Music -- in all its formal components and levels of meaning, its status as a language uniting cultures, its flexibility allowing multitudes to combine in harmony, its offer of freedom from all material preoccupations to musical practitioners seeking mastery -- is my soul's tonic.
This song is my Sermon on the Mount.
Scotty Moore's guitar solo includes perhaps the invention of the power chord. That should tell you enough about this song's influence on all subsequent rock music.
The driving Elvis vocal, in the upper register of his peak youth, cracks with passion and rebellion over half a century after its recording.
How gleaming must have been the air as those players summoned what they knew was an altered beast from the void.
In the Purple Rain film, this is the closing song, after the epic performance of "Purple Rain" brought the crowd to tears and assured everyone that the Kid would eventually leave that town and become the superstar he needed to be.
"Purple Rain" broke them all down. "I Would Die 4 U" builds them all back up with triumphant energy. That is how I choose to frame this song in my mind.
The futuristic pop melodies of this song, in the verse, in the chorus, are beautiful. Just so much imagination.
If there is one master of lyrics in our own era, it is Benji Hughes. Their clarity, first of all, is astounding. You might not realize how hard it is to write lyrics (or anything) where people purely understand what is happening. Throw in the advance level of emotional and abstract insight he often imparts, and just the fact that he culls those words into such sharp, dynamic clarity is alone an achievement. This has the effect of making his lyrics supremely memorable. I don't have to research what Benji Hughes's lyrics are; their construction is so sophisticated that hearing them is remembering them.
But he often includes the element of storytelling as well, so he's taking you through some experience while conveying it so clearly.
Then he makes the lyrics funny and strange, about odd topics in just the most ideal, telling moments.
Then he fits it all to elegant, imaginative, often lengthy and challenging melodies.
And then there is this song, where he does all of that, but he forms the music to the storytelling in a way that just awes me.
The first portion of the song is this giddy, hyper sequence of young folks getting to town and preparing for a Flaming Lips concert. The song is a cacophony of sound, including fanfares of triumph. It's all a little silly.
A triplet beat slows everything down and sends the final sequence of the song into a dreamy three beat. And you literally visualize the characters in his story move into slow motion, you feel the concert lights wash milkily over them, you see our characters in closeup with the background blurred. This is all purely suggested through music; the lyrics do not suggest these cues. The orchestration of instrumentation to achieve the shift in dynamics, tempo, and style is excellently managed.
These concertgoers all took mushrooms before the show, but poor Mark went further and took ecstasy too, and he has become incapacitated. The song slows down for multiple reasons. It represents their states of mind at that moment. But more impressively, it represents the future memory of the show by the narrator, who years later is reflecting on it all. The narrator slows the whole night down to fully appreciate things that have become important to him within those seemingly fleeting moments: The music of course, the way he held the girl that he loved in his arms, the overall excellent night he and his friends had, the way they all worked together holding Mark. He realizes the full greatness of this memory only after years and maybe some greater experience and disillusionment with the world - or at least the music world. That's why the song slows down.
Then there is the final point: Mark remembers none of this. This is the final line of the song, a sweet note of irony and pathos, evoking something about the fragile and personal nature of memory.
And it's a rock song.
Think Rick Rubin producing Johnny Cash's '90s cover album was out of left field? Well, he produced Tom Petty's stalwart Wildflowers album too.
History cannot be allowed to forget the legacy of Tom Petty and his Wildflowers in particular.
"It's Good to Be King" is the centerpiece of the album, with the most imaginative songwriting, and puts on a clinic of powerful drumming.