#76) "Simple Life" by Mary Chapin Carpenter - I wouldn't know much or anything about Mary Chapin Carpenter were it not for my time working in country radio in the late 1990s, and even then, she was an enigma. There always seemed to be something off about her, reluctant even, something (someone) different from the Shania/Faith/JoDee/Martina/Tricia ranks of the day. Reading about her now, it seems my suspicions were correct.
It's also possible that I was the reluctant one, never anything more than indifferent to Mary Chapin Carpenter. None of the music from her hey-day has ever gotten me to really take notice, with one exception: 2001's Simple Life. Its elastic beat and odd melody strewn with Beatles-esque harmonies distinguishes Carpenter even further from country music, and though it might be considered the end of her 'hey-day', I'd be willing to bet she views it as the beginning of a whole new chapter, her much overdue departure from the country music genre she never quite fit into.
I don't normally respond well (er, at all...) to songs that are overly message-y, and Simple Life is not all that different from countless self-esteem/coping with life/everything's okay numbers (the country music genre is full of them). But I like the way it goes about it: cleverly waiting until the very last minute, very last second, to poke you right between the eyes.
"The simple life is overrated..."
#77) "Early Morning Rain" by Gordon Lightfoot - Gordon Lightfoot is probably best known for The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a song about a tragedy that affected my home region directly. It proved to forever connect the Canadian-born singer with the Great Lakes, but I've always thought there's something uniquely 'northern' about all his music.
I don't think I'm alone in this. I've seen Lightfoot live in concert three times in my life, in (fittingly enough) Duluth, Minnesota, the port that Edmund... sailed out of on that fateful day in November 1975 (well, Superior, Wisconsin specifically...but one of the 'twins' nevertheless...), and always got a sense - from each well-timed round of applause to certain songs, or lines in certain songs, or to remarks made between songs - that the audience considered Lightfoot one of them - a 'northerner', who knew what they knew.
In other words, the South has no small number of boisterous good ol' boys lauding their way of life with their rebel cries and flags and cowboy hats. Northerners have Lightfoot as their musical ambassador; his plaintive, sometimes brooding music befits roads strung through snow-packed woods, early frost and early dawns, bitter winds, long twilights, long winters, and all else that tends to engender the unique and persistent solemnity southerners just can't quite understand.
I used to think the singer in Early Morning Rain, the 'character', is a traveler IN an airport, and for this, the song always evoked a fairly on-the-nose restlessness. But now I realize he's more or less homeless, having nowhere to go and unable to get home, standing outside the chicken wire fence at the far end of the runway in the early morning rain, as if having just emerged from the nearby woods, watching the 707 as it takes off.
In spite of this, or maybe because of it, the song's pulsating acoustic rhythm, lyrics full of longing and town crier vocal styling still get me feeling exuberant and restless, wanting to be on my way somewhere, between places. Frankly, it seems the guy in Early Morning Rain is as 'nebulous' as you can get without being dead.
NOTE: It has to be the original single version from 1966 that I take with me on 1/48/50, not Lightfoot's own cover version from Gord's Gold, a compilation album released in the 70s. The original is much more energetic, crisper, snappier, and boy, do I love me some crispy snappy! ;-)
"She's away and westward bound / far above the clouds she'll fly..."
#78) "I've Gotta Be Me" by Sammy Davis Jr. - When it was released as a single in 1968, born into a world getting its ass kicked by the electrified energy of exciting new things like acid rock and Motown, I've Gotta Be Me must have sounded like Sunday sing-along in the geriatric ward. But take a moment to listen, open your mind, and you might realize that this song's only real crime is being uncool.
Written for a completely forgettable Broadway musical, it's actually a fairly stirring affirmation of 'self', an ode to dreams, to keeping them alive, to never settling or conforming, living life by one's own terms. It's a sentiment precious few of us have not felt or practiced at one point or another in our lives, and it was just starting to burgeon in '68, with all of society trying to strike a blow to conformity. Measured by that yardstick, I've Gotta Be Me wasn't really outdated at all. It was as much a part of what the 60s were all about as anything.
And really, what's not to love about Sammy Davis, Jr. to this day?
"I'll go it alone, that's how it must be / I can't be right for somebody else, if I'm not right for me..."
#79) "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" by Toby Keith - Without question, I have - at certain moments and for certain reasons - a strong sense of abiding patriotism. But I think here, more than in any other facet of our lives, we should all be trying to strike a balance. There's a time to recognize the greatness of this country, the success story that it very much is overall, unique in the history of the world, and there's a time to step back, acknowledge its exploits, its mistakes, its ill-advised decisions.
There's been a lot of both in 238 years.
When I look back on the 2000s, I can't help but cringe: the 2000 election set the tone for the decade, chopping the country up (seemingly irreparably) into talking point armies of red and blue states. Then came 9/11, followed by interminable war, natural disaster, corporate greed, financial meltdown...all of it engendering a strange cocktail of impending doom, and complacency in the face of that doom, that permeated our society and seems to have stuck.
All told, it was a shitty, divisive decade.
In country music, the 2003 feud between Toby Keith and The Dixie Chicks was an encapsulation of that division. I was ambivalent. I didn't think what Natalie Maines said to a London crowd was too swift (not so much what she said, as the timing of it - on the eve of a major conflict), yet I found the new, totally immovable patriotism in this country hard to swallow, and the suggestion - just that icy whisper that you were somehow NOT patriotic if you dared raise questions about things - unsettling, to say the least.
That being said, I think Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue is a great song. Maines was quoted as saying she thought the song made country music sound ignorant. But its purpose, I believe, wasn't to sound smart. I don't even think it was intended to be all that political. Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue reflected a deeply emotional response to what really was a 'sucker punch' on September 11, 2001. We had the right to be outraged then, galvanized in that outrage; we should not have felt sheepish for our anger or desire for retribution. Courtesy... represents that well I think, without trying too hard.
It surely represents accurately the part of me that - sensible and open-minded as I am - wanted to see the guilty parties fry when it happened, and ten years later, rejoiced when Osama bin Laden got fried.
And the bells at the end of the song, like all bells in anything, are beautiful.
How could I not bring this song along on 1/48/50?
Please support our military, no matter how you feel about the war.
http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/
"Cuz we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way..."
