Every Song Ever

In the mid-’80s I went to hear Merle Haggard at a New Jersey arena concert so heavily sponsored by a cigarette company that its operatives gave out half-packs by the beer concessions. During his set he played “Silver Wings,” a song with great stillness and resonance and trust in its tonic chord. Space opened up around him in the music: the rhythm section played its parts very quietly.

At one moment, between two lines of lyrics, he strummed a guitar chord in a slow upstroke, from the highest string to the lowest. I stopped breathing and felt as if a splinter were being withdrawn from my skin. Here was a little detail, a trebly chime, so full of meaning and wordlessly consistent with the information of the song—the shiver of loneliness, the glint of the airplane leaving with the girlfriend in it—that it blocked out nearly everything else: it’s all I remember.

We think of pieces of music from a distance as blocks of time, but can we hold more than a second or two in our minds? And are we—with all music, to some extent—waiting around for some pinpointed extraordinariness to happen? Not necessarily anything as obvious and mechanical as a peak of pitch or volume, like the swells in DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What.” Maybe we are waiting for what we might slangily call perfection.

In music, nothing is perfect, unique, or exclusive: Haggard, as mannered a performer as Marlon Brando, could have done any number of little things at different points in that song and perhaps achieved similarly strong results. But we will use the term as a figure of speech to denote a particular event.

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A perfect moment is often wordless, or indirect if it has words. It is the song blushing: an unplanned or perhaps only semiplanned occurrence in which the music suddenly embodies its own meaning. The conscious mind of the singer or the instrumentalist temporarily goes out the window. It can contain everything of value about the piece of music in one note or chord, or a very short sequence of time. It communicates a complicated human gesture, feeling, or interaction that could not be literally demonstrated or sung; it transcends or surpasses the listener’s expectation set up by context in order to create a moment of beneficial confusion or satisfaction. It is the song turning itself inside out for you, sleepwalking or convulsing or speaking a temporary truth.

Perhaps here we’re on the thinnest ice of subjectivity. Is my perfect moment your perfect moment? Possibly. No guarantees there. I do know, anecdotally, that many people notice the same ones, given a little training. That’s why more than one person cries “Ole!” at a flamenco singer.

Near the beginning of Miles Davis’s “The Meaning of the Blues,” from Miles Ahead, after the introduction, Davis improvises slowly—looking for his own perfect note or moment, perhaps, but only playing at the middle of his game—over a brass-and-reeds background of ascending chords that keeps changing its instrumentation at the arrival of certain new chords. Those backgrounds don’t change in a neat sequence, one type of sound switching fully to another—but in staggered swaths, suggesting color gradations. So the climb begins with low brass, then low brass and oboes, then high brass and oboes, then brass and muted high brass and oboes, then—the oboes drop out—muted brass alone, as thin and silvery as Haggard’s upstroke.

At the point of muted brass alone—the chord-climb continues for only one more step, in an eight-second sequence (0:55 to 1:03 or thereabouts)—the listener feels at great altitude and in thinner air. During that perfect sequence, Davis plays only two notes, bouncing between them with nonchalant meaning, as if defending a point in conversational speech, first arguing with reason, then driving the point home. You hear that? Not much in what he played required a lot of planning. But as a gesture, his casual top line against the vertiginous background, it feels magnetic, possibly because it suggests a deep human experience—in the sense of human experience as motion—without spelling it out as such. I wouldn’t know how you’d read it. For me it suggests a lot at once: futility and transcendence, transitory beauty, maybe loss, maybe a cool face during hot events.

Frank Sinatra was a literal singer: when he wanted to express happiness, he sang like a confident man. When he wanted to express sadness, he sang like a defeated one. Plenty of people may tell you that he sang thousands of perfect notes—at least one in each of his greatest performances. I’m not so sure of that. But once in a while he, too, could create one of these overwhelming, irreducible moments.

The record Only the Lonely repeatedly asks “What’d I do?” It is about the out-of-body confusion of having been dumped: a man’s looping, self-recriminating, self-absolving thoughts. He can only think of himself in one frame: loser. “Good-Bye” is its peak, and the peak of “Good-Bye” is the chorus. It comes around twice. As the chorus builds in admixtures of major and minor, he sings: “But that was long ago.” The sound-mass drains away, as does the narrator’s courage, and he adds “You’ve forgotten—I know.”

In the first chorus, that addition sounds realistic: he’s moving forward with his life, because what are the options? The second time, the swelling builds higher—the “o” of “ago” is the longest-held and most powerfully sung vowel in the entire song, with a mighty vibrato—and the draining afterward more dramatic. Now, when he sings “You’ve forgotten—I know,” in a light tone with little spin on it, he seems temporarily absent, blank. Where is he? He’s disappeared into the song. What makes this a perfect moment is that Sinatra performs within the drama of the music, not the emotion of its character: he becomes a faintly ridiculous man in the low tide.

John Lydon, unlike Frank Sinatra, is not a singer concerned with developing a system of expectation and reward with the listener. He’s not even necessarily dependable at being undependable: beyond a small number of great and pressurized performances he can come to seem like a collection of trademarks—a monotone chant, a palpating wail. Like Young Thug today, in the ’70s and early ’80s Lydon was brave and astonishing with limited resources, and left behind some of the most perfect moments on records: he gathered up whatever was the ugly or battling spirit in the music and hurled it out through his voice. Because the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” was the band’s greatest antiprogram song, one giant self-destruct button—here’s something that monarchies are built to suppress!—it was his perfect song, and as it happened, contained his perfect moment.

The song is, plainly, an attack—on the culture of respect toward the queen, but really toward any monarch—and on the listener. It’s like a cousin of the Stooges’ “No Fun”—which the Sex Pistols covered—with the same kick drum and snare pattern and similarly patterned vocals, but it’s gotten off the couch; it is complaining with a purpose. The band had enough training in outrage, at this point, to know that they had to play a sort of stamina game within three and a half minutes; with the slugging drums, the anthem guitar riffs, the wild, hoarsening leer, it’s like a Felix Trinidad boxing performance, in which the stamina seems to increase as the match goes on.

The perfect moment arrives in a preview just before Steve Jones’s guitar solo, and as a feature just after it: the return to the one and the tonic chord and Lydon yelling “God save the Queen. We mean it, man! We love our queen!” Before: trenchant, surprising, funny. (He means nothing of the kind.) After: all that plus mania. The singer has left the practical world. He has achieved the correct state of mind for starting a public disturbance and getting people to join it: he has become magnetic, and it is this song’s purpose to find magnetism.

What is “Time,” from Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, about? It is slow and slouchy. Sly Stone sings as one who is bothered by the nature of time: his complaint is possibly even bigger than Lydon’s, maybe the biggest one humankind has and the most abstract, the one Proust wrote a seven-volume novel about. It’s a composition, a set of chord movements, but so much of it is delaying through improvising—voice-and-keyboard, black American church stuff, melisma and passing notes and wah-wah, putting shapeliness and swell into the moment now, and now, and now, because at certain points in life, and in listening, you become anxious about time moving when you don’t want it to. You fall out of step. And so there is no way a song such as this can achieve greatness unless it demonstrates, in some extraordinary way, falling out of step.

The first line is “Time needs another minute, at least.” The second is “But you got a limit.” And as we listen to “Time” we might experience some of this two-sided frustration ourselves—that of the person who needs the world to slow down and hold up, and of the person who’s been waiting too long already.

Its top lines sound mostly improvised, with disjointed emphasis. (“A bear! / A bear-in-the-woods / Looks forward to hiber-na-ting.”) The playing—electric piano, bass, a little guitar, drum machine—is sensitive and beautiful, so much that we want it to keep rolling. At one place, before a key change, he builds up our hopes with tremolos, as a way of making us impatient for the next phase, the next target. He delivers heavily. And at a later place, near the end of the song, he builds up expectation and then withdraws, dissolves, melts. That’s it: that’s the song’s perfect moment.

The track was made during a period when Stone was typically understood as a man from whom great things could be expected but who had started to test that understanding—working in isolation, hard to deal with, self-medicating, revising and rerecording, perhaps not trusting others or himself. (Sometimes he sings parts of the song off the microphone, but there seems like a reasonable chance that the sounds you’re half-hearing are the magnetic tape residue from an earlier run-through.)

Stone goes down low and sings another line that doesn’t scan to spoken phrasing, stretching out the words, mockingly: “Time, they say—is the aan-swer. Huh.” Then he yelps quickly, in a falsetto: “But I don’t believe them!” And from there—from 2:37, to the end about twenty seconds later—the song begins to crumple and dissolve.

Stone makes a strangulated noise, as if he’s run out of ideas, or has been punched in the stomach. (“T-t … uh.”) And then an appearance of a sound: a keyboard sound, like a church organ heard from down the block. Almost a smell, or a coloring of the sky, more than a sounded tone. You can’t quite picture the musician’s hand.

Who’s playing that? How did it get there? Was it on purpose? Is it a ghost from an old take? Is Stone making it himself? Is he even hearing it? Is he reacting to that noise as we are? Like Sinatra, he seems to have momentarily lost his sense of a man making a recording for others to hear: he stepped inside the song and almost died in it.

“Ask the Watchman How Long” is a song recorded by the Moving Star Hall Singers, a praise-house choir from St. John Island, off the coast of South Carolina. It is about uncertainty and having no resources but the power to ask. It feels liberated by its loud, rough, loose harmony, its intersecting patterns of cracking voices; but it also feels like a work song stuck in place, trudging slowly to a slow underlying single clapped beat: a work song. Life can’t go on like this forever. Just before two minutes in the singers seem to rear back and sing in unison: “How long? How long?” Suddenly a cousin of the tresillo rhythm comes in and the song begins to jump: a transformative moment of decisive action. The desire in the song has found its target. Because implicit in the question “How long?” is a desire to know time and measure it, to master it; the sudden bounce in the rhythm marks a transition toward that mastery.

Al Green’s “Dream,” from his Belle Album, takes the shape of a slow dance with very quiet, almost chirping backup vocalists, and a glossy organlike synthesizer setting. It is about perfection—about a generalized version of beatitude. There are no referents: the song imagines a state of grace, not necessarily one created or managed by Green, or the character in his song. It says “make it last forever”; it suggests that you should “dream without knowing the reason why.” And at one point the singing quiets down to nearly nothing, as if to show how little one needs to experience that kind of happiness. “Shh, shh,” Green warns. “Oh, dream. Shh! Dream, dream dream. Dream. Dream dream. Dream. Shh. Won’t you dream-dream-dream? Skies are shining bright, oh. Dream—let your mind and your heart just melt, melt, melt like ice—dream. Ooh, ooh, dream.”

Then he stops short: maybe he’s looking down, concentrating on his guitar. An Al Green song, with Al Green temporarily missing from it. The two backup singers continue their cycle. “We can make it all come true,” they chirp, in the deep background. And they do this for four more eight-bar cycles, but it’s the first one that is the most perfect because it contains the surprise disappearance. Of course this is a convention: this is where the soul singer shakes hands in the audience, or feigns exhaustion, or enters his transports, while the band vamps and the backup vocalists continue. But this is a song about moving into meaning. Al Green is actually doing it: melting, making it last a long time, seeming to forget the reason why.

Héctor Lavoe’s “Periódico de Ayer,” from 1976—written by Tite Curet Alonso, arranged by Willie Colón—is about a woman’s love that has cheapened over time, the way a newspaper does; by the afternoon it’s forgotten, or “olvidada,” as Lavoe phrases it with a kind of distortion in the mouth, as if he were tasting something gone off. It’s an angry and self-protective song, and the man takes no responsibility; it exacts revenge through metaphor. And because it is about time as an inevitable force and as natural enemy, the instrumental section in the middle demonstrates the passage of news, or love, through time.

One can imagine both of those narratives clearly: a focused and exclusive communication between lovers, or between reader and newspaper. Then the communications grow complicated: counternarratives from other directions, or other stories muscling in to push the first one out of focus; the appearance of old relationships as threats, lapses in trust, deal-breaking behavior. And then both turn into nonsense—discord, darkness, something to be swept away so a new cycle can begin.

The dramatic part of Colón’s arrangement—two instrumental middle sections of a nearly seven-minute song—puts quarreling trumpets and trombones over massed strings. For eight bars a trumpet plays D-G/C-F—a kind of logical statement, a pair of perfect-fourth intervals that, if reversed (C-F/D-G), would echo the “Bring back, bring back” section of “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” The trombones seem to talk over it, inveighing against it. The strings enter in unison, like backlighting. A trombone takes up the perfect fourths and the trumpets find their own rejoinder. And then the amazing thing happens: the trumpets go sour. Their harmonized rejoinder moves into dissonance. Nothing continuous or displeasing: just synchronized jabs of dissonance in the brass. (The first of them are the most perfect moments.) The song grows its own poison plants.

Betty Carter sang a short song called “I Think I Got It Now” on her live record The Audience with Betty Carter. Everything about it is unlikely: extremely slow, yet short; no solos by her or anyone else, yet aggressive improvisation within the simple words in the vocal lines. It isn’t vocally normative like Sinatra: it doesn’t put the emphasis in obvious places, it’s not afraid to confuse the listener. Her text seems clear enough. She is a grown and picky woman who has found a mate and hopes that he might be the one. But underneath the words two forces run together. One is emphatic: Do you get how good this man is? Am I making myself understood? And one is tentative: I have been wrong before and I don’t like disappointment, but I am beginning to hope that I can relax into this relationship. The song implies something complex: that she is looking for a way to express joy and security and isn’t sure how to do it. She can only show without telling, by putting the spirit of the song into the sound of the words.

I think—I got it—no-ooow.

I think I got the answer—for me.

For me it’s you-ou!

There is a lot of qualifying here—“I think,” “now,” “for me,” “someday,” “soon.” The music she wrote around all of that becomes a slow love song of strange design, with unusual and argumentative chord changes. And in her phrasing there is the usual contradiction of new love: overexcitement and hesitation. She communicates the fragility of hope and trust. It doesn’t sound rehearsed. It sounds only like the life force. Is there one perfect note? Yes: the second syllable of “you-ou.” Or perhaps the song is one long perfect note.

And then later:

We’ll—

Be lovers—

Someday.

Soo—oon.

MILES DAVIS, “The Meaning of the Blues,” from Miles Ahead, 1957

FRANK SINATRA, “Good-Bye,” from Only the Lonely, 1958

SEX PISTOLS, “God Save the Queen,” 1977

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE, “Time,” from There’s a Riot Goin’ On, 1971

MOVING STAR HALL SINGERS, “Ask the Watchman How Long,” from Sea Island Folk Festival, 1968

AL GREEN, “Dream,” from The Belle Album, 1977

HÉCTOR LAVOE, “Periodico de Ayer,” 1976

BETTY CARTER, “I Think I Got It Now,” from The Audience with Betty Carter, 1979