#355) "Ain't Even Done With the Night" by John Mellencamp - John Mellencamp is kind of an enigma. He's an American small-towner, proponent and defender of the perceived sanctity of family farms and dirt roads and cornfields and small towns and general stores and bright afternoon sunlight glowing through frosted gymnasium windows just after school, as girls congregate in the bleachers checking their makeup and watching the boys down on the hardwood, who are running practice drills and pretending not to notice...and all that.
Yet he's not a good old boy...not exactly...and if you look back at the height of his career in the 1980s, none of his work could be called bare bones anything. There was always something else going on, a certain artistic expression, a certain polish, that pushed him right to edge of legitimacy without ever pushing him too far. That's because John Mellencamp really is an artist, fully capable of bringing to bear a vision without ever letting it become overstated or obvious, or fake. He's kind of like the Billy Joel of the Heartland, except the argument has been made (by others, not me) that Billy Joel allowed his craft to push him a bit too far off the city streets and into schmaltz, whereas Mellencamp always seemed - to me anyway - legit. That is, always knowing completely that which he was singing about.
Just the name of the 1980 album on which "Ain't Even Done With the Night" appears suggests a certain expanded state of mind: Nothin' Matters, and What if it Did. That's pretty heady, and any small towner who earnestly engages that kind of rhetoric is the one I want to sit and have a few beers with.
Sublimely tender without ever becoming too much so, "Ain't Even Done with the Night" sways, swings and bumps its way along with equal parts confidence and clumsiness, mirroring the vulnerable nature of the lyrics. It's fun, funny, sexy and pathetic all at once, not to mention compellingly pretty, and never allows whatever vulnerability might be afoot to quash a stellar sense of anticipation.
"Well I don't even know if I'm doin' this right..."
#356) "All Those Years Ago" by George Harrison - My introduction to the Beatles came in two parts when I was eight years old: first the assassination of John Lennon in December 1980. When it happened, I was mostly just annoyed, because coverage of the tragedy interrupted my after-school TV viewing (a full week of The Brady Bunch, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and Battle of the Planets got pre-empted), but eventually I learned, through my parents, who John Lennon was, what the Beatles were, and how significant that impossible tragedy was.
Then, a few months later, George Harrison's musical tribute to his fallen friend was released and pretty much defined the year 1981 for me, turned me into a Beatlemaniac for life.
This is more of a thing all around as I age, but man, when this song was new, I really considered "all those years ago" to be some mythical epoch long, long ago, covered in the dust of the ages and only detectable through the micro-lens of George Harrison's first-hand songwriting. But it was barely 15 years past that Harrison was singing about when he sang about it. Not even one generation. The Boomers were barely into their thirties at the time, and Gen X...well, we were all still kids. Nowadays, of course, fifteen years feels more like the amount of time it takes to lift a coffee mug to my lips, take a drink and set it back down.
As to the song itself, it's one of Harrison's best, and the "quiet Beatle" had a lot of songs that placed him shoulder to shoulder with the "Lennon-McCartney" songwriting juggernaut. I think it's brilliantly suited to its subject matter, bonded seamlessly to melancholy and reminiscing, with Harrison's uniquely bittersweet musical signature - gentle humor, and winsome-sounding chords strained like juice from a citrus fruit. Maybe that's a tortured metaphor, but I'm sticking with it. ;-)
"You were the one that they said was so weird..."
