jazz trio showcase, so if the idea is to make the music take on the shape of its container, as Bruce Lee observed water likes to do, then he’s succeeded.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The main chord progression is a descending one, but it doesn’t descend chromatically or evenly. Less like a standard waterfall and more like rock-strewn rapids.

2. The percussionist adds several unpredictable elements – a shaker here, a quiet woodblock there, the occasional bell tree – to add to the feeling of a winding river.

3. As often happens in jazz covers, things get pretty hectic towards the end, but somehow the listener knows it’s all going to smooth over eventually.

Recommended listening activity:

Making little whirlpools in the bath.

Buy it here.

The post Week 662: “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith (Christian Sands cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/SLOW-BURN-by-Kacey-Musgraves-Lyric-Video.mp3When I started this blog I thought it was important to tag each post with the musical genre of the song being featured.

Occasionally, a song would come up that would be difficult to classify; sometimes a song would be out-of-charater for the musician singing it, for example. What then? Tag the post with the genre of the song specifically? Or the style that the artist is more commonly known for? Or both?

I started to suspect that tagging posts with genres was not important. Still, it might be useful. Readers might want to explore similar tracks, right?

I guess the problem with musical genres is that they are not discrete categories. A hip hop song might get remixed and classified as techno. A pop song with a banjo might wander towards the country genre. Genres are more of a spectrum. Except that a spectrum usually operates along a single line…so it’s more like a double spectrum with both an X and Y axis. Try too hard to map all the genres and you end up with colour-coded madness.

Some genres are so dead set on their own definitions that they end up drawing arbitrary (and often self-contradictory) lines around themselves. Take country music for example. The de facto gatekeeper of all things Country is the Country Music Association (CMA). This organization proudly declares on its website that it has a “commitment to inclusivity” – yet this is an organization that decided “Old Town Road” was not a country song, that the Chicks (formerly known as The Dixie Chicks) were no longer allowed in the club, and that seems to just have a problem with women generally.

Kacey Musgraves knows all about this: despite winning seven CMAs, including one for the album that this song comes from, the CMA has deemd her new album too pop-like to be eligible for an award…even though one of the songs on that album is eligible on its own.

I guess it’s time to admit it: tagging posts by genre isn’t important, and it’s barely even useful. But at least it’s interesting.

So I’m still going to tag this song as “country.” But if you’ve decided that musical genres are bogus, you’re probably right, and more power to you. You get to enjoy this track without worrying about how to classify it.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The vocal melody is as catchy and pop-ish as can be, but her enunciation and tonal quality really channels country stars from decades past.

2. The lyric “Texas is hot / I can be cold” is a great way to summarize the tension between Musgraves’ creative ambitions and the restrictive limits of “country music.” And she sings it as a banjo plays in the background.

3. The bass is pretty invisible for most of the song, but at 2:27 during the bridge it really goes its own way, as if tired of being limited to the root note of each chord.

Recommended listening activity:

Filling a sticky note with labels you’ve been given all your life, and then burning it.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Catching-Flies-Diamonds.mp3Ask someone why diamonds are expensive and they’ll probably say diamonds have value because they’re rare. Y’know, supply and demand.

This makes logical sense. And it’s also untrue.

Diamonds were rare. For centuries only royalty wore diamonds because they were exceedingly hard to find and get out of the earth. But then the 20th century rolled around and technology made finding and extracting diamonds simpler. A couple of South African farmers named De Beers discovered that their farm was sitting on an enormous deposit of diamonds, and suddenly supply wasn’t a problem anymore.

The trick was to boost demand, and that’s where another 20th-century technique – marketing – took over. Once the De Beers company had built a monopoly, clever advertising minds convinced generations of young couples that despite the previously common practise of using rubies or sapphires on engagement rings, the only stone worthy of that particular piece of jewellery was a diamond.

Advertisers convinced us that a diamond was (more than any other stone for some reason) forever. This cultural agreement that diamonds are special has given us the perception that they must, because they are so special, also be rare.

Diamonds are not rare at all; in fact, we’re growing them.

It’s true: modern labs use bits of carbon and specialized equipment to “grow” diamonds. These lab-grown diamonds are molecularly identical to mined diamonds, and the difference is invisible even to trained eyes.

But lab-grown diamonds aren’t necessarily for the engagement ring market. As well as being sparkly and pretty, diamonds are also useful. In addition to their utility in tools made for cutting, they are also good semiconductors. Some experts believe that as computers become more powerful, diamonds (lab-grown ones) will replace silicon as that vital ingredient in our devices.

This will likely lead to a boom in the lab-grown diamond industry, and reduced demand for the labour-intensive, ethically suspect, and environmentally devastating practise of diamond mining. Which means, in a funny twist, that diamonds extracted from the earth will likely become rarities again.

If all this is interesting to you, you should listen to this podcast,which is where I learned most of what I’ve just related to you. If not, skip it and just enjoy this lovely tune by British producer and instrumentalist Catching Flies.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The main keyboard he uses has such a wonderful sparkle to it.

2. Other instruments subtly make their way into the mix as it progresses; my favourite is the upright bass that provides a nice counterpoint to the keyboard sparkle.

3. The tempo keeps shifting between a steady 70-or-so bpm to a looser, slower pace. As if the composer is manipulating supply and demand.

Recommended listening activity:

Holding something in your hands has high personal value and low market value.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/a-ha-Take-On-Me-2017-Acoustic-Lyric-Video.mp3Although it stands as one of the most successful pop songs in the history of pop songs, “Take On Me” began its life as a notably unsuccessful pop song.

The first version was released in 1984, and despite mild success in a-ha’s native Norway, the song failed to make the top 100 in the UK, which was the market they were really intent on cracking. The original version didn’t do enough to highlight singer Morten Harket’s voice, and the subsequent video was uninspired, and didn’t help push the song any further up the pop charts.

Executives must still have seen potential though, because Warner Brothers was willing to pay for a new recording of the track. With a modified ending and more lively mix, the new version was released as a single…and flopped again.

And here’s the part of this song’s story that baffles me: despite flopping twice as a song, someone was willing to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars to create a new video which used an old technique known as “rotoscoping” – a painstaking process of sketching over top of live action film, frame by frame. With 3000 frames to sketch, the four-minute video took about four months to complete…all for a band with no international success and a song that had already twice failed to gain any commercial traction.

Of course, the investment paid off. The video is widely considered one of the best of all time, and the song itself is a pop masterpiece; the dictionary definition of 80s synth pop.

But all the song’s poppiness and eighties-ness hides the fact that it’s also quite beautiful. Strip back the synths and up-tempo 80s cheese, take away the musical equivalent of its shoulder pads and overdone makeup, and you end up with a surprisingly heartfelt piece of music.

This 2017 acoustic version proves it.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The two elements that define the 1985 version are almost absent: the chorus’ final soaring note is brought down an octave, and the staccato synth melody is heard only once, as a piano melody with fewer notes and less 80s gusto. But the scaling back of those elements allows the listener to, paradoxically, hear more of the song.

2. Harket’s voice really is quite incredible. This version was recorded as he was nearing 60, and his precision and control are still world class.

3. The chord structure in the chorus is just slightly different than in the original, and the chord on the “be” of “I’ll be gone” adds some emotional weight that is unexpected and wonderful.

Recommended listening activity:

Dusting off some of your failed resolutions from previous years and re-investing in them.

Buy it here.

The post Week 659: “Take On Me (2017 acoustic)” by a-ha appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/A-Childs-Christmas-in-Wales.mp3Christmas is a bit of a nostalgia trap.

We decorate the same way we do every year (and likely the same way our parents did), we listen to the same music, we eat the same food, and we watch movies that celebrate the way things used to be. Back when it always snowed on Christmas, and kids roamed the streets playing happily with their Red Ryder carbine action BB gun.

You know, a simpler time.

But the important thing to remember is that it only seemed simpler because we – our childhood selves, the protagonists in these memories – were simpler. The times themselves were as complicated as they’ve always been. It’s quite possible that as you were enjoying those childhood Christmases back in that simpler time, there was an adult supervising you who was lost in their own thoughts about how things were so much simpler when they were kids.

Now I’m not here to discourage you from having fond memories of your childhood. What I’m here to do is to advise you not to pair those memories with the toxic follow-up thought that because the past was wonderful and care-free, the present is awful.

The present is uncertain, yes. The present is always uncertain. To us, the world of 1952 may seem like a golden age; something to be nostalgic for. At the time however, plenty of folks feared nuclear holocaust, and felt that they were living in a time of extreme uncertainty. It only seems like a golden age to us because we have the benefit of knowing that the nuclear apocalypse didn’t happen. (Hindsight bias is a real thing, and you can hear more about it here.)

Speaking of 1952, it was in that year that Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”, a reminiscence of childhood days when things were good and people were good and it always snowed on Christmas. You know, a simpler time.

So instead of bemoaning the fact that the good old days are gone, remember that you’re currently living in the next generation’s good old days. Be on the lookout for what will one day make these days, in retrospect, so good.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Welsh songwriter Al Lewis wrote it for the 100th anniversary of Dylan Thomas’ birth, but rather than quote Thomas’ work directly, Lewis builds the imagery around his own childhood memories.

2. A few times including the opening ten seconds, a very quiet ambient noise can be heard in the background. It sounds a bit like a child’s laughter, but it’s so far back in the mix that the listener gets the impression that their memory might be planting it there.

3. For a moment, Lewis sings in Welsh: Aiff y teimlad byth yn hen – which translates to, “The feeling never grows old.”

Recommended listening activity:

Capturing a feeling that never grow old.

Buy it here.

The post Week 658: “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Al Lewis appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Christmas-Time-is-Here.mp3I grew up in a household that used a fake Christmas tree. The reasons were more financial than environmental, but I was a kid and didn’t really know the difference.

And because I didn’t know the difference, I didn’t associate our cheap little tree with cheapness. It was something to be taken out of the box each year with a certain amount of ceremony. The tree was in multiple pieces; each branch was made of wires, and the ends of the branches that were to be inserted into the “trunk” were painted different colours depending on how high up the trunk they belonged.

It was all very involved, and required true professionalism and attention.

My wife grew up in a household that used real Christmas trees. For the first few years that we were together, it was a mostly-joking point of contention for us. Neither one of us could believe that the other could seriously prefer the type of tree they advocated, and we defended our traditions vehemently. Real trees smell wonderful! Fake trees are so convenient! Real trees look better! Fake trees are less messy!

These arguments were always fairly tongue-in-cheek, and soon I realized (and she probably did too) that I was really only arguing for a fake tree because it’s what I was used to. I didn’t really care what kind of tree we had.

Fast-forward to the present.

Each year, our own kids help us put up the little fake tree that lives in the dining room, proudly displaying all the ornaments that have special meaning to us. Meanwhile, sitting outside by the front door is a real tree that the kids help us pick out. Every time we come home we can breathe in a quick whiff of pine, and then come inside to enjoy a tree that doesn’t make a mess.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Unlike a lot of neo-classical piano, the instrument isn’t recorded with mics so close that you can hear the felt dampeners on the strings. It’s a more muted sound, like Christmas lights seen through curtains.

2. Christopher John’s version of Vince Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown classic is slower and doesn’t have the Peanuts singing vocals, which means the listener gets to appreciate how lovely the chords actually are. Full and robust, like a real Christmas tree.

3. Listening closely on headphones, some light synths and twinkling notes way up on the piano are audible. Shimmery and glittery, like a fake Christmas tree.

Recommended listening activity:

Blending traditions.

Buy it here.

The post Week 657: “Christmas Time is Here” by Vince Guaraldi (Christopher John Cover) appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/A-Spotless-Rose.mp3December is the shortest month.

Okay, technically, February is the shortest month. It’s just that February seems to last forever. You struggle through the horrible weather, the unnecessary stress associated with Valentine’s Day, the curious lack of days off work, and then you glance at the calendar…and it’s still only February 17th.

By contrast, December hits the ground running. It races from milestone to milestone before ending with a literal bang on the 31st, leaving you dazed and hungover, wondering where the time has gone.

So let’s get your December off to a good start, courtesy of a Christmas carol by Herbert Howells, who managed to live through 90 Decembers. And if possible, take the advice he wrote on the sheet music for this piece and apply it to your attitude as we begin this hectic, fast-paced month; try to get through it “with easeful movement.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. In the first verse, the voices sing in harmony, but match each other’s rhythm, like a family walking in brisk lockstep through the snow.

2. For about ten seconds starting at 1:36, the choir holds a delicious chord while the tenor soloist finishes his verse.

3. The final cadence slows everything down before resting on a cozy final chord.

Recommended listening activity:

Wearing socks (or if possible, stockings) to bed.

Buy it here.

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My parents didn’t watch much TV when I was a kid, but when they did…

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Do have that friend who can’t take a compliment without slipping into self-deprecation? The one…

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Ambient duo yes/and is the project of guitarist Meg Duffy and producer Joel Ford. But…

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We’ve all heard of the two common types of twins: identical (in which a fertilized…

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Teeth Agency is a transatlantic audio-visual art collaboration between producer Jesse Hackett and Mariano Chavez.…

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I got COVID this week, so I spent a lot more time sleeping than finding…

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Salvador Dali was a complicated person. I mean, I know that’s not a groundbreaking statement.…

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John Waters, a quirky cult filmmaker famous for movies like Pink Flamingos and Hairspray, and…

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People don’t give autumn the recognition it deserves. Spring is the season of life and…

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Here’s a weird fact about me that will probably make you think I’m totally strange:…

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Roger Federer retired from tennis last week, and it hit me a bit harder than…

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Sometimes you just need to hear a good break-up song. A good break-up song doesn’t…

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Looking at my hands. Resting on the keys. Index ‘f’ and ‘j’. I can feel…

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In university I was in a student production of the musical Hair; a hippie time…

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“Fold me into you” – the opening line Abimaro’s strikingly beautiful “Folding” is a simple…

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Here are some of my favourite ways to use my five senses: Sight: watching the…

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On my first day of high school, we were given a tour of the building…

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If you had to put the following things in order from oldest to most recent…

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I think one of the under-appreciated movies of this century is the 2005 comedy Stranger…

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I sang in a church choir as a kid, and this was one of the…

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More and more people, it seems to me, are getting comfortable with travelling again, and…

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Every group of friends has one member who, despite being a bit off-the-wall, is really…

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Have you ever had a small child try to scare you, but you knew it…

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Just a short post this week to thank you for reading. That’s you: the person…

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2016 was shaping up to be a great year for Madison McFerrin. Until it was…

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A movie that I don’t think got enough attention was Ben Stiller’s 2013 adaptation of…

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In the Swiss city of Winterthur, a residential tower is under construction that will, when…

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I’ve never been one for teams of superheroes. Or superheroes at all, really. I know…

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The most beautiful but also most heartbreaking part of parenting has to do with control.…

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In the category of “best album by an artist or band who only released one…

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I sometimes shy away from including dance tracks on this list, which isn’t really fair.…

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Lizzy McAlpine was meant to be our featured artist last week, but her enthusiastic endorsement…

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I had this week’s song ready to go. Then, 24 hours ago, I was listening…

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Okay everyone, quick check-in: is there a project you were working on, or plans you…

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Miriam Makeba’s story is incredible, and can’t be adequately summed up in a few-hundred-word blog…

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The story of Terry Fox – the 22-year-old cancer survivor and amputee who set out…

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I’ve become one of those people. You know those people who track their step count…

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For a white dude who was alive in the 80s, I have a very difficult…

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As a teenager, I remember hearing that some of great songs – Purple Haze by…

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Andrew-Bird-Glad-Official-Audio.mp3 Is it strange to feature a song from a Christmas album on the last day of February?

Yes, it is. Thanks for asking.

But in my defense, a) the song itself isn’t overtly Christmas-like, b) there’s another track on the same album called “Christmas in April,” c) it’s my blog so I can do whatever I like.

And hey, we shouldn’t allow the calendar to dictate our level of festivity, right?

If you feel like putting a stocking by your fireplace tonight, go right ahead. Or maybe you’d prefer to hide a bunch of Easter eggs tonight for your loved ones to find tomorrow morning? Go for it. Feel like counting down to midnight tonight before opening a cheap bottle of sparkling wine? Yes.

Everyone needs something to spice up the late-winter lull that follows the many cultural celebrations of December and January. So while we’re all aching for warmer weather and various fireworks-related holidays of spring and summer, let’s cook a turkey, throw on a holiday sweater, and listen to a bit of Andrew Bird.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Whether Bird plays the violin by plucking or bowing, it makes me think of big fat snowflakes.

2. In the song’s final minute, he whistles along softly to the melody. It’s not very present in the mix, which makes it sound casual, even absent-minded, like Santa whistling to himself while stuffing stockings.

3. While most tracks on the Hark! album are traditional Christmas songs, this one was written by Bird’s friend and collaborator Alan Hampton. We love cover songs here at Beautiful Song of the Week, but I can’t classify this as a cover song because Hampton doesn’t appear to have released a version of it himself.

But as we’ve already established, gift-giving isn’t tied to a specific date on the calendar, so I’ll just have to drop an Alan Hampton song in your stocking next week.

Recommended listening activity:

Finally using a gift card you received a long time ago.

Buy it here.

The post Week 616: “Glad” by Andrew Bird appeared first on Beautiful Song Of The Week.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Rob-Burger-A-Robin-Egg.mp3 The blue colouring of Robin eggs, while beautiful, is a bit puzzling.

Many bird species lay speckled eggs, which blend in with their surroundings and make them less likely to be eaten. Some go beyond mere speckles and into the realm of squiggles, to camouflage them almost completely within the twigs of the nest. The Great Bowerbird’s eggs are a perfect example of this, and look like they were painted by a kindergartener with a tiny brush.

So why does the Robin lay pastel-blue eggs that look like they were made by Cadbury?

The leading theory has to do with sunlight.

Robins lay their eggs in areas that get moderate sun, and the blue is thought to protect against UV rays. In fact, the colour of an egg says a lot about the environment in which they are laid. Some eggs’ primary concern is with overheating; in these cases, the shells are pure white to reflect the sun’s rays. For others, predators are the main threat, so: speckles.

Whether or not the blue protects the inside of a Robin’s egg from UV rays, it certainly does make for one of the prettier entries in the highly varied world of avian eggs.

American pianist Rob Burger’snew record, Marching With Feathers, offers impressive variety as well. Each track is sonically unique, and the instruments listed on the record include guitar, Ebow lapsteel, organ, dulcitone, harmonium, accordion, melodica, orchestron, and something called a “resonant garden.”

The whole record is worth a listen, but the clear standout for me is “A Robin Egg.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Burger’s touch on the piano, as lilting as Satie and as soft as Olafur Arnalds, gives the track its eggshell fragility.

2. The way the right hand isn’t quite in time with the left hand somehow conveys the twitching head of a bird eyeing the horizon for danger as it sits on its eggs.

3. On first listen it comes off as a simple piano solo, but listen closely at 1.40 and there’s something else there in the background. A clarinet? Something stringed? A resonant garden? I don’t know, but it helps give the song its pastel-blue finish.

Recommended listening activity:

Imagining what the view from your window will look like when spring comes.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Intro.mp3 If you’ve ever sent a message to a loved one and signed off with an ‘x’, you’ve probably wondered, even if just for a second, why in the world the alphabet’s third-last letter – a letter associated with algebra, treasure maps, and wrong answers – has somehow also become associated with kissing.

The answer, predictably, is that nobody knows for sure.

Some reasonable guesses include:

• In the Christian tradition, the cross was associated with Christ, and therefore faith and fidelity
• Before most people were literate, folks used to sign their name with an “x”
• It kinda looks like puckered lips
• It kinda looks like two (very minimalist) profiles joining in a kiss
• The word “kiss” kinda has the same sounds as the letter “x”
• If you say the letter “x” repeatedly, it sounds…like another word

Okay, that last one was a theory a friend of mine had in fifth grade. But I’m including it anyway, because when nobody knows the answer to something, anybody could be right.

The origins of British indie pop band The xx are far less mysterious. Founding member Jamie Smith was DJing under the name Jamie xx, and when the band formed around him, they adopted the moniker.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The opening song on their debut album, this track was never a big hit, and wasn’t meant to be. But there’s something so evocative and exciting about it that you’ve likely heard it in a commercial or on a TV show. It’s the perfect album kick-off, with all the tension and promising momentum of a first date.

2. The percussion has a lot to do with that momentum, especially the occasional 16th-note thudding of the kick drum.

3. The “aahs” in the second half remind us that this is a band of human musicians.

Recommended listening activity:

Sharing some cinnamon hearts.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Animal-Collective-Sand-That-Moves-from-the-Crestone-Original-Score.mp3 The Sahara desert is moving.

Or rather, it’s growing.

The estimates vary, but over the past 100 years the world’s largest hot desert has grown by something like 10 to 18%. This is a desert, don’t forget, that’s already as big as the entire United States.

Scientists think that the Sahara has cycled through periods of lush vegetation and arid desert over the millennia, as a result of slight changes in the tilt of the earth’s axis. It should eventually be green again one day, but – surprise! – the effect of humans on climate might prolong the current dry period.

But even though humankind’s number one talent seems to be “messing things up,” our second greatest skill is “trying to make up for it.”

Exhibit A: the Great Green Wall.

Deserts grow when dry spells prevent plants from holding the soil in place, and so an enormous project is underway to build and maintain an 8000km “wall” of greenery along the sahel – the semi-arid region just south of the Sahara – to stop the desert from reaching further south.

It’s a project that would be unbelievably ambitious even if it were being undertaken in a part of the world that wasn’t already struggling with food insecurity and government corruption, but the website documenting the project claims that it is on track, and CNN reported that the project got $14 billion in funding early last year…so it’s possible. Perhaps if some space-obsessed billionaires could be convinced to spend their money down here on earth, we could really build this thing.

Animal Collective’s moody and evocative soundtrack for the documentary Crestone is perfect desert music. Having read the description for the film, I probably won’t be watching it, but I would happily listen to the entire album while watching drone footage of deserts.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The harsh sound at the opening, a crossfade from the album’s previous track, grabs your attention like a face full of sand in the wind.

2. The harshness disappears quickly, replaced by softly plucked guitars. But the percussion and long reverb maintains the arid atmosphere.

3. As everything else fades out, just one instrument (a mandolin, maybe?) remains. Awash in reverb, it sounds small and delicate, with the bravery of a small plant holding its ground against an advancing desert.

Recommended listening activity:

Watering the plants while (optional) whispering words of encouragement to them.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Sloan-Junior-Panthers.mp3 It’s unlikely that you’ve heard of Sloan if you live outside of Canada, but they’ve been plugging away in their musical niche for 30 years.

In some ways, they were the prototype for Canadian indie rock bands of the 1990s: huge underground following, quirky songwriting, a mysterious inability to break through in the US, and a look that falls somewhere between “grunge deity” and “IT specialist.”

The record that many Sloan fans contend is their strongest is their 1996 effort, One Chord to Another. In retrospect, it might have been the record that confirmed what they were going to be: it was their first album on their own label (having left American giant Geffen Records) and it garnered their first Juno Award (the Canadian Grammys).

Before One Chord to Another, the band was on the verge of breaking up. The album’s success locked them in for decades of productive work together.

It also, in my opinion, is the record that nailed down their formula: each of their albums seems to include one track destined to be a rock anthem played at every Maple Leafs home game, followed by a series of gentle, thoughtful, clever, Beatles-quoting numbers.

“Junior Panthers” has always been one of my favourite non-rock-anthem Sloan songs.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. This was a record made on the cheap – about 8% of the previous record’s budget – and exhibit A is the piano here. They didn’t have one at the studio, so they brought a four-track tape to bassist Chris Murphy’s mother’s house. Lacking the, um, ability to play a piano, Murphy played the left hand and guitarist Jay Ferguson played the right hand. For a band that was about to break up, it was a nice bit of collaborative symbolism.

2. The “ooh” vocals that open each chorus highlight harmonies as one of the band’s strengths.

3. The ending always catches me by surprise. The song feels like it’s got another verse left in it, but then the chorus cuts short, and it ends on a major chord, at odds with the rest of the song. But economical songwriting is another one of the band’s strengths…and hey, if you don’t need another verse, you don’t need another verse.

Recommended listening activity:

Leaning in to your habits.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Magnificent-Moon.mp3 I’m starting to recognize that within the jazz genre, I’m a bit of a sucker for simple chord structure. Songs that might be described as “hypnotic.” Think of the Yusef Lateef track from week 370,or Garage à Trois in week 56,or Ahmad Jamal way back in week 6.

It’s tempting to write off simple chord structure as unimaginative, especially in the world of jazz, where technical wizardry is a badge of honour and chord complexity is sometimes an end in itself. Jamal was a perfect example; spurned by critics in his time for being too simple.

For me, if “simple” music is done right, it can be beautiful. And if the listener is willing to listen closely to the details, that simplicity reveals itself to have slight variations and gradations that add to the beauty.

New Zealand’s Lucien Johnson’s recent album is aptly named for the moon’s phases, and this song, the record’s opening track, is named for the deceptively simple circle that most of us glance at without a second thought. As we’ve already learned, the moon is more magnificent than most people give it credit for, and Johnson’s “Magnificent Moon” is a worthy namesake.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The combination of instruments – the brightness of the harp, dark moodiness of the vibraphone – is a nice reflection of the moon’s light/dark dualism.

2. Johnson’s saxophone mediates the lighter and darker sounds with his soft playing style, reminiscent of Christian Scott’s whispering trumpet.

3. The structure is hypnotically simple, with just one chord throughout, interrupted by brief, two-bar changes that seem to promise a new phase, before waxing back to home base.

Recommended listening activity:

Looking really closely at the back of your hand and realizing you don’t actually know it that well.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Mystery-of-Love.mp3 We’ve featured plenty of soundtracks on this blog over the years, and a healthy amount of cover songs too. But I’m pretty sure this is the first time we’ve featured a track that’s both.

This momentous occasion comes courtesy of Thibault Cauvin, a French guitarist, who in 2021 put together an album of classical guitar cover versions of film soundtracks. The range is incredible – films from “Deliverance” to “Kill Bill” to “La La Land” to “Spirited Away” all get the Cauvin treatment – and they all work. Innocuous enough to serve as background music in a coffee shop but intricate enough to stand up to a close listening, this is a great album to help get movie nerds (or classical guitar nerds) through a cold winter.

They’re all pretty (it’s difficult for classical guitar to come off as anything else) but the opening song might be the most beautiful of the bunch: a cover of a Sufjan Stevens tune written for 2017’s “Call Me By Your Name”.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The melody. Sufjan Stevens really does write some gorgeous melodic lines. When I first heard this one, I didn’t know it was a Sufjan cover, but my first thought was, “hey, this is kind of Sufjan-ish.”

2. Thibault’s attention to detail. In the original, there are some subtle notes on piano that are barely audible. Beginning at 0:37, Thibault uses harmonics to mimic those notes.

3. In the song’s second half, Thibault adds some synth pads in the background. It’s a small thing, but it gives everything a more complete, more widescreen feeling.

Recommended listening activity:

Making popcorn.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Keep-Going.mp3 The right thing to say always comes to mind when it’s too late.

My big plans always end their lives as half-finished vanity projects.

I didn’t make his birthday special enough.

This shirt looks stupid on me.

Everyone thinks I’m arrogant.

I’m tired of feeling like my money won’t last.

I can’t decide whether it’s harder to be my child’s parent, or to be my parents’ grown-up child.

There are things others have figured out that I can’t seem to grasp.

That room needs re-decorating but I don’t know where to start.

I waste so much time, it’s embarrassing.

I never seem to remember moments that are supposed to be important.

Living in the past is so much easier than living in the present.

Living in the future is terrifying.

Humanity doesn’t deserve a second chance.

Why are we so much better at coping with a crisis than avoiding it in the first place?

I don’t know how to do this.

The healthiest moment of my life is probably behind me.

What if people realize I have no idea what I’m doing?

Every decision I’ve made has cut off whole lines of possibilities and opportunities and it’s impossible to go back.

The only option is to keep going.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. Potential in the waiting.

2. Movement is deciding.

3. Forward is the doing.

Recommended listening activity:

Lifting your chin just enough to feel a difference.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Enchanted-Mirror.mp3 When the bossa nova craze swept through the jazz world in the 1950s, it swept with it a guitarist named Luiz Bonfá.

Bonfá was already fairly established in Brazil by this time, but the American fascination with younger artists like Gilberto and Jobim was a rising tide that lifted many Brazillian boats. Already in his 30s when he left for New York to capitalize on the style’s popularity, Bonfá probably owes a fair bit of his success and wealth to bossa nova.

Which is strange, because his style is pretty different from the restrained, mumbly beach music of his contemporaries.

Okay, he did put out plenty of music that would be right at home on a bossa nova compilation album, but lots of his music lands miles away from that style. His 1972 record Introspection has the feel of Segovia and the album art of Herbie Hancock, and it’s a wonderful album for easing yourself into winter, or a Monday, or a new year…or anything that needs easing into, really.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The guitar is (I’m pretty sure) a 12-string, which gives a richness and breadth that’s hard to accomplish otherwise.

2. Just to remind you that this was recorded in the 1970s, there are little moments where he throws in wah-wah guitar effects.

3. With no real tempo, Bonfá is free to speed up and slow down whenever he wants to. As if he’s the tide and we’re the ones being lifted.

Recommended listening activity:

Drinking strong coffee out of a small mug.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Desert-Song-by-säje.mp3 With resolution season coming up this week, it might be a good idea to review the rules* of good resolution-making:

• Make it specific. “Be a better person” is a noble goal, but it’s a bit vague. In what way do you want to be better? More grateful? Less critical?
• Make it measurable. “Be a better person” is also tough to measure. However, “listing three things I’m grateful for each day” is easy to track.
• Challenge vs. Attainability. This is a tricky balance. Something that can be achieved by February is not a great goal, but if a slow start makes the goal unreachable by February, that’s no better. A good resolution keeps you motivated, but doesn’t but doesn’t beat you down with its level of difficulty.
• Keep it within your control. “Publish a novel” is nice, but a lot of that process is out of your hands. Instead, try “finish a novel and submit to 20 publishers.” It’s not really your goal if someone else can keep you from reaching it.
• Focus on process. That last example, “finish a novel,” can seem overwhelming in the early stages. “Write a thousand words a week” might be preferable. Focus on the process and the product will (often) take care of itself.

Säje (rhymes with beige) is an ensemble of four singers/composers/arrangers who all had successful solo careers before deciding to assemble, Voltron-like, as a quartet shortly pre-pandemic. While the pandemic cancelled many of their early shows, it didn’t inhibit their creativity. They’ve also released several beautifully arranged covers, including one of a song we featured way back in week 16. “Desert Song” – their first original release – was nominated for a Grammy, and as debuts go, is just about as stunning as it gets.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. It’s not a song about making resolutions, but the lyrics can be read as a bit of a parable about setting the wrong goals: I bet when you reach the ocean / Can’t waittosinkyour toes intothe sand / Instead youwill sink into the ocean / And watch your heart move slowly from your hands.

2. The instrumentation is just enough to support the voices. It would have been easy to add a string quartet to this track, but that probably would have ruined it.

3. The vocals are like New Year’s fireworks: the four voices frequently begin lines in unison before splitting off into flickering harmonies at the tail end of the line.

Recommended listening activity:

Reading your resolutions out loud while locking pinkies with yourself.

Buy it here.

*These rules are by no means official and are pretty much my own humble opinion, although they overlap a fair bit with the idea of “SMART goals” that many organizations and schools like to use.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Duke-Ellington-Sugar-Rum-Cherry-Dance-of-the-Sugar-Plum-Fairy.mp3 Most Christmas music falls into one of two categories.

First, you’ve got the music written for the weeks leading up to Christmas. These are the high-spirited, up-tempo numbers that make you excited for the season’s first snow, the neighbourhood’s first decorative lights, the grocery store’s first egg nog. Think “Jingle Bell Rock” or “Sleigh Ride” or quirky indie re-works of Christmas classics.

Then there’s music made for the day itself. These are generally more reverent or sappy or both. Most of the Bing Crosby Christmas songbook fits into this category, along with most traditional religious carols.

“Sugar Rum Cherry” – Ellington and Strayhorn’s re-work of the Tchaikovsky classic from The Nutcracker – is different. It doesn’t get the listener hyped for Christmas weeks in advance, and it doesn’t communicate the fireside bliss of some idealized Christmas day that you might see on a greeting card. To me, this one feels like it’s written for the end of a hectic, noisy, just barely enjoyable Christmas.

The kids have finally conked out after a chaotic day fueled by adrenaline, toys, sugar, and grandparents. The kitchen is an absolute disaster. The excitement of the first snow of the season has given way to the grim reality that you’ve got to shovel that stuff for the next eight weeks.

That kind of night calls for a stiff drink, a comfy chair, and “Sugar Rum Cherry.”

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The percussion. Reverberating as if bubbling up from the basement stairs of a jazz club somewhere in the seedier part of Chicago.

2. The saxophones. The way they roar and moan the melody could hardly be more different from the sound achieved by the Celesta,the instrument that took the melody in Tchaikovsky’s original piece.

3. It’s rare for a Christmas song to be described as “sultry.” The only other one I can think of is that awful “Santa Baby” song, and that’s more silly than sultry. This one saunters out of your speakers and winks at you before you know what’s happening. Then it uses some 1920s cheeky slang to ask whether you celebrate Christmas here often.

Recommended listening activity:

Watching discarded wrapping paper roasting on an open fire.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Hundred-Acres.mp3 Sometimes you’ve just gotta hunker down.

Feeling tired of the world and all the people in it? Go into airplane mode and hunker down. Work piling up? Hunker down. Driven to sort out what to do with the next five years of your life? Hunker.

After his band and his long-term relationship melted down, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver famously hunkered down in an isolated cabin to record his excellent debut album. When Vernon started performing live at his university, fellow student and drummer Sean Carey was so taken by it that he hunkered down and listened to it repeatedly on Myspace for two weeks, learning every drum part and backup vocal. Carey did this so that the next time he attended one of Vernon’s performances he could, with confidence, declare that Bon Iver needed a drummer, and that he was it.

Sean Carey did indeed become Bon Iver’s drummer, and was along for that band’s rise to the top of the indie folk mountain of the 2000s.

By the end of that decade, he was releasing music of his own under the S. Carey moniker on Bon Iver’s Jagjaguwar label. Critics praised Carey’s work as possessing “filtered approximation[s] of natural beauty.” This connection to natural beauty, both as inspiration and evocation, is on full display on his 2018 record Hundred Acres, which can be seen as a manifesto for immersion in, even hunkering down in, nature.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. S. Carey is a drummer, but also a classical percussionist, and it’s clear here that for him, percussion is about more than timekeeping. Various percussive elements are at work in this song, covering a variety of pitches and timbres.

2. The main vocal melody – that opening ascending line – is just so pretty. He uses a falsetto similar to Justin Vernon’s, but it sounds less pained.

3. The time signature is weird, and I have a hard time pinning it down, because the guitar riff doesn’t start on the downbeat. Is it a bar of 7/8 mixed in with a few bars of 4/4? No, that’s not quite right. I might have to lock myself in my room and listen to it on repeat for a couple weeks until I can get it right.

Recommended listening activity:

Mono-tasking.

Buy it here.

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http://www.beautifulsongoftheweek.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/amon-tobin-nova.mp3 Most of Amon Tobin’s music from the late 90s sounds like the soundtrack to a nightmare. Assuming that your nightmares feature a lot of frenetic jazz drumming.

I remember buying and liking his 1998 album Permutation, but having a hard time listening to it end-to-end. I loved the dark samples and jazzy flavour, but about halfway through I would be craving a more straightforward DJ Shadow-type percussion. It’s hard to nod your head when your head is spinning.

That must be why I missed that album’s closing track: “Nova.” It’s still dark, but not dark enough to qualify as the soundtrack to a nightmare; maybe the soundtrack to a séance designed to call upon the spirits of Getz and Gilberto.

What makes this a beautiful song:

1. The syrupy saxophone.

2. The downward roll on the vibraphone, heavy with echo and reverb.

3. The tempo. While most of Tobin’s music pushes along like a scared squirrel, this one hangs back like a…like a….like a squirrel who can’t be bothered to come up with a good metaphor.

Recommended listening activity:

Washing dishes during a blackout.

Buy it here.

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