357. "You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" by Queens of the Stone Age

If you don't like heavy music, just skip right on by this entry. There's nothing here for you.

Those of you who are left, who knows this song?

There are a lot of bodacious songs on the Songs For the Deaf album.... but this is the one that makes hairs stand up on the arms of reality itself. It is a cement truck somersaulting through the relic shop of your imagination. 

The simple combination of a four-beat drum pattern and a three-note guitar has never been so affronting.

The vocals are shrieked by Nick Oliveri, an old associate of the band's that has since been fired for violent behavior. So I shouldn't glorify the violent style of this song too slavishly. There are some who buy into it for their image and life comportment.

It's pure sound, guys. 

It's a sculpture, not a manifesto.

Always some cannot be stronger than their patterns.

356. "You Stood Me Up" by Benji Hughes

A 3.5 minute song that I'd rather not call rock, but it sure isn't a pop song. It's a bizarre little marvel that probably has no home and will never get the appreciation it deserves.

The choruses ride the choppy beat into waves of fuzz guitar in melodramatic minor open chords, the vocal in ridiculous but catchy falsetto. Such pleasant, tuneful darkness, existing purely to reach its unique melodic conclusions.

The ending rides the same chorus chord progression but finds a fantastic new melody to repeat into the infinity of the fadeout. The leaps and drops of the melody line are so assured, fitting without an ounce of tension the speech rhythm of the lyrics ("I guess you got me, yeah you really got me, 100 million ways to break a heart and that's one you taught me.") 

Benji Hughes's singing voice is a gravely deadpan. It doesn't attempt to achieve some sweet, romantic charisma. You can't strum Benji Hughes songs up to a window of a beloved. Well, “You Stood Me Up” wouldn’t be a great option anyway. 

The detail of the production is a standard Benji Hughes delight. Put this thing on headphones. You'll hear opera singing.

355. "You Never Give Me Your Money" by The Beatles

I've been avoiding writing about this song for four days...

It's not something I should be writing about pro bono like this. Proper care needs to be taken. 

It's just too many things at once.

It is, I believe, the finest Beatles song recorded. That's just all on its own. I could go into extreme depth just about the extraordinary creativity replete throughout the song, down to the cricket chirping faintly in the song's fade-out.

It's also the opening track of a connected medley of songs that takes up the entire second side of the Abbey Road album, forming the Beatles' grandest composition. It may not seem connected to the rest of the songs of the medley at first, until you hear that cricket chirp persisting into "Sun King," the next song in the sequence.

This epic medley is also the final sequence of music produced by the Beatles on their final album. That album, Abbey Road, is a landmark of songwriting quality, far and away the band's most mature creation.

In the lyrics, it's a song documenting the impending breakup of the Beatles, obsessing over financial struggles and fantasies of escape.

It's a Paul song, and that also means many things in this context. That means that this song is tuneful as hell because that was Paul's genius, and it's a culmination of his tunefulness meeting his increasing need to get back to his roots as a rocker. That also means the lyrics are from the perspective of the one Beatle who saw himself as the stabilizing force in the band's later years while the other members dabbled and dallied and distanced.

And yet I've also thought about how "You Never Give Me Your Money," the Side B medley, and Abbey Road as a whole is not really Beatles music. It's post-Beatles music. It's a Beatles reboot. The Beatles had essentially broken up after the collapse of the previous album, which would end up being released after Abbey Road as Let It Be. And even Let It Be had been a drastic departure from every Beatles album before it, utilizing a different producer (Phil Spector), a different recording studio, and experimenting with a new songwriting method, where the members attempted to write their music on a cold sound stage in front of an array of rolling cameras. The failure of those experiments had essentially ended the band as a functioning entity. The Beatles really only came back together to record the Abbey Road album out of the basest of motivations: Contractual obligation. To just get it done with the least possible discomfort, the band opted to go back to their old producer (George Martin) and recording studio (Abbey Road studio). But you can't really go home again. 

Rather than really break much new ground, Abbey Road became a pastiche of Beatles-ness. It took all the songwriting and production tricks they had learned on previous albums and re-applied them with the efficiency of veterans. There is palpable comfort from being back in the old routines after gaining some hard-earned perspective on them.

That's not to say Abbey Road isn't incredibly rich. No matter what the tabloid drama going on with the Beatles, when it came down to picking up the instruments, they couldn't help but produce excellent music.

It came in more distracted fits and starts now, though. The Beatles went into the Abbey Road sessions overflowing with song fragments. Previous Beatles albums had taken unfinished fragments and stitched them together into some amazing songs like "A Day In the Life." But for Abbey Road, there were more fragments than completed songs.

"You Never Give Me Your Money" is a song assembled from fragments that is joined onto additional fragments to create a "medley" of songs that fill half an album. A medley usually takes full-length songs and reduces them to fragments so as to only play a series of highlights. The songs in the Beatles' medley, however, only ever existed in fragmentary form.

This approach is actually pretty lazy, and if we're honest, only the Beatles could've gotten away with it. A less acclaimed band probably would've been ridiculed for producing such multiple-personality music. Rather than develop songs with traditional musical methods of sonic unity and harmonic tension, "You Never Give Me Your Money" jump-cuts from one style to another without warning or even introductory transitions. But the Beatles had already established this as part of their style, so no one complained.

The Beatles could also get away with it because even a 30-second fragment written by the Beatles was blessed with profound catchiness. 

Every fragmentary portion of "You Never Give Me Your Money" is satisfaction. Ditto the medley that follows.

I don't have the inclination to give you the guided tour. It's all there for you. Listen to the song, then listen to the medley, then listen to the entirety of Abbey Road. Then go back and listen to all of the Beatles. Then come back here. Think of Jon struggling with "You Never Give Me Your Money" and nod.

354. "You Got It" by Roy Orbison

One question obsesses me with this song: What came first? What appeared first in the songwriter's mind and demanded the creation of this song? Was it the descending guitar scale that closes the choruses? Or was it the verse singing melody?

The chorus guitar scale is one of the catchiest instrumental cues in pop music, taking perfect advantage of the peak of that impassioned "baaa-by!" It also strikes me as one of those guitar melodies you kind of bump into as you're sitting around, watching TV, noodling around with the guitar in your hand while you're barely even noticing. That little phrase pops in there as you're absently working scales, and the moment you hear it, all the world disappears, and a song you know will be great begins.

But it could just as easily have been that vocal melody. It's the type of thing you start out humming in the shower, your vision completely unfocused, just singing for love of the sounds, sometimes just the satisfying feel of making sounds. If you do this a lot, just by the odds, you will eventually mistake your way into something you probably shouldn't have, some melody that will take you dripping from the shower, late for your day, searching for a sound recorder to get it down before it's gone. It will disappear as quickly as a dream, forever.

The best part about creating music is that, once you've given yourself permission to do so, any moment it can happen. The antenna is always up. Often, nothing happens. Then out of nowhere, like a signal from space, there is contact!

There is a certainty the moment you hear it. A triggered focus. The universe opens to you, and you gape into it with trance eyeballs. Your face feels like it's being sucked forward into a vacuum. Everything in the Earthly world goes dark.

The experience of the creative trance is life-altering, and somewhat life-destroying.

I'm in it right now, as I type this. I didn't start out that way; I was just pecking around on keys for a while. Then a way forward presents itself, and you don't even realize how everything around quickly fades out, like vignetting around a photograph. There is a feeling of fullness, like a water pitcher suddenly splashing at the brim that must be brought to its destination.

"You Got It" is one big, full water pitcher. The feeling of fullness felt writing this song is palpable in those pre-choruses (those passionate vibrato peaks), and so much so in that effusive upward shift into the celebratory "doo-doo-doo"s of the bridge, sung by Roy Orbison’s friends Tom Petty and Jeff Lynn, purely happy for him in this excellent moment.

What got them there? What sparked this song? Was it those beguiling opening vocal lines over that gorgeous chord pattern, a repeated line that resolves so sweetly the second time through on a seductively placed E? Did that send them on to ever greater musical heights? Or did one of them see the top of the mountain first, that declamatory downward guitar scale, and know that they needed to craft a fitting ascent to reach it?

Regardless, from late in a lifetime of setbacks, failures, and tragedies, this song was one of Roy Orbison's fullest days.

He only performed it once before he died.

353. “You Can’t Hurry Love,” performed by the Supremes

I’m scrolling down, down, down Facebook into a Moria abyss with advertising, and one pattern I notice is post after post with photographs of those darling little Christmas bubble lights that fill me with nostalgia for my grandparents’ livingroom in my childhood, the rough-hewn wooden bowl of walnuts on the coffee table with the simple metal cracker I could not operate, the 8-track player with Lawrence Welk tapes arrayed beside in a primitive organizer. The photograph caption is always some kind of high and mighty “who out there has the moral rectitude to have seen these objects back in the ol’ superior days?” I get it; memories are fantastic. 

I mean, they truly are fantastic in a literal way. They are great trances of fantasy that portal us into our past selves. To have memories is one of our most powerful metaphysical talents. They are nothing short of intoxicating. 

But I have my own little Christmas bubble lights in my house. They’re plugged in right now, glowing as I type. I feel like many people have them now, and these Facebook posts treating them like a lost code of honor grow more straw-manish each year I continue seeing them. 

These lost lights, they have essentially re-entered the culture as something of simultaneously now and ago. Don’t say “timeless” because we know they don’t belong; we have just accepted them as if Marty McFly missed his 1955 lightning strike and just ended up moving in. 

And this is what the internet is helping us achieve together, an ever-past/ever-present that trades in deep nostalgia as fluidly as in the no-spoilers anticipation for the latest mech karate. 

So “You Can’t Hurry Love” definitely is of a time of the purest gospel R&B artistry. It absolutely was the signature work of the Motown label that was still simply its own dream come true, not some regularly sold-off imprint under the umbrella of one media conglomerate or another. 

But the internet has augmented that reality with literally the weight of everything else too. 

It won’t ever lose its original context; we will just stop trying to remind everyone of those inventive, iconic days of American ‘60s Motown because it will still partially be the ‘60s for all times, and all the portals will be stuck open.