347. “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak

There are plenty of songs I wish I’d written because I feel like I could’ve. As in, they are my exact sensibility.

“Wicked Game” I wish I’d written because this is the exact opposite of what I’m capable of. I am so jealous of this song. 

What an absolutely lacquered-thick atmosphere of love, lust, obsession, disorientation, desperation, and really, isolation. Few songs are as teleportational to a certain place, to a certain headspace.

A long, long time ago, I wrote about the minimal production that benefitted Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love.” The small number of instruments playing had the effect of putting the vocal out front-and-center, creating a feeling that represented the theme of the song: intimacy.

“Wicked Game” is a song, three decades later, that dutifully learned that lesson.

But it’s not just Chris Isaak’s utterly handsome crying baritone that carries this song. 

An outstanding lead guitar part serves as his foil, picking through gorgeous minor strains, then moaning over the silent space of the song with the impressively nuanced application of whammy bar.

The melodic cast of this song is intoxicating, from the impassioned vocal ideas to those lead guitar phrases. It’s a marvel of a creation in that way. 

In its structure, I have to praise the soft, subtle craft of the ending. This song deserved to have a true ending, not some fade-out or simple strike of the tonic note. Instead, it’s a two-part a cappella harmony of such affirmative heart. It’s a sequence that I’ll describe in the rarest way: Elegiac.

And maybe that works for the whole piece. 

I’m proud to live in a world of emotions as sweltering as this.

346. “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procol Harum

What an easygoing song, and yet unassumingly intense, like a flirtation masking the emotion of once-in-a-lifetime attraction.

The organ part defines all memory of this song, but I wouldn’t call it exceedingly beautiful. It’s more like the Bach baroque music that inspired it, its oddity meant to challenge you, its technical rigor meant to show you it cares. It is seeking its own salvation in trying to help you find yours. 

But Bach would never burst into these choruses. Those are thanks to ‘60s Soul. These two worlds were waiting centuries to mix. 

What a voice on this anonymous singer. The late ‘60s and early ‘70s were a time for immense, soulful vocal talent in rock music, evident here right along with Van Morrison, Joe Cocker, Levon Helm, Janis Joplin, and much more. They’ve never been equaled. 

Underrated drumming too, that echoing snare cracking off a patient backbeat. If only trap sets were around in Bach’s time. It’s the one major advantage we have over those orchestral composers. So much feel can be created with drums, cymbals, and a few simultaneous limbs. 

The lyrics were composed by the band’s dedicated lyricist; he had no other job. They hint at some kind of romance going on, and I guess the Boomers thought pretty highly of their ideas back in that Summer of Love when this song was tearing up the charts and becoming an emblem of that event. 

The Miller telling his tale is a reference to the great Middle English epic poem the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. Before Shakespeare arrived on the scene, the C-Tales was the greatest writing eked out of the charming new tongue of English. It’s a series of tales, each told by a character from a large, varied cast. And the Miller was a drunken lascivious sort, so his tale was appropriately dumb and sex-obsessed. 

Not sure why this would cause the woman in the song to turn a whiter shade of pale. It’s a mystery, maybe. A Mona Lisa for our time.

345. "White Room" by Cream

Drum creativity is song creativity. The 5/4 time tympani playing in the opening undergirds the epic, regal harmonies. Without such an outstanding drum part, there is nothing to inspire the creative painting of the percussive canvas. The verse roils on the driving strength of the drum pattern, the guitar and bass inspired into flowing blues interplay.

Second only to drum creativity, I have to credit the strength of a chord progression for inspiring a song to come alive. In "White Room," the instruments sing in pure pleasure of moving from chord to chord, elated about the next change on its way. When you love the upcoming chord, you play towards it with enlivened finesse; you can't contain your anticipation. Sometimes the chord progression is a song's ultimate motivator, sending the drums into a bliss selling the changes, which only raises the quality of the song all around. A virtuous cycle.

Ok: Eric Clapton...

Eric Clapton has done some very questionable things in his life. He gave credence to white nationalist political groups back in the '70s, typically ripped on drugs and alcohol as most small-minded fools are when he decided to spout off. Worse, he's continued to defend those comments and dig himself deeper. He went and broke up poor George Harrison's marriage. Even just professionally, he never fully lived up to his promise after the dissolution of Cream, bouncing around between solo projects and hastily formed collaborations. Even his most notable post-Cream recordings are half-realized productions with all kinds of songwriting rough edges.

But this guy can play the geetar. What's that worth? I mean, his wah-wah soloing on "White Room" is so, so good. And it truly inspired musicians around the world.

His life story is also something to look up to. He grew up in England in a pretty low economic state, believing that his young mother was his sister, his grandparents his parents. When he finally did learn the truth, it didn't change much; his mother eventually married and moved away to Germany, and he continued to be raised by his grandparents.

As for many kids that grow up with very little, including very little family identity, he self-created an identity as an artist, because one thing nobody can take from you are your observations and your ability to express them. If your vision is compelling, it's a way for you to rise up. At age 13, he got his first guitar. I swear that his guitars became the nuclear family he lacked, as it was his guitars he spent most of his time with from then on. He had a cool trick for improving his technique, recording his practices and listening back to them at a time when personal recording devices were tricky to find. There is a deep lesson in this: Self improvement comes from distanced verification. Be a critic of yourself, not an enabler of your own self-satisfaction. Seek an objective method of judging yourself. I believe it pays off, and not just in the development of your skills. You won't be perfect, but at least you'll know that you're not perfect.

Although, maybe Clapton should've applied his same practice of self-judgement to his apparent cultural/political beliefs. He had very little schooling, and school is ideally where you learn those self-assessing techniques of the intellectual variety, or are at least inspired to search for them.

Coexisting is a skill too, after all. In the cultural and historical complexity of a post-colonial world, coexisting is not just a basic, instinctual ability. And if you're lazy about it, you'll just convince yourself you're better than you are.

It's lonely in a white room.

344. "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin

One of the great recordings. A time capsule entry for the human race.

This is technically blues music. So much about the verse is blues, the guitar part, the vocal pattern.

But what blues group ever let their drummer record their part in the bottom of a stairwell? What blues song ever had a heavy, syncopated drum beat like that at all?

And beyond the verse, the song completely leaves all definition behind. The "chorus" is a pure instrumental that fuses one of my favorite guitar progressions with the grooving bass guitar of John Paul Jones. I will never forget the goosebumps I felt the first time I heard this chorus, at home with my brother, digging into this record the night I decided to take my first deep dive into my bro's Led Zeppelin collection (the same night as I heard "Immigrant Song," to reference back a bit). The middle development, with its organ, emphatic singing, thundering drums, and complimentary guitar, is just part of my consciousness - I take its perfect composition as just a given. I don't throw around the word, but Led Zeppelin has a genius that allows you to relax into a sound sponge, like watching a transcendent athlete continue to perform again and again, never saddling you with uneasiness that they'll choke in the clutch.

Robert Plant is credited as a great stand-alone vocalist. But in "When the Levee Breaks," he is a full instrumental contributor, opening this song with a hell of a tranced-out harmonica solo, then adding another beaut in the middle where the standard Jimmy Page guitar solo should go. His harmonica work was never perfunctory, not just some frontman affectation. When he decided to add harmonica, he always contributed sonic memories claiming part of our collective unconsciousness on their own merits. By comparison, John Lennon in the early Beatles records played harmonica like it was a novelty. There are some famous Beatles harmonica cues, but they are brief sound bites, and by the later records, the harmonica was gone entirely. Robert Plant righteously wailed on that instrument.

Just listening to the sound of the song, there are so many details in the recording, such attention to the panning of the instruments (and the panning slowly moves around throughout the song too), such attention to the effects on all the instruments, nothing sounding exactly natural. The entire track was recorded and then slowed down, creating that overall deep, gravely feel. I'll never quite understand how Jimmy Page got his guitar voice to be essentially clean but with an indefinable hoarseness. The cymbal sound in the drums was always so broad and sustained, even when not recorded in a stairwell, creating this kind of classical weight. 

Many bands can go out and jam on a stage for seven minutes and be very impressive. Very few bands can compose a song that does enough in melody, structure, and sound production to hold interest for seven minutes. "When the Levee Breaks" is a heavyweight song from a heavyweight band.

343. "When I'm Small" by Phantogram

There was a time when independent music had the imagination to see the future.