#ayearofsongs

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #8 - “I’m A Man” by Chicago

The band that barfed out “You’re The Inspiration” in the 80s wasn’t always winery ready adult contemporary. When the Chicago Transit Authority - later shortened after the actual CTA threatened legal action - emerged in 1969, they were a ferociously tight jazz-rock 7-piece that gave equal weight to both halves of their chosen genre. 

To wit, their downright nasty, Afro-Cuban inflected, electric guitar lacerated take on the Spencer Davis Group’s 1967 hit single, which transports Little Stevie Winwood’s ode to modern masculinity to strange new places, transforming the original under 3-minute bopper into a nearly 8-minute assault. 

Their version appears on Chicago’s ballsy 1969 double record debut, and while a truncated single version was released, it’s the full figured take where all the good things of early Chicago rise and rip with terrific power and presence. 

From Peter Cetera’s thick, bounding bass riff to the clave-cowbell-tambourine chug of the horn section when they’re not punctuating lines with brass punch to the Buddy Rich-like charge of drummer Danny Seraphine to the three lead vocalists trading verses to the undeniable star, Terry Kath’s incendiary guitar, Chicago’s interpretation seizes hold and pulls one along at a breath snatching clip. 

As he is throughout their debut, Kath is a marvel - soloing, comping, and chomping at the edges, a player possessed by a ceaseless imagination anchored to a wide stance, bell bottom, badass guitar hero magic. Trombonist James Pankow describes meeting Jimi Hendrix  in 1968 after Chicago opened for Albert King. Hendrix said, “You guys have a horn section that sounds like one set of lungs and a guitar player who’s better than me. You wanna go on the road?” Hendrix later called Kath “the best guitarist in the universe.” 

A focused examination of Kath’s work across the eleven Chicago albums he worked on between 1969-1977 suggests Jimi wasn’t overblown in his praise. Kath’s genius is never more evident than the dozen tracks on the 1969 debut album, and “I’m A Man” is the perfect entry point for the unfamiliar. 

[billyvan]

Pro Tip: Redbull in the studio makes for energetic, albeit eccentric vocal performances. 👍 #studio #recording #vocals #ayearofsongs #billyvan #sunglasses

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #1 - “I Will Not Be Sad In This World” by Djivan Gasparyan 

A wordless prayer, human breath given wings, a benediction redolent of the pain and yearning of the living. The title track from the Djivan Gasparyan’s 1983 album is all of these things, the sound of his duduk - a double reed woodwind carved from Armenian apricot wood - a haunting, beckoning call, all at once sharp and low and suffused with unrushed emotion. Over six minutes, Gasparyan carves the air with a simple eloquence, a quietly perfect response to Rumi’s sunrise imploring:

“Today, like every other day,

we wake up empty and frightened. 

Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. 

Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #16 - “Orbital Maneuvers” by Asher Fulero

“Orbital Maneuvers” is the steady rising, vibrant sound of day’s dawning, creation crackling to life with a delightfully funky sproing as light peeks around a planet’s edges. 

2024’s Worlds throws lines back to lively genre-stretchers like Pharoah Sanders and Lonnie Liston Smith & The Cosmic Echoes and more recent electronic-organic blenders like Kruder & Dorfmeister, Ashley Beedle and Emancipator, whose live band Fulero played keys in. Confidently exploratory throughout, Worlds introduces us to colorful vistas, murmuring expanses, and interesting new soil to curl beneath our mind’s toes. 

A tangible forward motion pushes “Orbital Maneuvers, Jack Yaguda’s saxophone breathing slow and steady in the opening moments before thrusters ignite with a mix of programmed and live drums that keeps the vibe modern amidst Fulero’s pleasing analog keyboard throwback touches. Gina Sobel’s delicious flute accents and Brett McConnell’s lap steel moan further enliven the journey with Fulero bringing in and dropping out elements with a badass DJ’s nuance.

Portland’s Asher Fulero is not only one of the West Coast’s most reliably excellent keyboardists, he’s increasingly one of the coolest independent producers and composers going today with a reach and comfort level in everything from jazz to jam, electronica to experimental, twangy to Technicolor, and beyond. Worlds is the best overall showcase of his diverse talents yet, and “Orbital Maneuvers” is a beguiling blooming for ears. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #15 - “Moon Maiden” by Duke Ellington

Ellington made his debut as a vocalist at the seasoned age of 70, a charming lark for the septuagenarian bandleader, who usually referred to himself as “the piano player” in his orchestras. “Moon Maiden” appeared as part of ABC Television’s 33-hour “Music To Land On The Moon By” series that accompanied their extended coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969. 

The version that aired featured Ellington singing at the piano with Rufus Jones (drums), Paul Kondziela (bass), and Al Chernet (guitar) but during rehearsal, Ellington attempted the piece solo on a Celeste, a small bell-piano, that gives the piece an romantic cosmic vibe while spotlighting Duke’s charming proto-Tom Waits croak in a love ode to the lady in the moon.

“Moon Maiden, listen here my dear

Your vibration’s are coming in loud and clear

'Cause I’m just a fly-by-night guy, but for you

I might be quite the right-do-right guy”

The rehearsal take surfaced on 1977’s late period odds & sods collection The Intimate Ellington, letting a wider audience enjoy a swell historical oddity. 

At a post-taping press conference, Ellington said, “At my age, I don’t really need an excuse to do anything. I just felt I could do it. But it’s a one-shot thing. This is the end of my singing career.”

Besides the solo version, I’ve included the broadcast version and a rare full orchestra version played in September 1969 because each take has its own appeal. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #13 - “How Am I Different” by Aimee Mann

The opener to 2000’s tumultuously released 3rd album by Aimee Mann shuffles in to a drum machine skip, spare, breathy electric guitar and feather light keys accompanying Mann’s exposed voice offering a cold assessment of a suitor’s gamesmanship:

“I can't do it

I can't conceive

You're everything you're trying to make me believe”

After Geffen Records refused to put out the album for a lack of potential hit singles, Mann started her own independent label and released Bachelor No. 2 (Or The Last Remains of the Dodo) to over a quarter million album sales. Viewed 25 years later, the album and its middle-finger salute to the corporate music industry shines as one of the best pop-rock collections in this new century, a crackling, tough-sensitive examination of relationships in their rise and demise.

“How Am I Different” dissects the mentality of a lover more concerned with ending up on the winning side than being real and vulnerable. The song glides along with a melodic grace and layered studio artistry present throughout the album, which includes guest turns from Benmont Tench, Michael Penn, Jon Brion (co-writer of “How Am I Different”), Juliana Hatfield and more. 

The song rolls into a salty refrain worth keeping in one’s back pocket for a future breakup:

“And just one question before I pack

When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”

Mann came out the gate of her solo career pretty damn great and then kept building on that start with every release to date. She’s overdue to be regarded in the company of resounding greats like Nick Lowe, Chrissie Hynde, and Elvis Costello, who co-wrote “The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist” with Mann on Bachelor No. 2, an excellent place to start for the uninitiated interested in plumbing the gem mines of her catalog. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #12 - “Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” by Steely Dan

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are often painted as cynical hard men but no one is more bitter or caustic than a bruised romantic. You can’t be truly disappointed in an ideal vision unless you first believed in it.

“Any World (That I’m Welcome To)” is the closest the songwriters ever came to wistful - yearning for innocence and escape from life’s slings & arrows offered in an exposed way the traditionally arch, opaque duo generally eschewed.

“I think I'll go to the park

Watch the children playing

Perhaps I'll find in my head

What my heart is saying

A vision of a child returning

A kingdom where the sky is burning

Honey I will be there

Yes I'll be there”

At a lean four-minutes, “Any World” moves from tender to powerful, driven along at a rising clip by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine. Fagen’s piano is the bedrock, and there’s no better example in their catalog of the potency of the Fagen lead vocal juiced by Michael McDonald’s dark, velvet backing vocals. 

The track appears on the pair’s cnotoriously least favorite album, 1975’s Katy Lied, which also gets less critical love than the rest of their 70s catalog. Decades on, the album endures as one of their most interesting, diverse song cycles, the first post-touring album still possessed of some of the immediate live band energy of their earlier LP’s, ripe for reevaluation in the new century. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #11 - “Gratitude” by the Don Pullen Quintet

To convey emotion and feeling in a palpable way without words is one of music’s supreme virtues - to supersede language and thus offer momentary passage to more universal forms of communication, a melodic despoiler of the Tower of Babel’s great schism. 

On 1985’s quietly stellar The Sixth Sense album, pianist Don Pullen and alto saxophonist Donald Harrison approach the broad idea of “Gratitude” in a hushed after hours conversation - delicate, warmly sentimental, gently tearful, a beautiful dance of nostalgia and yearning. There’s some of Vince Guaraldi’s tintinabulous grace over this nearly 8-minute sighing thank you. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #10 - “But It Comes Out Mad” by Camille Yarbrough

A stinging reminder that the have-nots been getting by on scraps in the richest country in human history since way back. American inequality - economic, racial, gender, opportunity, and so on - is the driving force here that busts up even love and desire. 

Most folks familiar with Camille Yarbrough know her as the sampled core of Fatboy Slim’s 1999 hit “Praise You.” That track, “Take Yo’ Praise,” appears on 1975’s The Iron Pot Licker, a fierce, honest, so funky you can smell it song cycle that reconfigures Yarbrough’s early 70s one woman, spoken word theatre production into a feminine examination of the same terrain Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson were creating in the same era. 

“But It Comes Out Mad” slowly unfolds with the restrained power and palpable groove of Bill Withers’ best, Yarbrough sketching the broken heart inside of economically beat down Black America in a voice equal parts soul cry, lustful observer, and unflinching truthsayer. Guitarist Cornell Dupree is at his saucy best here, judiciously serving up licks, a constant sparring partner for Linda Twine’s roiling, mad colorful Clavinet. 

Yarbrough reminds us that protest music need not be “If I Had A Hammer” to hit hard and muthafunkin’ true. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #9 - “Vamanos” by Lettuce

No other contemporary band is making the kind of music Lettuce is crafting. While often categorized as a funk unit, Lettuce embraces and extracts choice aspects of classic soul, tropicalismo, stanky funk, EDM, roots rock, jazz fusion, dub, prog rock and more. What they distill from this broad spectrum is a color distinct to Lettuce.

“Vamanos” off 2022’s Unify LP crystallizes their unique blend of styles into a romping Salsoul savvy banger filled with thrilling drops, brass ecstasy, reverberating rhythms, slashing guitar, slinky keys, and a use of space and artful underplaying that epitomizes their collective strength and wise downplaying of showboat soloing.

Lettuce’s vision is widescreen but always approached as a shared vision, the cumulative whomp of intertwined intentions composing music steeped in the past but ever-aimed at the future.

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #7 - “Wilmot” by The Sabres of Paradise

Haunted Dancehall. Rarely has an album’s title given a better indication of the vibe when you drop the needle. Built around samples from a 1930s calypso hit by Wilmoth Houdini titled “Black But Sweet,” this 1994 track by the short lived trio of UK remixers/producers Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns ushers us onto a dub dappled dance floor, stoned swingers swaying to intoxicating organ swells and reverbed-out horns. It’s a broadly appealing atmosphere that might entice both Squirrel Nut Zippers hip kids and Lee “Scratch” Perry devotees equally 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #2 - “Tiara Dievers” by Tim Bluhm

Some songs seem plucked from the invisible, universal river that’s fed bards since before history took note. Despite being one person’s creation, there’s a largess of spirit, emotion, and truth that resonates widely. 

Tim Bluhm’s “Tiara Dievers” is a blessing meant for one that all with ears can relate to. Like the many named characters in Dylan tunes, we need not know who Tiara Dievers is - perhaps a child or a woman but no matter for the listener - to chuckle and smile as Bluhm prays, “May you always stay ticklish no matter how much you grow.” 

At its heart, this song is about how certain people that come into our lives make the world glow a touch brighter, and how these individuals stir a yearning that this jagged, often cruel life not steal the sweetness illuminating these rare few from inside.

California Way celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2025, and “Tiara Dievers” like rest of this intimate, spare, captured-in-a-day song cycle is the ideal music for rain slicked days and solitary mornings when most music feels an intrusion, a companion for the solitary when things are quiet enough to really listen. 

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #5 - “New Ghosts” by Albert Ayler

Free Jazz for folks that don’t think they like Free Jazz. On 1969’s New Grass album, decidedly free saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler tapped his youthful rhythm & blues experience, marrying free form exultation with a pulse saturated in Bourbon Street marches and rollicking church music. 

The positive results of this intermingling are clearest on “New Ghosts,” a welcome ditty for newly minted saints marching in. Ayler soars and swoops like Noah’s dove while Bernard “Pretty” Purdie whomps out a beat to make the dead dance in this paean to love winning out over the darkness that descends on all things. 

#songoftheday #ayearofsongs #albertayler #freejazz #jazz #death #bernardpurdie

[snappyssongbook]

A Year Of Songs #4 - “Shabop Shalom” by Devendra Banhart

60s sweetheart bop careens headlong into Jewish culture resulting in the funniest, toe-tapping-est, strangely sweet song in Banhart’s quarter century career. 

Capturing the feeling of swoony, sudden onset L-O-V-E is the lightning songwriters have strived to bottle since bards sang of maidens at fairs. Banhart does so with nimble feet and a teen crooner purr charismatic enough you’ll too consider getting to know the Torah better.

“Whenever I'm in a foul mood, I gotta' see you in your Talmud and so happy it makes me, you wanna know who, who wrote the Book of Job? She wants to know, ‘Who, who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls?’

Well I did, I did. Yes.”

And this lusty verse worthy of Leonard Cohen. 

“Your sweet supple breasts are golden ghettos, soft statues in stilettos. Two wise men instead of three.”

That his 2007 band called Spiritual Bonerz (with a silent ‘z’) recorded this jukebox ready jam affords a bonus chuckle at the mention of a bris in the first verse. 

#songoftheday #ayearofsongs #devendrabanhart #shalom #shabopshalom #teenpop

[billyvan]

Sometimes you find a cool melody, then totally forget it and don't use it in the actual song. @mradamchristopher #ayearofsongs #sunglasses

[billyvan]

All In was almost an island jam. Adam and Sara veto'd that idea. Haters gon hate. #ayearofsongs #sunglasses