I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
Part II of ME & THEE is coming, I swear it on my life, but I am a patient midwife to my art not a timekeeping manager, so the hour and the day will be as much a surprise to me as to you. It won’t be long. In the meantime I give you a few of the most beautiful singers there are, in case you don’t know all of them, singing some beautiful songs. Well, you probably do already know all the beautiful music in the world, but there’s more to life than beauty (some would say) and most of these are sad, too.
1. Mary Margaret O’Hara, Dark Dear Heart. I have to be in the mood for her voice or it grates, and I can’t force it; maybe you can’t either. If this does nothing for you, come back to it when you feel differently, just to check. She sings this song more beautifully—most beautifully—live at the funeral service for John Candy, she breaks down after one minute there, but you get so much in that one minute. I don’t feel right about waving that video around for cheap Beauty but you can follow that link if you are short on patience for the full six-minute song, and I think you should.
The studio version is good, though, and here it is. Sometimes, a lot of the time, slow music like slow speech makes me want to tear my ears off and break the playback machine but it can be rewarding, too. give it time, a few minutes for her to work up into it, and as much volume as you can tolerate. it expands.
There are no other versions of this song worth your time.
2. Anita Carter, As The Sparrow Goes.
The completely berserk video commenter people — well, you know that those people, the commenters, are a people apart. The folk of the valley they say that youtube commenters are a little closer to god than the rest of us, a little more touched by the fiery hand of the Divine, that it left them a little unsteady and completely burned out their inhibition centers and good sense. In whispers they say to one another, when this one’s daughter is in trouble with the law or that one’s son is an agitation to his parents, Go see the youtube commenters, they say, they’ll make you a posset or give you a charm. They’re not welcome in our homes, mind you, but they know things, secret things.
well now, that might be true and it might not. but the fact is the commenters like to say she had the voice of god’s angels and no more beautiful song was ever recorded.
The voice part is definitely true. Maybelle and June are the famous Carters and they earned it for their songwriting and more, but no Carter could sing worth a damn next to Anita. Wasn’t their fault; nobody could. June wrote Ring of Fire for Anita before it got to Johnny Cash, but she didn’t do very well with it. Her version’s not unlistenable or anything but she didn’t do well with anything that could use a little punch and staccato. or a horn section. But that is like blaming the whole Sea for being too fluid and for not being more like a grasshopper or a nimble rabbit who lives to hop on the beat. The sea is what it is and does what it does.
This might be the song she sang the best; most of the songs she was given to sing were terrible and had terrible contemporary productions with all this jingle-jangle country pep and syrupy strings competing with the purity of her voice, but there are a few where they quiet down and she breaks through all that. If it doesn’t grab you at first, give it a chance until 0:40 when she floats up a little, see if you change your mind.
3. Blixa Bargeld with Die Haut, Johnny Guitar
play the guitar
play it again
my Johnny
maybe you’re cold
but you’re so warm
inside
I could introduce this some more but I don’t think I have to. Peggy Lee could write a song, and Blixa, when he was low and deliberate with his voice, he could place it gently into any curve or whorl of your shell-like ear he pleased. he could go right into the brain with that voice if he wanted to. Blixa, Blixa, Blixa. He wasn’t like a sexier male Marlene Dietrich all of the time or most of the time, but when he was, he was, he was.
The tragedy is, the live version of Die Haut doing Johnny Guitar doesn’t want to be embedded. so I am linking to it for your pleasure. Nobody likes to work for their pleasure by clicking a click, but you might get a wonderful surprise. The album version is good but doesn’t compare.
For visual list symmetry, I include a different song too, an embeddable one: this is Blixa crooning Schubert’s Die Leiermann in an excerpt from Peter Sempel’s documentary on Kazuo Ohno, which I have not seen.
4. Kirsty MacColl, The Butcher Boy.
Just an old folk song, a pretty one, with an uninspired instrumental backing. A million people have sung it and another million are singing it right now. Nobody sings it like this. Last for best and best for last.
Kirsty sings it so tired, so tired. She sings it she can barely hold up her head. People have said (I’ve heard them!) that one measure of skill or competence in musicianship is when you make a phrase or a whole melody sounds inevitable: not just that you don’t expect any mistakes to be made and look, none are; but that by playing you prove the composer’s thesis. You confirm that yes, this note is right; yes, this is the one that comes next; no, there isn’t any alternative solution. sometimes when someone is good enough you feel like if they suddenly stopped playing you could finish the piece in your head even if you’d never heard it before. They were that sure. It feels the same way as when you see a car headed down the street very straight and very fast, and you can close your eyes and know which way it’s still going and where it’s going to crash.
Kirsty doesn’t sing this like that, exactly. she sings it like she’s marching uphill to die and everything is very heavy, but nothing is left. It isn’t always good to sing folk songs like you understand the lyrics and really mean them—to be vocally emotionally demonstrative in the wrong way in folk music is to kill it dead and to musically misunderstand it completely—but in this case, it is good. when she sings “I wish, I wish,” there’s nearly no emotion perceptible in it because the wish is empty now, so flattened by impossibility, hollowed out by sorrow, a dead girl wishing it hadn’t been like this.
maybe it’s just the tempo? maybe singing it slowly is all it takes. I can’t sing at all, so I don’t know how anything is done. it’s all magic to me.
That’s all for now. This is for everyone but it’s specially and secretly for the ones awake right now. It’s not quite 3 in the morning but by the time I sort out the links and the typos it will be. If it’s the middle of the night where you are, this is for you. specially.
P.S. one extra, number 5. Henri Ledroit. This one’s for the singer, not the composer. surprise surprise.