Better as a Single: "My Spanish Heart" by Chick Corea

Chick Corea's My Spanish Heart needed to be a double-length album merely for the fact that he could not otherwise have shoehorned three completely disparate genres into a single vinyl record. Well... three is other people's math; not mine. This is apparently a 'fusion fusion' record, jazz-rock fusion further fused with the Spanish music tradition of Corea's ancestors. However, maybe it's because so many years have passed since Bitches Brew but fusion doesn't feel like two different genres in one to me: it mostly feels like jazz played on inappropriate instruments. In the case of Corea, a keyboardist, it appears to be trad jazz when he sits at a normal piano but 'fusion' when he sits at the horribly squelchy 1970s electronic keyboards that have, more than thirty years later, rendered much 1970s work unlistenable.

Happily, Corea plays both kinds of keyboard (and more) here. The genres on display here range from authentically Spanish to authentically synthwank, but most of the tracks fall, true 'fusion' style, somewhere in between. More to the point, Corea takes his varying keyboard instruments, assembles a jazz band, tosses in a string section and a brass section, spices it up with some Iberian percussion, and then adds a handful of female backing vocalists whose sole purpose is to melodically proclaim 'aaah' from time to time on what remains an instrumental package. Then, he reassembles these ingredients in a different combination for each track, giving the package a feeling of highly diverse eclecticism, even as tracks run into each other or are bundled together in four-part 'suites'.

Now, I have to be honest with you: I don't know a thing about Spanish music, and I don't know a thing about jazz. Both have their terminology and their particular approaches to discussion; I'm clueless to all of that. But where a jazz aficionado might find himself obliged to take the Spanish elements in without understanding their origin, and where the Spanish music fan might feel the need to take in the more American jazz moments without asking too many questions, I personally find that I have something in common with both of those people.

But so what? The excitement of discovery is very much what this disc, with its rather horrid front cover picture of Corea in a toreador outfit, presents the listener with. So let's discover, shall we?

My Spanish Heart

Side one

1. Spanish Fantasy, Part One (6:06)
2. Love Castle (4:45)
3. The Gardens (3:12)
4. Wind Danse (5:00)

Side two

1. The Hilltop (6:16)
2. Armando's Rhumba (5:19)
3. El Bozo, Part Three (5:03)
4. My Spanish Heart (1:37)

Love Castle: keep (side one, track two)

The first three tracks on this package run together in a kind of 'suite', but throughout this package I've felt free to ignore suites. In any case, this is a strong opener, primarily piano with fretless bass and hyperactive drums until the second half, when it rises and rises to include a not-too-annoying synth (the only time we'll hear it on the whole side one of the double) and, very briefly, the brass. Throughout, however, the stars of the performance are the 'aah' girls, giving the whole piece an enjoyably memorable 'hook'.

It's an arresting beginning for the double, though it's not my beginning. Instead, it's my track two.

The Gardens: keep (side one, track three)

After 'Love Castle', this brings the tempo right down, maintaining the piano and the fretless but this time bringing in a wonderfully expressive violin to set the mood. Though Corea's rather incredible piano playing is more than up to the task by itself. Toward the end the tempo picks up, and the spell is shattered a little, but it remains excellent, the sound of three talented musicians in the same room at the same time working off of each other. I know, I know, that's what jazz is, right?

As it is on the double, I have kept these two tracks side by side, let them run together as Corea envisaged. That means. of course, that it's my side one, track three.

Day Danse: lose

'Danse' is with an 's', and I presume that this track is a faithful take on a particular Spanish idiom. The instrumentation remains more or less the same, though there are two violins this time, and we also hear the first of those handclaps-as-percussion that are so prominent in Spanish music. It's easy to imagine this being performed in a small, intimate room to the accompaniment of Spanish dancers. But for me, it's a bit too disjointed to fully work as a piece, though it has moments of extreme beauty.

My Spanish Heart: keep (side two, track four)

Not like this, though, which is one hundred seconds of truly sublime beauty. I'd call this an 'étude' if I really knew what that meant, but it's a simple and gorgeous piece for solo piano until the 'aah' girls come in and somehow manage to render the listener absolutely speechless. This is absolutely gorgeous music, not a moment wasted, designed for maximum emotional effect.

It might not be that everyone out there loves this particular piece as much as I do, but really it's the finest part of the album. And as such, I give it pride of placement as the final track on the whole album. So where the double finishes with grand statements, my single finishes with a fragile little wisp of a goodbye.

Night Streets: lose

The name just sounds like dated and overinflated 1970s pre-punk studio music, doesn't it? And it doesn't disappoint: yes, there is a piano, there is brass, and there are bursts of Spanish percussion. But this is very much a 'fusion' piece, and its squeaky would-be funk is precisely why the genre is so maligned.

The Hilltop: keep (side two, track one)

Corea clearly didn't invest all that much effort in making names for these tracks. I don't know if this song really evokes a hilltop, but perhaps it evokes a journey up to one; again the ingredients are primarily piano and fretless bass, but the overall mood is kind of 'new age' - which is not an insult by any means - and the piece is indeed evocative of a journey. I don't detect much Spanish influence here, really, or much jazz-rock fusion either. But that's not a problem, because Corea's piano part is highly melodic and quite enjoyable. Who'd have thought I'd be calling something 'new age' and yet still liking it?

I don't have any particular reason for starting side two with this piece, above and beyond the fact that that's what Corea does too.

The Sky: lose

Okay, I'll be straight with you: the reason I'm not including 'The Sky' is that I've never heard 'The Sky', so I don't know if it's any good or not. How is that possible? Well, in the early days of the CD, a disc's upper limit was 73 minutes, so the odd double that clocked in at, say, 75 minutes would actually be released with tracks removed as opposed to on two discs. So the version of My Spanish Heart that I own does not feature this track at all. And it's not on YouTube or anything... so I'm left with a fair supposition: that if this is the one track that the record company decided was least essential, it's not likely to show up among my list of most essential tracks, right? Well, hopefully.

Wind Danse: keep (side one, track four)

The 'aah' girls are all over this particular piece, which makes it of a piece with the opening 'Love Castle'. Like that first piece, as well, squeaky synths are all over the place. It's a decently composed piece but you can't overcome the nagging feeling that it merely crosses a boundary of good taste, at least by the standards of 2012. It's what you might call 'kitschy', though that word is often used when people attempt to defend what really, artistically, can't be.

And yet I include it. I found this a very confusing album, really, filled with moments of sublime beauty reinforced with horribly aged artistic decisions. If nothing else, at least tracks two, three and four on my side one (of which this is the fourth) do make a kind of 'suite' of my own imagining. One that doesn't really have much to do with jazz or Spanish music, but is certainly of its era. And having them side by side like this allows you to shuck off your cynicism and just enjoy them for what they are, whatever exactly that is.

Armando's Rhumba: keep (side two, track two)

I have no idea what a 'rhumba' is, though I guess this is one. From start to finish, this seems authentically Spanish to me, with most of the hallmarks I associate with Spanish music. The violin and the handclaps are well prominent, and you half expect people to start calling out 'olé!' (they don't). It's easy enough merely to enjoy the genre, but in addition it's in service of an expressive and joyful vertical melody line that I dare say would be enjoyable regardless of genre. The track is five and a half minutes long and yet seems to go by in a blink of an eye.

After a side one that attempted a consistent feel, my side two is very much 'all over the place'. To that end, then, track two is the perfect place for this particular piece.

Prelude to El Bozo: lose
El Bozo, Part One: lose
El Bozo, Part Two: lose
El Bozo, Part Three: keep (side two, track three)

Excepting 'Armando's Rhumba', the entire second disc is given over to two extended multi-part 'suites'. Normally that might disqualify a double from consideration here, but in this case each of the two 'suites' is divided into four parts, which I feel free to break up and consider as distinct 'entities' (Chick Corea might hate me for that). So really, for me, they are eight different 'songs', really. The first four, a suite called 'El Bozo', feature some of the double's most grating moments. The prelude is a piano piece of little consequence, but the next two parts are short segments for sci-fi sounding farting synths, sounding like something out of Doctor Who. At two minutes in length each, they still last far too long and threaten to render the entire 'El Bozo' suite as unlistenable synthwank, until the five-minute long Part III comes along. Featuring the robotic synth, on yet another setting, as its lead instrument, this much-longer part would seem to be 'more of the same'. And yet by bringing in a Spanish rhythmic feeling and putting a big-hearted melody over top of it, the piece winds up reminiscent of the very best moments of 1970s 'Sesame Street' cartoons or after-school documentaries. And that is no insult either; the piece is sweet and difficult to resist, outdated synth burbling an attraction now and not a detraction.

So indeed what I do is take the lengthy part three, as track three on my b-side, and can the rest. And then the extreme stylistic variations in my side two start to seem the very point: as if the varied elements that were 'fused' to create this project were unfused on side two: authentic Spanish music, urban American synth music side by side.

Spanish Fantasy, Part One: keep (side one, track one)
Spanish Fantasy, Part Two: lose
Spanish Fantasy, Part Three: lose
Spanish Fantasy, Part Four: lose

At just shy of twenty minutes, 'Spanish Fantasy' is by far the album's most ambitious moment, a culmination of sorts of all of the album's various moods and feels in a piece that is highly composed and structured as opposed to improvised. The first 'movement', the highlight of the whole suite, is the most dramatic and most authentically Spanish moment, taking as much from classical idioms as from folk idioms (and sounding like no kind of jazz at all) and using every acoustic instrument in the whole studio - strings, piano, brass, bass, percussion - in service of a highly complex piece that jerks back and forth from mood to intricate mood. It's a display of virtuosity, yes, but one that never fails to be melodic. Within seconds of the beginning of Part II, a rock drum kit enters along with a booming synth, and these two new elements serve as the main focus of the movement: this is practically one five-minute-long drum fill. And while the drum work is rhythmically inventive, it appears that the balance of virtuosity and melodicism has been discarded. Part II is impressive but not overly enjoyable. Part III is three minutes of dramatic and intricate solo piano, shining the 'virtuoso' spotlight on the album's band leader himself. And yet the same caveat applies: where this is technically impressive, it feels more than a bit like showing off. Part IV, the conclusion of the piece and of the whole double album, has the same complex feel of Part I, but this time combining the 'fusion' instruments (i.e. the synth and the drum kit) with the Spanish instruments. The drum is hyperkinetic in a surprisingly 21st century way, and yet the keyboard conspires to give the listener a headache - in a sadly unsurprising 1970s way. The piece winds down in an attractively dramatic way, but by then it's too late.

The only part of this suite that catches my attention is the first part - and that first part works so hard to be a 'dramatic opening' that it made sense for me to make it my album's opener, as track one on side one. It's a bit deceptive, since it isn't jazz at all and sounds little like the remainder of the album. So it serves as a kind of 'psyche!' opening, I suppose.

Better as a Single: "Yeti" by Amon Düül II

'Kosmische' is what they'll have you call it if they want you to be politically correct. 'Krautrock' is what they'll refer to it as if they don't care about that. Both terms are pretty stupid, and in any case the music that was coming out of Germany in the late sixties and the seventies didn't necessarily have a distinct 'sound' to it, not enough to merit the creation of a new genre label, anyway.

Or is that really true? You'll never hear of a person who, say, loves Can but has nothing to say about Faust. If someone happens to know who Ash Ra Tempel are, you can safely bet they've heard of Neu! as well. This group of musical acts, which also feature a healthy amount of cross-pollination between them, are always mentioned in the same breath. And, more critically, never mentioned otherwise. I mean, this is pretty damned obscure stuff, stuff you'll never stumble across on a radio dial or while surfing YouTube. Not if you're not specifically looking for it.

Which is a damned shame, because much of the 'Krautrock' canon is pretty incredible music. Having first heard the name associated with Kraftwerk and with David Bowie's Berlin era, I presumed the genre to consist primarily of clinical, efficient synthesiser-based pieces: German engineering applied to vinyl.

That could really not be further from the case, especially not in the case of this double-album and the band that created it, Amon Düül II. Yes, that's II as in 'two', and there is also an Amon Düül I, a different band (who guest on the final track of this album) borne of the same hippie-era commune as this band (and also, as fate would have it, of the insurrectionist Baader-Meinhof Gang). The shorthand on Krautrock is that post-war Germans were seeking to create a native form of musical expression indebted neither to the schlocky Bierhaus music of German AM radio nor the blues-based 'Anglo-Saxon' idioms of American and English FM radio. Yet most of Yeti sounds perfectly in keeping with what long-haired hippies of England were producing at the time, be that stoned mantra-rock or gnomic heavy metal; it's more than a little derivative, but that's only an insult inasmuch as 'derivative' is a bad thing to be, and it's really not: I would say that a lot of this album improves on the acid-casualty music is seems to ape. A lot, I stress, but not all. Some of this album isn't very good.

Well, what is it? It's ten songs over four sides, though that actually breaks down as 2, 5, 1 and 2 per side. The second disc is given over to 'free-form' improvisation, while the first disc consists of more structured compositions (the reason why side one has only two tracks is that the first one, 'Soap Shop Rock', can more accurately be described as a 'suite').

Given my personal musical tastes, you might guess that my single-disc version of this project would take more from the first disc than from the second disc. It would be deceptive, though not actually untrue to say 'I merely removed one song from each side of the disc' - but a simple application of math will reveal that that means my six-song single-length takes five of its tracks from the first disc of the double and only one from the second. Why? Well, I'm not averse to improvisation. But it seems to me that if I'm listening to a band 'jamming', I need to hear, well, I need to hear something that stands out, that distinguishes the end product from any of a million other moments of collective improvisation regularly performed and recorded in all corners of the world; something to make me say, 'wow, the band gelled in a truly unique way right there'. And while the jam segments aren't by any means bad, they're generally quite listenable, those particular moments are rare indeed. There's little on disc two that you sense Amon Düül II couldn't have pulled off pretty much any time they pressed 'record' in the studio.

On the other hand, disc one is overflowing with creativity, inspiration, and - yes - embarrassment as well. Where a lot of Krautrock is rather amazingly timeless, this particular album could have been produced in no year but 1970, and has aged as well as the era's bell-bottomed jeans have. That's not a bad thing; it just means the music needs to be approached as a period-piece more than as a living, breathing thing.

It's been this 'Better as a Single' project that has brought me into the below-the-radar world of Krautrock, and I must admit I'm quite enjoying the discovery. A lot of pretty amazing stuff came out of Germany in the late sixties and early seventies. Here's a particularly interesting slice of it.

Yeti

Side one

1. Soap Shop Rock (13:47)
2. Cerberus (4:21)

Side two

1. Archangels Thunderbird (3:33)
2. Pale Gallery (2:16)
3. Sandoz in the Rain (9:00)
4. The Return of Rübezahl (1:41)

Soap Shop Rock: keep (side one, track one)

Starting and ending with the same catchy electric riff, 'Soap Shop Rock' crams enough musical incident into the thirteen minutes in between to last four different songs - which makes sense, since it's a four-part 'suite' of sorts. With the exception of the third part, which is about a minute's worth of piss-take quasi-operatic vocals, the entire suite seems very much to fall within the 'rock' realm. The first part is a rocking and screaming song structured so tightly it seems to pass in barely a minute. The second part is a bit looser, with a prominent bassline and more 'declaiming' spoken vocals (as occurs throughout the album, the lyrics are in English but are of no real importance to the overall effect of the music). The second part seems to be losing its bearings a bit, devolving into a jam, when the brief 'sonata' segment appears out of nowhere (the component parts of this suite seem cross-faded as opposed to played as a single composition), soon enough giving way to the longer fourth part which features some completely fabulous 'exotica' violin, which is very much the focal point of the final minutes of the suite. The whole thing is wonderfully inventive from start to finish, and even where it doesn't 'make sense' in any conventional way, it is still a real joy to listen to - even if it seems hopelessly self-indulgent on first listen.

With that lapel-grabbing opening riff, this is a great way to introduce the album. Starting with the longest song is a risk (well, it's the longest song on my single-length if not the double), but the fact that it's not really a single piece but a suite makes me not mind. Anyway, what's wrong with a little risk?

She Came In Through the Window: lose

This starts off with a very attractive riff, played 'cleanly' on an electric guitar on an album where the electric guitars otherwise tend to be distorted. Bongos come in and that swirling gypsy violin from the previous track reappears, and by the one-minute point you're ready to declaim 'album highlight'. The problem is that the song doesn't end there - but it doesn't go anywhere either. There is no forward momentum at all. Once the spell has been woven, it merely stays there, content to stay in one plays at the violin and whatever the other lead instrument is get progressively squeakier.

Archangels Thunderbird: keep (side two, track one)

The idea that Krautrock was trying to escape American/English influences is comical in light of this track, a song which, from its crunching guitar riff to its shrieking lead vocals, from its come-from-nowhere organ moments to its Tolkeinesque mood, is as heavy metal as Spinal Tap, and as easy to take seriously as well. I practically burst out laughing the first time I heard this slice of would-be Zeppelin, but somehow it manages to grow on you, for all its preposterousness. Maybe it's the very insincerity of it that is somehow attractive. Who knows?

I had a hard time sequencing my side two, and for a stretch wanted to finish the disc with this OTT monstrosity. But I couldn't make it work, so instead it's the side opener.

Cerberus: keep (side one, track two)

This is the first Amon Düül II track I ever heard, and it really is a great starting point: after a rather pointless slurping sound as an introduction, the song itself comes in, a hippie-era riff evocative of points east played with confidence and no small amount of technical acuity on acoustic guitars and bongos slowly converts itself into a harder piece played on swirling electric guitars and a plodding drum set. It's a pretty amazing piece of work, beautiful and frightening as well, earthy and cosmic at the same time. A true album highlight.

This and 'Soap Shop Rock' are probably the most user-friendly tunes on the disc, so it might make sense to fill side one with the radio-playable stuff. But in fact the main reason I put 'Cerberus' as track two on side one is because only two of the six songs I chose are primarily acoustic, so they needed to be on opposite sides of the disc.

The Return of Rübezahl: keep (side two, track four)

At a mere 100 seconds, 'The Return of Rübezahl' is less a song than a decent collection of catchy electric guitar riffs. The track is certainly memorable, and you imagine most early-seventies prog-rock bands would seize on the riffs here and expand each of them into a ten-minute epic. It's just as well that that's not what Amon Düül II do, as one of the more enjoyable aspects of Yeti is how brief throwaways sit alongside the extended pieces.

I actually conclude the album with this little track. Why? Well, I see it as a bit of a coda after the nine-minute jam that might logically serve as the conclusion. So it's kind of a 'Her Majesty'-style situational prank. But in addition, side two is the nine-minute epic and three briefer tunes; putting those three little bits all side-by-side seemed to diminish their individual charms.

Eye-Shaking King: lose

Though the whole of Yeti is not uniformly 'heavy' in a guitar-bass-drums way, side two certainly stands up with the metal of the day. 'Eye-Shaking King', the longest song on side two, would be a rather conventional piece of plodding metal shrieking and riffing were it not for the curious decision to bury the lead vocals under so much studio manipulation that it seems like another instrument in the mix. An acid-addled guitar solo brings the song through its middle section, but by the end it's all just become a bit silly and tiresome. TIme for a change of pace, I reckon.

Pale Gallery: keep (side two, track two)

A little swamp-like thing, little more than a grungy riff, thumping drums and a few random noises over top. Probably redeemed mostly by its brevity - it has the good sense not to outstay its welcome, and as such intrigues but does not annoy.

This didn't really seem to fit anywhere else. I didn't really even have a compelling reason to include it at all. But... anyway, here it is - track two on side two.

Yeti: lose

Oh boy. Eighteen minutes and twelve seconds. For what it's worth, I want you to know that I didn't just immediately discount the album's title track on seeing its inordinate length. I mean, I get it; Yeti (the Abominable Snowman) is a massive, lumbering, vaguely exotic creature, and Amon Düül II are trying to evoke the creature - or more to the point, like so many early seventies' side-long jams, they're seemingly attempting to soundtrack a drug trip. The track is not without merit - in all probability it coheres and rewards more than, say, (the) Pink Floyd's side-long epics of the same vintage. It takes fully six agonising minutes of dicking around for the ensemble to find a groove, but once they do they ride it as hard as they can for another six minutes or so, an unrelenting rush of excitement and the clear and definite highlight of the jam piece. The groove collapses in the twelfth minute, and the third part of the piece is a simple riff played with a wah petal, competing for attention with various other instruments attempting to maintain the 'trippy' vibe for a few minutes before fading out with no resolution. This third part isn't that bad either, really, but unlike 'Soap Shop Rock', invention is in short order here. Eighteen minutes is almost two percent of a person's entire waking day, and that's way too much to spend on this particular indulgence.

Yeti Talks to Yogi: lose

This particular jam doesn't seem to be a direct continuation of the eighteen minutes of side three, but it might as well be - it starts off by replicating exactly the mood that 'Yeti' fades out on. Pretty soon, though, it's been replaced by a walloping drumbeat over which the other instrumentalists play sustained drones, as if waiting for their chance to break into a melodic groove. Which, needless to say, never really arrives. The male and female vocalists show up about half a kilometre away from their mics and attempt to give the piece a focal point, but they're just buried in the muck by then, and the track comes to a natural conclusion after six-some minutes, having accomplished nothing at all.

Sandoz in the Rain: keep (side two, track three)

Sounding like nothing else on these four sides, this nine-minute improvisation barely even qualifies as an Amon Düül II song, as one of the guitars, the vocals and the bass are performed by members of estranged sister group Amon Düül I, and the flute is also played by a guest musician. No matter, really, as the result is something quite special. It's improvisational, but clearly played from a designed structure. The drums rumble like timpani, the acoustic guitars build to a crescendo, the vocals rise and fall in dramatic fashion, the violin, flute, bongos and whatever else is there all compete for space in the sonic space, and yet the overall feel remains a kind of graceful calm throughout. After the bluster of so much of the previous three-and-a-half sides, this nine-minute comedown feels like watching the sun rise after an all-night party.

This is the double-album's closing track, and it quite obviously seems like a closing track. It's not quite my final track, but as track three of side two, it definitely functions as the 'climax' of the album - before a brief little addendum that follows it. It's interesting that an album filled with bluster should have such as pastoral moment serve as its climax. But hey; 'interesting' is where Amon Düül II live.

Better as a Single: "Hot Stuff" by Donna Summer

Donna Summer's death in May of 2012 turned out to be just one of many, another in a tragic list of back-to-back celebrity passings, to the point where she seems, in death as in life, to be little more than 'something somewhere between Whitney Houston and the Bee Gees'.

While that's a horrible take on her considerable legacy, it is a testament to how confused Summer's place in musical history is - undisputed queen of a genre that has been badly maligned down the decades, top-notch singer in a genre that values machines, moral Christian famed for sex-kitten purring and decadent paeans to fleshly love, and all-American girl who flourished in a very European idiom. And lastly, a humble, reluctant celebrity promoted with so much hubris that not only is this current album, her most famous a double-album, it is rather amazingly one of four consecutive double-albums released between 1977 and 1979.

Bad Girls was designed to launch Summer as a 'breakthrough' artist, to expand her audience and her palette beyond a limited genre whose star, Summer and team correctly surmised, was already starting to fade. In that it launched two number one singles and was the best-selling album of her career, it was a marked success. Measured by the album's ability to eke out a new career for its singer, though, one would need to consider the project a failure: disco is all Summer is remembered for, and disco remains the defining sound of this album and of its very best tracks - the flirtations with rock guitar or conventional balladry remain irrelevant distractions next to the main business of a repetitive drum beat with which to while the hours away on the dancefloor.

Sadly, of course, disco was also Summer's downfall. Rehabilitated though it might by now be, disco was eradicated from the public's consciousness in the 1980s with a fervour that approached Stalinesque. Anybody with the 'taint' of association with disco failed commercially, as they floundered to find new niches in a post-disco world order. Summer fought with her record label, fought with her faith, and fought with a public image as a vapid sex-obsessed piece of fluff. A cover image of Summer as a tarted-up hooker hanging by a lamppost was never going to help with that, but the contents of this album offer lots of dignity: the dignity that comes with creating memorable, expressive music designed to bring listeners to a dance-induced state of bliss. That within a few years of its creation people would give into the knee-jerk conservative impulse that this studio-crafted music 'sucks' is an expression of blinkered bigotry at its worst. It's a relief that Summer lived long enough to see her reputation salvaged.

Bad Girls

Side one

1. Hot Stuff (5:14)
2. Bad Girls (4:55)
3. Dim All the Lights (4:40)
4. Journey to the Center of Your Heart (4:36)

Side two

1. All Through the Night (6:06)
2. On My Honor (3:32)
3. Love Will Always Find You (3:59)
4. Our Love (4:52)

Hot Stuff: keep (side one, track one)

The shorthand on this track is that this is Summer's 'rock-disco' crossover, but I have to admit that all these years later, it's tough to hear quite what this has to do with rock music except for a slightly distorted electric guitar riffing away in the background and, of course, a solo that shows up at the song's halfway point. More interesting, in my opinion, is the cheesy little arabesque keyboard line that serves as the song's actual main hook. And it does have to be mentioned that Summer really was a hell of a singer when she wanted to be. The song is probably a bit overlong, to tell the truth (on an album shorn of the side-long excesses that marred her earlier albums), but it's still quite irrepressible.

I didn't immediately make this my track one just because it was track one on the double and Donna Summer's biggest hit. But it's certainly an attention-grabbing tune, and it makes more sense opening the album than stuck somewhere in the middle.

Bad Girls: keep (side one, track two)

This song, the album's title track and Siamese twin to 'Hot Stuff', couldn't care less about crossover success, really - it's unrepentantly dancefloor-oriented, with brass all over the place, propulsive rhythm guitar, disco whistles, and backing vocalists singing all kinds of nonsense in counterpoint. It is a lot of fun, but it could have been a lot more fun - what's holding it back is a strangely 'moral' take on the topic of prostitution: Summer was always the most reluctant of libertines, and while maybe that tension added a lot to her career as a whole, this particular track could use a little more abandon.

Most of this album is programmed to run together seamlessly into twenty-minute segments of music - album covers of the era called this NON-STOP DISCO MIX! For my purposes, it means that songs which seem like natural bedfellows on the double do so on the single as well - and so as this follows 'Hot Stuff' as side one track two on the double, so it does on my smaller album.

Love Will Always Find You: keep (side two, track three)

The only song on side one of the double not to have been released as a single, this song, with its simplistic vocal melody and cheerfully inane 'Latin' horn line, is admittedly a bit of a throwaway on an album without many of those. And yet its silliness is completely infectious, and its cotton-candy charms are a good deal of fun. It's empty, it's insignificant... but hell, isn't that a compliment for a disco tune?

My single-length summary follows the flow of the double to such an extent that it might even seem like I wasn't trying. But I did have my reasons... In any case, this is the sole track on my entire eight-song album that is greatly removed from its overall position on the album, moving from early in the album to late in it, as side two, track three - a 'pick-me-up' after a two-song slow segment.

Walk Away: lose

Like the best funk, this particular tune grooves hard while somehow seeming laid-back and unhurried. And like the best funk, it features an amazing clavinet line. It's a well-constructed song, yet for some reason it fails to take flight. Well, I guess it's walking, not flying. Plus it's got a sax solo. Who in God's name invented the sax solo?

Dim All the Lights: keep (side one, track three)

I first had this top-two single down as an unfortunately generic ditty tricked up with timbales and digital effects on the vocals until a quick glance at the songs Wikipedia page showed me that (a) it's a solo composition (intended for Rod Stewart, of all people), (b) Summer holds a note for sixteen seconds in it, and (c) you can use it to check if a watch is running at the right speed. This all made me listen to the song, and its great rhythm guitar line and propulsive chorus, with fresh ears. And I liked what I heard.

This track, and the one that follows it, winds up being a second two-song suite. Since I had an overall idea of the flow I wanted for this album, the last-minute addition of this track presented a bit of a conundrum for me: it obviously needed to be next to its Siamese twin, and that meant that those two tunes would have to be tracks three and four on side one. The overall flow is good, but unfortunately the slow introduction means that the NON-STOP DISCO MIX! that is side one gets interrupted. Ah well, so be it.

Journey to the Center of Your Heart: keep (side one, track three)

Prog-disco! Now that's exactly what the world needs! Well, the lyrical conceit and the guitar riff at the beginning are as close as the song gets to progressive rock, really, as the noodling synth line belongs equally to the two genres but that propulsive guitar line and that amazingly kinetic brass arrangement could belong to nothing but the world of disco. In any case, this is a deliriously giddy song, well aware of just how silly it is and profoundly unconcerned. This is great party music. Hell, it's great music for pretty much any purpose.

This is side one, track four, as explained above.

One Night in a Lifetime: lose

Bad Girls manages more melodic and sonic invention than one might have thought possible within the disco genre, but it is a double-length and, as such, is bound to fall victim to the problem of 'filler' that plagues all double albums (and is my very raison d'être on this site). A sustained side and a half as an impressive achievement, but the quality control sinks just a bit here, as this song - which, with its piano lines and memorable chorus, is not all that bad in isolation (and almost made my final cut) - represents a dip in quality to 'merely decent disco music'. There's nothing to embarrass across these four sides, and it's a strong album indeed whose weakest moments are when it's 'merely decent'.

Can't Get to Sleep at Night: lose

By now that relentless disco drumbeat has been carrying on, unchanged, for more than half an hour, and the songs are starting to sound the same - this particular one features a jolly roller-rink organ and a few other 'personality' quirks but otherwise little else to distinguish it. It's a decent enough song in its own right, but by now, at the halfway point of this double length, the listener really just calling out for some diversity.

On My Honor: keep (side two, track two)

After two sides (a full disc's worth) of non-stop disco, the album is programmed to 'take things down a notch', with a full side of slow-tunes. Inasmuch as the best disco often resembles R&B balladry with a double-time dance beat, and seeing as this is clearly the music Donna Summer wanted to sing (her name is on the writing credit of every song on this side, two as solo compositions), this side ought to be a highlight. While it's quite good, though, it's kind of beside the point, in that what one really wants from Donna Summer is ultimately dancefloor abandon. In any case, this track, the album's shortest, is a beguiling little thing, a well-constructed ballad with a chorus melody reminiscent of a million songs before but with a moving vocal performance that really sells the song. And there's a steel guitar, right out of Nashville. And you know what? It sounds good. Donna Summer must have been some sort of musical alchemist.

I wound up including two of the slowies - two in eight is 25%, or a decent ratio for a disco performer trying to expand her repertoire. But the question of where to put them is vexing; putting them side-by-side would not normally be my first choice, but I have this time, with this one in particular being side two track two, so that you can either view the whole album as having a slow-dance segment toward the end before ramping it up to end on a high (like high school dances were always programmed) or following the utilitarian format of the original in allowing you to conveniently skip over half a vinyl side if the rhythm is moving you.

There Will Always Be a You: lose

The problem, of course, with slow songs is that it's more difficult to dress up a substandard song with sonic accoutrements. Not to say Summer doesn't try, with a strange little quasi-operatic introduction and a hushed ambiance. The vocal melody is decent enough too, but the overall effect is underwhelming, and filled with the sense that this kind of thing is perhaps not the best use of Summer's ample talents.

All Through the Night: keep (side two, track one)

With a spoken introduction just as preposterous as any other spoken introduction in history, with an obtrusively synthetic synth line dropped on top of the otherwise organic arrangement, with a six-minute running time, and with melodic similarities to every other song ever to bear the title 'All Through the Night', this song doesn't start out very promising. But as it kicks into gear and reveals itself as a lighters-aloft stadium anthem ranking right up there with 'Purple Rain', its many glories reveal themselves. This is a wonderfully dramatic piece that tugs all the right heartstrings - with cynicism perhaps, but with precision too.

Side two, track one, for reasons explained above, under 'On My Honor'. I put this first and not that because starting the side with the spoken-word intro seemed pleasingly perverse.

My Baby Understands: lose

With a more active drumbeat than on the rest of side three, with a vocal delivery that reaches the level of 'guttural' at times, and with odd outbursts of crunchy electric guitar, the best word to describe this one final slow-song is 'interesting'. Unfortunately, 'interesting' is not the quality that determines what makes the final cut and what doesn't.

Our Love: keep (side two, track four)

After the slow-song side three, side four ramps the tempo back up for a sustained twenty-minute blast of sequenced 'deep' dance music at its most European. The three songs on side four have a kind of sequenced pulse much more evocative of the club music of the 1980s and 90s that it influenced than the disco genre that influenced it. This particular track isn't much of a song, really, with a chorus that consists of little more than a single sentence shouted over sequenced and artificial-sounding drums (that actually are a dead ringer for 'Blue Monday' half a decade later). And yet somehow it's completely wonderful - ecstatic, profound and moving. This is music for long after midnight, after you're already soaked in sweat and after you've shed those early-evening inhibitions. This song could, indeed, 'last forever'.

And I finished the album (side two, track four) with its most ecstatic moment, pushing ahead into the eighties and indicating roads soon to be taken, though not by Summer herself, who was about to lose the plot, musically.

Lucky: lose

This particular tune has several ingredients that ought to make it successful: the sequenced pulse is evocative and hypnotic, the song Summer sings over top of it quite attractive. The mood throughout is sensual and ethereal. The main problem with it, though, is that it's essentially 'I Feel Love' part two, sounding more or less exactly like that earlier revolutionary single but suffering, as it's bound to, from diminished returns. That earlier single is jaw-dropping from start to finish. This repeat is too much of a good thing.

Sunset People: lose

The final track on Bad Girls is also the longest one. It's a peculiar tribute to the Sunset Strip and, more to the point, (sonically at least) to roads in general - in a way, it's Giorgio Moroder's take on Kraftwerk's 'Autobahn', overlong at a quarter the length. The tempo is bizarrely uncertain, lurching forward and dragging backward as it attempts to convey a sense of mood it never quite grasps. The whole thing is far too formless and uncertain to really leave much of a positive impression.

Better as a Single: "Songs in the Key of Life" by Stevie Wonder

Well, this is it. Having already spoken about Blonde on Blonde, The White Album and London Calling, there was really only one stone-cold classic double album left for me to take on. And it's not as if I've ignored it: I actually drew up a tentative tracklist fully two years ago but have left it sitting there, to age, I suppose. I've been waiting for 'the right moment' to tackle it, I suppose. But I think that moment's arrived.

What's particularly daunting about discussing Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life is not merely its massive size, both as a huge critical and commercial success and also as a 100+ minute epic flowing across two full-length records and even a third 7" 'ep'. It's not even the hugeness of the project, two years in the making and allegedly featuring a cast of hundreds, released to enormous expectation after a string of four classic albums that presented Stevie Wonder as perhaps the single most gifted musician of his generation. The challenge, in fact, is the huge scale of the accomplishment of the album. Not all of the 21 songs on this album are classics, and it's certainly as worthy of a good trim as any other double out there. But as it's effectively five sides' worth of music, concentrating Songs in the Key of Life to an efficient 45 minutes requires binning fully 60% of one of popular music's greatest achievements. Loving Stevie Wonder as much as I do, that's a tall order, and one that threatens to derail my entire project: what I'm about to cut off this album, collated and presented as its own entity, would still kick the ass of 95% of popular music.

Yes, Songs in the Key of Life is that good, make no mistake about it. I'm not given to hyperbole, but in this particular case there's no real avoiding it. I would probably say that I consider 19 of the 21 songs on this album to be 'good': there's only two that I tend to skip over. The two main criticisms that can be gently placed on the shoulders of this album are, however, a useful start for the process of shrinking this colossal work down to a more manageable size, so it's useful to take a minute to consider them:

First is the quality of the lyrics. You simply can't love Stevie Wonder if your cynicism is so inbuilt that mawkish sentimentality or misty-eyed utopianism, no matter how masterfully presented, makes you gag: for someone lacking the sense of sight, he has a wide-eyed optimism and a wide-eyed sense of wonder about the world around him (I was never going to make it through that sentence without some kind of pun). The ability to tap proudly into this particular emotional resource is much of what makes Wonder unique, but when unchecked it can become cloying, and at times his exuberance does embarrass. In effect, Stevie Wonder lyrics come in three varieties: insightful and memorable, rather weak but carried with a disarming vocal sincerity or else buried beneath brilliant music, and lastly too tacky or embarrassing to be redeemed. Songs in the third group provide me with an obvious starting point.

The second is the length of the tracks. Now, Stevie can cook up an amazing groove, both alone in a studio overdubbing all the instruments or leading a crack band of session players and celebrity 'special guests'. To this end, then, certain songs are given the opportunity to stretch out a little bit. But a good number of these songs drag on for no discernible reason, and it frankly is to the detriment of the album as a whole. While a good number of these songs do exist as truncated 'radio edits', I've avoided the temptation to resort to those, meaning that a track will go on my single-length intact or not at all. This has allowed me to make some exclusions here and there that might strike some as sacrilege. But let's be honest: that was bound to happen no matter what I did.

Lacking sight but possessing vision few can rival, Stevie Wonder's journey is one of popular music's most amazing. From 'Fingerprints' to 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' (to say nothing of the almost thirty years since) is a pretty remarkable tale, from youthful exuberance to middle-aged smarminess. One horrid song does not negate all his greatness, though, and not even a million 'I Just Called To Say I Love You's can dent the impact of this musical milestone. Years before that horror, Wonder discovered as Dylan had before him that critical response to a double album can range from the absolute heights of praise to the bitter depths of panning - in Stevie's case back to back as he followed up this critical-darling with the almost-universally-panned Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. The day may come when I attempt to tackle that particular beast. But at the moment, let's take a rest for a while at the absolute summit of Stevie Wonder's artistry, and enjoy the view from this lofty vantage, a view so beautiful only someone without the capacity for sight could have conceived of it.

Songs in the Key of Life

Side one

1. Sir Duke (3:54)
2. Pastime Paradise (3:28)
3. Knocks Me Off My Feet (3:36)
4. Summer Soft (4:14)
5. Isn't She Lovely (6:34)

Side two

1. I Wish (4:12)
2. Have a Talk with God (2:42)
3. Ebony Eyes (4:09)
4. Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I am Singing (3:49)
5. As (7:08)

Love's in Need of Love Today: lose

First track on the album, first 'length' issue. This is a beautiful piece, with a smooth, swaying vibe, a gospel feel, and a sturdy melody designed for lighters held above heads at stadiums. The lyrics are mawkish, but the song's overall mood sells them all the same. So what's the problem? It's just that damned song length. Everything Stevie really needs to say he's already said by the three-minute point of the song, and yet the song carries on in excess of seven minutes, with no real 'Hey Jude'-style buildup either: it merely repeats its chorus innumerable times while Stevie vocally improvises on top. It's trying, and that's too bad, since it's a beautiful piece.

Have a Talk With God: keep (side two, track two)

And no sooner have I said that then we get into the shorted piece on the album, a beguiling little effort that is almost charming in its scope. The religious sentiments are delivered via a dependable but not overly 'catchy' melody, something that seeps into the subconscious only after a few listens. For me, though, what stops traffic here is the amazing musical accompaniment, an almost random juxtaposition of harmonica licks, aquatic synth burbles, bell-like tones and other disparate fragments, arranged over a beat in a way that we in the post-sampling era are able to compute but which must have been amazingly forward-looking for 1976. Hell, 36 years later it still sounds like the future.

This isn't the first track on the double, but it's close enough to still be 'introductory' in an important way. I like the idea of using it early in the album, but I just couldn't make it happen. Instead, it wound up on my side two, as track two.

Village Ghetto Land: lose

These synths, however, sound resolutely mid-seventies. And they're all you get on this track, sheets of new-age chords and elaborate instrumental breaks. I suspect that Stevie was going for a baroque sense of 'drama', juxtaposing bleak scenes from the ghetto with elaborate neo-classical synthesiser accompaniment. But the effect does not fail to be ostentatious, and the main way to get through this dated piece is to ignore the synths completely and focus instead on Wonder's amazingly authoritative and touching vocal performance. Pity that's not enough.

Contusion: lose

In a juxtaposition so extreme that it must have been deliberate, we go from a solo performance of new-age synths redeemed by amazing vocals to dirty improvisational funk played by a full band with no vocals at all. Well, no lead vocals, at least - this os one of the album's two instrumentals, and while I'm tempted to leave my commentary at "instrumental: gone", I should point out that the showy melody line, doubled throughout on guitar and on synth, is technically impressive but not especially loveable. Everyone knows Stevie Wonder has chops to put the entire Chinese food industry on the streets, but that's never been enough: Wonder's best music is always about how he uses that amazing musical prowess as a mainline to human emotional response mechanisms. He can make us cry in sadness, cry in joy, or feel both feelings equally deeply at the same time. This showiness, however, leaves me emotionally cold.

Sir Duke: keep (side one, track one)

And compare it to this. If someone were ever to challenge me to prove to them in four minutes why the advent of recorded sound was one of the greatest advancements in human culture, I'd merely play this song. I'm not sure how a song could be more 'perfect' than this particular one is: the horn 'riff' is catchy and compelling, Wonder's obvious excitement and simple joy is evident every time air passes through his vocal chords, and the breakdowns in the song are enough to reduce even the most emotionless zombie to a giddy little child, caught up in the excitement and simple glee at the power of music, the same feeling that clearly caught up the poor little blind, black kid from Detroit whose childlike love of Duke Ellington (and others) is still vivid all these years later in this touching tribute. That someone can take such joy from music is remarkable, but that he's also able to impart that feeling and expressly give others that same joy is a talent almost unique in the musical world. It's probably Stevie Wonder's single greatest gift.

What is a musical 'statement of purpose'? Well, I'd say it's a single song that, in the scope of an album, sets out the main themes that will be further explored as the album progresses - be those themes musical or lyrical. If you're very lucky, it can do both - and I would argue that this tribute to, and case study in, the joy music can impart is indeed a 'statement of purpose'. And plus it was a number one single. I think it's an obvious opening track. That brass fanfare is exactly what you need to knock the listener off his feet and keep him in one place for an amazing 40 minute ride.

I Wish: keep (side two, track one)

On vinyl, these two monsters were split across different sides of the first disc; it's only in the CD era, and the post-CD download era, that we're able to hear 'Sir Duke' and 'I Wish', two of Wonders' most amazing expressions of joy and two number-one singles, back to back. This particular piece, pop-funk at its finest, is a bit of a different beast to 'Sir Duke', being a reflection on childhood, in particular the various innocuous ways that a poor blind kid managed to get into trouble. Considering how actively Stevie Wonder has always been able to maintain an emotional connection to his pre-fame childhood (something he has always had in common with fellow Motown child star Michael Jackson), this is obviously a subject that hits close to home, and you can tell his conviction when listening. But the voice of innocence is, happily, not couched in a sappy heartstring-pulling midtempo arrangement but sits atop a truly raucous, fun yet 'mature' pop-funk background. A lot of 1970s kids' programming sounded a lot like this, but there is no age at which a person can't feel genuine pleasure listening to this song. If Stevie Wonder had recorded nothing in his entire life except this song and 'Sir Duke', we'd still be writing about him 36 years after the fact.

If you buy this on CD, you'll find 'I Wish' to be one of an amazing five-song stretch of songs that made it to my single-length; fully half the final album. But while four of those are on side one, this is the outlier: my side-opener for side two. Why? Well, 'I Wish' and 'Sir Duke' really are cousins, and they both serve to start each side with a foot on the gas pedal.

Knocks Me Off My Feet: keep (side one, track three)

After three mighty band-led funk tracks in a row, this downtempo piece, recorded entirely solo as a one-man overdub band, is certainly a change of pace. And yet while slow-dance Stevie is often the riskiest, with many songs spilling over the boundary between 'touching' and 'tacky', there's no such thing happening here. This is a touching lyric set to a gorgeous melody, given a gripping vocal performance, and entirely over in three and a half minutes. Again, not to disparage longer pieces, but there's not a single unneeded note here, not a single extraneous second - which is part of what's so amazing about this beautiful track. It could have been an 'American songbook' standard had it been composed a generation or two earlier. And take a minute to marvel at the fact that Wonder performed every note of every instrument here, accompanied only by headphones and a clearly vivid musical imagination.

This is my track three. I explain why in detail below, but I'd like to add that a big ballad like this shouldn't come too early in a set. Track three is about as early as it could realistically come.

Pastime Paradise: keep (side one, track two)

Well, this song belongs to Coolio now, I suppose. Coolio's rap interpolation, called 'Gangsta's Paradise', is every bit the work of genius it's widely considered. And yet the genius of that track is as much as 50% Wonder's, as you can hear by listening to the original, which works a truly suspenseful vibe, a midtempo collision of ringing percussion and icy synth-strings over which, in a stroke of genius, a Christian gospel choir and a Hare Krishna temple sing simultaneously. This song is all tension and no release as it merely builds and build for the duration. All these years later, it's easy to miss Coolio's dramatic inner-city-life recitation, but with Stevie Wonder's stark vocals reading a meaningful list of '-ation' words, a performance somehow simultaneously bleak and optimistic, it's not like there's anything 'lacking' in the original.

Call me a revisionist cheat... I had this as track three, after 'Knocks Me Off My Feet', but the honest truth is that this song's subsequent celebrity made me want to put it back-to-back with 'Sir Duke' in a kind of one-two punch of hit tunes. So it's my track two, a bit of real-life seriousness immediately after the escapism of the opener, 'Sir Duke'.

Summer Soft: keep (side one, track four)

And yes, I'm aware that I've now taken five songs in a row, fully half of my album. They're not quite 'in a row' due to the vinyl split, but I do take four of the five songs on the original's side two. This one is, by far, the least well-known of them, and yet, like 'Have a Talk with God', the song's under-appreciated nature actually endears me to it. As Wonder was spending the 1970s progressing by leaps and bounds year by year (when not almost-dying, another thing he did just a year or two before starting work on this album), there was obviously little chance to step back and reconsider what's come before. And yet that's largely what I love about this song, its free, easy jazzy groove and rise-and-fall dynamics, to say nothing of the sense that the Stevie's keyboard performance is a direct side-product of his beautiful vocals, most reminiscent of his early-1970s formal breakthroughs. Those albums, Music of My Mind and Innervisions, were so magnificent that saying this track sounds like an outtake from those albums is no insult at all but a high compliment indeed. This is wonderful music indeed, a song that ought to be just as famous as any of this album's many highlights.

It's a bit strange that my side one is constructed largely out of Motown's side two, with three consecutive tracks remaining consecutive here. At least my decision to push 'Pastime Paradise' forward means the exact order is not the same, but this is my track four, just like it is on the double - though side one for me and side two for Motown.

Ordinary Pain: lose

This is a strange one. It clocks in at six and a half minutes - long, yes, but not too long for two songs, which is what this effectively is. Somewhere shy of three minutes in, the song comes to a natural conclusion, only to be reborn as a slightly faster 'part two' sung by Shirley Brewer instead of Stevie Wonder. While the shorter 'part one' is a lovely enough mid-tempo composition, the longer 'part two' is far too repetitive, musically, to have much merit. It's the sole disappointment on an otherwise flawless side two.

Isn't She Lovely: keep (side one, track five)

The one moment that most readily divides Songs in the Key of Life fans, and Stevie Wonder fans as a whole: simply put, this song is almost as mushy and schmaltzy as 'I Just Called to Say I Love You' (a horrid blight on a wonderful discography). The joy of becoming a father is clearly one of life's greatest joys, and the desire to commemorate it in song is evident, especially for one who communicates with the world via song. But that does not necessitate that the rest of us should hear what is in fact a private moment, an ego-stroke of rather massive proportions, especially as the minutes tick by and we start to listen to the sounds of Stevie bathing his infant, of all things. And yet, God-damn it, inevitably I succumb. As much as I'd like to hate this song's sentimentality, I merely can't, and it's all to do with the expressive melody, the happy-go-lucky instrumentation, and Stevie's best-ever performance on one of the several instruments of which he is an undisputed master: the harmonica. In most people's hands, the harmonica is either a bluesy drone or a mere annoyance, but Wonder plays the instrument like no other, a clarion call of simple happiness and exuberance. He sounds like no one else, and you can listen to him carry on for minutes, as you do here, without getting tired of it.

My final tracklist takes only two extended tunes and puts them alongside eight radio-length tracks. That being the case, I don't care for the original album's tendency to crowd the longer songs together on the second LP. If you have two long ones and eight short ones, it makes sense to divide them down the middle - one and four per side. So as the other long one is my album closer, this one got relegated to side one. It's bright-morning exuberance might seem better suited for a side-opener, but its lengthy conclusion also makes it an ideal predecessor to needle silence. At the end of side one.

Joy Inside My Tears: lose

Though the first disc features two lengthy pieces and the second disc two briefer ones, by and large Songs in the Key of Love is programmed in such a fashion as to spotlight briefer moments on the first disc and then longer vamps on the second. So as there's not necessarily any wavering in the quality of the compositions themselves across the two discs, ultimately one's preference for one disc or another will have much to do with one's opinion of songs that last longer than a 45 rpm 7" could accommodate. My prejudices on this topic are laid quite clear, I suppose - but it's not quite as cut and dry as merely excising any track that exceeds five minutes. For me, a lengthy track has to justify its length, and I'm not sure many do on Songs in the Key of Life. This, for example, is a truly gorgeous song, like 'Love's in Need of Love Today' a slow-burning stadium-filling crowd-pleaser. But, pardon my insolence, why is it six and a half minutes long? There's nothing in this song that hasn't been said by the three-minute point, and yet the song is less than half over by that point. It's tough not to find yourself rolling your eyes as Stevie goes into the one-hundredth iteration of the same two lines of lyrics that make up the majority of this song. Pity, because it's a thing of beauty.

Black Man: lose

I said earlier that there were only two songs on this entire behemoth I found it challenging to listen to from start to finish. In one case, it's largely the sickly-sweet instrumentation, but in the other case - this one - the elementary-school-funk background is quite enjoyable indeed. But this is what it is: a dated eight-and-a-half-minute public service announcement, a well-meaning 'educational' reminder of the ethnic diversity of American 'heroes' and pioneers. The flag-waving fervour is apparently in honour of the USA's bicentennial in 1977, but it clearly comes from a genuine source of patriotism buried within a man who was apparently thinking of leaving the USA and moving to Ghana at around this time. And yet jingoism is no more attractive when 'genuine', and this whole exercise is unpleasant, as well-meaning as it might be. By the final two minutes, a mock 'classroom' featuring 'teachers' and children shouting out people's names, it's become an embarrassment to listen to.

Ngiculela - Es Una Historia - I am Singing: keep (side two, track four)

After the well-meaning browbeating of the previous song, we get yet another well-meaning celebration of diversity, in this case via a song that renders its chorus in three different languages - Zulu, Spanish and a clearly relieved English. I can't say much about how authentic Wonder's Zulu and Spanish are, but this kind of po-faced 'inclusiveness' has lost much of its lustre in the intervening thirty-six years. If all it had going for it was the novelty of hearing Wonder sing foreign languages, this track would probably not make my final tracklist. As it is, though, it also happens to feature a wonderful melody line, beautifully sung (the third iteration, in English, features perhaps Wonder's best singing on the album) and atop another one-man-band performance of real character (minus the percussion, apparently played by nine people, though I don't hear it).

Like it or not, in may cases albums' original tracklists have effects on my tracklists. The first four tracks on my album come from disc one of the double, and the final three tracks all come from the end of the package - including this one, which I raise to the position of 'penultimate track': side two, track four.

If It's Magic: lose

Probably the most experimental moment on this album is this particular track, arranged for solo voice and two overdubbed harmonicas with concert harp accompaniment. And nothing else. The harp is not the most versatile of instruments, and I must confess not one of my personal favourites. It makes the recording more than a little boring in my opinion, not helped by a bit of a ho-hum composition that fails to stick in the memory. The brief little snatches of harmonica are the highlights, but it's nowhere near enough.

As: keep (side two, track five)

Let's review, then, the main criticisms of this album: pat lyrics that cross the boundary of good taste, and songs that continue on and on for no good reason. Consider, then, the wonder of 'As', one of the album's four singles, in a version greatly condensed from these seven minutes. The overall groove of the track is a kind of easy-listening funk, a flowing and swaying groove of a jazzy thing played by a full band (as opposed to a one-man show) over which Herbie Hancock adds layers and layers of delightful Hammond paint. A chorus of background vocalists add a gospel feel to the proceedings, and the lyrics go on for pages and pages (in the original booklet) filled with various poetic and metaphysical ways to say 'I'll be loving you always'. Stevie Wonder the lyricist excels here, and nothing is trite, even the most unguarded lines. And he sets it to music that shows Stevie Wonder the composer (and arranger) at his very finest. Not a single moment is wasted, and though the song goes on for a whole seven minutes, it could have gone on even longer.

As this song gracefully fades away, it seems preposterous to follow it with anything else. Alas, by that definition Stevie Wonder is preposterous, because he does. But I don't. It's my final track: side two, track five.

Another Star: lose

Unless you're Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or Pink Floyd, how much hubris does it take to follow up a seven-minute epic with an eight-and-a-half-minute one? Plenty... but there are quite a few epic songs here, and as I've already said, most of them don't really merit their length. Does this one? Well, the feel of the song is quite attractive: it's a harder piece than 'As', with a more insistent forward motion and more hyperactive rolls of drums, over which any number of instruments percolate and a brass section competes with some rather repetitive 'la la la' vocals for primacy. Stevie Wonder's epic pieces tend to follow a structure of 'composition plus vamp', and when the composition merits it, the listener is more than pleased to listen to a bit of a vamp. The listener should want to; he or she should be loathe to let the song go. But in this case, the composition is three and a half minutes and the vamp is an indulgent five, tiresome even for the jammiest of us. By the bitter end, the song's very real charms have long since dissipated.

Saturn: lose

The seven-inch 'ep' that served as the third disc of Songs int he Key of Life, that runs at 33 rpm, lasts about fifteen minutes and contains four songs, is titled 'A Something's Extra', a name that implies it's a bit of an 'addendum' to the album proper, like bonus tracks on reissued CDs. None of the four songs are particularly show-stopping, and their relative anonymity suggests that most of the album's fans play the third disc much less than the first two. Yet no edition of the album exists that omits these four songs, so they're 'core' to the whole package. And they're quite decent, at times wonderful. Not this time, though, as the head-in-the-stars sci-fi of the lyrics and the swooping would-be 'grandeur' of the synths manage to evoke the most self-indulgent moments of both new-age music and prog-rock. At the same time. This track sits alongside 'Black Man' as only one of two songs on the whole project I find difficult to listen to.

Ebony Eyes: keep (side two, track three)

From the pomp of the stratosphere, we come crashing down with perhaps the most down-to-earth track on the whole collection: an earthy strut of a song built around staccato piano chords, with perhaps the most enjoyable talk-box performance not made by Roger Troutman. The song is incredibly charming, not in any misty-eyed or sickly way but just in the simple charms of a down-home vibe. It's a delightful song, all the more so for how unsung it is: tucked away on the seven-inch that no-one plays or even talks about, a tiny little piece of wonder. No surprise that Songs in the Key of Life is so highly rated: even its darkest corners are filled with delights.

Poor Stevie didn't know quite what to do with this song, and neither do I. My side two is a bit all-over-the-place, and I've put this one smack-dab in the centre of that: side two, track three.

All Day Sucker: lose

No mere ditty at five minutes, 'All Day Sucker' still feels quite compact for the funk workout it is. Though there's a bizarre mix of instrumentation, including a marimba here and there and a rhythm that somehow sounds like a malfunctioning drum machine, the piece is 'hard' by Wonder's standards: the guitar is quite 'dirty' and the bass is quite aggressive. All in all, though, the song does too little to stand out. It feels like an outtake: while clearly an enjoyable listening experience, it's not distinctive enough to rank with the very best, though still too good to dispose of entirely. It's a good listening, but on this epic album 'good' just isn't good enough.

Easy Goin' Evening (My Mama's Call): lose

Is this the album's final track? Or was that 'Another Star'? If it's that one, then the album goes out on an epic, with a four-song encore. If it's this one, then the track ends not with a bang but with a whimper, a lazy little instrumental shuffle so non-descript that at first you barely even notice it. But its charms sink in with time: it has an evocative harmonica melody and a nonchalant feel, mood music for a relaxed time at home. With your mama, I suppose. It's quite decent stuff, but ultimately it's 'throwaway', and there's too much here that's essential.

Better as a Single: "The River" by Bruce Springsteen

So the story of The River is this: Springsteen had been intending to release a normal-length release. He'd even written and recorded it, plus given it a cover and a title: The Ties that Bind. An eleventh-hour change-of-heart had him deciding the material wasn't varied enough, so he pulled it and went back to the studio to record some more material. In the end, the story goes, he recorded fully a second album's worth and decided to mix the whole mess together into the dog's breakfast that is The River.

The clever trick of the album is that that's exactly what it sounds like: like two entirely different albums forced to share elbow-room. And to that end, my job would seem to be clear: extricate one from the other. I've seen the tracklist of The Ties that Bind, though, and it seems that the two albums that seem to exist across these four sides are mostly a trick of the light: historically, no such beasts existed.

Fine, then. Who needs history? This rather frustrating album veers between fist-pumping stadium-bar rabble-rousers that for the most part utterly fail to impress and more emotional mid-tempo tracks that range from adequate to truly exceptional. I can recognise the value of a good ol' foot-stomper from time to time, but as far as material of quality, as far as stuff I'd actually want to listen to (a) sober and (b) more than once, there's really no competition here. Much of my work here will consist of removing the frat-rock and preserving the kitchen-drama stuff. Not entirely, I should mention, as a few of the rockier songs rank among the album's, and in fact Springsteen's, very best. But my album has a much slower average BPM than the double.

The slower tracks are not perfect either. Springsteen has a way with a melody that could kindly be described as 'respectful of tradition': his compositions are not groundbreaking musically, and in several cases it's a wonder he avoided plagiarism suits. The most affecting lyrics are ultimately as inelegant and ham-fisted as the repetitive rockers, but somehow the tongue-tied nature of the best of them is actually something that appeals. Cliché as it is, this is really popular music about and for the 'common man', and Springsteen's failure to couch his tales of working-class pride and working-class defeat in flowery or overdone language works in their favour: it's a more direct pipeline to the emotions he's trying to tap into, even if on paper the words can at times be embarrassingly clunky. Sung though, they are at times enormously moving. At times. I think if any double album has ever been perfectly suited to the 'Better as a Single' treatment, it is probably this particular one. It's not a great album by any means, but if you sift through it, there is a great album hidden within it: here is that album.

The River


Side one

1. Out on the Street (4:18)
2. The River (5:01)
3. The Ties That Bind (3:34)
4. I Wanna Marry You (3:30)
5. Point Blank (6:06)

Side two

1. Hungry Heart (3:19)
2. Fade Away (4:46)
3. Stolen Car (3:54)
4. Wreck on the Highway (3:54)
5. Independence Day (4:50)

The Ties That Bind: keep (side one, track three)

This would have been the title track to the single-record Springsteen was considering releasing. It's a fists-in-the-air stadium-filler, not quite an 'anthem' but a crowd-pleaser anyway. It's filled with a lot of Springsteen's most lunkheaded tendencies - turning the word 'bind' into a thirteen-syllable word at one point and a pained grunt at another point. The chiming guitars remind me of the Byrds, and are a highlight. It's not a wonderful song, certainly the inferior of what eventually became the title track, but it's good enough. It doesn't offend, it has something to say about family, which is a major theme of this album, and it's less empty than most of the uptempo songs here.

This is my third track, sandwiched between two songs explicitly about marriage on a side that's programmed as a series of mood contrasts. After up and down, uptempo again, though not for long.

Sherry Darling: lose

A truism: if you have to dub the sounds of people having fun onto your song, it's probably because the song can't do it by itself. It's like a laugh track, and while it probably plays into Springsteen's fantasy of remaining some great undiscovered bar band, the fact is that most bar bands remain undiscovered because they suck. This song doesn't suck, but it comes pretty close, and it's sad to hear Springsteen refusing to grow up by singing stuff like this when there was so much more that he was capable of.

Jackson Cage: lose

You get the sense he's trying to say something here - there's lots of words and ideas. The name of the song sounds like it means something - moreso than, say, 'I'm a Rocker'. But the Dylan harmonica aside, there's not really anything exciting enough in this song to make you really want to dig in and figure it out.

Two Hearts: lose

Fourth in a row now. Side one's almost finished, and the overall feel has been party-band. This is starting to seem like a rather inconsequential album - or that is to say that knowing what else is on this album, what's to come very soon, makes the first four tracks flatly monotonous. This one chugs along through its predictable paces in a pleasant enough fashion. It's all just fine, really, for the two minutes and forty-five seconds it takes to listen to it. Immediately after, though, you've completely forgotten every not of it.

Independence Day: keep (side two, track five)

Daddy issues transmuted into art. A major accomplishment by any standard, and one that should have been heard more widely - even if it borrows more from a single source, Van Morrison, than it really should have. The tale is that our narrator is leaving home, after the millionth argument with his father, not slamming doors in anger but pushing them closed with a weary resignation. The lyrics are intelligent, emotionally direct and confused - as they would be. Springsteen doesn't attempt to make his narrator perfectly righteous. What he has to say isn't even entirely fair to the stoic and emotionally-stunted father he's addressing, but it's all very honest. It feels autobiographical, especially since he sings about men who have mixed relationships with their fathers on several occasions, and more importantly that organ and the sax cut to the heart, mining emotions even Springsteen's beautiful composition can't access.

Might be first on Bruce's album, but on mine, this is my third wide-screen family-misery epic. Each deserves prominent placement somewhere, and I decided to use this one as my finishing touch. Why? Well, if nothing else, 'goodbye' is one of the main words in the lyric. Just another broken family, just another case where blood is so much thicker than water it starts to clot. Take a baby Aspirin, maybe?

Hungry Heart: keep (side two, track one)

A sentimental favourite for me: my mother absolutely adored this song when it came out. In retrospect, it should unnerve me that one of my parents was so enamoured with a song about a spouse escaping a marital union, but I'm quite sure it wasn't the words but that simple drum stomp, those background vocals and that roller-rink organ solo. 'Anthemic', right? Gorgeous and visceral, either way. Springsteen claims he wrote this for the Ramones, which probably confirms he didn't really listen to the Ramones much. Their version would probably have sucked, but this is glorious. I should also mention that toward the end, he manages a quintuple-negative, which must surely be in the Guinness Book of World Records, isn't it?

I really wanted to start the album with this, and did right up until the last minute. But there's a more obvious candidate, so what I wound up doing was the same thing Springsteen himself did: starting side two with it. So long as I start something with it, right?

Out on the Street: keep (side one, track one)

And then Springsteen follows it up with this, the album's best 'Born to Run' move. In the midst of the artistic confusion Springsteen is clearly feeling on this album, tapped as he remains into his muse, it's odd how little he chooses to exploit his obvious gift for setting to music the moments of ecstasy of the inarticulate working class. Because god-damn is he good at it; it may be the one thing he's absolutely best at. A secret he knows: you can't put that particular hoi polloi jubilation into erudite words; the truest expression of that feeling does happen to be 'Woah-oh-oh-oh-oh'. Which is not an insult at all: it's been true ever since 'A-wop-bop-a-loo-bop'. This song doesn't pander in even the slightest, and if we find its simplistic lyrics cheesy, it's because we've conditioned ourselves to feel embarrassment at our least 'refined' joys. Phenomenal, in any case, and heads-and-shoulders above the vast majority of the up-tempo stuff on this album. Interesting to note, also, that Elvis Costello's 'Oliver's Army' came out as a single a mere month before recording started on The River.

Yes, my album's much more mid-tempo that Bruce's. But if I'm going to have a rocker or two, I might as well give them a prominent place. I had to completely restructure this album at the last minute (just like Springsteen himself!) to accommodate a sudden desire to have this be the opening track, but given its lyrical conceit, I can't really see where else I could put it. It just has to be the album opener.

Crush on You: lose

And then... from the sublime to the ridiculous. Shrieking meaningless one-liners in a highly unpleasant voice, Springsteen attempts to bring some energy to an intentionally meaningless song. After two brilliant fast-songs, one might start to wonder where I get off saying it's the uptempo pieces that drag this album down. And yet...

You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch): lose

On an album filled with touching insights into dignity and human character, Springsteen wastes some more time on this crass song talking about almost breaking a lamp in a shop and feeling 'mean' enough after watching an attractive girl on TV to telephone a 'dirty' girl for an evening of 'parking'. If you can tune out the song's message, it does pump along with a more genuine energy than many of this album's weak points, but all told it's just too unpleasant to bear repeated listening.

I Wanna Marry You: keep (side one, track four)

If this album truly is a schizophrenic melding of uptempo songs about hope and slower pieces about despair, this track is the outlier. Or perhaps it's the bridge between two discrete halves. It's slow but optimistic, lyrically simple but with a weight pushing down the slightly hazy instrumental performance. And here's the thing: it's gorgeous. There's not a drop of cynicism here, and it's really disarming to the cynic, who wants to sneer but finds he can't quite. This is not a 'major piece' by any standard, but it really does stick out as a minor highlight. Cruel to put a song about the simple pleasures of getting married right before a bitter song about the disappointment of it.

Me, however, I stick a song between them. And I invert the order, too. So this is a nice pat-on-the-back, then, as track four on side one. Though did I mention what I'm putting after it? I'm just as cruel as Springsteen, I suppose.

The River: keep (side one, track two)

If you told me I could only ever listen to one Springsteen song again, that every song he wrote bar one would be wiped from my consciousness, it might well be this one I keep. I've held onto this song for years and years now. Not because I relate but because I hope never to. It's a really dismal song, a life of promise slowly extinguished through the decisions we make, that seem like the right thing at that moment but accumulate. Misery, sure, but there's plenty of misery out there. No, for me what makes this song, and Tracy Chapman's markedly similar 'Fast Car', one of the greats is what happens about three minutes into the song, when a reminiscence of those glorious and long-lost early days serves two contradictory purposes: on the one hand, to further progress him down a spiral of despair (the memories haunt him like a ghost, he confesses in his best-sung line on the album) but rather amazingly somehow also gives him a jolt of energy, something to hang on to get him through another day. Stupidly and beautifully contradictory, it's a truly beautiful message for those of us stuck in our lives, and it's a message not even made with words but with the feeling in his voice as he says them.

Springsteen concludes side two with the title track, sticking it in roughly the midpoint. But I'd say it's more than merely the title track, it's also a kind of overview of the themes of the album. After the good-times celebration of Out on the Street, it's a rapid end to funtime to stick this track after it, as side one track two. But among other things, I think the songs sound good together.

Point Blank: keep (side one, track five)

No matter what the medium - vinyl, cassette, CD - there is a pause between the preceding track and this one. Just as well, too - two emotionally-wracked epics side by side would be a bit too much. 'Epic' applies to this one more than to the title track, of course: at six minutes, it's the longest track here that doesn't suck. They're both equally cinematic, though this one is a black-and-white mood piece, with maybe a European director. It's all atop a very well-built chassis, and though I feel embarrassed for it, I find that my attention wavers from the plot line and I'm focusing on details: a clever turn of a phrase, a well-sung word or two here, a great piano line, bass throb, organ swell or guitar lick. But as Springsteen veers between slow-burn verses and more dramatic choruses, you can sense that plot-line perfectly clear even if you're not paying attention. This is amazingly compelling music, and it's strange to me that it's as obscure a track as it is. Why isn't it on every greatest-hits collection Springsteen's ever released?

Springsteen brings the first half of his album to a close with 'I Wanna Marry You' and one kitchen drama, 'The River'. I decided to be radically different though, and bring the first half to a close with 'I Wanna Marry You' and a different kitchen drama. Maybe even bleaker, really, especially now that I have both this song and the title track on the same slab of vinyl (this one is track five). In fact, it's just as well the first half comes to a close with this track. You need a break afterwards.

Cadillac Ranch: lose

Bruce Springsteen likes cars. He once said that he didn't write songs about cars but about people in those cars. While that may be true from time to time, it's not here. This song is devoid of any meaning at all above and beyond 'I like Cadillacs'. Bruce Springsteen likes cars. I don't. Pity it's me whittling this album down, then.

I'm a Rocker: lose

In light of all the content-free uptempo wastes of space, you'd figure upon learning that one has the title 'I'm a Rocker' that it would be the worst offender. And yet it has a kind of carefree energy and, dear Lord, genuine excitement sadly missing from so many of these bar-band generics. Not enough to make me want to include this song or anything, but still... you take it where you can get it.

Fade Away: keep (side two, track two)

Choosing singles for radio play has got to be a difficult science. I can't really say I know how they decide what to put out, except that for some reason it always seems incredibly obvious only in retrospect. Like the fact that this double's first single remains one of Springsteen's most celebrated rockers and the second single is all but unknown, a track whose very title seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a nice slowish track, quite well-sung for Springsteen with a nice melody. But it struggles to maintain the listener's interest, even a listener desperately trying to concentrate on it. Given how many songs here stick in the mind as 'god-awful', this track's anonymity isn't entirely an insult - in fact, I'm including it on my single-disc. But it's the ultimate example of the 'album track', an ingredient that enriches the sauce rather than stands as a meal centrepiece. So why was it a single?

Obviously this song deserves to get slotted somewhere in the middle of side two. But it serves a purposes as side two, track two: it gets you from the fist-pumping roar of "Hungry Heart" onto the deeper-and-deeper well of misery that is my side two.

Stolen Car: keep (side two, track three)

Let's use the word 'skeletal' to describe this delicate little wisp of a song. It builds as it progresses, but at its heart it's deliberately minimalist: carried out with the minimum of instrumentation, the minimum of melody and the minimum of emotional depth in Springsteen's vocal performance: that's very much the point; this desperately sad tale of a man driven to wanton acts of crime merely because he has ceased to care about much of anything in his loveless life. The single moment he feels saddest in the entire performance is when he admits that despite his crimes, he never gets caught. It's an impressive thing for Springsteen to attempt, even if it's yet another car-thing. The song ends by merely fading out, entirely without resolution. Resolution would have been too Hollywood, wouldn't it?

On my disc, this becomes the first of two emotionally distant tracks involving cars in a row. Concept! Call it side two, track three. The middle of the second half.

Ramrod: lose

A by-the-numbers twelve-bar so blandly generic that there's not a single note within it you don't see coming a mile away. It's joyless too, like the product of some horrible afterlife where a bar band is forced to play this kind of music continuously for all of eternity.

The Price You Pay: lose

I've seen this track listed as an album highlight in some places out there, but I don't see it. It's at that tempo that on this album signifies 'portentous' as opposed to 'throwaway', and that gravelly voice squeezes out a Ford-tough durable melody line. But I guess there's a bit of a been-there-done-that feel to it. Or maybe the problem is that, sandwiched between two duds, it'd have to be a classic not to be carried down by its bedfellows.

Drive All Night: lose

Second-to-last position on a double is 'climax' territory, typical place for an eight-and-a-half-minute 'epic' to appear. And so it would seem Springsteen decided the album needed one. Content? Irrelevant. Let's press record and go at it for a little while. We're a good band; it'll be enough. Or perhaps not: the song is boring and clearly meaningless (the chorus line about driving all night to buy shoes is widely, and justly, ridiculed). or rather, the last minute or two might be the most amazing music Springsteen's ever committed to vinyl. I have no idea, though, as try as I might I've never made it all the way to the end. It's about the time he starts caterwauling, 'You've got my love, heart and soul' about a hundred times over and over that I tune out. Gruntshrieking? But of course... that's what an eight-and-a-half-minute album 'climax' needs, right? That's what it says in the manual.

Wreck on the Highway: keep (side two, track four)

A pretty little midtempo slice of melancholy, this is a tale of a man who views the titular accident and find it haunts him, though the rather dispassionate vocal performance gives no taste of that. The main inspiration I here on this track is the melodically similar 'Green, Green Grass of Home', but Springsteen apparently modelled this on the country standard of the same name (which I've critiqued elsewhere). That song is expressly religious, though, with a moral about a society that has lost sight of prayer. Springsteen offers little in the way of a greater society-at-large picture, though; even when sleepless about the disaster he witnessed he seeks no comfort from up above. Stark, perhaps, like the subsequent 'Reason to Believe' (which also swipes its title from an old classic) - but the absence of religion is noticeable only by contrasting it with the other song. Beautiful, anyway, though it's an odd choice to conclude the album.

So I don't. Not quite. It's penultimate for me, track four of side two. And the unresolved unease that concludes this track doesn't serve as the last note the album strikes. Instead, that honour goes to another song that ends with unresolved unease.