Songs that capture something with incredible efficiency

“You Should All be Murdered” by Another Sunny Day. Droll, misanthropic lyrics belied by a gorgeous and wistful underlying melody. Idealism piercing through the bitterness. “A Catcher in the Rye” in miniature.

Love Another Sunny Day!

Not sure if I totally understand the thread premise but... The Clientele song 6am Morningside has always captured the quiet hazy feeling of a peaceful dreamlike morning (and then evening). It perfectly nails the atmosphere, and atmosphere is perhaps the biggest draw for me with any music I like. The cinematic quality.

I had to read A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan for a class once, and it seemed to me at the time that you could easily replace the entire book with Rod Stewart's "You Wear it Well" and not only would it be a vast improvement but none of the meaning of the book would be lost.

the dead kennedys - "nazi punks fuck off"

Strapping Young Lad - "Detox". the lyrics are written as bluntly and artlessly as possible, but it pretty effortlessly describes my experience with anxiety and feeling lost in the world. Especially prior to being medicated.

Devin played it on the metal cruise last year and it was an emotional experience.

"so here are my hopes and aspirations/nothing but puke/god, I'm so lonely"

don't feel like that *anymore* per se, but my 20s, that basically nailed it.

proof, I guess that this one has stuck with me - I started a thread in 2008 about lyrics that describe how you're feeling right now, and posted this:

"So here are my hopes and aspirations
Nothing but puke
God I'm so lonely"

(Strapping Young Lad, "Detox")

― Bo Jackson Overdrive, Friday, January 11, 2008 12:21 AM bookmarkflaglink

At the time, I hadn't started on my meds yet (wouldn't until the following year)

The Coup - "Underdogs" basically captures living in poverty in devastatingly accurate detail. it's a harder listen now than when the song originally came out.

trying to think of a serious answer, and i think i've landed on a couple

townes van zandt's "pancho and lefty" tells a cinematic western story in miniature, but focuses on the human element, zeroing in on lefty's despair over betraying his friend and painting a complex picture of two outlaws doomed to terrible fates. but whose fate is worse?

different mood entirely, but scott walker (and jacques brel's) "jackie" captures a sort of swashbuckling (and oh-so-french) adventurism and libertinism unique to a young man with an entire lifetime ahead of him.

Radiohead - Fake Plastic Trees

Such a well-addressed ache.

"Fast Car." I posted about this on the Tracy Chapman thread a while back, but one of the things that astonishes me about the song is how efficiently it captures everything: not just this painful story of a life caught in a cycle of poverty, but also the emotional experience of every part of the story.

Like, it's basically a Springsteen song, and yet it does more, imo, than Springsteen ever accomplished in a single song. He has plenty of songs about being young and feeling like you can break free of the trap of small-town poverty; plenty of songs about being older and feeling that trap closing around you; plenty of songs about generational suffering and cycles of abuse and neglect and failure. But I can't think of a song of his that encapsulates all of this, together, as perfectly and efficiently as "Fast Car" does.

Like, think about all that Springsteen does in "The River" - the story that follows these people from age seventeen, through their rushed marriage, to an early, unhappy middle age, the weight of having to do exactly what your parents did, the sense of confusion and loss and nostalgia for something that barely existed. That's a lot. And yet for for all the looking back that the song does - "but I remember us riding in my brother's car/ her body tan and wet down at the reservoir" - there's no part of "The River" that feels like riding in your brother's car at age seventeen. And that's what "Fast Car" manages to capture, perfectly, without sacrificing any of the story.

Really wish there were an edit button so I could erase that second "for."

oh yes, Fast Car is a good one

Yeah I think the lyrics of "The River" are fairly clunky (esp. compared to what Bruce would be writing later).

I actually like the lyrics of "The River," though I also think he hasn't quite reached his songwriting peak there. I wasn't trying to criticize the song, just saying that for all that it manages to do, "Fast Car" does more.

"Born in the USA" is also a very efficient Bruce song imo - "Come back home to the refinery/ hiring man said 'son if it was up to me'" is one of those lines where I could use ten times as many words as are in the line itself, just trying to convey all that I get from it.

I don't think songs capture anything, I think the thing is in your head and the song resonates with it in a way that's idiosyncratic to you

They Might be Giants have a tune called "Judy is Your Vietnam" which is basically a perfect power-pop song and it's less than 90 seconds long

xxp "Born in the USA" is indeed a great example of that prime Bruce songwriting efficiency. There are probably movies that try to tell the story that song tells, and which do it less well!

'Beautiful Star' by Yu Miyake is almost magical in its wistful evocation of summers past (for me anyway, feel free to make up your own mind about whether it wistfully evokes anything for you) through the use of subtle samples of field recordings layered over an instrumental track. It does the trick right out of the gate and then sends me down its aural lazy river for another three minutes. That it's the background music from a Katamari level is pretty much entirely incidental.

Squeeze - Up The Junction captures SE London, doomed romance and regret inside three minutes

Boys of Summer.

Don can see you.
Your brown skin shining in the sun

so much Katamari music (at least in the first 2 games) is incredibly evocative for me, I feel like "Angel Flavor's Present" represents the entire birth and collapse of the cosmos in 5 minutes

You suffer
But why?

also this:

Well, I tumble outta bed and stumble to the kitchen
Pour myself a cup of ambition
Yawn and stretch and try to come to life

The Coup - "Underdogs" basically captures living in poverty in devastatingly accurate detail. it's a harder listen now than when the song originally came out.

― cancel culture club (Neanderthal), Wednesday, June 16, 2021 8:24 AM

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^

man the coup is underrated!

also kendrick basically owns this post.

I’ve always thought of Silhouettes as a wonderfully “efficient” song… it tells a story of obsession, heartbreak, rage, relief, and devotion, with a comedic twist; all in two verses.

I don't think songs capture anything, I think the thing is in your head and the song resonates with it in a way that's idiosyncratic to you

I like that. I could point to some song and what it definitely captures for me (if I could even explain it in the first place), and it might make no sense at all to someone else.

True, but we could say this about any of the opinions expressed on this board. What's instructive is to compare subjectivities.

The second half of your post immediately made me think of this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5cQcmAtjJ0

Booming post about Fast Car, Lily.

As my kids get older I think a lot about "In Metal" from Low

Partly hate to see you grow / And just like your baby shoes / wish I could keep you little body / in metal / in metal

^your little body...

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 … “Roadrunner” perfectly captures the joy and freedom of driving at night with the radio for company

I've always thought that this couplet from "Alison" is a brilliantly concise expression of a complex emotional state:

I heard you let that little friend of mine / Take off your party dress

Robert Wyatt - Sea Song

Even though I don't fully understand a lot of the references, I guess the Minutemen were pretty good at nailing the personal/political diaspora of the 80s.

Big Star "Kanga Roo" preternaturally captures young lust/love/jealousy/mentalism

I know you have a girlfriend
Cause I heard you had a fight

Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’ perfectly captures the repetitious nature of hopelessness and the disintegration of self it induces.

"as you turn to go" by the 6ths captures the feeling of shame that comes from being dumped, and knowing that you were not to them what they were to you:

"i know i'm not supposed to say i'm sorry / i know you've had more loves than mata hari / but you know you're the star of my life story / and i'm so sorry."

i shudder when i hear these lines. it's such a distinctive and familiar sentiment and not one you see so often in poetry or music.

a lot of modest mouse songs convey a similarly distinctive mood that is connected with shame. like, in "trailer trash" you get this longing for dignity embodied in that guitar solo that comes right after these lines about poverty and failure. guitar solos are great at expressing longing. they're not as masculine/triumphant as people tend to think.

I don't think songs capture anything, I think the thing is in your head and the song resonates with it in a way that's idiosyncratic to you

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Wednesday, June 16, 2021 1:18 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

but lyrics are poetry and all poetry is like this. it plays on associations. that is why orwell wrote that lyrical poetry is a kind of "inside joke" among speakers of a language. the critical, associative dimension, this capacity for resonance, is reduced or even destroyed by translation.
(i'm not totally convinced of this because i love a lot of poetry in translation. but who is to say that i am not missing something fundamental -- i usually am anyway).

Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann’ perfectly captures the repetitious nature of hopelessness and the disintegration of self it induces.

Good one. How about Schumann's "Ich Grolle Nicht"? I was analysing it with a student a couple of weeks ago. In 36 bars (less than 2m in performance), we get a thorough portrait of the singer's mix of heartbreak, suppressed resentment and contempt, and effort to rise above, through the use of chromaticism to highlight text. The leap to the flattened A on "Herz" in the third bar is enough to dramatize the first thing. Then we get a sequence (sung first on "Wie du auch strahlst in Diamantenpracht" - "however you gleam in your diamond splendour") transposed up to a sharpened F (and C in the harmony) and unresolved B when the mood switches to "Es fällt kein Strahl in deines Herzens Nacht" ("no ray falls in the night of your heart"); or the repeated high Ds ending on an Em7b5 chord when he describes the serpent gnawing at the subject's heart - ultimately leading to a deceptive resolution of E7 to F heading into a standard IV-V-I in C major on the final statements of "Ich grolle nicht" (I bear no grudge).

Very much so, yes! You should do a Rick Beato-style video about it. I’m not even kidding.

There are many thousands of depressing songs but 'Na Na Na' by the Knife is one of a very few I can think of that sound like depression to me, like an aural translation of that headspace.

Ha, it occurs to me that there do seem to be a dearth of those layman's-theory explainer videos that are actually about classical music.

I’d subscribe forthwith.

And that's OK! Here's why...
Xp

"Born in the USA" is also a very efficient Bruce song imo - "Come back home to the refinery/ hiring man said 'son if it was up to me'" is one of those lines where I could use ten times as many words as are in the line itself, just trying to convey all that I get from it.

― Lily Dale, Wednesday, June 16, 2021 1:12 PM (yesterday

I actually listened to BITUSA last night for the first time in almost 30 years, and was also struck by the resonance of that line (you could reduce it to "son if it was up to me", that one phrase does most of the heavy lifting) and the amount of information contains.

Leaving the line open-ended is what does it. It's unneccesary to complete the thought, of course- we all know how it ends. But leaving it incomplete forces you to conjre all that.

Reminds me a bit of Juliana Hatfield's 'My Darling' where the first two verses end with a rhyming couplet and the third ends with 'I was happy as a child' and the absence of a second line pretty much says everything that needs to be said.

"as you turn to go" by the 6ths captures the feeling of shame that comes from being dumped, and knowing that you were not to them what they were to you

Jane Siberry’s love songs are also very effective/efficient at this sort of thing. From “The Taxi Ride”:

“I can win you with reason
I can make you agree
The way that I love you
It only makes sense that you love me”

And really the whole conceit of arranging a taxi to take you on a search for a better match for your lover than you can be.

Also from “Goodbye”, albeit the shame of being newly single:

“I want a table
No, just for one
But I know you do
I can see some from here
Okay, then say for two
No, there's only one
Don't you want my business?
I will never come back here!”

"In California" by Lisa Marr and covered by Neko Case, about a musician moving to L.A. and struggling to make it.

So many perfectly vivid and concise moments...
"I remember your face when I showed you the ticket"
"Just a phone call away, now there's nothing to say"
"With the night falling down, now I'm living in Koreatown, waking to the sound of car alarms"
"Another fool, playing songs that don't matter, to people who chatter on endlessly"
"Another suicide on the 405"
"The Black Dahlia, she smiles and smiles" - another person who aspired to make it in L.A., with a graphic reference to her mutilation, while possibly mocking the protagonist, like the "palm trees" that "are laughing at me".

And yes yes yes to Jane Siberry's "The Taxi Ride" - I remember listening to that over and over on a plane ride, absorbing each line and contemplating what "a jump of cards in an idle man's hands" meant...