...is my favourite single so far this year. It took a little while for me to get it, ‘cause the Bone Thugs N’Harmony-ish staccato singing thing isn’t something I’m particularly fond of, but since I’ve got past that, I’ve decided that it’s her “Take A Bow”; and possibly the best thing she’s ever done.
She’s never really been into the more experimental stuff that excites me about most of the mainstream r’n’b that I like, and, indeed, this song is about as simple & basic as can be - verse, chorus, verse, chorus to fade, with the same chords throughout. But the words, for me, sound so very ‘real’*, particularly the second verse:
I can’t sleep at night when you are on my mind
Bobby Womack’s on the radio, singing to me:
“If you think you’re lonely now...”
Wait a minute, this is too deep (too deep)
I gotta change the station
So I turn the dial, trying to catch a break,
And then I hear Babyface:
“I only think of you as breaking my heart...”**
I’m trying to keep it together but I’m falling apart
I’m feeling all out of my element
Throwing things, crying,
Trying to figure out where the hell I went wrong
And the pain reflected in this song
Ain’t even half of what I’m feeling inside
I need you, need you back in my life, baby...
The little details here, the specificity of the whole thing, is moving in a way that her ballads don’t tend to be. When she sings “When you left I lost a part of me, it’s still so hard to believe”, yeah, ok, it’s hardly something you’ve never heard before, but the ‘It’s still so hard to believe’ is what sells it for me: I get a sense that dealing with all this - or at least trying to - is an actual activity that she’s sitting there, spending time doing. I was enthusing about all this to someone the other day, and she said she thought it was all a bit pathetic (and I’m assuming she meant Mariah & not me, although I guess that’s open to interpretation...), but the vulnerability of it all is part of what I find moving. And, of course, the original meaning of ‘pathetic’ is [blah, blah, pedantic dictionary-boy blah...]
It’s weird: I’m at once both more-than-usually aware of the construction, of the songwriterliness of what’s going on - Neil Tennant or Jimmy Webb spring to mind - and also able to bypass my appreciation of the craftedness of it and have it affect me emotionally too. I even like the fact that she appears to be the only person left in the world whose radio actually has a dial, rather than button for ‘up’ & ‘down’. And she just about manages to keep the vocal gymnastics in check until the final chorus, where they seem like a nice escalation of emotion, rather than the usual empty virtuosity. And the melody - which I don’t really have the requisite tools to discuss - well, I really like that, too.
In truth, I feel a little concerned that maybe, despite having been buying her records on and off for thirteen years now, I haven’t taken her as seriously as I should have done.
(Apologies if all this sounds like over-reading - I think the Nick Cave lecture on “Better The Devil You Know” is a horrible, trying-too-hard embarrassment, and I wouldn’t want to end up in that particular boat. I’m fairly new to all this, and I’m torn between wanting to contribute and remaining somewhat unconvinced of whether or not the subjectivity of all of this renders it kind of pointless. Which maybe leaves me sounding wankier than I’d hope, but there we go...)
Anyone have any thoughts?
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* ‘Real’ in inverted commas because I neither know nor care whether it’s actually something that happened to her - the point is that it sounds like it did. There’s certainly a chance that this is connected to the (semi-serious) image that I have of her as a proper, tragic, ‘Sunset Boulevard’-style diva, tottering around her mansion knocking back the valium. But writing songs that intentionally utilise the way you’re perceived by the public is perfectly valid, it seems to me.
** Not actually certain if this should be in speech marks or not - it’s not something I recognise, but Babyface is listed in the songwriting credits, so I reckon it should be (although if so, it’s a shame that it’s sung by Lead-Vocal-Mariah rather than the Backing-Vocal-Mariahs like the Womack quotation is). |
